fantastic_four

Cgcmod0 put those strikes in, not Arch, right?

This is not what I said. And the fact that you either know that I didn't say that, or are unable to distinguish what I said is the problem. I also blame my mis-paraphrasing on mental deficiency.

There is much truth in this. Much. Too much, in fact. Every single person individually has an opportunity to take something negative and turn it around. It's how the Internet tends to work... anonymity brings out the worst in some people. It hasn't always been like that around here, and I've seen other forums where it isn't like that. You can see the worst of that attitude in video game forums, probably because many of the posters are teenagers. RMA isn't wrong that moderation can fix it, but I've not personally seen a forum from a small company like CGC that did any better job. Well-moderated forums have two things in common that I've seen--they're not tied to companies, and moderation status is given to active users. Only active participants in a forum can moderate that forum as tightly as he's reaming Arch for not doing. It's tough for a small non-Internet company to identify unbiased and objective moderators within the community. I've seen Internet companies find good moderators for their forums--I like the Cracked.com forums and they've done a good job of it--but for companies like CGC, the web site is a peripheral entity and the boards are something they've mostly outsourced. There are some active community members who are objective enough to moderate they could probably get to help a bit. It's not likely they'll do that, but it's worth considering. I'm not sure I would if I were making that decision, but I'd think about it.

They seem different, but I liked it when Ogami pronounced anyone who sees issues with RMA as "mentally deficient." I have no doubt RMA has changed in five years--everyone does, despite Ogami's most excellent pronunciation that many people haven't changed but he has--but he's still far too aggressive in making his points just as he was from the start, which causes a majority of people to feel attacked. His posts from the last two weeks have shown that to be the case. His dismantling of Architect was a fantastic example. It's important to understand I'm not disagreeing with much of what RMA specifically says, it's the way he says it. His tone and conversational motivation is most unfriendly. And when I type a sentence, I'm not reading a wall of text dismantling it. The entire purpose of that type of posting is anathema to the reason most people use forums--to connect with people, learn, and have some fun. I don't ignore anyone, but I have about five or six people on mental ignore who tend to post in attack mode...as soon as I see that in the first sentence or two, I skip to the next post. I don't think I've read one of his posts yet in the thread, although I did skip around and read several sentences of the one he made about Arch, just to see if it remained aggressive throughout. The people who have met him at cons say he's not like this in person. I hope he's eventually able to tone down the aggressiveness.

I recently urged him to start posting again hoping that you're exactly right about him changing...and then last week he started. First thread I saw him in was a back-and-forth with Hellblazer where neither would shut up until the other relented. Most of the thread is pulled now, and I quickly realized nothing had really changed that I can tell so far.

I've talked to him numerous times, but I don't continue talking to people who think every discussion is a debate they're uncontrollably compelled to win. I avoid a number of people in most forums for that reason.

Having been subjected to a few years of watching RMA talk I can say that he ALWAYS kicks when he talks. Everyone's. His conversational style is about like that of a overly-excitable pitbull on crack. And that's why he has to hold himself back from talking.

I just got a response to my PM from about a month ago about why I got wrist slapped. Here's the content of the original post along with my offending post: THAT'S political? I must misunderstand what the issue with talking about politics in society is. Talking about abortion or guns or partisan stances is politics, but if you take the broadest definition of "politics," it applies to anything related to interaction between two or more people. This thread itself is about politics--or, more specifically, politics within these forums. A comment on how almost everybody fails to pay their state use taxes in a thread about taxes is political? Sheesh. Politics is talking about controversial topics. Going by this strict a definition of the word "politics," then Arch's metaphor above about cops giving speeding tickets is political because it relates to laws created by the government.

+1 I can't believe he just ripped into Architect like that.

He and I want to live in the exact same place.

Based on your sig gif maybe it was "polly"-shticts That GIF seems G-rated to me.

Most everyone missed that except the people actively posting that part of the day. I saw all those references to it and had no idea what it meant until just now. Who said that?

My only issue is getting wrist slaps or strikes with no reference as to what the offending post was. I got a wrist slap for politics last month, and I have no idea what the moderator saw. Some topics verge on politics but aren't quite there, so if I stepped over the line, I was unaware of it, but since I don't know which post it was, I didn't learn much.

I don't remember, but I thought they changed it because it didn't make much anatomical sense for them to come out of the back of his hand. The idea of them going forward and back is much easier to accept if they run parallel to the bones in his forearm.

What difference does it make? Colossus was in the original story from X-Men 141 and 142 anyway. I don't know who Blink is, but maybe he's a cool character. Doesn't really change the story much. Yea, Wolverine is 5' 2" in the comics. Does it change the character to have him portrayed by the 6' 3" Hugh Jackman? Yes. Is everything that made Wolverine popular still intact? Yep.

Forget the dudes, who is the hottie in the middle? All three are from the Twilight films, so I wouldn't know since I'm not a teenage girl.

That guy has the look and voice of a leading man, but I bet he gets passed over due to his height. Tough to do much besides action flicks when you're being distracting on-screen by being six inches to a foot and a half taller than everybody else in the film. Guy to the left of him is 6', but Cudmore makes him look short.

