Windows Media Reviews My New Music

The music:

Give Up by The Postal Service: 2.4 stars
Andorra by Caribou: 2.49
Version by Mark Ronson: 2.5
Writer's Block by Peter Bjorn and John: 2.86

Windows Media Player 11(WMP11) has assigned all of my music stars. I don't know from where these "stars" originate nor do I know from whence in "time" they might have been from in the past future, but I do know that I won't have cared tomorrow for one day longer than I don't care today.¹

Allow to explicate on my previous exposition. WMP11 has rated the entirety of The Milk of Human Kindness by Caribou at roughly 2.49 "stars". It has rated Andorra by Caribou at ~2.66 "stars". I have not assigned these ratings. When I am forced to override the "stars", my ratings are arbitrarily assigned a gold-ish color.² Given our culture's obsession with this rather silly metal that is only useful in electronics and nearly pointless as a wearable accessory, I am left to guess that WMP11 thinks that I should somehow be pleased to see that my ratings receive gold-ish "stars" of distinction from WMP11 disdain for my decidedly deranged collection. As some people are fond of remembering³, gold stars were the reward for significant achievements of the kindergarten through third grade set. To receive these stars, we acted in a way that our educators found exemplary and felt deserved a reward, trivial in nature though it may have been.

As these "gold" "stars" pertain to WMP11, I find these artifacts to be even less deserving of any merit and I feel cheapened to the core of my being that some drone of a content manager thought that merely clicking a "star" to assign a rating to a song deserved some flagrantly fleeting reward of a "gold" "star". Have we sunk so low?⁴ I have merely banished the embarrassing ratings given to my musical entertainment in order to provide me with some hope of an interesting shuffle while pounding through pedantic and profusely proliferating circulation reports. I am not entirely certain, and am completely willing to admit that my feeling is based on no small amount of superstition, but I believe that these ratings are related to the frequency at which WMP11 will play a selection when instructed to do so at "random".⁵

Furthermore to the point just made and given the frequency at which any of the songs on DJ Shadow's Preemptive Strike are chosen at "random", I am inclined to believe that the further my ratings vary from WMP11's, the less likely it is to choose to play those songs at any given point at which it is allowed to choose a song. I feel entirely justified in saying this in response to WMP11: I know where you live and I am freezing the urine as I type.

1 Why yes, I did study Latin.
2 A bit watered down, like a weak yellow.
3 Those years were tough for me. No amount of Concrete Blonde helped The Genius as he struggled through them. A lot of processing power with a little bit of information on a lot of topics leads to strange questions posed to profoundly puzzled parents.
4 YES.
5 In my many long years at the college of my collegiate experience, I spent no small time studying computer science. Unsuccessfully, as it were. Be that as it may, I still know that programs can never do anything truly random. To do that, you need an irrational capability. If only we could program AG into binary or trinary, we could have a whole new era of irrational processors.