Slashdot Mirror
Answers From 'They Might Be Giants'
John:
Hello. John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants at the typewriter here. I am answering a bunch of questions that have been scored by someone as to how interesting they are. I would never be so presumptuous as to do this or to publish such a score. I am a bit concerned that this rating system tacitly implies the score is part of my response to their question, which kinda disturbs me. You might disagree, but this is how I would understand it, and I would greatly appreciate it if it were removed.
The scores have been removed; all questions sent were moderated +5 anyway, so it doesn't matter. John also declined to answer question number one, but we have always told interview guests that they were free to skip questions if they like, so no big deal.
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2) The Future
by zpengo
Do you guys really think that online music has a chance, or are you doing this out of idealism? I'd personally like to think that it does, but I've heard some pretty powerful arguments against it as well.
John:
That is a very wide-open question, and idea of "online music" means different things to different people. I wouldn't characterize our on-line efforts so much as being driven by idealism for the specific format as much as our general personal desire to be challenged creatively, which is probably more unrelated than you might assume. It is sort of like writing for your self or writing for the room. Good music (and almost all my favorite music) often only finds a small audience. That's no reason not to do it.
3) Professional musicians
by yamla
These days, it seems that virtually no professional musicians actually make a decent living. Courtney Love has said that she is pretty much playing for free already. TLC declared bankruptcy. And these are just two examples. Yet during this time, the record industry is reporting record sales, record profits.
What do you think the answer is? Is the day of the professional artist over? Is it still possible to make the music you love and make enough to pay the bills? If so, how? How do you see the record industry changing over the next ten years?
John:
Being broke is not being poor, and one should be skeptical of such complaints, as they often reveal poor judgement more than poverty. In both of your examples, you are talking about people who generate huge amounts of revenue and conspicuously purchased very expensive things.
I don't think the era of the professional musical artist ever really existed. Through the course of the 20th Century from the birth of publishing to the explosion of rock as a mass market business, the business terrain has changed for the better, but long term professional employment remains an elusive reality. Musicians are always at the end of the food chain in the music business. It has never been easy making money.
4) Creative process
by Masem
What's the process by which you come up with and create your songs, at least prior to getting to the recording studio? Certainly with a wide enough berth of unusual topics that your songs cover, there's probably numerous ways that this works, but is there some common occurrence that causes these songs to be written, such as a theme you want to do, or a melody that needs to be written?
John:
I drink a cup of coffee and try to write something new. We've used a lot of different approaches. A melodic line can hit you at almost any time. Sometimes a title or a couplet is the spring-board, or using a new instrument or effect. As far as lyrics are concerned, we just try to write about ideas that are interesting to us, and seem bold enough to interest other people.
5) Internet distributable music
by iamsure
If music *could* be distributed securely online, would you as an artist be willing to do so INSTEAD of signing with a label? If not, would you be willing to do so and pressure your label?
John:
There is a leap of logic within the question. It is not security that keeps musicians from going into electronic music distribution, it is the size of the audience. For a period when we were without a label we did a bunch of on-line things, but they would not ever make us the revenue we can make selling discs. We are planning on releasing all our Restless material online through EMusic, in the unsecured MP3 format.
Finally, if secure transmission of music wasn't possible (as it doesn't seem to be now), are you willing to live with the possibility of people copying your music for free digitally, just to get more people to listen to it?
I think that is the exact environment I am living in now. The Napster discussion is such a strange cultural third rail, and bores me so completely now, I just can't talk about it anymore.
6) EMusic deal limiting access?
by gorsh
Hi guys - I've been a big fan of TMBG for some time, and a long-time subscriber to your mailing list.
Prior to the introduction of the $10 a month EMusic "TMBG Unlimited" service, TMBG frequently provided free MP3 downloads of unreleased songs and live versions not available on Dial-A-Song to those fans on the TMBG mailing list.
Now that the service has been introduced, membership seems to be a requirement for any new MP3 downloads. All the e-mails that I've received from TMBG lately have essentially been advertisements for this new service, with little or no free material offered fans. Because I don't like getting what is essentially glorified spam for Emusic in my mailbox, I've actually unsubscribed myself from your mailing list.
I understand that you guys have to make money and all, but are you concerned at all that you may be posing what could be construed a membership fee to be a member of the "official" TMBG fan community, asking fans to pay for material you had previously provided for free?
I'm perfectly willing to pay money for new TMBG albums and music, but I'm concerned that asking fans to pay $10 a month to have access to new TMBG tunes may cause you to lose more fans than you gain.
