Forum - View topicINTEREST: Break-Up Goes South After Girlfriend Steals Over US$800 of Anime DVDs
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MarshalBanana
Posts: 5484 |
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if anyone is wondering about the thumbnail, it is from Jigen's Gravestone.
Last edited by MarshalBanana on Wed Nov 29, 2017 3:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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ihate4kids
Posts: 20 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAjAyel3-9M |
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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Lets get some perspective here. Silverware is precious, jewels are precious, first print editions of old books of rare/precious. Rare stamps are precious. Anime dvds ? Lol, it's like bitcoin. No intrinsic value whatsoever just speculation. Dvds in an era of Blu-rays for pete's sake. The story is so absurd as to be funny in a cynical sort of way. The interesting question is how much did she sell them for ? Did she find a gullible otaku that bought 1 dvd for 500 $ or she got 100$ for the whole set ? |
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belvadeer
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Haha. XD |
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DerekL1963
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Posts: 1119 Location: Puget Sound |
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Depending on your definition of intrinsic value... None of those things have any intrinsic value either. Maybe the gems (scarcity drives demand, but that's true of everything on your list), not really the silverware (the silver alloy is plated on and in an average set, there's only a couple of grams). And no matter what your definition of intrinsic value, the price of all those things are ultimately based on speculation. Rule of thumb - if it's not local currency and liquid, it's speculative. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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Exactly. The most amusing comparison is "first print editions of old books", the only difference between a first print of a DVD today and a a first print of say a copy of "Poor Richard's Almanac" from the 1750s is 250 years. The biggest questions for DVDs or any other media items are 1) Will people get to a point where they'll STOP thinking every consumable media item may one day be Action Comics #1, and 2) for things like DVDs/BDs, will we still have the means to PLAY them 100+ years from now? I mean, how hard would you need to look to find a drive that can read a floppy disk? And it's been less than 20 years since THAT was considered a viable format. |
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TsukasaElkKite
Posts: 4005 |
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Wow. I'd lose my damn mind if my ex stole my anime/manga collection (679 books and 154 DVDs collected over quite a few years YES I know I have a problem) and sold it.
That's a genius idea! |
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Primus
Posts: 2803 Location: Toronto |
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Buying physical media as an investment is probably a bad idea, because it's impossible to know what will get a re-release. Most people just want to enjoy the thing in question so they don't care if it's a first printing. Especially if the re-release is in a newer format/higher resolution. |
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Lady Multi
Posts: 675 |
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It would be considered Grand Larceny to take my collection... really there is just a small fragment that is considered rare and high valued in my collection but yeah..
I'd be really ticked off if someone even said they were borrowing one of mine. I'm kinda obsessive and very OCD about my collection.... They're all in pretty much Like New or New condition (except for the ones by which the DVD cases were already broken when I bought them)... and my Paprika DVD which came from a closing rental store. ...I mean heck I had to movie my .hack//sign box onto a high shelf because of my cat cause I didn't want any marks on it. The fact that he had unopened stuff that was opened; I feel the upset. I'd be really angry if someone decided to just open up one of my still sealed items. I know some people may see it as silly to collect games, cards, movies, anime, or books... but realize that its not just the one person you think that's weird that is doing it. It's a group of collectors and they have a value to those collectors that is different than market value. ...Such as Walmart's $5 NES game morphed into a $60 collector's item. |
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Lady Multi
Posts: 675 |
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You can still buy drives to read floppy disks... well the 3.5 floppy disks anyway; the drive costs like $20-$30 on Newegg and other sites.. the 5.25 disks due to their discontinuance never had a USB and they would have decapitated with age so data corruption is highly likely on any that remain. However, people refurbish the the 5.25 drives for refurbishment of older devices so even those have values to those particular collectors of technology. |
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DerekL1963
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Posts: 1119 Location: Puget Sound |
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And what most people don't realize, not having been in the used and rare book trade (as I have), is that "first edition" and "old" don't automatically equate to "valuable" - scarcity and demand play a role too. A copy of "Poor Richard" is in demand because of it's association with Benjamin Franklin. A copy of "Poor Randomguy" wouldn't fetch even as much as few percent of what "Poor Richard" would sell for. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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It was always something I had wondered about: In Japan, anime DVDs and Blu-Rays are rather expensive, in limited quantities, and are physically small. That means they must be easy targets, and thus frequent targets, for thieves. When they're sold in stores, are they typically behind a secure case so shoplifters and burglars don't just come in and take them?
