Sunday, October 08, 2023

I DISMISS Thee, Auto-Play (& I Still Want Paper Statements)

Fucking Amazon music. 

And Amazon Kindle, while we're at it.

When the album Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan ends, DO NOT FUCKING TAKE IT UPON YOUR ALGORHYTHMIC BULLSHIT SELF TO IMMEDIATELY START PLAYING MOTHERFUCKING JAMES TAYLOR. I didn't ask for that shit. EVER.

I know there are some good rants and coverage of this trend of streaming music (and video) services to automatically play music and videos "you might like based on ..." but I'm too lazy at the moment to refind them. All I mean to say is that I'm absolutely not the only person to really hate this.

Yes, you can (now) change the settings so it doesn't happen. But you have to do it on every device, and I swear to god it does NOT remember your selection. Kind of like the bank won't let me do any banking until I once again insist I want to continue getting PAPER statements, and yes this is very timely as I'm preparing to prepare 2022 taxes that need to be mailed by Monday, October 16th but actually I need to finish them by Wednesday the 11th MY POINT IS I require paper trails and documentation of everything that I've paid for, etc. so I can piece together an entire long-gone year of expenses and income, and I do not want to have to print them out after they're no longer online and the internet is down and the printer is broken. Chase bank has become particularly PESKY *every fucking time* I open the app or log in via browser, making me reconfirm this, multiple times a week. It's fucking insane.

But back to Steely Dan.

I used to HATE Steely Dan. But bitches get older, and now I am some kind of a middle-aged asshole stereotype. Who ... loves Steely Dan. And I hate that the whole neighborhood who has wondered who this cunt is who FREAKS OUT when other people construction fuckers play loud music, forcing everyone to hear their SHIT, like what kind of music does this cunt like? Does this cunt not like ANY music? And now, with the windows open, the answer is STEELY DAN. Of course this insufferable intolerant misanthropic asshole does like "music", if you consider Steely Dan "music", which a lot of people do not.

The point is that back in the days of VINYL when albums were a whole carefully crafted book from beginning to end, and the end meant THE END, unless the needle picked up and went back to the beginning of that exact album, or you loaded five records on at a time to drop on one after another, but man Amazon music you are not my old record player and YOU ARE RUINING THE EXPERIENCE OF LISTENING TO AN ALBUM, just automatically putting some bullshit on at the end of the ONE album I selected. ONE. I will make and play a playlist if I want it to keep going. Or I'll tell you to suggest some of your shitty shit predictions for me that are always wrong.

The same thing goes for when I finish a book. ALLOW ME TO LINGER ON THOSE LAST WORDS WHILE I CRY instead of IMMEDIATELY POPPING UP SOME ADVERTISEMENT AND ASKING ME "WHAT'S NEXT???" Jesus FUCKING CHRIST can a person enjoy the moment? When the book or the movie finishes?

We need a kind of white space in our timeline of experiences. Space ... silence ... focus on the last lines of the book we've committed so much time and concentration on ... before immediately being PUSHED OUT THE DOOR AND INTO THE UGLY CHAOS OF YOUR NOISY UGLY WORDY PREDICTIVE WRONGNESS.

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