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for years i've had this box of boxes with my old apple devices in it, most notably my first one, a blue ipod nano. after a quick jog over to apple's website i've determined it's a 5th generation nano. apparently these were the first ipods to have a camera and microphone; older ones could play videos, but not record them. i purchased my little blue rectangle with my own savings, and because i also kept the receipt, i know this purchase took place on august 18, 2010 at 7:25 PM (shortly after my 15th birthday). the price was $145, though i paid slightly less thanks to the target employee discount my dad had at the time. i'm getting a little wistful imagining paying relatively so little for an iphone nowadays.
anyway, back in 2012 and 2013 i dug out the nano to upload some videos sitting on it to youtube, only getting about a third of the way done before promptly dropping this project... until today. today wasn't significant, it's just when i finally got back around to it. i had been a little concerned the ipod wouldn't work anymore, having been unused for over a decade, but i plugged it in and it reacted immediately, turning on and charging like no time had passed at all. i let it charge while i did the dishes, then came back for further investigation.
i think it's a stylish little guy whose design holds up. the blue exterior looks nice especially with the sleek sheen on it (which was also new to the gen 5 nano). i dig the control scheme based around running your thumb along the circle of buttons to scroll and change the volume, though the buttons on mine seem a bit worn out and sometimes only work if i really press on them. the battery seemed worn out too, not holding charge for very long (i had to plug it in while browsing the music library and videos). the time and date were both incorrect, displaying that it was the morning of may 27, 2013... which is the same day i uploaded some of its videos to youtube. in all likelihood, that really was the last time i had touched this ipod. really made this feel like opening a time capsule i buried when i was 17 years old.
so, what's on this thing?
it's really just music and videos. to be precise: 439 songs, 30 videos... and 3 games, which i'm assuming are loaded on the nano by default. no pictures, no voice memos, no contacts.
the music is about what i expected. my music taste hasn't really changed since back then, or rather, it's expanded and developed, but i still like pretty much all the music i listened to as a teenager. there's multiple full albums from the beancore classics: green day, sum 41, blink 182, the blink-182 spin-offs, new found glory, mxpx. assorted albums and/or handfuls of tracks from the wonder years, linkin park, yellowcard, the story so far. nice batch of songs from the pillows (the FLCL soundtrack, basically). few bits and bobs, or in some cases a single bit or bob, from jimmy eat world, relient k, set your goals, all american rejects, emily's army, and the starting line. two songs i don't think i recognize now from rise against. to my surprise, no paramore at all. and even more surprising, homestuck-- two official tracks, and a handful of fansongs. i'm talking broadway karkat, fawn, and kylee henke. it's 2025 and i played 8lack Romance on my ipod nano. ridiculous. the original video of that song isn't even on youtube anymore, from what i can find.
i'm not certain when i would've stopped using this ipod, though my best guess would be at some point in 2013, around when i got my ipod touch. i really figured this nano would've predated my obsessive entry into homestuck, but that was at the beginning of 2013, so i guess there was probably some overlap there. i don't know exactly when i got the ipod touch because it never made it to the old devices hoard due to the screen being cracked and possibly risky to touch. (one night i rather carelessly tossed it across my room, aiming for my bed but missing by a few inches and face-planting the poor thing directly onto the hardwood floor.)
getting back on track, what about the videos? in short, it's a bunch of random shit from 2010 through 2012. but, random shit i'm very glad to have found again.
conveniently, all of the time and date information for these videos is intact. the earliest recordings are a set of three "point the ipod at a computer screen" videos that i've since archived properly-- these were taken from an old blogspot site about a grandmother that plays video games. then there's the video from september 11, 2010, taken up at The Lake. i'm really happy about this one because i had almost entirely forgotten about it, and it's a lot of my parents and i laughing at some goofy tangent my mom went on. plus, due to the date, there's footage of obama giving a speech with my mom's commentary running in the background (she loves obama; she refers to former president george w. bush as "skippy"). next up chronologically was a few videos i took of my uncle's wedding in october, which amazingly includes the officiator declaring the marriage official by the power vested in him by god and the justice league of america.
there are a couple videos from 2011 that are mostly irrelevant-- one i took of school of rock on tv while... somewhere. i'm not sure where. i'm pretty sure my cousin's also there watching the movie with me, but i don't recognize the room. the other is the entirety of the adventure time episode "What Was Missing," recorded by pointing my ipod at the tv. you know, the bubbline episode? yeah.
