Hello. I am a 24 year old woman who collects a lot of old junk. I live in Michigan and enjoy the midwest.
I have been into toy trains for as long as I have had access to toys - any vehicle toy or toys with wheels would capture my attention, with this later expanding into train, building, and construction sets of all sorts. My love of old junk was also instilled upon me at a young age. I played hours of Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars on my dad's Super Nintendo. My family continued to regularly use VHS tapes and tube TVs past when they were fashionable. I was given free range over my grandfather's cassette stash around age eight. Mostly I recorded music from the radio, took apart cassettes, and listened to the handful of tapes I was interested in at the time (I had a fascination with nature sounds tapes, Christmas music, and the guided tour tapes for his Apple Macintosh and 1984 Buick Riviera, both of which were long gone by that point). When I was in middle school I began to go to garage sales and thrift stores whenever I could to buy video games and whatever interesting audio or video stuff caught my eye. At the time (~2013) I already thought prices for old video games were too high - they have only gotten higher since! Although I still have a decent collection of video games, I do not really consider myself an active collector, and only really buy things that I see for a good price if it is something I actually want.
In high school I got more into old computers and built up even larger audio and video collections. I built my first new computer and played around with old printers and hard drives. I also started to get back into toy trains and learned more about the ones I had as a kid and collected more from garage sales and flea markets. Most of my collection of 1980s home and business computers were acquired during this period... the prices of which have also been going up. I am glad that I managed to find just about every computer I really wanted (mostly 1980s IBMs) during this time. I also collected a lot of eight track tapes and continued to play the older games I actually enjoyed. I also joined the local FIRST robotics team and eventually amassed a large collection of old photographs and information related to the competition.
In college I wrapped up finding pretty much every eight track release I wanted and also got into digitizing video tapes, in particular Betamax. Working with tapes was where I first began to develop more efficient workflows for working on my projects and making better use of the features of the software I use (and changing it when its features do not meet my needs). After some time I tend to "burn out" on one interest and shift around to focusing on another and now when I come back to them I try to further develop my workflow for each. After video tapes I got into collecting Plarail and dramatically expanded out my toy collections. When I had control over my internet service I began to host and develop my own websites, at first the FRC archive and later this personal site. My interests shifted back around to video tapes and my VCR and tape collection as well as digitized and cataloged recordings expanded dramatically. After I moved again in mid 2023 I began writing the Plarail pages on this site and working on related projects and began importing even more Plarail.
My goal with this site is to catalogue and share some of the things I collect and am interested in, and present the information I find interesting or exciting about different things in a way that is easy for me to reference in the future. I have browsed through dozens of old webpages, alive and archived, for years picking up small things that I like about many of them, and I hope to keep alive the spirit of the internet as it was on the cusp of its widespread adoption. In the future I would like to record video accompaniment or companion pieces to some of my pages, as I understand that video is an engaging form for informative media and that a video adaptation of my pages may attract a wider audience. I have done plenty of work with video but little real "editing," but I think a narration adapted from my written pages with relevant footage showing with minimal textual elements would be easy enough to produce.
I am worried about the state of the world and the future. I stay up at night listening to freight trains blowing their horns, hunched over a keyboard in the glow of my monitors.
If you enjoy any of the things you see here, please sign my guestbook!