This was originally published as zine, launched at the 2024 Festival of the Photocopier zine fair. I still have a few copies, if you’d like one email me and we can work something out. All profits from my zines are currently being used to purchase e-sims for Gaza.

On November 30th, 2020, the day of my 32nd birthday, I was given a fully functional 2007 MacBook. Given, in the sense that someone found it in an e-waste bin, and I was allowed to take it home. And fully functional, in the sense that everything works but it is too old to connect to the internet.


black and white cat sitting on white macbook laptop

I love this laptop. I love the weight of it, I love the sound it makes when you turn it on, I love the way the charging cable is magnetic and goes into the port with a satisfying little click. It is the laptop 19 year old me always wanted but couldn’t afford, and now, 13 years after its initial release, I have one, and I got it for free. Happy fucking birthday to me.

My love was pure, but for years this laptop sat on top of a bookcase, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. I briefly considered using it as a disconnected, “distraction free” word processor for writing but, you know, smartphones exist. I’ve also had a bunch of half formed ideas to turn it into some sort of interactive fiction art project thing but so far nothing has stuck. Still, I refused to put it back in the e-waste bin from whence it came, lugging it from one apartment to the next, knowing that, one day, its true purpose would be revealed to me. And it has, finally. About 6 months ago I discovered that my beautiful, pristine(ish), 2.5kg, 2007 MacBook has a disc drive.


What You Are Looking For is In The Op Shop

Now, you may be thinking - what kind of person gets excited, in this the year 2024, about a disc drive? The kind of person who has also kept every CD and DVD she ever bought since she started earning her own money, that’s who. And, to be fair, I have been able to watch my DVDs on the PS4 this whole time, but the PS4 is set up in the lounge room, with the big tv, where everyone can see what I’m watching. And when I’m watching a movie, particularly movies that I once loved so much I was willing to part with twenty to thirty dollars to own it, I want to cultivate a more intimate experience. I want to lay in bed with the lights off, the room lit only by the laptop screen, my face so close to it that nothing can pass between me and the world of what I’m watching.

The day I realised that I could watch movies on the MacBook, I went straight to the op shop across the road from my house. As you might already know, op shop DVD sections are an absolute goldmine for films released before a certain time, and on that visit I purchased the first X Men movie and a copy of Little Women (Winona Ryder’s version), both for $2. The next day I went to two more op shops and bought Sunshine, Little Miss Sunshine, Gattaca, Muriel’s Wedding, Mulholland Drive, and the box set of Freaks and Geeks. Some of these are movies I’ve seen a thousand times, some I’ve seen once and wanted to watch again, some I’ve never seen before but have always meant to. I thought about all the DVD sections of all the op shops I’d ever been to, and a thrill shot through my fingers and up my spine. In my head, the shelves were suddenly filled with treasures, tucked in between the endless box sets of Friends and Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother, and my new purpose in life was to unearth them.

In reality, I wouldn’t say I’m hauling away treasures (unless you count the movie Underworld as a treasure, which I do, actually), but I’ve found plenty of things worth watching, at an average of $2 a pop. And yes, if I were to break down the cost/benefit analysis of this new hobby vs signing up to a streaming service ($14 a month for 7 movies vs $14 a month for infinite movies), it doesn’t seem all that efficient or cost effective. Except I’m having so much fun doing this - I literally just popped into the op shop on the way back from getting a coffee and came out with a copy of Get Over It and I feel like a genius and also the luckiest person in the world. I’m getting so much more out of being more intentional with my movie choices, or maybe it’s the fact that I have to surrender my viewing to the mercy of strangers donating their DVD collections, rather than Netflix, Disney etc. I don’t know, I guess it’s just making me think a lot about how holding a movie in my hands makes me feel.


Engine of Hell is a Christmas Album

On one of my Friday’s off I was walking up Smith St, trying to knock out some last minute Christmas shopping and listening to Engine of Hell by Emma Ruth Rundle. Engine of Hell is not at all what I would consider a Christmas album, but I like to listen to it around this time, because I listened to it a lot a when my grandpa died, and my grandpa died on Christmas Eve, so I find it comforting. Anyway, I was listening to ‘Body’ while I was walking, which is my favourite song from the album, and the song that reminds me the most of that time, when this thought popped into my head;

“Damn this song is like, the perfect companion for ‘Beauty Queen/Horses’ by Tori Amos. If I ever had a radio show I would make sure to play those two songs together.”

which lead to;

“I have a digital download of Body, but I only have Beauty Queen/Horses on CD. I wish there was a way I could put them together on my laptop, but it doesn’t have disk drive”

and was quickly followed by;

“I wonder if I could upload my CDs to iTunes on on the MacBook and then transfer them onto my big boy computer and mix them together OH MY GOD I PROBABLY COULD I AM GOING TO TRY THAT AS SOON AS I GET HOME.”

