Sinister Missives

Thank you Mr. McKeeman for bringing Joshua Hoffine’s photography to my attention!

Looks like we’re buying a house in South Bend, Indiana (about 90 minutes from Chicago) - the home of Notre Dame University. Who’d'a’thunk it?

This is pretty cool - Adobe has launched a web-based version of Photoshop for those that (a) don’t have the cabbage to lay down for the full version and/or (b) those that don’t NEED the full version. Pretty swank.

I’m on it. Now what?

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably seen LolCatz - a photo with a deliberately web-inspired misspelled caption that, once in a while, are pure genius. One of my favorite sites to find them is http://icanhascheezburger.com, where occasionally I find seizure-inducingly-funny ones.

I don’t know when these went from random bits of web silliness to a recognizable format, but I suppose it was only a matter of time until we got LOLTHULHU!

Alex brought me a couple of amazing pieces of cut paper art from New Orleans last October, but the artist’s info got buried on my desk ’til today. Check out Jack Wittenbrink.

Nine Inch Nails has followed the example set by Radiohead and quietly released a new all-instrumental album, “Ghosts I-IV”, available directly from http://ghosts.nin.com/.

Something he’s talked about doing for years, so far it reminds me a bit of the kind of work Aphex Twin did a few years ago, without actually sounding like Aphex Twin. Disparate audio soundscapes and suchlike. Very cool so far (I’m on track 6 of 36) - some of my favorite pieces by Trent/NIN are his instrumentals. I still love the music he did for Quake!

Oi. I’m about ready to give up on the idea of building community websites.

I built and ran spookyART.com for 5 years in the misguided belief that if dark artists had a way to communicate, share ideas and resources, and help up-and-coming artists, that it’d eventually take off and become something really cool and useful, the kind of site I wish I’d had access to when I was starting out.

I was wrong. 90% of the artists involved didn’t do a damned thing to help; I wound up doing all the work until I finally killed it this past fall. The funny part of that - the artists involved that emailed me more than a month after I shut the site down to ask what happened to the site, then to to scold me for killing it. If you didn’t notice for a MONTH that it was gone, doesn’t that tell you something?

Now another community site I set up to be an asset to everybody that uses it is probably going to go down the tubes because several of the key people involved just don’t get it. I don’t know if it’s an ego thing or what, but I’ve put a LOT of hours into this thing, free of charge, and it looks like I’m going to get boned on it two or three times over without so much as a “thank you, but we’ve decided to go a different direction”.

Maybe I’m just clueless or naive. It seems to me that if you have a specific genre, in a specific market, it would be of benefit to everybody within it to help promote each other, all in one place. What makes more sense - making web surfers hunt through 10 different websites to find out what’s going on this weekend, or having all the info in ONE PLACE?

You don’t like one particular other participant? No problem - voice your concerns and opinions and experiences, but don’t expect everybody else to adopt your viewpoint. You want to break away from the community after agreeing to take part in it? No problem, but at least have the decency to SAY SOMETHING when you do, instead of letting me find out by accident a month later.

I really am starting to question my own viewpoint on things, and why I’m not dropping all the shit I do for free for people in favor of focusing solely on my business concerns. People take waaaay too much for granted, and I’m getting tired of it.

Holy crap - a friend (thanks, Gina!) sent me a link to a British Halloween Mashup album, which led me to do some quick online snooping. The results I share with you now, so that you may know my spooky mashup bliss!

Beat Boot-ique Mashup Massacre

Bride of Monster Mashup

Son of Monster Mashup

As of this post, these are all ready-to-go, no-hassle MP3 downloads (!)