Oh OOF I was literally just discussing with my therapist how much I miss this sort of thing, and the social interactions that tend to come with them. You know. Leaving the house. Talking to people. Having a momentary, ephemeral connection with a stranger over the same movie/music/thing...
spotify totally recommends you new songs and stuff, i fell in love with songs i've never heard before. songs that aren't even available in a record store
The point isn’t not finding new stuff, it’s about having the new stuff algorithmically deposited in your feeding trough so you miss out on the emotionally fulfilling process of going out to hunt for new and interesting things yourself.
The algorithm just keeps giving me more of the same, all of the variety in my music collection comes from asking what was playing in a record store, seeking something out because an artist I love mentioned it in an interview, etc
It’s like replacing walks along the beach to look for pretty rocks with a service that sends you a pretty rock in the mail every month. The emotionally fulfilling part of the process isn’t necessarily “having a pretty rock” at the end of it.
Right. I remember back in the early 90s, the only place to find Asian action movies was at these tiny video stores in strip malls catering to the local Asian community. Or Italian horror movies traded by fans on mailing lists making dubs for each other. That you had to search that hard was the fun.
Yeah, I spent over a week finding tracks to an out of print album on Kazaa when I was younger. The album eventually got reissued but I've kept my cobbled together copy out of pride
I get it, but I also live in the Midwest, once upon a time I had to stay up until 3AM because that’s when MTV played the music I wanted. I’d have to go Best Buy and pay $30 in 1997 money for their one copy of Fatboy Slim. There’s room for both approaches.
I'm glad I'm able to find movies and such at a really cool store for hobbyists.
Also makes me glad that I actually physically purchased albums, even if I got them from Amazon. It was cool to blast them in the car when I was in high school.
Totally understand what it’s saying but It’s only true if we make it true!! I still love going hunting at the record store and finding DVDs that aren’t streaming anywhere. Finding an album that Spotify doesn’t have still gives me that rush!!
One of the funnest parts of having a record player now is having that extra motivation to stop at every thrift store and look at their unsorted piles of surrendered record collections
I had to order some more of my favorite ink today. Amazon has it, but there's an art supply store right by me that I went to instead. I got out of the house, has a nice chat with the owner while she put in my order, and found a few new pens to try out. It feels so much more gratifying that way 🖤
I don't have any interest in the hunting exercise though. Stuff we like is now much easier to find without having the time, money, and safety to go exploring in a space that wasn't always accessible for all of us.
Also, I remember that in the seeking, you might never see a force that recommended for or against what you were trying. So you might scrape together disparate signals in trying to find what's good, and it might be as little as an album cover and a genre, or that one artist worked with another band.
I think he's romanticized it a bit. Yeah, it is still great to flip through records at record stores, but my music collection is much broader because of the internet. Not sure I'd trade that.
The street I live on used to be famous for its many bookstores, and none remain. Ten years ago a friend opened a used book store that’s just a lot more attuned to modern aesthetics and it killed so hard they expanded to double the size pretty quick. I’ve been saying we need that for movies.
I feel this so hard. For me it was books. I frequented a dozen used book stores in the greater Seattle area looking for hard to find Sci-Fi and fantasy. I was gleeful when I ran into something on my list. I found that Dean Koontz had published under other names and hunted them down. I miss it.
God... I grew up going to this little used book store and spending HOURS picking through their fantasy section, grabbing whatever dime paperbacks had the weirdest covers and digging through them like I was starving. Now the publishing industry is trying to crank out stuff like crazy.
Not gonna lie. We have a local record store and we drop in every now and then just to see what they have. They have a great mix of old and new. It's fun.
Please, you and anyone reading this check out Bandcamp because it is exactly like this but a digital space. Tons of indies, live feed of what people are buying, weekly 90 minute radio show with 1-2 artist interviews. Musicians get 75% of the money
it's kinda more like a podcast i guess (90min each week, rather than 24/7), but you can use the "discover" feature to basically have a radio station of your preferred genres
i'll definitely have to try it because i feel like my music library has stagnated. i kicked spotify a couple years ago and just listen to my own self hosted stuff / things ive digitally bought.
but im having a hard time finding new things.
thanks!
