it's the noise that makes me human

My friend in_thy_bounty posted this and I was overwhelmed by memories of making mixtapes.

Those of us caught on the wrong side of 30 will remember making mixtapes for friends. You'd spend ages thinking about what to put on it, the running order (you couldn't be running out of tape halfway through a song after all), how it would be received by the person and how it would make you look. By the end of the process, you were really handing over a representation of yourself, your very essence distilled down into magnetic signals. It's 10 years since I last recorded a cassette, and it was already anachronistic then; but today we have the internet, and Livejournal is the perfect podium for your virtual mixtape. Give your tape a title, choose your tracks, put up links to the songs on youtube (they're always on youtube), talk a little bit about each one, what it means to you etc. Or don't, just stick up the songs and say absolutely nothing, maybe that's part of your whole mystique. Just go and be yourself, share a little part of yourself with your online friends, and make the world a better place*.

*world may not actually improve as a result of your post

So while I wait on many, many gigabytes of files to upload for work I will compose this mix tape for you.

( the dark edge of blinding sunlight )