Loud mouthed anon-racists are calling me a scalper on 4chan. I asked for a civil conversation about it on my blog and one of them goes on a rant. I guess because asking for a conversation made him all butt-hurt.

Not everyone reads my blog so I'm gonna try to do the same here. Lemme get the copy paste set up....



And... discuss!

Pretty sure that started out as a troll thread, trying to bate people, like every Jin thread someone trys. But it always escalates.


/toy/ can sometimes be good, but too many people bring drama over from other places, mix that with anonymity and the odd weirdness (why was there a post your picture thread last week?)

I prefer the picture and toy comic threads, pure fun.

Screw the drama, I'm curious about the actual question at hand. I buy toys, customize them and sell them. Does this make me a scalper?

Yeah - there's a difference. You're buying materials for your craft. Scalping is buying up everything for the sole purpose of selling it at a higher price because SURPRISE no one else can find them (because the scalper bought them all).

Also, I'd say that your current projects are not exactly hard to find on shelves. While you may do some rarer pieces, most of the stuff is fairly common and that is anti-scalper. You're clearing the shelves of things that would otherwise likely sit - and making them way better to boot.

Honestly it sounds like one guy is same***ing because he doesn't like you Cheets.

Do you do it via commission?

Or do you buy x of so many character and do your magic and see if you can sell them?


Neither are scalping, the 2nd one is a bit greedy though (capitalist society, nature of the western world etc)

ABSOLUTELY. I HATE YOU AND YOU SHOULD DIEEE1lol!!!

Well, actually, no. And yes.

Yes, in that you're creating a shortage of the rarer figs, and reselling them at much higher the price, with you making over 100% profit as a result, off our misery.

But no, in that you're churning out MUCH BETTER versions of the product, in that you are pretty much working off the extra bucks you charge for them. So it's fair. Except it's not, for those who just want a Vehicon, not a Picasso-acon. Except those who do.

Soo.... you're either a scalper with a heart of gold, Scalper v.2.0, or... some new breed of evil good bastard antihero scalper that... that's good, but evil, and.... I DUNNO!

*sorry, we've deleted similar stuff so this has to go*

Do online enemies mean I've made it big?

Nah man, /toy/ only really hates Walky and Jin, really.

You're just getting this because somebody doesn't like you or is just trying to stir jive.

Dammit, I was all excited too.

Walky likes to poke the jive out of people so I can get that but the Jin hate blows my mind.

I usually do one and slap it on eBay to gauge interest. After that it's pretty much commission. Or I'll put up a "preorder" on eBay and make them to order. I only do that with stuff that is relatively easy to find.

The Jin stuff might come from tfw2005 and fwoosh's forums, drama being dragged onto 4chan and then gets really nasty.

I'm pretty much right there with you, especially with regard to your definition of a scalper. I don't think you're "not far from that", though -- the premium price paid for your work isn't just for the "raw material", it's for the skill-based service of painting and detailing it and the workmanship involved. There's materials and other overhead too, but even if I had all that and bought a toy at retail I wouldn't be able to replicate what you do, so I'd rather cough up the dough for the whole shebang.

Well to be honest most anons are more annoyed about having the same damn threads about the guys them the guys themselves. It's like mentioning Minecraft on /v/ or Naruto on /a/, it's clearly inflammatory and it's not worth your time.

It's not really any different than making art and selling it then. Not even remotely scalping.

'Sup, Cheets?

It's actually funny to see you bring this up here, since I was sticking up for you on /toy/. You'll just have to cleverly guess which posts were me.

I could tell it was an Allsparker but I wasn't sure who.
Love the Jer!

I'm actually going to take the blog post down because this is kinda stupid. But it's still fun to discuss here.

You can call it whatever helps you sleep at night, Cheets.

Just don't stop, ok?

None of the figures you're currently modding are "rare." You're not specifically going after the shortpacked one because it's shortpacked. It could potentially create the same effects as scalping on the local level if you really DID buy up every Ratchet in town, but I'm doubting that Ratchet demand is high enough for that to make a difference.

VINDICATION!!!

But Jin has appeared in Walky's blog & so have you RECENTLY. Those two facts might be related. See? When they say no good deed goes unpunished, they mean it. Serves you right for supporting Walky's Hot Shot addiction, a plastic crak dealer, no less.

If you're customizing short-packed figures, I can see how it would annoy people. I wish you would customize all the FE Bees hanging around in Canada...