Bet you there wasn't a worldwide pandemic making it unsafe to leave the house when this guy was a teenager. But I guess that's just farm animal thinking
who cares. i never woulda discovered some of my favorite artists if I have to pay for every single thing I listened to. the world is a better place when music is cheaply available.
I remember I went crate digging and found Todd Rundgren's "A wizard-A true star" vinyl record and that shit made me feel madd accomplished cause it was my favorite album by him
but then I lost it when I couldn't afford to keep my storage unit smh
Another point to consider - the act of getting the dust out the grooves of records made listening to music more of a ritual. It was harder work to get to the song you wanted and more special.
This is why things like books and comics still have such an appeal to me. I guess there are apps for those but they're much more tied to physical media.
i love going to the store and even just *looking* at the games and movies and albums and books i can find. even if i dont buy anything! it feels like an adventure. i never wouldve read some of the cute cat manga i have if i just took to book streaming or w/e, it just wouldnt have mattered.
I think I’ve escaped this by continuously rotating themed playlists with friends that we handpick songs for ourselves, and recommending/discovering new stuff that way.
That said, the act of physically leaving the house definitely adds something
"oh but I hate movie theatres" "oh this feels like an old man post" "oh spotify does this" "oh I did a lot of my hunting online" "i don't like interacting with other people"
Crom on his mountain, but I feel this so hard, too. For me, it was anime back in the 90s, when I had what aired on SciFi channel every SatAM, early AOL recommendations, lucky Anime Web Turnpike finds, and magazines that weren't always in color as my treasure maps.
Some time back I found my membership card for the anime video rental library the game store across the street from my dorms used to run in the late 90's. Good memories of a bunch of friends piled into the lounge watching hard subbed VHS tapes.
Yeah, in the hunt lies the enjoyment of life. The problem is we're hunting for so many things at once, that we put the pleasurable hunts into convenient form so we can spend more time on the hunt just to survive.
It renders the fruit of our labors more hollow. It's just there, on the shelf.
However that may be true for those with access to public transport or even a car but there is a vast population of people who do not have access to trains, buses, or even cars let alone record stores and other niche stores to "hunt" for art. Steaming, if done right, gives greater access to many.
Honestly the day I axed Spotify in favor of an MP3 player, Bandcamp and an external CD drive turned out to be a HUGE improvement. I hadn't even properly realized the rot had set in until I tried doing different.
What I have realised since streaming came along is how many albums I missed in the 90s and 00s - and that was despite being really into music, buying magazines to try and catch new releases.
So I am glad now that we can have both streaming and physical, and best of both worlds.
I've been meaning to take the bus to the library to get a library care and find a community, but I'm just to burned out. I want this feeling back, but it's a matter of digging myself out of a hole.
Oh I can 110% relate to this. My focus is on comics and there is nothing like going to a comic book store, especially y hr ones wirh older comics in news print - thr smell alone puts me in a good mood as I browse boxes of comics.
Ot the whole thing of flipping through and finding a surprise comic
That's why I refuse to depend on spotify (that and they are a terrible company ethically). it does have its uses with helping me find new artists, but as soon as I find new beats to buy/download, I'm back to using my zune.
For me the problem isn't exactly the described one.
Is the abundance of choice.
Obviously having an abundance of choice sounds like a great thing and should be a great thing, but our brains are wonky and that's not how it works in practice.
My parents used to take my brother and I to Borders as a treat for good grades. They'd give us each $15 and tell us to find a new book or music to try. And we would go to the CD aisles putting in headphones to listen to the new singles and read the backs of the cases. Found Nickel Creek that way.
Stewart Lee told how he used to have a wishlist of obscure records: he'd hunt out vinyl shops in the towns he toured to, and very occasionally get that wonderful thrill of finding some treasure. Then the Internet came in, and he found everything on his wishlist in a fortnight.
