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Post by The Captain on Feb 23, 2021 8:28:44 GMT -5
I don't necessarily speculate on books, but if I can buy a book that I know is underpriced and then flip it, I will do so.
I was casually browsing ebay and noticed....huh??? An Ultimate Spider-Man #1 DF cover that no one else seemed to notice and picked it up for $27...a steal. Resold it for a flat hundred and the buyer thought that was a great deal. Win:Win
And $73 left for the comic kitty.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Nice grab. My philosophy is this. If a seller (particularly in a store) has put a price on something, it is not my job to tell him (or her) that he has undervalued it; it's up to them to know what the market is doing and what the prices of books are at that moment. One time I did tell a seller their book was undervalued happened about 20 years ago. I was at a rummage sale in a church basement, and there was this cute little old lady with a stack of comics at her table. Lot of Archies and Gold Key books that I really didn't have any interest in, but there was a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #150 in really nice condition toward the bottom of the stack. I asked what she wanted for it, and she said "all of the comics are $.50". Being in a church and all (and my newly-married wife was with me), I replied that the book was easily worth 40x that amount, so if she wanted to up the price, I'd let her. She smiled and told me that the comics were her late husband's and that he would want them to go to someone who loved them as much as he did, and while she thanked me for being honest, she kept the price at $.50.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 21:34:29 GMT -5
I don't necessarily speculate on books, but if I can buy a book that I know is underpriced and then flip it, I will do so.
Oddball books like Darkhawk #49 and #50 can be found, if one is willing to hunt, in $1 boxes, and these sell from anywhere from $10 - $50 on eBay. They had very low print runs as they were the last two issues in the series, so I'll buy them any chance I get and resell them.
I won't, however, buy a book that has a character that is rumored, by one guy from his mom's basement in Peoria, Illinois, to maybe be appearing in a future movie (or now TV show). Once said rumor is confirmed, if it can still be had cheap, then I'll buy it, but I can't afford to buy piles of books to sit on hoping they get hot.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 20:36:23 GMT -5
JRJr's short return to UXM (#300-311) might be the last time I really liked his work. He did some nice stuff on Spider-Man years later, but I credit the inker and colorist for saving it. But it's been a good 20 yrs that he's slowly gone downhill; his pencils on Bendis' Action Comics run were downright offensive. Wasn't Uncanny write around the time that he was doing Man Without Fear? I really liked his run on Daredevil as a kid. His Thor stuff intrigued has always intrigued me from afar. As a former X-Men fan, I always wonder if I should read the Morrison run. The Morrison run is OK. Some of it is interesting, like the Quentin Quire issues, the mystery of "who murdered Emma Frost", and some of the fleshing out of the Weapon Plus program. However, it also includes the introduction and arc of Xorn, which is a serious black eye on the X-franchise. These issues fit neatly into this whole "Run Ruiner" discussion.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 12:01:01 GMT -5
Things are settling down a little bit in our household. HS swim season is over, so we have a few weeks until HS track season starts back up, which means less driving back and forth to the school for now. Glad my daughter is involved and active, but man, I'd like some kind of down time during the year. She should be driving by next spring, which will help, although that will be a whole different bundle of concerns once that happens.
Mom survived COVID (I can't say recovered), although we are having to move her to a assisted-living facility at least for the short term. She experienced some further cognitive decline from the illness; my sister believes she suffered from hypoxia for long enough to do additional damage to her brain. Mom forgets to eat or take her meds and she is unsteady on her feet at times, so we're going to see if this is the kind of place she needs going forward or if she can recover enough to go back to her apartment. I'm not overly optimistic, but stranger things have happened and God does move in His own mysterious ways.
