A little over four months ago in mid June, I along with tens of thousands of hapless like-mindeds — inconsolable and defeated — mourned like the covert Scottish patriots at William Wallace’s public execution in BRAVEHEART as the last two American Virgins were sacrificed in New York and Hollywood.

More specifically, the last two Virgin Megastores. That, coupled with the shuttering of the venerable and iconic Tower Records chain, had the subtle effect of a Muay Thai elephant kick to the already deflated psyches of recorded media collectors worldwide. In a few fell swoops of corporate bottom-lining, the record store experience: Venues to escape and lose oneself filtering through bins, discovering a semi-obscure album and/or an underappreciated director, actor and film, became critically fewer. This was the day we all had been foretold and dreaded actually experiencing happen.

And so how to cope amidst the digital onslaught of mp3 players, 3-inch mobile screens and Serrato? How to contend, us holdouts, who insist on genuine, quality, artist-paying copies of CDs and DVDs with real sleeve inserts, cover art and liner notes where others make do with bit torrent-originating burns of varying grade replete with the handwritten sharpie titling?

Even Best Buy (gasp) recently announced that some retail space once devoted to hard copies of popular CDs and DVD box sets will be replaced by displays for download cards for Napster and CinemaNow, both of which it now owns. In so many ways, I now know what vinyl and tape collectors must have felt like when discs came into mass retail and left them staring forlornly at their collections, products of hours upon hours of crate-diggin’ and shelf-searchin’, now deemed obsolete.

This is not a whine as much as it is a lament. I understand that the market, changing habits and accessibility — not random circumstance — are ultimately driving the push to contained, flash memory collections.

But, to those among us who won’t readily give up on building their personal media libraries, it’s like Lee Marvin stepping in as Battling Maxo to fight the superior B7 robot in the classic (Aren’t they all, really?) “Twilight Zone” episode “Steel.” I implore you to find it at Amoeba (Bay Area and LA folks are so fortunate to have you.) but, in all likelihood, it’s on a torrent somewhere or already on YouTube.

What’s become of your music/movie collection? Do you still collect or have you ripped and sold all your hard copies and now download like a mofo? For those who still buy hard copies, what’s your primary source?