Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Teacher's Pet

Episode 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: shownotes of a big fat geek.

This is the one that's a badly veiled metaphor for teachers as sexual predators. This teach is a praying mantis and is the first, of many, demon-like creatures attracted to Xander. I had a teacher I liked once. He's still cute, but fortunately, he was not a predator, because I was dumb enough that I would have probably madeout with him and then been pissed at him later for taking advantage. It's not cool to make out with a 16 year old if you're a teacher; even if you're a really young hot teacher, ok? Don't do it!

Buffy in red satin. You'll never see that again! Wait, this is a dream sequence. Oh, man, seriously, who is doing the costume design here? They've got Buffy in a baby blue sleeveless sweater...oh, and it has a collar. And fucking pearl buttons! WTF?! I'm not even going to look up the costume designer because I don't want to hate her/him. Maybe they were having a bad year. I imagine the budget was terrible at this point and they didn't realize, apparently, that Buffy is a fashion icon, not a soccer mom. Yeesh! How come all I can talk about is fashion on these shownotes? Wow, I guess I do think about physical image a lot. I never really noticed. I suppose I did just spend 96$ this very night on glitter makeup online. Ok, I'm vain. I knew that. But glitter is priceless, man! And it was cruelty-free and neon, too!

First ep to get Angel (mostly) topless.

OMG, Giles is wearing a sweater vest, tweed, gingham, AND a tie. Sexy librarian!

Mmmm, a mayonnaise sandwich with crickets!

Ooh, remember babydoll shirts? I used to have one with a big lemon on it.

I usually like organic girl-predators, but the pedophile aspect here is throwing me. And insects just aren't as awesome as Poison Ivy. And at least she had a global goal!

This is the first ep where Buffy takes charge and tells everyone what to do instead of Giles. I've said it once and I'll say it again, I like Buffy with a little more meat. Her ass is poppin' in yellow pants! If only my ass stayed lush at such thinness levels...Sarah Michelle Gellar's genetic gifts are plentiful, that's for sure.

How come in TV shows and movies, everyone assumes you're NOT a virgin, until proven otherwise when you're in high school? Wouldn't it be the other way around? At 15, I didn't know a whole lot of nonvirgins...guess I wasn't enough of a delinquent.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Witch.

Episode 3, Season 1...of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...one girl's inane shownotes:

Ah, Buffy's last attempt at cheerleading. "Something normal, something safe". Yeah, RIGHT Buffy, don't you know you live on the Hellmouth?!?! Gah! Oh, this is the one where the cheerleader spontaneously combusts. Awesome.

Oh, Giles, I'm so glad for your logical explanations for everything. Buffy is still bucking the friends helping her out thing. Cute.

Classic Xander line: "I laugh in the face of danger...then I hide until it goes away."

Again, I'm distracted by the fashion. You never think the era you're in has a style, and I didn't think we had one in the '90s, but I'm seein' it everywhere in Sunnydale. In this ep Buffy is wearing a funky psychedlic pattern a la the '70s, but with a definite '90s twist. The '90s had a lot of revamped '70s stuff towards the end.

Joyce was mean and broken-recordy at the beginning, jeez! I guess that makes sense, 'cause we're supposed to be on the teenagers' side and moms are lame in 10th grade.

Are there really high schools that teach you how to drive? That would be a good idea.

There's not much to say about this episode. It's one of those early eps where they're just lettin' you know that there are witches, psychological horrors, slimy fish monsters, and other ghoulies in addition to vampires in the Buffyverse.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Harvest

So, I've been suuuper existential since I got THE BILL in the mail for school. I will be paying for my Bachelor's degree for a really long time and its really put into focus how unsure I am about being a counselor. So I, like a lot of other recent college graduates, have decided not to make any decisions about grad school just yet. And I reread some old journal entries and such yesterday and am reminding myself of things that are important to me that I have lost sight of in the last 6 years or so. I have really bought into how things are "supposed" to be...how society wants to automatize...I forgot that I used to want to be a writer and I used to want to program music and have a radio station, etc. I miss being a page at the library. I miss the physicality of it and the pure simplicity of never having to interact with patrons if I didn't want to. Lately, going to work has paralyzed me with anxiety thinking about all the interactions I'll have to face. And the truth of it is that I've always had this reaction to throngs of people. I've just tried to submerse it and plaster that big smile on my face. I'm not a social being, most of the time. This isn't me. I do want a job that deals with less people. If I could afford it, I'd go back to being a page in a SECOND. Best. Job. Ever. Anyway, I know I need a career plan, but for now I want to work more toward writing. Maybe I'll start freelancing in a few months, but for now my first project is:

One episode of Buffy per day with real-time blogging. I will blog as I'm watching the ep freeflow-style with minimal proofreading after ep is over. I will not think about how lame my writing is, I will just do it for the love of doing it. So, dust off those old Buffy tapes and watch along with me, kids! It'll be fun!

