Pokémon Card Shop Saturday
Tyler and I went on a drive around the cities yesterday to check out some Pokémon card shops in town. This was a similar trip to our Game Store Tour in February. This was focused solely on Pokémon!
Viral Card Games
Our first stop was Viral Card Games in Fridley. We both liked this shop a lot. It was likely the most organized and well structured card shop that we had been in. They had a several glass cases with graded and raw cards on display in a wide range of prices. They were super helpful pulling cards out to give them a closer look.
The big differentiator for Viral Card Games was their bulk management. Most card shops simply have dozens of boxes filled with thousands of cards grouped by their sets. The team at Viral has fully embraced the TCG Player system with two very large screen kiosks in the store so you can search their entire bulk collection with ease, add the cards you are looking for, and then they will bring those out for you. With a couple searches I was able to grab the first 3 of a 9 card illustration set that I’m looking for.
I also grabbed the final card for a 3-card illustration set.
This is also the only downside that Tyler and I had. The tradeoff of amazing bulk management is less fun flipping through binders and browsing different things. If Viral also had several binders to bridge the gap between the amazing bulk system they have and the singles under the counter it would be about perfect.
Ultimate Collectibles Warehouse Sale
Our second stop was a tip from my brother-in-law Max — Ultimate Collectibles was having their “Warehouse Sale” at the Hopkins VFW. We had no idea what to expect but were excited to head over and check it out. There was no real signage but the full parking lot on a Saturday afternoon was a sign we were in the right spot.
Ultimate has a lot of sports memorabilia and more than half of the sale was that, but if you watched the foot traffic the vast majority of that was there for the Pokémon sets they were selling. They had a huge collection on display and the prices were pretty good — above retail but not typical card shop pricing.
Ultimate is the more typical card shop experience with just piles of stuff and you need to dig around to find what you want. The warehouse sale was just piles of boxes on folding tables. They also had a good selection of singles on display but the focus for this event was moving large boxes.
It was awesome to check out and Tyler and I got our first Ultra-Premium Collection box ever here — snagging one of the last three left before they all were taken.
MN Poke Pulls
After a quick coffee stop in Hopkins, we made our way to MN Poke Pulls in Plymouth timed just after their pretty late 2:00 PM opening time. We had planned to start here until we realized they weren’t even open until much later. That is a pretty late starting time, especially given that they don’t host tournaments, but I suspect it is because of the origin of the store around Whatnot.
So a quick Whatnot detour if you, like me, have no idea what this is. The owner of this store started on Whatnot by streaming Pokémon boxes that viewers auction for in real-time. Once the auction is won, the box is immediately opened and they go through all the packs. The purchaser of the box then gets the cards that are valuable sent to them.
To me this seems strange as I would want to open the box and packs together at home. Tyler and I have fun doing that. But if you are a big collector and you have opened 10,000 packs already it is different. Here you get to outsource the opening part as well as the raw management of all the bulk that you get. You just get the stuff that you really want. Meanwhile the Whatnot viewers all get to share in the fun of opening and the “hits” when opening the packs.
With that backdrop this store had huge volume of packs as that is what they need to run the Whatnot events. They had a few cases with singles and graded cards, but not a ton. They didn’t have prices on anything which Tyler and I both dislike. They also have a giant messy pile of bulk cards for $0.10 each if you want to do that.
Overall a fun place to stop but it is like a warehouse inside and you wouldn’t spend a ton of time hanging out and browsing.
Lost Zone Cards
Our last stop was Lost Zone Cards in Bloomington. This ended up being the least Pokémon focused shop of the day, and unfortunately was even more so when we arrived and heard their Pokémon stuff was gone that day for a show in Wisconsin. The photo below you can see the left-most case is empty.
Overall this seemed like a great place for a variety of card games and they had a big area for tournaments — but was the least exciting of the day for Pokémon collectors.
We have a lot of fun exploring these places. On our list for shops to check out still are Krakenhits in Fridley and The Forge in Chaska.
Commanding performance by Verstappen to take the lead on the first turn and never let up the entire Las Vegas GP — winning by 17 seconds. Impressive!
Tyler and I opened our first Pokémon Ultra-Premium Collection tonight. No big pulls but some good fun.
After we’ve made hundreds of candles for the Candle Fundraiser it is fun to casually pour a bunch of individual scents to try out. Ten scents poured tonight for the 2025 Scent Survey.
