Ridiculousness At Auction

Earlier in the day I swore I wasn't going to talk about this and I was going to put it completely out of my head. How quickly my resolve weakened. I tend to dwell on things, so I was trying not to with this matter - and this matter was a fairly large one to come along in a while for me.

If you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, (all 2 of you, lol) you know that I use eBay, but I'm definitely no fan of eBay. If I could obtain Game & Watches anywhere else easily, or sell things to a large audience with greater ease, I would. But for right now, there's no real alternative. Paypal pretty much sucks, too. Their "umbrella" of security isn't bad, but their policies - and greed - are ridiculous.

My hobbies work in cycles, I get (back) into something, get bored, move on to something else I'm interested in, etc. Gaming to anime to Game & Watches/LCD games to cute mascot goods to quirky gadgets, etc. This is horrible when you collect things, because then you tend to run out of space quickly, due to the sheer number of different things you collect. (Which is why it took me 2+ years to gut my gaming inventory) Sometime in the last 2 months or so I wound up getting back into Game & Watch collecting, eventually buying more in a short period of time than I ever had before.

I won't bore with the details, but suffice it to say that since I collected in fits & starts - and when ebay had a much smaller user base which meant less auctions overall - I think I had a misconception of what was "rare" and what was not. So that meant that this time I jumped on a few games I thought were rare that kinda weren't. Seeing the Crystal Screen Series of games on eBay for the longest time, priced at $500-$2000 a piece, usually new, seeing one unboxed (used) & therefore, cheaper, I wanted to jump on the chance to get one without taking out a loan.

Though the auction was listed as being in Hong Kong & the seller in Singapore raised some red flags, they were a "registered business seller", had over 2000 positive feedback, published their address on the page, etc. Moreover, the pictures weren't generic stock photos, they looked genuine, taken just for that item and the description wasn't in horrid English, i.e. - it had no earmarks of a scam/bootleg/whatever, auction. Which, was the biggest selling point, "This game would be nearly impossible (and not financially feasible) to bootleg or counterfeit, so why the hell not bid on it?"

So I bid on this auction and won. I was fairly excited, I snagged a Crystal Screen Game & Watch for only $135! I paid immediately, and just as soon afterward I received an e-mail with the tracking number that was in the system about 48 hours later, just like any other package I'd tracked before. I had no real reason to be suspicious. Except, a few days later, while cruising the same search I always do, I found the exact same pictures and description for the same auction, by the same seller - only this one had a Buy It Now price $100 higher than the one I had bought. Then I noticed something else, the tracking number ended with a 'CN', indicating China being the originating post, not Hong Kong. All sorts of red flags were now popping up. I could just see in my head either an empty package, something broken or something completely different showing up in the mail.

My suspicion was that either a) the seller never had the Game & Watch in their possession to begin with & just took a picture of someone else's or something to scam online or b) they didn't get what they wanted, neglected to put a reserve price on it & decided they didn't want to "be out" $100 or more, whatever they expected to get out of this, and sent the wrong thing intentionally, like "oops, sorry."

At any rate, it took almost a month for me to receive my package and I finally got the slip to come pick it up at the post office, in the mail. Upon picking it up, I noticed the package was fairly round and cushy. (which, if you've ever ordered anything from HK is insane because those sellers usually wrap whatever in paper, without bubble wrap or packing material of any sort, and send it off "bare". If they could get away with writing directly on the item, they would.) So I sign for it, get to the car, and my curiosity overwhelms me & I open it. I neglected to look at the customs tag before doing so, and after looking inside and seeing not what I had paid for, notice a declaration for "$10 Shorts". And sure enough, what was inside were 2 pairs of the ugliest briefs I've ever seen that I would never wear even if I had nothing else to wear in my life.

