One of the largest regrets I have is getting rid of all my Apple ][e stuff. I kept it for years in attics as I moved from house to house. I had a couple of ][e's, disk drives, ImageWriter printer, Apple monitors, and so many original software titles including manuals and boxes. (Of course I had 2-3 large boxes of copies too).
About 5 years ago I was moving house and just got rid of everything because I was tired of moving it. I started regretting it 6 months later and even more today.
The problem is that the stuff probably isn't worth much--and it probably isn't worth much to you either if it's gathering dust in the attic. I keep a few old game boxes in my office bookcase. I have a few old computers up in the attic. (An Osborne someone gave me and a couple old DG/Ones. Also a huge pile of laserdiscs and player.) Probably someone would love to take off my hands and might even pay a few dollars. But there's a very real limit to how much effort I'm going to put into finding that person locally.
The "huge pile" can actually make it easier - lay the laserdiscs out on the floor, take a picture, sell the whole thing as a lot on eBay. Sure there might be some rare ones or something, but if there is that's just all the more likely to help it sell.
I've heard some of the authors of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) project say that the main goal of the software is to preserve the old hardware in code form; the ability to play games on it is just a nice side effect. I used to think that this was just a way of sidestepping piracy debates, but having been around the block a time or two now, I see some merit to it. But I suspect they still play games on it ;)
That would be “Apple //e”. They stopped the brackets after the Apple ][+ was discontinued.
Ok, yes, I’m still jealous that everybody else had a //e. I also had the early Amiga 2000 with the bad ROM revision, the base model NextStation, and I don’t even want to talk about my non-turbo Porsche 944.
Sigh. My school's computer lab had a pile of dust covered Apple ]['s sitting in the corner, circa 2005. I don't believe they'd been plugged in since having been moved into the new building ~1999. Myself and a friend offered to take them off the school's hands and free up the space, but were denied for <red tape bullshit>.
With reference to another post somewhere: I got rid of a $$$ guitar because 'i can only play one at a time', and i kept the one i enjoyed (<$300) playing more.
Dont regret a thing and i dont see any lost $$. Quite the opposite. Good riddance to something i wasn't using?
Did i lose out?
Nope. Not to me....i could have dropped it the next day, or could've got stolen..
I'm very happy to consider anything i own as $0 value, despite what i paid for it.
My childhood //e, duodisk, epson clone printer and monitor are sitting in my parents garage. dusty, so the drives are probably shot now.
They tossed the floppies about 5 years back, and that’s probably what I would have wanted to save. Custom lode runner levels. That ultimate Iv saved game. The disks and disks of AppleWorks docs.
I sometimes have similar regrets, but remind myself that I can do far better things without the baggage of that old stuff. After all, what I truly miss is the spirit of the era rather than the physical artifacts. Much of that can be recreated by other means: emulation for the software, and electronics for the hardware.
I'm more of the Marie Kondo style but couldn't get rid of the computers of my childhood: Atari 600 XL, Commodore 128, Amiga 500, Ti 99/4a (although that one I bought only a few years ago). My most prized possession is a very rare 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Amiga (which was supposed to have 3"1/2 floppies): not the official Commodore 5"1/4 floppy disk reader (also a rarity) but a bootleg one.
I've got two big boxes and when I move to another country, these come with me. We've already done three countries together. The Atari 600 XL and the Commodore 128 were still working during the first lockdown (I was stuck at home and took the time to test them).
Once in a rare while I boot the non-modded, time capsule, C128 of my teenage years and launch the game Commando just to hear the song on the SID chip.
TI made so many 4a's (and firesaled them) that they aren't really collectables. They are cheap cheap cheap on ebay. maybe one day they'll be worth something, but I have my doubts. there are probably many that are just sitting around unopened still in their original boxes because people bought them for what they thought was cheap as "might as well get one as a backup".
but yes, I'm found of it as it was my first computer and grew up on munch-man and parsec (amongst other things)
Everything old is cool and expensive again. This is why I hate throwing stuff out. I hate how society denigrates hoarders. They [the hoarders] were right.
Most of it isn't actually that expensive. The examples in the article are extremely rare or perfectly mint copies of very old games. A rare unopened copy of SMB sold for 1.5 million but that doesn't mean a loose Mario bros/duck hunt cartridge with scuffed label is worth more than $5.
Same for some of the old computers i have in my attic, they are worth something but still sub $100, barely worth the effort of going through the trouble of listing and shipping them. Never mind storing them for decades.
One Charles de Fleury catalogued pieces of the true cross in the 1800s and found them to sum to 2% of a plausibly sized cross, not the oft-repeated claim that they add up to a large ship, or a nice house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross#Dispersal_of_relics paragraph 6. While perhaps biased, it does seem plausible that a cataloguing of such claimed relics today would add up to a similar total volume.
I suspect the saying comes from a time more in the past when many many false relics would abound. Once the fervor around them died off, any ones deemed fake would disappear from circulation and the total amount would dwindle.
Since the fragments were said to come from a single piece of wood in Constantinople (see the article linked above), it is not that surprising that their sum would be reasonable. Clearer-cut and a little more entertaining are the thirty or more "holy nails:"
The famous John Calvin quote about relics comes from 1543, and many of the other quotes come from before 1000, while that catalogue is from the 1870.
In between comes the Protestant Reformation, more than a century of religious wars across all of Europe where one side in many cases actively sought to destroy relics and the gradual conversion to Islam of many densely populated Christian areas.
A catalogue from the 1870 is next to worthless for telling us how many relics existed in the early 1500s.
But everyone knows, that the number of relics increases over time. For each one lost, two new ones appear. So if we had 2% of the true cross in 1870, perhaps we had only 1% in 1543. Someone needs to update the catalogue. When we see how much we have today, we can estimate, when the cross crosses 100%. In the year 3451? (The Hobbes theory.)
The claim that you could build a house out of the fragments comes from the 1500s, so that's the number that matters if you're checking the veracity of that claim.
There are far less now that Protestants spent a century destroying purported fragments.
> “And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Christopher Buckley (of Thank You For Smoking fame) did a funny book recently called The Relic Hunter that satirizes this situation in a Middle Ages context.
