One last blog post for the year
Date published: 2024.12.31
Honestly, I love reading other people’s blogs. The more sloppy and rambly the posts the better. The first thing I do when encountering a personal website I haven’t seen before is checking if there’s some kind of blog in there and reading a random entry. I genuinely love how human those little corners of the Internet feel, how unbothered.
They make me want to share more imperfect rants, more nonsense than no one other than me would truly understand. Because those are the posts that I love the most from other people, and I kind of want to be that too.
🌀
It’s been a couple months since I’ve fully moved to listening to music from local mp3 files instead of streaming, and god, how nice it feels. Sometimes I open MusicBee and just browse through my album collection. Editing the metadata on a whim, being able to upload the most obscure of albums and have them look just as nice as the ones that are available on streaming sites, manually adding and syncing song lyrics…
I guess there’s just so much more love I can show my music collection when I have full control over it! I really enjoy spending hours syncing lyrics to chosen albums, or googling soundtracks that I’m not really that obsessed with but simply want to have in my collection, that I want to make sure I’ll always have access to, so that even if they one day completely disappear from the face of the Internet I will rest easy knowing I still have them, knowing they won’t disappear from my memory too.
Spotify was very accessible and made organizing music take less time, sure, but now I see that was kind of a downside. Organizing my libraries (be it music, books, etc.) has never been a chore to me, it has always been a pleasant experience. The more I care about something, the more I want to organize it myself, to put things in the right place, to make them stand out more or to polish their rough edges. I want to make them mine in the truest meaning of the word.
As of writing this, I have exactly 6501 tracks in my music library (exactly 2042 albums) that MusicBee claims would take exactly 18 days 3 hours and 59 minutes to listen to. For a lot of people that’s a giant amount. But like, look: even with such a giant amount of songs, I still managed to ditch streaming, get all of the files on my computer and phone, and edit them to my liking. I’ve successfully transferred all of my favourite playlists too. That might have seemed like a lot of work, and yet it really wasn’t that hard, and it was all worth it.
If you like music and like having control over your collections, then streaming is just limiting you. I mean it sincerely.
And look, being able to change the album cover of Takako Mamiya’s LOVE TRIP to the picture that made me take interest in citypop in the first place back when YouTube first suggested it to me, well, that’s an amazing feeling.
It’s the end of December and yet it still feels like Fall. It fucks with my head really badly, tbh. Makes the passage of time feel less real than it should.
I know the winters of my childhood will never return, but it shouldn’t be so warm now. Lately I hear even the people who prefer higher temperatures say “the weather is pleasant today!… although it shouldn’t be, haha…”
For sure.
And so the year ends. You know, I don’t intend to share any super personal reflections on the Internet – I don’t trust you enough with this information, anonymous stranger. But it was a tough year, although a necessary one. There were many bumps on the road.
I greeted this year with a positive mindset, and that isn’t going to change going forward. You should know that New Year’s is the only truly spiritual holiday for me; maybe there is divinity in all of nature, but Time is the only god I worship. I will never be bitter or distrustful about a new year coming.
I will share one good (?) thing about this year though: at the beginning of it I was told that my pet rabbit was terribly, incurably ill and was going to die soon. But in just a moment a new year will come. She might still be sick, but she’s also still alive – and happy to be so.
New year’s resolutions section
There are more things I want to achieve, but not all of them I’m going to have full control over. If a resolution can fail due to no fault of my own, then it’s a dumb resolution and it has no place here.
Have a happy new year!