Your Personal Feelings, Digitized

Production description from X-tremeGeek.com (Thanks to Doug Williams for the link):

Before CDs and MP3s came along, mixtape creation was a time-consuming art form practiced by many but mastered by few. Can you assemble the perfect collection of music in less than 60 minutes? The USB MixTape gives you the opportunity to show off your musical collection brevity skills. This dinged-up looking cassette case holds an equally dinged-up looking USB memory stick. Load only the crème de la crème of your MP3s, because you only have 60 minutes (at best) of playtime to prove your music connoisseurship. Inscribe your play list in fancy penmanship and your gift is complete!

It is true that modern digital methods have yet to duplicate the intimacy of the mixtape. Even mix CD's are cold in sterile in comparison. How can one make an emotional connection to something that's "burned?" When making a mixtape, one had to, at the very least, listen to each some as he or she was recording it. Taking the time to do that and handwriting each song and artist conveys a completely different feeling than a digital readout.Besides, cassette were fragile things. One false move and they were ruined forever, so one had to really cherish a particularly loved tape.

Trying replicate that experience via a USB flash drive seems like a quixotic gesture at best and totally stupid at worst. For $20 retail, one can buy and 8GB flash drive, which, if my math is right, is 125 times the capacity of the above item. Granted, it won't come in a cute package but you can impress that special someone with not only 100 hours of music but also a PDF of that screenplay you've been working on.