The Vineyards

Unlike I expected, Last.fm is not completely abandoned yet, but it has bothered me somewhat so far. The first few times I tried to listen to it, I picked "female vocalists" for lack of a better idea and because a big portion of what I like is sung by girls, I realized recently. Last.fm then presented me with Ramones, Bee Gees and a number of other bands and singers I was quite sure were male. I guess you can never tell these days - something I learned from Venus and Serena Williams, I admit.

Seeing as Last.fm's choice of female vocalists was a bit broad, I gave it some thought and decided to pick a specific band - in this case, Rush. Last.fm played everything but Rush. It gave me rap and hip-hop but it did not give me Rush!

So I diligently went to their website, found the page for Rush, clicked the little button that clearly embodies the idea of "click me to listen to this particular song or band" and at last it played some Rush! For a whole 21 seconds. Then it just stopped completely and forgot its purpose is to serve me with music. If I hit the Play button again it would just play something at random; if I tried the button on the site it would play another 21 seconds and stop again.

I expected I would not touch Last.fm for lack of interest. Contrary to my strongest beliefs, however, I keep going back to it - and being disappointed. Surely, the randomness it presents can be quite interesting - right now it is playing a song called "Day Six: Childhood" by Ayeron, something I had no idea existed, and it is sounding great. But I wanted female vocalists, I wanted Rush, and it did not give me that!

I was going to write about a quirk of Portuguese language I find quite interesting but forgot about it because the music got in the way. Some people say they can get nothing done without music and give me funny looks, "Are you from the planet Geborigeru or something?", when I say music just distracts me. It is thereby proven.

On the other hand, Rozen Maiden is not disappointing me at all.

(Wow, Last.fm is playing Rush. It had to go through Depeche Mode and Snoop Dogg and over a dozen completely unrelated songs before getting to it.)

Last night, around 2am, instead of doing something useful like going to bed or watching Ashita no Nadja on Cartoon Network, I decided to check some blogs to see if anyone had posted anything during the day, expecting to see the same posts I had been seeing for nearly a week. No such luck: there were many updates everywhere and when I was done reading everything it was too late to catch Nadja, so I thought I could post something as well since everyone had done it. Between me and my goal, however, there were multiple technology forums with interesting topics that kidnapped my attention, so the writing of this post was postponed to today, when I no longer remember half the themes I was going to mention.

One of such themes, I recall, was Justin moving back to LiveJournal for all the reasons he ran away from it years before: social networking et al. Indeed, his posts now suddenly have lots of comments from people I can only imagine who are and who did not comment before. The communities in LJ have been known to me for a while, but I never imagined the site itself had grown so big that one could hop back in and two days later have comments from so many different friends.

It almost made me want to go back myself, until I considered the differences in situation. If I went back, first I would be abandoning this domain and all that relates to it, and I am far from fond of abandoning things. More important, however, I have nearly no friends in LJ that are not Justin or directly related. I had little contact with the fun and fine people of Dark Ages, so even Swanberg is a stranger to me. Furthermore, my fellow countrymen are all in orkut, not in LJ (or MySpace, hah!); I would just switch from one isolated island to another, and this one is easier to remember.

Not to be said that I flee from all this social networking thing, however. I got into Last.fm last night - not a social networking system, of course, but it is a first step in two different directions. I am sure it will be completely forgotten within the week, as music is far from a desperate need for me - it is often a nuisance, in fact, and I constantly worry I am bothering people around me if I use my speakers, but earphones can get very tiresome and make one's ears hot - and my cable company's download limits are being imposed. I tend to reach it on upload alone, since I am such a nice guy (ever had a torrent shared to 65000%?); I was hoping to keep it lower, not increase it further.

Note, I really wish Mary-Beth Maybell or Sage would comment between songs. It would make it all so much more interesting.