Same goes for vinyl. I love techno music from the 90th. It seems that there is an abundance of vinyl that magically survived 20 years of niche existence.
Especially records from the legendary Harthouse label, seems to be ubiquitously available. Harthouse was famous for its limited edition policy and restricted selling of its records. They were very selective and that's how the famous "sound of Frankfurt" was born: access to Harthouse records was limited, and distribution took mainly place here in Frankfurt. It was tough back then to buy certain records even in the famous Delirium store.
Nowadays you simply place an order in the Internets...
I'd say there's some wiggle room there - I own lots of guitars, the most expensive of which would retail for about $5k today (I paid maybe half that when I got it ~15 years ago).
Once you get past a certain price, you're paying more for different (e.g. custom build) rather than better.
I'm a weirdo in that I generally like modern (even ultramodern, I own a Strandberg) - guitars for playability - thinner necks, comfort contours, that sort of thing, but vintage for tone...so I have a couple I've commissioned that try to combine the best of both worlds.
They both look like weird, but both have vintage roots...
The one on the left is heavily inspired by vintage Gibsons in the ways that mattger... neck and body are korina, the top (very not vintage) is flamed Hawaiian Koa.
The one on the right is basically my take on a Fender Strat... but headless (better weight distribution, and allows for the..) and with an excellent modern tremolo bridge.
It is astounding how good of a guitar you can get for a few hundred dollars these days.
My Yamaha FG800 cost $200 and is probably 70-80% as good as my Martin that cost $1300.
There is even less of a difference between cheap and expensive electric guitars. Especially if you learn to do a good setup yourself and replace the pickups.
It's not just about sound but also the way it feels in your hands when you play it. I had a ~$400 Squire Stratocaster as my main guitar that sounds great and is nearly indistinguishable from a Fender, but I had a hard time playing it for more than an hour at a time since it was hard on my hands (because of the quality of wood of the neck and fretboard, and I had trouble keeping the neck action where I want it).
Then I saved up and got an American Fender Jazzmaster that's a recreation of one of the 60s models (cost around $2k used), and I can easily play that for 3-4 hours at a time without straining my hands. Everything just feels nicer in your hands because of the wood quality and you play better since it's more ergonomical.
I agree that you probably can't hear the difference between a Squire and a Fender unless you are really familiar with how guitars and the pickup electronics work and have really good musical hearing, however I'd say in general the cutoff for a good sounding guitar (that's almost indistinguishable from something in the $750 to $2k range) is around $400. Anything less than that and the quality of materials and wiring will probably be bad enough to be noticeable, or things will wear out sooner rather than later (and poor ergonomics can keep you from playing at your full potential).
There are exceptions to that though, I have a cheapo Washburn fretless bass that plays and sounds great, and I think I got it used for around $100.
Then above the low 4 figures you're getting diminishing returns and/or just getting a collectible instead of something you intend to actually make music with.
My favorite story along those lines was when I got paid $300 to own an exotic bass for a decade.
The bass in question: An Alembic 6 string fretless. Original retail price in 1991: $6800 ($14.4k inflation adjusted).
My local small town music store took it in on trade...tagged it at around $2500 or so... it proceeded to sit on the wall for the next 3 or 4 years. Owner of the store was a quirky older dude who doesn't do internet sales at all.
So, finally, I catch the owner in a good mood one day and say look - I'm the only guy with weird enough tastes in this town to ever buy that...but I can't afford it at that price. I'll give $1000 in cash, today.
...and he took it.
That was, if memory serves, about 2003.
Had a bit of cash crunch when I was laid off for about 6 months circa 2012 or so, and put up a few of my instruments at a high end consignment shop (but in a big city, with an actual instrument market). Even aftger their cut I ended up with about $1,350.
I think anyone with passing experience playing can tell the difference between a $200 and $700 guitar even with a professional set up.
A $200 strat will never be in tune, the tuning pegs will all have weird amounts of varying resistance, the bridge might rattle, you probably need a fret leveling right out of the box unless you're ok with either a crazy high action or nasty fret buzz, and so on. Oh and it sounds pretty terrible relative to something with decent pups in a decent amp.
Personally the sweet spot of cheap guitars is more like $500 with inflation these days. The expensive stuff from China and cheap stuff from Korea is great. Those are giggable, serviceable guitars. In the $1k range for cheap American, expensive Korean, or Mexican or Japanese guitars you're paying for quality control. One model will play and sound like the others.
My first acoustic guitar (2007) was a Yamaha, FG800 I think. $200. Had absolutely no problems with it, but I gave it to my brother and then purchased a PRS SE Angelus A10E that was about $600. To be honest, there was no difference at all in quality or tone. I really only got it for the electric pickups & aesthetic (who doesn't love those bird inlays?!).
It's also crazy how disparate the values of older guitars are as well. I inherited a pristine 1975 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe Blue Sparkle; one of 250 made. Despite its rarity, it's not a super high demand guitar, so it barely clears 4-5 figures.
Allow me to understand. The packaging is identical to the originals, the CDs are identical, the games on those CDs are identical, but the product is considered a forgery?
Why do vintage PC game collectors care whether the product in their hand was manufactured in 1995 by the original company or in 2021 by someone in their garage?
Is the goal to play the game or to acquire bragging rights about an old object just because it's an original copy?
Because that's the point of collecting. You do not purchase the material, but the history of the item. I say this as a book collector of first edition (among other stuff): I understand second printing may be identical to the first printing (or even better in some quality aspects), but the thrill of buying something that has history is what makes interesting.
Is there some specific date where you would allow for collectors to value an object? A 40 year old book? A 50 year old car? A Magic the Gathering card from 31 years ago? An arcade console from 35? I’m curious what the calculus is here because it seems quite specific.
It's quite subjective. It comes down to how popular culture romanticizes a thing. Popular culture has romanticized 50 year old cars, or old books, but it hasn't romanticized 35 year old gaming consoles. Why that is, I couldn't say.
It has though, clearly. That people are buying them and this article exists is the most obvious evidence, but there’s a whole retrograming subculture out there who collects and plays with this stuff. Ready Player One was a recent retrogaming pop culture phenomenon. Try searching for a 35 year old console on eBay and be amazed at what you find.
