Pano of the farm, while we were up for Christmas. Looks best big!
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- Fun with form inputs and js... tenori, scrollbars.. more at the389.com.
- MADATOMS - Sexual Bases Through the Decades (borderline NSFW)
- Vintage Ad Browser - thousands of vintage ads, searchable by category.
- BBC News - Reporter breaks an 'unbreakable' mobile phone at CES (amusing)
- FUI Fantasy User Interfaces | Mark Coleran Visual Designer - a gallery from a guy who invents interfaces for movies.
DJ Shadow blogs about paying for music, and why he doesn't give his work away for free:
As distasteful as it may sound, the fact is that so many of our heroes: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, The Beatles, whoever you care to name; generated much of their best art in return for financial compensation. If you take away the compensation, guess what…the art stops.
...
Be prepared to keep waiting…and for music, overall, to keep sucking. Why? Because only bottom-of-the-barrel, embarrassing pop tripe generates enough income to feed the machine. Anything unproven or risky? Nobody’s going to bankroll that kind of ‘experiment.’
...
[I]f $9.99 is too much to spend for one of my albums, so be it, your choice. But if you’re holding your breath, waiting for me to boost my cool-quotient by giving my music away for free, it’s not going to happen. The fact is that I feel my music has value. You may disagree, and that’s fine. [...] I’d rather sell it to 100 people who value it as I do than give it away to 1000 who could care less. That’s MY choice.
Worth reading the whole thing. But I look at this and think... my first copy of Endtroducing was taped. I've since bought that album twice on CD (normal album, plus deluxe edition that came out years later). So I agree his music has value. But I probably wouldn't have ended up buying it if I hadn't had it on tape first.
Ultimately I suspect the real trick here is not about giving away your music, so much as not losing your mind if it gets pirated. Because overall, pirates are either people who were never going to pay you money (feel free to curse such leeches, but don't waste your time trying to stop them); or they're people who will ultimately buy the next album and go to a gig (ie. your fans).
I don't know when I last listened to the radio. All the new music I've discovered lately came from listening to streams on blip.fm, which no doubt the music industry will eventually try to shut down. Most of the music on blip is probably technically not meant to be there, but as an artist you'd be mad to intentionally pull your stuff out of the index.
...and a bit of LOL to finish:
Fireworks and smoke, seen from our balcony.
Happy new year, all.
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