Sauce Dog

One other update: We can now 100% confirm that Hero Restoration was taking NEW restoration projects after they closed the submissions back in July (and not small jobs, we are talking about more AF15s)

Saw it and want to go see it again, and again. Not only is it easily the absolute best modern Godzilla film by a mile, but it can certainly be held to be the best 'zilla film of the entire franchise. By far the best movie I've seen this year (and I think in recent years as well, as this one hit much harder than anything else I loved)

100% correct. Best of the run, though if I were to pick a second place it would be #9 (which I have yet to find a copy of)

I think purchase wise I didn't actually hit any of my 2023 goals, though admittedly I have very few specific books I'm hunting for; the remaining full helmet Doctor Fate covers from early More Fun Comics (two left to find), Hourman covers from Adventure Comics (five more to go), or early Iron Man Tales of Suspense appearances that are recognized Pedigrees. I also once again did not manage to upgrade my House of Secrets #92 to a better copy (I have a 7.0 and would love to get it up to at least 8.0) I did manage to find all the parts of a X-Men #1 which I wanted to try building and conserve all for less than the price of a CGC 0.5 copy (repair all the parts and leaf cast it into a more presentable low grade copy), however that is still being worked on by Jerry the Jitterbug so it won't come to fruition until yearly next year.

I won't go into exact details on any data yet, but will touch on one. We all come to assume lots of the people who have problems are due to complex restoration jobs on epic books, but this is isn't that and it hits different: One of the entries was for someone who only submitted a stack of books for pressing - that's it, not even crazy dry cleaning since they were modern books - and none of those books were worked on in the two years after payment of several hundreds of dollars was made to Hero. Keep in mind this is during the same time frame the operation was expanding with a new facility and more staff.

Only six replies so far, but the amount of $$ of books still held (or money taken with no services provided) averages over $13k per person. edit: this is out of date, we have more replies and both the number of books and total value are considerably higher.

For you, anything! I've edited my original comment to remove the

For sure. But also Yes, and also no. The message is important, but it certainly does matter who is the messenger in many cases. I am not weighing medical advice from my unemployed stoner uncle as much as I would an actual doctor in that field. The problem is really many are not taught things like media literacy, or knowing how to think about claims or how to verify them rationally. Then the time to believe in those answers is when they are shown to exist, not a moment sooner. Nobody is saying we shouldn't be investigating the things we know little about Just because science wasn't answer something doesn't mean the answers provided by philosophy or religion were correct, in fact every falsifiable answer that was once explained by those were investigated by science not a single one, ever, bore out to its original explanation (lighting coming from the gods, or miasma for example). The first kid to put his hand up to give an answer in class isn't by default correct, even if nobody else offers up an explanation. There are plenty of ancient works that did put forward ideas, but I'm fine ascribing those to human ingenuity - not something else. Also I would normally push back on the 'understanding scientific principals before scientists' as that is a super common topic that comes up in my religious discussions (especially from Islamic apologetics), but this ain't the venue for that and better done IRL. Sure, there are bad actors everyone in every profession - but something being useful doesn't make it true, nor does being usual for a long time doesn't make it any more true. The last bit of your comment there sounds like an appeal to authority, lots of smart people believe in odd things. Something isn't true because scientists believe it, especially so if it isn't even in their field. Also, one cannot 'choose' to believe in something ;) I don't deny you believe it, that was ever in question. I'm not sure what the 'they've been proven' is referring to exactly? What? Who? What do you mean 'something out there'? I agree, of course there is...even going something as simple as the Drake equation shows there is something 'out there'...but if you mean that is beyond the natural then that's another ball game, and that has certainly never been even shown to be a candidate explanation, let alone proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. No argument there I'm a shining example of limitations, I think I'll collect them all! Okay, sorry this is my area now...this is an incomplete view at best, but that is me being charitable. They were not incapable of understanding it - that is so dismissive, and shows a complete misunderstanding of the measurement system they employed, as how they would describe distance and direction would also be used to describe time. They did have a concept for eternity / forever (in fact it predated them)...most of my expertise deals with the context of that as 'eternal law', however the word has many uses that are dependant on the context - it can mean a literal 'to the horizon' but it also means the entire 'world', all of 'existence', ones entire 'lifetime' (both before and after it depending on prefix), or 'eternity'. This plays a huge factor in ANE studies and parsing biblical scripture, so much so I cannot get into without blowing up the entire message board (unless of course your ancient Hebrew is better than mine, which is very much possible as I'm rusty and only needed to take it for my scriptural certifications!) Nope. Infinity does not mean everything is possible...sorry, infinite monkeys won't produce Shakespeare. I think this might be a confusion on what the concept of many-worlds entails. We are not human because we have limitations, nor are we human because we eventually die. Humanity is a collective concept, it isn't some specific biological set of things that we have to adhere to. If we shed a limitation that isn't making us non-human, it is simply changing how we define being human. That is sci-fi to me, exploring how humans can change themselves or be changed. Showing us possible paths of humanity that all stem from our current selves, which includes removing human limitations and questioning what it means to be 'human'. Some of my favourite classic books on what humanity becomes (and still regarded as being 'human' regardless of limitations being removed) include 'Forever War' by Haldeman, and 'Childhoods End' by Clarke, but I think humanity merging with the machine in 'The Last Question' by Asimov would also fit the bill. I personally feel/see/sense-vibrations that there isn't any need for something non-human to address our limitations, that destiny is in our own hands. I'm jealous as I'm terrible at math. Absolutely a wreck in it and yet I need to still do it daily! Nothing metaphysical or otherworldly about this - no magic. Some people are better at things than others..that's just life, like comparing the processor speed of a computer released in 1990 to one today, there will be differences between people - which do you think can cycle calculations faster? You trust her because of the evidence and reasonable expectations/history that have been verified over time - she has shown her work, shown to be qualified, shown to be reliable in such calculations. You don't just trust in her answers because she simply told you she was always right and you took her word for it. This isn't some sense or awareness of how things work - she studied the math and knows it well, she can show it, reproduce it, and anyone else can follow along and repeat her calculations. If someone claims they have a 'truth', then they need to back it up - nobody should be expected to simply accept at face value someones ability to 'understand' something. Saying you simply 'feel it' doesn't help anyone else, nor does it help show what you are feeling is at all correct. I actually do agree that Sci-Fi helps show us what might be possible for humanity, both the good and bad...the difference it seems is we both have different ideas what is 'possible'; nothing about death or the removal of our human limitations jump out at me as anything more than problems that could be answered. They might never be answered, but they certainly feel like they could be. As for you showing your work, I would love it but...DON'T! Let's just get drinks sometime and chat about it so we don't eat up all of the boards database space

