Extra Life is some seriously intense, at times creepy, music from Brooklyn. I think (I know) they think the music often gets pigeon-holed as the kind of nerdy esoterica that sends women running for the hills, but it’s incredible, and who needs women with shit this good?
OK people: No more excuses. No more “I’ve got this great idea, I wish I could make the world see!” It’s simple, crowdsource your funding with Kickstarter. Strangers (or legions of inter-friends and tweeples) put up cash in an “all-or-nothing” funding model. If you don’t raise all the cash, you don’t get any. It seems like it’s a little too much to ask right? People funding your projects because they believe?
Well it works and awesome projects like 8-Bit Cities are cropping up. As of this writing they’ve exceeded their funding goal with 27 days to go.
I won’t explain much. I’ve been listening to these songs for one reason or another. You should too. Listen to them with good speakers. Respect the bass.
I turned Buzz off, and deleted all my posts. I’m not as upset as everybody else seems to be about privacy. I just think all the buzzing is annoying. I use Google primarily for productivity. Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader are all tools that help me do my work more efficiently. Twitter is more than enough to keep me distracted.
But I have to say, we’re all a bunch of suckers. Google wanted to get us all sharing, and that’s exactly what we did. So here it is my over-sharing friends. “How I disabled Google Buzz and shared the experience with everyone I knew.”
Step 1: Navigate to my Google Profile and select the option to delete everything.
Step 2: Confirm that I did not change my mind in the last two seconds.
Step 3: Send an update to all my Twitter followers informing them that I turned off Buzz because I don’t need everyone knowing everything about me. Christ.
Step 4: Update my Google Chat status to inform all of my contacts that I’m not dead. I merely turned off Buzz. If they are still using it, they should feel stupid.
Step 5: write a blog post about how I turned off Google Buzz.
Now that Apple has finally officially dropped the iPad bomb, technology experts are pretty much losing their shit about how the new iBooks interface and super slick design for reading will save the publishing industry. But if you really want to know what will happen to publishing in the future, ask a “comic book guy” what he wants. Even as CD, book, and magazine sales are down, comic books have stayed strong. In fact since the recession started, comic books have barely seen a blip in sales. Of course, comic books could be seen as an escapist solution to the monotony of unemployment. I won’t quibble with that point except to say that comic book purists are still a great test market for tablet reading.
Why? Yes, comics fans might be seen as a niche market. People like me still buy vinyl records after all. But if you can convince a comic book reader that they should pay $1.99 to ride along with Tony Stark on a screen, you’ll be able to convince people to buy Tom Wolfe, Esquire or anything else. The problem involves not only developing the proper hardware device, which Apple may have just done, but also an interactive format that sucks you in like a bound comic.
At this point in the old Tablet-as-Savior hardware discussion I’m dwelling on the obvious so let’s take a look at what’s available for Superhereo geekery on-the-go.
The fiends at Panelfly are way ahead of the curve on this one. They’ve been building up relationships with publishers with what they think can be a viable model for mobile adventure reading. Partners include several top-shelf publishers including the Disney-owned giant Marvel Comics. Panelfly currently distributes high-quality comics via an iPhone application with a built-in store– and if Panelfly’s “leaked” screen shots are any indication, their model scales up nicely to the iPad.
Stepping the platform up to the iPad is a major improvement because even though Panelfly comics look great on the iPhone, navigating the pages can be a major pain in the ass on such a tiny screen (see below). My main issue with Panelfly, as with all of the available options for mobile comics, is that purchases are tethered to Panelfly. Even though I “buy” comics from them, I don’t really own them. I just own the right to view them on Panelfly. As Apple learned a long time ago with music, tethering purchases is a major mental-impediment to consumer activity in certain areas of traditional consumption. People want to “own” their MP3’s much like comic readers will likely want the option of porting their purchases around from one platform to another. While Panelfly’s locked, DRM-like ownership model will make publishers confident that their entire catalogs won’t suddenly end up on bittorrent, I think it may also stifle people’s desire to invest in a significant collection.
Here’s a few shots from Storeyville on Panelfly for the iPhone.
The well-seated independent publisher Dark Horse Comics is trying a different approach to mobile distribution. I read the entirety of the excellent Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite on my phone and it was an engrossing experience. I read the whole thing one night in a crowded bar and barely got distracted.
Instead of using a central application or service to distribute their comics, Dark Horse is going through the labor intensive process of scaling each panel to fit the iPhone’s landscape view and packaging each issue as a standalone application. The upside is that the reading experience of Dark Horse’s apps is tailored for ease. Reading the comic is a linear, effort-free experience with no resizing, no and no bells and whistles. The downside is that an individual, standalone applications makes managing a comic book reader’s collection cumbersome. If you see comics as something you want to come back to in the future, this could be problematic. I could always back the comics on my computer to clear up my phone (or tablet) and then reload them when I feel like it, but this seems like too many steps to really be realistic as a long term investment.
Of course, lost longevity is almost an assumption when it comes to downloading music, apps, or books. You sacrifice the perceived perpetuity of physical objects for ephemeral bits because it’s more convenient. The challenge lies in making the ownership of bits as satisfying as the real thing. But I guess in some markets, the real thing stopped selling well long ago. Maybe it won’t matter at all.