I did try it as soon as I got home. I imported my ‘Boys for Pele’ CD to iTunes, copied the track I needed onto a USB (no internet on the MacBook remember), and then transferred it to my ‘big boy’ computer, a ridiculous gaming laptop that I’ve affectionately nicknamed The Beast. Lucky for me, The Beast also had a copy of sound editing software Audacity already installed on it, from way back in 2020 when I’d needed some library work to do from home, and had ended up editing episodes of the library podcast. I imported my digital copy of ‘Body’, and then ‘Beauty Queen/Horses’ after it, and then, after looking up a couple of YouTube Videos on how to make mixes with Audacity, dragged the files around a bit until I got a mix I liked. I stretched, back aching from hunching over the laptop, and pressed play. It sounded even better than I thought it would.


Scratch That Mixing Itch

I spent the rest of that afternoon making my first mix, only tearing myself away for Friday night plans I’d now regretted making. I scrapped all the ideas I’d had for Christmas presents for my loved ones, and made them all mixes instead, mixing older songs that shared meaning with newer songs I thought they might like. I dug through storage crates looking for CDs I knew I’d stashed somewhere for safe keeping and hadn’t looked at in years. I bought packets of USBs from Officeworks to save the files on, and taped them to little note cards with washi and stickers. I loved making them, and people seemed to love receiving them, too. And then Christmas was over, but I didn’t stop. I started making mixes just for me.

It turns out, making a mix scratches the same itch as making a collage or solving a puzzle. The satisfaction that comes with find the perfect songs to stitch together, it reminds me of when I first started learning how to code. Or when I used to write more poetry, and the spark that came with the perfect combination of two words. And making a mix is like writing a poem, in that I spend a lot of time on it, arranging and rearranging, reaching a point where I think I’ve fucked it, putting it away for a bit and having to trust that it will all come together, eventually. And it always does.

Anyway, I’ve been uploading some of these mixes to mixcloud if you would like to have a listen - they tend to be a real mixed bag of songs from my CD collection, CDs I’ve borrowed from the library and newer songs I’ve bought from Bandcamp.




Cultivating Intimacy (yuck)

There have been a few cool side effects? by-products? of this new hobby of mine. My op shop treasure hunting has now expanded to include the CD racks, and while it turns out a good CD these days is harder to find, there are a couple of op shops that consistently come through with the goods. It also turns out that needing the actual ripped or downloaded mp3s to mix was the push I needed to properly start moving away from morally bankrupt streaming services, and I’ve been buying a LOT more music on Bandcamp.

My favourite one, though, is that I’ve started to reconnect with my teenage-early 20s CD collection, which spans 2003 (the year I got a job) to about 2011. At first I was digging them out to look for songs for mixes, but lately I’ve taken to putting on a CD, laying on the floor in the study, and just listening to it, front to back. This gives me a similar peace to when I listen to the radio, in that the choice of what song will play next is taken out of my hands, and I can just let it all wash over me. But it’s another kind of intimacy that I’m responding to. Listening to these albums is like taking a walk through the suburb I grew up in, long after my parents sold our house and moved away.

And that’s the crux of it, I think, the I keep coming back to - cultivating intimacy. Going back through these CD and DVD collections has reminded me, I had such an intimate relationship with the media I consumed. And I know a lot of it was probably because I was young, and used books and movies and tv and music to hold me together while I tired to figure out who I was - kind of like a balloon you stick pieces of newspaper to, to make a paper mache mask. But I think chalking it all up to youth and nostalgia doesn’t quite fit, either. I don’t know. I guess it makes me think about how, by having access to everything, I’m finding it harder to form an attachment to anything. But in finding this laptop, collecting these films and making these mixes, it feels like I’m starting to not only retrace the grooves of old attachments, but forge and reinforce new ones, too. And I like how that feels. It feels really, really good.

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