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~inquiry

I'm occasionally frighted by how quickly muscle-memory evaporates at my age. Similar for coding language keywords/syntax. I've been out of the game maybe a year, and almost always have to grep previous scripts for how to do this Lua thing or that. And by the time I'm done grinding out another script, I'm typically increasingly convinced I'd have had a more peaceful/joyful life sans software.

Take last night (yes, a touch of the topic-drift, here..) My wife and I performed out on a rooftop overlooking one of the "Great Lakes" (ungodly gorgeous as sunset ensued), and during a break I conversed with another musician about the joy of spoken phrases evoking song memories, and it hit me that long before gazillion streaming music options, people in music-defined "clades" (per a recent post of yours) (except in this case the clades were defined by a rough musical genre, e.g. "top 40", "rock", "country", etc.) all heard the same songs AT THE SAME TIME. In other words, we're talkin' a very real clade/community binding waaaaaaaay above and beyond the happy horseshit claims of internet potential to stoke community. And such took place on a many-times-a-daily basis.

Tying that second paragraph back to the first, we developed the same musical-muscle-memory, and now use the phrases thereof in speech, "bringing it all back" on moments' notices, all winky grins of joy.

And that's amplified all the more for those of us that could retain the non-verbal aspects, i.e. notes and chords. We've become musical muscle memory teases - as in "teasing out" such memories, which further tease out memories of events and surroundings accompanying those songs back in the childhood-through-adolescence day.

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~tetris wrote (thread):

That's normal, I think of it more as "language inertia". I use Python and R daily in my life and it still somehow takes me some time to adjust between these two languages (e.g. oh right I'm in R, how do I for loop again, oh that's right I'm not meant to...)

Your music community sounds genuinely magical, and I can just imagine you all buzzing to the same shared musical contexts, like pieces of the same brain.

Sometimes I lament living in a foreign land where I can't contribute much to the greater zeitgeist there due to the missing cultural references, but it awakens when I'm sitting with a group of english-speakers and we suddenly sync topic-wise on some shared thought. There, I'm a neuron flashing in rhythm with my neighbours.

Rant:

As for life sans software: No! It didn't have to be like this. Software was meant to empower us, automate the boring aspects of our lives, enrich us instead of hindering us. A smartphone in 2022 should allow users to communicate between their owned devices without using middleman software. Under the guise of better security from big corps, we've been hindered in that respect.