Let It Out!What bugs you re this hobby?

What bugs me right now is this site is broken 1/2 the time. Please fix.

What bugs me a lot is that a lot of gallery owners just disappeared, for one reason or another. And I'm not talking about the people who willingly got rid of their cels and said goodbye to the hobby. I'm talking about the others. The galleries are still there but there's no way to contact the owners. And it's not just because you want to make them an offer. Sometimes you just want to chat about the hobby with someone or ask them questions about certain cels.

Also since a lot of people talked about deputy services, the year is 2013. I started collecting about 8 years ago and still nothing has changed. I find it hard to believe that sellers are that incapable of shipping internationally, even more so that they have no knowledge of English. Hello, computers anyone? My mom had to quickly learn both computers and English to conduct a simple conversation. It just seems like people are pure lazy and uncaring since folks are ready to go through all extends to acquire the item they want. Deputy services have made a really great business for themselves.

Also as a Sailor Moon collector I'm also wondering if they're ever going to come up with a a way to better preserve those fade lines and colors of the cels. Even though those same fade lines make it easier to spot an original from a fake.

To conclude I feel not so much frustration, more like sadness for a lot of shows, which seem to be getting forgotten. I really wish that one day there could be some sort of a museum that would be dedicated to anime. I would give my collection in a blink. So far I haven't seen it happen, or at least nothing major. How cool would it be to have a Metropolitan Museum of Anime and Animation.

As a relatively new person to the hobby, a few things have been a bit annoying.

My main pet peeve are cel scalpers. They'll take cels they get for dirt cheap on Y! Japan or some other store in Japan and jack up the price, inflating the market. Saw a few auctions last week for about 10 cels all go combined for about 5000 yen. See the exact same cels pop up on eBay again this week ranging from $80 to $200 dollars each, plus shipping. As with any collectable hobby, the ones in it for the money tend to make it harder on the ones in it for the love of the hobby. I'm not saying people don't have the right to try and sell their cels at what they think they're worth, but you can tell quickly the people who love the hobby and people who love the money involved with it.

As riona said, it's also hard to connect with other gallery owners here who have abandoned their galleries, but at least you still have an idea of where certain cels have been. It'd be very interesting to have a road map of where cels have traveled in their life span. From animation studio, to market, passed from collector to collector. Every cel simultaneously tells a story and has a story.

Other minor gripes, deputy fees annoy everyone, but it goes with the territory. Deputy services are a mini-industry now so there's little chance they'll go away.

Last major sort-of-issue, THERE'S SO MANY AWESOME CELS OUT THERE!!! Sometimes you pull the trigger on a nice cel and BAM the next day a masterpiece falls out of the sky. Hard to say no sometimes, you know?

All gripes considered, it's still a really fun hobby. That's why I'm here! : D

@ teppy: We reply to every inquiry so long as it gets to us and not the spam box. Lol. We too enjoy talking with cel collectors especially one’s who share our love for Macross and anime in general. Btw, you have some lovely new additions in your gallery. Congratulations on growing your gallery extremely quickly with some very nice cels.

As for being outgunned, we certainly feel the same way. There are quite a few international collectors who can dedicate far more monies to cels than ourselves; this why we treasure the few cels we have, it is good enough. :) We feel quality over quantity best describes our collecting habits.

How about everyone else? Has your cel collecting style changed or remained the same over the years?

@ ginga: Ohh, quite true RS sadly does break down frequently. We actually prefer the previous RS version since it was much more stable. Hopefully Jason will dedicate some time to stabilizing RS and even replying to emails. We've repeatedly contacted him over the last two years but no reply. We’d happily donate more money but we don’t know if he’d receive it. One can hope he will update the entire RS community, someday sooner than later.

@ riona: We’ve had our share of experiences with some RS cel gallery owners who disappeared over the years. It is frustrating when their contact email for RS is dead and there is simply no way to chat with them. Kind of sad, since each time a gallery owner disappears there is just one less person to share/chat with in the dwindling cel community. :'(

We agree it is quite sad that many once great and deeply loved shows are slowly, but surely becoming forgotten. We feel RS is the closest thing we will ever have in our lifetime to a virtual anime museum.

Oh your comments about deputy services and sellers refusal to change hit the nail on the head! Frankly it is disappointing how some international sellers just cannot look past minor language and technical issues, so they can expand to much larger audience of buyers. Don’t know if it is a myopic perspective, discrimination, or other seller reasoning, but the results are the same. We’ve seen more and more international sellers refusing to sell abroad, does anyone have any insights why?

@ GoalieZero: Cel scalpers are a toughie. Our cel friends tell us on more than one occasion how they feel dealers are not better than scalpers since their entire business is for profit. After all dealers inflate their prices too don't they? But we understand how it is hard not to shake one’s head when you see a cel that you recognize from overseas reappear at highly inflated prices. We’ve found sometimes it is just better to walk away and take a well deserved break. Life is just too short not to be happy.

It's been a while since I've written anything on this topic.

My peeve - Arsehole sketch collectors and convention staff.

Like in the cel community, there are a lot of very nice people out there that truly love the hobby, and despite realizing the "one of a kind-ness" of the sketch collecting, generally wish others good will. But some of the sketch collectors are absolutely insane and personally go out of their way to make sure someone else who they perceive has nicer sketches them them, suffers. I know one particular collector, who, upon seeing that I received a couple colored sketches from a Japanese artist when he only got a black and white sketch, proceeded to go up to the artist and complain how I received two sketches and how unfair it was. Should this person, who is not a member of this board, read this, let me state that I did not receive 2 colored sketches. I got 3.

There are a couple of sketch collectors that I personally know who seem to feel that a sucessful convention is any con where they feel that they received either 'more' or 'better' stuff than me. And I shake my head and wonder how crappy their lives must be if getting a better sketch than me from any artist is the highlight of their day/week/month/year.

As for convention staff, I don't understand how repeat conventions have the same problems, year after year. Take Anime Expo - It's been around for 22 years, and yet it still can't figure out how to get stuff right. Doesn't anyone take notes as to what works and what doesn't, and then pass that on to future staffers? It seems like AX, and other cons, improve one fallacy, only to create another just as equally bad in another area.