N=D, Ping Things, Webstats

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I posted up a review of The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland over on Nostalgia Equals Distortion.

Rik over at Ping Things has this pretty brilliant sale going on.  If someone reviews one of his releases he gives them a $10 credit on their next order.  I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to clone it or not.  I really like the idea of it.  Incidentally one of the releases you can review is the free download of Remora’s Ensoulment.

Did some work putting up some new reviews on the website of about a dozen different releases.  So if there’s something you’ve been thinking about buying, check out the site & see if there’s some news to push you over the edge on buying it.

I checked out my webstats for the past month.  It’s interesting to see the number of folks checking out the free downloads.  About 500 for the Christmas comp & 100 each for Rllrbll, Magi, & Remora.  I don’t even know if those are good numbers.  The Christmas comp from 2006 has almost 50,000 downloads & the Halloween comp from 2007 has about 45,000.  How have things changed that much?  Still running the same type of promotion as best I can, but I guess MySpace & newsgroups & forums are gone….

 

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Remora

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Started working on a new Remora release.  Tentatively titled “The Heart that Kills” & I’m planning it to be three short songs & three long drones.  Here’s a little clip showing the set up for the drones.

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Digital Sales, Videos, Puzzle Boxes, Dreams

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

My buddy (& sometimes comic collaborator) Nick Marino just posted in his blog about pulling all his music off of iTunes & Amazon because of crappy sales numbers the past year (he uses TuneCore who as an aggregator charge an annual fee rather than taking a percentage of earnings, I use folks who take a cut after every sale which is what I’d suggest to anyone who makes less than $1000 per release per year on external digital downloads).  It’s disconcerting for sure, even if he’s not pushing his music as hard as his comics.  Oh, it’s probably also worth telling you that Nick’s music is pretty comedic & not like Silber stuff at all.

When I was over at my brother’s I watched the video for “My Brother’s Guns & Knives” on his larger/better than mine monitor & it looked pretty crappy.  So I tried my best to recreate the video in Adobe Premiere instead of Windows Movie Maker.  The exported file was ten times the size, so hopefully it looks better this time out.  Though I imagine it looks more or less identical not at full screen.
New version:

Old version:

So on the puzzle box front I designed two supplement blocks that allow you to combine two 3×3 blocks into a 4×4 block when you add the two of them.  So I’m pretty stoked about getting that to happen as I think it will really serve to help with an “upsale” reason to buy two block sets instead of one & I can keep the two for the same price as two individual ones given the bonus block scenario.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve.  The night when all the lonely people celebrate by cooking their frozen dinners in the oven instead of the microwave.

Last Night’s Dreams:
My grandmother has come back to me as a polar bear.  But she doesn’t seem like a real polar bear so much as a full sized version of a child’s stuffed animal.  She can’t standup so I get on the ground with her & she gives me a hug & is rolling around holding me slamming me against the floor from side to side & breaking me.

I’ve been drinking at a friend’s house in Pittsburgh & a friend of his offers to give me a ride home.  I get in his car & realize that I no longer have a home.  I lay down in the backseat wedging my head in the corner where the seats meet the door on the passenger side & hope for a car crash to take me out of this situation.

Posted in daily news, dreams, music, puzzle boxes, video | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Digital Sales, Videos, Puzzle Boxes, Dreams

  1. Nick Marino says:
    December 31, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    The stuff I posted through TuneCore wasn’t comedic — it was all instrumental, electronic/funk/rock hybrid type of stuff.

    My humorous stuff probably would have sold a little bit better, or (at the very least)
    would have pissed some people off and gotten removed from a few sites.

  2. N. says:
    December 31, 2011 at 4:22 pm

    It’s also the night when all the lonely people eat less than usual

Robots & Dreams

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about robot generated internet content.  So I made my first big step in embracing the idea today by making a special Twitter account that auto-posts RSS feeds from a couple hundred comic websites & blogs.  People way smarter than me at social networking say about doing the auto-content as an easy & natural way to generate interest & interaction from people.  We’ll see what happens with it.

Last Night’s Dreams:
The county is selling off the names of all it’s streets for renaming to corporations to generate revenue.

For some reason I’m reading a book on the history of Blue Beetle (which is odd because all I know about him is that he’s a fan favorite that is fairly obscure) & they don’t even use the name “Blue Beetle” until page 186.

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2 Responses to Robots & Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    December 30, 2011 at 8:58 am

    doesn’t the whole robot concept go against the whole silber concept (ie the handwriting and personalizing etc. . . .) ?

    • Brian John Mitchell says:
      December 30, 2011 at 7:44 pm

      Yes, it does run counter-intuitive to a lot of what Silber is about & that’s why I’ve resisted trying to do something like it for so long. But much like the Start page that I made (& virtually no one uses), it will predominantly be made a resource for me to keep in touch with these few hundred websites & I’m hoping end up a service to drive traffic to sites I like & help more people be aware of the sites. If it does end up a workable thing that could generate traffic & potential advertising income, maybe I’ll try to make some pages that are truly robotic about things I don’t care about to help support Silber. I don’t know. I like the idea of having robots do things I’d do myself if I had the time & knowledge more so than having them do tedious tasks. I’m trying to come up with something to be excited & hopeful about lately & to be honest, it’s pretty hard with how things have been in 2012.

Tins, Tin Tin, Life, & Dreams

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I went to a couple shops today looking for metal tins to use to package my minis when people buy a complete set.  Oddly it was cheaper to buy ones with food inside than empty ones.  Hopefully in a couple weeks the price will drop more & I’ll get a few more as I was hoping I could find some of the right size for a buck & right now they are $2.50.

