Shop Around

I hope you also have the song Jump Around stuck in your head now too.

Finding a good deal is an art. It takes effort. Sure, sometimes deals can fall into your lap like on Black Friday or something, but often, you need to put in the work to ensure you’re making the most of your money. But it’s hard. And time-consuming.

Last week I did it a lot.

Though I’m decently satisfied with my current phone plan, I heard there were some good deals out there, and wondered if I could be getting more for what I pay. Or better yet, more for less. But to find this out, I have to look into all the phone plan providers. I have to see what kind of offers they have and compare it to my current situation. So I made a spreadsheet one night. It’ll be out of date in a few months probably, but it’s a good way to quickly see what my options are now. And yeah, as it turns out, there is a year-long plan with a different provider that’ll end up costing a bit less and giving me nearly three times as much data per month. So my research efforts have been rewarding.

I guess it’s good that we live in a society where there is room for competitive pricing and a variety of options from companies. We don’t want a monopoly forcing our wallets. (Even if all 12-ish phone plan providers in Canada are technically owned by the same three companies….).

Then my boyfriend and I looked into accommodations for a trip we want to take this summer. Nothing fancy, just trying to hit up some provincial parks. We plan to split our trip between two main areas, so we needed to find two places to stay. AirBnB was an easy answer for the first place, as we found a cheap room that’ll meet our humble needs. But the second place we were looking was a very small town with a pitiful rental selection, so we turned to hotels. My boyfriend has a Perkopolis hookup, so we started looking through there for a set discount. Except we noticed that a better deal could be found by going directly to the hotel chain website. And then we started looking through those travel comparison sites that all seemed to link back to each other and not really offer too much of a price difference comparatively. In the end, we definitely got the best deal we could find and are satisfied, but it took effort.

Good deal hunting and shopping around can have huge results, saving you thousands sometimes. My father is a master of it, and I have no plans to stop putting in the work to save myself money either. But sometimes I wish it were easier. Or maybe I just wish my brain was wired differently, wired to let myself just buy some something without doing the research. But alas, even for fast food, I must consult the offers tab in every single chain app to ensure I’m getting the best and cheapest chicken nuggets. It’s a gift and a curse.

Anyway, I urge you to take some time and shop around to see what you could be getting a better deal on. I casually mentioned my phone plan research to a friend who told me what they pay monthly. Turns out they didn’t even realize how bad of a plan they were on, so I shared my spreadsheet so they could save some moolah too.

That’s all for now!

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Board Game Culture

It wasn’t often, but once in a while, my family would play some board games together. It was always the classics: Trouble, Pictionary, Sorry, Cadoo, Crazy 8’s. That’s what all the kids were playing. And then it seemed like board games fell out of style to some extent. Or maybe it was just in my circles. Either way, when they came back into style, they came back hard. Board games today are insane.

My boyfriend and I went into one of those game shops because we were looking for a birthday gift. We didn’t really know what we were looking for, but we stood there facing shelves and shelves of games we’d never heard of. The employees know a lot though, and several would talk to us and try and help point us in the right direction.

I like board games and I like trying new games that friends are excited about, but I find that games today are wildly complicated. No more is it simply moving your little marker along a path for a tight 15. It’s so much more. I never feel dumber than when I’m an hour into playing a game with friends who seem to grasp things more than me.

In the midst of writing this post, I came across this video, which fits well with the theme:

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A post shared by Milton Plays Solo (@miltonplayssolo)

That being said, there is this interesting flip side. As much as there are complicated games you can find at the niche game stores, there’s also a huge rise in very basic party games available anywhere. The kind where you just pass out cards based on superlatives or memes or something. And don’t get me wrong, they’re fun, but they don’t have much replayability unless your social circle constantly changes. I’m kind of fascinated by the popularity of these games and how/if they evolve over time.

