bumblebee

This is one of those auctions where it is almost futile to try to explain to a non-collector, or even a non-Pelt-head. 😜 https://www.ebay.com/itm/224660871436

Got this oddball cork with aventurine in a killer score, along with a matching patch. Need to take better pictures though. Cork on left, patch on right. Obviously original owner from the wild kept these two on purpose, as there were no others in the bags like these.

Interestingly, traditional "aniseed ball" candy looks like a 1/2" marble but is formed of hardened layers of sugar candy around a rapeseed seed. I had them in Ireland and they are rock hard like jaw breakers, so you have to suck them patiently. I was surprised the first time I got to the center and found a seed, although the seed in mine looked more like an actual aniseed rather than rapeseed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniseed_ball

Like these railroad crossing sign reflectors, which are sort of half a marble with their bodies all glass, the bottom half being painted a pale green. The fellow said his dad probably took them off signs during his railroad job back in the 1940s. I got 40 of the red and 23 of the clear, so enough to get crafty!

That's a very nice agate, likely vintage handmade in Germany, in a rare blue color. Agate is a form of chalcedony. Here's a useful excerpt from an 1887 London paper article of an interview with a mineralogist. Note he says carnelian is not banded, but elsewhere I have seen carnelian is used to describe the typical reddish color of banded agates...I need to pick up the slack on my research!:

I was enjoying sniping some nice agates at low prices on eBay during the past couple of years, but clearly there are some new old kids in town with deeper pockets and just as sharp eyes. This first one was a premium agate with an unusual bullseye to boot. At shooter size for they really do not get better than in this color in my experience, so I should have bid higher than $51. (I recall a newspaper article from early 20th century saying jewelry shops would purchase the highest grade agates like this for use in their creations. Will have to look that up.) While this is a premium agate at an usually larger size with uncommon chocolately shades, I have not seen one go for this much in a very long time. I attribute that more to this being from a popular seller, so lots of competition. I personally would trade this one below for the one above if given the chance, but not if I spent $138 on it!

Here, here! MarbleConnection is the oldest and largest marble collecting forum on the Web. Unlike FB where interesting and valuable information seemingly vanishes into oblivion in a day, forums like this encourage discussion, reflection, learning, and storing of valuable historic and cultural information about this great hobby. I encourage everyone to use the search features to discover just how much great content there is on here. I am grateful to Lou for allowing me to help repair it and take over operations back in early 2019. I will keep it going as long as I can. Thanks to generous donations from members, I have not had to pay out of pocket this past year for the hosting, domain name, or licensing support fees. YTD, we have seen a 33% increase in visitor activity year over year with more engagement: If growth continues, at some point in the future I could upgrade the hosting to much faster, but that would likely add $150 annually to recurring fees. So far it seems snappy enough for me but of course as more users pile on it can slow down. Will just have to wait and see! Fun fact: because this site is so old and reputable among the search engines, I get daily requests from "search engine optimization experts" who want to pay me to post articles that link back to their sites. The reason they do this is because when an old and reputable site links out to another site, the search engines consider this an endorsement or voucher that those sites are reputable. Then the search engines give those sites a little boost in their rankings. I ignore all these because the sites in question are almost always spammy and unrelated to marble collecting. Not-so-fun fact: Forums like ours are under constant attack from spammers and "bots" which are automated computer programs trying to break in or post spam. 95% of our new user sign-ups are fake and they never confirm their accounts, but our system is programmed to delete those after two weeks if they don't confirm their accounts, which saves me a lot of work. Sometimes these attacks force me to require users from some countries to solve a "CAPTCHA" code to prove they are real users. Recently we have been getting about 2.9k attacks a day from servers in the UK, so unfortunately our legitimate UK users have to solve a CAPTCHA each session before they can use the site.

I went to buy old books yesterday from a private party when I spotted a coffee can full of marbles mostly from 60s/70s with lots of bright Vitro Agates. He let my cherry pick 10 or so, and said that was just 1/3 of the collection. He'll be contacting me when he pulls the rest. Here's some of the better ones for under a dollar each, taken by my trademark $1500 camera and lens combo that always looks like a 1990s web cam photo when I take photos of marbles. 😜

Moderators can restore deleted posts, if that helps?