So, here I go: episode 2, season 1:

Some inconsistency with dusting vamps in the beginning here; sometimes they dust and sometimes you just hear them hit the ground with a thud. I should probably not get distracted with stupid continuity details like some uber-nerd, but I probably will.

A favorite quote from Giles reassures the audience that despite the wearing of crosses, Buffy is NOT a religious show: "This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise."

The first scene after the theme is a big explainy-in-the-library scene. I love those!

The show started out a lot cheesier than it ended up, but that makes perfect sense as Joss meant for the series to mirror the kids growing up and right now they're sophomores, so their fears are cheesier (big Nosferatu-type vampire).

OMG, Xander and his weird computer-graphic mushroom button-up! Nice.

I love watching old TV shows; the dated styles and decor. The bad haircuts and the overly dramatic '90s makeup. Classic.

It's so weird when Buffy jumps over that big school gate...it's like 12 feet in the air! I know she's supposed to have super powers, but she never does this again! There I go with the continuity-nerd stuff again.

You know, I never noticed this until now, but it's pretty subversive that not only is a tiny little girl kicking serious metaphysical ass throughout this series, but apart from the occasional vampire taunting her for her tinyness, the humans around her hardly ever question why she can do the things she can even though she's "just a girl". In most other TV shows, they'd be harping on that aspect, constantly pointing out that she's no ordinary girl. In this show, it's apparent she isn't an ordinary girl, but this is focused on the grown-up nature of her responsibilities as Slayer, not in the fact that she's JUST a girl.

It annoys me when much older people play high school kids, such as Charisma Carpenter, who was 27 when the show started. Sarah Michelle Gellar still has some baby fat goin', so she's gotta still be in her early '20s (just looked it up--she was 20). However, with Charisma, she just looks older to me when she's thin. Later when she crosses over to Angel, she gains a bit of weight and looks a lot better, but here she's tiny. I like my women with a bit of meat. I liked Jennifer Aniston better in the first few seasons of Friends when she was a bit curvy too.

"Everything is life or death when you're a 16-year-old girl." -Joyce Summers.

Subtext! My favorite part of Buffy. If only I got all of it.

Skirts were so short in 1997. And the music was still good...I miss 1997. I miss it so much! The beginning years of this show make me so nostalgic. What's the metaphor for big scary Nosferatu-vamp being stuck in the between-world like a "cork in a bottle"? Is that vaginal or just coincidental? Has Mother Earth swallowed him whole and he's just too big of a dick to squeeze out on his own? I'm stretching...

No one ever bares their midriffs anymore like they did in the '90s. It looks, like their bare legs, so revealing. Why have we trended towards MORE prudish?

I love Giles' famous line at the end: "The Earth's doomed." He says this again in a mirrored bookend scene in the last episode of the series right before they go into their final battle on the show.

Commentary (by Joss Whedon) notes added 5.22.13: The Master was made to look like he was devolving into a bat. Joss is talking about how awesomely dark the lighting is on the show. I agree, as I've said many times before. You don't always need to see everything. First scene with Harmony ever and she's wearing a t shirt with a unicorn on it.

Joss just stopped talking for like the last 5 minutes...longest silence in a commentary ever! Wtf?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Welcome to the Hellmouth

I've decided, in order to occupy myself on sick days and other free time chunks of my life when I could be prone to too much self-analysis, to rewatch Buffy and write about it! Yeay: two of my favorite things: Buffy and academics!!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Journal of an Obsession.

Entry #1- Welcome to the Hellmouth shownotes: I love how the show starts out with a seemingly innocent schoolgirl being lead through the highschool at night by a teenaged boy and you suspect the boy’s a vampire because the girl is acting all goody-goody, but she’s really, SHOCKER, naughty naughty. She’s the vampire. This is, of course, Joss Whedon’s (creator/head writer of Buffy) intentional gender role reversal from the very first scene of the very first episode of this seven season epicly-spectacular series. Scene two shows the protagonist as a cutesy short blonde girl who, if you didn’t know the premise of the show, doesn’t seem like she could slay anything. From the beginning, you are to suspend all your typical beliefs about how things appear, and this theme is paramount throughout the show.