Y'all can stream Rocky Horror to your phones, but sitting in a huge theater full of crazies with bags of props at midnight in a repressed Midwest town in 1977? Can't be beat
I have a similar attitude towards the library. I see the convenience of the internet, there again, it's not all reliable or updated. Going to the library got you out of the house and you'd be looking up one thing and get distracted by another book that was physically near by on a different topic.
I used to go to movie rental places almost every other day when I was living in Canada, when I moved to the states 14 years ago and suddenly had Hulu and Netflix at first it seemed great but now it makes picking a movie to watch feel like staring at the fridge and wishing there was something to eat
hey wait thats the best way ive seen to describe this! i routinely check the fridge over and over hoping ill find something i can at least *tolerate*, and i often have the same experience streaming. i dont usually go out of my way to stream unless i know theres something there i already wanted.
I have a weekly movie night with friends and also have been to the movie theatre twice this week alone, I watch tons of movies every way they’re made available to me.
What streaming mostly replaced was the ritual of seeking out the kind of stuff I would put on to watch passively while I worked. At first the convenience was amazing, but when I started to miss the analogue hunt suddenly all the rental places had been bankrupted by streaming.
This is why I go thrifting from time to time. Sure I can get most movies, songs, shows, and comics online but I enjoy having a personal collection, finding good deal, etc. online retailer hunting can be fun to but walking around is great
Wow, the “living your life” part especially. Like, beyond hunting for awesome new things, I just don’t even bother to go out to buy mundane things. Add in automation - don’t have to get up to turn on the lights, the TV, the washing machine… just slowly making “moving around” obsolete.
The thing that gets me is it's not like I dont want to go hunting for cool stuff, the age of convenience has just made it impractical for places with niche stuff to exist.
For me no feeling will compare to owning physical releases of music, that's why I started collecting vinyl of some of my favorite albums. Ngl I'm actually pretty thankful companies still press vinyl records.
I luckily get to experience the hunt by seemingly nothing I want to watch being available in any streaming service in my region… >:v
I have to chase like a cat going through the house’s garbage bin.
Did the same thing with video game cartridges, there were a couple of second hand stores in nearby towns that I'd take the train with a couple of friends to as teenagers.
Kind of sucks the fun out of it when you can find the exact game on an online store at the press of a button.
I talk with one of my older friends who worked at a video store. We were pining about having to hunt down anime on vhs and if you’re lucky you knew a guy that had a bootleg. I don’t think we should really go back to that but the experience of finding something for yourself is definitely missed.
As nice as it is to watch a show from the start and at whatever pace I want, it was neat to discover something through a random episode and piece together through reruns (sometimes out of order) what was going on.
What I miss is going down the aisles, see a weird box art, grab it and think "Eh, what's the harm?" because I haven't watched enough hentai to know where this is going. Or grab one and find out there's an entire robot series with atrocious voice acting but amazing mecha designs.
Still remember a friend finding some badly scuffed up bootleg DragonBall Z dvds on the side of the road and that's how I watched most of the show the first time.
I still have strong memories of anime/manga I bought literally by mistake, and what led to to make those mistakes. I wouldn't give up the easy access to books and especially music we have now, but there's something to be said for hunting for shit and taking weird risks.
I had a weird filesharing app that wasn't blocked by my college, so my freshman year (2000) I became a kind of anime dealer, handing out burned CD-Rs of 128x90 RealMedia anime files.
I went to college a little later but I happened to live close enough to Chinatown in Manhattan that I could find their bootleg anime imports. I was kinda a hero for finding the entire Ghibli collection with english subtitles, that included all their more obscure films and shorts.
I guarantee you the vast majority of our ancient ancestors would have been perfectly happy getting Door Dash. They wouldn't have felt "deprived of the hunt" or whatever.
What Hertzfeldt is really lamenting is the loss of third spaces and community, but those things are bad for the economy.
