stuff, stuff and more stuff

This last couple of months I've been drowning in new stuff.

Obviously I'm aware that Christmas is 'just around the corner' so in a way it should be no big surprise, but I dunno, I'd always kinda assumed most of the stuff I buy is rather immune from the Chrimbo effect.

The best example is that I'm collecting quite a few manga series and manga is released periodically. Now for some series that have been going for a while there's a gap between what's being released in the west and where the series is in Japan, so it can only been two or three months between new volumes. For others they're pretty much up with the Japanese, so it's more like one a year.

So if that's the case, how come every single series I'm collecting has volumes out either this month or next month and in some cases in January too. In order for that to happen they must all be trying to release a Christmas volume or two.

Which initially seemed a little illogical to me. If these things are coming out every few months or in the middle of the year then people are buying them anyway. In other words, they're not really Christmas present territory.

Generally, stuff comes out at Christmas because it can then be bought as gifts, you see. The good example of that for stuff I buy is computer games. COD: Modern warfare 2 came out this week and I'm sure it's therefore lodged on a lot of people's Christmas lists (even if it is an 18-rated title).

But then it occurred to me - people get money as a present too, so then it makes more sense to have these 'non-Christmas' items out too. It gives people something to spend their Christmas money on, especially given the manga market has been in a bit of a decline. So it's more like a sensible "alignment" than bringing them out specifically as gift items.

Anyway, the real point of this is that because I pre-order everything on Amazon ages in advance I don't tend to pay attention to the dates. And because of how complex the dates are I generally set everything to deliver "as soon as possible". I mean, it doesn't make sense if you're ordering two things, one of which goes on sale in October 2009 and the other in August 2010 to put it as "despatch together" does it?

Well no, but this means that over the last couple of weeks I've received a constant stream of parcels of new stuff. Indeed, it's gotten to the stage that it's sucked all of the money out of my bank account. Considering I keep about £200 in that account and each book only costs about £8 delivered, you get some idea how many things have been sent.

In fact I've actually switched the payment method over to a credit card because I just don't have the cash to cover it all and I swore I'd never do that after I racked up so much debt before :/.