I don't know if these Moog ads are effective or what, but they frigging disgust me:

God, gross, patch cable in sausage. YUCK.

SICK. LEAVE THAT DOG ALONE. MAN WHY. YOU ARE THE MEANEST SYNTH PEOPLE EVER.

Brought to you by the pimp cane people, this Clear Floor Micrphone Stand does not appeal to me:

 

Kinda looks like you're singing into a bathroom fixture or something.

Jukka Forsten did this cool video for my song Fixing My Brain:

I like it, it's got a nice surreal feel to it.

I guess I missed the announcement or something, but the Metafilter Compilation Album is shipping. My song Dirtbag's on it and there are lots of other lovely songs. All proceeds go to The Mockingbird Foundation, a non-profit that funds music education programs for kids.

The award for the creepiest guitar I've seen all day goes to the Teenar:

Here is Lou Reimuller (a.k.a. Sunset Lou, musician, collector, luthier, artist) and his invention: Teenar, The Girl Guitar - a vintage mannequin transformed into an electric guitar (1986, Richmond, VA).

Totally sweet.

Still so very impressed with Google Reader. It's changed the way I read the web and I thought I was pretty good at that already.

While I felt like I  was on information overload with Bloglines with 117 feeds, since switching to Google Reader a couple months ago my subscriptions have spiraled up to 243 in Google Reader in a short time and I still find myself looking for new stuff to add. With Bloglines I always kept an eye out for subscriptions I could drop. That's such a nice change.

Here's my obligatory braindump feedback:

• They shold integrate Google bookmarks. I hit "share" on any item that I kind of like, which then creates this useless feed. It would be great if I could quickly Google bookmark this stuff, which Google could then do nice stuff for me with -- let me search, syndicate, personalize my search based off of it, remind me of it later. I also find myself wanting to "share" stuff when not inside of Reader, such as for sites that only offer excerpts in their feeds.
• Integrate with Gmail. No brainer here. I'm using integrate with gmail greasemonkey script, but it lacks a level of awesome integration that could exist.
• I wish "v" would open in new tabs in the background instead of focusing on them. Not sure if this is anything they can do much about, but I WANTS IT.
• That "Loading..." screen gets old real fast and I've been using Google Reader for a while now. Could use some speed improvements.
• Better blog search. Lately I find myself going to Bloglines to find feeds to subscribe to in Google Reader. How weird is that?
• Everyone has complained about it, but the whole tags/folders/labels issue at Google is confusing. I can understand not wanting to use the word "tags" -- it's a little jarring for the moms of the world. But like, I tag a post and it makes a folder (with a different icon) on the left side. And the "tag" then shows up under "change folders" in the Feed actions pulldown. I don't get it.
• Speaking of tagging entries, I don't get what the point of tagging entries is. Why would I do this? What is it for?
• Also don't get starring versus sharing. Starring seems to just be sharing without an RSS feed. What's the point? (Full disclosure: I also don't really get starring things in Gmail, but having a share option makes it more obvious.)
• It would be nice to prioritize my feeds a bit. Some (like friend's blogs, important news sites) I'd like to see first thing when I hit "all items". Others, like ebay searches I'm tracking can hang out near the bottom. Maybe just let me prioritize certain folders instead of individual blogs, that'd be good enough for me.
• A few feeds like to show up as new all the time. Pitchfork and Technorati searches for two.

Also may I also say I'm tired of comics not offering their comic image in their feeds.

• I did an interview with the We Are Not Cool podcast the other week.
• I put a new theme on the Brad Sucks forums. They are now sexy as all get out thanks to Jazzman's theme.
• I did a little visual makeover on Stripcreator.
• The mailing list wasn't signing people up properly. Fixed.

Got myself a nice cold, heading to bed.

I would not kick any of the items on The Open source gift guide out of bed for eating crackers.

AKA I want all of them, especially the music stuff.

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.

Hey, I'm a judge in Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey remix contest. Grab the source, remix it, be judged by me, potentially win prizes, etc.

But the most exciting thing (for me) is that Dana Snyder, the voice of Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Master Shake is on there. That's right. Master Shake and I are basically buds now. We hang.

Benny Davis performs a whole bunch of pop songs using the same four chords.

MC Frontalot and I attempted to kick out something approximating the jams this week for Songfight. Go check it out:

I think it turned out decent for like a two day thang.

Many years ago my family used to smuggle fireworks into Canada from the US. It was wonderful and maybe a federal crime, like all family memories I treasure.

Then we went without fireworks for a long time but recently we've been blowing a lot of money on grocery and hardware store fireworks that just suck.

For my birthday my girlfriend got me this:

That's a hundred dollars worth of fireworks from Kaboom.com. After the last sad display at Canada day I found this place on the web and had meant to order the next time fireworks were required. Turns out it's me turning 30. We're setting them off tonight and if I die, just know that it was awesome.

Update: I survived, but it was still awesome. They were excellent, A+++, will buy again.

Neil Gaiman linked to my copy of Babble yesterday, interesting:

I'm just reading the introduction to Fragile Things, and I'm intrigued by your mention of a computer program called Babble that you used in the writing of "Diseasemaker's Croup". I'm really curious about what the program is and how it works, but I'm not able to find other references to it online. What can you tell me about Babble, and how can I get a copy?

A quick Google found me a copy of Babble up on http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2003/07/08/lyric-generators/
It's strange that no-one's updated or reinvented it in the last 15 years, isn't it? It can make some wonderful things.

Neil Gaiman is old school. And seriously -- what is the deal with there being no good modern version of Babble? It's like a mixing desk for language, what art nerd would not want that?

Been reading about the Zune launch today. Here's what intelligence I've gathered:

• it's brown
• the controls aren't as good as the iPod
• what's with the brown
• ganked wi-fi is lame
• the brown looks better up close than it does in pictures
• kind of awkward turning the thing over to view videos and things
• brown, eh
• not that sturdy of a design
• brown
• it's brown

Oh there are other colors, sure. But the brown is getting all the attention.

Here's a service that someone with more time than me should make: a personal aggregator that combines all your feeds from various services together into a timeline view. I first saw this here and I made my own here.

Things that mine doesn't do that would be great:

• Archive everything that rolls in off the feeds so you can go back in time further
• Import old entries
• Search within the article and page text
• Alternative views, timeline, group by topic, tag, etc.
• Spit out a combined RSS feed
• Let visitors filter sources (say I just want to see your blog and delicious)
• Let users easily add feeds to their own pages. Mine's pure hackery.
• Widgets and so on so embed this stuff in your blog, myspace, etc.

Of course this heavily leans towards the nerdy as hell demographic so I don't know how you'd make your millions. But it would be nice.

Tomorrow (the 14th) I turn 30 years old. I must be slowing down in my old age because I was totally tricked by a surprise party on Friday night. My cat-like reflexes failed me and I'm just lucky I didn't break a hip.

I've been thinking about music videos a lot, mainly inexpensive but effective music videos. One of my ideas for the first single off the next album was to film myself playing and singing in front of a green screen and then put that online for people to remix (a la The Colbert Report's green screen challenge.)

Today I read that The Decemberists beat me to it. My hat's off to you, you damn, damn Decemberists.

I think this bank-themed version of U2's One may be the most painful thing I've watched all day:

I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight.

Update: original video disappeared, updated with crappy youtube one.

I'm having a hard time getting excited about Windows Vista, but this almost does it.