| 29/6/2008 Finally, this week, after saying he would do so well over a year ago, Nathan started the process of selling off his PS2 and its games on Ebay. He's not putting up all of them for auction mind you, since his research on what's on sale showed nobody wanted the Smackdown! and Smackdown VS Raw games he has (Sports games never are really high in demand) nor Twisted Metal Black the non-online version. He's also not putting up Gitaroo Man for sale because he needed my permission to sell my games and I'm really not ready to part with Gitaroo Man (it's hard to find apparently, plus I'm suspecting I'll want to play it again someday). He's already sold off some games (which are on display for 3 days while the console itself is being put on display for a week). While Nathan has chosen to follow the general laws and logic of economics, Ebay has proven that auctions don't go the way people expect them to. While Time Crisis 3 is worth roughly £1 it found itself the object of a bidding war (the winning bid being £5.69). Despite their popularity no one wants either of the Grand Theft Auto games on sale. And with a winning bid of roughly £27 MGS2: Substance is currently worth more than the console it plays on. What's even more baffling is that no one wants MGS3. In fact, the entire auction seems to have been rather astounding considering there are happy buyers of Wipeout: Fusion and the first Burnout (whose graphics seem horribly substandard today and the controls are frustrating at times) while it was days before there was a bid for Hitman: Blood Money, which is not only a quality game but the version Nathan has and is selling comes in a rare steel box rather than the typical plastic, making it more valuable. When a bid finally came through Nathan said to me that the bidder was likely a collector, buying the game simply because of the collector's item box rather than having any intention of playing it. I find that somewhat sad. As far as I know, there are still no bids for Hitman: Contracts, even though there isn't much difference in quality between the two games. The reason for this long auctioning process is obvious: Nathan needs money (and having a PS3 renders the PS2 useless, it's literally spent over a year being in a box outside his room). So I was surprised that Nathan has decided to find work of some kind considering he originally didn't want to work for fear of missing various sporting events (Wimbledon right now) this Summer. His reasons are that his Summer will be greatly reduced next year and while he believes that he is financially stable for the coming year, he's predicting that money will be very tight by Third Year. So he's basically building a float for Third Year and beyond. Having not gotten the job of being Youth Leader for Hong Kong kids I'm scurrying around for a job to do in July and maybe some of August. Had I gotten the job, I would've felt financially secure enough to go to Heidelberg and be able to live comfortably after paying all those admin fees. But being aware of how slow and tedious job-hunting can be, I'm not stressing or tiring myself over it. Mum is still in the habit of job-hunting for both me and Nathan though, which baffles me. Does she do it out of love? Or fear of our financial security? No. Earlier she revealed she did it out of a sense of obligation to make sure we got jobs in the first place because part of her thought we didn't shift our weight enough when searching for said jobs. How offensive, she still thinks we're so helpless (lazy). And Nathan got annoyed when he found out she thought I put more effort into searching than he did. Thing is, I still have application opportunities and one of my emails has links to student jobsites-I think I'm well resourced thank you. |