In many ways it's exactly the same. They're both art, both created by the original "artist."
But it's normal for most people to think collectors of certain items are silly. I used to collect books, and most people think it's utterly stupid to obtain books and only read copies of them rather than the original (opening a binding causes it to deteriorate a little bit).
To be fair, that's about all you can do with a painting: hanging it on a wall and keeping it clean. A better way for me to read your comment is: "No one made the decision to throw them out with the garbage."
Your walls are compatible with 30 y.o. paintings, along with a century old, five centuries old or even a prehistoric ones (if you manage to find such).
99% of 20 y.o. games aren't compatible with anything newer than a 2010's hardware and for 30 year old games you can't even copy/try to run them on anything modern - floppies died ~2010.
20 y.o. video games are roughly equivalent of Late modern period art.
30 y.o. video games are somewhere between the classical antiquity and the Middle ages.
I have a book in one of my bookshelves that was printed in 1906. It's in awful shape but readable. I just wanted the first English printing of the book, because newer prints are abridged. That's over a century old, and it's just a book!
You do not purchase the material, but the history of the item.
I don't really buy that for functional objects. I've restored old Teletype machines, some almost a century old, and provenance is not a big issue.
In fact, because of the way they were maintained, many are not an original set. There are four main components of a Model 15, keyboard, typing unit, base, and motor. All are field-replaceable, and the first two are easily swappable without tools. Maintenance was often a swap, not field repair. The units went back to a repair depot, were repaired, cleaned, and oiled, and then went to another rental customer. Retired machines rarely have the original subunit combo, and nobody cares.
Also yes, in the case of collecting, the point is "acquire bragging rights about an old object just because it's an original copy"
If you wanted to just play it you'd just play it in an emulator.
I will point out that the history of video games is not that old in itself, meaning a several decade old game is falling into the "one of the first games made" vintage tier.
Yeah, the case of "this is something we knew existed but didn't have a copy of" makes a lot more sense than "I want to be one of 20 people who own a copy of this thing". Even the collectors openly admit to actually playing the games via emulators.
There are as many goals in collecting as there are collectors. Many collectors do not want to use their items as some of the items are pushing 40 years old and will not last forever. Every disc read and manual flip subtracts from their life. This may all sound silly, but compare this to Silent Era films. 75% of films from that time period are gone, forever [0]. We are still in the beginnings of the medium of games and we could fall prey to the same mistakes as previous mediums. Some section of the medium must get locked down so that future historians can study them in as much detail as possible.
One advantage we have is the rapid increase in digital storage space means that many of these will not be lost if we can get them imaged, many people can each have a copy of almost every known NES game in only a few hundred megabytes.
What will be lost are the manuals, boxes, cloth maps. little post card inserts for some random warranty or club, and most importantly, the physical feel of all these things. That is the primary thing collectors want to preserve.
I like buying used (not collectible) books, and once in a while I find artifacts used as bookmarks - a store receipt, an airline boarding pass, a newspaper clipping. These objects are fascinating to me; I'm briefly transported into the world of the person who originally bought the book and how different it seems from that of today. The details of the 'bonus item' are like clues to the identity of the mysterious reader that preceded me, whose identity and trajectory are as entertaining to speculate about as as the fictional or theoretical subject matter of the book itself.
Over time, everything becomes an antique; competitive collecting (for well-defined subsets of items in a niche market) is arguably a way for people of similar temperaments and taste to locate each other socially, but the more effort they invest in this (by developing catalogues or price histories of their favored artifacts) the more likely they are to be crowded out speculators who recognize the hallmarks of an asset class without especially caring what they are attached to.
IANA game collector so take my comment with a grain of salt, but no the goal is usually not to play the game. Playing the game could damage/harm the original media. Many times the original shrink wrap hasn't even been removed.
There are definitely some collectors who do play the games so this is not a universal statement.
If it's exceptionally rare, the collector will often work to make an image of the data (which is how the rare one discussed was found, the image revealed a pirate copy).
Well, that's just it though. The packaging, storage medium, art and documents that come with these games are not identical, and in a couple examples given the game data is either corrupted, or of a pirated and modified version of the game.
To draw an analogy, if I was a collector of vinyl records and I purchased a first edition album that actually turned out to be a poorly reproduced print made from modern MP3 files, with a label that was printed by some dude's inkjet printer at home, I would be furious.
I really wonder how many of these one can make and sell and is it really worth all the effort to go thorough the whole thing? At least from time and resources spend.
Probably, still seems like quite a bit of work to get even this level.
The fact that all of these are in pristine condition should have been a black flag earlier. The whole commercial grading system is a joke but if only a handful of copies exist at all then it's extremely surprising that all of them are mint or near mint in condition after more than 30 years.
I don't understand I don't understand paying a premium for a rare or old item that is easily replicated. The same goes for art forgeries. Why not buy a reproduction? There is no difference in the functional value of the item before and after this revelation. I assume these games are available for emulation. I'm sick of people bsing and scamming each other by turning fun things into investment vehicles.
Not only is there no functional advantage to buying the real thing, there is no easy way to prove for certain that you have the real thing, so even speculation is difficult.
One thing I find interesting about NFT collections is that the only reason it gets detractors attention is because it works …. so well? Like, we have no idea how much the baseball card issuing organization made, especially not in real time. We have no idea the total supply, or revenue or trading volume. In NFTs we have that instantly.
I think the NFT space just provides transparency into the size of the existing collectibles market.
Even the proxies we have for digital gaming stuff is just buried deep in quarterly reports of a few publicly traded companies.
Most of the facepalm worthy NFT headlines would be non-news if we even had the ability to compare it to the pre-existing collections market.
> I could have all bored ape pictures and could reproduce them infinitely. What now? How does the NFT thingy stop me from doing that?