John:
Our audience means a lot to us, and we respect their interest and email addresses. Virtually all the EMusic emails include some free component, although it is not all free. We personally give away more than any other band I've heard of, and live wonderful, earthbound existences. I don't know what else to say but sorry we bugged you.
7) Stage Crashers
by irqzero
I was at the Philadelphia show (day after thanksgiving) when that doofy guy jumped on stage and started flailing about. You whispered into his ear before security took him away. I was just curious what you said to him. Other than that and the few sound glitches (ouch) that was an incredible show. Thanks guys.
John:
I said "Can you please get off the stage?"
8) Tiny Toons Music Videos
by Pxtl
Honestly, I'll bet a lot of people out there first heard you when Tiny Toons did that music video day with two of your songs (Istanbul and Particle Man, to the slashdotters who don't know).... how much do you think your career owes to that episode? How did that get handled, were you simply approached by WB with a proposal and a contract to sign, or was it more complicated?
John:
Among a certain age group I think you are right. The Tiny Toons get repeated a lot, which also adds to their secret power. It was just a license that they had to pay the record company and publisher to use the music. We had already made the recordings, and had no creative involvement beyond that.
9) Digital or Analog???
by HamNRye
As a musician myself I must ask my role models this burning question:
Digital or Analog?
Indeed I know there lurks a purist analog soul in TMBG, but who better to get the most out of digital mixing??
John:
We do both. We really get a lot out of both mediums.
10) good Vs bad john
by ashileedo
There are rumors that there is a "good" John and a "bad"John. Is this true?
If so, would the Johns care to reveal who is who?
John:
We are both polite, nice fellows. TMBG is a team effort, and John and I share a lot of responsibilities, but we also have different skills and abilities. As far as business goes, I am the self-declared "bad John." In lot of day to day logistics, especially on tour, the buck stops with me, making me the heavy in some situations. I've had to fire people, which isn't ever fun, but I am willing to do it for the sake of the band.
Heck, here's a rough sketch of the algorithm we worked up:
The system maintains a weighted trust graph where each user is a node and the degree to which they trust another user is represented by an integer weight on the edge between the two users. A weight of 0 represents no connection, a positive weight implies trust, and a negative weight implies distrust (i.e. I believe the opposite of what you say).
Every comment displayed in a given story has three radio buttons next to it: "-", "0", and "+". All comments default to 0. If you want more of a particular type of comment, you mark it with a "+". If you want less, you mark it with a "-". The system will increase by 1 the weight of the edge between you and every other user who marked that comment the same (both "+" or both "-") and decrease the weight by 1 between you and every user who marked it opposite to you (one "+" and the other "-").
The ranking of a given post to you via another user is the product of your trust metric toward them (the weight of the edge connecting you to them) and their opinion of the post (treat "+" as +1 and "-" as -1). The overall ranking of a post will be the the sum of all of the rankings via every user you are adjacent to (nonzero weight between you).
This is a first attempt at an algorithm and has a number of details missing. It also has a problem that you might not be adjacent to enough people to give most posts a ranking other than zero. That's where the network flow part comes in. You could consider users adjacent to the users you are adjacent to, and so on. Of course, running the Ford-Fulkerson algorthm (designed to compute just such a thing) on the entire user base of a site like Slashdot would kill the servers. But, it might be possible to use a depth limit, or some other trick (calculate the distance in a cron job rather than on the fly) to make it doable for a smaller site, on the order of Kuro5hin.
Anyway, there's some food for thought for you. To anyone who reads this: drop me an email if you actually implement something like this.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
But remember, moderation is not only moving posts up when they are deemed worthy of consideration, but to also move posts down that get undesired points. A good example is the +1 karma bonus; I try to avoid posting with that if the post is a throwaway gag or something or doesn't contribute to the thread. But some bonus-holers don't do this and post things that shouldn't have a +2 moderation to start with. Other cases include first posts that might have some information but as the story develops , it's discovered to be wrong -- the story needs to move down...
As for the whack-a-toss-away account, the only way to do this is to basically make getting a new account a 'lengthy' process (namely, your user password needs to be sent to an email address). Sure, it's five minutes, but it might be enough that one who continually spams /. will give up.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
he really didn't answer the question asked about the Tiny Toons... Yes, I guess it would ahve been a certain age group watching that series (I was one of them) but I didn't get my start w/TMBG w/that show..
:)
I would say that the show did give them a little more widespread acceptance but it wasn't a BIG reason for their fame.