So now what to do? Naturally, most people would go screaming to Paypal to get their money back. I was trying to consider my options before I did this. "Why", you ask? I know Paypal's/eBay's game very well at this point, and the core of it is what pisses me off. They come off on this pretense that, "The community makes us what we are, without the community, we'd have nothing," which is fairly amazing because they treat that community like crap by way of fee hikes the MORE business they do and abide scammers because scammers add to their bottom line! Who cares if you or I got a $10 pair of cheap Chinese knockoff knickers instead of the $150 game we paid for? eBay got their cut, Paypal got theirs, and what's better is that they got the fees on $150! Woo! It's xmas everyday for them! In fact, scammers generally make MORE money for them, because chances are they're doing more volume tricking people into buying bootleg products. If you've spent any amount of time on eBay, you've probably noticed that every Hong Kong/Chinese seller has about 20000 feedback.

And, if I want my money back now, I have to return the item, because this smart scammer had the foresight to force "Registration" on me, so it's tracked & recorded that I received something in the mail. Even filing a 'SNAD' (significantly not as described) complaint with Paypal in what amounts to - under scrutiny - almost obvious fraud, I still have to play nice with the scammer. Which is incomprehensible to me.

The thing that really frosts my ass - as well as why I'm writing this - is because I have had multiple claims by liars and scammers that have had to send back nothing, because they claimed they received nothing (and every time it was remarked that they had, "tried to message seller multiple times!" when I had not received word one from them. If they lie, then I can only assume that they're scamming by filing a false report). So not only did I pay for their item, I paid to SEND them their item as well. So now I've officially been scammed on both ends of the spectrum, and I have to pay this pile of human garbage approximately $20 to get my money back. And on top of it all, I have to wait until the item reaches them, which will probably be another 20-25 days. Aaaaaaand another who-knows-how-many for Paypal to give me my money back.

Conversely, in the approximately 3 years I've been dealing with Yahoo Japan Auctions, I've never even had someone say so much as a rude word to me. I've had exactly one problem that was a mistake by the seller, they readily admitted it & sent me the one missing capsule figure with their apologies. (Mind you, this was a 1000yen transaction. I didn't get so much as a, "sorry" over a $150 transaction and an item worth less than 10% of what I paid for the item I didn't receive)

So, lesson learned. I will, from now on, buy only from first world countries and stick with just buying from Japan, as far as Asia is concerned.

Re: Hell is Other Players

For as much as I can't stand Kotaku sometimes, their posts can be somewhat thought-provoking. This article about playing games with others online and the lack of civility on the "anonymous net" produced this response from me:

The irony is that half of these little prepubescent pukes probably get beat on at school because THEY are different and they need to try and create their own "norm" so that they can be little hypocrites and do the same thing to people they don't deem worthy of their little inner circle.

I played the free game League of Legends with some friends for a little while, and I can honestly say that even with REAL LIFE friends playing alongside me, it was worse than having played on Live (some of the time) and playing WoW for a few years' time. And it wasn't due to lack of skill... I don't game on the PC very much, so my PC is about 3 years old, and my friends and I would talk on Skype whilst playing LoL. Well, somewhere along the line LoL, in conjunction with Skype running, would lag, HARD. And when you're playing a game where you're constantly in combat, that makes a lot of difference. So I had a choice, play the game, shut off Skype and type to everyone, which was no fun, or stop playing altogether. Not using Skype to chat was the equivalent of just playing with strangers, I played with friends while talking on Skype because I got to talk to friends that had moved to another state, that I used to game with in person. So I quit, because every match with lag was unbearable and frustrating to me, and there was just a constant, uncalled for barrage of idiotic comments in a game that was basically a glorified (FREE) tower defense game that was actually a Warcraft 3 mod. You seriously would have thought I was killing my own team members or something with some of the comments that were made to me. If you don't know how the game works, it's 5-on-5, and you can invite people or join a random game and get matched with teammates. There were normally 3 of us with 2 randoms, and sometimes 4 + 1 random if my buddy's girlfriend decided to play. It doesn't help that their matching system is deeply flawed, but the problem was usually some random assbag going off.

