01 Aug 2025
First off, welcome to the first post of 2025. No update here, just trying out freeform writing via bullshitting/ranting. I'm going to try and post every day for Blaugust to get into the "write what's on my mind" groove, but I've never been much of a journaler so bear with me.
I hate to say it, but I’m getting fuckin’ old. I’ve been on the internet since my early teens, so that’s a whole life lived on this place. Over that time, we’ve moved a bunch of things as a society over to internet-friendly formats. Digital distribution became the main distribution format for games and movies, with physical releases either getting de-emphasized or foregone entirely. This wasn’t too much of a concern back in the 90’s/00’s, there were physical copies we could buy that couldn’t be taken away. For digital formats we had these things called Files that would end with .mp3 or .ogg and could be used on any device that supported these common formats. My favorite music player before I got my first drive-based MP3 player was an MP3 CD player, where I could burn MP3s to a CD-RW and then play them on what looked to be a regular portable CD player. Unlike regular CDs, the songs never skipped when the player got jostled, and you could fit so many songs on there for cheap! It was extremely reliable all through high school and always ready to belt out tunes.
We’re in the future now. Blockbuster failed to predict the future, passed on buying Netflix, and is now a tombstone in retail history. Computer cases rarely ever come with 5 1/4” bays for disc drives. Cars don’t bother coming with CD players built in anymore, their consoles replaced with screen slabs that will hook up to Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Google Play Music. Actually wait, that last one is dead and rolled into YouTube Music. Which leads me to…
It’s all up in the fucking cloud. It’s immaterial data both in presence and ownership. The money you pay is not to be guaranteed usage rights of an item, but to be granted usage rights of what’s currently selected in an ever-changing catalog. This used to have a physical-media analogue, the Disney Vault, where Disney would not release and reprint VHS tapes of their catalog all the time. They’d artificially stop printing movies for long stretches of time, raising the value of any tapes that were already sold and preserving sales of future runs. If you wanted to watch Bambi, you better hope you remembered to buy a copy when the VHSs were first dropped or knew someone who did (and if you wanted to watch The Black Cauldron, you were shit outta luck). Now, you can’t lean on a neighbor to have bought it first.
Even independent works aren’t entirely free of the trappings of online services. Soundcloud is popular for sharing individual songs or albums, but there’s no guarantee that Soundcloud will exist tomorrow and all those songs will be gone in an instant. Just recently itch.io got walloped by payment processors and had to remove visibility from thousands of works. Online presences are not permanent and never have been, but even moreso 20 years ago. We’ve had a long stretch of time where the internet persisted in much the same state and social networks didn’t live and die on the regular. Now people are losing these online cloud storage and sharing solutions, and because their stuff was never distributed as a file or physical media, it’s gone forever.
Wait until the day Imgur dies, that’s going to be an armageddon.
I also found myself getting reliant on a bunch of online services over the years. I used Google Play Music to backup my at-the-time MP3 collection and make it playable anywhere on my phone. That’s now dead and rolled into YouTube Music…somewhere, I can’t recall. When I open YouTube Music it’s not emphasized, mostly their vibe-based auto-generated playlists are. Only recently did I try to find where my offline MP3 collection was, and realized that the newest storage I had it on was a 15-year old hard drive, last touched maybe 10 years ago. Oops.
If I hadn’t found that drive, and had Google gone “yeah we dont need to store mp3s in fucking youtube music lol”, that would’ve been a whole cache of music that I grew up with gone in an instant. Borrowed albums from friends and family, random tracks found all around the internet, the latest Gundam opening song from a buddy on AIM, it’s not extremely extensive but it’s got good memories. Finding that drive made me realize that I stopped the regular data migration that used to happen from device to device, from site to site. Sometimes stuff would be lost, but there could be someone else out there that had still downloaded it long ago.
So, I copied that music off to some network backup storage I recently set up and then got myself an MP3 player. It’s not a complex one, it takes a large microSD card that I’ll never run out of space on, but other than that it just plays individual songs, folders, or playlists. It’s also very small at about 1.5” x 2”, perfect for when I’m walking or biking about. Going out and about with it has been great, just digging through folders of music to play or hitting all random and getting whatever chaos comes up. So much stuff I hadn’t heard in years like the full Digitalism Idealism album came back up and threw me back into the past at an uncomfortable speed.
I’ve also been going through my DVD collection and backing up as much as I can. What with the Warner disc rot occurring, I want to make sure I’ve at least got all those movies backed up elsewhere so I don’t lose them forever. Hell, some stuff I won’t ever be able to find again because no streaming service could ever work out the rights or find it profitable/notable, or might be “remastered” and changed from the original like the Simpsons getting forced into 16:9. If you just want a fat load of storage for backing up your physical media, look into getting a NAS. I’m set up with an effective 21TB RAID10 network storage that I can just whatever files into from Windows or even my Steam Deck. You’ll have a local unending cache of stuff that is yours to do with, save any horrible physical events occurring to the storage.
Oh you bet. I never got into Audible, but I have had an ongoing ebook collection. Calibre came to the rescue and collected up all of the scattered ebooks I had into one list. Now that I’ve got all of my purchased books from Amazon and Humble Bundle offline, I can browse through them easily either on my computer or via a calibre web service on my NAS. Sure it’s still networked, but that’s only home use. If I still need to I can take those ebook files into another device. Even then, I’ve been picking up a few physical books like I Am Error and going through them every now and then. I don’t read nearly as many physical books as I used to, but it’s nice to again.
That’s books covered, now what about just straight up Wikipedia? What if one day Wikipedia gets fucking murdered or Freedom Censored or overrun with AI-generated bullshit? Thanks to a Kiwix flatpak, I now have a local copy of Wikipedia that’s 110 GB (yes that small!) running on my NAS. Even in the case of the internet going down I’ll still have access to a somewhat-reliable source of knowledge. I even threw in a few other wikis they had available like the ZDoom wiki for some extra fun on top. If the nationwide network infrastructure ever collapses, I’ll still be able to keep making Doom maps.
I’m working out what else I want to have backed up as an offline copy. I’ve got Plex for stuff I’ve ripped (including whole TV series I had to name individual episodes of) and while it can do music I’m interested in seeing if I can set up a Shoutcast radio of the music I’ve got.
Pretty well! The MP3 player’s got a rechargeable battery via USB-C that lasts forever, a two hour long bike trip will be far from putting a dent into the charge. It also has bluetooth, which is handy in the car since I can also control previous/next track from the steering wheel. Just having a little physical device with physical buttons has been great. Being able to blindly adjust volume or change tracks while it’s in your pocket is an almost unnoticed but welcome boon. It’s Bandcamp Friday today and I bought a few albums that’ll be going straigh tonto that MP3 player. I’ll shout them out at the end of this piece.
Doing this has had a bit of a calming effect. A lot of shit sucks right now and we’re slowly losing access to more and more of the Circuses half of society, so to be able to have something that’s always there as long as you don’t beat it with hammers is grounding. Give it a shot, find some cheap MP3 player, throw in a big SD card, and find some music to put on. Get wired headphones too, don’t futz with wireless connections. Play all the songs and set the play mode to Random. You’ve got your own personally-tailored offline music algorithm now, and you won’t lose it when the company gets bought out by VC. Enjoy it.
I really hope I’ve had a coherent-enough stream of consciousness to encourage someone to try out a standalone MP3 player. It really has been a fun thing to have and I just wanna’ share that fun with others. I also wanna’ share the stuff I bought on Bandcamp Friday today:
Go grab an album and load it up on that newfangled device you went and got. Who knows if Bandcamp will be here tomorrow.
