Bittorrent & the Decemberists: A 'Revolutionary' Medium 19 years, 1 month ago by Martey Dodoo

My favorite band, The Decemberists, have a new album, Picaresque, coming out on March 22. As you might assume, I am excited. So excited that I pre-ordered the album on Amazon, using my Amazon Prime membership (extremely useful for textbooks) to get $4 one-day shipping.

I was feeling sort of depressed when I came back to my room this morning (for reasons I am not going to go into here, obviously), so finding that the Decemberists' personal blog had a new post was sort of cool. I expected news about their stolen trailer, but the news that the first video from Picaresque, "16 Military Wives" was released was just as good. When I read that it was only available over BitTorrent, I smiled:

The video for 16 Military Wives is now available via bittorrent. This allows us to release a much higher quality video file than usual. Medium and low resolution versions will be available soon via the web.

The torrent is available here.

Since I never use anywhere near my bandwidth quota, I have a copy of the video available here. Just note three things:

• The file will take a while to upload, so if it stops before 77 MB, it is not all on the server yet.


• It will probably be better for you in the long run if you learn how to use BitTorrent.


• Please link to this post, and not the file itself, or I will remove it. The link to the video now redirects to archive.org.

The video is pretty good (especially compared to the video for "The Soldiering Life," a song on their last full-length album "Her Majesty The Decemberists"). It feels like the movie Rushmore, from the private school environment, to the captions explaining the story. The song is obviously about America's actions in March 2003, and the video shows that, but still manages to maintain a sense of humor.