It’s pretty hilarious that Xander’s introduction to the show is on a skateboard, as he’s never seen with one again.

What school checks their textbooks out in the library? If this is how they do it in Sunnydale, how come there’s never anyone in the damn library?

I like how Buffy immediately gives a disapproval face to Cordelia when she insults Willow’s nerdy dress, instantly aligning herself with the misfits.

Valley speak? Perhaps this was an homage to the movie? Regardless, I’m glad they abandoned that after episode 1.

Xander is hilarious from day one. *sigh* Xander is dreamy. He has that vague highschool boy sleaziness that only an adolescent in the mid-‘90s can bestow: Michael used to have this same style-effect back in the day.

Buffy is such a Watcher-backtalker! Yeow! Loves it!

The first Big Bad is introduced already: a classic Nosferatu-type vampire called The Master. He is summoned with incantations from a pool of blood, of course.

Oh, there’s Angel. He looks so pale and young! I used to hate his guts, but now I kind of like him. So broody! Velvet jacket, though? They so did not have his wardrobe worked out, yet! Ooh, mysterious Angel, didn’t even tell Buffy his name, yet he gave her a cross necklace. What a dweeb.

I heart the Bronze! It’s the coolest ‘90s adolescent hangout ever. I wish this place existed in Joplin when I was a sophomore in high school! Oh, cute, Willow’s eating a box of raisins.

I wonder if they had a different wardrobe designer at the beginning, because everyone looks terrible. Willow’s bad nerd-dress, Buffy looks like a mom or a typical Christian character...was this how we dressed in 1996?

One thing I really love about Buffy is that I grew up with her. When the show started, she was a sophomore in high school and I would have been a freshman, I think...maybe I was in 8th grade, either way we were almost the same age throughout the series. Buffy, with its diversity and subtexty-parallels-to-real-life-themes, was a good influence on me in my adolescence like GaGa and Glee are to kids now.

I actually didn’t start watching Buffy until season three when Faith arrived. A boyfriend forced me to watch it and I was incredibly resistant, because I liked the movie and thought the show would be stupid, not unlike thousands of people over the years have assumed, and then later watched one episode and been totally hooked. I loved the show right away and watched it through the season. We lost the WB network on local TV after that year, so I missed seasons 4 and 5, rejoining season 6 when it aired late at night on UPN. It was a shocker at the beginning of the 6th season, *spoiler alert!* because I had no idea Willow was gay now or that Buffy was dead.

Ah, getting ahead of myself! So, the first episode gets a lot of the main details out of the way, like a good first ep should. I’m glad they didn’t name it “Pilot”. I hate that.

to be continued...

Commentary (by Joss Whedon) notes added 5.22.13: Joss says the mission statement of the whole show is that "nothing is at it seems". Unfortunately, usually that means the girls kick ass when you don't think they will. When Joss cast Willow he wanted to make sure he didn't cast the "supermodel in the horn-rimmed glasses" type and get an actual quirky girl. Glad he pushed for someone like Alyson Hanigan.

The decision to make the vampires be in and out of vamp face was because Joss wanted the "villains" to not always be obvious, but he wanted them to be seen as villains when B kills them. He made them "dust" because he didn't want the good guys to have to clean up the bodies and for it to be plausible for the vampires to remain unseen by the general population.

Baby Feminist.

We found out yesterday that Cara's new spawn is going to be a girl. I am actually really excited to have a niece. I am very vocal about not wanting kids of my own, so I am happy to get to be a part of a young woman's life. That sounds so gay, but it's true.

I wasn't there for my sis when she had her first (Gavin). I didn't approve of her having a child so young and I was in my rebellious phase and just wasn't very supportive, so this is my chance to make up for it.

I plan to instill upon this little chicky some serious feminist ideals. I want to make her mixes and have her contribute to my zine and buy her her first pair of combat boots.

I hope she's a little weirdo in her own way.

a few pet peeves...

