Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Third Party Website is Dead. Long Live Third Party!

Thirdxparty.com has been dead and gone for a year now. Methane Sea, the web hosting service I used packed up shop and shut down without announcement or fanfare. In fact, the Paypal subscription payments still go through automatically and I have to fight the charges every 6 months because Paypal's automated system for dealing with complaints minimizes human involvement and there isn't anyone involved to make a the necessary decision to disable the payments.

For a long time I thought I was going to bring back thirdxparty.com and set up a better webstore but the truth is - I hate packing orders. Its actually the biggest weakness of the whole Third x Party operation. I have so many interests and things going on in my life, that packing orders usually gets pretty low priority and then people are upset. A full distribution webstore would just continually maximize people's disappointment. If they day ever comes where I can justify hiring help again, I'll bring it back. But for now, I'm going forward without it. There will still be the ability to pre-order direct and to get my own releases, but the distro will just be making the isolated treks with me out to shows.

As of right now Third x Party has no new releases lined up. I have the COKE BUST 'Fuck Bar Culture' 7" and the SICK FIX s/t 7" both being repressed at the plant, and the POISON PLANET 'Oblivious' 7" will be repressed shortly.

SICK FIX and COKE BUST are both leaving together on a US tour shortly. BLANK STARE will be shaking the dust of to play the Boston show of their tour. BLACK SS are still playing shows in Syracuse - it would be nice to see them get out of town (at least to Chicago) sometime soon. POISON PLANET are still a band, we're just working out some member issues. And I'm pretty sure ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE are still kicking around while Chad and Shariq are being adults. That's kind of the Third Party sort-of-roster update.

Rumor has it that Eric Ellman from NO GOAL and STILL ILL has 2 new edge bands so keep an eye out for that. Otherwise, listen to DURESS, SORRY EXCUSE, BOILING OVER, and COLD SHOULDER. They are all SXE punk bands that make me want to break shit.

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