Can't believe they didn't use Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler the last two films, so I'm glad to see him returning. Never really liked him much in the comic, but that opening sequence in X2 where he takes out the entire White House Secret Service by quickly teleporting around the Oval Office is freaking insanely cool. Loved his design, particularly the carvings in his skin. Not realistic at all--probably a bad choice without revealing some kind of motive and explanation for how he did the tougher ones--but cool-looking. Bryan Singer is just a passable director. Wish they had gotten Matthew Vaughn again, he made the fifth or sixth best superhero film of all time with "X-Men: First Class" and the best of the X-films by far.

I can unreservedly say the answer is no, mostly because I'm pretty sure CGC doesn't downgrade for sigs below the nosebleed level, but also in this case because the book has enough pre-chips on the right side and spine ticks to never have had a shot at a 9.2. This is the first time I've seen a pre-chip that long get a 9.0...looks like the biggest one is around 3/4" long. I've got an 8.5 copy of FF #4 graded during CGC's first year that is a 9.4/9.6 except for one chip that looks extremely similar to the one on this X-Men #1...Bunky's book is the best example I've seen that it's absolutely worth resubmitting that baby for a higher grade. GREAT looking book, grats on it!

I have never sold a comic book that I didn't already have a higher-graded copy of, so I'm unable to relate to this thread. I hang onto most of my upgraded-from copies as well...it's a weakness. I'm planning to move from the 2800 square foot house I live alone in now to my girlfriend's 1500 square foot house in the city within the next year, so I'll probably have to break the ice and sell some stuff between now and then, not enough room for a ton of longboxes over there. Or I can just rent some storage space until we find a bigger house in the city, or even ask my dad to use an empty room in his house for a while, haven't decided yet. I probably should get rid of the 1980-up stuff I've already read, that'd probably solve all my space issues.

Don't you think that the majority of the hoarded F.F. 48's have been dissipated into collections by now though? If you're asking me if I think they're still sitting either in a warehouse or en masse in a dealer's inventory, no, I think they've all entered collections...but so many collections that it is the most-flipped issue of Fantastic Four I've ever seen by a huge margin as compared to almost all others. At any given time there are usually half a dozen to several dozen high grade copies up for sale. There are a few other issues that were quite clearly present in some sort of stash--44 and 59 jump immediately to mind--but 48 sees more traffic due to its popularity and price.

It's important to also realize that it's easy to see something like restoration removal as being like trimming. Trimming and restoration removal are similar in that they're both intentional attempts to manipulate a comic that leave no explicit non-original materials like restoration does. However, where they differ is that trimming is detectable in the state of a comic, whereas restoration removal isn't. There is no normal usage of a comic within which a straight-edge and an exacto knife is used along an entire edge of a comic, so if you see the evidence in the paper that could have only come from this trimming, you know it was trimmed. Of course all comics are trimmed at the press, but if the trim pattern is different than production cuts or the color of the trimmed edge differs from the color of the remaining paper, that's the evidence of an intentional trim. If you remove restoration, it's almost the same act that caused the damage the restoration was there to cover up in the first place, albeit more expertly done than the likely-accidental damage that caused the original defect. You can't tell from the state of the comic what caused that damage--could have been removal of resto or not, you just don't know.

The graders' mandate must be to grade the book in front of them, not to draw from any previous knowledge of the book. +2 People seem to be equating restoration removal or pressing as a crime, that forensics should be used to uncover said crime, and that if CGC has evidence of this crime or can interpret the intent of a change to the state of a comic that they should give it some sort of red-flag demarcation. Restoration and manipulation of a comic book is not a crime, so intent is irrelevant. Comic book grading is about evaluating the current state of a comic, not a past state. A comic has restoration, or it doesn't. This in-between "intentionally tampered with!!!" state people want to assign to an unrestored comic is an illusion.

I think he never attempted to define a standard, as in writing one down. He's said in the forums he doesn't think you can account for the infinity of defects that are possible on a comic. I disagree because I've seen human knowledge categorize plenty of other seemingly-chaotic parts of nature in other arts, but given that Overstreet's grading guides don't achieve the goal of standardizing grading, the possibility of it remains to be proven. I'm vaguely interested in proving this but have no actual incentive to spend the six to twelve man-months it'd take to do so. We all write our own guide and categorize defects in our heads--if humans can do it, they can write it down and agree. It's just that nobody's done it yet. Yes, grading is an art in that we decide how much to deduct for defects. But the science is in categorizing defects and coming to agreement on how much to deduct for them. It's tough to collaborate to this degree and get the community to accept it, but it's possible. Quite tough, but also quite possible. CGC has implicitly done this already via their stance on defects and how much they deduct for them. Plenty of us disagree with the way they downgrade, yet we comprehend what they're doing. If they were able to openly discuss their standards instead of keeping the secret sauce a secret, more of us may actually come to agree with them. I don't expect them to ever do this, but someone else in the hobby can. The contradiction is that nobody's had the incentive to do so.

And they don't count, so yep, nobody uses it.