What Made you Smile/What Ticked you off Today?

[SamuraiMegas]

Sick as a dog. ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[oxymoron]

This traffics giving me fucking hell.

[Hobie-wan]

I picked up a cool 70s suitcase record player for my 90 year old aunt that has records but no player. Cheap and not working fully, but that means I get to tinker. Physically it's in pretty good shape for its age.

Finally working on it today and there's dried cat piss and hair all over the bottom and it generally reeks. The guy said it was his grandmothers and it was sitting out on his back patio when I got it, so between that and the 70s piss mustard color scheme, it just looked dirty and I didn't notice any smell.

Making progress cleaning the shell and checking out the guts.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Good day with the family.

May have let a sociopath in to the house today.

I didn't ask nor did I want to be involved in any way with what could be happening here.

[REPO Man]

No hours next week! And I only have 12 hours this week.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I hear you on the convention prices. I paid $35 for just one day at the last con I went to. Worth it for the arcade experience. Also paid $17 for a pirated wall scroll and $35 for a bootleg "Figma" - of course, they looked official sealed. Ugh...should have known...one of those stalls got caught selling scanlations later I've learned my lesson.

Mega Man scroll is all right, especially from a few feet away. If you get closer...the speckled colors aren't a JEPG artifact. That's how it actually looks.

GUMI's pretty cute from the front. Plastic packaging+nearsightedness obscured the tiny flaws when it was in the box. Great pose - apparently this is a "bootleg original" and you can't get this pose anywhere else.

Still...It's definitely not a Figma...

[SamuraiMegas]

I think the speckles are on purpose, they are in space... Also, one of the biggest booths had all DVD/manga 20% off. It was 25% overpriced before it. Also, overpriced Figma! figures EVERYWHERE. 70$ for a Kirito. Though, there were some deals on expensiv items, like the Play Arts Kai Spike Spiegal.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

No, the speckled pattern is on the characters and logo too. The copyright text on the bottom makes it pretty plain that it's a pirated version of an official product, scanned and converted to a different DPI before printing. It's a little hard to tell from the photo.

As for the fake figma, I would have been pretty happy with that price if it was quality. I feel bad for people who bought $90 figures. I'm still keeping it around, though. Cute even with chipped paint. I love that it's adorable and colorful but not creepy in the least. I mean, I'd love one of the new Hitagi Senjougahara figures, but how would I explain them to a normal person?

Some con merchants will charge a lot to make you think you'll get what you paid for. Once you take it home, you're stuck with it. I should've opened mine right there. I guess the best policy is not to trust them.

For many figures on the way out, you can get great deals for similar prices if you look (and know your stuff - but I don't). Even if you're importing, you can get official goods for real cheap if the box is damaged. Why do collectors care about the box? I actually ripped mine apart when I saw that the figure was fake.

Of course, bigger+better gets expensive really quickly. I always thought figures were too expensive too be worth it, but some cross the line twice. Is that the holy grail? Maybe I'm naive and there's some fifteen foot tall Gundam to be had.

CDs and DVDs are very commonly pirated at cons, since they're so easy to copy and boots have such a huge profit margin.

Books are probably the only thing you can rely on. There's no money in forging them. Looks like I'll end up buying online from now on!

[GirlGamer55]

Well the same thing that ticks me off every weekend. People at yard sales who when you ask "Do you have any old to new video games", go "Yes, but i'm keeping them", or "Oh we JUST sold them". If you don't have them for sale...please just say no ok? Hurts less.

Oh and then when I ask that and you say no...but then I wonder around and end up finding a freaking stack of games...the hell people?

Also the people who sell video games...PLEASE check your cases before you put them out. idk how many times I get a stack of games and like 5 of them are empty cases. And sometimes I'm so excited to find that hard to find game...I don't check the cases until it's to late (my fault I know, but eh...I forget).

Then people who list yard sales on craigslist...FFS take the time to list if your "video games" are for the PC, Xbox, NES or whatever. I don't buy PC games in CD form anymore...i'm using Steam for my PC games now...much easier. So if I see video games in a listing I wonder...well what the heck are they for!?

And this is less made me ticked off and more of a I feel sorry for them thing. The first one...the place we stopped at was a dump (trailer...really crappy stuff, people looked poor as heck), I spotted a Xbox rock band thing, so I asked if they had any video games. The lady pulled out a box of Gamecube stuff, I grabbed the good stuff and struck a deal. She said 15, I knew I had like 9 on me, so I asked my mom for the rest, she gave me a few bucks and a ton of change (we were about to go to the bank for money, and we arn't very well off so we use whatever we have), it came to like 14 something. I mean we were counting pennys ffs...they needed the cash obviously but she said it was fine and let me go.

The second one, this lady had some random stuff, toys, comics and odds and ends. I found a pokemon hat that looked like Ash's so I grabbed it, as I did she started saying most of this was her sons stuff. Pokemon + son = video games or video game items. So I asked, she said there might be a few and pointed me to a cluttered box. I sorted through and picked up some good games (Mario Kart DS to name one), but noticed that almost all of the cases were empty, when I asked her about it she told me her son was a drug addict and last night came and broke into their storage container. He ended up taking a bunch of stuff, mainly most if not all his games and leaving the cases (why I have no idea...it's worth more with the case..). I was feeling pretty sorry for her at that point so I didn't have the heart to haggle the price with her.

Now what made me happy today was lucking out on my hunt for games. I got a stack of Gamecube games and a controller for 14 bucks (and these are like really good games), got a stack of so-so Xbox games for 8 bucks, some handheld games and a pretty hard to find SNES game for 10 bucks, some Playstation games and a FNV game guide that is like mint with a map in it for 2.50. And a GBA Zelda game for 3 bucks. Today was a good day.

[Luke]

Labor Day! Coincidentally, my Sister is in labor and at the hospital.



Edit: Sister is still in the hospital, all is well.

Smile: My wife has been at the OBX for the past few days, and will be coming home to this: