A two-panel comic strip titled "Back in the Day" and "Now." In the first panel, a man sits at a desk cluttered with 1990s technology, including a bulky cell phone, a portable CD player, a radio, a cassette player, headphones, and stacks of CDs. He thinks, "Wow, it would be great to have all that in one device." In the second panel, the man sits at a clean, empty desk with only a modern smartphone in front of him. He has a nostalgic expression and thinks, "I miss my Walkman."
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[–] 3 points 10 months ago

I semi-agree. A phone is better in any practical way.

But there is something magical about interacting with mechanical (and electromechanical) stuff.

Sometimes I really love putting a record on a record table, flipping a switch, and gently lowering the stylus into the groove. There's no track skip, no fast-forward, you just sit there and listen to an entire album at once. The quality is worse than what I could get from YouTube or something, but it feels so much more engaging.

And it's not nostalgia either, my childhood music was on cassettes and later CDs, and I feel less attracted to either of those.

I would probably absolutely hate it if it was the only music format available to me. But the contrast with modern digital music blasted from a depression rectangle is what probably makes it so appealing to me.

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