Rethinking your hobbies

I love what you write about keeping your hobbies and interests, but I have a bit of a different problem.

When I was a teenager, I found a lot of solace in comic books. I like how they presented a world that wasn’t completely soaked in moral ambiguity and that good people generally came out on top, something I didn’t often see in my real life at the time.

Now, I’m 31. I have a great job that pays very well. I’ve been dating a girl seriously for several years. And I also still have my comic book hobby. I buy a few dozen titles a month, read them, put them in plastic bags, and save them in a storage room I have in the basement of my home.

Sometimes, though, when I go down there, I feel like there’s a ton of money wasted. I look around and wonder what I could have done with all of those resources and it adds a twinge of guilt. I also have a sense that maybe I should “grow up.”

I’m wondering what your thoughts are.

First of all, I don’t have a problem with any non-destructive hobby that brings personal enjoyment, even ones others might define as “childish.” I have one friend who collects vintage action figures and another friend who’s into My Little Ponies. They’re both in their thirties and are well-adjusted folks with great careers. If it brings you joy without personal injury, enjoy it.

The question really is whether or not you get sufficient enjoyment out of the hobby for what you put into it. I don’t really know what your costs are for the hobby and I also don’t know what your enjoyment level is at this point. Do you get excited about comic books at this point? Do you look forward to reading them? Do you re-read old issues? Do you follow hobby news online?

There’s also the nostalgia factor. Sometimes we change as people and it’s very hard to let go of something that meant something deeply to us in the past. In fact, it can often go so far as to produce some joy in the present that’s actually just an echo of what we once got a great deal of joy out of. It also may be that what you enjoy about the hobby has changed – or, in your case, you now have this sense that you need to “bag” all of your comics to preserve them when before they were something you read, cut up for art projects, mangled, threw under your bed, and “lived” with.

The closest hobby I have in my own life to compare this to is Magic: the Gathering. For those unfamiliar, Magic: the Gathering is a trading card game, meaning that you can easily play a game of it with just a few cards, but there are literally tens of thousands of different cards available, each of which can alter the game. Players choose their own small sets of cards from their collection to play with, called decks.

I started playing Magic: the Gathering in high school when several of my friends and I started playing all at once. I kept playing into college and for a bit after college, but once my first child was born, I had to take stock of the hobby. I realized that what I actually enjoyed at this point was the occasional game with my wife and with old friends. I had no real need or interest to continue to buy new cards.

So I sold off most of my collection right around the time we needed some help with our financial turnaround. The collection had been sitting in my closet for a year or two anyway at that point, with only a few cards actually played with. I turned the remainder of the cards into a handful of playable decks and a “draft cube” (another playable set of cards) and kept around a few leftovers to occasionally trade for newer stuff to put into those decks.

Today, I probably play Magic once a month. I’ll play with my wife or with another close friend of mine. I don’t buy any new cards – instead, I just pull out some of the ones I have. I realized that what I enjoy about the hobby right now doesn’t require me to spend any money.

My oldest child is starting to show an interest in it, too, as he watches us play. His reading skills aren’t quite there yet, but he understands some of what’s going on.

Kim Kardashian’s ice cube diet

Kim Kardashian's resorted to a bizarre ice cube diet to ensure she'll look like a million dollars at her wedding.

The 8st 10lb TV star, 30, who was snapped hitting the gym last week, is determined to drop to 8st or less before tying the knot with basketball player Kris Humphries, 26.

‘Kim swears by ice cubes with hoodia plant extracts, which curb your appetite,' a source tells Now.

‘And it's working - she's lost 3lb.'

The ice cube supplements boost energy - and, thanks to the active ingredient P57, also help signal to your brain when you're full so that you won't overeat.

‘Kim heard about the ice cubes from a friend,' says our source.

‘She's eating them before meals and nibbling on them instead of calorific snacks.'

While hoodia ice cubes are currently only available in the US, you can get the same results using Perfect Hoodia capsules (£16.95 for a month's supply, hoodia-shop.co.uk).

Dissolve the powder from the capsules in water and freeze to make your own cubes or swallow the capsules whole to avoid the hoodia's bitter taste.

Read the full story about Kim Kardashian's diet in Now magazine dated 27 June 2011 - out now!

