Clearoutageddon VII: Clutterpocalypse

Oh my goodness! Even by my, uh.. impressive track record, I'm not sure I've ever been this quiet online for this long. Yikes though, between sifting through mountains of paperwork, keeping my garden ticking over, a giant cleanup operation and finally Christmas, I've barley had the energy for coherent thought for a good chunk of the last year. :D Lots of collapsing in front of the TV to watch superhero shows though. (Black Lightning and Titans: highly recommended.)



So, that cleanup: well, it started off simply enough with this little shed. I really wanted to get all the clutter out so I'd have a bit more storage space for tools and stuff. Then, in a highly uncharacteristic display of me taking things a bit too far, that quickly escalated into removing every bit of scrap metal, moldy wood and broken and/or useless junk from my dad's old farm.



About 64 cubic yards of garbage! This is about 20. Some pretty tough work, but it's great to finally be able to move around without constantly stepping over trash. I mean, I going to miss the thrill of possibly contracting tetanus at every step, but still, it's good.

Clearoutageddon Part Six: Final Destination

After a couple of months of de-cluttering, and disposing of as much stuff as I could online, I was finally ready to head out with the remaining haul to one of our local charity shops - a haul that actually contained amongst everything else a frankly depressing number of bad purchasing decisions from the very recent past:



I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but there are a lot of DVDs (and Blu-rays) in my collection I've only ever watched once; the four on the left here being prime examples. Unlike many of the others though, these four I was pretty confident I'd never want to watch again.

Face Off, The Grudge, The Eye - all decent, but action and horror are two genres where the movies really have to be top notch, Terminator 2/The Omen calibre stuff before I'll watch them more than once. Unfortunately I bought all these before I'd finally come to realise that.

As for stand-up, I've yet to see a comedy set I've had any desire to rewatch; I'm starting to suspect that maybe it's just not my thing. (Thank goodness I don't get lumbered with any of the stand up DVDs that seem to come out in their thousands every Christmas).

The Goldfinger DVD on the other hand, I never watched at all. I picked it up for €4 in a CD Wow sale back in 2009. Seemed like a great deal, but then I ended up picking up the whole Connery Bond collection for €20 a couple of months later, having barley removed the shrink wrap from this. Whoops.

And finally, The Ministry of Sound Annual 2000. Or is it?



Actually, no. Inside, to my dismay, was the previous year's compilation which I'd already picked up a couple of years before. Not that I blame the seller on Amazon, with MoS using the year 2000 to market their CDs for two years running. I can only hope that the eventual charity shop buyer doesn't mind a bit of surprise. :D



The only engagement I had with Omen remake up until very recently was listening to a really softball interview with the director the Summer it came out while checking out the copy of Tekken 2 I'd just bought on eBay, simultaneously thinking "Yeah, this movie's going to be shit" and "Man, I should have that PS1 I ordered like, tomorrow. This is going to be awesome!". No, it was my brother who picked this up while we were browsing around GameStop several years later. I'd never watched it and I had no intention of doing so either. But, curiosity finally got the better of me last Halloween and I popped in another bloody copy of it I've ended up with it in the Omen box set, and yep, it's every bit as pointless and lame as I imagined.

Speaking of lame: Revenge of the Sith. So having finally accepted that Episodes I and II were mostly junk, I pretty much ignored this when it came out in '05. Over the following year though I started buying more and more into the consensus that "hey, this one was actually pretty good" to the point where I finally caved-in and bought the DVD. And it was terrible! Again! Well, alright: Palpatine was enjoyably over the top at times, but the rest of it? No thanks. *sigh* Another €18 own the drain. :D

Probably the best of the trio, but something I doubt I'll ever rewatch is Dodgeball, which I impulse bought in a sort of panic after fruitlessly (and exhaustively) searching the ex rental section of a video place for (non-existent) bargains back in the mid aughts.



A few more CDs. 1977, I decided to part with after upgrading to the awesome 3-CD reissue from 2009. The other two were duplicates I'd ended up with. I'm pretty sure the copy of Thriller I hung onto was the superior version, but there are so may at this stage you'd need an extremely elaborate chart to properly access that.



