I was talking to one of my friends and he mentioned staying home on July 4, citing how there are a lot of really ugly things going on in the US.

After thinking about this myself, I’m starting to feel the same way. Instead of being proud of the country, I’m feeling like I’m just another wallet that companies and the government are trying to suck all the money out of.

The cost of living is going up, the housing market is a nightmare, I don’t feel very confident in our government at all, the job market is a nightmare…

I think I’ll be staying home this year too… anyone else?

I was watching some YouTube, trying to find some forgotten gems from retro systems. I ran into one about the Jaguar and decided to watch it.

Well, the fellow said a lot of the games were great, and I was kind of curious about that because I don’t think it’s controversial to say there’s only a handful of decent games on the Jag, but this fellow was rating everything highly.

Later on I sat down to think about it and I realized something… after every game the fellow would say “Oh, and you can get it for about $XX.XX.”

At that point the light-bulb went off and I realized this fellow is probably deriving enjoyment from collecting the Jaguar games, not playing them. To him, if he buys a game, plays it for a few minutes to make sure it works, it’s probably a winner for him.

For me, who is getting Jaguar games from uhhhh a friend, I don’t care about collecting them, I just want some fun stuff to play.

Anyway, I learned my lesson: I’ll believe non-collectors’ opinions more than collectors because they are mostly concerned with gameplay instead of how it looks on the shelf, or how rare and difficult it was to acquire.

P.S. I don’t know how “hot” of a take this is, but I figure it’ll probably hurt the feelings of collectors, so that’s why I prefixed it.