Catchy tunes that are fun do
You can hear the episode of This American Life which talks about dial a song and other interesting TMBG stuff here. Don't bother clicking unless you have Realaudio or steambox ripper. The TMBG segment is in act two, about 37 minutes into it. The original referring page is here. Enjoy.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
For those that didn't click the link, this was the first question that was skipped: "TMBG, do you know about the Street Performer Protocol, and if so, what do you think of it? ..." I took them skipping a response to mean "I have no idea what the Street Performer Protocol is" and not "I know and I don't feel like talking about it". It would have been nice to get a "Never heard of it" response but they were told they could skip questions. The teeming /. masses are probably yelling, "Go to Google and look it up, John". Please remember that this was a Q&A, not a research paper. We got concise, non-BS responses to our questions. That's all I was looking for.
-B
Rob tried implementing moderation to the system, which, although is far from perfect, does bring some worthwhile comments to the top (sadly, most are "funny" at this point). It has faults, but it helps.
In any community, there are going to be people who poo-poo it, trying to ruin it for everyone else, just because they can. It is sad, but inevitable. The choices are really to:
- give up and go elsewhere
- Moderate the posts
- Ban offenders
- or just try to live with it.
The problem with going elsewhere, is that they will follow you. witness k5, technocrat, ect. The trolls commeth. Any gathering of signifigant size and popularity will attract people who want to ruin it.Moderating the posts brings up it's own set of problems however. Many good posts are left unread, and the collective tends to mod up those it agrees with (witness Sig11). Again, it is not easy to stop such abuses. If you make moderation too difficult (random comment at start, ect), no-one will do it. Such is the problem with a volunteer based system. Paying moderators introduces a swayed opinion of the moderators, and comes dangerously close to allowing Rob & Crew to decide what opinions are heard. They don't want this image, nor could they or anyone be trusted to do a good job.
Banning posters comes into the same idea of Slashdot Moderation dangers, but adds the difficulty of working for people behind firewalls, or on dynamic IPs. Even if accounts were required for use, it is trivial to create such an account, and abuse it.
Which brings us to what I attempt to do. Glean what information I can from the posts, and the stories, and ignore the rest. It is starting to help on USENET.. Some of the trolls are leaving, going on to other pastures, but much of the trash still, and will continue to, remain.
I'm not sure what else can really be done, save implementing some sort of address verification (snail-mail) system for accounts. You could ban on home address, but postal boxes, ect make this more difficult. It also would give slashdot a piece of information that could be viewed as invasive, dangerous, or what have you. *sighs*
But to get back to my point... Yes.. People are here. And we do care.
--
This message brought to you by Colin Davis
Colin Davis
John F. gave thoughtful, intelligent answers. He's obviously both a talented musician and someone who isn't burying his head in the sands of misguided, ranting idealism. Most of the Slashdot questions, though not necessarily those passed on to TMBG, assumed that John and John run around being wacky, anti-authoritarian loons, and that everything they did had a "stick it to the man" angle. As it turns out, they didn't just release MP3s out of hatred for record companies or an inate beliefe that music needs to be free. John didn't whisper some bizarre underground phrase to the stage crasher (just "Can you please get off the stage?"). They aren't trying to isolate themselves from business and "evil" money. Bottom line: The Slashdot impression of TMBG was a projection of Slashdot ideals, and the image turned out to be completely false. I suspect this is happening on a regular basis, and headline stories have a much more unrealistic spin on them than people want to believe.
I think I will bow out of Slashdot completely for the new year. As sad as it may sound, I think there are doers and then there are those who read Slashdot. I'm horrified to be associated with the latter.
Not quite ridiculous actually. Just considerably different that your opinion. Sorry if you don't think that's valid. I get so much spam it is funny. I have 3 bands on mp3.com that continuously email me their crap. To delist myself I have to remove the bands from mp3.com. How practicle is that? I see TMBG's abuse of their mailing list no less important.
Cheers.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
The sun is a "mass"...
of incandescent gas, a giant thermonuclear furnace!
Just had to say it. I love that song.
Simple, they have a balance there that was lost on slashdot years ago.
Most of us began trolling around here for the same reasons,
1. The moderation system and
2. The problems moderation caused.
What kind of problems? Groupthink. Moderation encourages groupthink, as signal 11 has demonstrated again and again.
So with each story, you have hundreds of posts saying the same things over and over again, each grasping at that elusive "karma". Maybe it was bad idea for Rob to name it that. It was probably the best he could do at the time as there was nothing really like this place before. Has k5 done better? I don't know, but it works for now, and we respect that. Will it scale when (if) they have a quarter million users and a couple million hits a day? I don't know.
