Compact Cassette
 Tuesday. 1.April.2008 | Comments? | Permalink 816

Having upgraded my home internet connection recently, I have wasted a significant amount of time lately in high-bandwidth activities, such as uploading stuff to Vimeo and watching future TV on Joost or Babelgum (Miro is a wonderful idea, but the current client is one piece of slow unusable rubbish - now a Joost client with Miro content would be it!). I also spent some time trying out the flashy new Web 6.0 (whatever) services and stuff. Besides Vimeo (and the über-cool Tumblr, which as you know I have used for more than a year now - and 80% of my blogging is done through it), not many deserved my time. Virb, for instance, looks cool enough, but I really don't need another place where I aggregate everything. That's what the very site you're reading is for, right? Virb may be nice looking and functional. Other 'web services' are not. Once I logged in to last.fm I went straight to the account cancellation form. Can't listening to music be just a matter of pressing one button?

That's why I think Muxtape (last week's meme, I know) is da shit: A list of songs in Big Type, you click one and it starts playing the list from that song onwards. Could it be simpler?

Well, here's my mixtape.

It's been a while since I last made a playlist, actually. I didn't use to find it this hard. I used to know a lot about music (well, a lot more than I know now, anyway). Ten years ago, I would spend a now unimaginable percentage of my income on records. My knowledge was biased towards the electronica and indie pop sides of things, but I could come up with a nice coherent playlist by heart. I used to record a lot of tapes for playing in my car radio, and I was confident enough to record a mixtape and present it to a girl. I even put a couple of mixtapes on my own website, back when MP3 was a technical term, Napster was a new thing, and nobody really seemed to care much about copyright infringement.

Nowadays, in an era where I can't really figure out Muxtape's legal existence (but I do hope it lasts) I had this unbeliveable neurosis putting together a simple playlist thought of as a tape I'd listen to while driving my car. I guess I'm old... ···