Premium Touhou!? A copy of December Issue of Comic Rex 2006 being sold at 350 000 yen!?

[Anonymous No.]

An amazon page listing the 12th issue of Comic REX in 2006 made thread headlines all over futaba after reaching a price tag of 350 000 yen. The issue is prized by collectors, especially touhou fans, because it is the only way to possess a physical copy of Memorizable Gensokyo, the companion manga to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense.

This listing wasn't the only place selling a copy of the book, however, the prices elsewhere are similarly exorbitant. Mercari, another e-commerce website, lists the issue at 333 333 yen, which is around the neighborhood of 3000 USD.

The companion manga was not included in the PMiSS compilation because of the excessive cost of color pages, and because it would not fit the style of PMiSS that ZUN was going for. ZUN had intended the compilation to have the look and feel of an actual book found in Gensokyo, and thought that an extra comic would not help with that image.

If you would like to get a look at the original copy, don't despair! The Japanese National Diet Library includes this issue of Comic REX at it's manga archives, along with other Touhou original works. The library is open to everyone, regardless of nationality, as long as the visitor is above 18.

[Anonymous No.]

physical copies are retarded and people who feel good about possessing them are even more stupid.
None of those copies will last forever and will always degrade over time no matter how safe you keep them, unlike digital media.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150094
digital copies suffer from degradation over time just like physical copies do.

1. Digital copies are, in the end, still stored in physical mediums.
2. The lifetime of digital storage media are measured in the decades.
3. While parities and checksums do exist, it's not impossible for them to be corrupted in such a way to appear intact from the storage system's point of view.

Also, don't you think there must be a good reason why people are willing to pony up 350k yen for these?

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150178
>digital copies suffer from degradation over time just like physical copies do.
Incorrect, digital files don't degrade

>Digital copies are, in the end, still stored in physical mediums.
>The lifetime of digital storage media are measured in the decades.
You can negate this by chaning the physical medium over time, since digital files don't degrade, you can just keep copying them over and over idefinitely.

>While parities and checksums do exist, it's not impossible for them to be corrupted in such a way to appear intact from the storage system's point of view.
What do you mean? with enough reduncancy this is not a real possibility to be honest.

>don't you think there must be a good reason why people are willing to pony up 350k yen for these?
Yeah, the same reason why stupid people think they are special for owning a physical copy of earthbound.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150256
I actually studied data degradation, I hope I can communicate the concept to you.

You digitize something and make copy A1. A1 is stored in, let's say, a magnetic disk drive. How do you propose that we make sure A1 is exactly how it was, bit by bit, forever and ever, considering that magnetic drives naturally lose charge over time (meaning even if you just let them be, data has a chance to get corrupted)? I'm interested in hearing what you think will be done.

>What do you mean?
This is big enough of an issue that if you download large files over the internet, they usually give you a checksum published on their website which you can check to make sure the file you received is correct. The reason being that the transport protocol you used doesn't see an issue on a per packet basis if one of the packets got corrupted in such a way to appear uncorrupted. Even if reliable data transfer has been engineered to minimize this, law of large numbers takes over in large files. A million astronomically small chances of failure could easily ruin an entire transfer.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150336
Magnetic disk drives are not the only way to store digital data. They are cheap but not exactly the best we have.

>A million astronomically small chances of failure could easily ruin an entire transfer
Yes, and a meteor could hit you in the head tomorrow morning. If your argument relies on what is "possible" then you could also convince anyone that anything is real.
But you are moving the goalpost here. Physical media will always be inferior to digital.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150355
>They are cheap but not exactly the best we have
What other options, then? Flash storage and optical disks are equally impermanent.

>Yes, and a meteor could hit you in the head tomorrow morning
That's very different. That's one astronomically small chance. I'm talking about a large number of astronomically small chances. I'll give you an example similar to what I said: would it be likely for me to get run over in my lifetime if there's a 0.0005% chance I get run over every time I cross the street and I crossed the street 100 000 times in my life? Computing the chance of this gives me a whopping 40% chance of getting run over. Even if the chances were low, I have a 40% chance of getting run over once, and getting run over once is enough to damage someone.

Going back to file transfer, even if the chance of a unit of transfer being corrupted is very small, if you have enough of them occurring over a given transfer, there's a significant chance that they might occur. In the case of file types like executables, there are plenty of places where the corruption could occur that would lead to a catastrophic failure. What's worse, you only need it to happen ONCE.

The goalposts have not been moved. You raised quite boldly that "digital files don't degrade" and I've challenged that assertion by showing you that they do. If you're going to call the price people are willing to pay for this comic "stupid", you better have a better justification than this.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150445
So you don't know that there are other storage options besides flash storage and optical disks.
Looks like was just wasting my time with a child, how sad.

[Anonymous No.]

I wonder what ZUN thinks about people selling/reselling his CDs, books and games at jacked up prices.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150451
Looks to me like you were standing on shaky ground, and you realized it just now, so you looked for a flimsy excuse to back down.
Nothing you've said has made sense and you don't seem to be reading what I say, on account of you misrepresenting my arguments or avoiding addressing them.

>>20150495
There's nothing unethical going on here. They own that issue and they get to decide how much to resell it for. It just happened that this turned out to be such a coveted item that they get to charge so much. After all, the true prices of things are how much people are willing to pay.

