Nik and I have spent some time recently examining our finances and preparing a plan for future spending and, more importantly, saving in an effort to prepare for some down-the-road life events. You know, buying an actual house and that sort of thing.

Part of this plan involves a pretty strict budget and a pre-agreed-upon set of major purchases for things we need (or actually have needed for quite some time, like a sofa that isn’t a continuous source of humiliation and bedroom furniture that isn’t broken or nearly useless) so as to avoid putting them off indefinitely. Of course that means less money on hand to purchase things that aren’t as pressing but arguably more fun to buy. I mean, for me the choice between sofa aesthetics and HDTV is really no choice at all but I recognize that our current television set is perfectly serviceable while our couch isn’t.

However, I’ve got a hankering for some equipment that isn’t included in the plans for a purpose I’ll reveal later and my only thought for affording it requires getting rid of some stuff I’m not using or don’t really want. Now, I know I’ve tried to offer stuff for sale here before to little response but since my audience is comprised almost entirely from friends and family members, I thought I’d give you a last chance to claim any of my stuff before I hunker down on eBay and try to accumulate some un-earmarked cash.

If any of this interests you, please let me know by emailing me any point before the auction starts. I plan to start listing things one at a time beginning this weekend. Everything here is first come/best offer and if you help me avoid an eBay listing I’ll ship it free assuming the shipping costs don’t eclipse the offered price.

• Comic Book Collection. I have hundreds of old comic books including lots of Iron Man, X-Men and Batman books. I’ve read them all several times over and they’re just taking up space at this point. Practically all of them are in good condition and have been kept in bags with cardboard to preserve the condition as best I could. I have a list I can dig up that catalogs the whole collection and I’ve estimated the value at somewhere north of $700, although I’ll pretty much take what I can get for them. It would be a pretty good gift for a budding geeklet/comic collector.
• iBook. My laptop is showing its age especially for the kinds of things I need it for like Photoshop and Final Cut. Also, it has a problem with the sleep feature which seems to cause the display to freak out more often than not which requires a cold reboot. I haven’t investigated how much repairs would cost but I’m guessing not that much since the display still works it just gets goofy sometimes. It’s probably a wire that gets pinched when the lid is closed. In any case, it’s a G4 PowerPC 944 MHz that has maxed out RAM (I think something odd like 640 MB) and even without repairs would probably work great with an external monitor as a nice intro machine to the world of OS X (I’ll include a fresh install of 10.4). Similar items on eBay seem to go for around $500.
• GameCube. It’s a nice system but I’ve played all the games for it that I was interested in and it’s just hogging room in the entertainment unit. I have a few games I’ll toss in as well including Zelda: Twilight Princess (which lots of people love but I didn’t care for) and I have a WaveBird wireless controller. Similar packages go for around $50 on eBay.
• Dreamcast. Yeah, I still have my Dreamcast. There are some really excellent games for this system that you can find really cheap so if you’re into the whole bargain gaming thing and don’t mind being several years behind the curve, it could offer some good times. People ask for around $50-60 on eBay; that’s too much in my opinion, but whatever. It’s your offer.
• Warhammer 40K Chaos Space Marines Army (Partially Painted). Okay, okay, this is a tough one. On one hand, I don’t want to give it up because, well, it’s cool and I put a lot of time and money into it. But several forces have conspired to make my time and desire for the game wane so I’m willing to entertain offers for it. This is a massive army (2,750 points worth at least, if you’re already familiar with the game rules) and while I confess the quality of some of the painting shows my learning curve, it is probably only in need of 6-8 hours worth of work to be tournament-ready and maybe twice that if you want to touch them up and make them look really nice (assuming you stick with the original palette). I’ve done some stripping before and it isn’t that hard if you wanted to start over. The thing is, I don’t want this to go bit by bit, it’s gotta be the whole enchilada. But I will throw in the Codex ($20-25 in stores) and some sample army lists I made plus the base color paints I special ordered from the UK because no one in the US makes the color anymore (grr). If you bought all this stuff retail it would be worth well over $1,000. Lesser pre-painted armies go on eBay for $600 or more. I won’t even indicate what would strike me as reasonable, it kind of depends, but if you’re interested let me know and I can provide specifics on what I have and the state of the painting and we’ll take it from there.
• Atari 2600 and games. I have a functioning Atari 2600 system plus a slew of great games, which are fun for some non-emulation retro fun. This kind of listing on eBay runs in the $30 range.
• Sony DVD player. I re-shuffled some entertainment center components and ended up deciding to use the XBox as the DVD player in the living room. The standalone player it replaced is less than two years old and quite good: I’ve never put anything in it that it wouldn’t play, including Video CDs and weird burned DVDs in funky formats. It isn’t region-free, but it’s probably worth $30 or so. I can get the exact model number and other specs if you need them.
• I have a copy of Dawn of War and the Winter Assault expansion for PC. I no longer have a PC available to me so they’re kind of useless. Let me know if you want ’em. I’d be willing to simply give these away to someone who wants to pay for shipping since they’re no good to me anymore.

I may have more stuff available once I start cleaning up, but these are the main items I know of right now.