I just installed Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin to see if maybe that will fight back some of the comment spam I've been getting here on Brad Sucks. If anyone has any problems posting legit comments, please email me and let me know.

A year or two ago for some reason I read Dilbert-creator Scott Adams' How To Become a Cartoonist. Recently as people have been writing in asking if it's okay to give out copies of my music (the answer is always yes), I've realized how influential one part of this article was on me. The copy test comes to mind at least a couple times a week:

3. Don't listen to your friends who tell you your comics are hilarious. They're lying. Don't listen to your friends who tell you your comics suck. They're idiots. The only reliable feedback is the copy test, i.e. does someone want to copy your comic and show it to someone else who you don't know. If someone says he likes your comic but he doesn't ask to copy it for someone else, he doesn't really like your comic.

Pretend it's talking about music. Far from being annoyed when people copy my stuff, I think it's one of the biggest complements an artist can get.

Today my CD-R drive fails on every CD I try to burn. Looks like a new drive must be purchased this weekend. Let's hope the next drive isn't a SISSY LITTLE BABY like this one. (Maybe shame will make it work.) Update: Shame had no effect.

Dropping Out Of SchoolGenre: Rock Length: 2:45 Date: 10/30/03

These song notes are so much fun to write. I should make a generic "NOT TOO SURE ABOUT THIS ONE, RELEASING IT ANYWAY" template and use that from now on.

Today I had pictures taken possibly for the Toronto Star. That was a really weird experience and now I am drinking heavily to help get the weird out. (Also I just like drinking heavily.) I also got a $35 ticket on the way home for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. It could have been $120, so I am thankful to the Ontario police, who are my lords and masters.

A week ago I was interviewed for an Outside the Inbox article for the Montreal daily La Presse and it ran today. Here it is:

«Les paroles à l'intérieur des chansons n'utilisent pas des mots pris aux pourriels, mais elles s'inspirent de leurs titres», explique Brad qui a réuni des collaborateurs de toute l'Amérique du Nord pour produire les 14 titres de Outside the Inbox.

I have no idea what I said there but I sure hope it's awesome.

Outside the Inbox is the site of the week on Maxim Online it seems:

Unless it's the easy-to-prepare, mechanically extracted meat counterpart, nobody likes to see spam first thing every morning. Now you can share your disdain for these time-wasting, bulk-addressed e-mails through time-wasting, poorly produced pop songs at Brad Sucks. Visiting will increase your penis size by three to six inches in under a month!

Did Maxim just diss us/me? First they make me feel ugly and now this.

I've been told the article on Outside the Inbox should show up tomorrow in La Presse. Some songs from Outside the Inbox are apparently being played on WMBC thanks to Wes Weber.

Outside the Inbox was mentioned (on air?) on 5FM, a South African (i think) radio station.

Thanks to everyone who has been linking to it and mentioning it!

Here I sit waiting for any one of my two bulk orders of padded mailers to show up so I can mail off more CDs. I also have learned that my CD burner overheats or something after doing 10-15 CDs in a row and starts burning coasters.

Many thanks to Tycho and also a big well hello there to everyone coming in from Penny Arcade, one of the only comics I read (along with Bob the Angry Flower).

Between churning out CDs and going to the office supply store to buy them out of mailing envelopes over and over, I've been meaning to blog some of the crazy hype Outside the Inbox has been getting, so here's a list of some of the bigger media coverage so that I can impress my mom: The Register (UK) Folha Online (Brazil) PCforalla (Sweden) Security Focus TechDirt SiliconValley Metafilter San Jose Business Journal

Outside the Inbox has so far made it to #8 on Blogdex, and you can track some (but only a tiny amount) of the weblog linkage here:

http://blogdex.net/track.asp?id=734581431021125345_PFA542.dbp.asp

And my personal hero Leo Laporte from The Screen Savers linked to it here.

I've done phone interviews with the San Jose Business Journal and Montreal's La Presse. Apparently the compilation has been mentioned on BBC Radio and I signed a waiver to allow LBC 97.3 to broadcast any of the Outside the Inbox or Brad Sucks stuff. Eric Wiltsher has told me they're going to let me know when that's going to happen so I can let you folks know.

I am assuming one day I will have time to work on music again.

The Register noticed Outside the Inbox. That is like a nerd dream come true.

So apparently Outside the Inbox is popular. The server seems to be holding up OK right now, but the traffic is flooding in and I'd like to have a contingency plan. If anyone's got bandwidth they want to offer up for mirrors (or maybe a BitTorrent or something?), please contact me. Thanks so much!

After so many delays, Outside the Inbox is now finally out. After screwing around with Cafe Press, it seemed best to just make the CDs myself for now and sell them for $5 US shipping included a la my album. Thanks so much to everyone who participated and also thank you for being patient through all the delays. I hope everyone enjoys the compilation!

Update: A few people have asked if they could buy both my album and Outside the Inbox at the same time and that's no problem, just Paypal me $10 and let me know you want both. Thanks!

Because I am apparently 'blowing up large' as they say, I decided to invest in my indie musician future by buying a laser printer. It's a Brother HL-1435 and so far I'm pretty happy with it. An old school musician may have blown that $300 on drugs and girls. The musician of the future spends it on office equipment. I really didn't have much use for a laser printer before I started making albums. Since then I have been a consistent laser and toner mooch on local friends and businesses that foolishly allow me in their homes and offices. Now I have the ability to print labels right here! Hooray!

So if the guilt of making me impose myself on my friends and employers was holding you back from ordering my album: IT'S ALL CLEAR NOW BABY.

I think I've decided that Outside the Inbox is going to be out this weekend. If Cafe Press doesn't work out by then I'll just offer the $5 US home burned version for now. I'm getting the impression nobody really cares about the packaging if the price is low enough and I'd really like to get this thing out. THE GUILT OF DELAY IS TEARING ME UP INSIDE.

I just thought I'd post another update about the status of Outside the Inbox. It was mailed off to Cafe Press almost two weeks ago and I haven't heard from them yet. I'm all ready to go and am hoping it gets processed soon so I can get this in the bag.

Here's the new Brad Sucks design. My goals were to make it brighter, make the text bigger and to give me more sidebar space. I had a lot of ambition to try and make a really gorgeous looking weblog design but in the end had to settle for fairly generic. I'm still finishing various pages up, so it may be a bit before it's fully done. If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.

Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic (via Anil Dash):

To classify some qualities as 'talents' and others as 'superficial' may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

It's an article that says some interesting things but also goes off into weirdness in other parts. Possibly I am too drunk process it at the moment, but it seems to go off on a rant about how Milli Vanilli were taken down because they seemed gay.

Being a studio musician guy, I'm often puzzled by people demanding authenticity in music and entertainment. It's like people demanding that all paintings be accurate portraits of real things. That would be boring. Usually people want entertainment to be jazzed up versions of reality. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Despite any studio trickery I may try to engage in, I would like to state for the record that I am 100% legit.

I'm trying to take it as a complement and a nod to the growing popularity of this site that I'm having to fend off comment spam at an alarming rate. Ah the internet.