re-inventing the mixtape swap for 2019

At the moment I'm digitising mixtapes, and it's a time-consuming task. Let me first clarify that I'm not on the actual case of audio casettes (still carefully filed downstairs alongside the Man from U.N.C.L.E novelisations and the Minic ships) so I'm skipping setting up some sort of lash-in to do the cross-channel ripping and scrubbing up my rusty audio-processing skills for the chopping and cleaning. No, all I'm doing is importing a mix CD and (where the track list has been lost) identifying the tracks, where possible.

Yes, this is me, with my phone to the speakers, with Google listening, poking away at What's this song until a match pops out. Or doesn't, in the case of a lot of the mid-90s stuff, where I was drifting through lo-fi, riot-grrl, anti-folk circles and bands popped in and out of existence like mushrooms with stickered guitars and brightly coloured hair.

In all of this, one of my old comp-swap friends Whatsapped me to say he was  thinking of getting a comp swap going again. Sounds like a good idea, I said. I still treasure them all, my happy old mixtapes, and what's more, I have a slightly shameful secret. I make a mix-tape every single month, using the following basic selection methodology:

1. Pre-load a music player with the long-list (recently added + random top-up for me)
2. Bookmark all tracks that resonate
3. Rearrange the list till it feels like a mixtape
4. Publish online in some way

And I do this absolutely irrespective of whether anyone else is listening. I don't need to be in a swap to do comping, which is good, as most swaps only last 6-24 months anyway, until people feel they can't handle the new stuff to listen to every month, or that they can't get it together to make the comp, or worst of all, that no-one's interested in what they think is good music and are sick of hearing their music collection.

Not that any of that isn't true. No-one else likes the music you do in the way that you do; it's one of the creases of your individuality. You're obviously too busy. No-body's been bored for years now; the world has moved into a space where everything is happening all of the time. Who has the time to be interested in anything? New awesome things fling themselves beneath your feet at every turn.

Nevertheless, if it's something you can do lightly, folded into life as normal, then it becomes a regular enhancement, a reliable pleasure, a road you like to walk down, an idea that blooms reliably and regularly, like a daisy on a well-trodden lawn. 

So yeah, I though. Why not, I thought:

And then I started tagging in the mixtapers old and new, following my usual rhythm, adjusting the aesthetic to be something a bit more public-facing:

and then somebody asked the question, like they always do:

not going to turn off my ad-blocker, sorry

Just this year, the whining to turn off your ad-blocker has really been cresting. "Support your local newspaper" says one "our advertising revenue is a vital income source" says another. I'm a reasonable person, and I understand their point. Sure, let's turn off the ad-blocker. 

Particularly on local news sites, this is quite a serious mistake. Adverts load slowly, blocking the news story as they load, as they are primed to load before other content. They freeze the browser. Sometimes they do that so hard that everything crashes, or you have to go to task manager to kill the browser, clear cookies, and start all over again. I particularly notice this at work, where on one of my browsers ad-blockers are not actionable and I need to look at local news sites. Typically I'll leave a few pages loading while I go off and do something else on another tab. But I'd better not be doing anything important, as this can easily crash the entire browser.

The reason people block ads on the internet is not because they hate you and want to kill your income streams. That's your motivation, not theirs. The reason people block online adverts is because they are shit. They break your browser. They stop information loading. They flash in hypnotic, migraine-inducing colours at the periphery of what you're reading. They simper click-bait into your peripheral vision. They start talking over the video you're watching (this is especially a feature of American news-sites).

Darlings, you are missing the point. You want me to turn off the ad blocker. I'd love to turn off the ad blocker. I love adverts. They're one of my favourite art forms. Seriously, when I was a kid I used to collect Silk Cut adverts and stick them on my wall.

But you can't watch an advert when it's busy breaking the furniture.

eternal downscroll and the downpage lacuna

I pull down the page, and pause. Pull down the page and pause.
While the content loads.
While the content loads,
while the page finds yet more page
below itself.

The tendons that link my finger to my wrist
slide through my carpal like elastic in a hood
puppet string my radius and ulna
to the very elbow

The muscles that balance my arm in quiet tension
Bunched over the bicep, taut across the tricep
Engaged, as my yoga teacher would say
to my ragged shoulder

All of these are begging me to stop,
and the neck too.

I pull down the page.
The scroll-bar catches, and lets go
There is more beyond the more
And more after.

My resource investigator brain
My hunter gatherer excitement
insists

The blank page
fills

Information transmits
spaced by whitepage lacunae

A tap, a click
a pause in the information flow
and then the delicious down-arrow saccade flutter
of information, arriving.