As the grandparent poster alluded to, the history is more important than the image - the same as the fine art and collections world, but technologically enforced in the NFT world. so the transaction hash from the collection contract is more important than the image it accesses, and is way more important than your indefinite reproductions because they won't be in the collection contract. An entry in the bored ape collection contract grants you access to a variety of goods and services. The "NFT thingy" doesn't try to stop you from defrauding undiscerning onlookers or consumers that don't look at the collection contract. The "NFT thingy" prevents you from having programmatic access to gated communities.
> Actually, one can't even "verify" a NFT if the market side goes down. Because the actual DB isn't on the blockchain…
What are you referring to? Did you mean the market site? You don't need OpenSea or any site to verify current possession, prior possession, or metadata. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on their own servers, which can go down. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on more resilient services like IPFS. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on the blockchain directly. All three styles use the blockchain directly for current possession and prior possession.
Which point did you think you were making? I only wrote all that because I didn't know what you were saying specifically.
Many of last year's NFT collections are for social clubs, where proving current possession grants you access.
(if you made it this far in this thread, I should reiterate that NFTs and NFT collections have many differences. A lot of people that spend more energy not using NFT's have not noticed)
These social clubs can have a physical real world component such as conferences and events. Some fast executing NFT project creators have been able to pull the logistics off quickly, thinking of Bored Ape Yacht Club (now with a large $450m investment led by Andreesen Horowitz' a16z), and Veefriends
Many more of these social clubs are online only, including access to online worlds that are currently being called Metaverses (or usually "the metaverse", pretending others do not exist), many are for benefits conveyed in games.
But even more commonly, the interoperability is leveraged and third parties offer access to their own assets and NFT collections by granting access to people that currently possess another NFT collection. Some of these things can be very valuable. Other times, these are "airdropped" directly to the holder of a valuable NFT.
As this is programmatic, It is impossible for any of these things to ever factor in a duplicate, or for the duplicate to accrue the same value and demand (unless someone successfully built a community around the duplicate themselves)
I apologize for my terseness. The private cryptographic key, which is only known to the owner, can be used to sign transactions and such, but it is never directly shared out. Thus, cryptography prevents the retrieval of the key from the outputs.
NFTs are like collecting beanie babies. When you designate something as a collectible at the start, you’re kind of jumping the gun on that whole “value of history” idea. Some of the most cherished collectibles are the things that nobody thought would be worth anything when they originated.
But the object is the story. All the stories are about creating and playing those objects. It's hardly irrational to want to own one if you're excited about the subject matter.
for me, the value is in staring at it, running your hands over it, knowing that decades ago, perhaps hundreds of years ago, this specific object was being seen and felt by another person, just like you
a relic in the right hands is both a time machine, and a constant reminder, via all our senses, of our fleeting existence, and of what we can do in that brief time, and what we can leave behind
it's also why I like old-growth forests, which don't really require purchase
buying something mass-produced last month doesn't give the same sort of visceral, emotional connection
What if you could perfectly replicate a loved one. Would you consider the replica equivalent to the original person? At least to me, there is something special and important in knowing that the original person was a part of my personal history. It’s not about how they look or act, but it’s our common context that’s important.
Part of what makes loved ones special is that they’re unique. We give people names because they’re unique. We don’t name things like bananas because they’re fungible. Perhaps if you had the only one copy of a loved one, you could love that person as much as the original, but if loved ones could be copied arbitrarily, I think something would be lost.
But that goes even deeper into a bit of the weird aspect of collecting. If I have my original 386 laying around, that is mine and is the one I used; if I get another one, even if it is the same make and model, it wasn't mine and so it's basically just a copy.
Part of it, of course, can be the "I couldn't get this when I was young, now I can" which drives up a lot of prices on old Lego sets, but there's more to it than just that, especially when collectors start buying items because they're rare, not because they once had them or wanted them.
Every time your loved one respirates, ingests food, and defecates, a portion of their body is replaced. The material person you know now may be completely different from the person you fell in love with.
The Ship of Theseus is not a parable. It doesn't have a lesson you're supposed to take away from it. There are different of ways of looking at the problem. The "solution" that appeals to you is probably a reflection of how you think, but there isn't one "right" answer.
For example, one answer is to look at the ship as a 4-dimensional object (the three spatial dimensions + time). Yes, the material in the 3D slice at t0 is different than at tN, but you're still looking at slices of the same object.
I've wondered about the subjective experience of "being alive" and whether - if I clone myself and the original me perished - I would continue to experience life. Reading the word "observer" makes me I guess I would, the clone has all my life's experiences and memories, and he'd just observe the memories, thoughts and feelings, and it'd be identical to my memories, thoughts and feelings.
If they were indeed a perfect replica that fact wouldn't matter. They wouldn't know if they were a replica, you wouldn't, and only a 3rd party could ever tell you they weren't the person you love. At that point learning whether or not this person standing in front of you is a replica can only harm either party. Would you really subject yourselves to that information if it could only hurt someone you objectively love? It's not a light choice to be considered selfishly in a vacuum, because even if they are a replica they're still perfect and a person you genuinely do love. Why on earth would you want to learn something that would make you not love them, that would alienate them from their entire sense of self? Even if is the truth, nobody stands to gain from the information. So long as neither of you can tell the difference, the truth doesn't doesn't matter. Pretty sure this exact subject comes up in like 2 or 3 episodes of Rick and Morty.
And that's the reason I think copyright should be about 10 years. People value "authenticity" even when it doesn't make sense. There's just something about having the "original" or the "true" one. With that in mind, I think that writers would still be able to sell their books and sequels even after other writers get access to their characters and worlds. It's almost like fanfiction vs actual author. Anyone could write The Winds of Winter. Someone somewhere probably has. But if they were able to release it alongside G.R.R. Martin, I know who I'd bet on having more sales.
I'd prefer if someone who knew how to finish story without killing off the protagonist wrote this novel he's never going to write. It worked ONCE, one time. When Ned Stark was executed it was genuinely surprising and that first book was good enough to inspire many to finish the whole saga. By the end second novel I got the impression he was just trying to recycle the same story, peppering-in bits he picked up from writing workshops. Trying desperately to make new characters people might care about after killing-off anyone interesting. He has no idea how to finish a story other than an abrupt death. Woah, but wait but now Caitlin's a zombie or some shit... Yeah, no. Last you'll ever hear of that.