New job has been going well, but our IT network has been down for the past week, which sucks. Can't access anything on any company server, so it's basically been a week of vacation. Not sure when we'll be back up and running, so I'm dreading the backlog I'm going to get hit with once we are.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 11:53:59 GMT -5
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 11:33:22 GMT -5
People like myself and my older daughter are piecing things together quickly because we've read a lot of the older comics. Marvel is, in a way, doing fan service to the "old-schoolers" by building off of storylines that we read 20, 30, 40 years ago, so for people with a significant knowledge of the Marvel Comics universe, some of these things aren't earth-shattering. No reason to go completely off the rails, because they know a big part of their audience are people like you and me and my daughter. No different, really, from Game of Thrones, in which the largest percentage of viewers had not read the books, and yet they were absolutely listening to people who had. There is a huge chunk of Avengers and Vision and Scarlet Witch history that is entirely off of my radar, but I've been reading up and following the learning curve all the same. I had no idea who Agatha Harkness was, for example, but I absolutely understood who she was and why neighbor Agatha should/should not have been her prior to the most recent episode. I'm of the mind that she is likely the "mini-boss" in this game, and we're going to meet the Final Boss in the next two episodes, as it's unlikely that they're going to use a mid-level character from the comics to set off the events of the next Dr. Strange movie. I personally believe {Spoiler: Click to show} that it's Nightmare behind all of this. Wanda's bad dreams, the purple effects in Agatha's basement (which ties into the green and purple color scheme usually associated with him), and someone far more powerful than "just a witch" needs to be involved. Kathryn Hahn is a fine actress, but she's not going to be Strange's adversary going forward. The MCU is about world-building, with things tying together into a rich tapestry. This show is going to have repercussions that ripple beyond just its 9 episodes.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 11:12:47 GMT -5
Am I the only one who found the most recent episode to be the first one I really didn't enjoy? I think Wandavision is going the way of all massively hyped, leave-you-hanging, mysteries. The fan community goes wild and churns out some brilliant theories. There are many more fans than writers, and the fans have a lot more time too, so they either guess what the writers were going for or come up with something even better. The writers can't just give the fans what they already came up with, as that would seem lame (i.e. the big reveal this past episode), so they go in an entirely different route in order to thwart the fan theories, and that direction ends up being stupid. The best part of this show is the guess-work but, between the big reveal that fans figured out five episodes back and the commercials suddenly seeming to hint something more random and less brilliant than what the fans had been coming up with, I feel like that thrill is winding down now, and we're going to have to settle with the less impressive stuff the show actually has to offer us instead. I'm willing to give Marvel some leeway on this one. It wasn't the strongest episode, particularly since it was the first that lacked any interaction between Vision and Wanda, which was really the strongest part of the show up to this point (although the scenes with Vision and Darcy almost made up for it). People like myself and my older daughter are piecing things together quickly because we've read a lot of the older comics. Marvel is, in a way, doing fan service to the "old-schoolers" by building off of storylines that we read 20, 30, 40 years ago, so for people with a significant knowledge of the Marvel Comics universe, some of these things aren't earth-shattering. No reason to go completely off the rails, because they know a big part of their audience are people like you and me and my daughter. For people like my younger daughter and wife, they're just enjoying the show as it plays out, without getting caught up in the online fan speculation. They watch the movies, but they're not reading comics or scouring the corners of the internet to see what noobmaster69 thinks might happen in the next episode (my older daughter does this to an extent, while I have tried to stay as far away from it as I can). It's been enjoyable enough, particularly since Marvel was willing to do something that was considerably out-of-the-box for them with the show. Will it bear repeated rewatching? Probably not, although it might get a once-over prior to the next Dr. Strange movie coming out to see if there are any little ties that I might have missed, and I am intrigued to see where both the Monica and Pietro situations are headed, as you know they're not going to do something like those and them them lie.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 9:52:08 GMT -5
