I collected rare music and live concert VHS videos, CDs, DVDs, and posters in the 80s and 90s and early 00s....lots of bootlegs of course, since there was no internet in the 80s and people mostly were on dial up during the 90s. Most were/are very rare promotional and professionally produced that I purchased from Japan and Europe, or west coast radio stations through mail order that were put up for sale in publications like "Goldmine" and music magazines such as CMJ Monthly, Alternative Press, and huH, some now long defunct. Never really understood the appeal of "buying/owning" movies, when they could easily be rented, (or "illegally" copied to VHS, and/or stored on HDD or burned to DVD/CD) since there are very few movies that I would want to re-watch more than very rarely or even occasionally, such as the Monty Python flicks, and unless they were quite unusual, rare, and foreign, like the European movies "More" and "The Valley" (Le Valle) that had Pink Floyd musical soundtracks.
Anyway, I had the desire to start my own "brick and mortar" video rental store, but instead of renting movies, I was going to rent and sell ONLY music in all formats and genres, CD, SACD, VHS, and DVD, as well as posters, t-shirts and music-related memorabilia. Thankfully, however, I never got to the point of attempting to get a bank or SBA loan to finance my idea, b/c broadband internet took off by the turn of the century, and the music that I liked pretty much had died off by then, being replaced by divas, boy "bands" like "In-Stink" and "Reacharound Boys", as well as rap, and hip-hop, the latter two I know are still very popular, but outside of rap-infused bands like RATM, Korn, and Faith No More, just not my cup of tea.
While I was a postal employee for USPS , I often had the job of training new hires to learn how to operate mail-sorting machinery and equipment. By doing so, I was paid at a higher level/grade. There was one guy who I trained, who told me that he was fond of collecting movie DVDs, and sure enough, I ran into him a couple of times at our local Best Buy, where he was always in the process of buying a half-dozen or so of movie DVDs ((shrug)).
Well...a year or so after he was hired, a new DVD movie-rental mail-order service started showing up in the mail-stream, as most of us know, is called "Netflix". Sure wish that I would have come up with that idea, but at the time, I really didn't think that it would become as wildly successful as it eventually was. Anyway, the guy who I mentioned earlier, was eventually caught and arrested by the postal police and the USPS Dept. of the Inspector General's office, for feloniously stealing the DVDs that were being shipped by or being returned through the mail by customers of Netflix, and when they made him open the trunk of his car. there were several hundred stolen Netflix DVDs inside. Who knows how many that he had at his house as well.
The guy was taking the DVDs out of the mail-stream, then home after his shift ended, copying and burning them, then selling the "illegal" copies that he made online or in advertisements in the newspapers. Since these Netflix DVDs were mailed and returned in envelopes that did not reveal what the title of the movies were, he had to steal many of them, in order to be sure to get different ones, then he would of course, after copying them, have to put them back into the mail to be sent to the customers, or returned to Netflix. Since many Netflix customers received their ordered/rented DVDs a week or two late, or were being charged late fees for returning them very late (or not at all) eventually Netflix figured out where the "problem" really was. This dummy/thief wasn't smart enough to realize that he was taking DVDs out of one or two zip-codes, and since the postal mail-sorting machinery is assigned to just a couple of zip codes overnight for delivery, it was easy for the postal police to narrow down the "suspects" since employees were assigned to one machine every week..I know that this guy wasn't the only ex-USPS jailbird who likely has been caught for stealing Netflix DVDs in the mail as an employee.
, Dragonball Z card game in high school (played at the world tournament the last year gen con was in milwaukee), and now i occasionally play magic. other than that its basically just movies and video games.
