Legion World Forums LEGION OUTPOST Mission Monitor Board The Moaning, Groaning, I just want to Vent thread

Sauerkraut.

I just walked to the gas station-- BRRR, it's cooled off! Checked the forecast, it will get down to 31 tonight with a high in the lower 40s tomorrow. FINALLY.

Cleome, one thing I have realized while doing pretty much nothing the past 8 months... time has moved by EVEN FASTER. Weirdness.

Not weird.

You ever notice how time seems to just stand still when you keep going back to look at a clock, but you largely ignore the clock and hours could by in what feels like no time at all.

Yes, the Watched Pot theory... it really is true.

Ugh stupid LEG CRAMPS. I will never make fun of pro-athletes again when they writhe on the field in agony from this affliction.

Now which one of you wants to pay me millions to grab mycalf and groan, while a teammate helps me stretch it out.

[snip]

Hey, now. It's not "nothing." It's art!

So at the locker room at my gym, there are usually towels left on the floor or the benches. How hard is it to carry a towel 7 steps to the used towel bins? Another thing I see that bugs me there is people who leave the locker door open. Are you so fatigued by your workout that it becomes too difficult to shut the darn door?

Lobster, again!

I don't know how you can stand it FC.

It is probably best to eat lobster sitting down instead of standing.

About ready to explode...I'm letting too many things get to me, and not doing enough to change them. Time to make changes in my life...and a lot of people are not gonna like them.

, Dev.

How come every time I spend 15 minutes waiting in a line the person in front of me has to throw salt in the wound by having 11,000 items to be rung in? And then proceeds to ask the cashier " do you have this, and do you have that...?" "Can you get someone on the floor to check the price of this for me?" "Oh and can I have...".
AAHHHRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Oh well, my fault for braving the craziness of retail on Boxing Day I guess.

I will never learn.

Something else else that bothers me is when you are in line at a fast food place. They have the menu on the wall above the register and it can be seen by everyone in line, but the person in front of you waits til they are at the register to think about what they want.

I may be able to top this one.

In the warehouse where I temp, we get tons of goods in carboard boxes. Almost all the cardboard boxes have an extra sheet of cardboard placed atop the goods before a box is closed for shipping. It's nicknamed a "slit" and it's the first thing that we have to remove from the box so we can get to the items to fill the orders. Presumably it's placed in the box in the first place to keep items or their shipping bags from being sliced open when the recipients (ie- us) cut open the box after it's shipped.

Almost everyone just takes the "slits" out of the boxes and throws them on the floor. This drives me nuts! It's both a nuisance and a safety hazard; because you could step on one of the things and skid and lose your footing on the floor.

It's just as easy to throw them on the cart or into the bin with which you're gathering items and then throw the "slits" out as soon as you pass a trashcan or recycling bin.

Of course, some people don't throw them on the floor. They throw them behind stacks of unopened boxes where they attract tons of dust and/or snag on the shelves and make it that much harder to pull the new goods forward when it's time to get a new box. Oh, and some winners just raise the "slit," pick an item out of the box and leave the cardboard over the remaining items: where it'll be in the way of the next poor slob that has to go and pull an item.

Gah. I get that a warehouse is not the place to expect Martha Stewart-levels of Neat 'N Clean, but c'mon, People!

Yeah, so how'd that work out Mikey?

Well, where I am, we've gotten the first snow in the south in a couple of years. Christmas night. No shorts for me here in lake city, SC.

This is something that has bugged me for years, but I just saw the most extreme example of it today so...

Why is it that whenever I see someone selling comics outside of a comic-specific venue (i.e. at a garage sale, a flea market, an antique store, etc.) the asked-for prices are just sooooo ludicrous? It is though non-collectors just assume, "Hey... I heard that comic books are valuable; I'm going to make a bundle off these."

I could understand if someone bought a price guide and decided to price all of their books at suggested "Mint" prices because they didn't know about grading, but it's never even that simple. It just always seems completely arbitrary.

I was in a mall today and there was a baseball card show going on (so one would assume these dealers are not entirely unfamiliar with the concept of price guides) and one fellow had a few boxes of comics. I started flipping though and I was just astounded at how ludicrously priced these were. It is not as though they were even uniformly high priced (like every book for $5 or something), they were individually priced at ridiculous prices.

Of the couple that caught my eye, he had a few mid-eighties Who's Who's for $10 apiece, some Byrne-era Superman for $40 apiece and the one that I actually was interested in, Adventure 345 - the second half to the Nardo story - at $120!

