FLAC, FAQs and Jason's c**k

Yes, as you may have noticed, this blog became kinda stale waters in the last weeks. But no, the author of these pages, who happens to be me, has not yet finished his opus. I just got succumbed by a maelstroem of accidents and incidents only life can stir about. I have fought entropy bravely while the whole universe was coming down on me heavy, which in the end sucked me off any energy I could have left for blogging.

Anyway, Future•Japan Relief Campaign went extremely well from my POV. The 20 or so posts generated about 1700 downloads until now. I have no idea how much money got collected. My secret wish is 1$ collected per download. As for those who just grabbed the files as usual: Your karma knows where you live. Expect it knocking on your door anytime soon.

Now let's go briefly through some issues that appear frequently in your emails and comments:

Comments moderation or Why my comments never appear on the blog?
I was forced to moderate comments some months ago when The Yellow Menace flooded my comments sections with paragraphs of spilled tea pointing to poorly disguised hoax-or-worse websites in god-forgotten countries. It caused the flood to stop then and saved my dear time I spent going through posts and cleaning up. Since then I filter out only two types of comments - gimme-gimmies (please keep on sending your requests, just don't expect them published unless you add some sweet remarks of this blog and its author) and you-sucks (This music blog sucks big hairy hard latin man c**k, and swallows semen, too, wrote Jason ;-). The remaining 10% gets published with reasonable delay.

Genres or not?
Some of you keep asking for genre tags. Please don't. I love the music I share with you just because it blends the genre boundaries, because it contains many genres or none at all. Future Vintage is a memorabilia blog, you'll hardly find something new or unexpected here. For those who don't remember those days and are not satisfied with the hints in accompanying short texts, there's always Discogs...

Why FLAC sucks?
Some of you keep asking for FLAC instead of MP3. Please don't. That will never happen. Why?
Reason 1: FLAC as we know it today is still a marginal format that lacks major support. None of my many MP3-playing electronic devices can handle it, except my computer. Why bother? I understand the need for lossless format when it comes to classical or accoustic music, none of which appears on this blog. Why bother? Besides, if you live in a big city or if you wear headphones on the street often, your numb ears probably won't know the difference. Why bother?
Reason 2: Let me tell you this story: I'm a cold war kid from a country behind the iron curtain. When I was young and music-hungry, the records from the free world were rare as diamonds. We used to share them in circles of trusted friends. Scratch it and you're out. A friend with good tape recorder (Dolby C of course;-) and time and will to tape the new stuff for you was a treasure. Remember, taping records happened in real time. To tape a 90 minute cassette, one had actually to pause the tape and flip the record several times. Musically, I lived off the tapes for the most part of my youngster years and later I never hesitated to do the same favor for others. When digital media blew the spot, it only allowed me to do the favor for more people; on FTP's, Limewire, Soulseek and finally here.
Shortly - I take MP3s as today's equivalent of a cassette, a practical format for sharing among friends that contains all the information while keeping a reasonable distance from the source material. If you love the music, an HQ MP3 will give all the joy. If you love the sound of your voice while rambling about compression and algorhythms, why don't you just buy the original and leave us alone?
Anyway I added some of my fav FLAC blogs in my blogroll including The Stroboscope Syndrome where you can find lossless versions of some of my posts.

Future Vintage invited the 123.456th visitor last weekend. Let me tell you the prospects for achieving 234.567th or more are bleak. Future Vintage still lives off the donations collected by the late The CTI Never Sleeps. As there wasn't a single donation during the two years of Future Vintage, I have just enough rapids to keep my gigantic Rapidshare account going for next 3 months. And then? Who knows. So if you see some value in continuing this blog and have a dime or rapid to spare, please do so. And now back to posting..

Stay tuned!