lo-fi – Livesay Writing

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

I like the way TV’s and computer screens look when you take them in photos. The colors get wavy, and geometric, like weaving, a loom. It’s got something to do with refresh rates and the speed a camera captures, I think, but I’m no expert. If anyone knows better than me please let me know.

(I could look this up – I’ve got google open in another tab – but where’s the fun in solving all your mysteries?)

Anyway, I took a picture of chat on a lo-fi stream that I like to put on while I’m working. I’ve talked about lo-fi before and chances are you’ve heard about it apart from me. It’s hip. An article called it ‘easy-listening for millennials’ and I think that fits. I never used to get in on the zeitgeists and still find myself falling off of them like dead leaves on a heat-burnt tree, but the fad around lo-fi streams has me by the hip. I like the sounds. The samples are nostalgic – quotes from Cowboy Bebop, a few lines of early aught’s hip-hop. It’s the closest I get to feeling empowered by my past.

And I like the community. The streams pop up with internet chats. Sometimes, like all things on the internet, they’re dressed in dim colors, people at their worse, but more often than not it’s just people talking.

I took a picture of a run from chat that speaks for itself. It’s my quote and photo for this Coffee Log. It made me glad to be living in 2019, and it made me wish it were raining, hot, humid, a full bowl of soup.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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See Below….

Taken from the chat on Nourish.’s Lo-fi stream.

Hi.

Coffee: Sumatra Medium-Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand

There’s a YouTube channel I’ve gotten into the habit of plastering the background of my days with. I read an article about it a couple months ago: a live stream, lo-fi electronic music, animated loop of a girl writing notes with her cat beside her. There’s somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people tuned in at any given time. A chat runs on the side. People ask each other’s ages, nationalities. Because it’s the internet, people sometimes tear at each other for their ages, nationalities. Old men try talking to young girls. But mostly I don’t see that sort of stuff here. A second ago, someone posted: “Type ‘c’ in chat if you wish you were this girl’s cat.” Now the log is full of ‘c’s’.

ChilledCow is the channel, if anyone’s interested.

I grew up in the ’90’s. Like everyone else of the era, I got fed this line that the internet would be this grand replacement of our public spaces. The clued-in kids were living lives on message boards. Fresh out the cold war, you could have casual conversation with a Russian and feel like maybe we aren’t so different after all.

For the most part, it didn’t go that way.

There are all sorts of communities on the net but they’re far from open. Subreddits on subreddits, you can get a group of like-minded mouths to build your echo-chamber. Step outside those boxes into something more public? Everything’s an ad or an assault. Meanwhile, brick and mortar America is dismantled, and the public spaces – the parks, the malls, the old downtowns – are stripped for expensive condos or parking decks.

I’m a part of this, or course. I go from work to home and back again. I don’t often have the thick skin for getting lost in the desolate unknown. But I wonder how we’ll know each other in fifty years? Gummy lips gone to atrophy.

So anyway, that’s why I think tiny public places like ChilledCow’s channel are precious.

Novel Count: 4,096 words

Currently Reading: Autumn, Ali Smith; Cherry, Nico Walker

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“Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.” – Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Tag: lo-fi

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