What am I listening to these days?  Not as much as I used to.  At work I still have to use headphones, and I don't bother that often, so that playlist has slowed to a crawl.  Even at home, though, since we moved, I feel inhibited from playing my music out loud too late at night, because Simon's bedroom is in the basement with me; less so in the summer, and now that he's getting into high school, but still.  Also, some of the games I play have their own incidental music, and while I often turn it off to listen to my own tunes, sometimes I don't.  Plus, more watching TV on the computer.

I'm still using Winamp on the computer (though from time to time I consider writing my own personal media player program, which would be optimized for the tasks that I want, but I haven't even considered how to begin yet), and I have a number of playlists, most of them themed (such as Female Artists, or music I acquired in the past year, or Canadian Artists, or whatever else I can come up with), including my long-term effort to listen to my entire library of songs in alphabetical order (started in 2009; almost done the M's).  However, I'm also acquiring music at my usual rate--90 tracks a month from eMusic, plus occasionally buying other stuff from iTunes or other sources, or acquiring free downloads from various sources.

What I had been doing was doing one screenful (35 tracks, generally) from my alphabetical ordering, then one from another playlist (cycling through in sequence).  But when my "New" playlist started piling up, I made it come up more often like Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-Other, or Alphabetical-New-Other.  And recently I've been falling behind enough that it's just been Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-New, with no time for any of my other playlists.  Maybe that 90-tracks-a-month thing is a little excessive, but I got grandfathered into it at a very good rate years ago and I feel like I should keep up with it.  Probably classic Sunk Costs Fallacy there, eh?  At least it keeps me from buying much on iTunes.  I do still get CDs from the library, once in a while, but I've started just ripping them and leaving them sitting around until I can try them out...which can be months.  Forget about trying to keep up on what's current--I haven't done that for years and years anyway.  (How long ago?  Does the word "Tubthumping" mean anything to you?)

More consistently, I tend to listen to my "favourite songs" playlist, various ordered, while I'm driving to and from work (or anywhere else alone in the car), or while I'm doing the big dishwashing push on the weekend.  My "favourite songs" list is up over a thousand songs right now, so close to 1/40 of my entire collection; these are the ones I can easily sing along to, or would like to be able to.  It amuses me to come up with different ways of sorting it--alphabetical by title, alphabetical by reversed title, increasing order of length, etc.  Currently I'm listening in decreasing order of song length, which is interesting, though I anticipate a lot of Beatles and They Might Be Giants as I get down below three minutes.  (Next up, sorted in order of the anagrammed form of the title...)  In between the complete scrambled list, I tend to pick a shortlist, plus any new songs I want to audition, and do them in a plain scramble.

I've also become a fan of the "Welcome To Night Vale" podcast, as so many others have before and since.  It's gone up and down in quality, some of that no doubt happening around the time I caught up and had to start waiting for new episodes.  The recent resolution of the Strexcorp plotline was pretty good, though.  I've started only listening when I've got a couple of episodes accumulated, so I haven't listened past that yet; Simon and I did go to see the live performance when it came through town, though.

What have I been buying recently?  I started tracking down artists featured in the "Weather" section of "Welcome To Night Vale", and downloaded a bunch of their albums (a lot of them were on eMusic, which makes sense because eMusic focuses on indie artists, and so does WtNV), including Eliza Rickman, who was at the live show.  I used to avoid albums with lots of tracks, but now I appreciate them because they help me burn through my monthly allotment faster, so recently I downloaded the extended version of [The London] Suede's debut album (most of the bonus tracks were a bit too noisy for me, but I did like their cover of "Brass In Pocket"), and Davíd Garza's sprawling "box set" "A Strange Mess of Flowers".  (If you're really curious about what I listen to, of course, you can check me out on last.fm.)

I've been debating getting the new Weird Al album on iTunes; I watched all of his videos, and I confess that the only one that really won me over as a song was "First World Problems".  Normally I like his single-artist pastiches, even though I was never a big fan of the Pixies (as he is apparently paying tribute to with this one).  His straight song parodies never did as much for me, and even less so these days when I've rarely even heard the song he's spoofing.  I had heard "Blurred Lines", but "Word Crimes" unfortunately runs afoul of my preference for descriptive over prescriptive grammar.  I'll probably get the album eventually--after all, I have all his others--but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it.  (I haven't bought the last TMBG album, "Nanobots", yet either, partly because I kept waiting for it to show up on eMusic, where most of their albums are available, and partly because I never got around to actually listening to any of the songs from it.  Again, probably one of these days.)