Yep! It’s super interesting to see how every kind of collectible has their own system for this. I work on the fringes of the comic book market so I really only know how CGC/CBCS handles their books and restoration guidelines, but it’s such a touchy subject regardless of the medium.

As far as restoring comic books or game labels, I think the motivation is simply: “I want this to look as nice as it possibly can.”And there’s nothing inherently sketchy in that - unless, of course, people go out of their way to then try and sell them as non-restored items. Then that’s sketchy as fuck. But I think…

Yep, many grading companies refuse restored products, or if they do choose to grade it, will grade it in a separate tier from unrestored items.

As with any sort of collectible, this debate would’ve come around eventually. Like with comic books and so on there’s always going to be a hardcore traditionalist/conservationalist mindset of “leave it as it is” compared to the restoration “it should look as nice as possible” point of view. Neither is wrong, but with…

This hurts me so much. I spent so much of my time at my local mall as a kid (it’s long gone now, whole building was leveled earlier this year). I understand why it’s happening, but I don’t like it.

Where’s the photos of Morse and Samardzija slamming face first into each other? Because that was 100% the best part about all of this

right? Like when are we gonna see photos from other photographers one of these days. this whole cosplay blog is just“shit luke decided he likes and is gonna label it ‘best’ regardless of how good anything actually is”

It became a reason over time, yeah. But when 99% of your trades don’t have that shit in there, and you’ve got a line wrapping around the store because you’re the only person working and some asshole brought in 85 xbox 360 games in to trade for cash at 12:30 on a tuesday, you’re not gonna check.

That being said my…

I worked at a GameStop in Baltimore for 4 years. Like almost all Gamestop employees, we basically just checked to make sure the discs weren’t scratched to hell, because there wasn’t any logical reason to waste time checking manuals. We definitely had our share of lil baggies of drugs pass through the store in cases,…

That video has got to go down as one of the most y2k videos ever. Did anyone ever figure out what exactly she had on her head?

Both of them are so fucking weird. The entire debacle over LaRoche’s kid still sticks out as such a bizarre occurrence

As a fellow Baltimore native who has also visited Fenway and Boston on several occasions, I’m seconding this notion

I’ve followed the team since Day One and had the pleasure of interning with them in 2011 in their creative services department. I worked on the blog and wrote a bunch of articles for their playbill magazine and whatnot. I interviewed Zim a couple of times that year, and he’s just the nicest dude. He had already been…

hail caesar

l o r d don’t get me started on hunter

I live in Baltimore. I don’t miss him on his off-days one bit.

Honestly I find “Chunk Widebody” to be far more hilarious anyway

What a stupid hill to die on.

I feel like there’s a thinkpiece brewing in the fact that a game that was apparently so egregious in 1992 that it contributed to the founding of the ESRB being rated T for Teen in 2017

Yeah, this was the impression I got as well - that Mipha loved Link but nothing ever came of it (besides dope armor). There’s that one cutscene where she basically almost tells Zelda “your power will awaken if you think about how much you love Link” and then Ganon shows up and the words don’t come out. So like, idk.…