Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

When I was 19 or 20, Subaru brought its rally team to the Gorge Games. This meant that there were a number of the new 2002 “bug-eye” Impreza WRXs running around Hood River, all in the World Rally Classic Blue (what I think of as Subaru blue): I … fell in love. This was the first car that I really, truly coveted. A colleague at the restaurant I was working at went out and bought one that summer, and I got to ride around in it when we went shooting. Man, I loved that car. The color. The power. The cool. [Eds note: I stand by my position that the gold wheels are dumb. It’s my only note on the whole car.] I’ve wanted one ever since. Every time I’ve gone to buy a car, I’ve looked at and test driven and seriously considered a WRX (and later, an STI). Each time, I’ve talked myself out of it. (I don’t always make the BEST financial choices, but when it comes to big things like cars, I’m more pragmatic and practical than y’all might expect.)  See, the thing is, it’s not a great daily driver...

Introduction A couple of years ago, towards the end of 2021, I started seeing a new phenomenon popping up all across my social media feeds: Spotify Wrapped. It was a really cool, social media-friendly analysis of my friends’ listening habits across the last year. I don’t, and probably won’t ever, use Spotify in any regular way, but I do use a couple of other services that provide some back-end statistics: Roon, the primary listening system in my house, which allows me to centrally direct music to a dozen endpoints around my house. Roon provides pretty detailed statistics about your listening habits, but only for either 1) a defined period starting on they day you’re looking and go back no more than the last year, or 2) as long as the server has been running. Tidal is the primary streaming service I use to feed Roon, and I occasionally use Tidal directly to listen to music on an iOS device or occasionally my work PC. Tidal’s data is reasonably accessible, but because I’m primarily playi...