S'funny because I kinda want one to do just that.

Well there you go, 4Chan and /toy/, that's your problem. The anonymity of the people who post there allow for trolling on an insane scale and they've seem to have switched the crosshairs from me to you for a time. The bad eggs there are only out to destroy the lives of others by posting rumors, false information, and real life addresses (they call 'dox') and it's their form of entertainment. NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING there about someone can be taken seriously. At all. I mean like ever. Even the good stuff said about an individual can be false like the time /toy/ made an entire thread about how great Shocker Toys was in order to get unwary people to preorder figures and lose their money.

If you're really serious about whether if you're a scalper or not ask yourself, "When I walk into the stores I frequent, am I disappointed by the lack of figures I see?" I seriously doubt you're making that big of a vacuum in the area. No offense but you're just one guy right? You don't have contacts in different counties hitting every walmart in a 50-mile radius picking up one particular figure right? But hey, if you bought every single Ratchet and Knockout in your city, like have a stack of 20+ of each figure in your closet, maaaaaybe that's a little crazy.

What you do however is not scalper-themed, customizing I mean. You need raw materials, base bodies, and in this case you have to buy them from retail. It's like me buying 5 packages of X-acto knife blades at a time and wiping out the peg, I need them. Or the guy who buys all 10 cans of baby blue spraypaint to paint his daughter's clubhouse, he needs them. I'm really impressed you're doing an assembly-line of customizing. That gets SUPER TEDIOUS. I hate it when I have to make more than one of the same character in a month, nevermind a single day.

So to recap: Don't tale /toy/ seriously. They only talk crap about you out of jealousy and wanting to ruin lives for sport. Customizing doesn't make you a scalper, you need parts. Buying every type of figure in every store in your whole city/region does make it very hard for anyone else to find things. But since it's not just to make a quick $5 by turning them around I leave that to you.

You can get some really great Transformers General threads on /co/ with like 300 pages.

Lots of cool stuff.

Thanks for taking the time, Jin. I really appreciate that as you've been in this game far longer than I have. I'm simply not used to this kind of random hate for the sake of hate.
And no, I don't buy up tons of extra stock. Aside from the first one and maybe two in a few cases I only buy what I need to fill orders. And yeah, it becomes VERY tedious but that's work for ya.

I personally know I'm not a scalper. I really did just want to hear what the fandom thought. I was a fool to think 4chan would do anything besides pile on the hate.

I will pay you to do one of me like that man. Story of my life.


I have? Awesome.
And /toy/ hates anyone remotely successful in what they do. If you A: make money, B: get exposure, C: your work takes some amount of skill, then /toy/ has a beef with you. Often times it's just one or two people who have a grudge against you and use /toy/ as a weapon by appearing to be an army. They post anonymously as this big community that hates so-and-so and tries to rally other people to hate you through mob mentality. I know some people like FrenzyRumble n' friends who have used 4chan to promote their work while calling for hackers to attack their competition. It's a sound strategy in some cases and a minor annoyance in others.

It's pretty obvious from the thread it's just one troll, man. Nobody else really cares.

Wait, what?! Are you serious? The "ProCustomizers" crowd?

No worries, it shocks people the first time. I remember a close friend of mine actually calling me up and was freaking out because people were posting his stuff and making online threats. He didn't have any idea about the site or what went on there. Once you figure out how they work the shock factor wears off. You're fine, let them quarrel and yell about you. I was duped into making an Anonymous and Xenu custom for someone before I knew what 4chan really was. Turns out it was a ploy by /toy/ board to get me into trouble with the /b/ board and I ended up with an article about me on Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Now that you're recognized on /toy/ you do need to be a little bit more careful. People there may try to start false commissions and waste your time, try to hack your site, spam your email, or general troll-type stuff. But since relatively new to all this they won't put fort that kind of effort just yet. Just be cautious about anyone wanting to pay you 5 grand for making an army of Vehicons all of a sudden with no down payment.

Dunno about FR, but Jin used to virally advertize his junk on /toy/ all the time be really egotistical about it. That's when people started getting annoyed at him.

These days though, Jin and FR are basically joke-words with no real meaning.

You do realize he's right behind you, right?

