napster memory

i just had a sad, nostalgic flashback. i felt like i was on napster again. a friend sent me a bunch of photographs attached to an email, because she doesn't have a web page to put them on, and i had to download them all. i was looking at the downloads all going at once, for sue's pictures, all these progress bars going across at one time. that's how napster used to be.

i used to have a cable modem, and also, a whole bunch of napster songs, before i deleted them all whenever i formatted the hard drive thinking that i could get rid of the computer virus once and for all, and that it was a one-time thing that would never come back. i sacrificed all those songs because i didn't have any large storage for them, like a zip drive or cd burner. and i didn't have a second hard drive at the time either.

downloading music was ... very happy. that's been missing from my life, again. i went a very long time without music in my life. then i got the internet and napster and also mp3.com (which went bankrupt), where i discovered homemade electronic music. and also on the internet i discovered programs where i could write that kind of music myself. music that wasn't on the radio. i even found songs from tv commercials that i liked (i found 'always coca-cola,' that song, on napster).

watching progress bars was what it meant to use napster. being excited about when enough of the song would have loaded so that i could listen to most of it. the songs were great, i could choose exactly what i wanted instead of getting one big cd with a whole bunch of garbage and only one song i ever listened to. and i could listen easily to only the songs i liked the most. ... that has been gone for a while now. somehow, while i love soundclick, i haven't found as many great songs on it as i found on mp3.com - i don't know why. i think it's partly because of how hard it is to search for songs while using dialup, and i went to soundclick during the time period when i gave up cable/dsl and switched to dialup. i'm not sure i'm willing to pay for those, because they are extremely unreliable and always getting hacked, much worse than dialup. i remember we'd have 'internet storms' where the internet would be inaccessible for hours, and you'd call the cable company, and their automated answering system would have lists of regions where they already knew that the cable internet was down. this was a weekly, commonplace event, happening all the time.

downloading mp3s on dialup is not much fun. i have tried it occasionally. the slow-loading web pages don't help, either, with all their ads and graphics and clutter.

i haven't decided how to deal with the music-downloading addiction phenomenon. i am asking questions about what activities i would give up, in order to have things that i value more. and i've said that i don't intend to 'become amish,' but i do want to give up a lot of things that cost money and time, in order to have children and to have a real relationship with them, and with other people, and to have things that are more important in the long run. i don't want to be anti-music; but i need to find some way to deal with the music addiction problem. it's very commonplace for people to have thousands and thousands of songs and movies that they've downloaded - my brother did that, and he was still using old-fashioned cassettes back then, not downloading.

there has to be some limit on just how much time you spend downloading and listening to music, whenever you've chosen to have a family and real human beings in your life, and when money, and time, has to be spent carefully. i remember how much time i spent on that hobby back whenever i was collecting music, and it was a lot of time. as i'm planning for a family, i am becoming much more religious-minded and wondering about all the things that i might have to give up, or won't have the time or the money to do. but i've never intended to give up music. i'm just not sure what i will do with music, to have it in my life, to make sure that it's GOOD music (instead of just listening to the radio), and yet not to spend too much time on it when i have other things to do. it really was addictive, and the number of available songs is infinite.