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for the majority of small bands, touring is a necessary out-of-pocket promotional expense to drive sales for a new release, not a source of profit to offset sales. Not to mention the fact that there’s virtually no radio support for touring acts in all but the biggest cities, thanks to Clear Channel and deregulation leading to the outsourcing of local DJs. I think a lot of musicians love playing live in front of crowds, but hate everything else about touring, which is both financially and emotionally draining.

If doing what you want is an option for you, you should do it, because your one of the few lucky people who can. And even if you fail, you will be in a better position than if you’d never tried. The competition probably isn’t that crazy. Most people are too scared to even try. Bad things can happen, but every horrible thing that has ever happened to me has added integrity to my art and improved my understanding of the human race.

Everyone's relationship to music has changed because of the Internet, and in a way that invalidates year-in-review summaries: We rank and file music all year long on our blogs and web magazines, in the list-drenched advertorial press, and even on our iPods. If everyone's a critic, do we still need a critics' poll?

Great advice for freelancers.

Too many to ever play them all, but a good place to look if I’m hankering for something new.

Details on 1Password 4.1 and how to use bookmarklet in Chrome and Safari to open the current URL in 1Password's browser. So incredibly useful.

Knowing how to program has been one of the most fulfilling skills I have acquired in my life, but I believe having the ability to ship something into the world for people to use is much more important.

So the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.

Drag any movie file onto Beamer and it will start streaming wirelessly to your TV with Apple TV instantly. No jailbreak required.

Our society can't help becoming increasingly nostalgic when constantly bombarded with images remembered from our own lost youths. So a cyclic spiral is created, in which public demand increasingly opts for revivalism in place of new work, because information providers are more than happy to keep their costs low by keeping our attention focused on the past.

The experimental pioneer's groundbreaking work with computers in the 70s and 80s helped lay the foundation for many of today's electronic noise makers.

Many Arab men today are attempting to unseat patriarchy in their own marriages and family lives, just as they have attempted to unseat inhumane, dictatorial rulers. Instead of portraying and viewing Arab men as the unpredictably violent enemies of women—and of the United States—we need to realize that most young men who have taken to the streets during the Arab uprisings are there for a reason: to create more just and humane societies, including for and with their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.

And It’s not like the moral stances against Chief Keef actually serve to enlighten his fanbase or empower the demographic that he is allegedly damaging anyway. They just widen the gap and give self-righteous idiots another controversy to wag their fingers and wave their torches at.

New Year's poem.

Still, it would be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The fact is I’m particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation one sensitive and intelligent individual’s subconscious thoughts. Like a mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail.

“Some Other Time”, my favorite standard. The sadness and the space in the music is for me just the perfect accompaniment to the lyric: “Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time.” And you so rarely do. You can hear the loss in it. Resignation. So much of life feels like that to me, of being just short of something, not quite getting what feels right and what you hope for. “Some other time” suggests the future but it’s one that never comes, so it’s a future of thinking about the past. The present moment doesn’t exist here, and that’s where the sorrow comes from.

For when your favorite song just isn't long enough

I’m saying that I would rather be in jail in a wheelchair with a body that doesn’t work than experience a severe episode of depression.

An interview with the chillwave-obsessed Romanian blogger of Warmer Climes.

i think vocal processing is really cool and i recognize that there are a lot of really interesting things being done with it and that in general it is kind of a new sound that identifies a piece of music as being a new vital thing that is happening right this second but i also know that i messed up by trying to use it as a veil to hide my singing and my lyrics behind because i was afraid of what people would think if confronted with them directly. that was a weak impulse and it ended up putting a wall between the content of the music and people who were trying to connect with it. i wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone else.

And even though not all current browsers make use of progressive jpeg’s progressive rendering, the ones that do really benefit, and we get file size savings across the board. It’s our best option today and we should use it. Progressive jpegs are the future, not the past.

The problem was, I saw a little too much of myself in these intensely serious, deeply focused young troubadours with their eyes cast downward and their faces bathed in the murky light from their bedroom windows. The revelation was a slow one, but once I saw the pages upon pages of videos of guitar-clutching Oberst disciples, the message was loud and clear: much like these high school-aged shut-ins, you need to lighten up a little. Sidewalks and pigeons and being your own best friend? Moonlight? Having a conversation with your own goddamned window reflection? It was all starting to seem a little overwrought, a little too drenched in false significance and melancholy. I didn’t want to share my personal meaning for the song with hundreds of other sad people, but it looked like I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

My friends Dana Paresa and Dominic Amorin's artboard Tumblr.

Affordable Art Prints

Portraits of 200 friends. A creative collaboration. Monotypes by Adam Funari. Photographs by Michael Keany.

Better to listen to music that alternates between disquiet and devastation, over and over, with no respite. Anything else feels like a lie.

On the bright side, by interpreting the confusing policy in the most alarming possible light, the tech press has forced Instagram to toe the line more carefully than it otherwise might have. That's a win for users

I am a sucker for this shit.

EmilyKun from the Hatventures Minecraft server drew this picture of herself, Siejo82, and me exploding from a giant sakura tree that I filled with TNT and then lit too soon.