The meficomp blog

Wowie!  I thought these things wouldn’t ship until tomorrow, and would take a week or so to get here.  Wrong on both counts:

(screenshot by young Billy Keane)

So they’re en route today!  Right now!  They have departed from Possibly Beautiful Don Mills, Ontario, and are expected to arrive in Portland on Friday!

Friday!  Man, I don’t even have the mailers yet.  Holy cow!  Friday!  I’m taken aback!  It’ll be nice to have a the CDs on hand, even if this does totally collapse my run-up time on the mailing out.

Yow!

Hooah!

Just a quick glance back in time—we had a meetup in Portland that happened not long after the meficomp track submission period.  I had received excellent and varied tracks from all sorts of mefites, and made my painful final decisions, and alerted artists.  But, a month later, chosen tracks or not, I was still listening to this stuff.  Constantly. 

At some point during the meetup, I snapped a couple of pictures of my ipod (to which, let us presume, I was not actually listening during the meetup).  Behold:

That’s a pretty healthy collection of contenders, actually—everything in this screenshot made the album, with the exception of “Just Like the B-Movies”, which is in fact an excellent and clever (but, damningly, very long) track from Paul “goodnewsfortheinsane” Hunt.  Sorry, Paul. 

Lesson learned, there: next time around, one should be explicit about a “shorter is better” guideline.  Many of the tracks I had to cut were cut as much as anything for time—a six minute song, or two three minute songs?  Balls!  This Editor stuff is plain mercenary.

So I’m continuing to get things organized for when the discs arrive in Portland (hoping for late next week), and one of those things that should really be organized is an up-to-date mailmerge-ready index of every single person I need to send one of these out to.

Consequently, I’m spelunking through CSV data from Paypal and coordinating it with various notes and emailed updates—this person paid with a check, that person has moved—and, as a result, I’m seeing all sorts of interesting numbers.

For example: we have no less than 140 pre-orders at the moment.  (That number is probably slightly low—I need to reconcile a few extra orders with Jessamyn yet.)  Most of those orders came in during a stunning week in late April when pre-orders were originally announced.  In the interim, it’s been understandably quiet; but with my recent chatter on Metatalk, orders have picked up a little again, with another dozen in the last few days.  And I expect that rate to tick upwards considerably when Matt goes live with the proposed Metafilter pimping.

Also, my rough estimate of our funds is about $1650.  We’ve spent about $1550 so far, but I need to spend a bit more this week on a couple gross of mailer envelopes.  And then, of course, somewhere (I hope considerably) upwards of 130 first class stamps worth of postage, and a solid dozen out-of-US orders.  Your shipping and handling surcharges in action!  So we’re not quite running in the black yet.  But!

That $1650 is straight post-Paypal-commission pre-order money—it isn’t counting a few donations made early on by avid supporters.  Once everything has arrived and gotten back out into the mail to fulfill orders and further orders put us into the black, those donations’ll go back to their generous (and initially admirably speculative) profferers. 

I rather expect we’ll easily net enough orders in the next couple weeks to land very firmly in Profitville.  Then we’ll fire back those donations, watch the money roll in, and start cutting checks to charity, baby.

Matt Haughey, the man behind Metafilter, has been offering a bit of space on MeFi to promote the album, and so I’ve knocked together a few 125*125 images.  Getting a yet more mileage out of interrobang’s awesome work, too boot!

I may work these into the site design as well, but in the mean time, for your peeking pleasure…

It goes without saying, of course, that, should you wish to promote the album yourself, you could use these images for just such a purpose.

  

 

For a long while now, I’ve had a semi-official, disorganized list of our selected musicians occupying the Artists page, but no more:

It has been gussied up.

Go, then, and see the brand new Artists page, complete with the official track order and links to each and every artist’s profile page.

That’s right, profile pages!  For example, here’s joe lisboa’s page.  I’ve reproduced the liner and contact info provided for the physical CD, and added lyrics and a brief paragraph of commentary.  You’ll also find mp3 samples and glorious lo-res thumbnails of each artist’s portrait/liner square from the album booklet art, as drawn by interrobang (who really ought to have a page of his own—it’s on the TODO list).

So take a look!

When we opened up pre-orders back when the project first kicked off, Jessamyn collected a big pile of cash in her Paypal account.  Fastforward a few months—she’s done her duty as trusted and responsible community figure, and it’s time to get ready to spend that money on hookers and blow CD duplication.

So she cuts me a check and puts it in the mail.  And makes me pinky swear to not mistake it for junkmail and throw it out.  I swear.  We re-swear.  Things get sworn.

And a few days later, I get this in the mail.

The post office tore the check in two.  Fantastic.  It’s good to know, though, that the USPS does care, and does sincerely regret.

Fortunately, it was a clean tear.  I called up my bank and asked if it’d be a problem if I deposited a taped-together check.  No problem at all, they said.  Whew!

One of my goals is to get the chain of money-in and money-out summarized and posted in the next week or two.  The capsule review: that $1584.80 is the sum total of pre-orders as of late August (and some seed donations, to be refunded when we’re in the black on sales), less commissions from Paypal (those devils!). 

There are a few more pre-orders that have come in since that check was cut—yay—but even that sum has covered the major costs for duplication (about $1540 for the duplication and for fedexing source materials out to said dupe firm) with a few bucks left over.  Now we just need to buy a few hundred padded mailers and postage, which those overflow bucks and the interim pre-orders will probably cover.  Heck yeah!

So I just got an email. And the email said something exciting. Observe:

Now, that’ll be coming to Portland from Vancouver via ground, so I probably won’t see these things until right about Thanksgiving. Then it’s label, postage, and in the mail for about 130 pre-orders (and growing!), and if all goes well the first of these may actually get to folks before November is quite over.

I cannot express my excitement. I am reduced to handwaving gestures.

Work continues behind the scenes here at meficomp—watch the site for the appearance of an updated Artists page later this week, and the unveiling of genuine artist profile pages for each and every one of our fabulous contributors.

In the mean time, how about some more art?  Yes?  Okay!  Viz the tableau below for a peek (in various resolutions, and in alphabetical rather than meritocratic order) of the liner notes portraits drawn by our own editor, John “interrobang” Ralston.

  

It’s a brand new look for meficomp.com! No more half-broken hand-rolled 1993-era web page architecture—we’re rocking the WordPress now.

Which means, for one thing, a much lower barrier to entry for updates and additions. Which is damned good news for me, because we’re are getting close to the drop date on these CDs, and I’ve got a few things I’d like to add to the site in the next few weeks. Tingle!

Also, note the RSS feed—now, instead of restlessly hitting the site to see if there’s news, you can restlessly hit your favorite feed aggregator instead. Yay!

If anything is broken or otherwise questionable, let me know—as of this writing, the new design has been tested behind the scenes but has only been live for about five minutes.

Happy Halloween! Oh, aren’t you just the cutest little ghost ever!

Waiting for the dupe firm to tick off the last few check boxes on the pre-flight checklist (news as it comes, natch), so to pass the time I thought I’d (finally!) get up a sneak peak at some of the art you’ll see in this thing. Accordingly, behold the liner note bits for our own COBRA!, as drawn and colored by interrobang: