storage is magic

Sep 02, 2012 23:51

Having been paid, I started my monthly expenditures with my new favorite hobby: music replacement.

Years ago, when I was unemployed, a student, and then very low-paid, I used to download (at freaking dial-up speeds) tons of music from napster and limewire, as back then, downloading was such a commitment and effort it felt to me like I was paying anyway. It was partially a matter of money, and at the time, very much a matter of having to buy an entire album to get a song I liked. The coming of iTunes changed that, in which I had better speeds, convenience, and music that was fairly high quality, which was a problem because once you're listening to professional recordings, it's hard to go back to napster-era quality without wincing like a lot.

Slowly but surely, I'm replacing my entire napster-era and limewire-era music downloads with the enthusiastic help of Amazon. It's not really controlled so much as running across a song while surfing music and realizing hey, there's one, and it's sixty-nine cents! (This happens with startling frequency). However, last month Sarah McLachlan was my major focus, and this month I rediscovered Roxette on one of my playlists and did a clean sweep. Also, Culture Beat for Mr. Vain, and I can't even tell you why that one stuck in my memory but it's both disturbingly catchy and it reminds me of going to a dance when I was an exchange student and dancing for hours and hours with this one coming up on rotation until I could sing along with it (at one time, I could sing along with Swedish pop as well; I didn't understand what I was singing, but autolyric memorization apparently has no language barrier).

I have to admit, this has been a really good way to actually explore my collection and find songs I forgot. Also, Christ, I have a lot of music. Honestly, my digital hoarding is reaching disturbing proportions. When i say disturbing, I mean, this is not helping when right now at Fry's, I saw a 4 terabyte hard drive that I could totally convince myself is necessary to my continued existence, or maybe two, since by my most recent check of my server, my entire media collection including all movies and television and music and ebooks is just over 5 terabytes.

...how the everlovingfuck did I get five terabytes of media? More importantly, thought. Sarah McLachlan was what I wrote my first fanfic to, and the hard drive on my computer then was four gigs. I can't even fit all my fanfic on that much space. That I wrote.

Really, I wonder how I survived back then.

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music, crosspost

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