❚ The Noise in my life, transition chapter

Fomo driven craze for that sweet tune

I started to see my older brother getting games and sometimes music from his trips to our parents personal office, they had a basement office in a building downtown, where they had their magazine publishing operations, my time would come when I hit 12, they offered to bring me there and browse the internet as well. At this point it was still super early for me to get any kind of music or learn about music related websites, the internet as I knew it were cartoon network games, barbie´s websites and maybe googling key illustration for my current favorite shows. Even with more constant access to internet through neighborhood cybercafes and the public library I was mostly getting into into chatrooms, novelty sites, flash games and looking at porn because I was a growing teenager and I needed to see what was the big deal. This went until 2005 when our parents office became underwater due to a fire (to which they saved some things, including the pc, and when I mean underwater it was due to the water from the fire hoses raining down from the upper floors which were on fire) and decided to move their office to our home, prompting dad to hire the same ISP to get a line for the house, and placed both the recovered pc and my brother's in his room, our routine became hanging out both of us in the same room during weekends, he would play whatever game het got his hand on and I would play neopets on the browser.

Between my introduction to internet, the fire, and getting internet at our home computer, national channels already created a block of programming for teen audiences, featuring almost all anime, paid cable was also getting it's fair share by bringing two channels, one was EtcTV, a dedicated channel for anime which shared the same shows licensed to the national channels but programming was 24/7, and another one with the same intention but offered a far more adult, experimental catalogue, including sometimes japanese music videos in between commercials and regular programming (we will return to this later). Locomotion and EtcTV were available only in certain cable services, and it happened that my grandmother and their sister had both cable services to see them. During summer months I would be dropped at their house, and you know what it's vacations at your grandparents, I would watch all the shows I could catch on the day, I managed to see more than the average kid in my age group, after breakfast I would go and play with my cousins who also were in care of my grandparents, once the sun was getting too intense we would go watch TV until lunch, eat, watch more TV and then go out in the afternoon for a dip in the river, go back, eat dinner and watch more TV until bed time.

Going back in march to school would mean being ripped out of my summer paradise but I also had a catalogue of shows and songs I heard and now, I could maybe download some of these for my own entertainment

P2P MY BELOVED

With my father bringing his music hoarding operations home I became familiar with p2p file sharing software, whatever where their search and download goals, he used eMule, that software was off limits for us, dad wanted all the possible bandwidth for their content as he claimed, but he left things like Shareeza, Limewire and specially Ares to our use as he wasn't a big fan of them.

"pokemon", "digimon", "sakura card captors", were the search words on the bar, starting simple and small, then going through soundtrack from some shows I saw during summer

A new need originated in me, I had music in my pc, but I wanted to listen it in another place as well (also considering I might wanted to add more songs later), with some notions of what kind of CDs we had at our disposal I grabbed a rewriteable one and looked up all the opening themes I could remember on Ares, got them and burned them onto that CD, this happened all during a night where I was left alone at home (maybe my brother was there idk), having the session finished on the disc I ran to the DVD player to test if my first cd was working, and it was!. One of the songs that downloaded in the process was something called "Copy of chobits"; sometimes these files were called "Copy of song-title" and it might have never come with id3v1 (or whatever it was at that time), CD players at our house weren't that advanced to display titles and artists for the CDs we had, neither our DVD player.

Have you heard that joke that someone is actually 5 other things under a trenchcoat?, I blindly trusted the song title and assumed maybe it was another piece of media I didn't saw yet from the Chobits IP, I didn't think too hard of it and kept it in my library, well, it was Trauma, a song by Ayumi Hamasaki, it actually took me to write this article to finally found out what was that song.

As a side note, our computer suffered greatly in the hands of my dad who wasn't that computer smart, and me and my brother who were not that much better than him. Our computer got so infected that opening our browser would instantly throw us a error of "This software stopped working, close and send a report", we eventually found out we could just move it to the side and keep using it, error messages would open saying that services weren't working, casino ads tabs would open from the same browser, etc, that computer was a real one for working for so long like that.

It's my turn with the player

With a music CD I could call my own I became insufferable, I brought it everywhere, silently aiming for a chance to play in any CD player, either school or my friends's houses, sometimes it wouldn't work because the player was meant for typical CDA format and mp3 based ones were still fairly new, it didn't last too long as my father complained I shouldn't have used their CD-RW without their permission, by this point I moved to CD-R but I was visiting my grandparents for summer who didn't have any CD-Player at the moment, only a big radio with cassette player, no big deal, father agreed to teach me how to record audio from any audio source into their cassette decks, decided what tracks from my CD were worth bringing with me I recorded like 2 different mixtapes, I don't recall the entirety of their contents but I do remember having tracks like Asian Kung-Fu Generation's Haruka Kanata and Sambomaster's Seishun Kyosoku, all the openings and endings of the 2003 FMA show and some of Rurouni Kenshin (namely 1/2 by Kawamoto Makoto, 1/3 no Junjou no Kanjou by Siam Shade and It's gonna Rain by Bonnie Pink), these were my number 1# tool to dissasociate as a teenager, needed to walk a distance to visit grand auntie Carmen?, getting a ride from my cousin's parents from A to B?, it was perfect except for the part that batteries would ran out in a couple of days so I was constantly visiting the only place that was selling them, which was 2 kms away. The next year they bought a CD player and I abused of it to the point the lens gave up and I broke the radio antenna, the newly bought one was off-limits of me obviously.

1GB of storage?, that's a lot!

When Christmas came around, my parents already acknowledged my insufferable need to have something to play my own music, and got a cheap generic, 1GB of storage MP3 portable player, from the local downtown shop of electronics. And I innocently thought there: "that's a lot, I will never run out of space". Which prompted a more chaotic period of just putting any song that I thought should be worth putting on the portable player. Especially songs that were earworms, either current ones or past ones, were put in the portable player. Because not all songs were available on P2P software. Some of them had to be downloaded from seedy websites And lots of them were songs that I listened to AMVS or tunes from the radio. I considered myself satisfied with the space available to me and the tools I had to my disposition for acquiring new music. Until I started thinking, "I just have singular songs of artists, maybe I should start, downloading entire discographies. And this behavior of me doesn't come from thin air, but it's me copying my father, who was a music hoarder. And every time he would find a new band that he considered was worth enough, he would download the entire discographies of them through his P2P software. I don't remember who was the first band that I started downloading their entire music. But I do remember a transition of moving from my portable player, which at this point, I lost it, bought another. That one stopped working and when acquiring another one I decided to get more storage, several models of mp3 players with more than 2gb were making it's way into the local shops, the biggest one I remember was 16gb between it's internal memory and a microSD that came with. Continue on Part 2