And I'm saying they most definitely would feel 'deprived of the hunt' because that is the real world experience of Indigenous peoples who have lost harvest rights in modern times. Shopping for food doesn't replace the hunt.
Yeah, I feel this one. I still prefer to to to the cinema or buy blu rays on the high street rather than just stream if I can help it. Aside from physical media being permanent, it's just more satisfying
the opposite happened to me, I scour over fuckass youtube videos to find some cult classic doujin games that a grand total of 5 people have played, the type of shit that simply would stay exclusive to japan and/or would've been lost media if it weren't for the internet
I’ve come to appreciate that there are so many record stores and funky lil niche shops here in seattle; the problem is having the time/energy/money to go to them lol
Anytime I have a reason to leave town feels great, but reasons for me to go are feeling smaller and smaller every day. I feel bad for the generations following me, as it’s just continued to get worse
I'm happy to see that record stores are becoming popular again. It's obvious there's a market for physical stores again. We have two in my not that big of a town which is promising! I'm hoping that something like that will catch on again for movies too
This is how i feel about television too...
Watching streaming is great, more convenient.
But dang it i miss having to check at a certain time of the day to watch a show i otherwise wouldnt have seen.
It has its charm and is somewhat more stimulating to me.
That library is a mile wide and a millimeter deep.
Plus it's the rest of the experience. Hell, I first saw Slipknot live because I was at a record store looking for another CD and got told about Dotfest happening half an hour from my college 25 years ago. A year later they're on national tour.
Endless options is not necessarily a good thing. If you only own a handful of records you will get to know those albums INCREDIBLY well. When you put endless playlists on, it becomes background noise.
Go to a store, make a few selections from the limited stock, and fall in love.
On the one hand, I understand this line of thinking. But if I'm honest with myself, having to go out and hunt down obscure things I wanted to watch never led to any friendships or connections. Even the social experience of moviegoing has usually been nil. So I get it, but also-- Jesus Christ, man.
I think this is misunderstanding the intent. Hunting for hard to find music was never about making friends or connections; that's not the reason to go out. It was about the amazing synergy of moving in the world, and discovery.
(This is why bandcamp can replicate *part* of the effect online.)
Then this just feels like elitist generational grousing. I'd rather live in a world where I can browse through the Criterion Channel and maybe take too long to settle on something new to watch than have to hunt for something for ages. You can still make discoveries.
I can both appreciate abundance and also observe its failings. And it's not like it's the sole down side; there's also how little creators make in these new systems, how shows that are popular by any traditional metric get cancelled, how entire works disappear and are lost forever...
The systems themselves certainly aren't helping revenue streams, but transitions like that are always where execs take advantage of things. Beyond that, I think there's also just a different kind of discovery that people adapt to when it comes to online navigation.
Plus the owner of your local record store probably wasn't exploiting every musician on the planet, manipulating their customers and investing massive profits into the defence industry
I definitely get where this is coming from and I definitely miss going to the local video store every weekend to see what new esoterica I could find to rent over the weekend. ...That said, the more disabled I get the more I've found that streaming has actually broadened my horizons in that regard.
Meh, I remember those days and don't want them back. Lo-fi VCDs or VHS dubs or a dub off the street again? Yeah, it was fun to find something good, but fewer people having access to that kind of media didn't magically make the content better.
Same thing applies to video games as well. Finding a hidden gem that you never would have been exposed to otherwise, if not for cool box art and promising features on the back, felt so rewarding.
The feeling of flipping through a random bin in a record store and just... stumbling upon an album that's like your White Whale is something "Oh yeah, that tune's pretty good, I should check out this band more" can never hope to match.
