Tldr
Man buys over a million cds, Vinyls, and cassettes from a failed company in an attempt to start the company over again. Abandons his family and buys and moves into a warehouse in another state in one of the most violent cities in America. Spends over half a million dollars to get cockblocked by the city for zoning violations and gets robbed over 30+ times. He sneeds about the city and it's inhabitants on twitter documenting his journey. He's also trying to build a fusion reactor and a science museum in the city
MY CASSETTES!
Backstory
Murfie was a startup company that focused on the digitization of physical media into digital media. People would send their CDs, Vinyls, and cassettes, which the company would store in their warehouse and rip the contents onto their own platform for people to stream. Murfie even allowed people to buy and sell with other users on their platform.
During sometime during early November, the company asked all of it's current customers to make sure they renewed their current subscription before November 17th. No more than 5 days later, the company sent out an email to it's customers saying that the compnay was ceasing all operations including the website. This abrupt shutdown shocked everyone, that even that former CEO had one idea what had happened .
The situation only continued to spiral out of control. Murfies ToS had a clause that promised its customers that they would return all of their physical media in the case the company shut down (For a small shipping fee of course ), but with all of their services down, customers had no way of getting back their cassettes and cds. In total, there were close to a million CDs, cassestes, and Vinyls left somewhere in limbo. Unsurprisingly, people were soying out about this:
They have my 100+ cd's and $1000+ dollars. nothing to be proud of if they leave people in a lurch.
At this point everyone had lost hope that they wouldn't get their stuff back. Until one determined man showed up.
John Fenley
John Fenley is an investor, landchad, family man and an neurodivergent for music. When he heard the news of Murfie going out of business he stepped up immediately and offered to buy the remaining digital collection.
It wasn't his first venture into this type of busines. Fenley had a similar business that to Murfie that he started years ago, but was unable to find investors for his company. But this a second chance for him, because he knew what he could do it right this time. This was his white whale.
Shortly after, Fenley sold about 150k dollars worth of stock he received from another company and purchased an abandoned warehouse in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Before we continue let's discuss Pine Bluff for those unfamiliar with it. The only aspect you really need to know about Pine Bluff is that it makes third world shitholes look like a paradise in comparison. Let us look at some statistics to truly understand it
Homicide rate:
Pine Bluff had 29 homicides in 2021. Pine Bluff had 23 murders in 2020 - a rate of 56.5 murders per 100,000 people. The national average was 6.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020
Poverty Rate:
The per capita income for the city was $17,334. About 24.3% of families and 30.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 45.6% of those under age 18 and 13.7% of those age 65 or over.
Demographics:
A fairly dangerous city to say the least. But, Im guessing at the time Fenley didn't understand this and would come across many problems in his journey for his whale.
The journey
Fenley has been documenting his adventure on twitter. These tweets are mostly in chronological order, but these aren't all of his tweets. You can check out Fenleys twitter account to see his full journey, but im just going to show some of the highlights.
Right off the bat, Fenley has issues with the Pine bluff city hall fining him for building violations:
He eventually meets with the mayor to discuss his future prospects but that ends up going nowhere:
I should mention too, that Fenley is also trying to turn the warehouse into a science museum and that he's attempting to build a fusion reactor
Tragically for Fenley, the PineBluff goverment are a bunch of chuds that don't trust the science:
What kind of city government tries to prevent someone from opening a science museum?
Fenleys frustrations with the city government only continue to grow:
The downward spiral only continues for Fenley:
He does offer a $3 bounty to whoever catches those robbers
Had over $20,000 worth of equipment stolen last Saturday. Putting a bounty on catching the crooks.
They never catch them lmao
Fenley also starts sneeding at the police for being shit at their job:
Despair grows inside Fenley:
I should mention that Fenley is also married and has kids that live in another state. It appears that he's somewhat abandoned them in pursuit of his dream.
7 days later...
Several hours later....
Febley is also is his own security guard too. He'll often confront those on his property with a gun of couse:
Fenley called the cops on the guy in the above video, and the police actually arrested him! But the guy was quickly released from jail and came back to Fenleys warehouse:
And they let the guy go, and surprise, he came back again today.
Three kids seeing if they can steal stuff. Just another day in PineBluff.
The constant stress continues to pile on our neurodivergent Ishmael:
I should clarify that he's basically living at the warehouse fulltime to ensure that one is trying to rob it. At least one has ever tried taking his security cameras:
Can anyone tell from the sound what kind of gun I just heard firing shots outside my warehouse?
Fenley has been here for 3 years at this point and still hasn't been murdered somehow
Good movie reference!
Hopefully 2023 brings better luck to our hero
Its never going to get better for him
So far that's Fenleys entire story. An interesting one to say the least. Hopefully he doesn't get murdered so we can get more updates on his pursuit of happiness. Fenley doesn't look like he's giving up on PineBluff yet, since he's bought over 75 properties in the city so far. I truly hope he does catch his white whale one day
Thanks for reading!
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