via the deerhunter band blog

Update 6/17: I was ahead of a trend!

photo by Lynt

There's a beat drop at about 2:30 of this song that is just perfect.  Highly recommended listening.

DJ Krush - Only the Strong Survive [Bon Mix]

There's some fresh dancing (and cool hats) in this video.

Gnarls Barkley - Going On

YouTube, via StereoGum and BoingBoing

So Trent Reznor released another album today online.  (Here is the earlier post.)  The music sounds really good so far, but this post is about how impressed I am by his web presence.  From a usability perspective, it's just the perfect method of distributing music. And behind the scenes, Trent and his web designers are elegantly balancing a number of other factors.

• First of all, the music is free.  As he writes on his blog, "this one's on me."  In exchange for your email address, you get sent an email link (expires in an hour) which you click to get to the download page.  By doing it this way, he's ensuring that people submit actual email addresses, and that they don't forward the emails around (much).  
  
• Beyond that, he's distributing the parts of his music as well, encouraging people to remix the tracks at his extensive remix site.  I don't know of any other artist that's doing that so successfully.
• Furthermore, he's giving you several download quality options, which are exactly the options people want (see below).
• The method of download rocks: if you choose the V0, you get a ZIP file, which makes it easy for most users.  Other formats are .torrent, which is a P2P method that eases the bandwidth on his server and doesn't compress the high-quality music files.
• And finally there's no Digital Rights Management (here's what happens when you buy music with DRM).

Here are the options that I'm so impressed with (quoting from the download page):

From 1990-94 I thought that NIN was just the coolest thing.  These days I still do, but for new reasons!

This is the first and last post about politics ever on this blog, and it's only to say that I'm fed up with it, and am no longer going to follow it. I stopped watching the Sunday talk shows a few years ago, and recently I unsubscribed from all my news feeds (eg Yahoo, NYTimes) and also from political blogs that follow the news, such as Atrios, ThinkProgress and AmericaBlog. The only way I'm going to read the Times is if BoingBoing, Kottke or Gawker links to it.

Why? Nothing could be more frivolous and deceptive than the traditional, international news freakshow. Things that become 'issues' of the day (I'm thinking of Jeremiah Wright here because that's what's on right now) almost always turn out to be the exact opposite of the story that's presented as news. Of course, you have to read the story to the jump page. (Usually I find the fragment of truth that invalidates the whole thing in the third-to-last paragraph of the story.)

No traditional news organization is exempt from this. People tend to blame Fox and say that NPR or the BBC is better. Well, it's not. A comedy show on Comedy Central better informs its audience than any of them, every single time.

So, why the announcement? Because I think you should too! Strip that negativity away and you'll be so much happier. Read the papers if you must. But keep it to yourself, ok?

The city is covered in advertising now for the upcoming release of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV.  I, personally, am into the ads.  They're all characters from the game, apparently.

Her expression is significant, from an ad perspective.  From this website:

In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right is looking positively into the future.

So: the tone of the image says "I'm looking at the future, and it's as sweet as my lollipop," or something.

UPDATE 5/5: The game is great!  I wish I had more time to play it!  

I think the reason why the ads are so thick down here is that Rockstar Games has an office at Broadway and Houston.

Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.