Mario Block Storage Cubes Hold More Than Gold Coins and 1-up Mushrooms

The Super Mario Bros. games have inspired a wide variety of fun decor over the years, and here’s a new batch of cool Mario items you can put in your office or home.


Each of these hollowed-out bricks and question mark blocks is designed for storing a pair of Wii-motes, but really can be used for just about anything like pens, tools, plants or anything else that’ll fit in a 4″ cube. I suppose you could use them to store your gold coin collection or canned mushrooms too. I’d steer clear of fresh ‘shrooms though, as they might end up leaving a mess.


Here’s another fun idea – paint your wall sky blue to look like a level from Super Mario Bros., then place a bunch of these cubes on shelves at various heights along the wall (or screw them directly into the drywall) so they look like they’re floating.

Both the red bricks and question mark blocks are available over at Strapya World for ¥1,500 (~$18 USD) each.

YouTube videos a profitable sideline for Temple student

Charming in a goofy way, Rob Homayoon, a 25-year-old dental student at Temple, has found a way to make money for himself by creating origami paper cranes and solving Rubik's Cube on YouTube.
"Hey, hey, what's going on," Homayoon begins, making a silly face in one of his most recent videos on YouTube, the Google-owned website that collects videos posted by individuals and companies.
"I made it a little bit easier for those of you who think you're funny and post your little comments below saying, 'Oh My God, pause at zero colon zero three, his face is sooo funny.'
"Just remember, you can't pause real life," he said.
But we can pause right here to let you know how Homayoon is making his money ($70,000 since 2008) and why.
YouTube's publicists are touting Homayoon as a success story in their partnership program, which could also be titled "Feeding the Beast," although YouTube doesn't call it that.
Kate Rose, a YouTube spokeswoman, explains: YouTube gets two billion video views a day, or 14 billion a week. Meanwhile, it has managed to monetize three billion video views a week and would love to monetize more.
Monetize is the magic word, meaning YouTube has been able to attract companies to pay to place their advertisements on various videos. Advertisers like good content, especially when it comes with a reliable and large audience.
The bigger and more reliable the audience, the more they are willing to pay in a process that works like an auction, as advertisers bid up for the best spots.
That's where Homayoon comes in.
His early videos on solving Rubik's Cube attracted enough of a following that he set up his own channel, "Rob's World."
As his audience grew, he applied to become a YouTube partner. He qualified because he had built an audience by producing his own top-quality videos using his own material. YouTube doesn't get much more specific about its partner threshold.
As of Friday morning, Rob's World had 24.9 million uploads and 64,525 subscribers wanting to be notified every time Homayoon posts a new video. That's quantity and reliability.
"Millions of viewers translates to thousands of dollars" for the video's creators, said Annie Baxter, another YouTube spokeswoman. "That's a rough guide."
The more the advertisers pay, the more both Homayoon and YouTube earn. YouTube wouldn't discuss the arrangement, but Homayoon said it was an 80-20 revenue split, with Homayoon getting the 80 percent share.
The money works as an incentive to keep creative people such as Homayoon producing quality videos "and to actually treat it like a job," Baxter said.
"The more people who treat it like a job and produce quality videos, the more people who will come back to YouTube," she said. "That's going to grow more quality programming to run advertising against."
Homayoon works to build views. His most successful video, now a year old, was an eight-minute, 37-second tutorial on making origami paper cranes. Now he's back with a new video that promotes making paper cranes as a way to raise money for tsunami victims in Japan.
Everything on his channel links to everything else, so every click around the channel adds to his statistics, making him more valuable. He constantly invites comments and responds to them, building his community - and his viewership.
The videos are shot in his apartment, nothing very elegant - a few bookshelves in the background. "I'm showing that I'm in my apartment and that I'm doing it all by myself," said Homayoon, who lives in Germantown.
"It is really hard to balance my life, school, and YouTube," he said. "This could be a full-time job, if I really wanted it to be."
His subscribers, he said, hound him if he doesn't produce. They comment, "When is your next video? Are you dead?"
"They get pretty funny on the comments," Homayoon said. "They want to know there is a person behind the video."
At first, he kept it simple, just posting whatever he could create in a few hours. But now, he said, it takes him days to produce a video and he has invested in a better camera. (Just the type of behavior YouTube wants.)