Now, I happen to have a price guide right here (admittedly from 2001... but let's take a look)... OK, Adventure 345... in Near Mint ... $30, in good (which is closer to what the book in question was) ... $3. So either that book has quadrupled in value over the past 10 years, or this guy is yet another example of someone who has no idea what he's doing.

The real irony of the situation to me is that I can't imagine who the target buyer would be in this situation. Someone who has no idea about comic value I wouldn't imagine would casually drop $120 on some random back issue, and someone who does would never pay that price.

I just wonder whether these fellows ever move any of their books, and, if they don't, do they ever question why that is?

Did you bring it to his attention how ridiculously priced his books were?

I actually did.

Not in an overly rude way, but when he asked me if I saw anything I liked I said, "Yes, but these seem a little high." He replied that sorry, most people thought they were fair.

I was going to try to negotiate, but, honestly, we were coming from such completely different mindsets (the majority of what I would have asked about, I would have been prepared to pay only between 25 cents to a dollar for), I didn't want to waste either of our time.

Perhaps the price of # 345 has indeed quadrupled since Lash has been using Nardo as his avatar.

I think the seller either was ignorant or was expecting his customers, casual buyers in malls, to be ignorant. If you know nothing about comics and you see an issue with a $120 price tag, you might assume that the seller knows what he's doing . . . particularly since it may be your only chance at procuring such a treasure for yourself!

Years ago, I was at a store that sold collectibles of various kinds, including a fair-sized collection of cheap comics. There was an issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths (# 10, I think) with the name "Dick Giordano" written across it in felt-tipped ink. My first thought, of course, was it was an autograph from Giordano, the DC bigwig who had inked Crisis. I bought the comic--it was less than three dollars--even though I already had a copy. The only reason I bought it was because of the hope, however slim, that the signature was real.

I never tried to sell the issue, however, as I came to realize how silly and greedy my thinking was. What difference would if make if it was Giordano's signature? He was hardly the superstar that penciller George Perez was. Also, I have no way of authenticating the signature, so any attempt to persuade a buyer that it's genuine would be dishonest.

However, the incident taught me a valuable lesson: fans such as me tend to perform mental cartwheels when we think we've stumbled upon a hidden treasure.

Don't doubt his influence! I paid like 14 bucks for an issue of Groovy 70s Teen Titans because of his talking up the series!

I wish reprints of Groovy 70s Teen Titans would in fact be titled "Groovy 70s Teen Titans". Life just ain't fair.

So I'm basically venting here because I don't feel like arguing with the people involved.

This morning on Facebook some friends (well, people I know from High School) were complaining about "greedy" songwriters who expect you to pay everytime their musics is performed, and how they used to copy tapes all the time but now musicians all complain about "illegal downloading".

The thing is that I know a lot of working musicians who basically are lucky if they break even on their music. For many independent artists, *if* almost everyone who acquires your music actually pays for it, then that means that you can basically recoup the costs you put into making the music and it won't be cutting into the money that you make at your day job as a UPS worker or something. Even the vast majority of musicians who manage to devote themselves to music aren't exactly making tons of profit off it, and illegal downloads or illegal use of copywrited material seriously lessons the likelihood that they actually can survives off their craft.

Of course, my frustration with these folks on Facebook is heightened by the fact that they (or at least most of them) are self-proclaimed "right-wingers" and "Reaganites" who think Obama is a "socialist" and complain about "redistribution of wealth", etc. But apparently when it comes to some product that they want but don't want to pay for, it's all "from each according to his ability, to each according to his [want]".

Things like that on facebook drive my wife crazy. I generally ignore any comments by anyone online unless they are funny or ones that I already agree with!

I sympathize with the musicians. But then again, almost every creative person I know gripes about this sort of thing. Most musicians who turn even a modest profit do so by touring, not by selling CDs or merchandise or what-have-you. And the ones who reap a modest profit usually do so by going out without the dubious blessings of a record label.

I myself do not buy new music. I borrow it or buy it used, when I can afford to, which is rarely. Not only are new downloads on Amazon and its ilk hideously overpriced, there's the recent unpleasantness with large corporations going after Wikileaks. I can't stomach the thought of even using PayPal any more; their behavior is so vile. There is nothing, alas, I can do about Visa. I'm yoked to them for eternity, basically.

If somebody goes to my art site and wants to do a click-and-save on my work for free, there's nothing I can do about that, either. When I sell an original work, it's stipulated that the new owner owns only the original, not the right to copy the image and sell it for profit. But the truth is that if somebody did that very thing, I might never find out. Even if I did, it's unlikely that I'd be able to stop them unless I had a pod of lawyers handy-- and something to pay them with.