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There's this place here in town that's been operating... probably thirty years, at least, since I started visiting in my mid teens. It started out in a converted house, a tiny place that nevertheless had mostly new stuff from month to month. The owner, I learned later, was a complete rear end in a top hat. They moved into bigger digs a block away-- an actual storefront this time, with side rooms they'd rent for gaming and such. It was then that I began to notice the owner was one of those guys who didn't understand the concept of stale merchandise. Does anyone remember the Dragonbone electronic dice? I wanted one when I was a geeklet, and here one was, in the display case by the cash, for... frankly, an exorbitant amount of money. Especially since it was actually labeled as being broken. After a few years there, he moved shop across to the other side of downtown to 'attract a better class of clientele'. Place was a bit smaller, but they had a LAN you could rent time on. Friends played Starcraft there, but I was just there for the RPG stuff... which got staler and weirder as time went on. I eventually bought a copy of GURPS Bunnies and Burrows, and two or three Flying Buffalo dueling gamebooks a few years after I first saw them on the shelves there. This was long years after all of them had gone out of print-- I've no idea where he got them, or why he thought they'd sell. Eventually they moved into what had been a little nook of a coffee shop in the late Nineties. It's survived, against all odds, but I went in recently and... woof. Nearly bare walls, nearly bare shelves, an utterly random assortment of AD&D books, WoD, a few blister packs of Bones and a rack of that Star Wars collectible minis game. Oh, and three employees chatting about Magic (which they didn't seem to stock) and ignoring potential customers. The original owner had clearly retired; I have no idea how the current owners made anywhere near enough to keep the place open.
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May 31, 2017 03:49
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 09:43 |
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