The answer to a musician's prayer

First there was Myspace, then Facebook. Now there are hundreds of other music sites out there as well. Everyone tells musicians not to rely on these services but to get their own website. It's good advice because you never know when an external site will die.

But these other sites exist all the same. And the more places you can put your music, the more likely people are to see it and discover you. But it takes time to upload, submit and maintain your presence in all these other places. Why?

I have a similar problem with the idea of "cloud storage". The Internet IS cloud storage, yet people are trying to make cloud storage a subset of the Internet. So we upload "our copy" of things that probably exist elsewhere on the Internet already. Once more we waste time.

I remember when the internet was young. When you could find stuff on a search engine with just two or three words. Without having to use some complex search or filtering to get at what you wanted in order to avoid both the spam and the paid-for ads that weren't what you wanted.

In an age of information overload, what we need is more intelligent behaviour, not more duplication. Just think about an intelligent global music database. All it needs is for you to supply the URL of your own website and it pulls your biography, shows, albums etc. into its own template format. And then periodically reindexes that content (like a search engine would) to keep that information up to date. So all you have to do is keep your own website up to date and the information propagates out automatically.

Isn't that the kind of website people ought to be looking to create. And wouldn't a propagation of such sites be the answer not only to the musician's prayer, but possibly also in other industries too?

Slender

So I've just played a video game called Slender which is currently in a (late?) beta version. Quite a simple idea for what is essentially a suspense-horror. Just wander round a forest and pick up 8 pages located within it. You have no weapons, only a flashlight and you need to avoid looking at or get caught by "the slender man" who is also out there somewhere. The flashlight has limited batteries and as you pick up pages it also gets darker and foggier out there.

Here's the trailer



The game is free to download and play for both Mac and PC and currently quite small at around 50Mb.

There's currently talk of a source mod for this (which will obviously be released through Steam if/when it arrives), so I decided to download the current version of the game and take a look to see whether it might be of interest later..

I found wandering through the forest for a half hour or so quite boring as there's no obvious clue where to go to look for pages (although you'll get some ideas of what you might want to look out for once you find a few), but the game does have the potential to make you seriously hit the ceiling and wonder where you left your nerves should you get caught. So from my point of view some potential if they perhaps add some back-story and make the wandering less tedious/more obvious.

Why not download a copy and see what you think?

Addiction

It's not often you find something akin to a kindred spirit, but I got followed on Twitter recently by Addy da Author. who goes by the name of Addiction on there. From what I've seen so far, he writes a lot like I think. Not so much in terms of content, but more the same analytical style.

I don't smoke - never have, never will - but there is something oddly compelling about his "Confessions of a Cuban Cigar lover", which has both a lot and nothing to do with smoking them. From the chapters posted on his site, it feels like I hit one of those "Everything in common yet nothing in common" moments. You've either encountered that before and know what it means or you haven't. And if you haven't there's no way to describe it to you.

If you're into the "real life observations" style of writing, this looks to be well worth checking out. As soon as I get my first regular paycheck again, he'll get his $2.99 from me for a copy for sure.

An introduction

I realised I've been writing my music blog a few years now, but I still have a gap to fill. In my travels both in real life and on the Internet I run across all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff and people. The random, the unusual, the stuff I find interesting. The oddities of both my life and life in general.

This blog fills that gap. Updated randomly , frequently and shortly. Occasionally you might find music covered in here instead of (or as well as) my Knifelady blog, but in general this is everything else.