I can't handle it when someone is a swarthy know-it-all when they don't have the grainy knowledge to back up their claims. Artificiality just bugs me. I'm not talkin' about artificial hair color or artificial boobs (which bug me aesthetically, but I believe a person has a right to alter themselves in whatever way they wish)--I'm talking about not having the salt to back up your swagger.

For example, today I went to Changing Hands (used bookstore on 6th & Virginia) and bought an old beat-up paperback copy of Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. This is a guilty pleasure book for me and I had the huge imposing hardback version of it checked out from the library and reading it was distracting me. Anne Rice writes some compelling vampire fiction, but it's fluff. I know it's fluff and I want the physical presence to be honest about its fluffiness. That five pound brick with the shiny gold lettering was too pretentious for the meat inside, so I had to buy the paperback. The cheesy '80s paperback with a generic picture of some gnarly tree branches with a house inexplicably in the background is infinitely more real because it represents what's inside. This is how I like my bad fiction--with a bad cover. Something wherein I can bend the spine backwards and spill coffee and shove hastily into my purse when someone I respect almost catches me reading it. Something that is cognizant of its own shamefulness and doesn't try to be big and important.

And I also hate it when pretty people who are not smart think they are. The pretty boy who thinks he's deep when he's daft and dull and self-involved. Ugh, that moment where you realize the package is not at all representative of the viscera within and it hits you like a slap in the face. Afterwards you no longer find them as pretty, and it's like a tiny death, because you always hope against all odds that the drop dead gorgeous ones have a brain...I hate that moment!

And I hate it when people proclaim things with factual certainty because they heard it from someone they know. Critical thinking, people!

I also can't stand it when people describe something that happened to them years ago with lurid detail, as if they really remember it that vividly.

And then there's pretentiousness. That's basically what that hardback Lestat book was trying to be, but also there's just plain human snobbery. Acceptance is way hotter than better-than-thouness, and please don't EVER talk in the third person. You are not that important. I could never be friends with a celebrity because how can you possibly stay "down-to-earth" when you're constantly having your ass kissed? I have a theory about famous people becoming evil that goes with this whole thing, but I'll save the blather for another blog or my zine or somethin'. A few of you have heard this rant already anyway...

Don't be a bad historian of your own life! Know what you know and what you don't know. Question everything! Be truthful. Ok, I'm sounding ridiculous and cliche-y now, so I'm going to stop.

Radio.

I just want to briefly express my deep appreciation for internet radio.

As a big fat hairy music nerd, my lifelong relationship with radio has been tense, to say the least. I listened to regular old-fashioned local radio nonstop in my preteen and elementary school years, settling for the R&B dance sounds of the early '90s. Actually, I quite liked it at the time, as I was young enough to appreciate SWV and En Vogue. Soon after, grunge hooked its tentacles into the radio waves and I liked Nirvana quite a bit, but I was ready for more eclectic sounds, so I stopped listening to the radio and started buying CDs based on the covers (This is how I discovered PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco). This, as I'm sure you can imagine, was hit or miss. And I was lucky enough to have grandparents with enough money to buy me what I remember as being a CD a week, though it probably wasn't quite that much. Looking back on that, I was so spoiled, but I have cherished that music and without this tiny piece of their infinite generosity, I wouldn't have advanced in my music love at such a breakneck pace as was possible in the mid to late '90s, before...

internet radio!!

Though its only been in the last few years that I have discovered gems such as Pandora and last.fm, they have made listening to radio great again. I haven't listened to local radio in years, except for those rare occasions that I decide to check out radio for a week in the car and decide, again, that it sucks. I'm sure I'd feel different about it if I lived in a big city, but I don't wanna live in a big city, so there!

Furthermore, ever since I got a smartphone I've REALLY taken advantage of not only the customizable radio stations like the aforementioned Pandora and last.fm but also many other radio station apps like Digitally Imported (all electronic radio stations like "Future Synthpop" and "Tribal House" and "Space Music" etc--I listen to this ALL THE TIME!), Slacker, and NPR Music. I also love music subscription services such as MOG and Rhapsody, wherein you pay a monthly fee to listen to pretty much anything you want to. This means, if I had a subscription to MOG, I could listen to music that I can't fit onto my phone or new stuff I don't know if I want yet, etc.

These online radio sources are MAGIC! I will never again want for new music to experience. I can listen to specific genres from user-defined radio stations or just click on a channel from DI (Digitally Imported). If I want to hear the new Shakira before I decide to buy it, I go to MOG (or I will once I start subscribing--I REALLY think I NEED it, so I will probably just sign up for it, like as soon as I finish posting this blog)...

