Clearoutageddon Part Two: Free Junk!

Whatever faint possibility there was of someone buying a VHS copy of Titanic in 2011, would anyone really want to take a bunch of wrecked PS2 discs or a pile of obsolete software off my hands, much less pay for the privilege of doing so? Well, mostly no. But there were a few surprising exceptions, as I took to some classifieds sites last year to unload some more clutter.



On first inspection, it looks like we've got a set of perfectly good PS2 games here (also, Sonic Heroes). Flip the discs over though and...



...you can see they're all scratched up pretty badly. Not unusual for used PS2 games of course, but in all my time hauling stacks of cheap PS2 games out of my local GameStop, these were the only ones that flat out didn't work. I guess I could have returned them, but given how little I paid for them, it never seemed worth the hassle. Instead I hung onto them in the hope that I'd be able to repair them later. Well, with something other than toothpaste anyway. I'd already tried that with unsuccessful, yet minty fresh results. :D

Tired of hanging onto them, I put up an ad up last September to see if anyone would take them off my hands for the cost of postage. And someone did. Or at least it looked like they were going to. Then they pulled out citing of a funeral in the family. As a newcomer to this classifieds site I thought "fair enough", but after the second time I had someone do that, I started to suspect that this was a go-to excuse for pulling out of a deal there. That, or a very strange coincidence.

In the end I wasn't able to get a taker for these so they found their way to the bottom of a bin bag.



I mentioned back in 2009 that I had a launch GBA that just randomly died while I was in the final stages of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. This is that GBA. At the time, I assumed that the whole system was fried, but after a bit of experimentation, I discovered that it was just the screen that had died. Replacements seemed to be relatively expensive though and I wasn't too confident in my ability to put in a new one, so I just put it aside.

Three years later, I decided I'd put up an ad for it and maybe let someone else have a crack at repairing it. I really wasn't expecting much interest, but within minutes of posting it, I was swamped with offers. In the end, I sent it to this guy, who seemed much more concerned about the (pretty well-preserved) box and the manuals than viability of the unit itself, so much so that I wondered if he was just planning to flip it as an "as new" handheld onto some unsuspecting sucker. Man, I really hope not.

I made this video to show that it really was just the screen that was broken, in case anyone needed proof. I guess I didn't need to bother. :)

007 Spy Files was this crappy, in-universe Bond magazine aimed at children from 2002. As such, I can't really explain why I picked up ten issues of it. I don't remember enjoying it in any capacity and I certainly had no interest in the Top Trumps style cards they were giving away with it. I guess there was precious little else to buy on the news stand of my local supermarket back then.

While I was initially surprised that someone who appeared to be a grown woman was interested in picking these up, it made much more sense when she mentioned they were for her nephew. I guess they finally found their way into the right hands. I have to wonder though, if he's only got into the series via Daniel Craig, will he have any idea who the Irish guy is on most of the covers is. :)

 

These, I got as fucking Christmas presents one year. Someone thought "Hey, you know what JiliK just loves? Knowledge. In CD-ROM form" Well, fuck that. These things ended up sitting in a pile of junk for a good decade or so afterwards. :D

A quick trial on Windows XP last year revealed that they probably wouldn't work on a modern PC, but I put an ad up for them anyway. Maybe someone, somewhere would be able to knock some use out of them. The same day, I did get one person willing to pay the postage for both these and all the French stuff below. After a month of waiting though, the guy never come through with the payment and into the bin they went.



I mentioned before that I had to learn French in secondary school. One of the most time-consuming parts of that, homework-wise, was always looking shit up in a French dictionary. A computer-based alternative would have been a godsend. Unfortunately, the Learn to Speak French set above was all I could get my hands on, but it absolutely wasn't what I needed.



Also included in the same ad as the above set was a French phrase book and tape I randomly picked up in a supermarket in 1999 and another bloody CD-ROM, that the same relative gave me the Christmas afterwards, still not grasping that PCs were for playing Doom, not learning. Out of these, the cassette/phrase book ended up going into the charity shop box and everything else got binned.