I went to see The Adventures of Tin Tin today & I’d give it a hearty endorsement for anyone who likes the Indiana Jones movies.

So I’m down visiting my brother & his family in Charlotte.  It’s a little funny because we were pretty close about 20 years ago & we both still see each other as who we were back then.  It’s weird too because I haven’t really noticed myself looking much older, but then I see it in my relatives & realize I must be getting old too.  Which is weird to realize.  I’m comfortable with death way more than I am getting old.

Last Night’s Dreams:
My niece is taller than me & she’s wearing a pink shirt that I think literally was my ex-girlfriend’s.

I’m walking in Brooklyn when I see something in the sky & after a sudden flash I’m in a yard overgrown enough to seem like a meadow.  The flash feels like it was two days ago & I’m trying to remember if they talked about it on the news.  Suddenly I’m back on the streets of Brooklyn & there’s a massive war machine carrying rockets the size of 18 wheelers & aiming them up at a white spot in the sky.  I guess this is how the world will end & where I’ll be for it.

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One Response to Tins, Tin Tin, Life, & Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    December 28, 2011 at 9:11 am

    i keep wanting that movie to be about the German Shepperd

Paperwork & Comics

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I got a bunch of paperwork done & the royalties are going out to artists tomorrow.  Pretty exciting to have that all done before the end of the year.  I’m ready to start 2012 with hopes it’s going to go a lot better for me than 2011 (those of you that read the blog regularly know 2011 was pretty rough for a lot of reasons).

I got a few drafts for Lost Kisses put into my computer (still write everything in a notebook to start) & a new REH that I sent to Andrew White for drawing.

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Mead, Puzzle Boxes, & Mixes

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I made a couple of batches of mead today.  It was the end of a bottle of honey so one of the batches ended up that it’s going to be 15% alcohol.  Which is maybe too strong to drink like a beer.

I got in my order of a thousand cubes to use to make the puzzle boxes & while they were a third of the price of where I ordered the initial 100, there seems to be a much higher error ratio for some not actually being perfect cubes (which makes them useless for making the boxes).  I suppose in the end if I’m really going to make a bunch of these boxes & sell them I need to figure out where the best place to get the cubes is going to be.

Did some tweaking on the Remora track for the North Pole Pop compilation & worked on getting something useful from the Butterfly Corpse recordings (see previous post).  So it feels like a positive day going.

Merry Christmas.  It’s the day when people of all faiths celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

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Butterfly Corpse

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So here are a couple of pieces from Butterfly Corpse.  Curious to hear what people think of them.  One of my initial descriptions of the project was “kinda like Black Sabbath covering Pink Floyd” which I think may still be accurate.  Anyway, please comment below.

 

 

 

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One Response to Butterfly Corpse

  1. N. says:
    December 25, 2011 at 5:34 am

    or Small Life Form covering Music for Nitrous Oxide :D
    I like them.

A Good Day

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I’m pretty happy with my day today.

First off I got recorded, mixed, & mastered the Remora song for a comp.  I’m not going to leak the version for the comp, but here’s the demo:

 

Then I wrote a first draft for the next issue of REH that I am pretty happy with.  I am planning for it to be an issue where the narrative portion has little to do with the images which I always like as a trick.

A couple new entries today in Nostalgia Equals Distortion.  One I did about the first Hefner album & one from Martin about his first album from burMonter.

I had another Butterfly Corpse practice.  I recorded some of it & will probably post a little of it tomorrow.  I think it’s starting to gel.  Strangely I think Darin is getting a little less satisfied in that he said something to the effect of, “We aren’t doing anything we could actually play again.”  Which I don’t think is true, but it is a little bit jammy & I did have the exact same complaint about the band practices with The Pointless Forest not feeling like they were going anywhere.  But I think with the recordings from this time it will give us two or three starting points that can recreate things pretty intentionally.  Or maybe we’ll started doing a jam & then playing that jam again a few times & have notes on them to play them just like I do for the Remora song catalog.

I got some research done on more bloggers to contact.  I also found a bunch of places that had posted about individual songs from the Remora album & not mentioned the album title so they slipped by Google Alerts.  Kinda interesting to see that happening.

I also scored a couple of bottles to use for mead making.  So I should get some brewing set up tomorrow.

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Joseph & Remora

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So last night I went out to see my half-brother Joseph Hausman play a show & my buddy Pete went with me.  Joseph is 23 & Pete said he wasn’t sure how he felt about him because he was too much like us a dozen years ago.  Which is one of the things I like about Joseph & that also drives me crazy is how much he reminds me of a young me in negative ways, but it gives me hope that on his own he’ll turn out alright & maybe I can give him some inspiration to end up in a better spot than me.  What are big brothers for?  Any way his music was Ministry style beats with him doing death metal screams on top & what made it good was seven songs in twelve minutes including telling jokes between songs.

I had two band practice things fall through today, but I did manage to force myself to play guitar some & write a Remora song for a compilation that I will hopefully have recorded tomorrow.  Did a demo of it on acoustic guitar, but I think for the final recording I’m going to go mecha style.  I’m really feeling a pull in a bunch of different directions for upcoming Remora stuff.  I want to do some really droney stuff & some poppy stuff & some americana stuff & some mechanical stuff.  I suppose ideally I will find a way to do all of these things simultaneously, I feel like I kinda pulled that off on Scars Bring Hope.  Speaking of which, the new record got a pretty good review on Heathen Harvest.

There’s a new review up of The Cure’s Faith on Nostalgia Equals Distortion & a new review of the first Bangles EP on Finally Checking It Out.  So it is looking like those blogs are coming back in vogue.  If you are interested in contributing, give me a shout.

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