Anyway, /. hasn't really gone downhill. It is the same as it has been for a long time, just moreso. The amount of crap has increased proportionally to the amount of creamy goodness, but with the advent of the karma cap, people who mistakenly believed that it was some kind of prize/reward/measurement of ones technical penis length, have stopped posting. The "Game" era of slashdot is at an end as it morphs into a zdnet type site that shoots out headline after headline.
rev
The Slashdot front page banner is an ad for EMusic's TMBG Unlimited...
be on the look out for the anime play station version of the slash dot theme song.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
"...score threading down to 1, do I read nothing but just garbage, useless rambles, and elementary school antics? "
Threshold++;
"The idea[l] solution would be to remove AC posting unless you've logged in, so that any abuses of AC posting can be dealt with."
I have a better solution: adjust your threshold. I keep mine at +1 (as mentioned in the sig)...no worrying about worthless ACs or trolls, because they're at 0 or lower.
If AC posting gets banned, then the trolls will probably resort to registering new accounts (read: automatic posting at +1), which means that their voice will get a little bit louder. A +1 threshold won't work then.
Just ignore them. Set your threshold at +1 and let them run around in the land of negative karma.
--
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
1. Because he is more fundamental.
2. Because Line Woman prefers him.
3. Because he is the dot in dot-com.
Maybe I should have posted AC-style.
A couple of months ago there was a request for slashdot readership to come up with ideas for TBMG's Dial a Song machine, since they were on their last one. Did they get a new machine, did they base their decision on anything said on slashdot
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
...and call me the Big Duluth!
Great to see that one of the two Johns replied so quickly!
I have been fans of the band for many many years now (since 1991). When I was working at a military radio station in Iceland back in 1992, they sent me three of their CDs for absolutely NOTHING, so I know that these gentlemen are absolutely dedicated to giving back to the fans as much as they can.
Great answers. Great band.
It's like the napster debate. There are times where AC is an absolute necessity, but x% (x approaching 100) of the time, it's used for Natalie Portman and Grits and various evil links. All because posting as AC lacks any accountability - (presumably) no one can trace back who posted what AC message, and if you have a high karma on your account, and post AC, you can't be hurt by it.
The idea solution would be to remove AC posting unless you've logged in, so that any abuses of AC posting can be dealt with. But then there would have to be legal notice that /. would not be responsible for AC posts, and what policy they might use if they were subpeoned for AC identities. (There was a recent case which I did try to submit but was nixed where an anonymous libelous comment to Yahoo was traced down to it's owner after Yahoo was forced to give up the user records, and the owner fined several thousand dollars for that). Now, IMO, I think the importance of avoiding the latter situation overrides the S/N ratio we're getting right now, so I'd rather keep the AC.
The only other option is to give a small percentage of registered users (like 1%) unlimited moderation points that can only be used to pull down ratings; to keep these users in check, if after so many meta-mods revealed that these users were abusing their privaledge, it would be taken away. The 5 moderation points that you get infrequently are too valuable most of the time to be wasting on trolls and the like, and this might make them more worthwhile. Who'd be chosen? Probably those users with high karmas, frequent postings and story submissions, people that are probably likely to see /. continue. But again, there's some simplicity in the current system, and this would require a lot of programming by Rob and co., plus it has it's own faults.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I am answering a bunch of questions that have been scored by someone as to how interesting they are. I am a bit concerned that this rating system tacitly implies the score is part of my response to their question, which kinda disturbs me.
Was the moderation system not at least briefly explained to him? He seems offended most that 1. one or a few god-like person(s) chose the scores, when in fact they are rather populistically derived, and 2. that we would assume the scores to be his even though nearly any reader knows what they mean.
Seems to me he would have been much less concerned if someone had told him how it works.
(Actually, his fear probably stems from experiences with shoddy fanboy pop-culture zines and/or repressively corporate cool-defining websites, and it's a smidge offensive to me that he would think Slashdot falls in the same category as either of those.)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Short, to the point, and interesting. Thanks for setting this up Slashdot. I'm disappointed that John didn't answer the first question. It was, by far, the most interesting question posed to them.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I was looking through some old stuff of my childhood at my parents' house, and in a young person's astronomy book was the sentence "The Sun is a ball of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is made into helium, at a temperature of millions of degrees." What other bands takes song lyrics from science books for kids? They truly do rock.
ok, I know it's in a FAQ, but I was hoping to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It was mod'd up to +5, you know. (wish I'd been the one who asked)
Oh well.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Actually, it's not a major Jewish holiday, in relation to the other holidays. It's considered a minor holiday, but has been enhanced due to the psychological problems that Jewish children have felt in recent year because of a lack of presents...which in turn reflects on the over-commertialization of the Christian Christmas
Of course, without Chanuka there would be no Christmas, because the Jews would have been assimilated by the Syrian Empire.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
"Hello. John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants at the typewriter here."
Why did the keyboard get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.