on april 17, 2011 i sat down and took 17 videos of... 17 videos. you see, back in the day, before youtube was the only video site that mattered, there was google video. and i found this guy that uploaded a bunch of videos of him and his friends playing super smash bros. melee and acting like the knucklehead teenagers they were. being a knucklehead teenager myself, i thought these videos were hilarious, and i watched them all the time, and so years down the line i wanted to have them available elsewhere. but i lacked the means and know-how to download them. these videos were originally recorded by pointing a camera at a tv screen (which means they all have a black bar repetitively scrolling down the screen the whole time)... so then my recordings were made by pointing a camera at a screen showing a camera pointing at a screen. and 17 might sound like a lot of videos but there were a lot more that i didn't ever record, and are likely lost to time now. RIP google video. (this was the set of videos i had in mind when starting this little project... it took me 13 years to upload 17 videos to youtube. fuck with me. but picking up where i left off was incredibly easy because i had left a list of these videos, numbered based on the file names, in the box i was storing the ipod in. the ones i had done already were checked off. i had expected this process to take a long time today but it really was just plug in and go, done in like 20 minutes.)
the videos from 2012 were all taken during the summer. i have two videos of my high school's marching band performances at the state fair. the crowd is incredibly fucking loud in both of them. the last video, taken on my 17th birthday, is of my former best friend playing Slender on my computer while we say stupid shit to each other; this one i had posted to facebook long ago. but the big win of this set was from the last day of july where i do a sort of tour of my bedroom. with sum 41 blaring from my speakers i walk around and zoom in on the printer-paper posters on the walls, the disorganized contents of my bookshelf, and my bass guitar. there's a brief glimpse at 2012-era youtube and my internet explorer bookmark bar, which includes the neopets homepage and punk-o-matic 2. my very first cell phone, in all its red clam shell glory, makes an appearance. absolute time capsule of a video, god bless.
this little project has brought me more joy than i expected. i was really hyped that the ipod still works and that recovering some record of this era of my life was not only possible, but so easy. i love snapshots of times past and piecing together a little timeline from details like dates and times and my own recollections. i don't know why but i find it so fascinating to look at some event and think of what else was happening at that time, or just before or after it. i like to think of periods in my life based on what things i was really into at the time. plus it's nice to have an archive of otherwise unavailable videos; it's nice to have an external version of your memories, i guess.
maybe i'll do another room tour video. after all, in the future i'll probably end up looking back on now and think it's cool that i can see what things looked like back then.
anyway, back in 2012 and 2013 i dug out the nano to upload some videos sitting on it to youtube, only getting about a third of the way done before promptly dropping this project... until today. today wasn't significant, it's just when i finally got back around to it. i had been a little concerned the ipod wouldn't work anymore, having been unused for over a decade, but i plugged it in and it reacted immediately, turning on and charging like no time had passed at all. i let it charge while i did the dishes, then came back for further investigation.
i think it's a stylish little guy whose design holds up. the blue exterior looks nice especially with the sleek sheen on it (which was also new to the gen 5 nano). i dig the control scheme based around running your thumb along the circle of buttons to scroll and change the volume, though the buttons on mine seem a bit worn out and sometimes only work if i really press on them. the battery seemed worn out too, not holding charge for very long (i had to plug it in while browsing the music library and videos). the time and date were both incorrect, displaying that it was the morning of may 27, 2013... which is the same day i uploaded some of its videos to youtube. in all likelihood, that really was the last time i had touched this ipod. really made this feel like opening a time capsule i buried when i was 17 years old.
so, what's on this thing?
it's really just music and videos. to be precise: 439 songs, 30 videos... and 3 games, which i'm assuming are loaded on the nano by default. no pictures, no voice memos, no contacts.
the music is about what i expected. my music taste hasn't really changed since back then, or rather, it's expanded and developed, but i still like pretty much all the music i listened to as a teenager. there's multiple full albums from the beancore classics: green day, sum 41, blink 182, the blink-182 spin-offs, new found glory, mxpx. assorted albums and/or handfuls of tracks from the wonder years, linkin park, yellowcard, the story so far. nice batch of songs from the pillows (the FLCL soundtrack, basically). few bits and bobs, or in some cases a single bit or bob, from jimmy eat world, relient k, set your goals, all american rejects, emily's army, and the starting line. two songs i don't think i recognize now from rise against. to my surprise, no paramore at all. and even more surprising, homestuck-- two official tracks, and a handful of fansongs. i'm talking broadway karkat, fawn, and kylee henke. it's 2025 and i played 8lack Romance on my ipod nano. ridiculous. the original video of that song isn't even on youtube anymore, from what i can find.