Of all the stuff here, I'm pretty gutted I ended up having to give away the two Lost sets. You'd think they'd still be worth something even in 2011. I mean, they used to cost like, €60 at one point, but I just couldn't offload them. I suppose it didn't help that A. most people lost interest early on, B. the rest were still pissed at the ending, and C. why get it on DVD when the Blu-rays were already relatively cheap? Actually that's pretty much why I got rid of these. I hadn't picked up Seasons 3-6 yet and I didn't see the point of continuing with the DVD sets when I'd finally started getting into Blu-ray.

Blu-ray was also the reason I was doing away with the Back to the Future DVD set. Kind of. I'd been meaning to grab BTTF on DVD for years and the new set they announced in 2010 sounded great, even better on DVD because it was only £10, so I pre-ordered it, months in advance. Obviously at such a low price point, I should have guessed something fishy was up, but it wasn't until I started watching the movies (appropriately enough the night the clocks were going back that year) that I realised that not only did this set not feature match it's identically-packaged Blu-ray sibling, it didn't even have the special features from the previous DVD sets. It was a repackaging of the original DVD releases of the three movies from back in goodness knows when. While was certainly fun watching the movies themselves again, this wasn't the release I signed up for.



Having had access to just two channels growing up there's a lot of things I missed out on. Slowly but sureley I've been checking out a lot of that stuff over the last few year and these Beavis and Butt-head sets were the first things I picked up as part of that project; a good place to start I thought, as I'd already seen and enjoyed the movie quite a bit. The show was great too, but while I was able to secure Volumes 2 and 3 for the tidy sum of €7.50 each, it was a year or so before I spotted the first volume for a decent price. Somewhat unfortunately it was exactly the same price as the full collection was going for (about €22) , so I decided to go for that instead freeing up some precious shelf space in the process.

Something else I missed out on as a kid was Twin Peaks, though I think that may have been for the best; I think I'd have been pretty freaked out by it at the time. Unlike Beavis and Butt-head though, I'm pretty certain this was on RTÉ at the time; as soon as I heard the theme music I had a hazy memory of hearing it in the background when I would have been five or six maybe. I picked this up on sale after Christmas '09 with no idea of how I was going to get hold of Season 2; it's UK release was still in limbo at that point. When it finally did hit, much like Beavis and Butt-head, it was priced high enough that it made more sense to pick up the Gold Box set and grab the extra special features than to buy it individually. I'm even more glad I didn't pay for just Season 2 now given how dumb I now know it gets. :D

And so finally, in May 2012 (good grief, I've dragged this thing on forever :D), I carted this lot, all the books, all the cassettes, and all the videos I'd gathered up off to charity shop land. I was a bit worried going in though that they'd send me packing again with half the stuff I brought (They did seem to be only selling books and clothes out of this outlet), but they were quite happy to take the donation in it's entirety, no questions asked. All that clutter, all that stuff I thought I'd never see the back of was finally gone. The Clearoutageddon was complete.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

Clearoutageddon Part Five: Video Games! (and More)

As someone who keeps banging on their big gaming backlog, it's fair to say there's a good chunk of my gaming collection I could probably do with getting rid of. I'm not quite there yet (I'm still labouring under the (mistaken) belief that I'll get around to playing everything some day), but there were certainly a few games in there that even I had to admit I'd never touch again:



So, these two, I picked up in late 2006, in an attempt to squeeze some last-minute fun out of the Gamecube. Hitman 2 seemed pretty intriguing. Not being the greatest at stealth games though, I never got more than a few missions into the game before I'd put it aside and later end up deleting it's (huge) save file to make room for something else. Having decided to give the game another go on PC, there was no need to keep this version around anymore.

Having been THE football franchise to get on N64, and having sunk an immeasurable amount of time into ISS 98, I was cautiously optimistic about ISS 2 despite the middling reviews. Within minutes of putting it in, I knew the critics were right. It felt janky, the most glaring problem of all being that a player would freeze for a few seconds after receiving a pass. Something I can't fathom making it past testing,which pretty much rendered the game unplayable.



