Welcome to cassie.land, the latest (as of writing this) web project that I’ve started and may promptly abandon.
Here’s the truth: These past few months have shown me the impermanence of online platforms. I have quit reddit with the third-party API shutdowns, and while I am probably better off for it, it does feel like losing one of the bastions of the internet I once knew. I regret to inform that I am officially an old person on the internet; I yearn for the days of hyper-specific Geocities pages with incredibly useful information written by a thirteen year old screaming into the void (and for the days where our search engines actually directed us to that information rather than some circuitous tripe written by AI that packs in every SEO keyword without actually saying anything).
This past year has emphasized to me the impermanence of online platforms. I have quit reddit with the third-party API shutdowns, and while I am probably better off for it, it does feel like losing one of the bastions of the internet I once knew. I regret to inform that I am officially an old person on the internet; I yearn for the days of hyper-specific Geocities pages with incredibly useful information written by a thirteen year old screaming into the void (and for the days where our search engines actually directed us to that information rather than some circuitous tripe written by AI that packs in every SEO keyword without actually saying anything).
It feels like most of my blog posts end up being about music. I’d like to pretend that this post is a piece of an annual tradition in which I review and analyze my listening patterns from the past year, but truth be told, I’ve only done this once before, in 2015, and then kind of early in 2020, when I reviewed my favorite albums from the last ten years. Truth is, I’d like this to be a tradition, a habit I develop, but I’ve had about as much success with that as I have with my resolution to exercise more regularly.
Recently, my boyfriend and I decided to revisit a childhood classic: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the film that jump-started what would prove to be an extremely lucrative and much beloved franchise for Disney. I first watched it not long after its 2003 release, making me 8 or 9 at the time, and enjoyed it, like most other children at the time. It brims with swashbuckling adventure and humor while maintaining Disney’s family-friendly directive. Unfortunately, with my older, more world-weary eyes saw through the dust of nostalgia, dismayed as the film makes no effort to pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which stands as an absolute bare minimum requirement for a creative endeavor’s portrayal of women.
As the year closes, naturally I must compile experiences and interests from the period into data and statistics.
Okay, maybe I’m not being quite that heartless, but last.fm sure makes it easy to indulge that desire. I scrobble (almost) all of my music to last.fm as I enjoy having a record of my listening habits for both reference and analysis. This year I finally found a solid app to do so from my phone, too, though my scrobbles lack what I listen to at work, which is a lot, as well as about half the year of listening on my phone. Therefore, as we head into 2016, I’d like to look back on what I listened to the most in 2015 (not necessarily my favorite releases from the year — my musical discovery process is best described as stumbling across things years after release).