I have lived and worked in places where shoplifting is rampant, so it was always weird to me that collectors would openly boast about them and display them where everyone can see them. I mean, part of the pride of a collector is to have other people know about your stuff, but you have to have some means of security if they are actually physically valuable.
Or even just selfish people with little to no conscience. I've had my stuff stolen from at least one family member who has no inhibitions about taking other people's things. People ask me why I have a lock to my door that I actually use whenever I'm not at home, and sometimes when I am. That family member is the reason why.
My impression is that, since she is desperate for money, she may have hooked up with him for the sole purpose of stealing his unwrapped discs to sell them.
I don't know about anime on home video, but I've collected various other things before, with very little in common with each other. But a pattern I found, regardless of what it is, is that very few things actually rise in value, with most of the others either slowly decreasing or rapidly decreasing. What drives the prices of old, out-of-production things up is not scarcity as much as it is demand. For something to rise in value with time, there has to be at least a few people who really want it and will buy it for a hefty amount of money. Though I wouldn't doubt at least one of the ones she stole would've wound up like this, I don't believe for a second that all of them would. Rather, the point of a collection is to have the items. They are of great sentimental value. (Another pattern I've noticed is that most collectors look down on those who collect for the purpose of investing. They don't mind if you don't use the items you collect, but if you do it to sell them later at a higher price, you're never going to hear the end of it from collectors who collect because they like to have those things.)
Indeed. I'd like to point out a few items among things I have collected myself that serve as examples: Disney Pins - There is a strong collectors market for these. There is a correlation between the age of the pin and its price, but it is a slow correlation and definitely not one-to-one. Rather, for a few years, the Disney Pins that stood out the most in value were not the oldest ones, but the ones pertaining to Wreck-It Ralph. The movie wound up being more popular than Disney anticipated, so relatively few pins were made. I have the Vanellope "School ID" pin that I got for $14 that, a year later, shot up to $85 to $90 on eBay and Amazon, because Disney made so few of them. Pokémon Cards - I think everyone who reads this knows about Base Set Charizard, with that 100-damage Fire Spin attack. This is the card with the highest quantity printed because they KNEW lots of people would want it, and they keep reprinting it. The reprints don't sell for as much but are still worth more than any other card the set comes in. The thing is...the people who PLAY the game don't even want it! Initially, it was because Charizard was predictable and had huge drawbacks, and later, it stopped being tournament legal. The value for this is driven solely by collectors who are drawn toward the big numbers on the card, which is why Chansey, Wailord, Lugia, etc. achieve high prices: They also have high numbers. Pinball Machines - If you don't know much about pinball machines, The Addams Family is probably the first and only one you can recall. In fact, this was the pinball machine with the highest production run, and due to Bally's machines being built for lastability, about two-thirds of them are still playable. (This means that, to this day, Addams is one of the most abundant pinball machines and one of the easiest to find if you want to buy one.) This thing averages about US$7,500 in the used market, which is three times the price when new and is consistently in the top 10 most valuable pinball machines of all time, because people outside of pinball communities who want a machine in their homes will typically turn to Addams first. By contrast, you have machines from the electromechanical era, long before Addams, most of which cannot sell for even one-tenth the price of an Addams despite there being far fewer working specimens, because few people really want them. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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Wow, really? I hadn't gone looking for them recently I figured they were more like LD players. (which, I don't know maybe they are, maybe you can still buy those on enthusiast sites) It's kind of funny to think that they were the STANDARD not that long ago and now you can fit like 1000s of them on a memory card the size of your finger nail.
I'm not saying this as "yay Japan" or even "there is NO crime in Japan", but it really is MUCH more rare then here. You can quite literally leave possessions laying out in public for a while and most of the time come back and find it where you left it. I've been to numerous stores in Akihabara and Ikebukuro where you COULD just take various anime toys and thrust them in your pockets in a crowded aisle and probably not be noticed (not sure if they actually have good camera coverage). As for how accessible most disks are? You can grab them just like you would at a store like Barnes & Noble or Target here. |
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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So the girl stole the Garden of Sinners set? that's not that much! |
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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You made my point. A book printed in 1700 is still readable today, a floppy disk made 20 years ago ? Not so much. Our dvd collections might outlive us if you can rip them to a hard drive. But that runs afoul of the DMCA so... You can bet that in 2100 you will not be able to find a dvd player to save your life. Digital technology is INHERENTLY a time-bomb in way physical objects are not (under normal circumstances). I've never understood people that buy dvd/blu-rays and keep them unopened. |
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