I have still not found a replacement for Justin.tv that isn't complete shit.

I was using Streamup.com for the last three weeks, but they have their heads so far up their asses that search parties have returned gaunt and empty-handed. It was incredibly unreliable from the start, then they made some "upgrades" that made it worse, and for the last 3 days their server has refused to let me connect at all. There seem to be other people managing to stream video through their site, though, so I don't know how that is.

They also completely fail at running a service. They ignore 100% of attempts to contact them at their official support email address or on Twitter. Once, I got a glad-handing response from a marketing guy, but after I replied with, "Yes, here are my very specific technical problems"... crickets.

Every other video streaming site I've found either wants to spam you all with interstitial video commercials all the time, or wants me to pay many thousands of dollars a year.

So today I tried using the Youtube live-streaming thing that they rolled out last year, and that works fine, except they run Content-ID on the audio streams -- which means that a mere 30 minutes into the first DJ set, their robots started freaking the fuck out, OMG COPYRIIIIIIIIGHT and shrieking and pointing like Donald Sutherland at the end of Body Snatchers. Because that company is run totally by robots, and there's apparently no mechanism to tell them, "Hey robot, STFU, I pay licensing fees for all of this music and it's totally legal for me to do this."

It's not quite the same systemic fuckery as Youtube's institutional disregard of any notions of "Fair Use", but it's closely related.

So if you know anyone who works at Streamup who will actually listen to my bug reports, or if you know anybody at Youtube who can turn Content-ID off for my page, please let me know.

In other video news, I made a bunch of Youtube playlists collecting the better live clips of things that have happened at DNA, divided up by year. Check them out on our Youtube page. Also I made a dynamically-updating playlist of Upcoming Events, which will always contain videos by the artists who are playing here in the future. I'm not sure how useful that is, since we have such a wide range of music here that there's guaranteed to be something in that playlist for everybody to hate, but, it's a thing.

We've had a few more late entries into the Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge, happening two weeks from now! If you have a cocktail robot gathering dust in the workshop, there's still time to enter...

Oh!

Yesterday we booked a show with some fresh-faced tyke named Jacob Whitesides, and the agent decided, at like 5pm, to let us know that he was announcing that tickets were going on sale at 8pm. Well, I was busy. And in keeping with my longstanding policy of, "lack of communication or poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part", I got around to posting the show at 10pm.

This, apparently, was A DISASTER to the foul-mouthed, all-caps-typing sprogs on the Twitters. So many people were calling that Barry's phone was useless. I was going to link to the Twitter responses, but apparently Twitter's "advanced search" field is 100% nonfunctional now -- well played, Twitter -- so instead I'll share some of the "best" here:

Anyway, once I put it up -- OMG TWO HOURS LATER OMG SO AWFUL -- it sold out in like three minutes. So that's nice. Though I can't say I'm really looking forward to having these sterling examples of today's youth in my house. Were teenagers this creepy when I was a kid? Because I kind of don't think they were. (Also I love how they think "404" means "ur website is down". I think that phone is too much 'puter for you, Zero Cool.)