markjgsmith

2024/01/04 #

The lost mini disc collection - I've been listenning to the latest RA mix pretty much on repeat. I went through an important part of my life listening to this type of music. Before that I had only really listenned to band music, mostly heavy metal and alternative rock. I absolutely despised electronic music. Anyhow at some point I found a bridge, on the other side of that bridge was a strange but very interesting world. The journey began.

The first few years were all about down tempo, very chill music, lots of remixes, samples and what not. I had bought a mini disc player and had a load of mini discs. This was a big step up from cassette tapes. Mini discs were awesome, kind of like CDs so you could skip between tracks, and create your own copies easily. It was still the era of listening to the same 10 or 20 albums over and over. We forget that today, because we have music abundance. You became very familiar with entire albums.

Anyhow I had a load of stuff from all these artists, I forget many of the names now. Too Many DJs, Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack. There were loads more. At some point between apartments and moving to CDs then to mp3s, I lost the entire mini disc collection. I also started getting into other electronic music genres.

I wish I hadn't lost that collection. Who knows maybe my life trajectory would have been very different. Listening to the RA mix reminded me how much it was a part of my life. The ambience of it is still very much a core part of who I am, even if I've been on a lot of adventures since then. #

Blocked (Issue #197)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Investing in Bitcoin, Elon complainers, macro outlook, we are brainwashed, some quality EDM, fun predictions for 2025

Issue details:

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

  • FreshRSS - "A free, self-hostable feed aggregator". Open source, had been in development fir 10 years, has extensions system, runs fast for up to 50k feeds. www.freshrss.org #

  • A restless Gen Z is reshaping the Chinese Dream - I hope the jobs situation for the youth in China improves. It's an interesting article if only to get a window into a very different world. Anecdotally I'm less convinced by the developing world / developed world distinction these days, at least the way it's popularly understood. The more I have traveled, especially around asia, the more I realise how innadequate these comparisons are. Yes in some senses poverty and hardship is more visible in some places, but on the other hand while places like the US have giant shops with every concievable grocery, with abundance of products and colors everywhere, in asia you have entire streets that are a vaste sea of variety and beautiful colors, filled with exotic delights. I wonder what the UK equivalent would be of student girl they interview for the article with her thick brown sugarcane filled hotcakes, spicy Sichuan sausage, mooncakes, chestnuts and dried mango. Fish & chips, a savoloy and some mushy peas? Perhaps the metric we measure by should be something else. We have very different societies optimised in very different ways. www.bbc.com #

For enquiries about my consulting, development, training and writing services, aswell as sponsorship opportunities contact me directly via email. More details about me here.