Axelrod

On 4/26/2024 at 12:06 PM, Dr. Balls said:

I am eagerly hoping that this movie is like one big, long, stressful episode of '24'. I'm super excited to see this on streaming.

Wouldn't compare it to an episode of 24.  But it definitely was big, long, and stressful.  In a mostly good way.  

On 4/26/2024 at 8:14 PM, zzutak said:

So, On Book #7 (CGC 9.6) I just imagined this tiny nick/tear and this color-breaking crease? 

You did not!  Grade was clearly too high!

4 pts. 

Three of that on the Spotlight.  I kind of thought that was whatever they call it "distributor spray" and not a stain, but I wasn't sure.  So I hedged with the other small defects I could see and called it 9.0

Otherwise, somehow three bullseyes.

Take it.

Late guesses best guesses

On 4/23/2024 at 8:51 PM, Beige said:

The whole GOT franchise is dead.

 

On 4/23/2024 at 9:19 PM, PVOG said:

Question, so I procured a couple new modern comics at my lcs. They are and look absolutely mint, under scrutiny, however, I did not open them and flip thru pages. I inspected under light and bl. Looks virtually untouched. If I buy a book in this condition, would it make sense to clean and press? I'm thinking of sending them in in this condition, without cleaning and pressing. 

My thoughts are,, if it is mint, just handling it more has the absolute potential to lessen the quality through handling. And being serviced. Thoughts and advice please? (I also do not want to dig it out just to take pics, please imagine I'm your head, perfect condition, lol)

There are some who suspect that if you use CGC's pressing services, you get a bump in the grade.  Pretty sure there is no way to verify this. 

Kind of like the old Publisher's Clearinghouse magazine sweepstakes where they claimed you did not need to buy a magazine to be entered, but people suspected that if you bought a magazine you had better odds.  

That said, people do send in books (esp. modern books) with no pressing and they do get 9.8s, so it's certainly possible.  You probably do increase your odds with a press. I think the chances you actually hurt the grade are not that high.  May just be another cost/benefit thing, i.e. how much more would it be worth.

Where would I be if I had skipped out on that one really bad contest!

Or, maybe it was more than one bad one actually.  I can't even remember. 

I usually have (at least) one really bad round, I remember that!

Still, these are fun!

On 4/22/2024 at 10:07 PM, Cman429 said:

5 points this round. I knew one of those three NM books would be a 9.6 and one would be 9.2 so I spilt the difference and guessed 9.4 on all them. In my experience the difference between those grades is basically a dart throw. 

Same!

One grade off each of the other two, so, 4 pts for me this round.

Weeeeeell

I think with Dave Stevens, sadly by virtue of dying young, there's also a limited output issue.  By which I mean that it's realistic to actually collect all his covers.  And that's appealing to many people.  

It's just another one for the "what were they thinking" file.  How do you spend so much on something so underwhelming?  How is it even possible?  You can make Godzilla Minus One for 10 million.  Did they really not see?  

Or is it all just what William Goldman said "Nobody knows anything."  

On 4/18/2024 at 5:15 PM, paperheart said:

my dance card filled up for the next eight weeks

Heh.  Old movies.  P'shaw.

My list for the next 8 looks (very) roughly something like:

Civil War

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Challengers

The Fall Guy

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

If

Furiosa

Bad Boys:  Ride or Die

Possibly some additions or substitutions in there depending on what else might be showing. 

Do not mock my tastes, or lack thereof!  

Are you talking about this?  People have definitely been talking about it.

Gonna go out on a limb and say there is no chance an "R" rated TMNT ever hits the screen.  Too many execs will complain about how they'd be knee-capping themselves and losing too much of the potential market.  

About as much chance as an "R" rated Barbie movie, I suspect. 

And I would totally go see an "R" rated Barbie movie.  

Well, I'm rescinding any insinuation that MCS undergrades when buying and then re-lists the same book at a higher grade. I misread Shadroch's above comment to mean that they had undergraded books he previously had bought from them, and then recalled other complaints in this thread of that happening.  I just re-skimmed the entire thread of 3 1/2 years and there were only two times people claimed that MCS had now graded a book lower than what the seller had bought it from MCS as.  

Many more people complaining/remarking about how tight they grade (as compared to what CGC would give a book), but that's really something different altogether.  

On 4/9/2024 at 1:13 PM, shadroch said:

I recently sent in a bunch of moderns that I'd picked up for almost nothing, and they were buying. I reviewed the books with a magnifying glass and only sent books I was confident would be VF or better. Nearly all of them were called Fines or worse.  Absurd. I'll give away my books before I send them any more raw books, and I've sold over $100K on their site as one of the earlier consigners. I was tempted to have them returned, but the round-trip shipping would have been more than they offered me.

That is kind of sad, but appears to be the M.O.  If you are selling to them, they will always undergrade you and pay you less.  Too many stories about people sending them the exact same book back that they previously bought from MCS and yet now it gets a lower grade.

And I also have little doubt that when the book subsequently goes up for sale it will magically have become the higher grade again - possibly I'm too cynical there.  

They assign tight grades on consignments too, I gather, but probably not as much as when they are buying themselves.

On 3/30/2024 at 10:12 AM, Axelrod said:

I will see this because it is the only game in town, but I can't say I'm "excited" about it.  I will confess to getting a bit tired of watching giant CGI pixels smashing into each other again and again and again. 

I will be pleasantly surprised if there is an actual decent story that goes along with it. 

Well, I was, in fact, pleasantly surprised that there was an actual story to go along with the giant monster smashing. 

A silly story, to be sure.  And, amusingly, almost too much story, as they have to jump through a lot of hoops to try and make all these silly "Monsterverse" films at least nominally consistent with each other, despite the "mythology" being just about the most ridiculous thing ever.  Many exposition dumps.

Godzilla really did not need to be in this movie at all.  It's much more just a Kong film.

On 4/5/2024 at 6:36 PM, speedcake said:

Why are there fourteen pages litigating what Ed Piskor may or may not have done or whether or not what he may or may not have done was illegal, simply immoral, just a little creepy, none of the above or all in the basket?  

It's the Internet and People Have Opinions.

I also had one fairly recently where my item that was supposed to have already shipped was suddenly returned by the carrier.  

I got a note like this:

They never said what happened.

I thought it was fine.  The main issue might have been trying to serve too many masters, with the all legacy characters and the new characters.  They had to dumb it down just to make everything fit, I think.  In particular:

I liked the frozen monster design and wish there had been more about it, and that there had been cleverer scheme to free it than the extremely far fetched scenario that actually occurred.  

Man, I had to do something akin to this when I retrieved my comic collection after 30 years from my mom's house and had to get it to my house in another state.  Not 130 short boxes, but it was about 18.  I had 4 days to clear out my stuff, and literally just took them to a local shipping company and said "how can you ship me this?"  I knew nothing about grading or CGC at the time.  Most of the books were in bags.  In retrospect, it's a miracle they weren't all completely trashed when they got to me, but that company did a nice job.