We love Mr. Jonathan Coulton here at Tor.com. There’s really no way to overstate this: if we could elect an official bard, I’m pretty sure he’d win in a landslide (even though he’s already Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science). More than a few of our posts have been composed while rocking out Coulton-style, not to mention the fact that Cory Doctorow used lyrics from “The Future Soon” as the title for one of the very first Tor.com original stories. If you’re not already obsessed with his geek anthems (especially those about zombies, monkeys, mad scientists, crazy cyborgs, robot roommates, NPR and, well, fancy pants) then you need to check him out immediately; fans of nerd culture, hilarity, and incredibly clever songwriting will thank me.
Coulton licenses all of his work through Creative Commons, so there are a ton of great videos available online (a word to the wise, though: the machinima video for “First of May” is totally, totally NSFW. Unless you work at Tor.com). Which brings us to the good news: as part of the 2008 Creative Commons fundraising campaign, Coulton is offering his fans a chance to get the super deluxe bonus edition of his new greatest hits album and support an excellent cause. Here’s the deal, according to his site:
Between now and the end of the year a $50 donation gets you a 1 Gb USB thumb drive with all 20 songs and the artwork, plus all the source tracks for all the songs. All the source tracks? Yes. It took me about a million hours, thank you very much. So if you’ve ever wanted to do some kind of kooky remix or mashup, or if you’ve ever just wanted to take these songs apart and see how they work, this would be just the thing for you.
It’s a fantastic selection of über-catchy songs, all of which will be stuck in your head until the end of time—and you will like it, and beg for more…beg, I say! So go check it out.
