The Dark Knight Returns and Ghosts

I bought this along with Watchmen because Amazon told me to. I'm not sorry about it, but this is not as good as Watchmen. Of course, very little is.

Frank Miller has gained a lot of popularity since the cinematographic versions of Sin City and 300 were released. Incidentally, the guy who directed 300 is currently going to be directing the film adaptation of Watchmen, which Alan Moore does not endorse, sadly. Anyway, Miller is a pretty good writer. He's also much more into the extremes of sex and violence, moreso the violence. TDKR has a lot of that. It's a story of an old Bruce Wayne returning to the streets of Gotham as Batman after a 10 year self-induced hiatus. The reason given is the death of the two Robins, as far as I can tell; I never read those storylines. The overall battle is one between Bruce and the stupidity-saturated media/government. This is another apocalyptic novel, as it was written at just about the same time as Watchmen, during the Cold War. As such, nuclear weaponry comes into play. An odd thing about that is that the effect is almost positive; it gives the man in black an opportunity to fix things in such a way that it's obvious he's the only one with his head on straight. Characters of note are The Joker, The Green Arrow, and Superman. Superman's story in this is a pretty cool one; he almost dies in the face of nuclear holocaust.

It was a good read.

This was released yesterday and I haven't yet had time to listen to it all. However, the special thing about this isn't just the music, it's the way it was released. Trent Reznor, recently freed from his record deal, has decided to go the way of Radiohead and put out a (partially) free album. You can buy the whole thing for a minimum of $5 as a download in a variety of formats. The coolest part of that is that unlike Radiohead, this guys knows what the hell he's doing with music encoding. The mp3s were encoded with LAME, the accepted standard of quality, at 320kbps, not 160. Lossless versions are also available in FLAC and M4A. Another extremely cool thing is that Trent and co. uploaded the first quarter (Ghosts I) to a bunch of torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. That is right way to get the internet's attention, friends. Also free is a 40 page PDF of images meant to accompany the music, complete with computer wallpaper versions in standard and widescreen formats.

As for the music, it is good. It's all instrumental and mostly experimental, a mix of electronic and a variety of traditional sounds. Adrien Belew of King Crimson appears on about half of it. 36 tracks of delicious music. I'm not the biggest fan of NIN but this is just too awesome to pass up. So, support this guy at ghosts.nin.com.