Tag Archives: Myspace

Looks like Sean Parker’s putting his Facebook billions to (good?) use…

Posted by gruesomegreg on

Although his net worth is reduced every time Facebook’s share price drops on the NASDAQ, Sean Parker, the guy best known for stealing the concept of Napster from Seth Green (and who surprisingly bears little resemblance to Justin Timberlake) has announced a new Facebook-based video chat service that will revolutionize the internet—if he can get it working.  As CNET reports, the launch event for Airtime was a
“glitch-filled disaster” during which any attempts to connect to the service failed miserably.  They even had trouble getting microphones to work.  Fortunately, Jim Carrey was there to save the day.  “Where do I click to download music…to destroy the music industry?” he reportedly asked Parker.

Unlike Napster, which was the first widely-used P2P file-sharing network, Airtime seems to be following in the footsteps of Chatroulette, a Russian-based service that peaked around 2007-2008, and has subsequently seen its popularity drop off dramatically—much like Myspace, which is now (partially) owned by the real Justin Timberlake.  Chatroulette’s problem, apparently, was that too many people were exposing themselves.  Or as CNET so eloquently put it: “The problem with Chatroulette … has been blamed on male genitalia, and the frequency with which some Chatroulette users displayed theirs over the video service.”

Parker says that privacy is a priority for his new service however; adding that being built on top of Facebook provides accountability.  Well, considering that Facebook is now courting pre-teen users, let’s hope that’s one issue they’ll have resolved when Airtime eventually launches.

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Not the best way to promote your new album, methinks…

Posted by gruesomegreg on

So, I don’t really use Myspace anymore (who does?), but I decided to drop by there to see if I got any friend requests that weren’t from gangsta rappers or electronic artists.  I also had a buncha new “messages,” most of which are from automated mailing lists nowadays.  I quickly skimmed through a bunch of them, before this one stopped me dead in my tracks:

Maybe discussing this kinda stuff isn’t so taboo in Hong Kong, but it’s not something I’d send out to my mailing list unless I was in a brown metal band.  That being said, part of me wants to know why being deaf while stuck to the toilet is a bit of a blessing.  Generally, the smell is worse than the sound–unless he’s going somewhere else with that…

Out with the old, in with the new…

Posted by gruesomegreg on

If you’re reading this, you obviously got the memo: On Saturday, August 20th, I cancelled my old domain, TooHighToGetItRight.com, which had been online for four years.  A big factor in this decision was the effective cancellation of my radio show, Smokin’ Green, when CKLN was taken off the air.  Some chose to stay with the station as it became an online-only identity, but I did not.  (They’re now in the process of evacuating from the Ryerson campus and moving to Regent Park, having been evicted by management.  Truly the end of an era…)

Although the site gained some momentum as it neared the end of its life cycle, I sometimes felt that the primary use of the domain was as a storage space for archived episodes of my show.  Nothing against my old hosting company; I’m grateful that they gave me a fuckton of storage space and the ability to make large file uploads, but let’s face it, THTGIR wasn’t pretty to look at–or easy to navigate.  I took a single HTML course a dozen or so years ago, and didn’t bother brushing up on my CSS or XHTML when the new languages came around.  Let’s face it, I’m a writer, not a programmer.  Not only does WordPress handle the layout for me, it also saves me 100 bucks a year versus hosting my own site, and it helps that I’ve been using it for a couple years already with Hellbound.

As for the writing on this site, well, you can expect something closer to my Hellbound blog rather than the local rah-rah reviews I’d written for THTGIR.  I am keeping “Gruesome Greg’s Gig List” on the right nav as a nod to the latter, but with the caveat that I’m only including shows I can see myself attending, as opposed to listing every heavy rock gig in Southern Ontario.  Keeping tabs on bands is a lot harder now that no one uses Myspace anymore.

I don’t plan on limiting myself to writing about music, either.  My Hellbound ramblings sometimes touched on topics ranging from KFC to the NFL and from chicken wing bars to federal politics in Quebec, but I plan on sticking to music-related topics over there from now on.  All that other stuff will go here–along with anything music-related that doesn’t happen on a Saturday, heh heh.  In case you were wondering, I spent last weekend in Upstate NY, where I caught Pentagram in concert, then took an overnite bus to Cooperstown to kneel before Robbie Alomar’s plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Pictures of both events will be posted here this weekend, so stick around for that.

One final note: I’ve still got three Too High To Get It Right t-shirts (two Large, one Medium) sitting around in my closet, and I don’t plan on wearing all of them.  If you’re in the GTA, I can deliver ‘em to your doorstep, or if not, I’m sure we can work out some kinda trade or Paypal arrangement.  Drop me a line at my new email addy, or leave me a comment below.

Peace,

Greg