As mentioned earlier, a Missouri-based company is still making audiocassettes and they will ship you blank cassettes, labels, "j-cards," and clear plastic shells. The cassettes ship in lots of 100 and up.
For the cassettes I'm making, I opted not to use a j-card (the cassette's equivalent of an LP sleeve or insert) but tried to fit as much relevant info as I could on the front and back labels, without bloating them too much with typography.
The red and grey stripes aren't a template that came from the company -- the labels ship blank white, and I added the color bars for the "small business chic" vibe. They are slightly asymmetrical by design ("art").
If you are printing a sheet of labels you need software that allows you to (i) make your own design and (ii) place multiple identical labels on the same page. NAC's sheets of stick-on labels follow the Avery format, even though Avery no longer manufactures audio cassette labels. Fortunately Avery's software, "Design Pro 5," includes templates for legacy products, including cassettes (Avery 5068 or 5198).
Applying the labels by hand is tricky and takes practice. Will spare you the nerdy details.
To record the cassette, I arrange the tracks in the desired order in my DAW and let the recorder run continuously without hitting stop or pause (which can cause clicks or pops). This hand dubbing is a pain. Levels-wise I aim for 0 db and let peaks go slightly over, to 3db. So far I have had only one song that wasn't accurately recorded. Too much bass frequency was causing bad-sounding distortion. I had to remix it with the lowest frequencies shelved off, otherwise I'd have to re-record all the cassettes at a much lower gain. Am not sure yet if the bass-loss hurt the composition; still thinking about it.
For mailers, ULINE makes a cardboard cassette mailer that is sturdy and easy to assemble.
general
a hip poster-person for opt-out
“We don’t put things up on servers anymore,” she said. “Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we’re not on WiFi, we’re not on the Internet, we don’t work in a way where anybody can access the information.”
The author of the above quote was not some Edward Abbey desert rat cyber-contrarian but rather a privileged mega-insider, who became wealthy thanks to the pre-Internet saturation "push" advertising of one-way TV and radio and is now all freaked about losing market position due to "sharing." Five Arbitron Ratings points if you guessed Madonna.
It's amusing, in a sick way, to see the upper crust behaving like the perpetually cash-strapped, who can't afford phone plans and pay bills with postal money orders. They don't put things up on servers, either!
This leaves a broad middle swath of the population susceptible to cyber spying and pocket picking, from powerful but naive corporations (if Sony had one ounce of Madonna's paranoia the famous recent "hack" wouldn't have happened) to techno worker ants with phones and data in the "cloud."
For those not buying into the phone-and-cloud lifestyle for ethical and aesthetic reasons (which is not mutually exclusive with being cash-strapped) a convenient explanation for non-participation in the new media world order could now be, "no, I'm like Madonna."
cassette documentation
A purchaser of the Home Electro for Fun and Profit LP received his complimentary audio cassette version and sent this photo of the cassette being played. Classy -- the Nakamichi 600 was an audiophile cassette player of the '70s-'80s and still pops up on eBay. In fact eBay has its own consumer reviews page where it talks about Nakamichi decks as if this were still the '70s. This is a strange historical moment, where one wing of the capitalist bloodsucking machine is telling us our gear is obsolete and we need to have the latest hard rectangle in our pants pocket if we are to be anyone, while another wing is extracting the last drop of value out of superseded state of the art devices, making it possible for something like a cassette underground to continue to exist.
As mentioned earlier, cassettes are still being manufactured, and Sam Ash, B&H Photo and other retailers are still selling the Tascam brand of cassette recorder, so this subculture is not based entirely on recycled media and electronics (yet).
untweeted tweets
norman lear, TV gatekeeper/empresario of the '70s, now uses promoted tweets to get his jokes out
obama "surprised as all heck" that the militarized cops his administration enabled post-Occupy were used in a racial context
10 articles that tell you about 10 foods that aren't as healthy as they're supposed to be
am retreating to my mind palace, a place of zoom lenses, captions, and CGI objects flying around
a problematizing stink bomb hurled into the perfumed corridors of so-called net art discourse
my attention isn't corralled into mall-like social networks, highwayed over by serial-television bingeing, or processed through an app toybox
introducing Chobani Real™ with added whey and no evaporated cane juice #satire
i don't care about paul mccarthy's butt plug monument
U.S. show of post-internet art in beijing is kind of like brad pitt doing coffee ads in tokyo (no one at home will see this)
square-ish monitor
Annoying autobiographical detail, apropos of the square monitor discussion: this was my main computer screen from approx 2004-2010: Samsung LCD screen that can be used as a TV, or with a PC. As late as 2004 they were still imitating the old 4:3 CRT orientation. We were not yet conditioned to expect our lives to be a work of total widescreen 24/7 cinematic adventure with Dolby™ and Sensurround™.
Another addendum to that Rhizome "square monitor" discussion (briefly addresseed in Zoë Salditch's comment): surely the more seismic shift isn't from 4:3 to 16:9 but from landscape to portrait in everybody's smartphones. Have given serious thought to dropping my sidebar for that reason. (Drifting with the prevailing winds of orientation fashion.)