Physical Media

I got a record player for Christmas. This is pretty much the culmination of the last six months of my spouse and I talking about going back to physical media, we've got a few CDs and I've got a CD burner, but we've been talking and joking about vinyl and "going full hipster" for months now and, well, now I've got a record player. I've now been to a couple of the many, many used record stores in Portland. I bought a Jim Steinman record for a dollar. I bought other records too, and so did my spouse.

The record player also plays CDs and has bluetooth, which is delightful.

In general I'm going back and forth between "digital files" and "physical media" because I do, in fact, have lots of mp3s and I already liked buying digital albums on Bandcamp. But in general, I'm burned on out not owning things, and other people have said more eloquently than I can why you should consider ownership over just jumping ship from Spotify to another service.

I like minimalism in a lot of ways but I also like maximalism as a design philosophy. I like being surrounded by things I love, and having access to stuff even if the internet is down.

Everything is a balancing act, everything is moderation, isn't that always how it goes? But I'd like to definitely not rely on streaming, and just have to balance between physical media and digital files on my computer.