That can happen, sure, but in this case, it seems like the nature of THIS particular show is that the speculation has been all the fun. And while the interconnectedness of the MCU has been great, it wasn't a cliffhanger...we KNEW Thanos was coming... he took a while to get here, but we knew it was happening. That's all the difference between speculating in a fun way on the how, and having to wait too long for a pay off, IMO. People's mileage may vary, of course. If the hex plot is resolved and XXXXXXX defeated, and we learn that there was something/someone else behind it that looms as a future threat-how is that different than Loki and the Chitauri being defeated in Avengers and learning Thanos was behind it and looming as a future threat? That's not speculation. Guessing how the Avengers reverse the snap between Infinity War and Endgame was speculation. And they're were people who got pissed and craping on Endgame because it didn't use the solution they had guessed, i.e. they set up their own discontent because they judged the movie based on their speculation not based on what it actually was. And it is happening for Wandavision as well. I see so many people pissing and moaning the astrophysicist wasn't Reed Richards and this has ruined the show for them because Marvel didn't do what they thought they were going to do or promised they were going to do. Where anywhere in the show was there any indication that it was going to introduce the FF? In any of the press for the show? No. It was pure fan speculation based on what they wanted rather than what had been indicated or promised, but now some fans are pissed at the show runners because they didn't fulfill the promise of the astrophysicist. What promise? If you say to someone I want you to do something and they don't do it, they haven't broken a promise, you've just placed unrealistic expectations on them and then got disappointed they didn't fulfill those expectations. The payoff of that scene with the astrophysicist was that the vehicle was designed on the specs Monica made earlier in the series and then it failed because Wanda's hex was stronger than she factored into her calculations. Not every scientist has to be a known MCU character, but fans speculated it was, ran with that, blew it out of proportion, and then got disappointed because they set up their own dissatisfaction. Sure fan speculation is part of the fun, but when it becomes something that taints your own enjoyment of the show if you aren't right, then it's a problem. Not the show's problem, the fan's problem, but they don't own their own role in the disappointment so the show has to bear the brunt of their disappointment. -M I just don't understand this mindset either. Sure, it would have been pretty cool if they had used the astrophysicist friend to work Reed Richards into the MCU, but now we just get to see them do it some other way (because they absolutely will at some point). Doesn't ruin my enjoyment of the show because something I hoped would happen didn't. The previous week, my first speculative thought on something was seemingly shut down. Thing is, I wasn't disappointed, and rather was quite impressed they'd inserted such an obvious Easter Egg only to have it serve as misdirection. {Spoiler: Click to show}I had said after episode 2 to my family that Agnes would turn out to be AGatha HarkNESS. This seemed to be debunked with the whole Vision/Agnes interaction at her car, only to be proven right in the most-recent episode. Fans, not just here but in all genres (although Marvel fans are pretty needy) seem to think that the writers and producers owe them nothing but fan service, putting together characters or making events happen exactly as THEY want, rather than trusting that the creators have a much "bigger picture" plan and that folks whose actual job it is to world-build are in charge, not a bunch of fanboys and fangirls who just want their favorite "ship" fulfilled.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 22, 2021 9:41:04 GMT -5
Crazy thing, this is almost exactly a toss-up for me. I buy these at about equal frequency when I do buy cookies.
Having to pick just one, I'd have to say Chocolate Chip cookies, only because there are different styles, hardness, level of sweetness of chips, etc., while Oreos are just Oreos. Also, it's hard to find a bakery version of an Oreo, but every bakery has its own recipe for a chocolate chip cookie, which is what puts it over the top.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 20, 2021 12:52:45 GMT -5
Now THIS is the Marvel show i'm looking forward to seeing. The best part of the MCU always centered on Captain America's corner of the universe, including his allies. I hope Falcon And The Winter Soldier gives Marvel more of an interest in exploring more of outlandish technical aspects of S.H.I.E.L.D. if the Peggy Carter show hasn't done so already (Haven't watched it) like with LMDs Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did a long arc with LMDs in one of the later seasons (pretty sure it was Season 4).