i'm not certain when i would've stopped using this ipod, though my best guess would be at some point in 2013, around when i got my ipod touch. i really figured this nano would've predated my obsessive entry into homestuck, but that was at the beginning of 2013, so i guess there was probably some overlap there. i don't know exactly when i got the ipod touch because it never made it to the old devices hoard due to the screen being cracked and possibly risky to touch. (one night i rather carelessly tossed it across my room, aiming for my bed but missing by a few inches and face-planting the poor thing directly onto the hardwood floor.)
getting back on track, what about the videos? in short, it's a bunch of random shit from 2010 through 2012. but, random shit i'm very glad to have found again.
conveniently, all of the time and date information for these videos is intact. the earliest recordings are a set of three "point the ipod at a computer screen" videos that i've since archived properly-- these were taken from an old blogspot site about a grandmother that plays video games. then there's the video from september 11, 2010, taken up at The Lake. i'm really happy about this one because i had almost entirely forgotten about it, and it's a lot of my parents and i laughing at some goofy tangent my mom went on. plus, due to the date, there's footage of obama giving a speech with my mom's commentary running in the background (she loves obama; she refers to former president george w. bush as "skippy"). next up chronologically was a few videos i took of my uncle's wedding in october, which amazingly includes the officiator declaring the marriage official by the power vested in him by god and the justice league of america.
there are a couple videos from 2011 that are mostly irrelevant-- one i took of school of rock on tv while... somewhere. i'm not sure where. i'm pretty sure my cousin's also there watching the movie with me, but i don't recognize the room. the other is the entirety of the adventure time episode "What Was Missing," recorded by pointing my ipod at the tv. you know, the bubbline episode? yeah.
on april 17, 2011 i sat down and took 17 videos of... 17 videos. you see, back in the day, before youtube was the only video site that mattered, there was google video. and i found this guy that uploaded a bunch of videos of him and his friends playing super smash bros. melee and acting like the knucklehead teenagers they were. being a knucklehead teenager myself, i thought these videos were hilarious, and i watched them all the time, and so years down the line i wanted to have them available elsewhere. but i lacked the means and know-how to download them. these videos were originally recorded by pointing a camera at a tv screen (which means they all have a black bar repetitively scrolling down the screen the whole time)... so then my recordings were made by pointing a camera at a screen showing a camera pointing at a screen. and 17 might sound like a lot of videos but there were a lot more that i didn't ever record, and are likely lost to time now. RIP google video. (this was the set of videos i had in mind when starting this little project... it took me 13 years to upload 17 videos to youtube. fuck with me. but picking up where i left off was incredibly easy because i had left a list of these videos, numbered based on the file names, in the box i was storing the ipod in. the ones i had done already were checked off. i had expected this process to take a long time today but it really was just plug in and go, done in like 20 minutes.)
the videos from 2012 were all taken during the summer. i have two videos of my high school's marching band performances at the state fair. the crowd is incredibly fucking loud in both of them. the last video, taken on my 17th birthday, is of my former best friend playing Slender on my computer while we say stupid shit to each other; this one i had posted to facebook long ago. but the big win of this set was from the last day of july where i do a sort of tour of my bedroom. with sum 41 blaring from my speakers i walk around and zoom in on the printer-paper posters on the walls, the disorganized contents of my bookshelf, and my bass guitar. there's a brief glimpse at 2012-era youtube and my internet explorer bookmark bar, which includes the neopets homepage and punk-o-matic 2. my very first cell phone, in all its red clam shell glory, makes an appearance. absolute time capsule of a video, god bless.
this little project has brought me more joy than i expected. i was really hyped that the ipod still works and that recovering some record of this era of my life was not only possible, but so easy. i love snapshots of times past and piecing together a little timeline from details like dates and times and my own recollections. i don't know why but i find it so fascinating to look at some event and think of what else was happening at that time, or just before or after it. i like to think of periods in my life based on what things i was really into at the time. plus it's nice to have an archive of otherwise unavailable videos; it's nice to have an external version of your memories, i guess.
maybe i'll do another room tour video. after all, in the future i'll probably end up looking back on now and think it's cool that i can see what things looked like back then.