I didn't realize what was going on until I went to an open mic comedy night. There was a shocking number of comedians who could draw you into a joke with a compelling hook, but only precious who could follow up with a real joke. The thought occurred to me, "This is Martin. A comedian who can't figure out how a joke works." He wrote 1 good book but never grew as an author. Now he's rich and old and I don't blame him if couldn't be bothered to give a shit. Oy, what am I even talking about now? Eh, I think a spiritual successor could take GoT a lot further than he ever will.
How could someone read 1,2, or more books of GoT -- one of the greatest literary works of realism in character and worldbuilding -- and presumably enjoy them, and think that a tidy, satisfying ending is something possible, or even desirable.
>I don't understand I don't understand paying a premium for a rare or old item that is easily replicated.
I once worked at the library of a university. Part of my job was to check the catalogue against the actual bookshelves to make sure the books are physically present.
So I got to social science section. In particular the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.
Now this is an national university with >170 years of history. The spreadsheet in my hand showed that there should be 9 copies of the 1908 edition on the shelf.
I found none.
Every copy has been stolen. The irony of this is just too much. Communism supporters stealing from the general public to satisfy their personal desire of collection.
Aside. A regret I have was not checking out 'The Hitler Youth' at the same time. Although I suspect the university might have removed them from the shelves.
I tend to stay away from anything that's marketed as (Rare|Vintage|Antique|Original). It means there's a price premium, above and beyond functionality and use value, which I'm by default unwilling to pay (e.g. musical instruments, cameras, etc - when I pick up a new hobby, I tend to go through a fairly large number of things through Kijiji to try them out and get a feel, until I settle on something that works for me long term:)
That being said, I understand in principle that there's an extra emotion & joy to be had with something possessing one of those attributes. Perhaps I'd enjoy a book signed by Arthur C. Clarke or guitar used by Mark Knopfler - though I'd make a point to read/play them rather than hide and never touch. On any given day, I have higher priorities for my money. Others with more money or different priorities, however, will make different choices.
(This simplistic framework is complicated by the notion of "Value" of course; some people believe, or tell themselves, that this is an "Investment"; like many things, this then becomes a abstract tower built on mutual belief, and people become invested [har] in believing ever so strongly. This can lead to interesting conversations unless & until you realize you have different axiomatic principles / beliefs / value perception).
A bit of a tangent… but we are rather dumb animals. If you watch an animal like a Bowerbird, that expends oodles of energy to stack petals in color-coordinated piles to attract a mate, and really think hard about all the stupid stuff we do, and what the underlying impulses are that cause us to act as we do, for the most part we are not much farther ahead of a Bowerbird intellectually. We just have flowery language to express our experiences.
Collecting antique crap falls in to that type of category, I think, no matter how much people try to gussy-up the behavior.
Edit, to add: there seems to be something more attractive about truly old things vs copies, just like certain petals are more enchanting to a Bower Bird. Why this is such a strong impulse I have no idea.
Someone who simply wants to read an old book, play an old game, etc, may be satisfied by a replica.
Historical artifacts are not valued for their functionality. It is for the associated historical relevance. Many have more value even when their current functionality is worse than a replica.
Dick goes into this in some detail in "The Man in the High Castle". I don't think he understands it either but he gives clear examples of the behavior:
> 'All afternoon assorted officials examined the alternatives,' Mr. Tagomi said. 'This is most
authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day.'
> Mr. Baynes opened the box. In it lay a Mickey Mouse wristwatch on a pad of black velvet.
> Was Mr. Tagomi playing a joke on him? He raised his eyes, saw Mr. Tagomi's tense, concerned
face. No, it was not a joke. 'Thank you very much,' Baynes said. 'This is indeed incredible.'
> 'Only few, perhaps ten, authentic 1938 Mickey Mouse watches in all world today,' Mr. Tagomi
said, studying him, drinking in his reaction, his appreciation. 'No collector known to me has one,
sir.'
Of course in his story something else is happening too:
> In fact, as far as he knew, it had never occurred to them to ask themselves if the so-called historic art objects for sale in West Coast shops were genuine. Perhaps someday they would . . . and then the bubble would burst, the market would collapse even for the authentic pieces. A Gresham's Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real. And that no doubt was the motive for the failure to investigate; after all, everyone was happy. The factories, here and there in the various cities, which turned out the-pieces, they made their profits. The wholesalers passed them on, and the dealers displayed and advertised them. The collectors shelled out their money and carried their purchases happily home, to impress their associates, friends, and mistresses.
Clearly they should have included an authenticity NFT printed on synthetic polymers that can survive heat and strong electrical fields with embedded NFC chips for multisig validation.
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize..?
I mean clearly in the movie he's one of the bad guys, but that doesn't mean he never makes any valid points. The whole "who cares if it's fake if it is indistinguishable from real" standpoint is perfectly reasonable. Killing several people to achieve it less so.
As somebody who has started collecting ultima box sets recently (pure nostalgia loved them as a kid) it's been mad to see how ultima 5 has gone from £50 when I bought it a few years ago to maybe even £250+ now. I was hoping I could got all of the ultimas but this makes me realise that 1 - 3 are probably out of reach (let alone akalabeth!)
There's not exactly a smoking gun but Ricciardi doesn't come out looking great.
With small insular communities like this, I wonder how often people end up making counterfeits they never intend to sell. Maybe you're having a dry streak or you've been swearing up and down you'll something, and you tell yourself there won't be any harm in making a fake and telling the guys you got it. Before the recent value explosion in the market there wouldn't be much value in it - but people like their hobbies and like to boast and it seems very normal.
There are lots of legitimate reasons to come out of this kind of experience feeling like you don't want to have anything to do with the scene - but also it could be that what was intended as a private forgery has gotten out of control.
Not sure I count as a “collector”. I own many hundreds of musical instruments, but the vast majority are meant to be played. But I never pay more for something than I think its “intrinsic“ worth to be precisely because this scenario. I wouldn’t pay much extra for a guitar that John Lennon had allegedly played, for example, because what if that turned out not to be true?
I have purchased duplicates of instruments for parts or preservation though.
