PS C:\> tar -xf Relapsed_At_Midnight_MP4_v1.zip

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Application_Install.exe

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I relapsed last night. Alone on the bridge over Whatcom Creek just after 12 AM, no warning, thirty one years of buildup and it finally caught me out in the open. Before you panic, this is the good kind. I have been dancing to this song in private for three decades, alone in bedrooms and living rooms where no one could see me do it. Last night I broke that habit. I danced to it out loud, on camera with cars driving by, where it could actually be seen. That is the relapse. Not the dancing. The hiding it stopped working on.

That is the application. The rest is the source code.

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Source_Code.txt

The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.

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> the song that started all of this: cafe_europa.mp4

It was 1995. I was in the fifth grade. Gas was around a dollar fifteen a gallon, Windows 95 was the biggest thing to happen to a computer screen, and I heard Cafe Europa by Deep Forest for the first time through a Discman. Mine had anti shock, which back then felt like the height of technology. You could walk around, maybe even jog a little, and the CD would not skip. That felt like magic. Somewhere in the middle of all that, this song found me, and I have never once let it go.

I did not know what it was doing to me back then. I just knew I needed to hear it again, and again, and then again for the next thirty one years. That song is the reason I found EDM at all. It is the doorway. Cafe Europa sits around 125 bpm, and I have since figured out that anything in that 120 range does something to my brain that nothing else does. It is almost rhythmic, almost automatic, like an auditory stim I did not have a name for until much later in life. Everything I love about this sound, the way it moves through a body instead of just through ears, started right there in a fifth grader’s bedroom in 1995.

Last night at midnight I finally did something about it. Thirty one years of keeping this song locked in private, and I broke. I turned it on and I danced where a camera could see me. Not a performance, not a routine, just whatever wanted to move through me after three decades of never letting anyone witness what this sound does to my body.

Thirty one years of discretion is a long time to keep something this good a secret. I am done hiding things that already know exactly what they mean to me.

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