deadryn.

hey y'all, jae here. it's been a bit since our last financial update (we've had A Lot going on, both personally and within the business) but we're at a point where we aren't going to get meaningfully more information by continuing to wait to publish this. as always, if you have questions about any terms it's worth taking a look at past financial updates.

"We haven't been able to contact the person we rely on for our regular rounds of funding" is one of those nightmare scenarios because, like, why would you ever plan against it? How would you even begin to see it coming? I hope the person, whoever they are, is okay, but like, goddamn dude. What a fuckin unimaginable amount of uncertainty to have to live under if you're @staff!

If you like the site (you should) and want to help out in the short term (you should), the best way is to drop a subscription (or several) to Cohost Plus. It's the best way of getting money into the hands of the developers and extending their runway for either developing more revenue-generating features (people have expressed support for user-purchased ads, which is nice, but there is currently no site infrastructure to support that) and/or hear back from their investor. There's currently less than 3k Cohost Plus subscribers, so, fuck it, maybe we can double that.

Also, while it's understandable that it might have felt inappropriate for them to bring it up in a financial update, it's worth remembering that 1/4 of @staff just had to very literally flee their home state in the last month to escape transphobic legislation that would have put their personal safety in very real danger. This is something that's difficult to deal with under ideal circumstances, and frankly insane to have to deal with while also stressing about finances at their day job. This should perhaps move the needle on whether you sign up or not!

"It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction.
From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will “speak” to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you’ve read this text, I hope for a different message."

Félix González-Torres (1957–1996) is described by his foundation's linked biographer as "one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s," as his work "resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political."

One of his most well-known installation pieces is "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which is a pile of candy weighing 175 pounds and was first exhibited in his gallery in 1991, the year his partner Ross Laycock died of AIDS-related complications.

A full gallery of the artist's work can be viewed on his foundation's page.

Regarding the specific piece above, it should be repeated that Forbidden Colors was originally produced/exhibited in 1988.

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

i would like to, i guess, complicate the "everyone should move away from streaming services and only distribute music using direct file downloads" sentiment that i see given all the time:

• many, many people nowadays, especially gen Z and younger, have very little conception of organizing and managing files on a hard disk (i have taught programming / web design to undergrads and been astounded by how much i have to explain about what a directory is. this is a well-documented problem that universities are finding themselves in). maybe they can do it, but they would never want to.
• a lot of phones and tablets and cheap laptops and other things people use as their primary devices have very little storage and/or have no option to expand storage. and in places where mobile data is dirt cheap, why would you bother having anything but a phone with 64 GB of storage?
• where do you start building your collection? the blogs where you could download mp3s are withered away. you can use sketchy, finicky telegram bots to download .ogg or .flac directly from spotify or tidal. bandcamp is lovely, for as long as it exists, but a lot of what you want to listen to is just not there. for some artists, nowadays, it is not easy to even find a place where you can legally purchase a download of their music!
• how do you sync your collection between your various devices? there are many ways to do this but you gotta set it up manually, yourself. if you are not terribly tech-inclined, getting it to work just the way you want is not a trivial task.

i agree the world would be better if more people did this, but current conditions create so many little barriers and frustrations - the hardware that people have, the software they have, the knowledge, the mobile data speeds, the lack of a communal infrastructure of mp3-sharing - so much friction in the experience that for the vast majority of people, they are never going to even try to get started. current conditions mean that to start making a habit out of this you kind of have to swim against the current and brave unfamiliar territory. I do this, and i love doing it, but i could not recommend it to most of my friends in a way that would convince them it is worth the time investment.

ANECDOTAL ZONE: i have been writing and releasing and sharing and talking about music online for a long time. i used to only distribute music by download. when i did this people would say - that's awesome! i'll listen to it. and they wouldn't. or they would download, listen once, and never again. (once i saw, in 2014, an EP i'd released in 2012, zipped, on the desktop of the pc of a friend. i asked if he ever listened and he said it keeps slipping his mind. never even got to unzipping it. (he liked it a lot when he finally listened though. thanks man)) when i finally bit the bullet and used a distro service and uploaded everything to youtube in, like, 2015 or 16, suddenly everyone listened. and people listened more than once, and bothered sharing it. i'm not thrilled about that.

i am not sure what conclusion to come to from this other than: most people who are not "into music" do not want to or are not able to curate a collection of files on their own machine, and even if they would like it in the abstract they do not want it hard enough to get over the learning curve and the initial friction of switching over. i do not know what to tell people to do instead of that, though.

yeah... after a few years of doing a soft boycott of uploading my work to streaming services, it feels like i'm just fighting a battle that was lost before i started fighting :/