Ok, so over a few posts over a number of days I want to get out some post-roulette deconstruction thoughts.
Not having done one of these before, my visions in my head of how things would go and how they actually went down were rather different. Let's just get this right out of the way...
*I'm pretty confident I can keep the pace up enough to make these breeze by.
Yeah, I didn't intend on having the longest non-hiatus roulette ever apparently, it just worked out that way. When I started the roulette we were in a period where the other current roulettes were also going at a let's say "leisurely" pace, and I thought, "well, my rounds couldn't take much longer than those, right?" If TAC and ariich were hosting the others at the time I'd likely have had different expectations. And I did want to make it a bit more epic than normal, since I've missed out on doing years of these, and wanted to figure out sort of a way for me to kind of participate in my own roulette via the mystery songs.
But what I quickly found out in the first few rounds is that speed probably isn't my comparative advantage. Especially for early rounds I was trying to get in three complete listens to each set while doing nothing else other than listening and taking notes. That proved not to be sustainable, especially for the multi-song rounds (which became the only kind of round in the second half), so I had to drop that back to just two completely undistracted listens for those (and just one for the EPs).
I was also more enjoying the process of getting in a lot of listens total (often a dozen or more, sometimes 20 or so probably to higher-scoring ones) to see what grew on me, over time more and more research to learn about the bands and sometimes a bit about the genres they were related to especially if they were less familiar to me. I'd often watch a music video and/or a live video if they were available, familiarized myself more with various music databases to find the ones that proved most consistently useful, etc. And then the writeups were often fun to do, though they take more time, even as fast as I can type.
All this did mean other hobbies mostly going on the backburner during the roulette, which is fine, I volunteered to do this. I just need to ponder how to do a more limited version of it in a later one.
My current thought is for a fun challenge, to try and do the complete opposite next time. Have it be a much shorter roulette, maybe 5-7 rounds, but try to get even more participants, and intentionally try and have much shorter writeups and round turnarounds, and possibly even a linear stacked ranking possibly like lonestar's, just to make myself try it out. The tentative title for it would be "Volume II: Celerity & Concision". But I'll think more about it in the upcoming months.
I have some other assorted songs that a number of you have sent or mentioned at various points that I'll listen to at some point and give a few brief comments on.
I'll probably also post a large Spotify "best of" list at some point, with most of the songs that did or would have scored 8.25 or above, and maybe a few other salient ones that have grown on me over time.
That's probably good for the moment, more to come later on later days.