Scampir

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One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

youtube shorts are basically dumbass comment bait. like yt very obviously applies absolutely no logic to how they spread these so my imac video is being put in front of hundreds of thousands of people who have never heard the word "retrocomputing" before and they're understandably confused about it. i have received half a million views on this video and i think almost none of them were from people who wanted to see it. this does not make any of their comments less stupid of course it's just an observation


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

also it's constantly amazing to me how many people don't understand what thrift stores are. a third of the comments on this are "OMG THEY GOT THAT FOR FREE AND THEY'RE CHARGING THAT MUCH FOR IT???" like buddy what do you think they should charge? do you think the purpose of the store is to give stuff to poor people at low prices? that was literally never the intent. like yeah goodwill apparently is a terrible charity that's mismanaged at best and fraudulent at worst but even if they were functioning ideally, their goal is to make as much profit off of resold donations as possible in order to pay for other projects. the reason you're donating or buying stuff is to indirectly support a charity! there are signs all over the store that say this! their retail demographic is the lower middle class! it always was!


nora
@nora

this is why i get so confused about people who get mad about reselling stuff from thrift stores.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i've had mixed opinions about this over the years and the process went like this

stage 1: [irritation] god damnit, they are taking everything before anyone else can get it. these people come in and scrape everything off the shelves into their cards at 8AM so if you pull in 4 minutes after the doors open, everything of value is piled up in a cart being slowly punched into terapeak. why even bother, you can't compete with someone whose fulltime job is Being There First

stage 2: [rage] okay and you know what, this sucks even more because thrift stores and flea markets were one of the few remaining bastions of functioning capitalism, where prices are set by what people are willing to pay. goodwill couldn't price something at $100 if the only person willing to pay that much was in new york, because they simply wouldn't come over here and buy it. the ebayers are putting everything online where the rich new yorker simply yawns and summons it to them. there is always someone willing to pay too much, which means all prices are now permanently set at "whatever someone, somewhere in the country, is willing to pay."

stage 3: [seething indignation] and furthermore, this is removing all locality from the secondary market. you live in topeka? good luck ever getting a neat Thing because every single one is going to get scraped out of your goodwills and exported to new york and california. even if they continue to circulate in a local market after their new owner tires of them or dies, it won't be your local market, so your only option for having one will be to summon it back at Nationwide Market Rate Plus Shipping. fuck you i guess if you wanted to ever experience Finding Something By Chance because that era is permanently over

stage 4: [dawning realization] oh. ohhhhhh. none of the thrift stores or flea market sellers wanted it to work like that. they always hated that. they didn't hang on to shit indefinitely. if i left this imac at the store it actually would have gotten thrown away eventually. in fact, since my tastes are way less congruent with the general "mainstream" of retroelectronics, i bet goodwill has thrown away gobs of stuff i would have wanted because nobody bought it after a week. i bet they do throw away tons of stuff i don't notice because my interests are so specific. i wonder how many really good sewing machines the seattle goodwill has chucked because nobody is coming in to buy them

stage 5: [acceptance] the shelf-scrapers are symbiotes performing a necessary if distasteful service. they warehouse shit goodwill would throw out, ensuring it remains available. yes, ebay prices out a lot of people but most of those people never had a chance at owning any of this anyway. this is the best it's going to get because the secondary market has no place in our economic system. used things go in the trash by default and it is only a tiny sliver that make it into anyone else's hands. well, this sucks, guess i'll stop caring


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

oh yeah youtube shorts comments are the worst

Espresso prep videos are the hellish Bruegel vista of comments, "the customer ordered this while the twin towers were still standing," "my grampa from Napoli used to make espresso in a garlic press, if he saw this he'd leave a horse head in your bed" kinda thing

in reply to @nora's post:

kinda feel like that's different though, i'm definitely mad that resellers have made speculation rampant in a lot of hobbies and thus killed access to them to a lot of people (i.e. even 10 years ago you could get film cameras/cassette decks/old electronics/... for a tenth to a 20th of what you find them for now, because some people realized they could get all the ones they saw at goodwill and sell them for a lot more on ebay, and from then on a bubble forms and prices keep going up. which is also feeding back into the prices that the thrift stores run, actually! cause they look at prices online too, obviously...). plus private speculators/resellers aren't like, companies, and even less companies that fund a charity, they're individuals that are enriching only themselves for no service beyond "having found the item at goodwill before you did". idk

Goodwill auctions off online all the real paintings they get which was the most fun aspect to me, a painting that maybe isn't Monet level but it still looks nice on my wall and it's unique

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

i bet they do throw away tons of stuff i don't notice because my interests are so specific.

