The tilt has cleared from the board, and the high score list has also returned to zero. The paddles move, an unencumbered movement. Another shot at love, perhaps. In the background, the soft punk listening channel continues to play.

I've been thinking more about music -- previously I positioned in my mind that punk and goth are really the same kind of music, punk being mostly more energetic, rough, and edgy. Someone claimed to me that they don't like punk because it's not very melodic, and while I think there is melodic punk, they said that it didn't have that certain je ne sais quois. The latter is rather subjective, but it did get me thinking about things. Punk music is actually rather versatile -- while traditionally it is "rocking" with guitar and lots of energy, I've also heard some soft, gentle punk that was still recognizable as such. Was it just because it was from punk bands and got mentally grandfathered in because of that tie, perhaps also because it had variants of their classic sound? I don't think so -- I'm not sure what it is that makes me think of it as punk -- it's something about the sound. Of course, this might be a case of soft categories -- perhaps there's no single thing that can make music punk, just as no single issue can make one liberal or conservative. Are there hard criteria, or are the borders like a cloud? If I find hard criteria, would I just be fooling myself? Is there even any reality to this struggle? Maybe different people might define their world in terms of essentialist or emergentist ideas, and so long as their perspectives share certain useful functional characteristics, there's no reason one is better than the other. On the other hand, perhaps it's arguable that those characteristics are generally or universally better served by one or the other perspectives, or by some meta-ordering of when to use each. As for now, I'm getting a bit too meta.

POUND is progressing nicely. It would progress more nicely if I didn't keep finding distractions.