Thursday, July 15, 2010
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Crazy Asian Nunchuk World Champion
Posted by gjblass at 5:18 PM 1 comments
Labels: Concealable Weapon, NINJA
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters

Odds are that if you have a Twitter account, you're one of the 640,000+ people following @trent_reznor. And one of 640,000+ people having their images of him systematically reformed one lovesick tweet at a time. Anyway, all that's over now: With what is apparently one last twit, Trent linked to a lengthy missive he posted on the NIN forum explaining the thinking behind "lowering the curtain" on his angsty mystique and making himself more approachable, and the attendant, inevitable fallout. Fallout which has become too distracting and destructive for him to bear, so he's retiring his Web 2.0 presence. If you're looking for someone to blame, try this guy (who made a big stink when Trent was trying to raise money for his ill fan), or the girls at Metal Sludge (a forum of "unattractive plump females ... people NOBODY will fuck [who] make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck"). By the way if you're a poster over at MS, Trent offers some handy advice on how better to cut your veins. Because he cares. Here's the unedited dispatch, typically articulate, worth a few minutes of your day:
It's been an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so. Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional record labels and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world - I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while. The reason no record label knows how to market anything to new media is they don't live there. They don't get it because they don't use it. What you've seen happen with the marketing and presentation of NIN over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly. There's no handlers or PR people here, it's me and my guys - that's it. There's no real plan, even - it's just trying to do the right thing that respects you the fan, the music, and me the artist. That's the goal - a mutual and shared respect.When Twitter made it's way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there's a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I'm not what you projected on me. All expected. I'm not as concerned about "breaking" your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven't noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.
The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there's 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 - 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.
Back to Twitter. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and "human". I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I'm in love and it's all I think about and that's that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you've projected on me, fair enough - it's probably time for you to leave. You are right, I'm not the same person I was in 1994 (and I'm happy about that). Are you?
Looks like the Metal Sludge contingency has discover Twitter! Finally! For those of you that don't know what this is, please let me explain. Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I've ever come across. It's populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will fuck make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck. It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn't stop there - hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious).
Cutter's tip for my friends there: remember to cut along the length of vein, not across. Bigger payoff.
So when you see the new accounts that pop up daily on Twitter spewing exactly the kind of thing I just discussed, usually from picture-less creatively named profiles, spewing hate at Mariqueen and I, take a moment to visualize the sad couple people behind them.
A few years ago some people tuned me in to that world and when I figured out who these people were, I was amazed that I'd been seeing them in the front rows of the shows for months. I really don't understand what kind of "fan" spends that kind of time and money to travel across the country seeing a band, to then dedicate an incredible amount of time and energy into non-stop hate diatribes online. That one puzzles me a little.Anyway, I'm bored on a long bus drive and there's no real moral to the story here, just writing. I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.
I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it's participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you're conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you'd have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC's heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I'd value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs's "opinion". Know what I mean? Anyway, we're in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.
With all of that said, I have business in the real world to attend to including wrapping up the live version of NIN, DOING some cool new shit and spending as much time as possible with the most amazing woman in the world.
It's been fun, Trent.
Posted by gjblass at 9:32 AM 0 comments
Labels: NIN, NIN | JA, Nine Inch Nails, NINJA, Trent Reznor, Tweeter
Sunday, March 22, 2009
NIN Launches BitTorrent Tracker for New Release
Written by Ernesto
Nine Inch Nails released their new tour sampler NIN/JA on their website a few hours ago. While the regular quality MP3s can be downloaded straight from their server, the band has set up their own BitTorrent tracker for the higher quality ‘lossless’ downloads.
Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails has always been pro-filesharing and admitted to downloading music using BitTorrent. Unlike others in the music biz, the NIN members are no stranger to BitTorrent.
“We use torrents ourselves, and we know that most NIN fans are tech-savvy and familiar with file-sharing, so we want to experiment with ways to use that to our advantage, instead of making the mistake of trying to fight or ignore it, as so many artists and labels do.” NIN’s Art Director Rob Sheridan explained to TorrentFreak last year.
In fact, when they released the album ‘Ghosts‘ for free last year their server couldn’t handle the high traffic numbers and downloads, so the linked to the torrents they had uploaded to The Pirate Bay instead. Thanks to The Pirate Bay, many fans didn’t have to wait till the server recovered, and the torrent quickly became one of the most downloaded files on the tracker.
With the release of their tour promo NIN/JA today, NIN decided to prevent similar server troubles, and the band now offers .torrent downloads for the higher quality (and size) downloads. The tracker used for the torrents is hosted by the band itself on the tracker.nin.com subdomain. The tracker is already being used by thousands of fans just hours after it went up.
Self-hosted BitTorrent trackers may become a new hype. Two weeks ago, the government-owned Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) had set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute some of their TV-shows.
Thus far, we haven’t spotted NIN’s tour sampler on any of the public torrent sites, but it won’t take long before it spreads. The official website requires people to submit their email address in order to get the links to the DRM-free downloads. It’s well worth it though.
Update: Apparently the tracker at nin.com was also used for some of the previous releases, we were not aware of this.
Posted by gjblass at 12:25 PM 159 comments
Labels: bittorrent, bittorrent tracker, Janes Adicition, NIN, NIN | JA, NINJA, Street Sweeper
Friday, March 20, 2009
NIN | JA - Trent Reznor Announces New Free EP
Posted by gjblass at 4:05 PM 0 comments
Labels: Janes Adicition, NIN, NIN | JA, NINJA