What's funny is that the more "mainstream" gaming seems to become - and the more social elements they add to gaming - the less civil the whole thing seems to be. I mean, when I played Starcraft and Diablo on Battle.net a decade ago, you could chat, there were rooms for it, and in-game chat in Starcraft at least (I forget if Diablo had it, everyone cheated anyway) and very rarely would anyone make shitty comments, much less anything you'd see/hear from someone who is 12 years old through a microphone today. I got the first Half-Life game exclusively for its online play, and even in those matches people still kinda kept their peace. Hell, even when I played World of Warcraft in 2004 until about 2006 or so, people were generally civil - at least on the servers I played on. Sure there were the know-it-alls and the people that took the game way too seriously, but there weren't any major trolls until around 2007 or so. That's also the year around when Blizzard started touting that 11.5 million subscribers number. So, is it the popularity that's driving uncivil behavior? An influx of more people means an influx of more assholes & trolls, right? But in a lot of these games anymore, and especially in the above example and Live, jerks seem to be the core, prevailing audience, which is kinda disturbing. Throw in texting, social networking, message boards on any number of sites & the anonymity that the internet/networked gaming provides and you have an unprecedented generation of kids/teens that have no sympathy or empathy because none of their communication need be civil, because nothing they say or do has any consequence to them until they bully someone to go kill or injure themselves and it winds up on the news. I mean, god knows there have always been little sociopaths running around bullying people *because* they're sociopaths, and that won't ever change, but now people don't even get a reprieve at home, because they can hunt them down online.

My generation had their parents accused of, "having the TV be the babysitter," which lots of parents did leave their kids in front of the TV all day, but then would blame the TV programs instead of looking inward to their own lack of parenting. And the TV, "instructed kids to imitate things they saw." Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Instead of unattentive, moronic parents blaming the TV now, it's going both ways. Instead of just imitating what they see, kids are free to be jackasses to one another on a grand scale. And what makes this so much worse than the previous generation is... it took several decades for TV to hit its stride. Which means that your parents' parents might not have understood that "wacky fad" of TV so well, but likely your parents knew how to work the dial. I'd say a sizable chunk of parents now don't know how to turn on half the devices their kids have, let alone operate them to see that their kid help make a classmate develop bulimia.

I'm not saying society is going to collapse because of this, but this anti-social-socializing is really something that people have never had to deal with before. And to someone that spent the majority of their life having to actually interact face-to-face with people and deal with the consequences of calling someone a "fuckbag" or a "pedo" to their face - whether we had SNES controllers in our hands or not - this is more than a little foreign. Arguing face-to-face or catching a beating - or dispensing one once in a while - as a consequence of endlessly running your mouth amongst peers instills a bit of an inner censor and ironically a little civility or humility, and I think that a lot of these kids/teens could really use that "interaction", for no other reason than it would likely cause it not to occur that much anymore.

Stupidity In My City

Kotaku ran this article today about a GameStop employee getting shitcanned for weighing in on the "raeplay controversy" (about a month late) for one of his friend's college newspaper articles. Apparently she mentioned that he mentioned that he was a GameSlop employee in the article and they didn't take too kindly to that. (As most companies wouldn't when discussing something controversial) I can only assume that the girl feeds into the typical mainstream journalism mentality, because apparently she published what is quoted below, verbatim, without bothering to fact check. Stuff like this really irritates me because it feeds into the controversy with misinformed pseudo-facts, and it eventually mutates into subscribing to the theory of, "Repeat something enough times and it becomes the truth." Since I can speak a little less generally here (knowing that most of you that read this know the scoop already), everyone knows these games are made for otaku. This person clearly has no fucking idea what they're talking about, and just wanted to hear their own voice or some such. Anyone who plays any sort of "dating sims" or games of any genre around that know that they're catering to one audience, and it ain't "suppressed" peoples. If anything, it is because of censorship law that things have gotten more creative sexually, but no one follows it because they're "suppressed" or fear for their lives or anything. Really, hardly anyone has been prosecuted under this law (Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution), the Japanese just have a penchant for following laws because that's the way things are, and have been for centuries. I've seen plenty of material worse than this raeplay bs, back in the late 90s/early 2000s, trust me, this isn't "exploratory" by comparison. Go here and here (NSFW) and meet me back here in 5 minutes, and then we'll discuss how "suppressed" (and I think he means Oppressed) Japan's sexuality is. Btw, the twist - and the reason why I'm so angry - is because this fool is from my city, and my city is full of fuckwit pseudo-intellectuals that love to hear themselves speak.

