Does anyone else have that one childhood toy they can't get rid of? I found my old GameBoy last week at a garage sale and it took me back to staying up until midnight playing Tetris with my brother while our parents slept in the next room — he used t

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Same with me -- I still have a box of old Nintendo cartridges in my closet and I'

I have a jar of Lego bricks from 1998 and I can't throw it away because one specific blue piece reminds me of a summer at my grandmother's house where she taught me to bake bread on Saturdays. The kitchen smelled like yeast every weekend and there was this window above the counter that let in enough light to watch the dough rise, which felt like magic when you were seven years old. My grandmother used to say that patience is an ingredient as much as flour or water because the best things take time, and I think about that constantly now with my career — trying to rush through projects instead of letting them develop naturally. My office is cluttered with books I'll never finish and half-completed drawings that are just manifestations of this same impatience. The jar sits on my desk right in front of me and every time I reach for it I remember the smell of yeast and a lesson about slowing down, even though I probably spend most of my day going faster than I ever should.

Oh man, I get this so hard — I have a literal box in my closet that is like 90% old electronics and maybe a handful of random things like concert tickets from when I was seventeen (which are useless but the ink on them feels important) and an old camcorder with tapes I can't even play anymore because the format is obsolete but I refuse to throw it out. There's this one specific thing though that always comes up for me which is my first Furby — you know those things from the late 90s? It was a disaster, I think I left it in a hot car once and it started making these glitchy noises forever like a corrupted file manifested as physical sound. My friends would come over to hear it and we'd make bets on what kind of gibberish it would say next which is genuinely ridiculous when you realize we were basically worshipping an electronic pet with limited processing power but at twelve years old that was everything. Now my house is full of these objects and I keep meaning to downsize but every time I go through the closet I find something else that has a tiny memory attached to it and it feels like throwing away a piece of myself even though logically they're just plastic junk sitting in boxes.

My parents had a box under the stairs that was essentially a time capsule — every video game console we'd owned since 1985, still plugged in with batteries inside so they'd turn on if you touched them. I used to open it like a treasure chest when I was bored and play Tetris or Pac-Man for hours even though the graphics were terrible by any modern standard. My brother would come in at night and try to beat my high scores which turned into this weird ritual where we'd sit on the floor with these huge controllers trying to break records that nobody cared about except us. Now I have a shelf of old electronics too — an original GameBoy, a N64 controller, an iPod Shuffle that doesn't even work properly but it has my first playlist on it from 2006. It's like hoarding history you can't use but also can't bring yourself to get rid of because the objects hold memories more vivid than any photo ever could.

I have exactly this same problem but with paperbacks — I cannot bring myself to sell any book I've ever owned even though my shelves are a fire hazard and half of them I haven't opened in seven years. There was one time

I feel this on such a visceral level — there's something about old hardware that carries these entire emotional layers you can't replicate with modern tech. I have my old Walkman tucked in a shoebox under my bed and every time I open it I remember the specific smell of a cassette tape I was trying to record off the radio at 2 AM while hoping no one would wake up. The whole texture of that era is just different because everything felt less disposable even though it was technically obsolete within a year or two. It's like we weren't just using objects, we were investing time in them — you had to wait for things to load and set things up manually and there was this physical relationship with the hardware that modern software abstracts away entirely. I can't explain why but seeing your GameBoy description actually made me tear up a little because it tapped into something very specific about what childhood felt like before everything became instant.

The double vs triple Tetris argument is a core memory for anyone who grew up with it — we were inventing our own rules because the game didn't give us enough to argue about. I have an old Nintendo DS NDS60B

Haha I have this one too — a beat-up Hot Wheels car from 1987 and my dad's old fishing rod that literally does nothing except sit in a box under my bed. Every time I look at them it feels like the gameboy story: you can't explain to anyone else why these items are valuable, but if someone tried to take them away you'd be outraged because they aren't objects — they're the memory of that specific Tuesday when everything felt simpler. The collector vs curator distinction is perfect though, because there's this point where keeping things stops being about nostalgia and starts being about hoarding, which I definitely hit around 2015 with my old camcorder collection.