"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

i used to be obsessed with music, had a collection i curated since high school that had grown to over 80k songs

it was stored by genre>artist>album where anything that i liked with on an album of reasonable substance would get the entire album along with it but then there'd be plenty of one offs in another folder which took the place of an artist one

it was perfectly optimized for winamp, i could just drag the genre(s) of desire or artists/albums of specific interest into the playlist, hit shuffle and we were off to the races

but for the most part i kept everything in there and let it play on shuffle but could easily queue up stuff in a matter of seconds that would last for hours

this was done much easier than creating any playlist on itunes and winamp understand the ephemeral nature of it, yes, we could have the same saved playlists as itunes, but it was much better to just be able to pull from a genre and then quickly select the next dozen songs to be played before it skipped back into random

winamp even had to solve the problem with humans not understanding how random works (ie you have 10 songs in a playlist, the odds of the last song getting chosen next is 10% which means it'll happen a lot) and thus had to tweak their algo to make it work more along with human expectations of random rather than what was actually random - which was a very difficult coding challenge at the time

but i digress, around 2016 i was going to spend a few months without an apartment as i planned to do a lot of global travel, my old roommate who i wasn't friends with and actually owed me money from unpaid rent said i could store a bunch of stuff up in the attic of her new apartment - i put in there, including my hard drive with all my music, when i get back i get in touch with her and she says she's already moved out and assumed the landlord threw it away and refused to look into it (so i assume she just took everything - especially since she didn't contact me once about this and this happened during a time when she knew i'd be out of the country)

i never rebuilt the collection and just leaned into pandora, youtube, spotify as crutches with plans to rebuild and never did, hence my music knowledge really kind of stopped growing and i know very little of any releases after 2016

so here i am, sick in bed on new years eve, installing winamp, probably not going to be up for midnight and deciding i'm going to reclaim my old music collection and stop passively streaming a very small sample of what comes into my mind to listen to at the moment