Monthly Archives: December 2023

Something Other Than Years

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It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it? What’s been going on?

Well, aside from the PC issues (which have since been thankfully resolved), I’ve been dealing with the holiday rush at the Day Job and squeezing in my 750 Words, and taking it easy. Catching up on a few things and deciding that other things can wait until the new year.

I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do here at Walk in Silence, because I feel it obviously needs a major change. On the one hand I’d been hyperfocusing through numerous entries about older music connected to certain parts of my past, and I’ve decided I’d rather not go that route anymore. I don’t need to post that kind of self-induced therapy anymore now, do I? But on the other hand, I’ve also been frustrated by my ‘new release posts’ which, let’s face it, are sounding a bit repetitious with not a lot of follow-through.

I’ve discovered that I’ve tied myself too closely to time management here, so to speak. I’m either talking about the personal past or talking about the immediate present. And I’m in dire need of untying myself from all of that. All of it has become less enjoyable and more…rote and uninteresting. It’s my own fault, really. I was just focusing too much on the acquiring of the music and not giving myself enough time to let it resonate with me. And that’s a problem when you acquire an album you like at the time but only vaguely remember any of the songs from it a few months down the line.

I want to change that.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted my end-of year list here, and that’s partly due to my inability to focus on new releases much this year. Sure, I do have a few favorites from this year (the above Lucinda Chua album, YIAN, is one of my favorites of the year, and of course I’ve had the ‘last’ Beatles song “Now and Then” floating through my head since it dropped). But…do I even have a countdown? Or a mixtape, for that matter?

I don’t, but I’m going to change that come the new year. I want to stop focusing on the acquiring and return to the resonance.

Until then, see you on the flip side, same schedule as always!

Year End: Crash and Burn

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Well, shit.

I did have part of a year-end review post in the making yesterday that I was going to post today, but about halfway through writing it my PC suddenly decided that it no longer wanted to read the externals, including my music library which I’d been using to reference said blog post.

Concerned but not overly so, I tried all sorts of things to get them readable again — as well as checking them against my laptop to make sure that it wasn’t the externals that got borked (they aren’t, and I AM VERY THANKFUL ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.). After completely wasting time that could have been used for a writing session, turned the PC off and hoped that letting it rest might help.

Aaaaand lo and behold, after restarting the PC after work today, I got a bluescreen.

As I said: well, shit.

I kept my old Lenovo PC for just this sort of thing, to be honest. [I like to joke that my family members are natural EMPs as our computer problems are rarely ever ‘oh you forgot to install this thingie’ and more ‘…good gravy, what the hell did you do to this?’ even though we hadn’t done a thing other than, y’know, use it as intended.] I just excavated it from Spare Oom closet, in hopes that it still works okay, considering it was behaving for the most part (it was just four years old and retired). We shall see where this leads.

[EDIT: Yay, it works! Boo, the USB hub I’d been using refuses to read anything! Yay, the externals work on their own! Boo, for some reason it won’t read the music library external and the film/tv external at the same time! And finally, shrug-emoji, now to wait for Lenovo to contact me about getting the new one fixed/replaced.]

In the meantime, I’d started thinking about what would happen if I had lost my music library. It is indeed ridiculously huge. But at the same time, I thought…well, this would be the end of an era, wouldn’t it? I’d be bummed, sure, but would it affect me as deeply as, say, losing my longhand writing forever? Hard to say, but maybe not? It got me thinking that maybe it’s time to pare it down and clean it up a bit. I’ve been contemplating having two versions of the collection: one that’s full and complete, and one that’s much smaller and for everyday use.

Something else to think about at the end of the year, at any rate.