Thanksgiving leftovers are still taking up half my fridge and I have already broken two promises I made to myself about not buying anything else this year. Black Friday landed on the 25th this time around, and between the doorbuster emails starting sometime around Halloween and my own weak will, I ended up spending money I did not really have a plan for. Figured I'd write it down here mostly so future-me has a record of what was worth it and what wasn't, because I never remember by January.
What I actually bought
The one purchase I don't regret at all: Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones, marked down to $328 at Best Buy from the usual $399. I've been using a pair of ancient Bose QC35s that have a crack in the headband held together with electrical tape, so this was overdue. Noise cancellation on these is genuinely a different tier than what I'm used to. I put them on in my kitchen with nothing playing and could not hear my downstairs neighbor's dog, which has been barking at literally nothing since September.
I also grabbed an Anker 737 power bank, the chunky 24,000mAh one, for about $85 after a coupon stacked on top of the sale price. Total impulse buy. I don't travel enough to justify it but I convinced myself it would be useful "for emergencies," which is the exact lie I tell myself about most gadgets.
What I almost bought and didn't
I had an LG C2 55-inch OLED in my cart at just under $1,400 for probably four hours on Friday. Kept the tab open, kept adding it back after closing it, the whole embarrassing routine. In the end I backed out because my current TV, a five-year-old Vizio, still works fine, and I could not come up with a real reason beyond wanting a nicer TV, which isn't nothing but also isn't $1,400. Ask me again next year and I bet I fold.
Here's my actual complaint, and I say this every year and nothing changes: the deals themselves have gotten harder to evaluate because so many prices get quietly bumped up in October so the November "discount" just brings them back to where they were in September. I don't have hard data on this, it's just a pattern I've noticed tracking a handful of items on camelcamelcamel over the past couple months. Doesn't mean every deal is fake. Just means I trust my own price history more than the giant red SALE banner.
The other thing I was watching this week
Not really shopping related, but NASA's Orion capsule swung by the Moon again on Monday, passing something like 80 miles above the surface on its way into a wide orbit around it, farther out than any capsule built for humans has gone before. I had NASA TV pulled up on a second monitor while I was doing dishes and my kid wandered in halfway through asking if it was "the rocket game." No, buddy, it's real, there's a real capsule out past the Moon right now with cameras on it. He was unimpressed and went back to Roblox, which feels like a pretty accurate summary of how much attention this mission is actually getting outside of people like me who still check spaceflightnow.com out of habit from a decade ago.
I keep meaning to write a longer post about Artemis once it actually splashes down, because I think in a few years this is going to look like a bigger deal in hindsight than it does right now, buried under Black Friday emails and everything happening over at Twitter. But that's a post for December, assuming the reentry goes the way it's supposed to.
For now the headphones are staying, the TV is not, and I have exactly one week left before Cyber Monday tries to talk me into something else I don't need.