I'm not sure how this works in the USA, but how does dissolving the company in March 2023 legally impact any business he accepted after that date?

Images of receipts can be uploaded in the survey at https://r8f0sk8dr88.typeform.com/to/yoKI6552

That would most certainly help and I encourage everyone to fill out the survey even if they have their books back (if they paid for services that were never provided that is very important)

This is disgusting and blatant Stilt-Man supremacy erasure - I will not stand for it!!!! The goal of any cultured collector should be to get as many copies of DD8 as possible so that they can stack them as high as possible!

But you do see how that might be a very poor way to categorize a genre objectively, and get others on board with it....based your personal feelings that are coming from an ill defined spiritual sense and vibrations, right? Plenty of people have had a sense about them which ended up not being truth (I sense the sun is revolving around the earth...). I personally have seen no reason to accept a proposition that there is anything more to us than the physical, nor do I see any good reason to accept that there is anything outside of nature (no super-natural, which it sounds like you are using the word metaphysical to allude to. To be clear I'm not saying such things do not exist.). However, to me the idea of the 'soul' is one of the most dead concepts in the modern era of philosophy, put to the test countless times with nothing to back it up and counter evidence that pushes it further back - so until there is sound reason to accept such a thing exists, then there isn't some genie we should account for when dealing with life and death. Life is a chemical system that uses energy to keep itself from reaching chemical equilibrium, while death is the moment when the system that maintains the far from equilibrium state ceases existence. Will the challenge that is death ever be conquered by mankind, I don't know, but from what I have seen from humanities progress thus far gives me no reason not to think it possible (heck, lets get sci-fi with it and backup up our minds digitally - something that doesn't seem impossible and would get around physical body limitations) I think the issue just comes down to we have different ideas of what is 'impossible by human capability', and sci-fi is exactly that me; any glimpse that such things could be possible, regardless of improbable or fantastic they may seem to us and our personal incredulity, but still have a sliver of connection to humanity as it stands today.

