Flashes of Panic

Sherry has thought about “now playing” more than I have.

I’d better catch up. (Trust me, in my mind this is a relevant link.)

Sherry’s thinking (as I understand it) boils down to this: “What does it have to do with what you’re writing about? If there’s no clear connection, it can only detract from the point you’re making.” (When/if I make significant structural changes to these pages, I am going to use Sherry as my guinea pig, if I can figure out how to make it worth her time.)

Of course, one could employ the “it’s my weblog and I’ll do what I want to” argument, but that’s just a way of evading the fact that you haven’t, actually, thought something through. Sherry’s right: despite my formatting tweaks, the way Ecto inserts the “now playing,” it’s a weird little postscript that doesn’t match the entry it goes with. It’s a U-Haul trailer on a sports car. Since iTunes is usually pulling random stuff out of the library (I have a complicated system to weight that randomness, but I won’t go into it here) the odds of a song and a post being related are, well, pretty small. For that reason, I’ve stopped tagging them on while I figure out a better way.

I have had people tell me they like it (OK, “person,”) and Tom pulls it off fairly well, even though his songs seldom relate to his posts either. Of course, Tom is (among other things) a professional musician. It’s fun to see what pops up there, and follow the links.

There is the question of, “Why do you think anyone would be interested in what you’re listening to?” I don’t think I can answer that satisfactorily, any more than I can answer the question, “Why do you think anyone would be interested in what you’re thinking about?” I can try, though.

One part: it’s there. Ecto has one button, and there it is. Of course, this puts “now playing” on a par with ugly tiled backgrounds on personal home pages (“…because I can!”) and I think I’m hoping to do better than that here.

More parts: I don’t understand the urge to share music, but it’s there. Why else mix tapes (mix CDs, now, I guess.) I made a few, but the best ones were the ones I got from Shawn in high school. I think there’s a bit of the mix tape in “now playing.” The problem with it, though, is that the urge falls apart when you think about it. Why should anyone else like what I like? I promise, your neurons aren’t hooked together exactly the same way mine are, and the electric charge I get from certain music probably won’t look quite the same on your MRI. I don’t think I’ve ever made a tape for anyone that they liked as much as I did. It must be hooked in to the weblog idea, though, and the misconception that what you listen to says something about who you are.

Maybe the solution is to tuck something over in the sidebar, the way Rachelle does with her links. Or Sam’s “Temple of Boom,” though in both cases I’d have to figure out how it’s done (and, in Sam’s case, how to have it not break on archive pages.) And I’d have to come up with a less smart-ass title.

Obligatory Good Will Hunting quote (not really obligatory, but it applies):

Will: Great, or maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels.

Skylar: What?

Will: When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.

(Now, I can get back to thinking about fink and creating a pseudo-LAMP development environment on my Mac, which is what I do think about, when I think. Some of the time. Some of the time I think about fink, that is, not some of the time I think. I’m going to cite the First Law of Holes and stop now.)