I'm a happy Bandcamper

In the interest of having somewhere I can actually link people to my music without awkward questions, I tried starting a page at a very trendy startup-ish site called Bandcamp last week. As oddly unnerving as it is to share this (especially lyrics which are often a wide-open window into your head) with people who know me rather than the anonymous Internet in general, I think after going through the basic setup steps my page is beginning to look almost legitimate - you can listen to anything online, or if you want to support my efforts and have been feeling particularly careless with your money recently, download high-quality versions through Paypal for a small fee.

The banner/album artwork at the top were drawn by an artist called Acidic who I've commissioned once before - good, isn't it? The only trouble is that it was meant to be a representation of all the awful cliches of online characters (see track 8) so at first glance it may look like I'm buying into pure fanfiction as well, but it's to his credit that he managed to make even something that should objectively be an abomination look this good. (The logo and other album art placeholders are my own. It's the only half-decent looking thing I've ever drawn.)

It's worth mentioning the site's remarkably casual interface - all the profile options are things like "It's OK to email me once in a blue moon about new features and stuff" and "This is part of an album or EP or what have you". When you click on a buy link, the value field is labelled "behold the PRICE" in a phrasing that I would have expected from Homestar Runner, and the download types are separated into those for normal people and "audiophiles and nerds". Alongside the "7/30/60 days" options on the statistics page, there's a mysterious button marked "Defender", which... lets you play Defender on your downloads graph.

And when I emailed a couple of things to the feedback address, one of the site developers (one of whom is the only person alive to have been sentenced to 40 hours of community service by his own human resources department, according to the profiles) responded within the hour, and it turned into a conversation about colourblindness. Nice people.