I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal:

Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed.

Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who, if I find one book by an author that I like, goes out and reads another three or four by the same author, and similarly with music. Also, my main constraint right now in music listening isn’t money or having an overabundance of new stuff to listen to, it’s finding new music that I like, so buying whole albums by artists when I’ve heard a single song that I like is generally a good way to approach that constraint.

Though now I’m rethinking that policy: I still support buying the whole album if there’s any serious chance that I’ll like it, but spending 89 cents on a whim is also probably something I should do more often. Though this song really is a special case. It’s from a video game soundtrack, or rather a soundtrack from a collection of video games. I haven’t played the other games in the collection, the other music is by different artists, the other music is all instrumental, so there’s no particular reason to think I’ll enjoy the rest of the music in the collection. I’m not ruling out the possibility of buying the rest of the album when I’ve played more of the games, but it will take a little while for me to get around to doing that.

And I certainly wasn’t going to wait to buy this one; I’ve been singing it over and over the last few days, I can’t think of a video game song that I like more. I suspect it holds up pretty well for people who haven’t played the game, too—it’s so delicious and moist—but who knows.

Look at me still talking when there’s science to do. Or blog reading. Hopefully I’ll get back to blog writing this weekend, though.

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