The Pez Outlaw

http://www.playboy.com/articles/pez-outlaw

166 39 11 years ago

yefim• 11 years ago

Never thought I'd see the day where a Playboy article is on the top of HN. Great read.

eli• 11 years ago

The 1994 Bill Gates interview is really worth a read if you haven't seen it before: http://web.archive.org/web/20090606130047/http://www.playboy...

vinceguidry2• 11 years ago

I'm not. Playboy's articles have always been tremendous. When I was younger I had a t-shirt with a Playboy logo on it and the phrase "I read the articles".

I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content. Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the music, purchasing a file makes more sense. But I never save articles, I don't have the time to re-read them. Subscription seems perfect.

How much would I pay for such a service? Potentially a lot. If it could get me past any paywall or even just the most common ones I run into, I might pay a hundred bucks a month for it. I can consume a lot of long-form articles, many many more than I can books or movies. Subscribing to a magazine has too little signal-to-noise, I'm not looking for just any article to read. Nor do I have enough time to read a whole magazine.

sun_machine• 11 years ago

I'm sure you've seen this, but to those who want to get a start on a curated resource of longform articles, I've always liked the aptly named http://longform.org

robocaptain• 11 years ago

Also try thebrowser.com

Mostly free, but if you subscribe you will get lots more (great) mostly long-form articles, and in cases where the article would normally be behind a paywall, they will do a special version for thebrowser's paying customers.

lmm• 11 years ago

If you don't have time to read a whole magazine once a month - or just the interesting-titled articles from it - then you're really not looking to read a lot.

I find glancing through the medium.com homepage works pretty well if I'm just looking for one or two stories to read.

hellbanner• 11 years ago

Weighted upvotes?

matt4077• 11 years ago

There is /r/thelongread or /r/longform I believe. Part of the problem is actually not discovery but availability – there just isn't that much longform content.

If you keep an eye on vanity fair, the atlantic, new yorker, the sunday times and a few others, you're likely to read most of the good stuff.

Better revenue streams might increase the supply. You are right that a model similar to music is needed – I'm not going to pay 100$+/year for a magazine subscription, but I'd gladly pay 40$/month for 'the netflix of journalism'. I've also seen quite a lot of writers publish kindle shorts which could become 'the itunes of journalism'.

slyall• 11 years ago

Vanity Fair is another magazine you might not expect to have great articles among the hundreds of pages of Fashion ads

https://longform.org/publications/vanity-fair

oliwary• 11 years ago

There is also a fantastic interview with Steve Jobs from playboy: http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs

BillFranklin• 11 years ago

Playboy: Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s a big change for people used to keyboards. Why the mouse?
Jobs: If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: “There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.” If you have a spot—“There!” [he points]—I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

Amazing. Thanks

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

The guards gave the Americans a choice: Surrender the undocumented merchandise and enter Austria, or turn back into war-torn Eastern Europe.

What war? This was Hungary in 1994, 4-5 years after a surprisingly peaceful end of communist rule.

DanBC• 11 years ago

They're talking about the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia - the Bosnian War; the Croatian War of Independance etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

Yugoslavia bordered the two countries mentioned - Austria and Hungary.

rostigerpudel• 11 years ago

Calling Hungary war-torn is a stretch, yes. But (South-)Eastern Europe at the time was an area of conflict and that was felt in Hungary as well.

The end of communism was surprisingly peaceful. Yugoslavia rapidly disintegrating afterwards was an entirely different affair. Austria had a border with Yugoslavia - with the part that today is known as Slowenia. The actual independence war of Slovenia lasted only 10 days [1]. Still, troop movements happened in sight of the Austrian border and the Austrians were not happy at all.

The outbreak of full conflict between the recently declared independent states of Croatia and Bosnia with Yugoslavia happend shortly after and was not over in 1993/94 [2]. So I guess any Austrian border patrol would have been wary of refugees/smugglers/shady elements crossing any eastern border.