If ZUN wouldn't approve of this "jacked up" price then I don't approve of ZUN.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150495
It can't be helped.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150445
Digital files only degrade if you're retarded. A SHA-256 checksum will in practice never be corrupted and remain valid. Chances of it happening are less than winning the Powerball lottery jackpot 9 times in a row. And unlike analog, digital files can have perfect backups. There has never been an instance of data loss or corruption that wasn't caused by human error.

[Anonymous No.]

Update on the story:

Touhou is no stranger to extremely high prices. The trial version of Perfect cherry blossom sold for 55 000 yen, much higher than the full version's 1700 yen list price. Other than the limited supply, the trial had something else going for it to have fetched such a high price.

Included in the game is a different sprite (pictured) used from the one in PCB's release version. It's more moe than release version's portrait. This small piece of a character's history may have driven a demand for the trial version. On that note, Memorizable Gensokyo is the very first appearance of Hieda no Akyuu, and the very first appearance of a character that was not first introduced in a game. That may be one of the reasons it's so valued, aside from its limited supply.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150178
>people are willing to pony up 350k yen for these?
That's the asking price, not the actual market price (what the highest paying buyer is willing to pay for them)

I could put my used jizz tissues on the open market for $5000 and say that my cum is valued in the thousands of dollars

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150661
>There's nothing unethical going on here.
I think you mean that there's nothing "unlawful" about speculating/flipping comic books.

Ethics can and do vary wildly from one person to the next, and your statement would be less misleading if you correctly identified it as your own opinion about what is ethical.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150661
You argument is a logical fallacy my dude.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150985
The ethics here rests on the right to private property. I'm just assuming we all respect the legitimacy of that right, which isn't a stretch, isn't it? It's not just "my own opinion" at that point. If you respect private property rights and consider it a part of your ethics, then there is nothing unethical about this. If you do respect it and think this is unethical, I'm interested to hear how you rationalized that.

If you don't respect private property rights then I hope your brain tumor gets cured soon.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150953
Marisa on the left there looks really damn good.
Has anyone ripped it?

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150953
The trial ver portraits are absolutely adorable. I can understand the high price.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150053
All that money for Aki Eda's crappy artwork

[Anonymous No.]

>>20150971
You're not wrong, but these manga have sold for ridiculous prices in the past. This article written in 2015 mentions a clipping of just Memorizable Gensokyo (so not the whole issue) was bid up from 3000 yen and sold at a whopping 213 000 yen! The item being sold in the OP is the full comic, and it's 2018 so it might have increased in demand considering the number of touhou fans are ever increasing. 350 000 yen is not unreasonable offer.

http://yahooauctionwatch.livedoor.biz/archives/52261092.html

[Anonymous No.]

>>20152806
Art is subjective.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20152806
That doesn't seem like what they're paying for. Well, it's what they're getting, but not the reason behind the price. Get it?

[Anonymous No.]

>>20151419
Sakuya face 2.0

[Anonymous No.]

>>20162101
Looks like something made with that animegirl face generator AI.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20151085
Why do YOU think that it's ethical to hoard things for the sole purpose of reselling them?

I bet you think it's ethical to buy up food before a hurricane and resell it to desperate families for a massive markup.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20168000
Not my fault you didn't get it first nerd.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20169054
People like you who colonize otaku culture for profit will face a great and painful retribution.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20168000
>hoarding
Let's get the facts right. We don't even know that's what is happening here. Reselling a 1000 yen manga for 330 times its amount isn't automatically some normie hoarding otaku goods, only caring about profit. This could easily have been someone who owned it, kept it in good condition, and might need some cash and is perfectly willing to sell that piece of touhou history but only for a very high price, because they value it at that price.

Either way, it's not unethical if you believe in private property rights.

>I bet you think it's ethical to buy up food before a hurricane and resell it to desperate families for a massive markup.
Yes. It's messed up, but there's nothing unethical about it if you believe in private property rights. They bought it with the fruits of their own labor, it's theirs. End of story.

Besides, if you're talking about price gouging, that's not how it happens in times of disasters.
The people who are buying up food before a hurricane are the smart people who know a hurricane is going to fuck them up. If you don't do that, you take responsibility for that dumb choice.
The people reselling food and other disaster relief goods at a high price are people who import it from outside the disaster area, using high demand, a broken supply chain, and high risk to justify the high prices.

Tell me how that's unethical. Like I said, I'm assuming you and mostly everyone has private property rights as a foundation of their ethics.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20169436
Like if otaku could actually manage to do something in their lives.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20168000
>I bet you think it's ethical to buy up food before a hurricane and resell it to desperate families for a massive markup.
It obviously is. If you think people should have government help (which is a reasonable position), then it should be directly from the government, not from unaccountable third parties.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20170834
>It's messed up, but there's nothing unethical about it
You're quite literally contradicting yourself here.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20168000
Way to shoot yourself in the foot, retard. Hoarding for disasters is necessary to ensure enough food exists and stimulate food production, and the failure to hoard is what creates shortages. The guy who hoards food to resell won't need any more food himself, so he's acting more ethically than someone who doesn't hoard at all and winds up demanding food after the disaster. Obviously, we're assuming he gathered his food long in advance like that manga, not after the hurricane became known.

Unlike food, manga isn't needed for survival, so the degree of markup doesn't matter here. All that matters is motivating hoarders to hoard things in case they get valuable someday, which is the only way to make sure things will be preserved in large quantities.

[Anonymous No.]

>>20179519
I'm not. While it doesn't seem compassionate at all, it's not unethical, as I have outlined above. Don't quote people and leave out the important bits.