Yeah, last year. I was like hmmmmm, there's a lot of FR's customs showing up there...and crap being talked about me, encline, and a few others. So I dropped an email to one of the admins I know and asked him to snag the IP's of those posts. Then I dug up a recent hate-filled email from Mike and snagged the IP's from the full headers. Whatta ya know, they matched. He didn't even bother to use a proxy. After I outed him on /toy/ his customs stopped appearing there and the hate threads for other customizers died down, go figure.


Yeah...no. /toy/ isn't my target audience by a longshot, everyone there likes off-the-shelf stuff. It's why I try to post guides and tips there to try and help the people who do want to make things for themselves. I'm only going to advertise on boards where I can back up my work by being a member, places with customizing sections of forums where people are interested in it. Advertising anything custom on /toy/ is a fruitless action and will get you despised pretty fast. Which is why trolls there find it funny to spam pics of my stuff going OMG THIS IS TEH COOLEST THING EVAR in order to anger everyone. That place is a multi-layered psychological cesspool of entitled leg-pulling.

Just saying man, he's like that on /toy/.

Well he was, doesn't post any more and nobody cares.


Thing is Cheets, this isn't the first time you've been brought up?

Generally the reaction to your customs vary, however you don't charge a fortune like Mr. Saotome and his drybrushed monstrosities, so nobody really has a beef with you at all.

I dunno if Jin is being paranoid, but the stuff he's talking about won't happen to you.

If you're watching Cheets, this is how you spot a troll from /toy/ when they slip up. Grab your scalpel and let's dissect.

(you don't charge a fortune like Mr. Saotome)
Everyone knows the bidders decide the price on ebay, especially when I start all my auctions at a penny. /toy/ knows this and tries to get people to believe I set my own prices. Once a custom sells for more than a vaunted Hot Toys 12" figure they will label you as a wallet-raper.

(his drybrushed monstrosities)
That's the battle cry of the /toy/ troll, drubrushing everywhere. They spam that label on every custom whether the technique was used or not and it's become a meme. If someone brings up drybrushing out of nowhere it's a good bet they're a /toy/ troll.

So I'd question anything Hora says at this point, I'm betting he's one of the people mirroring posts in the thread going on there I was altered to just a few minutes ago.

Cheets, I gave this some thought, and no... no you are not a scalper. And let me tell you why...

A Scalper will buy and then resell a hasbro product at an elevated price for his own profit. Now on the surface that may seem like what you do, HOWEVER, unlike the scalpers you open them up and add paint to them, and upon that moment, the instant that paintbrush touches that figure it ceases to be a hasbro product and becomes a Cheets product, at that moment you own it, because you bring something to the figure that only you can do, and THAT is what you sell.

Look I know where your coming from. I've been being called a monster on a daily basis for the past 4 years by every yahoo that has access to the internet because me & Gisiele write a sexy webcomic. And it can get to you, believe me I know what it's like. but at some point you just have to shut them all out and do what you love to do.

Everybody, let's be careful about trash-talking others. If you have an opinion about somebody's work, that's fine. If you have evidence of somebody doing something untoward, that's fine. If you want to discuss fraught territories of taste, ethics, and decorum, that's a good conversation to have.

But if you're saying something just to get a rise out of somebody, or if you're doing so in a way that suggests you don't have the decency to address the very people in the thread whom you are discussing, then that's not fine, and you need to cut it out.

You think /toy/ is bad, you should check out the papercraft board some time.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to take a cue from you, Walky and Jin and just let it slide. No reason to give the trolls anything to feed on.

Actually I don't even post on /toy/, just lurk there.

First off, even if your fans are the ones who drive your prices up you're still making mountains of money for selling cannibalized action figures. I can understand why this "factory line" style of construction would annoy some people, especially if you start chopping up stuff that isn't common. Cheets doesn't cannibalize the toys he does. And his prices are reasonable because he just does nice touch-ups.

As regards to drybrushing, it's a buzzword sure, but the overly-weathered look you're fond of does kind of bleed in together with everything else you do. Your creativity is weird, because you do lots of different sorts of figures but they often have such a similar pallete. It's like, hm, maybe someone painting a warhammer army but they only own a few paintpots, and you can tell just by looking at the army.

Jesus Christ.

All I see from people posting insults abpout your work are either jealous because they cant create the kind of customs you do or are just PO'd because nobody wants to pay the ridiculous prices they charge for what they make.I wish there wasnt so much cut-throatery among customizers,(just my own opinion),but I enjoy checking out the figures you do and it gives me some inspiration to try it myself and if you can make a little extra cash from your work,there is nothing wrong with that.