I don’t think convenience is necessarily a bad thing, though it has likely made us more docile. The issue is that, sure, consuming things is more convenient, but we still work a 9-5. Somehow despite productivity as a species increasing 1000x, the only thing getting more convenient is spending money
We’re too comfortable into just being seated and consume content through streaming rather than exploring and discovering neat stuff that is all around us. All of this is what makes life so absolutely exciting to go through and we’re pushing it away from our daily lives through each decade
I remember getting excited for my favorite bands releasing new music. When I was a teen, my dad drove me around to different music stores trying to find Dream Theater's new album when they weren't popular, and it took three stores to find it.
i don't listen to Spotify because it's either utterly
lacking the new bands my friends show me
or their best tracks and albums simply
cannot be found at all on Spotify.
friends and codes/flash drives
purchased at live shows
work better for me
Comments
Oh…
Oooooooooooh….
I get so much new music from KALX radio. And now I can Shazam every song I like, find out what it is, and add it automatically to a Spotify playlist
But I absolutely treasure the rare records I have that aren't on Spotify so 🤷
Also makes me glad that I actually physically purchased albums, even if I got them from Amazon. It was cool to blast them in the car when I was in high school.
I should go record shopping soon
I'm getting tattoos soon, so that's a little treasure
*with the exception of the anatomically correct edition of the Jungle Book.
https://www.bandcamp.com
i should spend more time on bandcamp
but im having a hard time finding new things.
thanks!
I also enjoy finding eclectic DJ mixes in general. My Analog Journal on YouTube, https://pinchyandfriends.com/ , etc.
An experience, a special feeling, the second season of DC's Super Hero Girls (2019).
Hm. What else can satisfy this feeling?
but then I lost it when I couldn't afford to keep my storage unit smh
While I am absolutely fine with the convenience of buying stuff digitally, I do miss it sometimes.
I was trying to put my finger on why playing a record was different, why I listen more closely to vinyl versus streaming an album.
It's a ritual (and the player doesn't have notifications to interrupt me).
That said, the act of physically leaving the house definitely adds something
"I didn't make this post for you!"
I miss that so much.
It renders the fruit of our labors more hollow. It's just there, on the shelf.
So I am glad now that we can have both streaming and physical, and best of both worlds.
Ot the whole thing of flipping through and finding a surprise comic
https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/a-revolutionary-concept
Is the abundance of choice.
Obviously having an abundance of choice sounds like a great thing and should be a great thing, but our brains are wonky and that's not how it works in practice.
I am so frustrated by that.
ANd there's times when I miss managing music stores.
Critical hit
I was raised JUST AS things like Analog TV, DVD, VHS, Blockbuster, etc. were all on their way out, so I was kinda born in this weird transition period
And low-key I prefer the way it was beforehand
I have to chase like a cat going through the house’s garbage bin.
Kind of sucks the fun out of it when you can find the exact game on an online store at the press of a button.
What Hertzfeldt is really lamenting is the loss of third spaces and community, but those things are bad for the economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7JyjZI3LUM
(if anyone reading this is in central MO, shop at Yellow Dog in CoMo)
The algorithms and the apathy have, under no circumstances, gotten any better.
Watching streaming is great, more convenient.
But dang it i miss having to check at a certain time of the day to watch a show i otherwise wouldnt have seen.
It has its charm and is somewhat more stimulating to me.
“Hunting” takes you deep into history, where you never know what you’ll find. Its library is a thousand times bigger than Spotify will ever be.
Plus it's the rest of the experience. Hell, I first saw Slipknot live because I was at a record store looking for another CD and got told about Dotfest happening half an hour from my college 25 years ago. A year later they're on national tour.
Go to a store, make a few selections from the limited stock, and fall in love.
My anus is bleeding.
MY ANUS... IS BLEEDING!
(This is why bandcamp can replicate *part* of the effect online.)
Maybe I am a curmudgeon, as I flat refuse to use Spotify, because I *enjoy* my quests for music. I do use Netflix, but we still own DVDs and Blu-rays.
And mail ordering video games and having to wait
Having to wait for Crash / zzap64 / c&vg / mean machines to come with the morning news paper for gaming new
More recently the chaos of lan parties replaced by online
Not having a TV episode on a specific night to watch*
lacking the new bands my friends show me
or their best tracks and albums simply
cannot be found at all on Spotify.
friends and codes/flash drives
purchased at live shows
work better for me