Bye Spotify

I recently decided to completely stop using Spotify. First of all, because fuck them and their investments in the facist regime currently ruling America. Second of all, I wanted to own my music. For the past year or so I've been thinking a lot about the things I own and the things that can be taken at the whims of a company. One of the things that really impacted me was thinking about my music this way. It was all stored on a profile, paid for each month, essentially rented, and could be deleted at anytime.

Owning my music just felt like something I needed to do. I bought an mp3 player from Innioasis a few weeks ago and so far I love it. I had a little difficulty getting everything setup and the keyboard feature still doesn't work while I'm using RockBox instead of the stock firmware. The community around fixing and modding these things is massive. I downloaded a theme I like, messed with the configs, and made it my own! Adding my music to it has been so fun, it opened up a whole new side of the internet for me. Messing with the mp3 made me more confident in my abilities to code and customize my things!!

Not that I wasn't confident in my coding abilities before, but I think I had a bit of a disconnect between doing a project for class and coding for my own sake. There's always a little fear when I do anything with my computer, or any electronic for that matter, that I might brick it or something. From messing with the mp3, I realized how much I know and how much I can rely on the skills I've learned to fix issues that might arise. Something something imposter syndrome, something something men in CS (this will be a different post, believe you me), something something.