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Revenant

Member: Seasoned Veteran
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Personal Information

  • Occupation
    Fire and Gas Protection Engineer
  • Hobbies
    coin collecting, photography, PC gaming, tabletop gaming
  • Location
    Texas

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  1. After my mother-in-law got me an MS70 2013 Koala, that got me looking at the set again. My wife got me the 2014 and 2016 in MS70 coins as part of my anniversary present a couple of weeks ago. Around the same time I scored pretty good deals on the 2019 and 2022 coins... As a funny aside, entered in the 2022 coin this morning, and I saw the pictures entered in the data base for the coin... that... doesn't quite look right... So that leaves me just needing to get the 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, and (soon) 2024 to bring that set back up to being 100% complete for the first time in years. I started the set back in 2008 and 2009 and won "Best in Category" in it for those years (along with a bunch of other people), but I haven't had the set caught up and complete in... 15 years. Wow. Time has flown... But I'm having fun just making some low-effort pick-ups when I find one at a reasonable deal. I think I'll keep looking and slowly trying to get the remaining coins over the next 9 months or so as I find them at attractive prices. "Low-effort" might seem kind of blah / harsh but... when you compare buying large lots of raw coins, searching through them, and submitting yourself to just picking up pre-graded MS70s for barely more than the price of the silver + grading... it's a different process. No dig to those that do this most of the time or exclusively in their collecting, but it's a different process and... it's just easier. On another front, because my collecting efforts haven't been very cost-heavy the last year or so - in part because past major award wins have subsidized the grading and building of some of my last few project sets - I'm sitting on more hobby money than I've had in a while - pushing $2,000 - and I'm seriously considering continuing to hoard some cash until I have the ~$2500 I'd need to buy an MS65 1924 Double Eagle. It'd be a large gold coin - the largest I'd own by a wide margin - and it's a Double Eagle, which I think is one of those "must haves" if you collect US coins. And 1924 would be for my grandmother's birth year. If I ever went for a 2nd one, I'd go for a 1920 - grandpa's birth year, my namesake. At the same time, not winning a major award this year and not having a $500 use-it-or-lose-it credit takes off the pressure to find / have things to submit and also frees me up to change my effort or where I spend my energy. I've been somewhat avoiding spending my time and budget on pre-graded stuff the last couple of years specifically because it doesn't help me with the goal of using / burning that credit. But I will probably be submitting something, because I'll get the $150 credit when my membership renews, and that will probably go towards some turtle coins. My step-father has discussed in the past the possibility of getting a non-1932 double eagle just to have one, just because neither of us see that 1932 double eagle in the cards. As part of this I'm realizing that a gift card that my brother-in-law gave me for my birthday has a slightly higher balance than I'd anticipated, and I'm discussing / considering with my wife spending that on more household expenses and rolling the equivalent cash into my budget fun / hobby money to get closer to that $2,500. Another one of the big ticket items that's kind of a soft-entry in my list of wants would be buying a new camera body - a mirrorless one this time - to replace my D600/D610. I've discussed / joked in the past that a double eagle could be my wife's 10th anniversary present to me. Maybe if I buy the coin, she could do that herself in 10 years. I guess we'll see how it all works out.
  2. Revenant

