Tikkabik

About three years ago or so I actively started using the iTunes Store to buy most of the music I listen to. I rarely buy CDs anymore, although I still will — but I’ve set very different criteria compared to the days before the iTunes Store became as useful to me as it has. Mainly I reserve my CD purchasing for stuff I want to make sure I have pristine archives of — music that’s important to me, artists that I consider my favorites, or content that I think will sound much better on CD than MP3/AAC.

But realistically, for about 80 percent of my purchases, the iTunes Store is perfectly sufficent. Whether it’s a pop song I can’t get out of my head or an album by an artist I’m not sure if I like, I’m willing to put up with the DRM limitations and relatively low bit-rate.

Now, before we had kids, I bought a lot of music on CD. I think when we got married I had about 550 CDs, plus probably another 100 of Bonnie’s, and by the time I started switching my purchases to the iTunes Store, I think I can safely say that I bought another 300 or 400. That’s in a span of about a decade and a half, and for a music lover, I really don’t think that’s a lot. I never got rid of many of my discs, though. If I tired of something, I’d put it away, into storage — I never sold back my old CDs to used record shops. Just never much saw the point in it. I’m not a collector, by any stretch, and I’m certainly not a completist. Just a musical pack-rat, really. Figured just because I didn’t want to listen to it today doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to listen to it, say, five years from now.

What’s irritating is that I’ve lost track of some of the music I really adored, and it’s stuff I want to hear again, and it’s stuff I can’t find. It’s undoubtedly around. I’m just not sure where.

Having kids changed things. I used to keep every CD I owned in a beautiful fruitwood rack that stood as tall as me. I had everything organized alphabetically by artist name (last name, first in the case of solo artists) and then subcategorized alphabetically by album name. It was a terrific system. Maybe not the greatest for just finding random stuff to listen to, but I always knew where stuff was.

My friend Joe and I argued on this point — he felt that artist collections should be subdivided chronologically (“Rubber Soul belongs between Help and Yesterday and Today, not after Revolver!”). Yeah, I know, it’s a flash from the movie High Fidelity, to be sure. Some of my friends tell me they’re surprised I’m not a musician given the depth and breadth of my musical nerdiness sometimes.

Then Robert came along. As a toddler, he took great joy in knocking all the CD jewel cases to the floor. I had to buy replacements because they’d break. But still I kept up the system.

Then Emme came along. And she decided when she was a toddler to mess with daddy’s CDs.

By the time James came along in 2000, I’d given up hope of keeping my CDs categorized. I swear, moving to MP3s was partly a relief because it meant the kids couldn’t screw up my collection any more. To this day, alphabetized by artist and subcategorized by album name is how I prefer to keep my “virtual” collection of music.

Anyway, I recently went looking for my collection of Love and Rockets stuff — the band that three guys from Bauhaus ultimately formed after Peter Murphy started his solo jaunt — and I’m damned but I can’t find it anywhere. Apparently I haven’t ripped any of my Love & Rockets stuff to MP3 on any Mac that I have in the house, and have no idea where the discs are. Same goes for Wire’s A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, and that REALLY pisses me off.

So I keep getting e-mail spam for “cialis soft tabs.” I have no idea if they’re real or not, but doesn’t anyone else see the irony in a soft version of a pill designed to … well … make you hard?

It’s probably telling that one of my all time favorite Mac games is Ambrosia’s incomparable Escape Velocity. It’s set in outer space, and it has you man the controls of a small spaceship as you travel from system to system, hauling freight and passengers for money. Eventually you can earn enough coin to trade in your meager vessel for a larger one, outfit it with weapons and more storage capacity. A branching storyline lets you become hero of the universe or a pirate, or just play endlessly as a merchant. I spent weeks playing this game when it first came out.

I’ve finally found a game that rivals it in terms of sheer gameplay. Over the long weekend I picked up Sid Meier’s Pirates for PSP, and I can’t stop playing it. It’s awesome.

The basic premise is the same: You start out as the captain of a small vessel in the Caribbean in the 17th century. You start out by aligning yourself with one of the dominant naval powers at the time — England, France, Spain or Holland — and you set out to make a fortune and a name for yourself.

At each port you can buy and sell goods, repair your ship and recruit crew members. You can also meet with mysterious strangers who will offer to sell you special items or offer you tips on where you can get the best prices for your goods; talk with barmaids and bartenders about where your enemies are hiding, and meet with the governors of each city or town and establish relationships that may ultmately lead you to taking one of their daughters dancing.

Once you’re out on the high seas, you’ll face off against pirates and merchants; if you win in a broadsie battle you can either scuttle their ships and steal the contents of their holds, or add their ships to your armada (a fleet of up to five ships). Occasionally you’ll have to board (or be boarded) and fight the enemy captain with swords.

Now, Sid Meier’s Pirates isn’t anything new — Pirates is a franchise that’s been around for years — but thanks to a confluence of events and my preference for Mac games, this is my first exposure to it, and I just love it.

Awesome game. Strongly recommended. Definitely worth the $20 I paid at GameStop.