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Post by The Captain on Feb 16, 2021 12:28:01 GMT -5
Didn't see the reviled first version of the film, but this doesn't look terrible. Sure, the Cyborg animations are kind of weak and it's unrelentingly dark, but it doesn't look any worse than Age of Ultron or GotG2, which are two of my least-favorite MCU films.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 15, 2021 19:35:53 GMT -5
Black licorice all the way.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 15, 2021 10:15:18 GMT -5
It's not a terrible thing, but PoliSci and Astrophysics are two VERY different fields. I find it hard to believe that someone, even a person like Darcy who experienced what she did in the Thor films, would suddenly jump into a highly scientific field like astrophysics from a liberal arts field like political science, let alone have the interest in it to not only get an undergrad, but also a Masters AND a doctorate in such a short (even with the Snap and 5-year jump) period of time. At the end of the day, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the show negatively, but it does seem a little forced to facilitate shoehorning a popular supporting character into the happenings rather than create a whole new character from scratch.
I know someone who graduated from undergrad as an English major at a liberal arts college who decided several years after college that she wanted to be a physicist. She ended up taking some classes, going back to school and now has a PhD in physics. I don't remember the exact time frame, but I want to say it took less than 12 years, which is about the same amount of time from Thor: The Dark World to Wandavision. I know quite a few science and engineering PhDs who completed their post-HS educations in 10-12 years (4 years undergrad + 2 years M.S. + 4-6 years PhD). One of my professors in college received undergrad, M.S., and PhDs in computer science in a total about 8-9 years.
Fair enough. I stand corrected.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 15, 2021 10:14:39 GMT -5
This past Saturday night, I made the following for dinner.
Starting Friday night at 10:00pm, I put a 2 lb boneless beef roast and a 2 lb boneless pork roast into my large crockpot after covering each with fajita seasoning (store-bought, as I didn't have everything I needed to make my own).
At 9:30am on Saturday, I fire-roasted three poblano peppers under the broiler in my oven. I would normally do this on the grill outside, but it was 15 degrees on Saturday, and even with a covered deck, I didn't want to stand out there for 15-20 minutes to get it done. Once finished, I removed the skins and diced these.
At 10:00am, I removed the meat from the crockpot, shredded it, then put it back in with about 20oz of green enchilada sauce (canned, although I should have used the homemade green tomatillo salsa that I had in the fridge; lesson learned) and the diced poblano peppers.
Around noon, I rendered down some bacon ends, diced about a quarter of a white onion, opened a can of diced jalapenos (my store didn't have any decent-looking fresh ones), and put these into my small crockpot along with two cans of black beans, then let these slow-cook all afternoon.
Made a little Mexican rice, warmed some tortillas, and got out the sour cream, and we had a mid-winter fiesta around 6:00pm on Saturday evening.
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Post by The Captain on Feb 13, 2021 17:46:44 GMT -5
Furthermore, just look at Darcy. In Thor, she's introduced as a political science major that took the internship with Jane Foster for the college credits, yet now she not only has a doctorate in astrophysics who is recruited for a top-secret government mission, she is also is a top-grade computer hacker who can easily get into S.W.O.R.D.'s network and files. There's a lot of "she's really smart, so she can do pretty much anything" right there, so why couldn't they just do the same thing with Reed? The computer hacking seems to be out of her field. But I like how the snap & 5 year gap, which can be an impediment to storytelling in other ways, can be helpful for things like Darcy's story. The time from Dark World to Infinity War plus the 5 year gap leaves a lot of time for someone to change their career path. Add the effect of the snap in rearranging how many people are in various fields, sprinkly in a little bit of comic book suspension of disbelief, and I can roll with it. It's not a terrible thing, but PoliSci and Astrophysics are two VERY different fields. I find it hard to believe that someone, even a person like Darcy who experienced what she did in the Thor films, would suddenly jump into a highly scientific field like astrophysics from a liberal arts field like political science, let alone have the interest in it to not only get an undergrad, but also a Masters AND a doctorate in such a short (even with the Snap and 5-year jump) period of time. At the end of the day, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the show negatively, but it does seem a little forced to facilitate shoehorning a popular supporting character into the happenings rather than create a whole new character from scratch.
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