 "One has to remember that Japanese culture itself is very suppressed in sexuality as a whole, to the point where they still censor their pornography with mosaics, both picture and film-wise," Littlejohn said. "If you continually suppress a country in terms of sexuality, they'll just find different ways of exploring things themselves. RapeLay is just one of those ways of people expressing themselves, to see new things."

One has to remember, weeaboos that have never spoken to a real Japanese person talk out of their stupid asses. Now I know that fans of teh animu will step out of animuland to read some sort of Japanese culture/history article written by someone equally as ignorant as they are about it as they are, and I think that's cute. But be ignorant on your own fucking time, and most importantly don't be like Kramer from Seinfeld and say that, "Oranges are rare in Japan," or something equally retarded to be published in an article where more ignoramii can read it and misquote it. I was actually surprised at the amount of nudity in places that you'd never find in Puritanica (aka - the US), when I went to Japan for the first time. The biggest example of which were almost completely nude, very large,  photos of idols posted up around the top of a bookstore in the middle of a mall, just out in the open in the middle of Kagoshima on Kyushu.

Time for a little education: Japan censors porn because they HAVE to. Before 1868 & the Meiji Restoration, things like sexual depiction in art weren't at all suppressed. For the most part, Japan has always had a "decorum" about the privacy of relations between people. It extends back to at least the 1100s, as exemplified in The Tale of Genji, where the male & female characters at time didn't even speak face to face, and did so through a curtain or door. In 1868, during the Meiji Restoration, the nation tried to Westernize, and as such began adopting Victorian values of the time. This included censorship. After World War 2 a constitution, by and large not written by Japan but by the allies (specifically, the US), kept Japan from having any sort of national military amongst other things, which included upholding the censorship laws of the bygone Victorian law-adoption days. You may think it's strange that Japan has tentacle porn, but without this law, they likely wouldn't. Things like bukkake and tentacles are creative ways of getting around the law of not being able to show genitalia (or drawings of) on film. This is also why, if you've ever seen live Japanese porn, there are mosaics over the naughty bits, like you're watching an episode of "Cops" where a penis committed a crime. So yeah, not suppression so much as just following laws, as Japan has had a very law-abiding society for centuries.

Additionally, Japanese society is not sexually repressed (except maybe in their interpersonal relationships, but that has nothing to do with censoring porn) by anything other than a lot of men working too much and - as of late, more and more "herbivore men" who aren't all that interested in sex, coming about. There is no overarching theocracy or social view on sexuality being a bad thing. No, rather, in modern Japan, sexuality is "displaced" by a couple of things. There is the aforementioned ongoing tiredness by overworked men, whose wives are then dissatisfied by their husbands and potentially leave them. These men are also "forced" to go to nomikai, or after work meetings to drink and well, we all know what drinking does to a lot of mens' sexual performance. My cousin's family hosted a Japanese girl in the late 90s and came back in the early 2000s to go to college here. She was an only child, and unfortunately she died in a car accident during her freshman year here. It's about 7 years on now, and Mariko would've been 27 this year. Her father was a professor and her mother is a housewife. Their problem - especially now without a child to focus on - is that the husband always worked so much that he and the wife never got to know each other. So now, he's retired and they're at home together and there's this innate awkwardness because they've never really known each other as more than the parts of the machine that they comprised to make life go on. And apparently, at least according to the husband, this is quite prevalent in Japan. Another problem is that in the traditional sense, when you get married in Japan, you're considered part of the family. This often includes relatives living with you in more than a "nuclear family" sense. In a lot of Western countries, when you get married you move in to your own place with your new spouse and if a parent comes to live with you or whatever it's not until much later or unless a relative gets sick or something. When you're part of a family like that, I guess things can get sexually awkward, or you see each other a certain way and it's hard to alter that. In more recent times, though, there has been a large societal shift toward equality, with more people doing part time jobs as opposed to making long careers out of tenure, attempts at entrepreneurship, etc. Historically, Japanese women have been more caretakers & "OLs", or office ladies. In more recent times, women have made progress, though, and unfortunately, to be taken seriously about a career they have to eschew having a family. People are also opting not to have families because they feel the pressure of social responsibility, i.e. - not feeling up to the social or financial responsibilities of children.

