why cds are the best form of physical media and why nobody uses them

07-07-2026

this is a rewrite of an older blogpost.
Okay, so. I'm a firm believer in friction. i see humanity as a sort of moss, or crystal, and it needs nucleation points to grow. i think that for the most part, enjoyment in day-to day life comes from the small bumps that come up. my favorite space probe says it well: "People wanted to walk. They wanted to take the bus that smelled like cigarettes. They wanted those precious three minutes between asking a question and knowing the answer." I think the rise of the response of "just google it" from forums or even people in irl life is a tragedy. Imagine if you could just go anywhere instantly. Imagine if you never had to wash the dishes, or do your laundry, or sweep the floor. on one hand it's great because you hated to do those things. On the other hand its terrible because you hated to do those things. I'm a long way off from my point. The medium is the message, and streaming is a non-medium. it completely side-steps the friction and smooths it down with four-million-grit sandpaper. Physical media adds roughness to the experience. You have to take care of your music. its your music! you have physical ownership of a representation of this artists work. When I want a new album, I can catch a bus to the neighboring town, where i can draw or write or listen to music, then I go to the house of the lord, JB-hifi (rip in peace), and purchase the album. I have to plan in advance when i'm going to go buy them and which ones I want. Theres friction. there's a process. Maybe I don't have money. Piracy is awesome:
$ cd Music/robzombie
$ mkdir hbdeluxe
$ cd hbdeluxe
$ yt-dlp -x --audio-format wav https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLULsbo4lTILVzrHnZZJy6v0hFxKSeAkbI
 and then I burn it to my own cd-r. Pro tip: your local dump shop sells awesome shit
Okay, hippie stuff aside. Physical media is great. Why cds? Vinyls are great. I love vinyls. Give me seventy dollars. Your album is more than 55 minutes long? give me one hundred and forty dollars. Listen to a vinyl in a car. How do you store your vinyls? it's wrong. Vinyls are needy. they fit one (1) niche and that is that they spin (things that spin are awesome. do not get me started) This issue was known to Big Music, so they needed something that was cheaper and more portable. This is where cassettes came into play. They're plastic and the size of an ipod nano. You can record your own playlists to cassettes, at varying quality. I just hope that you dont plan on listening to that music you bought, unless you want your tape to snap, or stretch, or wear thin. Hey, you don't keep magnets around do you? It is genuinely insane how peter quill kept a cassette tape in such good condition when it's been exposed to the vacuum of fucking space and associated cmbr, when the magnets in your iphone can erase the data on a cassette. Okay, we need something better. something... compact. The cd became the greatest physical media format to exist. Not just for music. I keep backups of shit i won't realistically ever use on cds. why? If you put a vinyl in a freezer (not really a freezer, imagine a hypothetical box that slows down entropy) and never open it you get 100 years before the cruelness of entropy corrupts the data* and makes it worthy of those millenial fruit bowls. Cassettes? Don't make me laugh. you'd be lucky to get 40. A compact disc, the absolute goat, would last as long if not longer than a vinyl. This is because sans oxidization or like uv i guess, the only way to damage a cd is physically. Add error correction and error smoothing (3blue1brown has an awesome video on the former) and you have near-perfect reconstruction of your data. Beautiful.
"God. CDs are the best. I sure hope nothing bad replaces them." I said with joys. I was then shot 57 times.
(disclaimer: We are going to skip mp3s. i will make a further blogpost if i feel like it but yeah they're cool. I listen to mp3s when showering or if i'm using a bluetooth speaker. Bandcamp is awesome for supporting artists and buying digital albums, but i usually burn them afterwards.)
Streaming sucks so bad bro. Not to sound like a drooling socialist, but corporations would genuinely rather have you rely on paying sixteen dollars a month to rent music -- no -- rent access to music. At the risk of being a character written by vivsiepop: that's so fucking stupid oh my fucking god what the fuck. you should not have to pay a continued fee each month to listen to music when you can spend 14.95 once and then rip the cd, or just pirate it!! send the artist 5 bucks, that would cover the amount of money that they would get if you listened to their music on spotify!!! i forgot to mention-- each stream on spotify makes less than a five hundredth of a dollar for the artist. You're structuring your business around keeping your consumers paying fucking rent to listen to music YOU DONT OWN! only to not pay the artists??? Where is this money going?? oh, right. King gizzard and the lizard wizard have all of their music on bandcamp for free because fuck spotify!!! and they got replaced by ai generated slop, that spotify is standing back and allowing to flood their platform, because they make the same amount of money either way, even though it's taking from the genuine pennies artists are already making. That makes so much sense. You know who doesnt make any cents? the people making the fucking music that funds your platform. This is such an amazing business.

second first blog!

06-07-2026

hi okay so i've completely rewritten my site from the ground up. the old code was baaaad. I dont want to go into specifics but i remember having body, a .body div, and a .content div and other than the first one i cannot tell you which one is the child of which. Now i have a much simpler #main div and everything is #hashtag awesome. I'm probably gonna write a bash script that will turn an obsidian document into html, then insert it into my blog.html file. okay anyways bye.