So first off, this is the Australian version of F-1 World Grand Prix. You're guess as to how it ended up in a crappy Kerry toy shop is as good as mine. I got this for Christmas 1999 after being wowed by the visuals on TV. Turns out I don't like Formula 1 games, or at least I didn't have the patience to get good enough at this one to find out one way or the other.



While we're on the subject of me having no patience, these are all games I almost immediately gave up on in the face of their complexity and/or difficulty. In my defence, I bought the lot of them with gift vouchers. Well, apart from NFS, which I sort-of inherited from my brother after he forgot about it. And I did give the two racing games a second crack before I sold them. Still couldn't get anywhere though; as far as racing games go, if there aren't karts, burnouts or ridges involved, I'm in trouble.



This is one of several fighters I picked up before I finally realised the genre just isn't for me. Apart from a select few older games anyway. I'm a bit gutted I sold this for a pittance though, minutes before I noticed another offer for €10; Street Fighter Alpha II - apparently rarer than I thought.



If I could have gone back and given this to a fourteen year old me, I have a feeling it'd be up there with my favourite N64 games. Back in 2006 though, I no longer had the patience or lack of other distractions to get past Body Harvest's clunky gameplay and lack of checkpoints.



I'm kind of ashamed to admit to it, but I only learned to use a keyboard and mouse for shooters in 2008 when I started playing through No One Lives Forever on PC - the PS2 version I only avoided because of how busted it apparently was. Only a couple of weeks earlier, still WASDphobic, I picked up this PS2 copy of Deus Ex - a game I didn't have the means to play back in the day, but that I'd always been interested in checking out. Several years later, of course I still hadn't played it, but if I ever do, it wasn't going to be this version and frankly, I needed the shelf space, so off it went.



But it wasn't without company. I sold it as part of a (depressingly) cheap bundle of other PS2 stuff I didn't want any more on a classifieds site. Just like Deus Ex, I'd recently upgraded my (unplayed) copy of Snake Eater to a superior version in the form of the MGS HD collection. PES 3 and Viewtiful Joe, on the other hand, I'd given a shot but I just couldn't get into. And Fantavision, well that's actually exactly the same version I'd tried to give away as a broken disk earlier in my clear out campaign. I'd since replaced it, but when I loaded up this disk again to make absolutely sure it was busted, it worked; perfectly. I'm not sure what changed exactly, but now finding myself with two copies, I bundled the resurrected version in with this lot.



And finally (sort of): my GameStop anti-haul. So, three of these I ended up with duplicates of after they disappeared into some sort of courier-based time crack, only to emerge again several months later. At which point, I'd bought them again elsewhere. But hey, at least I got a free Child of Eden t-shirt for my troubles. :D (A size too small, but anyway.) PGR4 though, like the other racing games here, I just couldn't get into. Did quite like the soundtrack though.

Not wanting to be arsed selling the lot of these online (and getting short-changed again), I decided I'd throw them into GameStop instead and just take whatever credit they gave me. Even with that attitude though, I was a little surprised by how little I actually got: 70 cents for PGR4 and €3.50 each for the rest.



Hah! But little did they know that I'd only bought PGR4 used for €1 on their web site. Getting €0.70 for that was tantamount to giving me €42 for a previously used copy of [insert current, big triple-A game here]. The joke's on you, GameStop. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *inhales* ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, and so on.

But wait, there's more!

Clearoutageddon Part Four: The Toy Show Has a Lot to Answer For

When I was a kid, back when we only had two television channels, one of the TV highlights of the year was The Late Late Toy Show: a two and a half hour orgy of toys being paraded in front of you and even better, you got to stay up late to watch it. One of the definite lowlights though was when the host would make an impassioned plea to parents to not forget the gift of reading come Christmas time, before subjecting us to a good fifteen minutes of nerdy kids reviewing the dullest-sounding books imaginable. (That and those stage school brats singing and dancing every half hour; fuck that bullshit.) While my eyes might have been glazing over this segment, that obviously wasn't the case for some of my relatives.

