Is this a bad time to ask again to have my commenting account removed? Teresa e-mailed me a one-liner reply to my request in November and I've heard nothing else about it since.

At this point, I even don't care if my comments and comment history remain. I just want to disable the account.

Teresa, that's fine. I understand that. I'd just rather link to my blog.

I'd still like to delete my BoingBoing account. How can I do that? There's no interface to do so.

Good work, looks solid. Unfortunately, I'm not into auto-generating comment profiles.

I don't see an interface to close/cancel/remove my account. How can I do that?

On a lighter note:

"I deedn't ifee meke-a it oooot ooff zee stete-a. Zeey cooght me-a in Sebestupul, tuuk me-a ooffff zee Greyhuoond in cooffffs veet seex goons oon me-a ell zee teeme-a."

"Zee deesks?"

"Zeey needed tu be-a soore-a thet yuoo gut reed ooff ell zee beckoops, thet zeere-a vesn't unytheeng steshed oonleene-a oor in a seffe-a-depuseet bux, thet zeey hed zee oonly cupy. It ves zeeur idea."

"Deed yuoo reelly get shut?"

"I reelly gut shut."

"I hupe-a it reelly foockeeng hoort. Um de hur de hur de hur."

"It reelly foockeeng hoort. Um de hur de hur de hur."

"Vell, guud. Bork bork bork!"

V for Vendetta/cell phone zen moment: The phone from the movie was built for Verizon and Sprint networks. The model number is even EV-K100.

Hyperbole? Hey, you're the one who mentioned Bob Lefsetz's "great" post, whose hyperbole goes so far over the top that I can't tell when he's being serious and when he's being snarky. ("Oops, they drive foreign cars, which are often NOISIER!" WTF?)

It's not a "gift" if you pay for it.

Then don't pay. You had that option. It was a gift - that's what you don't seem to be getting - and Radiohead let you thank them with money if you wanted. They didn't expect you to pay anything; the blank was empty by default, the site was insistent that you pay what you thought was fair - even if it's nothing.

If you didn't want to pay, you didn't have to break the law or violate your conscience. The process was even less intrusive than a tip jar - everything was set up for you to pay nothing, enter nothing, and register nothing if that's what you wanted to do. All they wanted was for you to get it directly from them.

And plenty of music fans/consumers aren't expecting "gifts," they'd be absolutely happy to pay a reasonable price for digitally-delivered music that is of no lesser quality than "real" CDs.

Then buy the full-quality download when it comes out. If the bonus disc is never released digitally, I'll be on your side about that, but then I'll probably be more upset that Radiohead would be too stupid to make money off their own music.

I'm glad, at least, that we can both agree about what everybody learns from the experiment.

Cute, Xeni, but the real product they're promoting isn't the limited-edition boxed set. It never was. It's still the $12-$24 CD, and $9-$18 digital album, the band's trying to release in January. Go back and read the NYT article again; to paraphrase David Cross, you know why I think that? That's what their management fucking said!

Bonus tracks aren't an album. They aren't part of the album. It's extra material, just like the LP jackets you aren't getting with the free download, or the CD art you aren't getting with the free download, or the box itself you aren't getting with the free download. They probably won't come with the CD, either.

They haven't sold a boxed set before - the Singles set was a redemption promotion - but since they consented to selling music online, they've been liberal about EPs. I'd be surprised if the boxed-set tracks you want will show up online soon after it ships in less than two months, and you can throw your money at them then.

Until then, sure, remain optimisitc. But stop spitting on a gift because it wasn't good enough.

I was going to let this go until Xeni insinuated that Radiohead was being condescending to its audience. Come on, now.

I'm sorry Radiohead disappointed you for not being brave enough to blindly trust the fickle, ungrateful, seething Internet and "let go of the vine and fly forward." But I'm with theminx - the only way Radiohead can even appear "condescending" here is if you didn't read what they told you before and during the transaction.

First, your comparison to Cory's books is flawed. Electronic books _are_, by their nature, an inferior product that lack the navigation features and portability of a physical book. And as an example, "Overclocked" is only available piecemeal, without cover artwork, without the printed version's typography and with loads of "machine-readable metadata" that I don't want, even on the PDF versions built for printing. I can fix these things, but at the expense of my time, ink and paper, so it costs me in the end.

And I pay as much for Cory's eBook releases as I paid for In Rainbows - $0. Can I send Cory a fiver in the mail and a note thanking him for the eBook, even if I don't want to pay the full price for the print edition, even if I'm happy with reading it on a PDA with a crappy display, the same way I read everything these days? Sure.

