God, one year at the school paper, the applicant for ad manager talked about her “wonderful repertoire with editorial.” Some malaprops, you can handle. This was just like “how the fuck?”

I’m not an asshole, just an opinionated prick.

OK. Listen to what you like, I’ll listen to what I like, and we can go about our days.

Are you not judging me without context?

I guess that’s certainly a thing to do. But not all albums are journeys, and thus, one buys individual tracks because the rest of it sucks.

Rent goes up 15%, and you get a 2% raise. Fucking thrilling.

When I had stepkids, I very quickly turned to piracy for their shows to avoid the endless “I need this because I saw it in an ad” routine. They were allowed to watch TV all night, and each morning was “what demand are they going to have now?”

I once accidentally made mustard gas at home trying to unclog a drain. I had bleach and ammonia on hand, and I ended up sleeping outside on the sofa on the porch of the main house after the hell I went through with my throat.

Why are you taking personal offense that I said I didn’t understand the behaviour of others? This is a petty hill to die on.

Look, people waste money on plenty of things, myself included. It just feels like being at the mercy of a company to listen to music is a poor choice.

I’ve got nearly 2,000 tracks and a few dozen albums that take up 25GB on my phone. Too large to store locally suggests a lot of ballast you never listen to.

You’re tying your access to music to a subscription. That feels wrong to me.

Maybe it’s just my age – I presume you were born in 1987 – but subscriptions are anathema to me. I rarely buy $10 in music in a given month, so there’s no value there to me. Add in the AI tracks, and, well … what would I be paying for?

The computer speakers aren’t terrible, and my earbuds acquit themselves decently when using my phone. Would I like some nice 8" speakers and a subwoofer? Sure. Not realistic in a van.

I’d also recommend KCRW. I found a lot of great music on their stream. My boss would pipe it through the setup in the copy store.

I mean, I can just choose a track on my phone or computer, hit play and have music. I don’t currently have a speaker setup.

You can only pirate with VC backing.

There are several albums I listen to as a complete work. But you can’t tell me that albums with one good track and a bunch of detritus weren’t a thing.

My Surface Pro 7 has refused to actually sleep or shut down for years at this point. I have to hold the physical power button for a while to actually get it to shut off. I’ve often awoken to a dead battery because I forgot that step.

Ask for pizza recipes, get an ad for Elmer’s Glue.