I wanna be inna band.

Joshua Lund at MissingM has posted a comprehensive review of the current options for secure mobile messaging. He’s not afraid to drop the hammer on the less than worthy:

If they can’t be bothered to release any source code, fail to provide even basic protocol documentation, and have not posted a threat model analysis, then they are not worthy of your time or your attention.

He concludes with recommendations for Android and iOS, and the promise of nirvana:

Encrypted phone calls and text messaging bundled together in a unified interface that will be available on both iOS and Android? Hell yes.

Dan Gillmor on the Indie Web, an attempt to wrest back some control from the corporate web barons:

We’re in danger of losing what’s made the Internet the most important medium in history – a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks – that would be you and me – don’t need permission to communicate, create and innovate.

Maybe a little hyperbolic - the most important medium in history? - but a timely reminder. Get your content out of the silos.

Speaking of Phil Noto¹, his new book Black Widow is definitely worth a look. He (and writer Nathan Edmondson) have created the all-too-rare female lead where her body is not the main focus of attention. She’s a ruthless, super capable super spy, and it’s all done without the need to show her in impossibly exploitative poses and scenes.

Of the books I’ve read recently only Fraction’s _Hawkeye_ and Gillen & McKelvie’s _Young Avengers_ can lay similar claim. Noto draws beautifully, particularly faces, his colours are gorgeous, and the use of drop focus and freeze frames is all great stuff. Meanwhile Edmondson makes Natasha herself the story, not her relationship to men. She’s running the show and the book is a breath of fresh air as a result.

Phil Noto is sporadically posting assorted artwork *From the Hank Pym Photo Archives*, capturing various Marvel heroes in daily life.

Tyler Hayes posits another argument for YouTube music:

Is there an etiquette for sharing music? A link to any of the music services, even the most popular ones, will inevitably fall on a few deaf ears of people you’re trying to reach. Not for lack of interest in the music, but rather in having to use a specific service. Since it’s 2013, you can’t just listen to music anymore, you need to be tied into an ecosystem. So, what’s the right way to share music, and actually get the other person to click through and listen?

Lots of talk recently about the mechanics and economics of the various streaming music services - Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and Pandora being the most visible examples. $10 a month for all the music all the time? Sounds like a bargain. However making sense of the economics of it from an artist’s perspective is hard. ​​

Pandora’s founder penned an impressive post about the bundles of cash his service is handing out to artists, which whilst sounding great in theory, was quickly stomped on by music industry guys like Bob Lefsetz (in a typically vitriolic rant), and perhaps more damningly by musicians like Galaxie 500 who report Pandora has given them all of $0.21c for the 7800 plays of one of their tracks.

Meanwhile Spotify finds funding that values the company at $3 *billion* despite losing $59 million in 2011, all of which supports Galaxie 500’s reasoning that, like a Sex Pistols reunion tour, these companies are only in it for the money:

These aren’t record companies– they don’t make records, or anything else; apparently not even income. They exist to attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership of that capital, they are earning millions– in 2012, Pandora’s executives sold $63 million of personal stock in the company. Or as Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has put it, “The question of when we’ll be profitable actually feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five.”

Everyone agrees that the physical CD era is over ¹, but the model to replace it is still being thrashed out:

It’s all about crowdfunding. Streaming is the answer. Streaming services will kill you and then themselves. Vinyl is the future. There’s no retail any more. Amazon is the enemy. Amazon is your friend. The labels are dead. Long live the labels. It’s all about distribution. We need a new format. Formats don’t matter any more.

What doesn’t seem to be discussed in all this coverage of how to make money from music is how people—particularly the lucrative ‘youth’—are actually listening to and finding new music.

The answer, according to my highly scientific polling of my nieces, nephews and assorted other under forties, is YouTube. Instead of radio, or CDs, or streaming audio, they all turn to YouTube when they want to listen to *or discover* music. The related links rabbit hole leads them to new and unheard music. Which is the role a good DJ plays on radio: challenging you with new sounds that flow seamlessly from music you already know.

This is quite foreign to old school stereo music nerds. Why go to a video site to listen to music? Pretty easy really - it’s free, it’s visual, it’s bottomless (like the streaming services), it’s shareable, and you can enjoy it on your iToy or PC or pretty much anywhere. More configurable than radio, and cheaper than Spotify. And YouTube even pays artists some kind of meagre royalty.

Maybe [Buggles][bug] were right. [bug]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

Letterboxd, a site for tracking your movie viewing habits, has just opened it’s doors to all ¹, having being in an invitation-only beta for some time.

It’s a great way of keeping tabs on your films – you can create lists, rate, review, and connect to friends also using Letterboxd. The design is top notch, and incorporates movie data and artwork from tmdb (a crowd sourced IMDB).

Best thing? They’re kiwis. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve struggled to stay on top of your film history.

Staggeringly detailed data mining to work out if the common refrain of “Lego is too expensive *these days*” holds any weight. Spoiler: nope. (via John Siracusa)

I’ve recently started buying single issue comics again (as opposed to trade paperbacks), tempted back largely by following Merlin Mann’s relentless love of all things X.

I’m buying physical issues despite the temptation of Comixology, as I enjoy the form of a comic book¹: the cover, splash pages, page-turn-anticipation, the cover, oh and the cover. I also worry about Comixology’s DRM lockdown. It’s strange and frustrating how ebooks/comics are stuck in the DRM world years after music escaped.

Monthly issues are a funny thing - once they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re like small pieces of art that exist in a temporal field that lasts only a few months². Which makes the weekly trip to the comic shop a fun adventure in spotting what’s new and grabbing it before it’s gone for good.

One thing I’ve noticed since venturing back into Sydney CBD’s sole surviving comic store is the fantastic variant covers that are being created. It seems that most issues–or at least most issue of the big series–are coming out with limited edition variant covers, and they often are spectacular.

Making the covers limited are an extremely transparent sales & marketing ploy by the publishers, but that doesn’t take away from their artistic merit. There is some beautiful work on show. The trouble is that buying the issues is impossible unless you like burning money. My shop sells the ‘limited limited’ covers for $50, the slighty-less-limited for $15, etc. They never make it to the shelves for the cover price of ~$5³. This kind of policy has been the subject of some heated debate amongst the retail fraternity, and I guess it’s tough making a living selling comics these days.

Marvel’s offical artwork archive is nigh on impossible to navigate sensibly, and the various user generated comic database sites are woefully incomplete and disorganised.

Given a tiny percentage of (well off) readers can lay their hands on them, why not at least make the digital covers easily available? As it stands, tumblr is easily the best way to find comics artwork. West Coast Avengers, and authors Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, and Kelly Sue DeConnick are all reliable sources of the good stuff.