Quick links: Guns ‘n Roses “lost” music, subscription fatigue and more

Clearing out the tabs on Saturday.

• The Search for Guns N’ Roses’ Lost Masterpiece: Good long-form post from Rolling Stone about leaked music from the Chinese Democracy sessions and how it played out for a fan who was accused of leaking some of the bootlegs. Once upon a time I thought that GNR might be the next Rolling Stones but they never managed to get it together. I kind of checked out after seeing them in 1991 at what turned out to be the Riverport Riot.
• Subscription Fatigue: Caught a discussion on Mastodon today where Tim Bray talked about the problems with Mastodon’s “business model,” via Patreon Subscriptions and donations. I think Bray has a point, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ever-growing list of monthly subscriptions I’ve been accumulating. I’m donating to Mastodon, Metafilter, to a handful of artists on Patreon and Bandcamp, various publications… $10 a month here, $5 there, $10 over here, pretty soon it starts adding up.
• Who Owns Omni? Old post, but read that with Public Domain Day and near-eternal copyright in mind. A lot of great stuff surfaced in Omni way back in the day, but a lot of that is going to go down the memory hole because ownership is too tough to sort out to give it a second life.

First weekend of 2023, hope everybody’s having a good one.