I love you man.

I love how you’re always there, ready to play me my favorite tunes.  I love that you work hard to get me the songs that I really want to hear.  I love that you listened when I asked you to keep me some songs offline so I don’t have to be connected to the internet to jam out.  I love how you scour the ends of the musical earth and analyze songs to make suggestions for me.  You’re just great.

While I’ve got you, I’d like to add just a quick note though on that algorithm… I mean, don’t get the wrong idea, I think you’re great. It’s really just where I’m at right now… I don’t know how to say this but… uh… I *HATE* Iron & Wine.  There, I said it. Feels good to get it off my chest.

And I know what you’re thinking, “But you love folks like Ben Howard” and “You’ve listened to Elliot Smith’s Behind the Bars like a thousand times”, so of course you’re thinking “this guy’s  going to love Iron & Wine”.

No.  Just no.

I don’t know why you’re surprised… The end of your playback bar has never hit the end while an Iron & Wine was playing.  Not on my computer.  Not on my iPhone.  Not even my TV.  Not once, ever.  Skip.  Next.  Thumbs down.  Always.  100% of the time.  I’ve NEVER listened to an entire Iron & Wine song.  The 15 seconds into an Iron & Wine song before I hit next feels like an eternity.

Ok, so you’re a relationship expert, you’re willing to listen…. We can work this out. Let’s just do a little role playing right?

So let’s say you’re thinking about playing me an Iron & Wine song, but you’re not sure if I’m into it. I feel the best way to move forward is for me to just provide an algorithm that may be helpful, here’s what I’m thinking:

`y = x – 1`

In this algorithm, `y` is the likelihood of me wanting to listen to an Iron & Wine song, and `x` is the likelihood of me wanting to listen to Jack Johnson, with is always zero.

So that works out to:

Likelihood of Collin wanting to hear a song from Iron & Wine = -1

Eureka! I think we’ve had a breakthrough moment and you’re really starting to get me. This is perfect, now I can stream away without fear of finding my way into a soundscape of monotone melancholy.