Without fail, I'd get a bunch of books every year. And that was cool, until I turned about ten, after which point I never got one that wasn't educational in some way ever again. As you can imagine, in the face of video games and Lego and the like, educational Christmas gifts (once said relatives were safely away) got tossed to the side and never thought of again. Fast forward fifteen years and most of these were still cluttering up my parents' place, gathering dust. But no more, for the time of Clearoutageddon was at hand!



So, out of the numerous books I got over the years, this DK Encyclopaedia was the only one I ever wanted beforehand, and the last one I enjoyed or got any use out of. I got it for Christmas '95, just in time for a schools quiz I was taking part in a few weeks later. Unfortunately, the questions there turned out to be more about pop culture and current events than science and history, and the weeks I spent swotting up on various subjects from the encyclopaedia went entirely to waste. But I did get a free pen.

The illustrated bible I got another year. It's actually quite nice, but I can't say I was particularly thrilled to unwrap it at the time.



Engendering a similar lack of excitement was this this illustrated history book. Well, at least until I had a look inside, and discovered that...



THERE WERE BOOBS!

You know, I sometimes genuinely wonder how differently my life would have turned out if I focused more on the knowledge contained in this book than the nudity. :D



After I got to secondary school and started learning French, various European language books started showing up at Christmas. I remember getting one of these Usborne books in English when I was younger. I quite liked the art style and the hidden rubber ducks throughout, but even that couldn't get me to learn any French of my own free will, or German for that mater. It was tough enough getting to grips with a third language, I certainly didn't need to get started on a fourth.



Not that I could explain that to the gift-givers though.

Also, a Geography counterpart to the World History book that proved to be, sadly, boob-free.



This lot are a bit different, in that I bought most of them for myself. Hey, remember the Filofax? No? Me neither, but the bottom four books here all sought to cash in on that. They were designed to fit into a sort of Filofax for children: a "Fun Fax" if you will.

Possibly the dumbest idea ever.

Knowing nothing about faxes of any sort, I  picked these up on various school trips because I thought they looked promisingly funny/scary. Boy, did I get a lesson in judging a book by it's (detachable) cover.

At the time I leant the two horror ones to a buddy. I don't remember getting any feedback afterwards, but knowing him, there's no way on Earth he possibly enjoyed these, especially Burning Secret which I remember having a sappy friendship between two teenage girls at its core and a distinct lack of gratuitous gun violence.

While we're on the subject of horror, one book that did genuinely freak me out when I was younger was the one in the top right: a selection of (purportedly) real life tales of the supernatural that I bought at a school book fair in '96. Looking back now, I'm pretty sure everything in there was complete toss, but that didn't stop the story about the waxworks coming to life from scaring the shit out of me for weeks on end, and holy shit, that back cover...

Brrrrrr.

Purchased in the same one-off book fair by my brother was Into the 21st Century, a collection of short stories by viewers of The Den (in it's lame, post Zig and Zag incarnation). Hearing the shitty stories my classmates and I would come up for English class week in/week out, I think I made the right choice in steering clear of this.



Finally here, we have a novelization of the first Ninja Turtles movie - a nice little gift my dad picked up given my obsession with the cartoon at the time. As crazy as I was about that though, I've never actually seen the movie, or any of the Turtles movies. Not that I had any opportunity at the time mind. Cinema trips were never something we did, we didn't have a VCR until later and, as far as I know, none of those movies got shown on TV over here. Just think: I went through my entire childhood totally unaware of the Ninja Rap. As for the book itself, I don't remember a bit of it now. I think a Blu-ray purchase might be in order.

More after the jump...

Clearoutageddon Part Three: Discpocalypse Now

I don't know if anyone remembers now, but ten years ago exactly we were now in the middle of an unrelenting free CD bombardment by every newspaper publisher in the UK and Ireland - the likes of probably hadn't been seen since AOL's heyday.