There’s no denying that the board/card game industry is popping off from both big companies as well as indie labels. And that’s really great because as far as hobbies and social activities go, it’s a pretty harmless, fun thing. But I do wonder if this is just a phase. The board game genre really seems to target young adults, and I have to wonder how sustainable that is.

Especially when the games are pretty expensive. All the games the employee showed us in the game store that one day were around if not above $50, which is a lot in my opinion. I can’t justify that for one game, nevermind the fact that I’ve never played it and may not like it. I’m glad that there are places like board game cafes and libraries where you can just try out games before you commit to owning them.

I know I seem negative here, but I do like board games and I’m glad I have some friends who are down to clown with them. I’d love to know which games have delighted you, so let me know your faves or recommendations.

And since we’re kind of on the topic, I want to reshare a blog post I wrote last year about these cool board game escape rooms that my friends and I adore. Read about the Unlock games here!

That’s all for now, gamers!

 

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Monthly Look Ahead: May 2024

This year is flying by! May is already upon us. I feel good about this month, even if I don’t have a whole lot going on…

• May is usually the start of garage sale season. There are two large community ones near me this month that my boyfriend and father and I are hyped for. I’m not even in need of anything in particular, I just like browsing. I like looking at things.
• Ben Platt’s third album Honeymind is out on the 31st. I really liked his first album, but was disappointed by his second, so I don’t really know what to expect here. Either way, I will listen a few times.
• If the weather is nice on the long weekend, my boyfriend and I want to go kayaking. He has kayaks that we haven’t used in a few years. However, for this endeavor to be successful, we also need to prepare physically. I gotta go find weights in the basement and get my arms ready because last time I really felt it. I need to be better.

As I said, not a lot going on, but that just means there’s more room for spontaneity. What’s going on in your May?

And of course, as is tradition, we’re using this post to put some love and respect on our favourite May, Melinda May from Agents Of SHIELD. I really miss that show. I really miss having a regular TV show to love unironically, and AoS was just so good. It feels like a lifetime ago.

That’s all for now!

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You’re What You Own

Go to any garage sale and you’ll find piles of DVDs for sale. Everyone’s getting rid of their collection. With streaming being so commonplace, no one’s turning to their hoards of disks for entertainment, so now getting a dollar or two for them is the way to go. Obviously, clicking play on Netflix is easier than finding the disk on the shelf, turning on the DVD player, zipping through the menu, and then pressing play, but that really only works when the movie you want is on the streaming service you have. What happens when it’s not? We’re at the mercy of whatever deal(s) the movie studios have with the streaming service(s). Yet for the sake of convenience, everyone’s giving up ownership.

And this isn’t unique to DVDs. Subscription models are popping up everywhere, and it’s resulting in a world where people don’t own anything anymore.

I’m not against the concept of subscriptions as a whole. Do I think that people should own a hard copy of every single movie they ever want to watch? Not at all. Netflix and Prime and all these other platforms are a great way to access media in a way that makes sense for the average person’s budget,  physical storage capabilities, and viewing habits. But clearly, streaming has influenced consumer culture so much that stores aren’t even selling hard copies anymore. Best Buy, for example, announced recently they’d be phasing out the sale of DVDs and Blu-rays, and I completely get it.

But as I said, then we’re just relying on streaming services to provide us with that content, and now we’re seeing that not only is physical media disappearing, sometimes digital media is too. Streaming services can just fully wipe content off their platform. Disney+ is doing it all the time, which is angering fans who now have no way of legally watching the Disney content they want to watch. And yeah, I said ‘legally’ because there’s always a good chance it was downloaded and put on some pop-up-riddled illegal hosting site, but some people (not me) have morals.

And since we’re on the topic of illegal activity: 90% of the music on my iPhone was ripped illegally from YouTube over the past 15 years. Those mp3s are stored on a hard drive, so no matter what happens to music streaming platforms, I own them. I use Spotify for free all the time at home, but my personal library is too precious to put behind a paywall.

