Snake? SNAKE??

Hello from Amazon.com.

We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on June 17 2009:

"Final Fantasy XI Online: The Vana'diel Collection 2008"
Estimated arrival date: July 15 2009 - July 17 2009

we'll play next week k

How's this for epic fail:

2 Tracks on the album, 1 is album only, album costs you 12 downloads!
6 tracks on the album, 4 are album only, album costs you 12 downloads!

I don't know whether to laugh at the audacity here, or cry while the marketing department ruins what used to be my favorite online music store.

So, eMusic was talking about their new "12-tracks per album" feature like it was a good thing - you'd be able to download albums with more than 12 tracks for only 12 download credits. Right?

Oh, except what they meant was, they can put up high-demand albums with less than 12 tracks, restrict half of the tracks to album only, and charge you 12 credits for the album.

Yeah, I'm sure the exceptional marketing person who came up with this spin is enjoying his employee-of-the-month parking spot, but at some point, we will find out where eMusic headquarters is and slash this guy's tires.

That particular bitching aside, I'm still on there for the next six months or so due to my annual plan being already paid for, but as soon as it expires, I'm going to cut back to a small plan and start using Amazon quite a bit more. I recently wrote to my favorite indie musician and asked how eMusic is as a distributor, and as it turns out, they don't pay very well (shock, I know).

The main advantages that eMusic had for me - Linux compatibility and no DRM - are equally available on Amazon now, and Amazon's downloader app is actually quite a bit better on Linux than eMusic, who took the easy way out and went with xulrunner. Amazon's app is native and way nicer, and lightweight as well. I just wish Amazon's site UI were better, their prices slightly lower (75c would be perfect for 256bps MP3, IMHO), and their indie catalog bigger.

What would be particularly awesome would be a site/program similar to Miro, except for music - with samples, and direct purchase from the musicians themselves. The site could sell product placement, ads, hosting for artists who don't want to run their own site, and money transfer service (perhaps a Live-style points system?) Users would be able to make lists, recommend new artists, rate songs, and vote up/promote their favorite bands.

I'd do it myself if I had the connections for that kind of thing. Unfortunately my music catalog is way bigger than the number of indie musicians I know personally. :P

Got a response from them this morning - somehow, I got a shipment notice e-mail for something that hasn't shipped yet. My account information there also says "not shipped" now, too.

There'll be more info as soon as they get their act together.

So, state regulators can apparently regulate national banks, and the national (read: bailed out) banks are whining about it:

The American Bankers Association said the ruling "changes over 140 years of settled law," and expressed worry that national banks now would "face a patchwork of duplicative and conflicting federal and state regulation and enforcement actions."

Of course, this would not be a problem for a small bank, which also has the advantage of not being too big to fail.

Seriously, fuck you, bankers. Your asses need to be split up and distributed into networks of small banks to prevent this kind of shit from ever happening again.

The big banks and their bailouts have, in one year, cost us more than the last 205 years worth of wars, social plans, and major scientific engineering efforts like the Apollo space program.

The prices for the historical events are adjusted for inflation, so it's not that old dollars were worth less.

NONE OF THEM. Damn prissy bastards, always adorably flopping about like the feathered Shirley-Temple wannabes they are. Fuck you, penguin!

How is it possible to be pro-life yet not believe that people have a right to at least some kind of minimal level of health care?

If a freeware game had a soundtrack you had to buy off of iTunes, Amazon, or eMusic for the game to have music, would you buy it, or would you be more likely to want to be able to put in music you already had? For the purposes of this question, assume the soundtrack doesn't suck.

Keep in mind that the game itself would be free, and you'd have both the game and the soundtrack for the $10-15 it would cost in downloads.

Would it make any difference if the game itself was able to buy and grab the tracks on its own (ie. a "Buy Soundtrack" option in the menus)?

How about if it was a commercial game and the cost of the tracks was dropped off the sticker, say, instead of a $50 complete game it would be $35 without music?

OH JAPAN YOU FRIGHTEN AND ENTRANCE ME AT THE SAME TIME. HELLO WEIRDFACE NINJA MANWOMAN HOW ARE YUO



IT'S OVER 9000



THIS ONE IS HERE FOR dwaleberry BECAUSE THIS WOMAN COULD KICK MY ASS. AND IS RELATED TO WEIRDFACE NINJA MANWOMAN SOMEHOW



OCCASIONALLY JAPAN ROCKS. CHAD VADER NOT INCLUDED

While I was thinking about online MMOs it occurred to me that it'd be pretty cool if there was a Shin Megami Tensei MMO. So, I mentioned it on Twitter. Almost instantly jukor mentioned SMT: Imagine - which from the looks of it, seems to be exactly what I was asking about.

What I wasn't expecting was for Aeria Games - the people who make SMT: Imagine - to have a Twitter account, and to catch what I said, add me, and also respond with a link to their game.

Now if only every company was that responsive!

People using IRC have probably noticed that CC's down. There was a lightning storm earlier today so I'm assuming that it took the power out at my house.

It'll be back as soon as I get home tonight.

All right, so I put a server up: ccserver.dynip.com, ports 6667,6668,6669,7000. If you're firewalled but have web access, there's a web-based client at http://ccserver.dynip.com/web-irc.html which should work with any browser, no java or Flash required. (It's actually a pretty good web client, too.)

If you want a full-window client you can just bookmark this link and it'll always get you to CC.

Obviously the only room on there is #cyborg_central. :P

We'll see how this holds up.

In the last couple of days I've heard a couple of old #CC'ers mention that they feel a little out of touch with their online friends, and I feel kind of the same way myself.

If I went through the trouble to set up a #cyborg_central IRC channel over on say, DALnet, would anyone (other than me, anyway) show up?

The Mayor of heavily-conservative San Angelo, Texas, suddenly resigned and fled to Mexico because he is having a homosexual affair with an illegal alien.

WHUT.

The only way this could be any funnier is if they'd been caught in the Mayor's office having kinky sex using cigars, on the mayor's desk, after signing gun control legislation. :O