As a former employee, I can absolutely confirm to you that this is true. Goodwill Columbia-Willamette had a blanket policy to trash any tech older than like 2000, and even aside that, nothing lasts more than a week on the floor. Managers might occasionally make exceptions for obvious high-ticket items but most stuff is churn and burn.

I saw incredible finds end up in the outlet bins to be thrown out, and because nobody knew what they were or what they were worth. Not just vintage tech but games and antiques and all kinds of shit just ends up in the crusher because the right person who knew what it was, just never arrived in time.

There was definitely a point where you could ride pretty easily off of information imbalance, i.e. the boomer running the junk shop rarely knew or cared to find out what any particular weird junk is but you as a person with no money but a lot of subject matter knowledge know a Knoll credenza or an authentic 17th century snaphance when you see it, and can put together a pretty nice collection for yourself.

Those days are largely gone, everything that might be theoretically worth anything gets tossed online where you have to bid against the entire country and every junk dealer's spent the last decade watching nonstop antiques roadshow/pawnstars clones that have them convinced that every box of yellowed hummels is secretly Marie Antonette's private collection and worth a trillion dollars in Japan and they're gonna be the ones to get it. But that's a lot less to do with the resellers who have been professionally scouring thrift stores for decades.

exactly - the entire thesis of the "bargain hunter", since time immemorial, is that they are in some way putting one over on sellers. every single person who walks away from a yard sale with something feels like they fleeced some yokel who Didn't Know What They Had. i still felt like i Owned that goodwill even though $50-100 is exactly the correct price for a decent condition imac, and - i don't need one! i already had one! i bought it only so it wouldn't get thrown away and i STILL felt the dopamine surge, because in essence this is a form of gambling. you put time on the table and hope the dealer doesn't know what cards they're handing you.

a lot of us (royal us) are mad because we no longer have an upper hand that only existed because the internet was hard to use and we'd put our character sheet points into that particular skill while other people put them elsewhere. was it ever right, morally, to pay someone $20 for a camera at a yard sale knowing they could have walked into even a local camera store and sold it for $200? yeah, well. even if a lot of us weren't avowed communists back when that was more common, we'd still be happy to quietly set our convictions aside for a Deal, because We Live In A (Capitalist) Society, and our very bones resonate with the energy of Getting Something For Nothing, or at least Less Than It Should Be. because we all still believe there is a Should, and anything less than that is a Victory.

we hiss and seethe and spit on the concept of Market Value but damned if i've ever seen someone cheerfully announce that they've just sold their 20" sony PVM for cost of shipping, or what they paid for it, or just what they needed to buy groceries. what we're mad about is that the playing field is level, and the days of paying $40 for "some old TV" are over, as if we ever deserved them.

Definitely, and it's a precious external form of validation for people who bother to spend any time thinking about dishware or 80s photographic equipment in the US, where very little value is otherwise placed on knowing anything about history or material culture.

the ugly secret of it all, though, was always that the great bargains usually happened because someone else who'd carefully curated an exquisite collection or taken unusual care of that imac because they genuinely valued it was selling it off for nothing to pay off an emergency bill, or had died and it had been thrown away, and odds are unless you know a lot of New York millionaires that's about how it'll leave your possession too. Maybe electronics are a little different rn, it's a much newer and more volatile market than the stuff I usually go bargain-hunting on that's definitely "worth" as much as a nice used car on 1stdibs and definitely changed hands half a dozen times without getting anyone rich before it reached me