Guru Larry did a fascinating video about the rise and collapse of the Beanie Baby market

[[McD] James]

To my memory, the Beanie Baby craze that happened in the mid to late nineties was nowhere near as hysterical in Canada as it was in America. I vaguely recall just kind of raising an eyebrow at the whole thing, without fully understanding why so many people were obsessed with hoarding the silly things. In retrospect, it's quite the intriguing saga, underlined with themes of greed, shortsightedness, and even murder. 

 

If you look up the rarest Beanie Babies on eBay, you'll see some of them desperately trying to be sold off for upwards of $3,000, but some of them will also be going for around $10. The comic book industry also tried to inflate its own self-worth around the same time by overproducing a lot of poorly written no.1 collectors edition comics. Economic bubbles are a really fascinating thing to examine. 

 

 

 

 

[Linguica]

I have a question, what makes you think it's normal to just write "Guru Larry" in the subject of your thread with no explanation as to who that is? I am genuinely curious at how and why young people consider certain obscure people "famous" and that everyone ought to just know who they are.

[[McD] James]

33 minutes ago, Linguica said:

I have a question, what makes you think it's normal to just write "Guru Larry" in the subject of your thread with no explanation as to who that is? I am genuinely curious at how and why young people consider certain obscure people "famous" and that everyone ought to just know who they are.

 

Mostly it's so that people can avoid clicking on the thread if they already know they dislike him. I'd imagine the natural thing people would assume is that my including of his name would be to try to add some name recognition to my thread, but really it's just to save people the hassle of opening the video only to think to themselves "Oh no, not him. I'm out."

[chungy]

3 hours ago, Linguica said:

I have a question, what makes you think it's normal to just write "Guru Larry" in the subject of your thread with no explanation as to who that is? I am genuinely curious at how and why young people consider certain obscure people "famous" and that everyone ought to just know who they are.

Was that just the title? The present one about Beanie Babies was enough for me to know what the thread really was about :P

[mrthejoshmon]

Guru Larry is a beautiful English treasure who is actually quite well known for what he is within the gaming world, known for previously doing a TV show, some design/artwork for old gaming publications and his newer but still brilliant "Fact Hunt" and "Rise and Demise" series as well as a few other ventures, I'd highly recommend his content myself.

 

Just finished watching his vid now, a quality look into the oddly interesting world of TY Beanie Babies is something I thought I'd never say but there you go.

[Neurosis]

18 hours ago, Linguica said:

obscure people "famous" and that everyone ought to just know who they are

It's the internet, you can literally look up anything you want within a few seconds

 

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=guru+larry

[geo]

22 hours ago, Linguica said:

I have a question, what makes you think it's normal to just write "Guru Larry" in the subject of your thread with no explanation as to who that is? I am genuinely curious at how and why young people consider certain obscure people "famous" and that everyone ought to just know who they are.

Oddly enough he's the first TV video game host to go to Youtube. I like the guy, his career on Youtube was dead for like 8 years before he stumbled upon the fact he can watch other people's content... present it in a different and better format and reap the rewards while having others edit the videos for him and write scripts for him. Whenever there's less work for more money its a good path to take.

 

He has a long memory that predates Google's search functions. So he can remember obscure scandals that were big at the time, but forgotten today.

 

... He also did art for Sega games back in the day.

[Lila Feuer]

How old is Linguica?

[Spectre.Charles]

40 minutes ago, cyan0s1s said:

How old is Linguica?

32,432

[Woolie Wool]

This shit happens and people still think, "hmmm yes capitalism is a perfectly good economic system". Except for Ty Warner and other top executives, there was absolutely nothing good in this craze for anyone, especially not the children the toys were meant for. Hooray for commodity fetishism!

[[McD] James]

1 hour ago, Woolie Wool said:

This shit happens and people still think, "hmmm yes capitalism is a perfectly good economic system". Except for Ty Warner and other top executives, there was absolutely nothing good in this craze for anyone, especially not the children the toys were meant for. Hooray for commodity fetishism!

 

There were a few other people that became incredibly rich off of selling them. I remember reading about an 11-year-old who made his family multimillionaires off of buying and selling Beanies. But in the end, far more people lost money than profited.  

[Mr. Freeze]

>toys never meant for the secondary market lose value therefore capitalism is bad

 

what the fuck am i reading

[Woolie Wool]

The entire gigantic craze would have never happened outside of capitalism. The very idea of putting your children's entire inheritance into a bunch of fucking stuffed toys in a get-rich-quick scheme would never happen without competitive markets and commodity fetishism. And the Beanie Baby craze is only one manifestation of a pathological feature of capitalism that has endured since the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. People had barely even invented capitalism and they were already blowing up national economies with bubbles.

[geo]

On 2/13/2018 at 1:48 PM, DepravedDiptera said:

32,432

You should listen to the interview.

[Reisal]

I remember those things, they were everywhere. Now they aren't.

[chungy]

9 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

The very idea of putting your children's entire inheritance into a bunch of fucking stuffed toys in a get-rich-quick scheme would never happen without competitive markets and commodity fetishism.

Yes, because people can be morons, let's discard literally the only rational and compassionate economic system we have to date. Yay progress?

[dew]

I respect Larry's obscure fact finding and forgotten history spelunking, but I cringe through his videos (on the rare occasion I watch them), because I find his speech insufferable. The vids are often protracted by trivial fluff disguised as context setting and his slooow, careful and tonally exaggerated diction strongly reminds me of edutainment for, like, 5 year olds. He's a shrewd observer of things both cool and lame, but I feel like I'm missing some crayons and a colouring book when he's talking.

[Woolie Wool]

4 hours ago, chungy said:

Yes, because people can be morons, let's discard literally the only rational and compassionate economic system we have to date. Yay progress?

COMPASSIONATE?

 

You mean to tell me that banks illegally foreclosing people's homes and getting away with it is compassionate?!

That private "prisons" (slave labor camps) are compassionate?!

That children in the Congo being worked to death to mine coltan for more fucking iPhones even though the iPhones we have would work perfectly well if coders would exercise some discipline writing software is compassionate?!

That Martin Shkreli raising the prices of life-saving medications by orders of magnitude because he could and bragging about it is compassionate?! He probably would have gotten away with it too if he hadn't run his big stupid mouth too much.

That five scumbag billionaires owning as much wealth as almost half the entire human species (probably more now because inequality is accelerating) is compassionate?!

 

Fuck the idea of it being "compassionate", it is sadistic. It consigns almost all of humanity to various forms of bondage for the sake of funneling money and luxuries to a small elite of sociopaths who raise their spoiled children without empathy, without curiosity, without any sort of common human decency so that their evil is perpetuated across generations. These incidents are not isolated, they are not exceptions. THE ENTIRE BIOSPHERE IS DYING from habitat destruction, pollution, and global warming because the rich don't think they're fucking rich enough already!

[esselfortium]

I agree with you that capitalism is a fucking terrible disaster but let's please end this line of discussion

[boris]

I wonder if we'll see videos like that about crypto currencies in 20 years.

[NightmareZer0]

I love Guru Larry's videos. I've seen almost all of them. If you dig deep and look at the other Youtuber's he is friend's with you will find other great Youtubers. Slope's Game Room...Top Hat Gaming Man..Kim Justice. 

 

Anyways, this is a great video.