We’ve seen even the most successful companies go down in flames over time, and I don’t like the idea of being left with nothing but credit card statements to show that I at one point had something. We can trust in companies and longevity and whatever you want, but when you don’t actually own anything, it’s a risk.

A subscription model for something like Netflix makes sense. You don’t need to actually own most movies to watch and enjoy them, and if you ever find the library unsatisfactory, you can cancel without disrupting your life. But when it comes to many other things, the loss can be significant. No productivity or access to files if you lose your Microsoft Office subscription. No family photos if you lose your cloud storage subscription. No ability to print stuff if you lose your printer ink subscription. Because yeah, printers now come with subscription services! It’s so fun!

Companies realized that they could make more money and over a longer period of time with the subscription model over a measly one-time payment so now everything has a monthly fee to keep you locked in. It all comes back to corporate greed!

So we’re just left owning nothing and figuring out which of the hundreds of possible monthly payments are worth it.

Of course, maybe it’s a good thing we don’t own anything. No one has a place to put our belongings in anyway. My generation can’t afford a house, so we have to rent…and what is rent if not a subscription service?

Look at me, bringing the post to a close with the mention of rent, when the post title is from a Rent song. Who caught that reference?

That’s all for now!

 

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Volunteering

This past week (April 14-20) was National Volunteer Week in Canada. I had to prepare some social media content for this because the company I work for has a lot of dedicated volunteers. During the week, I’d occasionally scroll through the hashtag and see various organizations thanking their volunteers and highlighting exemplary individuals, as they should.

Clearly, the volunteer community is alive and well, and I’ve seen this firsthand through work, but as I scrolled, it hit me that I don’t really know anyone in my immediate life who volunteers much in a real humanitarian way. When I think of volunteering, I think of food banks and raising money for good causes, but I don’t know anyone who goes out of their way to give back in those ways, or in other community-benefiting ways all that much.

I technically volunteer at my curling club by managing communications for the biggest league. I’m part of the committee, and the club itself is a non-profit. As I don’t get paid for it and no one’s making me do it, it is volunteer work, but I barely consider it so. I just think of it as just helping out. Besides, I if don’t do it, some boomer will, and I simply cannot take any more correspondence with people who “write like this !!”

As a youth, volunteer work was forced upon me, though. In Ontario, you need to do 40 hours of community service to graduate high school, and I think I needed to do 10 hours to get Confirmed (the Catholic thing) in elementary school. Volunteering wasn’t so we could be dedicated members of society, it was so we could look good to universities and employers. It was completely selfish.

But okay, I was a kid with limited options. What about the adults in my life? Well, my mom would volunteer to help in my classrooms sometimes, and my dad coached my brother’s hockey and was on the parent council in my high school. That was about it, as far as I can recall. Even my friends’ families weren’t out doing a bunch of selfless volunteer work that I was aware of. Was I just living in a very selfish mind-your-own-business bubble? Because I see the social media posts of people who dedicate hours and hours of time on the reg, and I just don’t identify with that.

Of course, my parents back then were working and raising kids. They didn’t exactly have oodles of spare time, and I acknowledge that. Between work, family, chores, commutes, and your own hobbies, people don’t exactly have tons of time open for volunteering. And if you did, you’d probably look for a second job, because in this economy, it’s helpful. Like I said, I don’t know anyone in my life who volunteers simply because they care, but I do know people with side hustles.

We are as a society more self-centered now than ever, and that’s unfortunate, but understandable. I can’t even end this post by advising you to now go find some organization to volunteer with because it’s not that simple. But I will say this: if you do ever find yourself able to give back, there are some great groups out there genuinely working to make a difference. You’ll be underappreciated by many, but you will be a part of something special. A hashtag like #NationalVolunteerWeek can only do so much, but it can at least bring some good groups to the surface.

Do you volunteer much? Brag on yourself if you do.

That’s all for now.

 

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