So, to sum up, here are a few suggestions for online radio from me to you:

*di.fm (for electronic music lovers--there are 37 channels on this site and it's available as an app for smartphones too. It's free! They have this new station called "Chip Tunes" that I've been listening to all day and it's all video game-sounding electronic music. I love it!!)
*MOG.com (subscription service that's $10/mo but you can do a 2week free trial, also available as an app and you can get 320kbps with this one. Yum!)
*pandora.com (if you've never tried Pandora, you HAVE to--it utilizes the Music Genome Project [meaning that it adjusts to what you like/dislike by using specific identifiers for each song, etc] and it is fabulousness--it's free!)

So, if you've been disillusioned with music since high school and have the perception that all music sucks these days, you are wrong and there are countless avenues to explore stuff out there that you like. Don't be scared. Get out there and find stuff you like! The internet is a beautiful thing, folks.

Girls, come on!

I was just looking through about 15 pages of Google images of Lady GaGa, nobigdeal, when I came across a picture of GaGa squatting down singing and there's a tiny indication of a tampon string emerging from her leotard thing and the writer of the blog where the picture was from was using words like "nasty" and saying sentences to the effect of "you should tuck those strings back before you show us your crotch, GaGa!" etc. I am outraged, and I'll tell you why:

1) when you're a performer of the magnitude of Lady GaGa, pictures are taken of you constantly. Girls, if you weren't paying attention in health class, spend 1/5 of our fucking LIVES bleeding out the crotch! There's gonna be a picture with a tampon string if you are a famous girl performer and you wear crotch-cutting leotards. Deal with it!

2) being a female and calling another female nasty for an accidental tamp-slip is terrible! You should be kicked out of the girlclub right now. How the hell can you fault someone for having a period and still daring to put on a kick-ass show?

How the hell can you point fingers at a woman who's doing what she wants and making a living being subversive and interesting? She is on her period and she's not compromising her regular crotch-baring-singing-crouch OR her outfit. She's, like women on the Tampax commercials, swimming and biking and wearing white pants. We should show this picture in our blogs with applause...not criticism! You go girl, having your period and still rawking the leotard and letting it all hang out.

I'm not gonna post it because GaGa is a very intentional performer, but this shot wasn't. Also, it could have been photoshopped, which is even worse that someone would fabricate this just to make fun of someone. That's gross. Way grosser than tampons!

Deodorant.

I have long been a user of Teen Spirit and other $2 antiperspirants and had no shame about it. I am okay with my pits smelling like chemically strawberry as long as sweat is not dripping down my arms skankin' up the place.

A few weeks ago I decided to try making my own deodorant. I found a recipe that is one part witch hazel, one part water, one part aloe vera gel and a 1/2 tsp of grapeseed oil with whatever essential oils you want for spicyness. I used it for about 2 and a half weeks. I had coworkers smell me and call me musky and earthy on a day when a) I had JUST started my period and my B.O. was KICKIN', b) I had just gone for a long walk before work and did NOT shower afterwards, c) it was day one of the new computer system at the 'brary and I was nervously sweating and d) I was wearing an airy shirt that was the perfect vehicle for wafting. This experiment isn't working all that well. I have been smelling myself and it has not smelled like teen spirit. At all. Especially during my period. That night I made a drastic decision to go ahead and BUY some hippy deodorant. The store-bought kind will work better than my own homemade, right? I chose one that had the scent of grapefruit and ginger. It's usually a good idea to go with citrus + earthy in these types of situations. I wore it all weekend, working both days and even going out to get sweaty karaoke drunk Saturday night. And apart from the ten minutes or so after applying the deo, I did NOT smell like ginger and grapefruit.

For the past two and a half weeks I've been spritzing my pits several times a day with my homemade deo, essential oils, perfume, whatever I could get my hands on that didn't reek of pits, but the sweat is abundant! I've had to wash sweaters after one use! I've been clamping my arms to my sides so as not to waft. I didn't even fist-pump during my rendition of "The Distance" last night!!

