As usual there are several ways to get it. Me, I prefer old-fashioned CD (see #3) but I’m told you kids enjoy iThis and iThat.

1. Download it via bittorrent (fastest).

2. Download it directly.

3. Get it on CD (“compact disc”—ask your parents about it). I’m happy to send you the double disc if you send me your address. Really. Just send me your address. Don’t feel like you’re imposing, or you don’t really know me, or whatever whatever. This is part of my life-long quest to rebalance my karma. (I was kind of a dick when I was younger.)

Why prefer a CD? Well, I put quite a bit of thought into song order and the unity of the sides, and occasionally edit the songs to make them flow together better. All that is lost when each of 46 songs becomes a single in an mp3 library. Really, it’s meant to be heard in a car, at high volume, on a road trip. Other listening scenarios are suboptimal, but what can you do?

I’d love to hear your feedback.

UPDATE: A track list has been requested, so a track list shall be provided:

Side I
01. fun.: At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be)
02. Florence And The Machine: Kiss With A Fist
03. Vinyl Life: Hot Sauce
04. Julian Casablancas: 11th Dimension
05. La Roux: Bulletproof
06. Wild Light: California On My Mind
07. The Avett Brothers: Slight Figure Of Speech
08. Grizzly Bear: Two Weeks
09. Monsters of Folk: Say Please
10. Pearl Jam: Got Some
11. Metric: Sick Muse
12. Little Boots: New In Town
13. Chali 2na: Get Focused
14. Blitzen Trapper: Silver Moon
15. Wilco: Bull Black Nova
16. Phoenix: Lisztomania
17. Mayer Hawthorne: Maybe So, Maybe No
18. Kid Cudi f. Kanye West & Common: Make Her Say
19. Manchester Orchestra: Tony The Tiger
20. Pink Mountaintops: Execution
21. Discovery: So Insane
22. General Elektriks: Helicopter
23. Owl City: Fireflies
24. The Budos Band: Bonus Track

Side II
01. Regina Spektor: Blue Lips
02. The xx: Islands
03. The Avett Brothers: Laundry Room
04. Deer Tick: Friday XIII
05. Todd Snider: Money, Compliments, Publicity (Song Number Ten)
06. Monsters of Folk: The Sandman, The Brakeman and Me
07. The Octopus Project: Wet Gold
08. Bat For Lashes: Daniel
09. Neko Case: This Tornado Loves You
10. Lightning Dust: History
11. Animal Collective: My Girls
12. K’naan: America
13. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: Home
14. Drug Rug: Coffee In The Morning
15. Iron & Wine: Stolen Houses (Die)
16. Frida Hyvönen: Sic Transit Gloria
17. Dawes: Bedside Manner
18. Here We Go Magic: Fangela
19. Phosphorescent: Pick Up The Tempo
20. Regina Spektor: Laughing With
21. Harper Simon: Ha Ha
22. The Cinematic Orchestra: Arrival of the Birds

2. Most people seem to use the execrable iTunes.

3. When you import the mix into the execrable iTunes, it completely scrambles it—won’t play it in order. And of course, song order is crucial.

Damn you iTunes.

As always, the easiest way to get it is to download the torrent. It’s a two-step process:

1. Install this program. (Or if you’re on a Mac, this one.)
2. Click this link.

Done!

(Previous years’ mixes can be found here.)

If you prefer to download it the old-fashioned (read: slow) way, you can do that here.

And finally, as always, if you’d like a CD send me your address and I’ll mail you one. (Really, even you.) I’ve got a stack of CDs and a stack of padded envelopes—don’t let them go to waste. I need the good karma.

Meanwhile, this is how to fight with a lightsaber:

If you want to download it, you can here.

To download it, you’ll need a bittorrent client.

If you’re using a Windows machine, download and install this one. If you’re using a Mac, try this one. Feel free to contact me if you run into trouble.

If you don’t feel comfortable using bittorrent (which is, I promise, fast, easy, and free), you can download directly: set list, playlist side one, playlist side two, side one files, side two files.

If you’re old-fashioned and want a CD, just send me your address and I’ll drop one in the mail. “Even me?” you ask. “But I barely know you.” Yeah, you too. Think of it as me paying general karmic debts accrued during my unfortunate 15-30 years. I have a stack of CDs, a stack of envelopes, and a book of stamps. Just say the word.

Contact me at realish ]at[ gmail ]dot[ com.

Here are some ways you can get it:

1. The Old-Fashioned Way: Snail Mail

If you still enjoy listening to actual, physical CDs—say, in your car or home stereo system—I will happily mail you one. As always, I spent quite a bit of time putting it together, and my heart swells with pride at the thought of you carrying it with you through the years, showing it to your children, having it placed in your coffin next to you, that sort of thing.

Just email me your physical address—realish [at symbol here] realish.com—with the subject line, “Dave, man, you rule. Really.”

However. If you’re a modern sort, and listen to music only on your iPod or other mp3 player, and intend to rip the CD immediately to your computer, let me urge you: don’t. The music will then have been encoded and compressed and re-encoded and re-compressed, leaving you with crappy, low-quality files.

