Damn... Didn't know they were cool like that...

if I had to pin it down, I'd say the recurring pattern is "the presence of a giant robot without its contextualisation within a real robot genre story"

and lots of good games have come out of this wave, but I wonder if the understanding of real robots as a trope rather than a genre is a confusion

I made the oopsie of scope creeping myself and it ended up being 100 pages long (when min is 20), and I fear I left some threads unresolved or under-explored. Dunno if my argument is actually good, and all that. But for something that long? Which I have never done before? Remarkably focused.

Lmao... Wow, you spent six times as much with them!!!! So much!!!

It went okay by the way

Different agony now (realizing I gotta crunch more mayhaps)

I am in agony

Very good ears

Big fan of those ears

"We're Traveling by the Mountain Pass and We May Have to Eat Each Other at Some Point (Hopefully Not)", which is all more minor acoustic pieces (and banjo). That one's actually been pretty difficult to populate, as it's so aggressively vibe-based I tend to be overselective. All in all, it's silly.

"These Make Me Feel Like an Alcoholic (But in a Sustainable and Healthy Way)", which is mostly cabaret and Japanese chanson,
"Semi-Comprehendingly Staring at a Newman", which is IDM and other similar stuff,
and, longest of all (I hit the character limit)...

so it can emerge naturally instead of being forced.

I do also still have playlists that are just genres. Hip-hop is pretty clear-cut, for example. In some cases splitting MORE (e.g. European folk vs. American folk) also helped a lot. Outside of that, I also now have playlists with names like...

WAY too broad, or labels like "folk" vs "bluegrass," which in my eyes have a LOT of overlap. So, instead, I've been classifying stuff not by genre, but by... usually more vibe-based stuff. It still ends up being pretty genre-defined, obviously, but this way I don't get mired in THAT detail,

When I inevitably had to think about whether a song was "rock" or "progressive" or "bluegrass" or "folk", I'd hit a point where it was just TOO HARD. Genres are nebulous! They're not a very good classification system a lot of the time! Especially when it comes to labels like "rock," which are-

Also as a result of this album-sorting process, I've re-discovered some stuff I haven't listened to in a while. That's also nice!

I've actually tried to do a lot of this stuff before, but I ran into a lot of problems. Specifically, I kept trying to sort things into specific genres. So,

I mean, I did- there was a period where I tangentially liked Japanese rock, and there were a few standout tracks (like None Shall Pass, by Aesop Rock) but now I got more. Been really enjoying these, specifically: Blueprint, A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Nas, and De La Soul. It's been fun.

I've gotten SUPER into 80s and 90s hip-hop (and stuff styled after it) which I really didn't know I liked! I've not listened to a ton of more lyrical stuff (rap, etc.) before. I have a friend to thank for helping me find more stuff in the style I like; he's pretty knowledgeable about this stuff.

But now I have a LOT more. In the process of doing so, I've also found some new music I liked! Because I'd find a song that was sort of alone stylistically (usually a single of some kind), and then think... well, there's gotta be more stuff like that. And there is! As a result,

I don't like doing that. Because then I have to actively seek out that album, and organizing is hard, and... a lot of things. I already had a few (massive) playlists filled with albums of That Kind (ambient, progressive rock, progressive bluegrass, and my Sin Repository of disparate vocaloid stuff),

It is NOT VERY EASY. I keep finding cases where I have only a few songs (and consequently albums) that sound similar, and putting those in a playlist of only a few songs (because the albums are short) feels kinda stupid. I know what you're thinking- "just add the albums to your library!" But...