Well, I haven't bought any game related stuff, but since I'm bored, I'll list some things I've bought recently LOL...
Bought an Ein Shemer Apple Tree, Three Jujube trees, some acoustic guitar strings, and a Voicetone Correct Vocal Pedal. This is a pre-amp, compressor, De-esser, low or Warm EQ, and pitch corrector all in one.
What the pre-amp does is pretty much lets you add gain to a mic before it goes in to a mixer or amp, which can be good when you use either a really low noise pickup mic or any non-condenser mic.
The De-Esser limits or stops some of the higher pitched/louder sounds that come out of some singers' mouths, like S sounds, th sounds, ch sounds etc. Apparently, some people have that problem but I didn't. So, I had to artificially create some higher pitched sounds, and it worked at limiting or stopping it completely.
A Warmth or low EQ is actually used mainly live, when the amp is too trebbly. It adds more bass to the sound. The pedal also has a tone shaper on it.
The compressor is actually one of the better features of this thing. What it does is, if setup correctly, make the lower notes sound higher and limits the higher notes so that your mixer or amp doesn't go in to clipping (distorting, etc.) A better compressor would have multiple knobs and switches, to shape every piece of the sound, but this is still a good one.
The pitch corrector as they call it, or pitch teacher as I'm going to call it, really isn't the best feature on this thing. It's suppose to be made to be used live, and maybe in a loud, smoky bar, it'd be fine, but not in a gig where people can hear your vocals clearly. How it works is when your voice is in tune, your voice sounds normal, but when you go out of tune, the corrected voice adds like harmony layers to the voice. The further you're out of tune, the more voices it adds.
Like a lot of pitch changers, it also has a lot of pops and crackles while pitch correct is on, more with higher pitch correction, less with little pitch correction. This definitely wouldn't be good to record in a studio on, because even if you stayed generally in tune, the song would still have those pops and crackles.
What good is the pitch correction then? It has an optional switch that will allow you to actually see how far you're out of pitch and tells you if your pitch needs to go up and down to correct. Even with pitch correction off, you can still use this feature. In that sense, it is still a great way to practice pitch.
This pedal also features an auto adjust feature, if you have the auto adjust on. It takes about 30 seconds for it to learn and adjust to your voice.
These pre-amp pedals are getting popular with podcasting now too. Add a cheap ($60ish) condenser mic to it, and you're ready to podcast. Of course, this only has XRL output. So, you'd have to get a converter that converts XLR to mono/phono 1/4" or whatever adapter you'd need.
hehe... yeah, I have a bunch of stuff, but it's like this. If I just put everything in storage, tightly packed, everything could probably fit fine, but with my video games, I really wanted to dedicate a room for them. Because of this, I had to get rid of about 2/3rds of my video game collection. It sucks having a collection of something and not being able to display it lol..
I collect/have collected a bunch of stuff: Coins, Stamps, Comic Books, Baseball Cards, Non-Sports Cards, Video Games, some video game books and magazines, various other books (sk) and magazines (older nat geo, reptiles), etc.
With the music stuff, I get the urge about every six months to get everything out and play. With the exception of that, it's usually just packed away in storage, but when all of the music gear is out, it takes up a hell of a lot of room. Tons of cables, mics, mixers, amps, multitrack recorders (stand-alone as well as PC), loopers (pc,) keyboard, bass, 12 string acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, two acoustic/electrics, effects pedals (delay, distortion, tube distortion/overdrive hybrid, tremolo, phaser, wah wah,) harmonicas, and who knows what else? I've also owned drum sets, saxophones, a mandolin and dulcimer but would like to get another mandolin and maybe a banjo and electric violin.
I was in a band for awhile many years ago, but I quit for several reasons. For one, I didn't really like the music every one else wanted to play. I like Nirvana and AC/DC and all, but that's the type of stuff we constantly played, as well as a few songs we made. Secondly, I played music because I liked to play music, and I didn't have to be drunk or stoned to play. In fact, that would take away from the experience, IMO. The other bandmates had the opposite thinking.
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Yard/plants/animals......
Yeah, I have 3 acres. It's not much for a southern boy, but it's more than any average Joe in New York City would own. I still want more, for the plant nursery though. It may be enough to do 4000-5000 3 gallon plants, as far as the extra space I have (I already have two houses, two barns, a few storage sheds, and a sh!tload of trees and other plants planted in my yard, including about a 75' row of grapevines.
