A couple weeks ago I decided I’d like to be able to play the upcoming NBA 2K27 game after a little hiatus. I’ve bought almost every iteration since about 2003. It was almost a yearly tradition. My old PS4 had broken down, so I needed a new platform first.

After a bit of research it looked like an Xbox series S would be the cheapest way to go about it. I wouldn’t have access to my PlayStation library which removed any temptation to buy other games. That’s when my Facebook Marketplace adventure started. Going with a used console seemed like the obvious choice to keep costs down as I was literally buying it to play a single game.

Out of all the sellers I contacted with legitimate questions, only a few even replied in the first place. When I finally got to the stage where we both agreed on deal the experience was eye opening. The first deal fell through just hours before I was about to leave for pickup. Fair enough I guess. The next day I made an offer on another console. This one was about an hour’s drive away so I sent a quick confirmation message to be sure. Thankfully I did. The seller informed me that someone else was just about to pick it up. I was confused but decided to move on. A few days later, I agreed on a deal with yet another seller and this time only minutes later they let me know that they’re selling it to someone else. Keep in mind I wasn’t lowballing and offered fair market value based on all the listings I saw.

When I told my partner she just laughed and said “It’s Facebook place. What did you expect?” I even followed her advice of acting quickly and decisively by offering to pick up the same day.

In the end, I convinced a seller hold the console for me before I left the house. Now I own an Xbox but I didn’t expect it to be such a rollercoaster of a social experiment. I hope NBA 2K27 will be worth it.

This one has been nagging me in the “Recommended for you” section of my Kindle for a while. I had always ignored it because the cover didn’t look appealing (I know) and I figured I had outgrown the LitRPG genre even though it reignited my love for reading all those years ago with Ready Player One.

An alien invasion chooses Earth as the next host of their televised game show where humans have to play to survive. Carl, a former coast guard along with his ex-girlfriends cat are quickly forced to work together to figure out this new reality. While I was initially skeptical of Princess Donut—the cat— as an interesting secondary character, she’s definitely grown on me over time.

Now I know exactly why it has all these great reviews—it’s simply a lot of fun. I’ve been looking forward to getting through a few chapters every night. I can already tell I’ll continue this series until it ends, it’s that good.

★★★★★

I don’t like having things around the house that I don’t use any more, so every now and then I enjoy selling stuff that has been gathering dust. One of those was my guitar amp. I bought it around 3 years ago for $280 and have since upgraded (to a lovely Yamaha THR II if you’re curious).

When it came to setting a price, I first had a look around the marketplace to get a rough idea. Pricing used items is interesting. Obviously you want to make as much money back to minimise your loss on the initial purchase. But if it’s too close to the price of the same item in new condition, no one is going to buy it because it just doesn’t make sense. You might as well just pay slightly more and get it brand new.

Is there really a loss in the equation though? From my perspective, holding on to an item that’s no longer useful is just dead money that takes up space–physically and mentally. The best option is to just sell it, even if the price is lower than you expected.

In this case I was happy to let my little amp go for $180. That’s $100 less than I bought it for. So I essentially spent $100 to use it for 3 years. In other words, it’s as if I’d rented the amp for about $33 per year, which is pretty good value.

In our house, everyone absolutely loves books. That’s why they’re pretty much everywhere, sprinkled around in strategic but also random locations—on the coffee table, under the TV, beside the bed, on any desk, on side tables and on top of drawers to name a few.

This way there’s always one within easy reach to distract you in a way doom scrolling never could. I noticed it’s also become a nice experience whenever we have friends over and they discover a new book they find interesting. They’re great conversation starters.

Funnily enough, my partner and I prefer to read digitally and it’s where we finish the majority of our books. But there’s nothing quite like browsing a bookstore and maybe taking home a nice hardcover to flip through on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

It’s also just been nice to pick up a book and spontaneously read for five or fifty minutes depending, how much time you have in that moment. Reading in bursts like that means it takes ages actually getting to the end, which is totally fine because I view these as “side-books” I can come back to whenever I feel like it.

When my partner’s Squarespace subscription came up for renewal, I thought “Wait a minute. That’s a lot of money for functionality she’s not even fully using.” So I started looking around for alternatives and landed on WordPress when I realised I had a spare domain slot sitting unused on my shared hosting plan. A week later we relaunched her online store and cancelled Squarespace which reduced our hosting costs significantly. Fewer expenses means more profit so what’s not to like?

But I wasn’t done yet. My own online store was on an expensive managed hosting plan that was overkill for my current needs. At the time I figured I needed a powerful plan to set my store up for success when in reality shared hosting would’ve been just fine for now. Upgrading later on was always an option. I had known this for a while but couldn’t be bothered with migrating to another provider. It sounded like a headache. And what if things broke? That wasn’t a good reason though, so I spent a Friday night moving it to my shared hosting plan, which turned out to be really easy with the Duplicator plugin.

Finally, I moved another WordPress blog of mine to the same hosting plan the two stores were already on. It had better performance too, thanks to Redis caching and LiteSpeed which was a non-negotiable now.

I used to dismiss shared hosting in the past because they were too slow or overcrowded, but it’s come a long way. I’ve now consolidated three websites onto a single shared hosting plan and saved about $450 USD per year.

The only other hosting I happily pay for is this blog that will remain on Blot for the foreseeable future because I just like this setup too much to give it up.