Djangology

On 11/19/2022 at 3:41 AM, Beige said:

Err...Brentford is nearly central London!

 

The 28k population was from how Wikipedia defined "Brentford":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentford

I have no idea how far Brentford's reach extends in any given direction before it is overtaken by other clubs, i.e. their "territory".

On 11/17/2022 at 2:43 PM, Beige said:

It's more about location and population.

Wrexham has 65,000 pop and is near 4 massive clubs, and 10 smaller ones.

 

Brentford is a suburb of London and has 10 big (and smaller) clubs nearby - Chelsea, Arsenal,Fulham,Spurs etc plus Charlton, Palace, Millwall etc etc - but in a City of 6,000,000 people - plus tourists.

I believe Brentford is the easiest club to get a ticket for a Premier League game - Fulham the cheapest - so those 2 get a fair few holidaymakers in London who want to see a 'big' football match.

 

Don't forget - Brentford just drew with Chelsea and beat Man City away!

Wrexham are in the National League.

I'd say the best Rob and Ryan could hope for was to get to L1 and yo-yo between L1 and L2 - go up from L2 to L1 take the prizemoney and extra TV revenue, get relegated, sell their best player, buy cheaper young hungry ones and try to go backup.

Wrexham is too small to sustain L1 and expect success (the costs are huge) - and the Championship would bankrupt the owners in 2 years.

Most Championship Clubs lost £30,000,000 - £35,000,000 this last season. You need either a wealthy patient owner, or parachute payments to survive in the Championship, and plenty of big clubs have fallen to League 1

Leeds Utd, Sunderland, Sheff Wed, Birmingham City, Aston Villa etc etc have all slipped into L1 at some point.

In the National League - at least 13 teams used to play in the Football League.

 

Very tough at the bottom.

 

L1 at best for Wrexham - L2 most likely.

 

Rob and Ryan need a cunning plan. That stadium cost is insane - I don't know why they think they need to spend £90,000,000 on a new stand. It seems way too expensive.And capacity only goes up by 3500.

As a comparison it only cost Bristol City FC  £45,000,000 to turn this:

Into this:

 

Rob and Ryan are spending 50% more on ONE stand.

It doesn't make any sense at all - is it poor reporting and it's the whole ground - or is the cost wrong - but that's all I'm seeing in UK papers.

 

It will be interesting - as I said - these guys could lose a serious amount of money.

Appreciate the info! Brentford proper is listed as having a smaller population (just under 28k as of 2011), but I assume there must be some additional pool of stable, long-term fans in the immediate vicinity? I would imagine the median household income in Brentford is higher than Wrexham as well? The whole Moneyball thing Brentford's done has been a great story itself. Being a solid mid-table club is very impressive given their resources.

Is the delta between the Bristol and Wrexham costs perhaps a death-by-a-thousand-cuts combination of Brexit, COVID, inflation, supply chain, etc.? Not sure how much construction has been impacted across the pond. Can't imagine those two would risk reputation damage by trying to engage in shenanigans.

Those losses in the Championship are eye-watering. I know there's a pot of gold for making it to the Prem - still, what a gamble!

What's the realistic level in the pyramid that the Wrexham market can sustainably support?

It's fun to look at a club like Brentford that was in League Two 20 years ago and playing in a 12,000 seat ground from a century earlier to see how far they've come. As a non-Brit, it's easy enough to understand how a club like Leeds could return to the Premier League and remain indefinitely; however, I don't have a good sense of just how big the economic gap is between Brentford and Wrexham.

Pretty much the last thing DC should do is 1) launch another Batman-related book 2) that caters to people old enough to remember the Bicentennial.

On 8/29/2022 at 10:52 PM, lou_fine said:

 

Not sure if I am misunderstanding your point here, but since CGC is seens as the top dog in grading when it comes to comic books, both of your points here would tend to confirm that this SCG 9.5 graded card is not the best condition Mantle card out there.  