“Oh, I know I have that Pokémon card in here somewhere. Just let me look in this pile.” 😳😆 at MN Poke Pulls TCG.
I don’t know when or what app did this but I finally purged a bunch of Twitter “profile” values from my Contacts database. Little housecleaning. Related.
POAP 7521420 at Horizon Oracle Finance Go Live.
MnTech Elevate was hosted in the Delta Sky360° Club at U.S. Bank Stadium and we got to take tours of the stadium including the locker room, going onto the field, seeing the Gjallarhorn, and the nicest couches you could watch a football game from.
We had a great TeamSPS presence at MnTech Elevate tonight celebrating the local technology community and recognizing Tekne award winners! 🏆
Selfie with Joel Crandall, CEO of MnTech, moments before we kick off the very first MnTech Elevate event!
Paragraph has now merged with Mirror and I decided to set up cross-posting to give it a try. Paragraph will pull posts from my RSS feed to show on my publication there as well.
Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum
In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.
In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.
I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.
I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!
Burning this many wooden wick candles at once is actually pretty noisy — so much crackle! 😮
Gall's Law
I was listening to The Omni Show — How Jorge Arango Uses OmniFocus. It was an overall good episode and at the end Arango shared a reference to Gall’s Law. I had not heard of this before so I looked it up:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
Arango was sharing this in reference to GTD systems — build a simple system that works and then figure out what you need from there. But I keep coming back to this because I think this happens in software and technology frequently.
I’ve been thinking about big enterprise system changes that companies have to make and the huge challenge that you face is really fighting Gall’s Law. These systems are always complex and due to the domain you cannot start simple — you have to start complex.
Gall’s Law is worth keeping in mind.
You can still find me on the web.
Things 4 Good Five Year Impact
We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for five years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $31,787 for non-profits! Thank you so much. This year was an incredible jump from last year selling 321 candles! ❤️
Last year we did the first day of the sale at Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique and that resulted in a lot of new people finding our candles — and a lot of transactions. This year we returned to our at home model but still saw a lot of people participating in the fundraiser with 73 unique transactions!
I also noticed this year that I felt like the distribution of funds between the non-profits seemed much tighter than usual. I went back and did the math and sure enough it was. The “range” between the four non-profits was only 2.4%, less than any previous year.
Here is another look at this data. In a completely even distribution each non-profit would get 25%. Here we look at the percent over-achievement of the highest performing organization and the percent under-achievement of the lowest. The first year had the highest range ever.
This event has become a treasured tradition for our family and I think it has for some of the folks that come as well. Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified of future sales.
See Four Year Impact.
Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Insights
We have wrapped up the 5th annual Candle Fundraiser. I’m proud to say that we raised $9,048 in donations! That is a $2,000 jump (29.1%) from last year’s results. Amazing!
Last year we made 252 candles and we sold out on Sunday. This year we sold 321 candles and only had 10 remaining after the sale. We didn’t necessarily set out to make 321 candles. It was a struggle to get the components that we needed to make all the candles. Vessels were all out of stock so I would order any vessels as soon as they came in stock but it was dribbles. Scent was also challenging. On Wednesday before the sale we had no Winter Wonderland candles and had made a bunch of True North to compensate. Then an order of 8 lbs of scent arrived a few days early and we got to making a bunch of candles!
Many people buy candles as gifts so we tend to see some larger orders. Our largest order this year was 16 candles. You can see folks tend to by in pairs — even numbers are more common than odd. We also saw a big difference this year versus last in the number of single candle sales. Last year at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique we had 32 sales of one candle, and this year there were only 9 sales with one candle.
This year we had eleven different scents, three more than last year. The new scent was Charcoal Rose. We also introduced two new “types” of candles — T4G Labs and Rekindled. Both of these candles were in a random scent distribution, requiring you to smell each one since they were different. The Labs candles are the result of our scent experimentation. Rekindled were all made using vessels that had been returned to us and then reused. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.
Here is the same data but using a different visualization.
This year was also the first year we offered XL 24oz candles for a $50 donation. I had no way of knowing demand for this so we only made 12 of them to start with and thankfully the preorders allowed me to oversell them and get more made the week after the sale — totally 22 sold. This added $1,100 to the fundraiser. (Note: XL candles are not in the graphs above.)
The last new thing this year were lids. We have been asked in the past if we have lids and I decided we should just have some available. These were $10 each, are very high quality, and can be used repeatedly on different candles. We sold 40 of these. These seemed to be mostly sold when people were giving them as gifts. This added $400 to the fundraiser.
