bumblebee

This morning, on my way to work, a disheveled elf called me into an alleyway and showed me this picture on his tiny flip phone, claiming it was part of the Christmas marble package being worked on in Santa's workshop. Of course, I cannot confirm nor deny this because that would spoil the gift, but I might as well share what I saw:

Tis' the season for giving, so I am putting together a Christmas marble mail package for one of our newer collectors. This drawing is for those collectors who will dance like Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre when they see vintage tri-color veneered patches and marbles with a neat spiral pattern. 🤣 In other words, I ask the old timers to take a step back and let the newcomers enjoy a better chance at winning all the marbles. But I won't judge anyone for entering, so you do you! The rules: You must be registered here as a user prior to the date of this post. To enter, simply reply here with the the phrase: I WANT ALL THE MARBLES! (You are free to reply and say other things, but you won't be entered unless you write I WANT ALL THE MARBLES!) On December 11th, I will put all the names in a hat and have my daughter choose the winner at random. I will message the winner and send the marbles to their shipping address. While it won't help you win, if you write in your reply why you want to win, it may inspire me to sweeten the pot even more. The drawing ends by end of day December 10th, 2023, so good luck! Names entered as of 12/5: @B-rett66, @Linda Gail, @Melissa, @Djp5690, @Big Billy red beard

Hah! I am repurposing that one elsewhere....😃

This time by the DALL-E-3 engine. Took me a few tries on each prompt to get the image I liked. These take under 20 seconds to generate. "a marble collector" "a female marble collector" collection of vintage agate bullseye marbles toy marbles made by aliens leprechauns playing marbles santa claus with a sleigh full of toy marbles

Topics that go bump in the night...

Maybe if she pawed them it would be Bye Bye! 🤣

Great point. Many of those mint marbles have already outlasted their original owners. They're just on loan to us.

So my girlfriend decided to go on a late-night cleaning spree, and, without my permission, tackled my dusty 6-ft marble temple shelves. All of you know what that means, and you're probably thinking the worse, and the worse is what happened: she somehow dropped or knocked off (from what height I know not) my most valuable brag box, which is sealed with a magnet, and which is still missing six marbles this morning. I presume they all fell out and she just put back the ones she could find. To find mint bricks and tri-color CACs floating around on the hard floor or lower wooden shelves feels as bad as you all can imagine. My mint Akro Royal with heavy aventurine is still missing, probably under the shelf on the floor. I refuse to take out a loupe and examine them. What's the point? They're each unique and irreplaceable, and I wouldn't sell them for five times their market worth. An obvious lesson here is ensure people in your life realize how fragile and important your marbles are so they see the DO NOT TOUCH sign. But for me the bigger lesson is that ultimately we all must let go of everything precious in this life when we leap into the unknown country. Little incidents like this can help us practice that shrug of letting go. When my time comes to be knocked off this mortal shelf, I hope that wherever I end up, someone or something discovers me in the darkness, shines their light on me, and finds me precious enough to be worthy of a seat in some divine--and much more secure--brag box. 😀

From the City Museum of Ljubljana.

Thanks guys! I was a bit lax on updating the donation tracker and pleasantly surprised by how we beat the funding goal this year, so thank you everyone who contributes here in activity and financially. I definitely fought a few technical battles getting the board moved to a new server and then offloading all the images to different hosting, but with that all settled now we should be able to coast along for a few years without running out of resources. This is a precious resource for marble collecting lore and information so I am honored to be able to keep it going.

So far it's been stable since I made the change, so fingers crossed we can coast along smoothly for a few more years.

Maybe it will inspire a marble maker. Confess my heart skipped a beat from the fantasy agates.

So the web server has been crashing. I only made one change that I think might have contributed, so I reversed that. Fingers crossed it will go back to being stable.

From the Indianapolis News. This is a great bit of history describing the scarcity of agates after World War I. We know some German agates trickled in over the coming years, as apparently the agates offered by Master Marble at the 1933 World's Fair were hand-faceted and presumably from Germany.

I think that's by design to prevent users from trading massive file attachments in private messages. But I would need to confirm that by asking someone else who isn't a moderator to test.

I have a dark-purple based Navarre that looks like that old soldier, although yours has a more elegant swirl.

Vintage to me would be those items enjoyed by the two or three generation before me, items that I would have no living memory of because they were no longer offered by the time I was around.

Oh, that agate shot I posted as a test? Yes I believe it is a moss agate, although someone else described it as "dendritic agate manganese inclusions under quartz" but I understand that dendritic agate is usually brown or black, if ever green. Never seen another one like it. Hand faceted too. Seems like the mossy part is more easily damaged.

The site is back up but images will be missing from many posts until the external storage is synchronized by late tonight or early tomorrow. Some important changes: All images are now hosted externally on Amazon S3 storage. The direct image links will begin with https://s3mcinvision.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ The server will never again fill up due to images, so that will make hosting and moving it to new hosting much simpler. I've lifted the image size restrictions, so high resolution images will no longer be resized to 1920x1080. My hope is that we won't need restrictions again, but we'll see how the storage costs are in a few months. Thanks for your patience and your support!

I'm not saying it's CAC. There is a massive bubble inside, but still this will require a custom brag box/chest.

Here's a couple of better macro shots.

Yes, the AI struggles mightily with human hands, but considering it was released in July 2022 at version 1, and we're currently at version 5, I expect it to conquer hands by this year.

...these three images were generated simply by me prompting the AI with a few words. So those glowing marbles were its response to me saying "middle-aged man playing marbles with his 10-year-old self".

Huge loss of a gentle man who was both an ambassador and scholar for marbles. Always wished I could have met him.

Our buy/sell forum sees little activity, but there are also some very active FB marble auction groups that have daily posts, sometimes some real killers. I can't outbid today's bidders on those sites, but I do sometimes still snag something on eBay when no one's looking.