Apropos musical instruments with a story: I've recently listened a lot to an album called "The Unfinished Violin" by the English folk musician Sam Sweeney. One of the rare good Spotify recommendations I've gotten in later years. Anyway, I wondered about the name, so I looked it up.
It turns out the violin he performs on was made by a young violin maker called Richard Howard, but never assembled by him: he was drafted for WW1, and died in 1917 at the battle of Messines.
I think that's the kind of history that matters, that adds a certain context to the music. To everyone in this thread saying the history of a thing doesn't matter: if something like that doesn't matter, what does?
Incredible story! Although I personally avoid most instruments with significant history because I’d be a poor steward. I just want to play and study them.
171 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 86.7 ms ] threadAbout 5 years ago I was moving house and just got rid of everything because I was tired of moving it. I started regretting it 6 months later and even more today.
Thats history.
Ok, yes, I’m still jealous that everybody else had a //e. I also had the early Amiga 2000 with the bad ROM revision, the base model NextStation, and I don’t even want to talk about my non-turbo Porsche 944.
They tossed the floppies about 5 years back, and that’s probably what I would have wanted to save. Custom lode runner levels. That ultimate Iv saved game. The disks and disks of AppleWorks docs.
While it still hurts and emulators are a different beast, it freed me. I filled the hole with doing modern stuff, like learning JavaScript back then.
While I regret getting rid of my beloved hardware, I never regret the decision to move forward.
I've got two big boxes and when I move to another country, these come with me. We've already done three countries together. The Atari 600 XL and the Commodore 128 were still working during the first lockdown (I was stuck at home and took the time to test them).
Once in a rare while I boot the non-modded, time capsule, C128 of my teenage years and launch the game Commando just to hear the song on the SID chip.
I take it they still bring me some joy!
but yes, I'm found of it as it was my first computer and grew up on munch-man and parsec (amongst other things)
In the guitar world it's a running joke that only 5000 of the the 1500 1959 Gibson Les Paul's survive.
($$$$, 6 digit prices for real ones is the rule, and top examples go for $500k+).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Nail
That said, I'd like to know the carbon date on those wooden fragments.
In between comes the Protestant Reformation, more than a century of religious wars across all of Europe where one side in many cases actively sought to destroy relics and the gradual conversion to Islam of many densely populated Christian areas.
A catalogue from the 1870 is next to worthless for telling us how many relics existed in the early 1500s.
I thought we were talking about how many are on display? What does the number of fragments that existed in the 1500s matter?
There are far less now that Protestants spent a century destroying purported fragments.
Frankly though, I consider authenticity overrated.
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting.” ― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Especially records from the legendary Harthouse label, seems to be ubiquitously available. Harthouse was famous for its limited edition policy and restricted selling of its records. They were very selective and that's how the famous "sound of Frankfurt" was born: access to Harthouse records was limited, and distribution took mainly place here in Frankfurt. It was tough back then to buy certain records even in the famous Delirium store.
Nowadays you simply place an order in the Internets...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPY9Mxg3OJQ
Long story short, go for the $700-$2k guitar unless you're an "art collector" that will never play it.
Then again, I doubt many people can tell the difference between a $200 guitar and a $700 one.
Once you get past a certain price, you're paying more for different (e.g. custom build) rather than better.
I'm a weirdo in that I generally like modern (even ultramodern, I own a Strandberg) - guitars for playability - thinner necks, comfort contours, that sort of thing, but vintage for tone...so I have a couple I've commissioned that try to combine the best of both worlds.
Here are two of mine: https://i.imgur.com/pVQiOfC.jpeg
They both look like weird, but both have vintage roots...
The one on the left is heavily inspired by vintage Gibsons in the ways that mattger... neck and body are korina, the top (very not vintage) is flamed Hawaiian Koa.
The one on the right is basically my take on a Fender Strat... but headless (better weight distribution, and allows for the..) and with an excellent modern tremolo bridge.
My Yamaha FG800 cost $200 and is probably 70-80% as good as my Martin that cost $1300.
There is even less of a difference between cheap and expensive electric guitars. Especially if you learn to do a good setup yourself and replace the pickups.
Just about every cheap electric I've ever seen has shitty pots, bad or no shielding, maybe even bad grounding.
Hum sucks.
Then I saved up and got an American Fender Jazzmaster that's a recreation of one of the 60s models (cost around $2k used), and I can easily play that for 3-4 hours at a time without straining my hands. Everything just feels nicer in your hands because of the wood quality and you play better since it's more ergonomical.
I agree that you probably can't hear the difference between a Squire and a Fender unless you are really familiar with how guitars and the pickup electronics work and have really good musical hearing, however I'd say in general the cutoff for a good sounding guitar (that's almost indistinguishable from something in the $750 to $2k range) is around $400. Anything less than that and the quality of materials and wiring will probably be bad enough to be noticeable, or things will wear out sooner rather than later (and poor ergonomics can keep you from playing at your full potential).
There are exceptions to that though, I have a cheapo Washburn fretless bass that plays and sounds great, and I think I got it used for around $100.
Then above the low 4 figures you're getting diminishing returns and/or just getting a collectible instead of something you intend to actually make music with.
My favorite story along those lines was when I got paid $300 to own an exotic bass for a decade.
The bass in question: An Alembic 6 string fretless. Original retail price in 1991: $6800 ($14.4k inflation adjusted).
My local small town music store took it in on trade...tagged it at around $2500 or so... it proceeded to sit on the wall for the next 3 or 4 years. Owner of the store was a quirky older dude who doesn't do internet sales at all.
So, finally, I catch the owner in a good mood one day and say look - I'm the only guy with weird enough tastes in this town to ever buy that...but I can't afford it at that price. I'll give $1000 in cash, today.
...and he took it.
That was, if memory serves, about 2003.
Had a bit of cash crunch when I was laid off for about 6 months circa 2012 or so, and put up a few of my instruments at a high end consignment shop (but in a big city, with an actual instrument market). Even aftger their cut I ended up with about $1,350.