Unfortunately you cannot "polish" photos with this many problems. The sharpening tools can't work miracles.

...you want pristine and special, but so often the glory is ruined by damage, or in my case, blurry focus. Spent 20 minutes trying to capture young Harlequin duck shooting the rapids and finally had my shot but it came out in NM- condition (or worse). Still, you can tell what a beauty it might have been.

Wow that's a very healthy collection. Enjoyed variety and nice orderly layout.

Ad from April, 1944, San Fernando Valley Times.

It is a bit daunting. I flirted with this idea before but the wheels came off when I started to try to gather collector names. If I were doing this I would start with a tabular data source like Excel or the free Google Sheets or https://airtable.com/pricing, then link to that on the forum or try to paste it from the source into a forum-friendly format. I spent an hour one evening starting one for Vitro but never got more than this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cxNKBi4Q8P9U0P0nu2EhGeFESowGD3VZVF89sA5k06o/edit?usp=sharing

And the USPS costs have skyrocketed. Does not bode well for economy methinks.

Yup! First laserdisc game. They also did Space Ace and another I think?

I sold something recently, a 12" replica working vintage video game called Dragon's Lair, for $384 (cost me $149 originally). eBay took $53 in fees and I paid $47 to ship it 1,200 miles USPS priority mail. I listed it as free shipping assume it would be about $20 in shipping. It weighed under 6lbs. I still made some money off the deal but simply not worth it. I could have sat on it another five years and watched the value double or triple as these were sold out. I had no idea postal costs had skyrocketed so much. I returned a single caster wheel for my BBQ that was the wrong size. I stuffed it in a small box and the cheapest shipping was $15, half the original price! If you were an 80s kid like me you may really enjoy these Replicade arcade recreations. Truly works of art!

Vitro "G"

Does it do Peltish things inside beneath the veneer?

Mibgirl26 is now banned for vulgar insults against another user in another topic. As you were my fellow mibsters!

I added a new rank for @Steph : Marble Queen Anyone with more than 100k reputation points gets this, but the person closest to Steph has 24k points so I think it'll be a while before I have to worry about a more gender-neutral badge.

It's a new feature in the latest board update but I barely understand it myself. Currently I believe it is only ranking based on one year of data. Otherwise it would take too long and too many computing resources to calculate. Sadly that means Steph doesn't get a "Marble King" badge for having more than 25k posts, but maybe I can cook something up! https://invisioncommunity.com/news/product-updates/drum-roll-please…-announcing-achievements-r1227/

Yum! Lots of juice in those.

Gorgeous but for my mileage I'd rather spend $14k on random eBay lots so I have something to pick through every day.

I moved into a new rural neighborhood recently where children play outside all day riding bikes, walking along the streams, even playing in the rain. Reminds me of my childhood. I was chatting with a group of them today while on a walk with my father and told them I had some marbles to share if they were interested. Their eyes lit up and one girl excitedly told me she thought all her bouncy balls were marbles, but she realized she did not have any actual marbles. Later I came back outside with two jugs: my commie game marbles, and my special jug of wounded placeholders. The four of them saw me with a jug under each arm and rushed over. I said they could take five from the common jug and one--any one they want--from the special jug. I told them some of the special ones were more than 100 years old. "Look how colorful they were for being so old," I said. They were excited but gave me one more glance to ask whether I was sure they could do this, then they dove in. After about 10 minutes they had all chosen. We agreed the little boy probably ended up with more than five, but nobody complained. The precocious 9-year-old girl latched on to my only sulphide, a beat-up bear(?). I told her that one was rare and more than 100 years old. Then they all dashed away to play. 30 minutes later, I heard a light knock on my door. The girl who took the sulphide had all her marbles in a small basket. She eagerly told me she had invented a game over on the dirt patch that sounded just like a real game of marbles to me: she made five holes in a big circle for the five marbles, and one big hold in the center for the sulphide, and tried to roll them all into the holes. It was such a wonderful feeling for me to be reminded of my childhood, and to realize that childhood can be much how it was in my day. For the childlike at heart, marbles are always fun and beautiful. Now my only sulphide is back where it belongs, in the wild in the hands of a child. No doubt I may have planted a few seeds today that could one day sprout into a future marble collector. Have you been able to share the joy with future generations as well?