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Bridging the Forum and the Website’s Supporter Systems

Jason Tate

Today I’m excited to announce I’ve completed the work on bridging our community and the main website’s supporter systems. Now, if you’re a supporting member of the forum community you can use your username and password to login on the content side of the website to view supporter only content (like my first impressions), manage your payment options, turn off advertisements site-wide, and soon gain access a special Dark Mode for the main website that matches perfectly with the Dark Mode of the forums.

And don’t forget: you don’t have to be a community member to be a supporter of the website! You can join right now for only $3 a month and help support this website and independent publishing. It’s because of readers like you that I can keep running this website. I can’t thank each and every one of you enough for your support over the past two years.

It’s funny how a project like this, which doesn’t end up having many outward facing changes, can be a massive undertaking behind the scenes. But now that it’s done, the foundation is better set for a bunch of cool things we can do in the future and the system is much more robust for handling payments and login credentials for our growing community.

If you are already a supporter, you don’t have to make any changes if you don’t want to, everything will just keep working as it has been. If you’d like to move away from PayPal and to the new credit card based system, you can do that here. Again, it’s totally optional to make that change if you want.

If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to drop me an email or message me in the forums.

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Review: U2 – Songs of Experience

Craig Manning

While he’s been coy about the exact details, Bono apparently almost died in 2017.

In general, it’s been a rough few years for the frontman of the world’s biggest rock band. The backlash against U2’s last record, 2014’s Songs of Innocence, was perhaps fiercer than for any other album released this decade (though the hate was more for the gung-ho iTunes release strategy than for the actual music). Then, a few months later, Bono crashed his bike, fractured his face, and shattered his arm. The injury, he later said, may have put a permanent end to his guitar playing days.

Still, neither Bono nor U2 have slowed down much. If anything, they sped up. This year, the band zipped around the globe playing The Joshua Tree for its 30th anniversary. Even at a relatively brief (by U2 standards) 51 dates, the tour grossed $316 million—enough to be the year’s highest grossing concert tour. Meanwhile, U2 have spent months tinkering with Songs of Experience, the sequel to their maligned 2014 album, which was supposed to come out a year ago. Even with the 12-month delay, Songs of Experience still arrives just three years and two months after its predecessor—the band’s briefest album-to-album gap since the early 1990s.

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Glassjaw Go Track-by-Track

Glassjaw
Jason Tate

Glassjaw did a track-by-track of their new album over at NPR:

When we were doing Worship And Tribute [the band’s second album, released in 2002], the label was like, “Yo, we need Chris Lord-Alge [engineer who’s worked on records by Prince, My Chemical Romance and Tina Turner] to mix this s***. This is your f****** hit.” We’re like, “All right, crazy guys, we’re cool with Alge mixing it. Whatever you guys want, spend the money.”

We walk in a room and I’m like, “Yo, gotta bring that bass up, man, bring the bass up.” He kind of just moves his hand just to shut me the f*** up. I’m like, “Yo, you gotta bring that bass up because that whole riff is the bass.” He goes, “Listen here, kid, let me guess: you’re the f****** bassist,” and I go, “Actually, d***head, I’m the f****** guitarist.” [Laughs.]

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