I honestly don't even know what Mr. Littlejohn was referring to with that, "finding new ways of exploring sexuality" remark, because if Japanese society was TRULY repressed sexually, then this game wouldn't have existed (at least not in the larger sense where anyone outside of a VERY small circle of people would've known about it) in the first place. Most of this sort of stuff is made by otaku, for otaku, lolicons, moetaku, etc, that are most certainly NOT representative of Japanese societal norms. (In fact, if you bring anything close to this or "loli" or "moe" up with a typical Japanese person, their reaction is almost universally, 「気持ちわる！」 or 「あれはキモい」, which basically means "Ew, disgusting.") It seems like he's trying to say that because some Japanese guy's wife/girlfriend won't put out, he gets pissy and runs out and buys a raeplay/rapelay game to take out his frustration or something.

Additionally, this is nothing new to the East or West. People get all up in arms about this, but really, things like Usenet groups and IRC have been publicly around for years and years - almost since the inception of the internet - here and some areas of those contain the most disgusting things a human being could produce. And they require no "language patch" or even that much technical skill to access. They're right out there for a kid or teenager to find, JUST like the torrent of this one game. (In fact, I'd say that it takes a comparable amount of technical knowhow with software to get a torrent as it does to operate IRC or Usenet and download absolutely filthy things) But, as usual, because there isn't some illustrated diagram out there of a woman getting violated, the generally stupid public doesn't get outraged, because that'd require them to actually understand something aside from what's directly in front of their faces.

Finally, I live in the same city as this seemingly-pretentious, wannabe jackass, and I'm really unsurprised. This city is full of pseudo-academics and fervent "wikischolars". I'm actually pretty sure that all of the people on the east coast that have failed life's little tests and ended up at a GameSlop, Best Buy or any given cell phone dealer, all moved here. If they really know as much as they think they do or their opinions are as valuable as they all act like they are, they wouldn't all be working for $8 an hour selling box sets of The Sopranos.

Becoming An Heirloom...

I was pretty happy the other day when, upon pure stupid luck I discovered that the button cell batteries in something with LEDs in it that broke on me, fit in this Lotte keychain watch I got in the mid 90's. I thought I'd never replace the battery in it, it died in like 1998, so for over 10 years this little device hasn't worked. It was a gift from my cousin's first trip to Japan, and I've always loved it anyway, even if it didn't have that connotation to it. I honestly didn't even think it'd work even with brand new batteries, after all of this time. But lo and behold, one battery and a careful installation did the trick. I've officially declared this item an heirloom. ^^

Now, I'm an introspective soul, so whenever I would buy anything for the longest time I would think ahead to when I'd had it "forever and ever" (about 20 years) and it would essentially be a conversation piece. When I see something I want - and moreover when I ultimately obtain it - I more or less categorize it in my head as something that will stick with me for a long time, something that's "neat" and will ultimately end up in the closet or in a box somewhere over time, or something that I like but will in the end, sell. That last one I don't really see a long ways off most of the time, i.e. - videogames. Initially, I thought that I would keep most or all of my games for a long time because I am (or was) sentimental about playing games over and over, love nostalgia, etc.