To begin with, this was actually pretty cool, especially for someone like me who had a very small collection of music, limited funds and a slow-ass internet connection. From the end of 2002 until around mid 2004, you could grab up to three random compilation CDs every weekend for the price of the (mostly) crappy newspapers they came bundled with, and have a new batch generally pretty decent 70's/80's/90's tracks to check out to for next to nothing.

A few relevant ads I found while digitising some VHS tapes. That 70's CD (from 2003) was pretty rad. A few years later though, the second and third ads were pretty much where things went.

By 2004 though, things were changing - the compilations became less frequent, the number of tracks decreased and increasingly they started being phased out in favour of shitty movies, single artist live CDs (for people with no taste), random CD-ROMs and the occasional BBC sitcom episode. Even though the frequency of these give-aways lessened over the next couple of years, for a family that bought a lot of newspapers and magazines anyway, this meant there was an ever-increasing pile of shitty free discs building up that no one could quite bring themselves to throw out.

After years of languishing in the cabinet under the TV, I finally decided the time had come to do something  about the sizeable disc pile in late 2011. Working under the assumption that, well, somebody has to want these, I decided I'd give them away (for just the cost of postage) on a local classifieds site. For my own convenience though, I decided not to offer them individually, but to pull a Best Buy and force bundles of them on people. Let's take a look at what was up for grabs:



In the movie bundle, and yes, the bundles were all themed, is a bunch of stuff I'd never watch, or use, including a hot new Vinnie Jones joint, a couple of DVD movie quizzes and promo discs for Spider Man 2 and Revenge of the Sith.



This lot I dubbed the Nature/Factual bundle. Up on top are a trio of BBC/National Geographic documentaries that I imagine are probably decent, but that kind of stuff just isn't my thing. The next four discs are all from the RTÉ Guide, Ireland's answer to the Radio Times or TV Guide (and a pretty poor excuse for a magazine overall). For wildlife enthusiasts we have not one, but two dawn chorus themed discs, as well as some kind of mammal-themed CD-ROM. And for lovers of terminally dull magazine shows is an episode of RTÉ's Nationwide on DVD, for some reason. In the bottom right are two audio "volumes" of Paul Williams Crime World - undoubtedly part of The Sunday World's ongoing effort to glorify, er, I mean expose Ireland's criminal underworld.



Also in the same bundle, but thrown in at the last minute, was this trio of even lamer, even less desirable stuff I found lying around - promo DVDs for eBay and the South East of Ireland and some kind of jewellery catalogue on CD-ROM from 2003. You know, factual stuff.



But wait, there's more! Even though I'd decided to keep this at one point, when the time came to dispatch this bundle (and I got a taker for it pretty much immediately. Goodness knows why.), I decided to bung it in there too. I barley even watched the last World Cup, when was I ever going to watch this?



The music bundle! I wouldn't go so far as to call this all dross (well, apart from the Westlife disc, obviously), because a. I never listened to most of it, and b. the two discs in the upper left are actually pretty decent, the Dave Fanning one especially; they were just duplicates of ones I already had. Notable also was the Anton Whatshisface dance DVD, not only for not being a DVD, but also for being the thinnest, most flimsy optical disc I've ever seen. If disc rot turns out to be a thing, I think I've found patient zero.

Clearoutageddon Part Two: Free Junk!

Whatever faint possibility there was of someone buying a VHS copy of Titanic in 2011, would anyone really want to take a bunch of wrecked PS2 discs or a pile of obsolete software off my hands, much less pay for the privilege of doing so? Well, mostly no. But there were a few surprising exceptions, as I took to some classifieds sites last year to unload some more clutter.



On first inspection, it looks like we've got a set of perfectly good PS2 games here (also, Sonic Heroes). Flip the discs over though and...