CGC can be both the top grader in the industry at the same as they're the grader of the Promise Collection books. Same thing happens with PSA. They receive many of the same criticisms from sports cards folks that people here have for CGC. I don't know that high-quality scans of any of the PSA 10 Mantles are out there for the public, but none of them are in recent slabs. Many people believe the grading standards have risen over time and one of those PSA 10s is in the early PSA slab, to boot. Part of PSA's appeal is that it's the easiest place to get a 10 from the main companies. Other big grading companies like BGS and SGC have a delineated range for their 10s while PSA does not. PSA has a wider range of what constitutes a 10 as a result.

Between the different time periods at which these cards were graded, the different humans who graded them, and the different companies who graded them, I don't think the nominal grades on the holders confirm anything in terms of which one is best. The Mantles that have been in holders for 10+ years could've been damaged since they were slabbed as well.

On 8/28/2022 at 11:44 PM, lou_fine said:

Not exactly sure how everybody quoted in that link can say definitiely that this SCG 9.5 graded card is the best when there are apparently also 3 PSA 10.0 Gem Mint graded copies of this card out there.  

My understanding is that all of the high grade Mantles out there are supposed to be from the find referenced in the article. That Mr. Mint character identified this one as the "finest" of the bunch in a letter to the buyer after he had sold it in that 1991 transaction. PSA's grades have the same sort of uncertainty as CGC's grades, particularly when it comes to vintage.

As an aside, there are/were detailed scans of the card on Heritage's site and I think SGC overgraded it. Modern cards do not receive that much leeway. It's in amazing condition and I have no reason to doubt it's the best one, but it has a number of flaws.

My library of trades is clear that the 00s are the era I like best (thus far). Makes sense when I think about it. Although Vertigo didn't have anything that hit the heights of Sandman, I'd say that was their best time overall. There were also plenty of great indie books from stalwarts as well as newcomers. There was a renaissance at Image. A number of my favorite comic writers - Brubaker, Ellis, Morrison, Vaughan, et al. - were focused on comics and prolific, to boot. I really enjoyed the first few years of a couple of the Ultimate titles. There were some real highlights from standard superhero writers like Busiek, Cooke, and JMS to name a few.

On 7/7/2022 at 3:12 PM, BrooksR said:

Midtown had number 1’s signed by Tynion for cover price for a long time, I ordered a couple. I thought the story was decent, I don’t know why it’s not catching on?

I think the main obstacle is that book had a huge print run: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/house-of-slaughter-1-gets-almost-half-a-million-orders/

On 6/17/2022 at 11:21 AM, D2 said:

I know this is much like talking into a black void…

And I preface this by saying that I say these things, really to remind and to tell myself…

That I find the whole comic book collecting thing to be a bit odd. 
 

I can understand why the first appearance of Spider-Man would be expensive, or why a certain issue would be valuable because reading it brought a great experience, and it developed your favourite character in a certain way.

I can understand why a variant would be popular, if it was based on a good read that you thoroughly enjoy/ed and it’s the more uncommon printing. 
 

I can understand that old books are rare, for all sorts of different reasons. War paper donations, poor collecting habits, genuine enjoyment of the medium, all of which would contribute to a certain thing being rare and therefore valuable. 
 

I don’t understand why books that are not valued reads are valuable. I don’t understand how a book based solely on its cover, and its exclusivity in its rarity, is valuable. 
 

I don’t agree with it, fundamentally. But even not agreeing with it, it is still easy to get swept away in the desires of others. That is a problem. 

Do you genuinely not comprehend the concept of people prioritizing art over writing in comics?

If anything, CGC should be headed in the opposite direction to maximize transparency: Eliminate the custom labels in order to standardize the front and use the back of the label to dump the "grader's notes"-type info. Use acronyms for the common stuff to save space, then elaborate with additional text when necessary.

I don't see any consumer benefit from pertinent information being restricted to an online-only source gated by a paid account. Databases are compromised all the time. At best, this change just manufactures additional hoops for a consumer to jump through to feel confident about the grade of a CGC book. 

On 2/9/2022 at 4:11 PM, mytastebud said:

No. I don't think so. 

Try to find another one with HOF football player HOF basketball player and 7 time Mr Olympia attending the same event and all three signing an event ticket that puts them all in the same place in time.