Over time, though, I sort of fell out of love and started to view the games I'd kept all of this time as "wasted space" or hunks of gray plastic. Some of this emerging attitude had to do with the fact that when technology was closer (i.e. - crappier), those games were still very entertaining to go back to. Also, there's that sort of "Crisco on the lens" effect that makes hindsight - as far as nostalgia is concerned anyway - blurry in a really fun way. As I aged more and reality set in, I think that for me at least, I realized that the gameplay aspect was still kind of there (I played through the first two Zelda games again the other day and they both still held my interest quite well, but I realized just how small they were this time around) but in general it's the art form of the game and aspects of design and such, that make the nostalgia hold so well. And that makes me really, really happy. Because going back and playing a game to relive being 8 is one thing, but when I can hear the music, look at a clump of pixels and truly appreciate them, and wade into art and products that glorify this as a medium (not to mention the numerous awesome Flash games and such that draw artistically on the 8/16-bit era), it makes me truly happy.

Some of the reason behind my waning interest was that aforementioned space constraint, and the fact that shelves of anime figures and paraphernalia take up much more space than a few game systems and fixed-form games that fit back-to-back in a drawer. The upside to this is that figures and such aren't uniform and are much more interesting to look at, versus plastic with a sticker on it, or a CD/DVD. And I know that's being completely superficial about it, because after all games are supposed to be about playing them, not thumbing through the manual or looking at the box, but if I'm not going to play the game again anyway, why keep it? I already played it, I have the memories of having played it, what's the difference if I keep it or not?

Finally, a large part of keeping these, since I wasn't planning on opening a museum dedicated to gaming, was going to be sharing them with my kids. Yes, I was geeky and foresight-ridden enough to actually think, "I'll keep this longer, it'll be awesome to share with my kids." But the more and more time rolls forward, well I don't even know any women that are unattached let alone have had any sort of date or anything in forever, so I don't see children in the offing anytime soon.

It cracks me up how naturally suspicious people are, and over such stupid things - often of their own doing. Spreading the blame around is nothing new to me: I grew up in a household, went to a school, and worked a few jobs in which throwing blame around and having constantly to be right was practically a lifestyle. In fact, I'd lay odds that if my parents weren't such irrational, intellectually deficient, unmotivated and often-racist douchebags, they would have probably both made good lawyers. I honestly don't even feel "at home" unless I feel like I'm being cross-examined for eating food, or having to explain where a noise came from because I accidentally dropped something on the floor. If I spilled a glass of milk in my youth, I'd feel compelled to give a crime forensics-like explanation of the event in total, from pouring to where it hit the ground, because otherwise I'd never hear the end of it. And I was still made to feel like a criminal afterward.

So naturally, one would probably reach the conclusion that I would probably - cyclically - wind up needing conflict to thrive. And though I can be argumentative in nature, once again Japan sort of intervened and saved me from the "nurture" (or lack thereof) component of my upbringing. I've always kind of shied away from conflict, but who knew that there was a cultural phrasing for it? "Meiwaku kakenai" is the phrase Japanese use for it, which essentially means that you're going out of your way not to disturb others or cause problems - preserving (societal) harmony.

I don't want to be an ass and say that I'm "different" or "evolved" because of this, but I do tend to step back and look at problems more before I start barking. Ironically, this makes me a hell of a lot more sensitive to other people's overreactions and then I do get a lot more offended than I normally would if I just took that attitude of involving myself in the argument right off, and miring myself deep into it and arguing until I'm right. And I know it's short-sighted to think that everyone will - or should - behave in the same way, arguing logically, not automatically letting fly with both barrels when something small is wrong, etc, but that is the way I think.

