Night Owl Cards

  This is Night Owl Cards at 17.   On this date in 2008, I started a card blog when it was about the coolest thing you could do in the hobby outside of pulling a card of Kosuke Fukudome. Today, it's not a very cool thing at all and whatever happened to Fukudome, Nick Blackburn and Callix Crabbe?   But this is still me. None of those other hobby outlets have suited me as much. I'm not immune to chasing the bright new thing, but I still keep coming back here. Writing about the hobby in a detailed way will always appeal to me most.   That doesn't mean I'm not cutting back on the hobby in other ways: not in words but in more physical aspects. You will see examples of this in Year 18 of NOC but for now, let's look back, using something I have collected for as long as I have written this blog and now their time is ending in my collection.   Wrappers!!!   I have tried to set aside a wrapper for any card product that I have opened -- but just one per set, I'm not t...

   The main reason I have collected cards as an adult for the last 20 years is for that nostalgic rush.   That's what I've been chasing all these years -- that feeling of collecting cards when I was a kid, pulling pictures of the players from that time and storing them in my collection. Collecting modern cards of modern players is fine, but if that's all I was doing, I would've given up by now.   But I have been collecting those original sets from my younger days -- and sometimes even before I started collecting -- for the last 20 years, too. And I've just about run out of the major sets to chase. I've almost run out of "new" cards of my guys.   1983 Donruss is the last stop as far as major sets that came out during my formative years as a fan, which I consider 1975-83 (1975-85 if I want to be a little more casual about it). It's the only major release from this time period that I have not completed.   The other day I received around 40 cards from ...

  I am clinging to at least four dying sources of information ... some would say "dead" in some cases.   I work at a newspaper and still read one virtually everyday. I'm certain half of the current population couldn't tell you what one looked like. I write for a magazine and read that same magazine -- when I have time. Again, half the population would say something like, "my dad used to talk about those."   I'm still part of Facebook. I check it maybe every other day just to stay up on the few friends that are still on there. But many, many people deleted that app a few years ago, and again, people in their 20s consider it social media for aunts and uncles. And, finally, I still run a card blog -- and I expect it to supply me with information and entertainment just like all those other "archaic" mediums.   But clearly, my expectations are too high. My own blog is probably dying, too. I used to brag about the still-robust reader numbers for year...