Can I do that with "In Rainbows," even if I'm happy hearing a lossy mp3s on my $20 car stereo and $5 headphones, the same way I listen to everything these days? Sure - in fact, Radiohead set up a nifty, secure credit-card form to pay them, so they one-up Cory in that respect. Cory's writings are released in Creative Commons, so they one-up Radiohead in that respect.

But they both serve an ultimately commercial purpose, and both admit to it: Cory doesn't want me selling his eBooks where there are people who can afford to buy full-quality print books from him, but I can do anything I want with them as long as I let everyone know who wrote them, and by tacit extention who to buy them from. If you want, you can spend more for a collectible signed copy.

Radiohead let you spend what you wanted on a 10-song album - not demos, not singles, not part of an album, but a cohesive work of musical art - and in the process, everybody knew it existed, and that a full-quality CD you could buy was on the way. If you want, you can spend more for a collectible boxed set.

Again, nobody involved with the production and distribution of In Rainbows said Radiohead was trying to think forward about the music industry. Radiohead never said they were setting a precedent, fighting the labels, or fostering a new business model. They never even said they weren't pursuing a traditional album sale or record label. At best, their management said it's an experiment:

“The final acid test,” Mr. Edge said, “is come January, when the music has been available. Will there still be sufficient demand for a CD for us to feel that we’ve proved that making music available does not necessarily cannibalize CD sales?” (NYT)

Radiohead wanted to get music to fans faster than they could get it on a CD and offer them a tip jar, while finding out what the record labels won't put the effort into learning because they fear the results - what exactly happens when a major band does release it online first?

The only people disappointed are the people who set a higher bar for this distribution than Radiohead did for themselves. Radiohead was honest about the release from the beginning. Others came up with unanswered questions and answered them themselves with the best possible answers, never asking the band what their intent was.

In the process, these too-hopeful music industry haters (and I say that with admiration) turned "In Rainbows" into the Second Life of album releases - an overhyped step forward in the evolution of media.

And hey, that's still fine. But all this attention to how the distribution method is inferior to the hype is bothersome. It is what it is, and what it was described as by the people who did it. I read Bob Lefsetz's post, and it's angry hyperbole repeating already beaten-into-the-ground anger at Radiohead for not catering to audiophiles. That's not good; it's asinine. The only part I agree with is that a tip jar isn't a business model, which would be a sharp comment if Radiohead hadn't implied that two days before he did.

This wasn't a shitty release by a band that doesn't understand the Internet; this was a hell of a lot better and more connected than Beck releasing an advance single and nothing else, or major-label bands posting 20-second iTunes advance previews for a record that's already got hundreds of torrent seeds, or a pirate posting an unfinished product.

Xeni, how is that condescending to Radiohead's audience? How is it missing the point of the Internet? How is it even lame? You'll get your high-quality, paid download, just like you did for "Hail to the Thief." What is the problem?

Can anyone point me to a statement made by the band or its management that this whole event was nothing more than a way to get the album to the fans early while giving them a chance to put money in the tip jar - all the while collecting a nominal amount of data (how many people are interested, what is it worth to them) that would've been impossible in the inevitable pirated advance of the album?

Did nobody read Johnny Greenwood's interview with Rolling Stone from _nine days ago_? (http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/10/10/radioheads-jonny-greenwood-on-in-rainbows-its-fun-to-make-people-think-about-what-music-is-worth/)

Nobody in Radiohead said this was a statement about record labels - they explicitly said, almost from the beginning, that this was going to eventually be a traditional album release.

This was just an acknowledgement of two things - things the band has learned on every album release since Kid A:

1. If they don't release the album online themselves, pirates will happily do it for them.

2. If they don't give fans a way to abate their guilt for downloading a pirated advance, it's a missed opportunity to connect to them.

Everybody who paid Radiohead money to make a statement to record labels wasn't paying attention to anything but the astonishingly weak and sensationalized, knee-jerk blog responses.

Fans who've been waiting for In Rainbows knew, or at least suspected, what was going on from the beginning. It's just Radiohead - free from archaic, paranoid label restrictions - learning and acting on the lessons learned from the broken street dates of almost every major label release in the last 5 years, at least.

And hey, it does make a great publicity stunt (and apparently a few million dollars) when you let a vaccum of information fill up with everyone's wildest dreams and fantasies. Everyone bit.

A comment posted by Lomesh on the entry:

"Early next week I hope to add another post about the diagrams in which I hope to do a few things:

* Release the source files under a Creative Commons license so others can extend and localize the diagrams.
* Offer a PDF that contains all the diagrams.
* Give a little story about the design process that led to their creation.
* And possibly offer shirts and mugs through a print-on-demand service, time permitting."