I think that "public square" conception of twitter was real at some point, but it's not been true since 2013 or so when algorithmic curation took over. I suspect the main issue is stickiness due to accumulated follower counts, but it's effectively meaningless over there now anyway.

Yeah I think my days of carefully curating digital music files are well over…

This was always a Korean niche and I'm v happy to see that advancedmp3players.com is still going. The Astell & Kern stuff looks really nice, but it's kind of spendy for me at this point. I'm also not sure a better quality player makes total sense with a streaming platform.

Even earlier than mine! Wow. The specs on these things were always surprisingly good for the time.

Tunes > fashion.

You could watch videos on it in 2004. An amazing thing. I never throw anything like this out, so I will have a few broken ones in the flat somewhere.

Holy fuck. You must have had big pockets.

This one? That's the H320. You were essentially carrying an actual mechanical hard drive around, which sounds bizarre now.

I vacuum the front room (sometimes) and do the vacuuming (again, not enough). I'm just hopelesly contrarian.

There were always better mp3 players around (the Korean ones were where it was at). But yeah, v much a minority interest. Tbh for me the mp3 player era dovetailed strongly with the Pirate Bay era. It's all gone, this.

Ha I realise I even still have this thing knocking about

Yeah, all this is v bad. I used to be a dedicated "separate mp3 player" person - and none of your iPod bullshit either, iriver H320 ftw - but it's just not viable in the age of streaming.

It's a major life disaster for me when that happens while out on the move; no exaggeration With the AKGs, you just swap out the wires, which is one of the reasons why they are the Best Headphones. The jack-to-lightning adaptor introduces another (fragile) point of failure, which I resent.