Hungary was never immediately affected by the war in the former Yugoslavia, but it had an enormously long border with a country at war with itself and the economic impact (loss of trade with the southern neighbours, influx of refugees etc.) could be felt in many ways. So, compared to western standards, Hungary might, at the time, have looked slightly less than appealing. In particular if you didn't know the local language and were smuggling...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

mxfh• 11 years ago

Couldn't get around the sensationalism either. There was no war in Eastern Europe at large in '94. There were the Yugoslav/Balkan wars, but they were exclusively on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Especially the borders of Austria were never in danger, let alone the Austrian/Hungarian border. At it's early height there was the Ten-Day War in Slovenia in '91, which was the closest the war came to Western Europe and its magnitude was less of that of one month of the ongoing conflict in Donbass/Ukraine.

Even speaking of Hungary, which shares a border with Croatia, Slovenia, some with Serbia further south east[corrected], but not Bosnia the situation was tense but not war-torn. The peak of the Croatian part of the Yugoslav wars was over with the 1992 ceasefire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence

foobarian• 11 years ago

Hungary does share a border with Serbia, though whether you consider Vojvodina Serbia or not could be debated.

abruzzi• 11 years ago

Most of this, pre-eBay. The article mentions conventions, but I wonder what the primary avenue for his sales was?

cge• 11 years ago

Conventions, newsletters, mailing lists, lists of potential buyers to contact personally, collectors contacting him and asking...

Having observed people in a fanatical collecting hobby (vintage pens) through the insistence of a friend of mine, I get the impression that people involved in such collecting often strongly dislike eBay and similar sites. eBay, for all its faults, creates some level of transparency and openness in the market, and allows everyone to buy, sell, and appraise. For what are essentially fragile but persistent bubbles, transparency is bad.

Dealers want to be able to tell stories about pieces and their rarity, without a large market to let buyers verify them, and want to be able to hide sales, letting them inflate prices as much as possible. They certainly don't want anyone to be able to compare prices. Buyers want to be able to get special access to sales of pieces (or what they think is special access), or want to find people who don't know the value of what they have.

It's interesting hearing people in the hobby talk about these things. Dealers will rant about eBay and its dangers, or about buyers who "don't want to pay enough" (meaning they didn't sell that piece at all). Buyers will talk about how so-and-so contacted them first about a new piece, or about the amazing rarity of pieces that nevertheless seem to show up pretty often, or about how values appreciate with time. Unsurprisingly, doing painstaking research on auction sales over the last several decades, my friend found that values of most pieces did not even outpace inflation. Somehow, this didn't dissuade him. The hobby/bubble in its current form, though, is dying, and that's a good thing.

This is even more the case for collecting bubbles that are based around items currently being manufactured, as there is always the possibility of just creating more, and that risk is highest when everyone knows what is going on. In this case, for example, the manufacturer was easily able to destroy the dealer's business, but did so because the pieces were being very publicly sold. Had he instead kept everything quiet, and sold privately, he could have kept up what was essentially a scam for much longer.

systemtheory2• 11 years ago

anyone else not clicking on the link since it's playboy.com?

systemtheory2• 11 years ago

-4 pts... wtf just happened

bliss• 11 years ago

I surprised myself by figuratively sitting at the edge of my seat reading this tale. The thing that interests me more though than the tale itself if the buyers. I'm not a collector. I can understand the shady dealings and the clandestine meetings to make cash selling these things, but I would love to read about the mind of the buyer of these things, that I consider junk. If I came across something in the attic that was judged by someone to be worth cash, then I'd happily part as long as it contained no sentimental value of course but I honestly can't understand how value works. I view it as a failing on my part, I'd honestly love to get into the head of collector types. Maybe I'm just too habitually frugal.

officemonkey• 11 years ago

I think it may be on the same spectrum that hoarding is on. When someone collects something from their childhood, nostalgia is a potent factor. Often the thing they're collecting is something pleasant from their childhood/youth (be it X-men comics, or baseball cards, or girly mags.)

Once there's a large group of "needful" collectors, the other collections (the kind that want to make money) show up. If an item becomes "hot" with needful collectors, the speculators will buy it up, creating scarcity and driving prices even higher.

This works out pretty good, until a disruption happens in the market. Sometimes the market gets flooded with low-value merch (how many X-titles were there?) Sometimes a couple of movie bombs ruin the property (exhibit number 1: "The Fantastic Four.")

You see this disruption in the "real world" too. When was the last time you saw a "used CD store?"

