Digital games. I’ll buy a game I know I’m never going to play, but boy did I sure get a good price!
Plastic bags. We save them because they’re useful to have around, mostly for garbage but other things too, but we also collect them far faster than we can use them. Every couple of months I’ll take them all to the recycler, but they’re just going to build up again.
Lots of games I’ve never played, or only played walk-throughs by myself.
Then just some things I like owning. Like my canoe. Was recently thinking of moving cross country and the single pause point for me was “What the fuck do I do with a 17’ canoe? How do I move that 900 miles?”
I collect progressive rock albums.
I’ve unintentionally accrued about a dozen guitars now. The “gotta have” is outpacing the “gotta get rid of”. I started out with disciplined rules: 1 acoustic, 1 electric. Later rationalized and amended by…
…and 1 hollow-body…and 1 semi-hollow…and 1 parlor…and 1 classical neck…and 1 red one…and 1 that looks fierce…arrrghhh!!!
Sprinkles, nonpareils, colored sanding sugar and the like. At last count I had over 30 containers. I do use them, although not nearly as fast as I buy them. I’ve decided to stop buying nonpareils though because those suckers just roll off whatever you’re sprinkling them on and end up mostly on the floor.
I love cookie decorating stuff too! I’ll tell you a tip I figured out when I was trying to get a mixture of sugar and crushed candy canes to stick to candy cane cookies: Go ahead and bake your cookies with no topping, and let them cool. Put them on a wire cooling rack with wax or parchment paper underneath. Put a half cup or so of light corn syrup in a bowl and heat it up in the microwave very briefly, just 15 seconds or so until it’s watery. Be VERY careful with this, please do NOT touch or spill it. Take a silicone pastry brush and lightly brush a few cookies, sprinkle on the topping. Repeat. With the paper underneath you can easily put any “spillage” back into the container. Let the cookies sit for awhile before storing. It’s possible that your nonpareils could “bleed” into the corn syrup, but hopefully a light hand when brushing it on would prevent that. Hope this method helps you as much as it has me!
Oh, another one for me: Hatpins and buttons. It started when I bought a bucket hat from the local Shakespeare company, because I wanted to buy something to support them. But the local arts festival used to have a button to show that you’d paid admission, and, well, the Shakespeare company is one of the anchor performers at the festival, so it made sense to put the button on the hat. But there’s a different button every year, so why not put all of them on? And this anti-light-pollution button I got from the astronomy club might as well go on there, too. And there’s room for a few pins between the buttons. And so on.
It’s gotten to the point where random people I’ve never met before will walk up to me and say “Here’s a button for your hat”, and whenever anyone I know goes on a trip, a pin is the default souvenir to bring back for me.
Souls
Actually, stuffed Pooh Bears (and other stuffed animals, but I have like 5 Pooh Bears).