A $200 strat will never be in tune, the tuning pegs will all have weird amounts of varying resistance, the bridge might rattle, you probably need a fret leveling right out of the box unless you're ok with either a crazy high action or nasty fret buzz, and so on. Oh and it sounds pretty terrible relative to something with decent pups in a decent amp.
Personally the sweet spot of cheap guitars is more like $500 with inflation these days. The expensive stuff from China and cheap stuff from Korea is great. Those are giggable, serviceable guitars. In the $1k range for cheap American, expensive Korean, or Mexican or Japanese guitars you're paying for quality control. One model will play and sound like the others.
Back in the day my old man parted ways with a 60s Tele - he doesn't appreciate being reminded about it
Why do vintage PC game collectors care whether the product in their hand was manufactured in 1995 by the original company or in 2021 by someone in their garage?
Is the goal to play the game or to acquire bragging rights about an old object just because it's an original copy?
It's just not the same.
To you.
But it's normal for most people to think collectors of certain items are silly. I used to collect books, and most people think it's utterly stupid to obtain books and only read copies of them rather than the original (opening a binding causes it to deteriorate a little bit).
Van Gogh died a pauper, not having sold a single work during his short life.
99% of 20 y.o. games aren't compatible with anything newer than a 2010's hardware and for 30 year old games you can't even copy/try to run them on anything modern - floppies died ~2010.
20 y.o. video games are roughly equivalent of Late modern period art.
30 y.o. video games are somewhere between the classical antiquity and the Middle ages.
40 y.o. are closer to Egyptian Pyramids.
I don't really buy that for functional objects. I've restored old Teletype machines, some almost a century old, and provenance is not a big issue. In fact, because of the way they were maintained, many are not an original set. There are four main components of a Model 15, keyboard, typing unit, base, and motor. All are field-replaceable, and the first two are easily swappable without tools. Maintenance was often a swap, not field repair. The units went back to a repair depot, were repaired, cleaned, and oiled, and then went to another rental customer. Retired machines rarely have the original subunit combo, and nobody cares.
The content on the disks are cracked copies that contain missing or modified data and are not the original game.
If you wanted to just play it you'd just play it in an emulator.
I will point out that the history of video games is not that old in itself, meaning a several decade old game is falling into the "one of the first games made" vintage tier.
Also, the packaging apparently wasn't identical. It was hand-cut at least some of the time and imperfect.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/12/most-ame...
I like buying used (not collectible) books, and once in a while I find artifacts used as bookmarks - a store receipt, an airline boarding pass, a newspaper clipping. These objects are fascinating to me; I'm briefly transported into the world of the person who originally bought the book and how different it seems from that of today. The details of the 'bonus item' are like clues to the identity of the mysterious reader that preceded me, whose identity and trajectory are as entertaining to speculate about as as the fictional or theoretical subject matter of the book itself.
Over time, everything becomes an antique; competitive collecting (for well-defined subsets of items in a niche market) is arguably a way for people of similar temperaments and taste to locate each other socially, but the more effort they invest in this (by developing catalogues or price histories of their favored artifacts) the more likely they are to be crowded out speculators who recognize the hallmarks of an asset class without especially caring what they are attached to.
No expiration date - I should try to use it!
There are definitely some collectors who do play the games so this is not a universal statement.
To draw an analogy, if I was a collector of vinyl records and I purchased a first edition album that actually turned out to be a poorly reproduced print made from modern MP3 files, with a label that was printed by some dude's inkjet printer at home, I would be furious.
Probably, still seems like quite a bit of work to get even this level.
Get super rare game for $10k, make as perfect a copy of it as you can, sell the copy for $10k, keep the original, even if privately.
But if you're doing that, you wouldn't need to make disks containing obvious fakes.
I don't understand I don't understand paying a premium for a rare or old item that is easily replicated. The same goes for art forgeries. Why not buy a reproduction? There is no difference in the functional value of the item before and after this revelation. I assume these games are available for emulation. I'm sick of people bsing and scamming each other by turning fun things into investment vehicles.
The value of history is the story, which doesn't need to be attached to the object.
I think the NFT space just provides transparency into the size of the existing collectibles market.
Even the proxies we have for digital gaming stuff is just buried deep in quarterly reports of a few publicly traded companies.
Most of the facepalm worthy NFT headlines would be non-news if we even had the ability to compare it to the pre-existing collections market.
Actually, one can't even "verify" a NFT if the market side goes down. Because the actual DB isn't on the blockchain…
As the grandparent poster alluded to, the history is more important than the image - the same as the fine art and collections world, but technologically enforced in the NFT world. so the transaction hash from the collection contract is more important than the image it accesses, and is way more important than your indefinite reproductions because they won't be in the collection contract. An entry in the bored ape collection contract grants you access to a variety of goods and services. The "NFT thingy" doesn't try to stop you from defrauding undiscerning onlookers or consumers that don't look at the collection contract. The "NFT thingy" prevents you from having programmatic access to gated communities.
> Actually, one can't even "verify" a NFT if the market side goes down. Because the actual DB isn't on the blockchain…
What are you referring to? Did you mean the market site? You don't need OpenSea or any site to verify current possession, prior possession, or metadata. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on their own servers, which can go down. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on more resilient services like IPFS. Some styles of NFT's store metadata on the blockchain directly. All three styles use the blockchain directly for current possession and prior possession.
Which point did you think you were making? I only wrote all that because I didn't know what you were saying specifically.
Which are?
(if you made it this far in this thread, I should reiterate that NFTs and NFT collections have many differences. A lot of people that spend more energy not using NFT's have not noticed)
These social clubs can have a physical real world component such as conferences and events. Some fast executing NFT project creators have been able to pull the logistics off quickly, thinking of Bored Ape Yacht Club (now with a large $450m investment led by Andreesen Horowitz' a16z), and Veefriends
Many more of these social clubs are online only, including access to online worlds that are currently being called Metaverses (or usually "the metaverse", pretending others do not exist), many are for benefits conveyed in games.
But even more commonly, the interoperability is leveraged and third parties offer access to their own assets and NFT collections by granting access to people that currently possess another NFT collection. Some of these things can be very valuable. Other times, these are "airdropped" directly to the holder of a valuable NFT.
