A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
Where you can find A Head Full of Wishes
I decided to try and tidy up where AHFoW exists. I’m doing this because I no longer want to spread myself so widely, and therefore so thinly around - although… still quite wide, and quite thin!
TL;DR
- The website is my pride and joy - it has news, regular articles, a discography and gigography (that even Dean uses when researching), and has over 30 years of my life in it:
- If you use RSS the best way to ensure you see all posts on AHFoW is to subscribe to the feeds:
- If you want to chat with other fans then these are probably your best bets, and it’s where you’re most likely find me:
You’ll notice that Twitter/X is not in those lists, of all the platforms Twitter is the one which has most notably changed. It’s unbearable to use and became more so when Twitter bought Tweedeck and ruined it.
Over the last couple of years AHFoW has mostly just been auto-posting on the platform, and without anyone responding I found myself spending less and less time looking after it. For those reasons, and for many others, I have decided to stop using Twitter/X as of now. The @ahfow account will still be there and will still be able to be reached that way but I won’t be posting or monitoring it in any notable way. The seventeen years of posts will, for now, remain.
The same applies to my personal account at @grange85.
There are a few other places you’ll find AHFoW but mostly in archived or legacy forms.
- I posted quite a lot on a Tumblr back in the day and that’s all still there.
- Once upon a time Flickr was close to perfect but… it’s a bit shit now, but does have a fair bit in the A Head Full of Wishes Flickr group.
- I posted a potted history of the Galaxie 500 Mailing List on Substack a while back and technically it still exists here.
- There’s also a Mixcloud with three mixes of AHFoW related stuff!
The bit where I rant a little
I wasn’t sure whether to post this bit since it’s just me whining about the state of things and you probably don’t want that, but since I’ve written it I’ll pop it here - you might want to stop reading now!
Over the last few years I have found the way social media has moved to be quite depressing, so I thought it was time to reign myself in and ease myself away from certain platforms. This has little to do with the evils of ownership (because all platforms have their issues in that area - even the ones that aren’t technically “owned”), it has more to do with the way that platforms deliver their content, the evils of their algorithms, their advertising, and their extortion and payola scams.
Engagement has dropped across all platforms, partly I think because everyone is suffering from social media overload, or just that social media has lost somewhat the “social” bit. The platforms choose what they think you want to see, or what’s beneficial for them for you to see, rather than what you’ve chosen to see. It’s hard to use a platform that doesn’t know you as well as it likes to think it does.
The other aspect that has become more frustrating is the way that the big players are building walls around their products - we once dreamed of this wonderful interconnected world where content could easily be shared and found. Now, by restricting and rate-limiting their APIs, paywalling content, obscuring content discovery behind undocumented algorithms, anyone who needs content to be discovered are being forced to pay for that discovery. Now, AHFoW isn’t, never has been, and never will be, something that is a commercial enterprise and so I won’t play this game, but that means that it relies on word of mouth and luck to get discovered.
I love talking (well typing) about these bands and so the demise of places to talk (type) is a little sad but for all the good that the Internet is (and I have made so many friends thanks to it over the 30 plus years), there is so much that isn’t good and it is being ruined by capitalism, by hate, by a sad lack of empathy.
There’s an oft-used criticism that we have all become siloed and are just living in our echo chambers… I sort of wish that was a tiny bit true but unfortunately it’s not. Sometimes life can be improved by focussing on the parts of it that are important to you. Improve what you can and do what’s best for your own well-being.
Sometimes it’s worth seeing the trees, not the wood!
