One of the things I feel I need to work on if I want my next releases to do better than A New Low in Hi-Fi did is embrace making video content. I hate that because to say I don’t like being on video or even seeing photos of myself is a massive understatement. But I feel like in this social media climate I absolutely have to suck it up and at least try if I want my songs to get heard.

So over the next while I’m planning to focus on learning to producing short vertical videos. To that end today I made a little video clip for my new song demo Killing It and it's on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. 

Anyway it all makes me cringe and want to jump in a volcano but maybe that’ll get better? Or it'll fail and I can give up. Either would be a relief!

Ideally for the new year I'd like to have a stream of clips from live performances and previous Brad Sucks stuff plus new ones showing off the songs I'm working towards releasing. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Thank youuu ❤️

Finally got around to adding a radial email address finder to my Mappy Email Signup app. Mappy Email lets visitors/fans select their locations on a map and save their email addresses. So you can contact them only when you're in the area (which is more polite). It's basically an open source Eventful.com that doesn't hang all your contacts up in a third party.

The new version finally has a page (/admin/) where you can specify a radius (in kilometers), click the map and see all the email addresses that are within that area. So you can paste them into whatever mailing list app you're using.

I seem to Twitter more than I blog, so let me get caught up here:

• My dog Maui was spayed Friday and is full of reflections on life without a cone collar:

   

  She's got 12 days to go. :(

• I'm still slowly working on the new live show. The pace should pick up soon and maybe some shows in a month or two?
• I tried out some LandRollers (in my living room):

  

  I'm thinking about getting some of these to skate with the dog instead of buying a new bike (which was the original plan for this year). Only catch: I am not a skilled skater.

• I'm also so close to being done with the new web design:

  

  Looking forward to getting that out the door.

• Sellout Central Episode 13 goes up tonight at midnight. The fact that I've stuck with it for 13 episodes is all thanks to my podcast generator script. Still not sure I can do the entire year though – do I really like that many songs?

Out of It's travelling around out there, which rules! A brief recap:

• I'm a Featured Commoner on the Creative Commons blog.
• There's a Jamendo feature.
• There's a Q&A with me over on ccMixter.
• I did an interview for the Command Line podcast.
• Wil Wheaton likes it!

Remixes and stuff:

• There are a good number of remixes going on over at ccMixter. Still going through them to find the gems – finding listening to my voice difficult.
• This partial-Flash video for Certain Death makes me happy.
• Athene (best paladin in the world) is using the new songs!
• I'm behind in updating the music info page but will get on that soon.

Extra places you can get it:

• Out of It is now on Amazon.com. It's out of stock right now but I shipped off some more a week ago so it should be up soon.
• It's on Magnatune now.
• It's on Jamendo.
• It's been delivered to Napster, Rhapsody, Amie Street, Apple iTunes and eMusic (and a few other I've never heard of) but when they put it online is up to them. Let me know if you spot it.
• Out of stock at CD Baby but should be back in soon.
• A bunch of the new tracks are on iLike, if you're into adding stuff to Facebook and so on.
• The whole album's up on Last.fm as well.
• My MySpace page has been updated with new songs also.

There are a lot of things I'm missing, but this will have to do for now.

Crunch time. Here's what I've been up to:

Mixing the album. Did a mixing meeting with Rob and am back on track with the album. Actually excited about getting it out, which is strange for me. It's really taking an embarrassing amount of time. You would think this would result in exponential improvements and new material and awesomeness and you would be wrong. Just a lot of coordination and logistic delays.

I've been reading a lot about the album being dead and all I can think is: THANK GOD. I'm not sure I ever want to do this again. But what to do instead?

Getting ready for Harvard + the show in Cambridge. Looks like there'll be a Metafilter meet before and during (and after?) the show on the 12th. I think I've got my show pretty much down, new Firewire card = improved stability, blah nerd blah.

The big thing lately has been packing all my gear to get down there. Do you know what a custom guitar flight case costs? I will tell you: around $500. That's five HUNDRED dollars. It would be cheaper for me to fly to Boston, buy a $250 guitar and throw it in the garbage on my way home. I honestly haven't ruled that out but for now I've ordered an SKB Freedom case which apparently "smells" (read the reviews) but works good.

If my guitar is shattered on the way there, I'll buy a cheap one for the shows and give it to a homeless person before I leave.

Getting the website ready for the new album. I've been re-jiggering all my store stuff for the new album and beyond and that should go live in the next week I hope. Due to lack of sales I've decided to drop the OGG format and limit it to MP3 and FLAC. Simpler for everyone. OGG fans can always get the FLAC and convert it as it's lossless after all. I want to support open formats but I'd rather it not feel like a waste of time, energy and resources.