...you can see they're all scratched up pretty badly. Not unusual for used PS2 games of course, but in all my time hauling stacks of cheap PS2 games out of my local GameStop, these were the only ones that flat out didn't work. I guess I could have returned them, but given how little I paid for them, it never seemed worth the hassle. Instead I hung onto them in the hope that I'd be able to repair them later. Well, with something other than toothpaste anyway. I'd already tried that with unsuccessful, yet minty fresh results. :D

Tired of hanging onto them, I put up an ad up last September to see if anyone would take them off my hands for the cost of postage. And someone did. Or at least it looked like they were going to. Then they pulled out citing of a funeral in the family. As a newcomer to this classifieds site I thought "fair enough", but after the second time I had someone do that, I started to suspect that this was a go-to excuse for pulling out of a deal there. That, or a very strange coincidence.

In the end I wasn't able to get a taker for these so they found their way to the bottom of a bin bag.



I mentioned back in 2009 that I had a launch GBA that just randomly died while I was in the final stages of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. This is that GBA. At the time, I assumed that the whole system was fried, but after a bit of experimentation, I discovered that it was just the screen that had died. Replacements seemed to be relatively expensive though and I wasn't too confident in my ability to put in a new one, so I just put it aside.

Three years later, I decided I'd put up an ad for it and maybe let someone else have a crack at repairing it. I really wasn't expecting much interest, but within minutes of posting it, I was swamped with offers. In the end, I sent it to this guy, who seemed much more concerned about the (pretty well-preserved) box and the manuals than viability of the unit itself, so much so that I wondered if he was just planning to flip it as an "as new" handheld onto some unsuspecting sucker. Man, I really hope not.

I made this video to show that it really was just the screen that was broken, in case anyone needed proof. I guess I didn't need to bother. :)

007 Spy Files was this crappy, in-universe Bond magazine aimed at children from 2002. As such, I can't really explain why I picked up ten issues of it. I don't remember enjoying it in any capacity and I certainly had no interest in the Top Trumps style cards they were giving away with it. I guess there was precious little else to buy on the news stand of my local supermarket back then.

While I was initially surprised that someone who appeared to be a grown woman was interested in picking these up, it made much more sense when she mentioned they were for her nephew. I guess they finally found their way into the right hands. I have to wonder though, if he's only got into the series via Daniel Craig, will he have any idea who the Irish guy is on most of the covers is. :)

 

These, I got as fucking Christmas presents one year. Someone thought "Hey, you know what JiliK just loves? Knowledge. In CD-ROM form" Well, fuck that. These things ended up sitting in a pile of junk for a good decade or so afterwards. :D

A quick trial on Windows XP last year revealed that they probably wouldn't work on a modern PC, but I put an ad up for them anyway. Maybe someone, somewhere would be able to knock some use out of them. The same day, I did get one person willing to pay the postage for both these and all the French stuff below. After a month of waiting though, the guy never come through with the payment and into the bin they went.



I mentioned before that I had to learn French in secondary school. One of the most time-consuming parts of that, homework-wise, was always looking shit up in a French dictionary. A computer-based alternative would have been a godsend. Unfortunately, the Learn to Speak French set above was all I could get my hands on, but it absolutely wasn't what I needed.



Also included in the same ad as the above set was a French phrase book and tape I randomly picked up in a supermarket in 1999 and another bloody CD-ROM, that the same relative gave me the Christmas afterwards, still not grasping that PCs were for playing Doom, not learning. Out of these, the cassette/phrase book ended up going into the charity shop box and everything else got binned.

Clearoutageddon Part One: The Analogue Purge

Since 2008 I've been on a bit of quest to replace my small collection of analogue media with disc-based counterparts.  Around this time last year, with my mission nearing completion, the question of what on earth I was going to do with this mounting pile of obsolete cassettes and VHS tapes finally came up.

Although it was pretty unclear if they'd even take this kind of stuff anymore, I decided to chance my arm and try dropping it off at one of the local charity shops. And while I was making the trip, I thought I might as well take a look around and round up any other old junk I could. Thus began The Clearoutageddon - a much needed purge of all the useless shit I've been holding onto for one reason or another over the last fifteen years or so.

And having recently wrapped things up on that front, I thought we'd take a a retroactive poke through a bunch of my former stuff, stating off with the pile of tapes that brought about the clutter end days in the first place.