    rare coins

    Pulling these from change, I'm sure they would be / seem rare in the same way I always thought it was cool when I found Canadian and Mexican coins mixed in with my change as a kid - the novelty made me not care about the fact that the store had basically cheated me by carelessly passing them on to me. I saved most of them. I still have a lot of coins I got that way... but... There's circumstantially "rare," legitimately "rare," and then there's "valuable."
  3. The obvious one that most of us are going to know and recognize on the Boards is Coin928 - Congrats to him - but we also have a double-win for Deposito I think (and I feel like maybe he's been on the boards in the past, but maybe I'm remembering wrong) and we also have a win from Electric Peak. So, a few recognizable names there. Congrats to all of them and the others we don't know.
  4. Ultimately, if serves any purpose, I suspect the NGCX scale is only going to serve to create market confusion among casuals and newbies and I don't think it will bring new people in. I honestly wonder if this hobby really has any legs left because most people my age and younger aren't into it and all I ever seem to see is people saying, "My grandpa died and gave me this. How much is it worth" (while looking to cash out on it probably.) We need to bring in a newer generation, and I respect the attempt, but I don't think this is the way to do it.
  5. Yes, they ditched the cards and the last time we got the jab the Dr told us that it was now considered endemic and we were going to just have annual CoVID shots now to go with the flu shots. Such a joy. The world keeps turning and finding ways to try to kill us.
  6. To this I would add, White Balance / White balancing can be tricky when you don't have a grey / white object in the shot for calibrating on.
  7. As a ChemE, I'd always heard the term "noble metals" applied to metals that generally don't rust or tarnish. It's also sometimes funny to me to think that aluminum was once considered semi-precious, or at least valuable, because for a time it was very hard to produce / separate metallic aluminum. Then they found a cheap way to do it and all of a sudden you get aluminum cans instead of tin cans. But it was surprising and funny to find Italian coins from the ~1950s made out of Aluminum.
  8. My reaction to my latest booster was pretty terrible at the injection site. Same for my son and Mother-in-law. I was quite shocked. I had redness for days in that spot and the skin was hot to the touch.
  9. About 4 years ago my Mother-in-Law went to New York and, while she was there, she stopped by the Mint in Philadelphia and bought me a proof SAE and a 2019 Birth Year set for our then new baby, Sam. I hadn't really been aware that these were a thing, so I hadn't gotten one when Ben was born, and, of course, in 2019, they were sold out of 2016. I've kept an eye out on eBay for the last few years but 2016 seems to be a harder-than-most year for these sets and if one ever comes up the seller is usually asking something silly for it like $125-150. About a week ago one came up for bid with a starting bid of about $41.25. I was hoping this would be a good chance to go for one at a more reasonable price, but there were several other people watching it and it ended up going for $96.00. I'm just not willing to spend that much on it, in part because, while I think Ben MIGHT like having one and might be jealous of Sam having one, I don't expect him to be THAT into it and for $100 I think there are other things I'd rather get him and other things he'd rather have. So, for now, I passed and I'll continue to watch and wait. I have an MS70 1/4th oz gold eagle for both boy's birthyears. I've also considered going back and trying to get each of them a 1/10th oz. While more expensive than $100, that's still on the list of things I'd rather get him / them if I'm going to be dropping $100+ on something.
  10. I hope everyone on here had a Good Christmas a few days ago and is looking forward to a good New Year's Eve and New Years Day. We'll be hosting a New Year's Eve party this year because Ben really liked it that one year and he wants one. From a coin collecting standpoint this year was a little more muted than last year - Shandy got me a 2023 MS70 Panda, surprising me after head-faking with the Koalas. I also got Choya a 1982-D Half dollar to fill in a hole in one of the year-sets we started years ago. That was a surprise for him because he claims that he'd been looking recently and hadn't seen anything on offer. I looked and had seen several things, but it's entirely possible that what I was willing to spend isn't the same thing as what he was willing to spend. Shandy also did me a HUGE favor on a non-coin collecting front and bought me a padded foam case for storing some of the minis I've been collecting and trying to slowly paint this year. It amuses me to think that my old High School Art Teachers, if they're still around and kicking somewhere, would probably be happy to see me still painting and doing things with art supplies into my mid- and soon to be late-30s. Lately I've continued working on a project of pink and purple mechs that I'm painting for Shandy: My mother-in-law gave me a beefier version of my magnifying lamp that I can clamp onto my table and, when I get to do this stuff in my office, this will be doing like it's smaller brother and doing double-duty for coins and mini-painting... But I need to put it together... Shouldn't be too hard. Shandy meanwhile is taking up crochete, and so there are times now when I'll be sitting and painting and she'll be working with yarn. I'm quietly (for now) seeing if I can pull something off for Ben. If I pull it off, I'll probably be posting about it soon. We'll see on that front, but I never talk about it until it's done on these things.