Just don't combine that dinner topic with this Frankenstein one, as I don't think you should be using that book as a reference for a recipe to serve your family

"unrealistic or implausible (or impossible) source, then it's no longer science fiction." It is only personal incredulity or ignorance that might lead one to paint something as explicitly impossible. You need a solid reason/evidence to label it as such and arrive at such a hard conclusion; just a lack of ideas on how it could be done or saying the time frame needed feels overwhelming is insufficient. I personally find none of your examples to be implausible (highly unlikely maybe, but never impossible) An egg does not create* life from nothing/scratch (aka ex nihilo) - I think this is where your argument might be faltering with some of us as you are using terms in a very loose fashion (this is why I called out your usage of the term 'scratch' in my initial post and you didn't address it when I brought up Carl Sagan's pie example). It also doesn't matter if we are not the 'same person' ever again - trauma while we are alive does that but you are not going to say PTSD is an impossibility or sci-fi, and people brought out of comas or suffer head trauma are never the "same person". Technically we are not the "same person" after a full cycle of cell replacement over the course of a decade - so I don't think me not being the 'same person' after death is all that remarkable or surprising. (*I assume by create you are speaking colloquially, right?) Honestly, I find the egg smashing example funny since that seems very much plausible in my mind - especially in a sci-fi setting. A smashed egg is not life yet, it is the parts needed to necessitate life. The smashing does not destroy the genetic code, markers or other aspects we can currently use to 'rebuild' it, and the problem of separating physical materials seems trivial to me, nor is the shell necessary (we can already grow chicks from eggs that we have removed the shells from in order to observe the growing process clearly) - the only issue I can think of is bacteria management in such delicate initial state (and that I know we are getting better at every day). Heck, this is without considering crazy ideas in the development of temporal sciences - even if I don't ascribe much confidence to a solution in that field I don't write it off as an impossibility.

Medical science has progressed well beyond what once was deemed impossible, so no reason to say it would be impossible to reach a point that we can counteract the brain death that occurs (which is the main reason we cannot resuscitate people after a certain point). The issue I'm raising is you are confidently saying NEVER, how did you reach that absolute conclusion? Your line "truth is absolute and can't be recreated" ...what does that mean, exactly? Of course things are a binary in the sense of logical absolutes. Something is or it isn't as per the law of identity, but 'can't be recreated' seems nonsensical to me, sorry. Not sure what that has to do with you saying the sci-fi genre can be identified because it contains a truth (which I contest as all genres contain 'truth' and so doesn't help to separate sci-fi from them in a unique way) oh and Frankenstein is soft sci-fi (Frankenhooker however is camp horror)

Nah, what you are describing basically sounds like getting into the debate on the differences between soft-scifi and hard-scifi. I don't find 'truth' value a meaningful distinction, as every story genre has a component of truth (be it literal or metaphorical) for the basis of the story. I personally don't see any reason why we won't eventually create human life from scratch (though that word needs to be defined, as it is very vague on exactly what you mean. Are you talking about scratch as in, Carl Sagan's apple pie from scratch?). I find the idea of creating life from the dead even more probably, as we are already working with a system of materials that we know for a fact can house life. If I believed mankind would never develop a faster-than-light travel should that disqualify Star Trek from being sci-fi?

and the surrounding paper that the rust stain has migrated into can most certainly disintegrate away during the staple removal/manipulating process, leaving a nice hole on every single wrap (source: The last book I worked on. That was enough to give me comic-book-conservation-PTSD)

The Terms & Conditions that were agreed to when making a submission have changed many times over the years so you can't just reference the one online now (which has been scrubbed https://herorestorationcomics.com/terms-conditions/ ). Each submission confirmation email sent to clients would simply indicate that the user clicked the "I agree to the Terms & Conditions" checkbox, it would not indicate which version of the TOS was used at the time (you would have to use the Wayback Machine to find an archive of the page on the date you made your submission). If however you made your submission prior to the July 2020 website revamp that used the old form system your original email should contain a TOS text block (see below for the last version of that text before the site was updated)

Don't use that sponge itself for cleaning covers...use it to clean your erasers on that are being used on the cover

Latest update:

Hence why it is critical more people fill out that survey, especially those who have large value submissions.

Direct confrontation is pointless if the customers do not consent to their books going into the hands of a third-party that does not have insurance (we are operating under the assumption Hero Restoration still has insurance at this point). If Matt goes over it has to be to pick up SPECIFIC books that customers in the survey he posted consented (to both Matt and HR) to change hands (details of which are not yet flushed out, the survey only hopes to figure out if people are interested in such an idea)

I will continue to chat with Matt about this since he is the most local in the area willing to help, but for now let us leave the posts here.