Tag: colin reuter

Selling crap on eBay, finding weird old Sega promo stuff

As the title says.

Over the last month or so I’ve been going through the bins of video games and other crap that I have in the barn, getting rid of things that I haven’t used in several years. Like Kolibri.

When I opened up the box, I found that it still contained a subscription card for Sega Visions (which I do recall having a subscription to at one point in my life), as well as this TOTALLY SWEET PAMPHLET FOR SEGA GEAR!!!!ryantkelly_2015-Feb-08 ryantkelly_2015-Feb-08 1

 

OH MY GOD I WANT A SLEEVELESS SONIC AND KNUCKLES DENIM JACKET!!!!!!

I should probably scan these at work (because nothing screams professionalism in an office than a man scanning a 20 year old Sega merchandise pamphlet) before they get mailed off to the lucky winner of the Kolibri auction on eBay.

NOTE: I bought Kolibri at some point after the 32X went bust, so the game was probably $10 at Electronics Boutique (in MY DAY, it was called ELECTRONICS BOUTIQUE). I think I’ve played it once or twice, it’s really weird and not that fun.

I checked eBay before I posted it to see what I should set for a Buy It Now price, and holy crap it’s going for at least $100 when it has the box and manual. Not worth hauling the damn thing around in a bin of other games for the last seven years, but interesting.

 

Watching cross worlds

I was thinking to myself today, “I wonder how much Universal Sports/NBC/Comcast/Xfinity paid for the rights to UCI CX? And I wonder how much the UCI would make if they charged everyone in the US $5 per race to watch it?”

I think I actually thought this out loud, while reading Twitter. Or something.

Because if you’re a fan of cyclocross in the US, you have probably discovered the wonder of installing Hola in Chrome, pretending to be another country where Jack Donaghy didn’t win the rights to broadcast CX worlds, and going to the UCI YouTube channel, and watching the race in normal definition (WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE we had pixelated crap feeds on steephill.tv AND WE LIKED IT) on your laptop or TV.

The situation in the US is so ugly that Tim Johnson is tweeting out VPN solutions.

ANYWAY, I was thinking all of this (and, as usual, Cosmo has a great post/rant about this), and thought I had a GREAT IDEA in the “charging $5/race”, until I realized that in all of the countries I pretend to be via Hola, the race is broadcast for free on YouTube.

Except in the US, where the UCI found a network willing to give them some money to “broadcast it” to it’s “subscribers” (and yes, I tried cycling.tv, but it was terrible, and they kept billing me after I cancelled my subscription).

So anyway. Someone in the UCI Media Rights Sales Department (gotta be a thing, right?) managed to discover a way to get some cash money from Xfinity International Sports, and we’ll never be able to watch UCI CX in a non-janky fashion again.

But thank you, Hola.