With 2009 just a few days away, now would be a good time to reflect on the year that was.
Myself? Plenty of time on discogs… too much perhaps, despite it having gone to the dogs.
The mix of music and data still holds a strange fascination, though.
Everyone else? Google have revealed that “Sarah Palin” was 2008’s hottest search item, while Yahoo users pushed “Britney Spears” to the top of their respective list, and, in a peculiar twist of irony, the term “Goggel” was yahoo.de’s #4 typo of the year (“Tschibo” took top honours) — all of which speaks volumes about the acuity of those allowed online nowadays.
WTF? The masses have spoken. LOL!
Saving grace is provided by Time Magazine’s “Top 10 Everything of 2008“; and this year we also bid farewell to Heath Ledger, Paul Newman, Eartha Kitt, Mama Afrika, Horst “Derrick” Tappert, and a certain Betty James — the co-inventor of the Slinky toy.
Being ejected for good, too, is the VHS cassette — at least in the USA, where the last distributor of the commercial fore-runner of the probably-soon-to-also-become-obsolete DVD format has recently shipped his final load. One wonders for how long remnants thereof will continue to survive in people’s living rooms or remain available for sale in third world countries. I, for one, still have a VCR (largely unused) as well as some tapes, and I treasure it merely for the sake of a growing museum of old gadgetry.
And while we’re on a retro-trip, a few days ago I finally managed to watch the fabulous BBS: The Documentary. All 5+ hours of it. In one sitting. In DivX format. Downloaded from archive.org. Off a USB flash drive plugged into a DVD player.
Quite in contrast to the viewing methods described in the previous paragraph, eh?
Now looking forward to next year, there’s lots of retro-geek kinda stuff to be done, like continuing the Tape2MP3 project, re-designing this blog, and somewhat re-creating my own old BBS. The aforementioned documentary also demands a second viewing as well as a proper review, and then there’s the “other” tape project, while an even larger music/media database is constantly being designed during idle cerebral clock cycles.
But not now; there’s some music editing work to be finished first.
Yes, I’m really looking forward to looking behind me.
Image credits: Unknown