Before the 2nd house was in the property, we had horses, cows, goats, chickens, hogs (including a wild boar), and various other animals we raised. Of course, these weren't all there at once. My father went through stages of raising horses, and after horses, cows.. and somewhere in between, goats and other animals.
Although I had one horse, I didn't generally have much to do with the rest of those animals. Goats can be good outside pets, but they eat up all of the bark off of your trees and can stink pretty bad. My horse would only let me ride it, and he'd buck any one else off that would try to ride. As a kid, I'd been run over by one horse that apparently just didn't like me, bitten by a horse that liked to bite every one, and bucked off of too many horses and mules to count. I never wore spurs and always rode either English or bareback, even took English riding lessons.
We sold one of our really good horses to a man that came back, telling us the horse was no good, that it couldn't be rode. We knew one of the guy's neighbors and he told us that the guy had been spurring the horse and beating the hell out of it with a whip. That kind of stuff just pisses me off. These jackasses watch an old western movie and think they are automatically some professional cowboy. We always taught our horses by verbal commands, not by spurring them.
Anyway, enough of the horse rant......
I have always liked animals, especially ones that most people wouldn't normally want. Over the years, I've had probably 500 snakes (including many venomous), many turtles (chicken turtles, florida cooters, common snappers, box turtles, mud and musk turtles, red eared sliders, Mississippi map turtles, ouchita map turtles, painted turtles, soft-shelled turtles) and tortoises, a few (10ish) tarantulas, many lizards (tegus, uromastix, monitors, curly-tailed lizards, iguanas, anoles, chameleons,) skunks, squirrels, sugar gliders, ferrets, rabbits, lynx cats, dogs, and many exotic birds.
The largest amount of animals I've had at one time would probably be around 150, mostly snakes, because I had gotten my permits and had a sellers license for them for awhile. Reptiles are something you have to raise and sell, not for money, but hopefully to pay for themselves. Paying for 150 mice, rats, rabbits, chickens, or pigs to feed snakes for a week or two is very expensive. Most people who do it usually do it as a second job, because their first job has to pay for it lol. Not to mention that when you have 150 snakes, you have a bunch of cleaning up to do every day, and many snakes which may have a high metabolism, like my black neck cobra, will actually take a dump, and when you clean its cage, take another dump, and when you clean its cage another time, in the same day, will take yet another dump the very same day.... LOL
If you like snakes but don't like cleaning crap a lot, then you have to go with one that has super low metabolism, like a gaboon viper or for non-venomous, maybe some type of candoia (http://www.kingsnake.com/candoia/) - From what I hear, a lot of the candoia species only eat about twice in three months, at their adult age that is. Gaboon vipers and some of the bush vipers only eat around once per month. My black neck spitter was a garbage disposal. It could eat every day, but generally, twice a week was normal.
Anyway, when I got heavily in to reptiles, I had a building built just for them, triple insulated and heated and cooled. It was small, could probably hold up to 300 snakes.
Yearly permit costs went up by 20x, and I eventually got out of reptiles for the most part. Of course, if I were to mysteriously hit it big, I'd probably get back in to them again. Dealing with venomous stuff isn't with out risks though, because when you deal with a lot of reptiles in general, many of the brokers/dealers aren't very honest about the health of their animals. You end up having to quarantine all new animals for six months, make sure they're eating and look healthy, and even then, treat them for common stuff, with panacur and flagyl, sometimes droncit. If that wasn't bad enough, and you can't get them to eat on their on, no matter how many tricks and different types of foods you try, you have to force feed them. I remember force feeding many timber rattlers, copperheads, pygmy rattlers, and even a puff adder.
It always seemed to be vipers or pit vipers that give me the problem, and they were the most scary to work with, because their have hinged fangs that can actually move around and go to the sides of their mouths and get you in the thumb or trigger finger if you aren't careful, and believe me, they try hard, especially the pygmy and copperheads. Copperheads aren't that bad if they're left alone, in my experience, but as soon as you touch them, they go ballistic. Pygmy rattlers can be hell on wheels though. You can't really hear them rattle usually. So, you don't usually hear their warning before they strike, and although they don't have a large venom gland, their venom is much more concentrated than most other rattlers.
I don't think the puff adder was that bad to deal with personally, but mentally, it is worse because you know if you take a bite, it's an almost guaranteed amputation.
I could go on pages and pages but better stop here, because I'm probably boring every one..
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Anyway, right now, I mainly just have dogs and a couple non-venomous snakes, some parrots, and a uromastix....