All The Things He Sold
The more interesting ones, at least.
Last summer I sold off sixty-four of the objects I amassed over a life of nearly two decades. I had fallen in love with product design and in the process found myself protective of an inner circle of objects, while the burden of the rest was too much to bear. I wanted to find a new home for all those I couldn’t keep, despite their sentimental value.
I painstakingly photographed each of these objects, but the resulting photos felt wasted if used only for eBay listings. I’ve decided to share a set of these photos on the blog, adding explanations beneath some to explain my connection to the object in question. Enjoy.
This Atomic Purple Game Boy Color came to me at the peak of my preteen retro gaming fixation. I acquired it at a Minneapolis store called We Got Game, which appears to have closed in 2016. (At least they never had to struggle through the pandemic!)
Transparent enclosures are tacky on some devices, while they just feel so right on others. Nintendo’s attempts were usually a case of the latter. I replaced the joystick before selling this Nintendo 64 controller, as the original had deteriorated to dust.
I helped my sister sell her old iPhone 5c. This glossy green plastic machine looks nicer than some of Apple’s modern options. Whether or not Ive was entirely responsible, it was a strangely classy piece of hardware.
The Game Boy Camera was the smallest digital camera in existence at its 1998 release.
This Gamecube controller, in the Spice Orange color, was one of my favorite objects to hold. It never gathered dust on my shelf due to how often I’d just pick it up to admire. Still, I knew it’d get more legitimate use elsewhere, so I let it go.
I don’t believe I mentioned in my Skyward Sword article that my childhood experience of the game was with the golden Zelda-themed Wii Remote. It’s still pretty damn cool. It was also worth a decent chunk of change.
No, I didn’t have friends in middle school.
I paid more attention and care to my Tamagotchi than I did any of the fish I owned as a child, and all of those fish were literally named after me. After scrubbing away some internal corrosion, I found that this paper crane variant of the Tamagotchi is a coveted one in the Tamagotchi community. It sold for far more than I anticipated.
I remember reading through this Animal Crossing guide during a drive through Colorado’s mountains in 2013, Adele’s 21 playing from the speakers of my father’s maroon truck. My sister had folded one of the pages in order to spite me, but I still managed to enjoy it.
Drones are very similar to action cams in that nobody realizes how little of their life is worth filming until the thirty-day return period has dried up. I had some good fun and captured new perspectives of my hometown with this DJI Phantom 3 Standard, but it never changed my life like I naively hoped it could. Some realtor bought it from me to avoid paying anyone else to take pictures of houses.
This Nintendo DSi made photography accessible to me at a young age, something which I am endlessly grateful for. I lost all its photos for a few years, but after finding its SD card in an old margarine container these valuable memories now sit on my archival hard drive.
As much as I love the latest and greatest, I tend to hold onto my tech for as long as I can stand. My Apple Watch Series 2 got a good four years of use before its lacking speed and software support forced me to jump to an SE model that I’ve now happily worn for a year.
This gold iPhone 5S was my very first iPhone. It was one of the first few phones with a camera that could be considered remotely good. Apple got it all right, and eight years later I still carry an iPhone in my pocket.
Not only did I play some of my most formative gaming experiences on this 3DS, it was also my creative outlet for years. I made Lego stop-motion videos, nature time-lapses, and even some digital art. I lost all of these forever when I stupidly wiped the SD card to make room for more Animal Crossing screenshots.
I heard that the system’s multilayered plastic exterior was incredibly difficult to manufacture, but Nintendo’s designers insisted on keeping the dimensionality in its look.
This came as a preorder bonus for buying Splatoon at Target. I never once put water in it out of fear of ruining a collector’s item. It then sold for nine dollars.
The most interesting story about this Wii, which my family bought around 2007, is what I did before selling it.
Some of the earliest photos I ever took, including a few of a childhood friend who has since passed, were stored on this Wii’s Photo Channel. For unclear reasons, the Wii lacks support for exporting these photos, but I couldn’t let them disappear. I ended up hacking the Wii to export its save data, and loaded it up in Dolphin Emulator, where I enabled texture dumping, then flipped through every image. The images were properly dumped as textures, which are now safely stored on my archival hard drive.
An old camera of my mother’s, which she kindly allowed me to sell and keep the cash. Luckily there are no digital memories to lose here. This picture also reveals that my white backdrop is simply the box in which my MacBook Pro came.
This item is not like the others, as I sold this particular one just a few days back. I include it here only to hint at my next post. Stay tuned!
With love,
Nate