Also, when an argument involves a sum of money my opinion tends to "flower" a little more. Which I guess makes me a hypocrite, because I'm talking about keeping logic in an argument, but then injecting my own opinions into it. But I guess I'm human that way. In short, I hate cheapness. Yes, it warranted a bold color change. I especially hate cheapness when it involves frivolous things. "Fiscal responsibility" when it comes to the essentials like food (not in a restaurant), sundries, travel-related things, etc is prudent, and tacit cheapness isn't horrible there. If a mechanic can get over on you, he will, food does go bad, cable companies charge too much, et cetera. Watching your back financially isn't a bad thing, because there are many vital areas of life where people without the skill sets to say, work on their own car - things you need and can't really avoid - get raked over the coals because that person is ignorant of how much something's actual cost is. That is not being cheap. However, when you opt to buy something completely frivolous and then nearly have an aneurysm when the item you spent a whopping $10 on turns out to have a small tear in it or whatever, that to me is just asinine.

I'll preface it with this: I generally don't buy things used. It's not that I have an aversion to purchasing used items, it's just that if something is available both new and used, used is generally not that much cheaper than new (except for like cars or homes, obviously). When something isn't available new and I do buy it used, I generally investigate it pretty thoroughly or just have a cushion for a certain preset level of disappointment I guess. Either that or I just have low standards to begin with.

If I purchase something that I had a clear, high-resolution view of before I bought it, it comes to me and isn't significantly different than what I saw online before purchase, then I'm generally pleased or blame myself for not looking more closely. (This is where the meiwaku kakenai thing comes in.) Otherwise I ask questions, but again I don't buy used that much, so if something looks fishy but is the only one of its kind I know I have a tough decision to make, I don't just impulse buy. If I do, and if it's under like $100, I generally don't get pissed off if the item in question has something small wrong/different.

These "ebay people", on the other hand, seem to be the kind of people that would go to a flea market, buy something secondhand and then demand a warranty on it after they get it home and it fails to meet every single specification of what they envisioned it to be. (even if it wasn't that to begin with) My real beef is, where is this sense of intense scrutiny before they buy? If you are that bad and that scrutinous about things then perhaps you shouldn't be buying items related to your hobby secondhand? Maybe you should ask questions first instead of blaming others for your lack of foresight? And finally, if you're going to get that bent over a matter of $10, then obviously you should not be collecting games or anime goods.

Should *I* be paying the price because they impulse bought something (and in both cases of this happening, both people mentioned being "potentially overzealous" up front) and then try and blame me because they didn't ask questions beforehand or because their mailman shoved it in their mail slot in an L shape when the post office put a DO NOT BEND stamp on it? I was actually called "naive" because I sent their poster in a bubble mailer with a DO NOT BEND stamp on it from the post office, and didn't put cardboard backing in it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if everyone second-guessed themselves a little bit more instead of trying to focus the blame like a laser beam onto everyone else - over 10 fucking dollars no less - perhaps the world wouldn't be such a craptacular place to dwell in.

The items in question here were a Samurai Shodown game for Gameboy and a circa '01 Cowboy Bebop poster from Newtype. The SamSho cart I take partial responsibility for, I had it in the 90's when I lived a house of smoke and the smell issue that the person complained about I kind of overlooked. I did, however post like 4 closeup high-res pics of the box and game and etc, the box had a really obvious permanent marker 'S' on it and I guess the case and little white insert didn't come with it. Instead of asking first, this person bought it and complained about it later. He admitted his zeal in finding the game (which is a B+ rarity in the Gameboy Rarity Guide), but doesn't think I should've marked it as "complete". What constitutes "completeness", to me at least, is up for debate, but for something that rare from the early 90's to have a box and instructions is pretty damned amazing, would be my thought process if I had bought it. Instead of focusing on the fact that it was missing 2 generic things I could easily replace from another random game, I would be extremely happy at having something so rare in my hot little hands. The person paid $30 for it, probably close to what it retailed for in 1994, so again, summing all of those things up, I would've probably been happy, blamed myself for the few things that are wrong, and then moved on. The buyer of this (from Norway), and myself resolved this amicably because he was willing to admit that it was partially him and partially me.

