Mmm, Japanese cinematic eye candy:
Casshern. Appleseed.

Super Mario Brothers, a tragedy in three parts. [via pretty much everyone]

Found a check in the mail yesterday, my portion of the claim in the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation settlement.

I think I'll spend the $13 on a Downhill Battle T-Shirt.

The letter that accompanied the check:

Dear Nevada Music Purchaser:

As Attorney General for the State of Nevada, I am pleased to enclose payment for your claim in the settlement of the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation. This Lawuit was brought by the Attorney General of 43 states and three territories and by counsel for Private Class Plantiffs on behalf of purcashers of music CDs. In accordance with the terms of the court-approved settlement, payment is being made to music purchasers who filed a valid and timely claim.

Whether you filed your claim online at the settlement web site, www.MusicCDSettlement.com, or by mail, the attached payment represents full payment of your portion of the Settlement. Please note that the attached payment instrument must be cashed by May 20, 2004.

It is a pleasure to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion and to return value to consumers who purchased CDs while the challenged pricing policies were in effect.

Brian Sandoval
Attorney General of Nevada

Part iTunes, part mp3.com, and part validation for the Bitpass micropayment system, Mperia went live this week.

From the FAQ:

While the "we're rebels because we say we're rebels" language is a bit over the top, I think the concept is great, and I hope it does well. Music catalog at this point is fairly limited, but hell, the site is still in beta. Just look at it as being that much easier to find the good stuff. Of the current selection, I'd say Gates of Hell by local band Darby O'Gill and the Little People and Human by local blogger and Mperia dev Josh Ellis are standouts. Yeah, Vegas representin'. Werd.

If you're a musician, go register an artist account and upload your songs. It couldn't hurt, and you'd make Scott McCloud awfully happy.

Some suggestions for the Mperia crew...

Ratings are great, but I want to do more with them. I want be able to say, find the top rated songs within Rock > Industrial, or within the entire Electronic category, or even the top rated songs period. Make finding high rated songs easily accessible, and you'll raise the chances that someone venturing across the site will find themselves with good music quickly, in any genre.

The design of the site is fine, but it does look a bit barren on larger monitors. Personally, I'd center and contain the page, using that blue on the bottom as a surrounding color, but that's just me. The logo should link to home.

On artist pages, why not list the artist name in the page title? It'd make referencing bookmarks a hell of a lot easier.

Search is good, but we need to be able to change the sort order when browsing the results, perhaps by title, artist, price, and rating. Open searches (highest rated, cheapest songs, etc) would help.

Local bands. Local bands.

What I'd love to see you guys do next, once you find yourselves soaked in capital: How bout a Launch for the indie scene?

I have a slightly unhealthy fascination with onomatopoeia and foreign languages. Individually, eh, they're both interesting, but combined... oh the sweet sweet bliss of an obscure triviality.

Having exhausted my supply of easily accessible immigrants, I was recently thrilled when a friend sent me the following:

Now that's the sort of thing the web was meant for, folks.

Josh Ellis has a conversation with Chuck Palahniuk:

Read the rest here. [btw Josh, it's on Rancho]

Came across this video while browsing through one of the RX-7 forums. Continuing the nothing but links you could easily find elsewhere trend:

Vinyl Adds Horsepower(wmv). Kids, don't do this to your cars.

On the patch for nine days so far, and they were right. I've had some seriously fucked up dreams this past week.

And so it ends/begins(#2). I eagerly await the nicotine dreams.

The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Media