Other observations from the sale:
- Having T4G Labs and Rekindled both be random scents did not make any sense. Next year the T4G Labs will be our experiments and include a list of scent lookup so folks know what each one is, using a number. Rekindled will likely become a consistent and reused scent just for that candle. We are thinking something that smells “fresh and clean”.
- The XL candles were hard for us to pour because they are double wicked. I have ideas how we can set the wicks next year to make that much easier.
- I’m not sharing the payment preferences as I did in previous years because we really steered people to Venmo this year which made the reconciling of payments much easier.
- Adding more products completely broke our sales checkout process and I did a refactor of that for Sunday that was so much better.
- For years I’ve wanted to create a handout to include with the candles for folks that have questions. I finally made this for Sunday and also have it online — Burn Instructions.
We are already busy thinking of improvements and how we will run next year’s sale! We hope to see you there! Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified.
Also see 2025 Fundraiser Results.
Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Results
We completed our annual candle sale raising $9,048 for the four organizations we picked! That is a 29.1% increase from 2024, topping the growth of previous years at 21.8, 9.7, and 10.3%. A huge thank you to the 73 folks from this community who made this possible by purchasing a wooden-wick candle made with love!
As in previous years, we let people pick which organizations they would like to support. People could pick any or all of the organizations. We even had some folks request specific allocations versus dividing it proportionally.
The is the closest clustering of amounts between the various organizations that we have ever had with only a 2.4% delta between the four organizations.
A bit more about the organizations that we have sent these funds to!
Animal Welfare Institute
The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit committed to freeing animals suffering because of people. They do this for animals stuck in labs all the way to animals suffering on farms. Their mission is to end all human-caused suffering for animals everywhere, improving the welfare of all. I picked this non-profit because put simply, animals shouldn’t suffer due to humans, and I think it is our responsibility as a society to make sure that we do not make animals unnecessarily hurt. — Tyler
Border Angels
Centered around love, Border Angels help migrants and refugees along the entire US-Mexico border with legal issues and human rights cases. Founded in 1986 by Enrique Morones, it now runs multiple direct action programs and advocacy and humanitarian work. Their Water Drops program stations food, water, and other essential resources along dangerous sections of desert that migrants must cross before arriving in the US. Their Bond Program assists families with the financial burden of bonds and legal struggles to free loved ones being held in detention facilities. Also made possible by Border Angels, the Caravan of Love donates hygiene supplies and clothing to refugees being held in overcrowded shelters in Tijuana, Mexico, and Volviendo a Casa provides support for families suffering from loss. — Mazie
The Food Group
The Food Group is a local non-profit that supplies food shelves with low cost, local healthy foods. They also own a organic farm in Marine on St Croix where they grow veggies and give opportunities for others to learn about sustainable farming helping the next generation of farmers gain access to land, markets, educational opportunities and a network of other likeminded individuals.
In this time where so many people are food insecure, I wanted to support an organization that is working directly on this problem. I chose the Food Group because not only are they working to help get food to people who need it, they are doing it with local, healthy food and in the framework of sustainable agriculture. I also love that they operate a farm which provides organic produce to food shelves and teaches others the tools to take up sustainable farming. — Tammy
Sandy Hook Promise
I was driving up Lyndale Ave on my way to work and became alarmed at the number of police and other first responders that were racing south as I was going north. Shortly after I found out there was a school shooting at Annunciation. This was less than a mile from our home. We know many people that are connected to Annunciation. It was horrible, and should never happen. None of this should happen. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. Sandy Hook Promise is doing good work everyday to stop this. Join me in supporting them, and supporting our kids. — Jamie
These four organizations add to the sixteen that we have supported in previous years:
- Constellation Fund
- Free Bikes 4 Kidz
- Appetite for Change
- Feed My Starving Children
- United Help Ukraine
- Agate Housing + Services
- Save the Snakes
- Free Guitars 4 Kids
- Oceanites
- Food Recovery Network
- Heart to Care Tanzania
- American Prairie
- SynGAP Research Fund
- Water to Thrive
- Sprint to Cité Soleil
- World Central Kitchen
Also see 2025 Fall Fundraiser Insights for more details from this year. Additionally see results from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.
POAP 7496955 at Farewell Ponder.
My happy place. Now add snow. ❄️🔥