I'm pretty sure I've seen pictures where you removed the top of a figure's head for one reason or another, so, Yes. Yes you are.

I just read through 3 pages to make sure that joke was safe to post, and it wasn't even a very good one. The things I do for my craft.

Ok Cheets as usual Im late to the party sorry for that. I am a fan of yours and you are truly a good guy with great skills. I wanna post this before reading through all this. But no you are no scalper not in any sense. If buying a couple of figures and modifying them gee I guess Im a scalper too. I bought a bunch of bots from a flea market with hopes of selling them gee I guess Im a scalper. I call up all my local stores and ask when certain products arrive and if they can be held for me gee I guess im a scalper. I go to stores right when they open to get what I want gee I guess Im a scalper. I bought 8 RTS Windchargers at my local Five Below to sell at cost to help those who can't get them gee I guess Im a scalper.

Na you sell an amazing product that I hope one day I can get one off of you soon. You my friend are no scalper.

I should probably sleep rather then post this, but screw it, I'll stay up rewording it anyway.

Cheets:
Let me finish the thought before you skip past this, but Yes, not because of malicous forethought, but due to the results of your actions, in a way. You buy an excessive amount of one figure from local stores, and maybe you deprive other people of the chance of finding that figure themselves. That's the thing about scalpers people hate, and you do it. No you aren't trying to create false scarcity, no you are not just turing around and reselling them on eBay (well you are, but, you know, anyway), however if after you leave a store with 4 Ratchets and 4 Knock-Outs a kid/collector comes looking and can't find one, the end result is the same. Honestly I don't think you would have posted any thing if you didn't think along the same lines anyway. If it really bothers you, you need to order online. Defer increased costs to your eBay customers, but leave toys on shelves. But really it doesn't matter, do what you want.

As far as /toy/ is concerned, it really isn't that bad. It's no worse then here or tfw or anywhere else people talk about things online. /toy/ is just a bunch of people who love toys and can't let jive slide. For example take this thread: Are you ready for summer?. That's more fun in 60 posts then I've seen on here in a while. On the other hand you have this: Battle Beasts. Which starts out as just joy on the new Takara Beast saga line and then deginerates because people can't just let jive slide on the internet. No different from the constant arguing over Animated and Prime here, or 3rd party toys, or whatever, just whining and bitching because you can't just drop it and accept that people have different tatses. And yeah I'm guilty to, but everyone is. /toy/ is just like any other board once you learn to just scroll past the pettiness and get to the actual discussion and love of the hobby. And occasional figma porn.

Which brings me to Jin and /toy/ and their special relationship. I don't like his customs as much as some others but he has talent and fine people like it, whatever good on you dude. Get that money, as it were. However here's the issue, you know /toy/ doesn't like you. You know every time you post or say /toy/ on twitter or whatever it's causing a problem. You can't just stop, sit back and say hug it what do I care and never go there or mention /toy/ because gasp people don't like me so I have to troll them back. No, you really don't. /toy/ would be better if they could just not respond to you, but it's kids, and they're dumb so what do you expect. If you want to post helpful tips, you have the option of not using your trip code and turning all the threads you post in to jive just to watch the reaction. Yeah, /toy/ will troll each other, but you are no better, because just like them you can't just ignore it.

So does it make a difference to you knowing that I only purchase figures after people make the request for them?
I don't stock up on toys and start making them before people want them. That would be a foolish potential waste of my own time. I'll purchase the first with the intent of painting and selling it on ebay. After that I purchase toys on demand from customers OR they simply ship them to me. Of the six Knock Outs I've produced so far only two were bought in store. Two others were sent to me and two more were ordered online.
Ratchet is the same way. I pick it up as people request it.
So, knowing that each figure has a planned destination already, does that still make me a scalper?

I have an unopened extra figure in front of me right now. It's Bumblebee. Guess that makes me a scalper for preventing some kid/collector from purchasing it.

Well is it:

"A Scalper is someone who buys multiples of a figure with the purpose of making money off of them"

or

"A Scalper is someone who buys up a whole bunch of figures at once as soon as they come out to make a huge profit off them"



Dictionary doesn't really specify an amount or specifies use?

The "established value" changes once you alter the toy into something more valuable. The "established value" of one of Cheets' customs is not the original $12.99. It is $12.99 plus additional labor.