So my car failed on me today and while I wait for tomorrow and the ungodly price the garage will charge me to make it move again, I came across this wonderful post on How to Change the World. As least I'm going to sleep smiling.....
Mostly I dream film mashups, but this was an event.
So I'm looking at a building which I've seen a million times before in my dreams - an amalgam of several different ones - which is probably doubling for a cathedral in this case. There's a very small service taking place outside - the archbishop is celebrating mass while his curate is filming it using a full size TV camera from the 80s that Tiswas used to love to torture. They have not rehearsed it so the camera keeps getting in the way. Archie gets pissed at the camera and berates the two three year olds who keep walking up to him because their mums can't stop them coming up to see dad.
Meanwhile my dead granddad (recognised by face) is talking to Michael Meacher MP (identified by the former naming the latter) and Daniel Radcliffe (also recognised by face) is also around nearer the altar waiting for communion.
Then its 6am
Found on a description of Iron Man....
Featuring an all star cast including Robert Downey Jr (Chaplin), Terrence Howard (Crash), Gwyneth Paltrow (Sliding Doors) and Jeff Bridges (Tron).
Now is it me or have all four named actors done better films more recently? It’s not as though all the films named are in the same context as Iron Man, so why these ones?
Sadly True (via i-marco):
So Nine Inch Nails, newly out of contract with Interscope, released a new double album to the web on Saturday in the same way the Radiohead didn’t release In Rainbows last autumn. i.e. Ghosts is 100% DRM-free, available in lossless formats, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. It’s also available in five packages, ranging from the first 9 tracks (of 36) for nothing through to the Ultra-Deluxe Ltd Edition Package for $300 which is now totally sold out.
Turns out, this kind of thing was a bit popular and their servers almost totally fell down under the weight of demand. The FLAC download is 600MB+ - big stuff. As bunny-comic put it,
but bittorrent and rapidshare are also now in full effect with NIN themselves uploading the 9 track sampler to the net. Also worth noting is that A+R have also done packages for Sigur Ros and some other bands. Very nice it is too.
How wonderful it is to see major bands really trying to utilize the technology they have in front of them to further their cause and plough a different path. We’ve already seen unsigned bands take advantage of YouTube and the like for exposure and now it’s NIN.
The question is whether or not those labels whose bands want to do something similar will be enlightened enough to let them do it. In Rainbows and Niggy Tardust were definitely the warm-up bouts before this title bout. It will be very interesting to see what information NIN give us once this release is three or six months old. Certainly the stats for Niggy were interesting:
- As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay. - Of those paying,
3220 chose 192kbps MP3
19,764 chose 320kbps MP3
5338 chose FLAC
And that was with no publicity save word of mouth. You can find a full commentary on those in the nin.com feed dated Jan 4
So bravo Trent Reznor for having a go. I’ve paid my $75 for you to figure out new ways to pervert the music industry further.