Although I've often claimed in the past that The Masterplan by Oasis was the first album I ever bought, that's not entirely true. Actually, the first purchase I ever made in a record store, in December of 1998, consisted of that and Now 41, which I would have gotten a world of shit from my mates about if they ever found out I'd picked up such a naff pop compilation. But, to be honest, I really enjoyed it. :D

Having access to only a Walkman at the time, of course I grabbed both on cassette, something I continued to do for the next two and a half years until I finally upgraded to a portable CD player. Before then I'd picked up all but the last three tapes above, which wasn't a whole lot of material to listen to over such an long span, but unfortunately I didn't have the cash for much more. As a result of that, I played most of these albums to death, to the point where the print on the cassettes themselves had worn off almost completely from sliding them into and out of my trusty Walkman. I give you exhibit A:



Still, even after all that repeat play I can still pop one of these on today and enjoy it, which is exactly why I went about replacing them. Mostly with used CDs off eBay mind (sorry, record industry). The last couple of cassettes I bought were Driving Rain, Paul McCartney's 2001 album and Standing on the Shoulder (ugh) of Giants by Oasis, which I picked out of the last handful of tapes they had, in the last record shop around that had them in July/August 2004. Not too long before the Panasonic personal stereo I bought to replace my old Walkman also gave out on me, definitively putting an end to my cassette-listening days.



Another (double) cassette I got rid of, which, technically, I only partially owned was an audiobook version of an early Oasis biography by Paul Mathur. Me and a buddy went halves on this, picking it up on a school tour in 1996, thinking it was some kind Oasis anthology we'd never heard about. We were both fans at the time, but he was definitely the bigger one, blowing through this in no time. On the other hand, I really couldn't summon the interest get through it and spent many, many weeks doing so, much to his disbelief. After fifteen years though, I kind of doubted he'd be back for it, so into the junk box it went.



Two years after I bought my first  couple of albums, I also started picking new(ish) movie releases I really wanted to see here and there, starting off with The World is Not Enough in December 2000. As you might have guessed, a VCR was the only playback mechanism I had access to back then, so of course it had to be on VHS. Much to my surprise I also ended up with a copy of Diamonds are Forever out of this transaction. Apparently there was a buy one, get one free promotion running at the time for Bond movies and I guess anyone who didn't pick up an extra tape got a random one chucked at them at the counter. I ended up watching most of it on Christmas night in 2000, right after my N64 died a few hours into playing Perfect Dark. What a fucking depressing night that was. :D

The next tapes I got were the Fellowship of the Ring in September '02 and freakin' Attack of the Clones in December '02. Ugh! At the time I had actually just seen the pre-Clones Star Wars movies for the first time at age 18. (How crazy is that?) The verdict? I really enjoyed the original trilogy for the most part (fuck those ewoks though). And The Phantom Menace? Well, after two viewings I think I knew deep down that it was bad, but riding on the high of seeing the original movies, I'd convinced myself that, yeah, it was alright, that I probably just needed to watch it a few more times and I'd finally get it. Watching Clones initially, I thought it was a big improvement, but even after several viewings I still couldn't make sense of the plot and I never managed to get through the entirety of any of those fucking awful love scenes without reaching for the fast-forward button.

Now I think they're both bloody terrible. :D



The last two tapes I bought at full price were Die Another Day and The Two Towers, both in 2003. Man, Die Another Day I enjoyed quite a bit at the time for how over the top it was, but any clip of I see of it now just makes me cringe, so I'm kind of doubtful it holds up in any way, shape or form. The Two Towers I still love though, but it wasn't long after I bought it that we finally picked up a DVD player, at which point I immediately regretted shelling out €20 for this over the identically-priced DVD copy.

The Ali G and the Ash concert tape, on the other hand, were both cheap pick-ups from one of the local record shops ever dwindling stock of cut-price VHS tapes in 2004. And yes, I did actually replace the Ali G movie with a VHS copy. What can I say, I have terrible tastes. :D And speaking of which...