...Conversely we have the case that descended on me today, and the real source of this rant. This was over a $10 Cowboy Bebop poster that was a bonus in an issue of Newtype in 2001. Obviously on US ebay, you're not going to find something like this, most likely ever again. Out of curiosity I looked for it on Yahoo Japan Auctions and couldn't find any CB posters at all, let alone this particular one. Anyone who reads J-mags that come with "furoku" or supplemental posters/stickers/etc, knows that they're mass produced and even though they're usually of good quality, the seams and such, since they're auto-folded by machines, will often break or show signs of wear, right out of the magazine, new. After 9 years of being stored, it had a pin sized hole in the center, which was overblown as if I'd torn the poster in half before I sent it. There is also a small stain (of which looks like Pepsi or something) toward the bottom. Again, high-res pictures make that fact obvious, is it too much to assume that visual assessment is beyond the grasp of someone that's so overly-scrutinous? According to the buyer, the poster was "filthy" because of that one spot. Also, I might add, this was a 7 day auction and they rode it out to the end. It's not like they used 'Buy It Now' or anything, so they had ample time to ask about these things if they were so concerned. Lastly, and this is what really infuriated me, is that I got blamed for his postman being an asshole and leaving it in an "L shape" in his mailbox. The post office put a DO NOT BEND stamp on the package. I got called "naive" because I assumed that someone would actually treat a package with respect. *GASP!* Apparently, according to the master, I should have put cardboard in it. Nevermind that it's a poster and it is made of paper, and generally curling paper one way means that it CAN be curled back to a flat state. Had I known we preferred cheap cardboard, I wouldn't have bothered wasting the dollar on a bubble mailer to make sure it didn't get wet in transit.

So I've yet to respond to this person, and I don't know if I will. They didn't seem to want a response and just wanted me to know that they were blaming me for whatever idiocy they displayed in not asking questions and the ignorance of their mailman. And I'm pretty certain that if I do respond I'll end up with negative feedback.

Youtube Reviews, Srsly?

I realize that the novelty of Youtube has by and large worn off for most people, and that's a good thing. For about a two year span there was this big deal about being a talking head on Youtube. If you owned a camera and had an opinion about something -- anything, YT welcomed you with open arms to sit there and "umm" and "ooh" at the camera while trying to "inform" or "entertain". This got staggeringly idiotic pretty quickly. (Though this still wasn't as bad as every AMV or "COVER, FULL VERSION!" shitty attempt at playing guitar that exist on there to this day) This "punditism" still exists now across a myriad of subjects that there are TONS of "experts" at, though they're not as popular as they were when Youtube was still in its heyday 3 or 4 years ago.

I really don't mean to come off as an elitist, because there are I'm sure, thousands of people that know more than me and get aggravated when I don't know what "Mac app X" is or how to code in "Programming Lang. Y", but when the entirety of thumbnails of results of any given search consists of a crowd of soulless faces jabbering about nonsense it gets grating. Yeah, it's great that your 14 year old is a computer expert, but that doesn't mean I want to watch his stupid ass on Youtube talking about games and movies. Now that isn't to say I don't like people reviewing things, hearing feedback from others is great sometimes, especially when you have sites like Gamepro being paid for their views on things. But I want to READ these reviews. This works two-fold: 1) I don't have to sit through 10 minutes of truly unintelligent tard-speak & wade through several of these videos to get to one with rhetoric of that above a fur-covered cyst and 2) If someone is intelligent enough to write something cohesively and I'm reading it, I know in about 2 seconds whether or not I'm wasting my time via red flags like "wut", "r" & "roflcopter".

If I'm reading an article on history or architecture or medical heuristics I can be kinda sure if someone has enough knowledge subjects like these and also bothered to write an article, that I'm not really wasting my time reading it. Conversely, entertainment is pretty much universally accessible, and opinions are like assholes - everyone has one. Therefore, pretty much anyone that can turn on a computer can "review" things now. And it certainly seems to be that way.