  11. Sounds like my initial impression was correct though, which is kinda cool.
  12. Good to know. Though I like the idea of having and seeing both. If my pictures and comments on the Venezuelan coins are any indication, I think that die and strike flaws can be interesting and add a little character. Of course, some of those Venezuelan coins have a lot of "character."
  13. Posting this a little late, but I thought I'd say "Happy Thanksgiving" to everyone. I found myself remembering a recent conversation with Ben, where he was wondering when he'd get his own cell phone (recall: he is 7), and we thought he'd probably get one in a few years, maybe as he's getting into middle school and starting to do things for school and such without us around or with him more, but we also pointed out that this would be subject to us having the money / funds available at the time for him to have a cell phone and pay the plan on it. We pointed out that it's always possible to have lean times and he just kind of shrugged that off and was like, "but that's not going to happen." Oh, how I wish I could share his confidence! He's too young to remember the year I didn't have a job. He's still really too young I think to remember much of the time before 2021, before his mother went back to work, and that was the point when we finally really got comfortable again - when we had 2 incomes again. Before that, we were making it, but we had to be more careful with the budget than we have been the last couple of years. But that was something I just had to think about and laugh about on Thanksgiving. "Yes, lean times do come. But they're not here right now, and that's something to be grateful for. And we have savings and a buffer to help us when lean times do come. And that's something else to be grateful for." On another note, I did manage to image the new 3P and 6P coins, and image the recent additions to my modern Italian projects. I thought I'd call out the results with the 3P coins. They're copper-nickel coins, so, perhaps unsurprisingly, they tone in a manner similar to what you see with some old US Nickels. There's a pretty major difference between the level of detail in the hair on the 1955 vs the 1957. I don't know if this is a die state issue or a strike quality issue. Were the details missing from the die at that point or did the coin just not get hit hard enough to transfer them? Overall, looking at the rest of the coin, I think the strike was solid but the die just didn't have the details to transfer. Here's a 6P reverse, just to share how the Leopard looks:
  14. Yes. Stalin did a good job of making sure there'd be conflict and Russia has benefitted from keeping that going to make sure that they remain the power and the major influence and necessary party in much of the region. I suspect they might live to regret that though as they will probably soon live in a very chaotic region that they no longer have the muscle to ride herd over. Thanks for the heads up on that. I've been considering some of those 50 pence pieces. May yet make it happen. I'll still considering it.
  15. One of the predictable outcomes of me starting to work more seriously on a collection / set of coins with a turtle theme is that its going to have me branching out into some more things and giving me extra opportunities to digress into, "Hey! Look at this thing I just found!" I recently found a seller offering 4 of these coins from that feature a sea turtle. I ordered all 4 of the ones they had listed. When those came in and looked great, and I saw the seller had listed 3 more, I ordered those too, just to have several to look at and for some extras. I have to say, it was a little jarring to see the old hammer and sickle on a coin dated 2018 - 27 years after the fall of the USSR. And that whole design looks very very anachronistically soviet. Moldova is a very small country stuck between Ukraine and Romania and it's right next to the port of Odesa. It has about 2.5 Million people. But as I read more, I've found that this coin doesn't actually come from Moldova. There's an even smaller, unrecognized, breakaway state called Transnistria that tried to break away during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. The Moldovan government has not had control or influence over the area since a ceasefire agreement was made to effectively end the Transnistria War in July 1992, and Transnistria (the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) has its own president. The currency of Moldova is the "Leu" and this coin is denominated in Roubles. Transnistria dropped "Soviet" from their name in 1991 and nominally abandoned the socialist ideology... but apparently not the symbolism and iconography, if this coin is any indication. Based on Numista, Transnistria puts out tons and tons of different 1 Rouble designs. It looks like in 2016 they did a whole "signs of the zodiac series" / set and in 2017 they had a "Coats of Arms of Transnistrian Cities series," several other commemorative issues, Chinese Zodiac issues... 2018 had their "Red Book of Transnistria" series, which included this coin, as well as a bunch of others. They put out a lot of these things.... a lot a lot. If you look at the coins of the "third rouble" (which has only existed since 2000) on Numista, they have 11 pages of coins / coin designs - 530 results. Venezuela has 136 results for the period from 1843-date. SO.... yeah. This little republic apparently likes to pump out limited-run, non-circulating coins with the best of them. A lot like Niue, but with nickel-plated steel instead of 1 oz silver coins. They are all non-circulating issues with limited mintages - this coin apparently has a mintage of only 50,000 - and they're all nickel-plated steel. So, an interesting little find to be sure.