Time – Page 19 – Robot Claw

A Good Investment

July 15, 2016

Back in 1996, specifically on March 26, I purchased this gameboy game:

It was the first Yu-Gi-Oh game released in the USA, and was pretty good for it’s time. Here’s some screenshots:

Obviously the USA version is subtitled, but you get the idea. I played the game, enjoyed it, put it in a box and forgot about it.

Look again at the cover, specifically the blurb at the bottom right: “3 Limited Edition Official Game Cards Insider!” Now I didn’t actually play the card game when I bought this (and never have) so the cards were little more than a curiosity to me. And for at least a decade they remained in the box with the game, unopened and unplayed.

Some years ago I removed them when I collected all the cards I had all over the place and put them into card boxes. Even at the time though I didn’t take moment to consider if any of them had value, although I was remotely aware that some of the cards I had acquired over the years must have been rare if only due to their age.

After this post, something triggered in me and I went and dug up my old Yu-Gi-Oh cards – including not just the three in this game but others that had come in other games or free with magazines – and looked up to see if any of them had value.

That’s when I did a double take!

That photo shows two of the cards that came with Dark Duel Stories. These were my cards, the exact ones that lived under a bed for almost 20 years. These two cards alone were each ‘worth’ over $100, by which I mean there were dealers on the internet prepared to pay me at least that much for them!

I’ve never actually sold anything of mine, but this was too good to refuse. After a quick chat with the guy that runs my local game store (who declined to buy them himself) I packaged up the three promos and a MTG card that I had pulled from a booster 9 years ago and sent them away to one of the leading secondary market websites. Here’s what I sold:

And about two weeks later my cheque arrived for an astonishing $460!

Individually, I got $20 for Exodia, $100 for Tarmogoyf, $100 for Dark Magician and an amazing $240 for Blue Eyes White Dragon!

Doing the math, based on the $20 cost of Dark Duel Stories and the $3.50 cost of the Magic booster, this works out to returns of 15.5% (over 20 years) and a whopping 45% (over 9) respectively. I should have bought 100 copies of Dark Duel stories 🙂

I was in denial this sale would go through until I actually received the cheque, because it’s hard to believe there is such value in Yu-Gi-Oh cards. But I have learned that the cards included with the game I purchased 20 years ago are amongst the ‘holy grails’ of collecting, specifically the ‘Blue Eyes’ since it was the first promo card released in the USA and has such a flashy foil effect on it.

I hope it eventually goes to someone that has wanted it for years and loves it. Even if it costs him $500 🙂

Now what should I do with the money?

Icehouse

April 26, 2016

It’s always cold inside the icehouse
Though the rivers never freeze
There’s a girl inside the icehouse
I can see her clearly through the trees

And now she’s dreaming of a new love
And she hopes he’ll be there soon
But she’s got so long to wait for him
Because he needs another year to get there

There’s no love inside the icehouse

The devil lives inside the icehouse
At least that’s what the old ones say
He came a long time ago
He came here in the winter snow
Now it’s colder every day

She’s still dreaming through the summer
And she’s hoping through the spring
She says she’s got no time for winter nights
She doesn’t notice as the days grow darker
She can’t remember getting any older

There’s no love inside the icehouse

Words (c) Iva Davies

Singles

April 19, 2016

When I arrived in the USA almost 23 years ago, I was strip searched at LA airport. They had me down to my daks, going through my clothes and shoes looking for something that wasn’t there. Part of the process was a thorough luggage search, and I can only imagine how surprised the guy was when I opened my (only) suitcase to reveal this:

This isn’t a post about that experience, it’s a post about what a 21 year old man that emigrated to the US thought valuable enough to pack with him. My suitcase that day contained a tiny amount of clothes, one extra pair of shoes, a few important documents, and hundreds of CDs and 7″ vinyl singles. Looking back on it now I can’t imagine how heavy it was (I had to use a cart in the airport for a single large hard-case suitcase) or how I wasn’t charged extra baggage. Those were the days, I suppose.

I’d always loved singles, and bought them religiously for all the bands I followed. I treated them well, and still have almost all of them today. To get them here I bundled them up in bubble wrap (in other words, inadvertently made them look as much like drug packages as possible!) and packed them tightly in around the similarly packed CDs. I don’t recall any of them getting damaged, and ever since arriving here they have lived in the comic box shown in the above photo.

I’m reasonably sure the first 7″ single I ever purchased was this one, probably bought in 1982:

In those early days I owned very few since I didn’t have my own record player. I bought them every now and then (Homosapien by Pete Shelley, Rockit by Herbie Hancock) but mostly bought cassettes of new albums. It wasn’t until maybe 1983 that Bernard and I started buying vinyl like no tomorrow, and by 1986 I had my own record player in my room and bought new records (often singles) almost weekly it seemed.

Here’s another one from those early days:

I bought the above because of Michael Hutchence (!!) recommending Nick Cave in an interview. I remember liking it, and thinking he looked like Julian ‘Zzap64’ Rignall on the cover 🙂

But enough history, let’s look at some highlights from the big box of 7″ vinyl that lives, mostly ignored, in my house today:

That’s the first ever Mute records release! I was a fan of so many bands on the label, when I saw this guy for sale used at Rices it was an instant buy. To this day I can’t imagine how it got there (much less to Australia) given it was released it such limited quantities. A treasure of my collection to be sure.

That’s Depeche Mode’s first single Dreaming of Me (on top, released in 1981), and there last wide-released 7″ single from 2009. I remember having trouble finding it, but eventually did in Japan a couple of years later. In those days vinyl was almost completely dead, and 7″ singles in particular hadn’t been seen for years. You may be aware of the big vinyl resurgence in the last few years, but 7″ singles aren’t exactly coming back.

The box is about 40% Depeche Mode singles (including three copies of many – UK, USA, Australian), about 30% Erasure and the rest Nick Cave, Sisters of Mercy, Mission, Fields of the Nephilim and a few random ones thrown in. As you may imagine of a collector as crazed as myself, many of these collections are complete (for instance, I have all known Mode, Nephilim and Erasure 7″ vinyl). Getting them entailed many trips to the import stores in Sydney (I used to go monthly), as well a semi-regular purchases from UK shops for which I used ‘international money orders’ and would wait months for the package to arrive. I also had a penpal (!) in The Netherlands that helped me get some of the harder to find European releases during the early 90s; I even still have one of the ones he sent me still in the bag it was purchased in!

Here’s some of the attractively-designed Sisters singles:

And the Nephilim stuff, which includes multiples since KLS & I merged our collections:

There’s a large amount of limited editions in the box as well, and in fact towards the last years of the popularity of 7″ vinyl, many releases were only available in limited or unusual versions. For instance many singles are pressed in coloured vinyl:

Or transparent vinyl:

Or picture discs:

Or – and this one is quite special – silver vinyl:

I’ve also got quite a selection of bootleg singles (which were very popular with the ‘goth’ bands):

And even several flexi discs (pressed on acetate so they could be included with magazines):

I hadn’t looked through the box of singles for many, many years and it was a bit like opening a time capsule. While I still have a working record player, I didn’t actually play any of them yesterday since every song on every one of them has since been made available on CD or for download, so their more curios now than essential possessions for the diehard fan.

But I had fun buying them back in the day, and used to listen to them over and over again. I’m happy I’ve still got these things; they’re one of the few possessions from my youth I still own today.