I have it graded now. It has population of 1. Mr. Schwarzenegger has a much bigger resume post 8/1984 too so I just need the right fan.

Look at it from a buyer's perspective: What independently-verifiable evidence is there that those three 1) attended the event in question and 2) signed the ticket 3) at that time? If I buy a ticket from Game 6 of the 1936 World Series and have it signed by Anthony Davis and Taylor Swift, it doesn't prove that they were both at the Polo Grounds that day.

I don't buy many variants because my general philosophy is to limit purchases of them to two categories:

1. A must-own cover. ASM 55 is a perfect example - I bought a virgin second print because that's the iteration I liked best. I had/have no clue which version will be the long-term winner in the market.

2. A limited or ratio of a (potential) key. Ideally, this is one with a small, finite print run announced up-front.

On 11/28/2021 at 5:37 AM, Lazyboy said:

Really? After a quick perusal, they mostly look pretty generic and pose-ish, and that's without even getting into the multitude of variants.

I'd say it's more that I incorporated speculation as part of my comics-related activities. While I had/have zero interest in the Young Avengers, it wouldn't have been any trouble to pick up a copy of the first issue back in 2005. I was literally at a comic store the day it was released, but was only buying stuff that I wanted to read (with the occasional cover buy) back then. Nowadays? I couldn't care less about Deadpool and recently picked up Black, White & Blood 4 because it's minimal risk with significant plausible upside. Given how much time I allocate to comics, the least I can do is try to utilize information I've learned where appropriate.

On 11/20/2021 at 2:44 PM, BladeTX said:

I feel like if this has the same momentum at Issue 50, the current values of 1-10 will be higher.   I only care about the A covers.  But what absolutely baffles me is the insane number of variants, limited this, limited that.  I can see those crashing a lot.  And I'm with @Wolverinex, I think those Issue 1 Frison covers are an absolute steal at about $300 each.  I think buying 10 for $3K could someday be a big payday.

Speaking of that Frison cover, the color splash and foil variants are both limited to 300 and go for ~$700 in 9.8 - those seem like relative bargains.

The original Avengers 1 is a perfect example of a ho-hum key to me. The whole concept of a superhero team had already existed for years, this doesn't have any character first appearances, and I don't think the cover is anything special.

There are a number of "key" categories that almost always fail to interest me, including:

- 1st team appearance of a group of existing characters

- 1st silver/bronze/etc. age appearance

- 1st battle/meeting between existing characters

On 8/31/2021 at 12:18 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

I don't collect video games but what I've learned from all of this is that for some reason, the games that I would personally consider the most desirable as collectibles -- basically those original Atari 2600 games and that first round of Activision games that raised the bar -- are not really the ones fetching the best prices.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the original Super Mario Bros. game would be a major collectible (#1, I gather?) since it launched one franchise (Nintendo consoles in general) and sort-of launched another (all things Mario -- which of course really started with the Donkey Kong arcade game).  But I would have expected much more love for the Atari.  The Atari 2600 changed my life as a 10-year-old kid, and it set me on the path of wanting to be a software developer before I even knew exactly what that meant.  I have never looked back.

On 8/31/2021 at 12:54 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

Honest question, what does how "playable" a game is today have to do with anything when these are all sealed in shrink-wrapped boxes?

If this is all (or mostly) about nostalgia, it shouldn't be about how well a game ages by today's standards, it should be about how that game made you feel as a kid.  Some of the least impressive games from a purely visual standpoint (Zork anyone?) are among the all-time greats in terms of how much they dominated the public consciousness in their time.

Out of curiosity, what are the arguments for why Atari's console games should be the most desirable independent of your personal connection to them? After Atari crashed the U.S. game market in the early 80s, they never really came back in any meaningful way. In contrast, Nintendo significantly expanded the market in the mid-80s and has been relevant to every subsequent generation. On top of that, the popular 2600 games were mostly wildly inferior arcade ports.

It's not like Platinum Age comics or 19th century baseball cards are the most desirable in those respective hobbies, so just being earlier in the market isn't inherently enough.