But for the "needful" collectors, the value is in having the thing. And the more the thing costs, the more value people place in having it.

pdw• 11 years ago

Here's a short (and quite sad) documentary about a family of Beanie Baby collectors -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgDsyj5eLmo

nogayli• 11 years ago

People do some crazy things. It's hard to imagine spending $100k on beanie babies or pez dispensers. In the 80s it was comics. In the 90s it was beanie babies and pez. I'm not sure what it is now in a few years, after the crash, we'll be hearing stories.

pyk• 11 years ago

I'd honestly love to get into the head of collector types.

As a previous Pez collector back in the 7th grade, or "Pezhead" (back in the 90s using my paper route money) who yes, attended several Pez conventions at the time, I can attest that the draw was in-part connecting with other people around a shared interest -- the community.

Although some of the email on the big Pez email list at the time [1] was buying and selling, a lot of it was joking around, organizing meet-ups, sharing stories about a great "find" at a garage sale etc...

For me, the ability to connect via email with people from around the globe talking about a subject like Pez was what stuck with me. Although my Pez collecting ended, that unifying aspect of the internet continued to inspire me through my formative years and continues to this day.

That said, here is an indie documentary about "Pezheads" if you are interested in hearing more about crazy collectors: http://pezheadsthemovie.com/

[1] http://www.pezlist.com/ The Original Pezheads Email List, online since 1995

JacobAldridge2• 11 years ago

I delivered a Social Media session at a business conference many years ago (07? 08? Back when that was something novel), and ran a quiz on Website Logos with Pez Dispensers as the prize.

I also wanted to make a point about hype and bubbles and evolving business models over time (what I guess we would now call pivoting). The Pez Dispensers were a way to discuss unbelievable bubbles, and e-Bay which evolved from a Pez swap & sell site into the auction juggernaut.

I'm sure some of the people in the room were laughing at inflated values for Pez and Tulips, while also investing their money into mortgage-backed securities.

c3o• 11 years ago

(Just an aside: Wikipedia says "the frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media, which were not interested in the company's previous explanation about wanting to create a 'perfect market')

judk2• 11 years ago

Wikipedia also has something to say about how the Tulip Mania was much less than has been portrayed. These fun stories tend to have a life of their own.

JacobAldridge2• 11 years ago

Well there you go! I hate it when I find myself perpetuating urban legends. Thank you.

I'll just have to go back to advising audiences that changing their Facebook profile picture on a regular basis will help cure cancer, prevent child abuse, catch Kony, and either impeach or re-elect President Obama (I'm never quite sure which).

Tomasoo• 11 years ago

"war-torn Eastern Europe" in Hungary in 1994? Looks like a parallel universe to me.

"the 100-mile-long freeway to Ormož was one of the most dangerous routes in Europe" In Slovenia in 1993? The war was in Bosnia hundreds of km away.

Thunder of rockets in ZAGREB?

When the easily verifiable stuff is fiction, one can assume a lot of the rest is also made up.

chx• 11 years ago

This is one shitty piece of work (beyond the laughable war torn Hungary others mentioned -- I was born Hungarian and back then I still lived there). There's an interesting start which never actually gets closure: we never learn what happened at that border crossing.

Also, “I pursued Patek across Austria in a car chase once" followed by "Steve bribed traffic cops with Pez dispensers stuffed with dollars." One, just how much money can you squeeze into a Pez dispenser? Two, bribing an Austrian cop? If this article said Hungarian, sure, bribing Hungarian cops was everyday business (pretty much everyone kept a conveniently large denomination bill in their driving license which at the time was folded not the credit card format) but have you ever tried to bribe an Austrian cop? Urgh.

mmarx• 11 years ago

we never learn what happened at that border crossing.

“So when the Austrian guards stopped Steve and Joshua at the Hungarian border and threatened to confiscate the toys, the Glews fled east to Budapest, bringing their Black Santas with them. Back in the U.S. the dispensers sold for hundreds of dollars each, and Steve vowed to return to Europe, next time with serious money.”

So they chose not to cross into Austria, but stay in Hungary and go to Budapest (and, somehow, to the US from there) instead.

operationblackg• 11 years ago

Rocket fire they are talking about being 1995 would be the Zagreb rocket attacks right on the border which seems like exactly the time they are taking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb_rocket_attacks

The Pez Outlaw

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