As this is programmatic, It is impossible for any of these things to ever factor in a duplicate, or for the duplicate to accrue the same value and demand (unless someone successfully built a community around the duplicate themselves)
If the cryptographic key has actual value (like the ability to access goods and services) what prevents the owner from sharing or selling copies?
a relic in the right hands is both a time machine, and a constant reminder, via all our senses, of our fleeting existence, and of what we can do in that brief time, and what we can leave behind
it's also why I like old-growth forests, which don't really require purchase
buying something mass-produced last month doesn't give the same sort of visceral, emotional connection
Yes. How could you not?
My loved one died. If there was perfect replica of her somewhere ready to spin up how could I not consider her equivalent to original person?
https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Duplicator
Part of it, of course, can be the "I couldn't get this when I was young, now I can" which drives up a lot of prices on old Lego sets, but there's more to it than just that, especially when collectors start buying items because they're rare, not because they once had them or wanted them.
Every time your loved one respirates, ingests food, and defecates, a portion of their body is replaced. The material person you know now may be completely different from the person you fell in love with.
For example, one answer is to look at the ship as a 4-dimensional object (the three spatial dimensions + time). Yes, the material in the 3D slice at t0 is different than at tN, but you're still looking at slices of the same object.
Everyone would do this unless you believed in the intrinsic nature of soul
Humans are the sum of their lived experiences and epigenetics, so if you could replicate both, to you as an observer what would be the difference?
That's why Amazon.com counterfeits are bad.
But this risk doesn't really apply to video game boxes.
Why would you want to do that? That horse is tired, that cow is milked, give it a rest.
But hey, I had David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr for training wheels ;-)
I once worked at the library of a university. Part of my job was to check the catalogue against the actual bookshelves to make sure the books are physically present.
So I got to social science section. In particular the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.
Now this is an national university with >170 years of history. The spreadsheet in my hand showed that there should be 9 copies of the 1908 edition on the shelf.
I found none.
Every copy has been stolen. The irony of this is just too much. Communism supporters stealing from the general public to satisfy their personal desire of collection.
Aside. A regret I have was not checking out 'The Hitler Youth' at the same time. Although I suspect the university might have removed them from the shelves.
That being said, I understand in principle that there's an extra emotion & joy to be had with something possessing one of those attributes. Perhaps I'd enjoy a book signed by Arthur C. Clarke or guitar used by Mark Knopfler - though I'd make a point to read/play them rather than hide and never touch. On any given day, I have higher priorities for my money. Others with more money or different priorities, however, will make different choices.
(This simplistic framework is complicated by the notion of "Value" of course; some people believe, or tell themselves, that this is an "Investment"; like many things, this then becomes a abstract tower built on mutual belief, and people become invested [har] in believing ever so strongly. This can lead to interesting conversations unless & until you realize you have different axiomatic principles / beliefs / value perception).
Unless you're pretty good at playing, you won't notice though
If replicas and copies of the thing make you happy, do that, other people do see value in originals, that's ok too.
Collecting antique crap falls in to that type of category, I think, no matter how much people try to gussy-up the behavior.
Edit, to add: there seems to be something more attractive about truly old things vs copies, just like certain petals are more enchanting to a Bower Bird. Why this is such a strong impulse I have no idea.
Historical artifacts are not valued for their functionality. It is for the associated historical relevance. Many have more value even when their current functionality is worse than a replica.
> 'All afternoon assorted officials examined the alternatives,' Mr. Tagomi said. 'This is most authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day.'
> Mr. Baynes opened the box. In it lay a Mickey Mouse wristwatch on a pad of black velvet.
> Was Mr. Tagomi playing a joke on him? He raised his eyes, saw Mr. Tagomi's tense, concerned face. No, it was not a joke. 'Thank you very much,' Baynes said. 'This is indeed incredible.'
> 'Only few, perhaps ten, authentic 1938 Mickey Mouse watches in all world today,' Mr. Tagomi said, studying him, drinking in his reaction, his appreciation. 'No collector known to me has one, sir.'
Of course in his story something else is happening too:
> In fact, as far as he knew, it had never occurred to them to ask themselves if the so-called historic art objects for sale in West Coast shops were genuine. Perhaps someday they would . . . and then the bubble would burst, the market would collapse even for the authentic pieces. A Gresham's Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real. And that no doubt was the motive for the failure to investigate; after all, everyone was happy. The factories, here and there in the various cities, which turned out the-pieces, they made their profits. The wholesalers passed them on, and the dealers displayed and advertised them. The collectors shelled out their money and carried their purchases happily home, to impress their associates, friends, and mistresses.
But I can never do this, because I could never feel certain that I didn't purchase a forgery
Ignorance is bliss."
- Cypher, The Matrix
IIRC in the last matrix movie there were humans that picked matrix over zion (might be wrong, it was such a firgettable movie)
It's a rewarding experience to ask "what's in that rock?" to discover it's invertebrates from millions of years ago!
https://www.amazon.com/Billionaires-Vinegar-Mystery-Worlds-E...
The boxes and packaging, also most of the disks inside the boxes were found to be blank.
With small insular communities like this, I wonder how often people end up making counterfeits they never intend to sell. Maybe you're having a dry streak or you've been swearing up and down you'll something, and you tell yourself there won't be any harm in making a fake and telling the guys you got it. Before the recent value explosion in the market there wouldn't be much value in it - but people like their hobbies and like to boast and it seems very normal.
There are lots of legitimate reasons to come out of this kind of experience feeling like you don't want to have anything to do with the scene - but also it could be that what was intended as a private forgery has gotten out of control.
I have purchased duplicates of instruments for parts or preservation though.
It turns out the violin he performs on was made by a young violin maker called Richard Howard, but never assembled by him: he was drafted for WW1, and died in 1917 at the battle of Messines.
I think that's the kind of history that matters, that adds a certain context to the music. To everyone in this thread saying the history of a thing doesn't matter: if something like that doesn't matter, what does?
The FBI estimates 70 percent of all autographed sports memorabilia are frauds.
a lot of people are confused, and seem to think that purporting to share an interest makes a community.
they're disappointed time and time again.