Well, big surprise, hippy deo does not work very well. That aluminum has done right by me for years, so tonight I officially resign my exclusive use of hippy deo. I have decided that during my period and during stressful times wherein I may sweat extra muchly, I'm wearin' that tried and true teen spirit with good old aluminum! On days off from work and days nowhere near my period, I'll go with the homemade or storebought hippy deo. I'm happy I did this experiment as I now know how bad going without deo can get (and it's not THAT bad, as on the worst possible day a lot of people smelled me and didn't seem terribly disgusted by me). And I now know how to make my own deo which actually smells nice and fares better than some $6 deo I got at Pricecutter (pictured in middle).

Man, I can't tell you how happy I was to come home from a stinky day of work to apply my trusty Just Dance deo. Gonna have to go with chemicals on this one, but at least I know I can cut back.

updating the bits.

I am re-ripping my entire cd collection in 320kbps. Most of it had been previously ripped at 128 back when I had the creative software. I had NO idea about bitrates until recently when:

*I recently checked the box in my iTunes to "convert higher bitrate songs to 128kbps" when transferring to my phone and it gave me 7GB more space and I was so excited. I researched online before I checked the box and a lot of audio snobs were whining about 128, but they admitted that most people can't tell the difference anyway, so I did it. I decided I was no audio snob. I can handle it. And it took nine hours to convert what little I did have in higher bitrates to 128 for my phone named Sister of Avalanche. But I immediately noticed a difference. Songs were muddled and hole-y. Note that this conversion to lower bitrates was done to transfer to my phone ONLY; it did not change the files in my music library! I'm not that daft!

*Then, I was listening to MOG (online music app) and put the audio quality at "high" and it sounded FABULOUS...and it was 320. And I compared a Them Crooked Vultures song in 320 from the app to the 128 version I had on my phone and there was a HUGE difference. How could anyone NOT tell? How did I live all these years with so much of my music in muddled low quality.

*On the way home from watching the Lady GaGa episode of Glee with my mom at her friend Paula and Gene's house (she was dawg sitting) I wanted to rawk out to "Bad Romance" on the way home and I just wasn't feelin' it. And I normally do. I felt disconnected from the sound. From the "ra ra ra-a-ahh", and that's just not right. Because GaGa isn't as big in 128. Also, I have to turn the volume way up in my car to feel encompassed by 128. That's not right.

So, I made two decisions right then and there:

1) That the 160GB iPod Classic I've had my eye on, that I look up online every couple of days just to stare at lovingly, was now a totally justifiable necessity, not just a fantasy that felt excessive. Ever since I gave up my Zendra (60GB Creative Zen mp3 player) I got back in my early 20s, I've wanted something that could fit all of my music. My Sister of Avalanche has been maxed out at 128kbps (she's 32GB and I have 45GB of music [BEFORE everything has been converted to 320, btw -- probably end up with 60 or 70ish GB at the end of it all] so she's just not gonna cut it), and she'll hold less than half as much music when I switch her to 320. I don't need to have all my music on me at all times, but I will acquire an iPod classic for road trips and parties and whenever I just want to grab my music and stomp out the door on a walk or something. I already know what I will name her and what engraving she will have on the back. She will be named Strict Machine (after a Goldfrapp song) and will have an adaptation of lyrics from the song engraved: "Wonderful electric, cover me in your white noise." Pretty good, right? I'm so excited. I'm waiting until I get some Xmas money and then I'll save up the rest from my cleaning job and hopefully have that baby by February.

2) That I'm re-ripping EVERYTHING to the highest capacity my iTunes converter can handle without going lossless. Lossless is way too big. And I have the CD hard copies for that.

So, I was going to wait until after xmas to do this enormous project (I have around 400 CDs still, I think -- and I've gotten rid of a lot!), but I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I started it Tuesday. I'm in the H's (ripping Billie Holiday at the moment) and I'm loving every minute of it. Hole, incidentally, doesn't sound much different in 320, but everything else sounds noticeably different. The highs and lows are more defined. I'm hearing nuance in music I've loved for years and never heard before. I'm discovering that a lot of the music I've loved intensely (such as Air's Talkie Walkie) happened to be at higher bitrates all along. So, I don't even know what I like anymore!! How much more music will I love at higher bitrates?

This is a wonderful wonderful thing. I'm rediscovering my music. I'm falling in love with The Cure again. I'm appreciating classical in a new way, as strings sound FAR FAR better in high bitrates, needless to say.

I'm in love with music again! I highly recommend, if you've never done so, checking the bitrates on your computer music collection. If they're low and you still have access to the hard copies, re-rip those babies!! It's totally worth it!!