You deserve better. You deserve high-quality mp3s. If you just want mp3s, please see delivery methods 2-5, below.

2. The Nifty Person-to-Person Filesharing Way: Pando

There’s a small, safe, and very nifty person-to-person filesharing program called Pando. It allows me to send big files or folders to you, and you to me (much bigger than email can handle). I recommend it. When you click on the following link, you’ll be prompted to download and install the program. Then you can download the mix.

You can read more about Pando here, if you like.

3. The Super Cutting Edge Firefox Way: AllPeers

For those of you who use the Mozilla Firefox browser rather than Internet Explorer—and I deeply hope that includes all of you—you’re probably familiar with “add-ons,” little widgets you can add to the browser to make it do various cool things. One of them is called AllPeers. Once you install it, you can share files with a private network of people, via the browser. You have to see it to believe it—it’s really cool.

Anyway, you can install AllPeers, then look for “realish.” You’ll see the folder available to download. Just leave your browser running.

4. The Dummy-Proof Way: Box.net

I have the mix stored online through a service called Box.net. You can download it from there via your web browser.

The catch is, you have to sign up for a box.net account. It’s free and only requires an email and password.

Once you’ve signed up for a box.net account, go here. You can click through and download the files individually, but that would take a while. Instead, click the little orange arrow at the top, next to the words “Music Mixes.” Choose “zip folder.” That will add all the files in the folder to a .zip file and start downloading.

The downloading will take a while. What can I say? It’s a big mix.

5. The Best, i.e. Bittorrent Way: Pirate Bay

If you’ve ever downloaded a bittorrent file, you know how sweet, fast, and secure it is. If you have a bittorrent client, you can download the mix from popular filesharing site Pirate Bay (yes, it’s perfectly legal … as long as you only download my mix), here.

If you don’t have a bittorrent client (a small piece of software that downloads bittorrents), well, good, you’re not a geek. I highly recommend uTorrent for its ease of use. Once you’ve installed the client just go here and click to download the torrent. That’s when the magic happens.

(Incidentally, you can also download last year’s mix, via this page.)

If you don’t want to install Pando or AllPeers, sign up for a box.net account, or download a bittorrent file … I got nothin’ for ya. Nice knowing you. Enjoy your arid, music-less life.

Questions? Email realish [ at ] realish.com, or leave a comment below.

My resume is diffuse; it doesn’t portray any particular narrative or direction or ambition-and that’s because I haven’t moved any particular direction and haven’t demonstrated any particular ambition. The natural reading of my resume is the correct one: this guy is not a go-getter. I’m not particularly qualified for anything, at least on paper. What I am qualified to doread, write, and edit-is scattered in tiny bits around my work history, but not in such a way that anyone would gather those fragments and say, “hey, here’s our guy!”

I have a smidgen of graphic design experience, but not enough to get a professional GD job. I’ve worked in internet advertising, and marketing, but honestly, one runs a real risk of suicide in pursuing those jobs, much less getting them. My experience creating advertisements for IMDb.com, and dealing with the folks who sold and managed the advertising end of things, was unpleasant, to say the least. And my experience marketing for Microsoft, while more pleasant, was pleasant in the way that one’s anesthitized floating in a dentist’s chair is pleasant: nothing you can, or would want to, remember or return to.

What I’ve really always wanted to do is write and edit content (preferably content I care about) for a smallish internet-based media outlet. But of course, I’m not particularly qualified for that either, having never, y’know… done it.

Note here the layers of bitter irony: I’m not at all qualified to do what I want to do, and anyway, there aren’t any such jobs advertised, at least not where I’m looking. I’m a little bit qualified to do several things I don’t want to do, so those are the things that, rationally-speaking, I should pursue. Thus, when I am looking for a job, this is the state I find myself in: desperately pursuing work that a) I really, really don’t want and would be miserable doing, and b) I have very little chance of getting anyway. Hopelessly seeking that which will degrade me. It’s no fun.

Ah, but I lay out this familiar (to my wife anyway) tale of woe for only one reason: to celebrate the galactically-unlikely happy ending.

Turns out there was one job editing content at a smallish internet-based media outlet that was advertising in a place I looked (it’s called craig’s list, and I only learned about it a few days before the job was posted). Knowing I was not particularly qualified, I wrote one of my patented long, overwrought cover letters, which (miracle!) found a receptive audience. They liked the sound of me. I liked the sound of them. I interviewed.

I got the job. And I like it.

Such small, simple words, so profoundly unexpected to me, so surprising, so beyond the scope of my fondest hopes.

After so many happy endings in my personal life and so much tedium and frustration in my work life, I had consigned myself to that state of affairs continuing in perpetuity. Now there are happy endings all around, and I’m just bewildered, not to mention happy as a pig in shit. I suppose it’s incumbent on me now to work my ass off and acquit myself well. To it!

(Oh, yeah, the job is editor at this online environmental magazine. I’m obliged to tell you that you should subscribe to their daily email, if for no other reason than to read my clever pun headlines.)