So I’ve been busy, and not really writing about it. That’s all gonna change—right now. Buckle up, kids: it’s blog time.

Executive summary: aural times is doing well, I might be on TV, I might be on your cellphone, and you might pre-order a fantastic non-profit compilation album I’m editing. Read on!

The Aural Times continues to do well. No great surges of traffic lately, but it’s clocking along at several hundred visits a day. One small boost last week came form Nerve.com’s Scanner Blog, which referenced my Tom Cruise story in a sort of Placenta Roundup.

Which led to an email from a guy who caught that and spent a little time at the site.

The guy works for a music television channel. But not the increasingly flaccid progenitor of that genre. He expressed interest in the idea of seeing Aural Times stuff on a show he works on. Fascinating! I replied to his email—tag! He is currently It.

And last week I signed a licensing agreement with a cellphone ringtone/etc distribution company, which is step two of about seven of making possible the realization of your lifelong dream of having me on your cellphone. More, obviously, as it happens.

And there’s this compilation album I’m working on. Specifically (and this is a working title, mind you) the Metafilter Compilation Album, Volume 1. What, you ask, is that; and how, you proceed, did I get involved in it?

It started Saturday before last. I had noticed a lot of music bumping around on Metafilter Projects, a relatively new part of Metafilter dedicated to members’ own project announcements. There were, at a glance, three or four interesting bands and musical projects on the Projects page, and I thought collecting all the good music made by mefites (for so I call my fellow members of Metafilter) would make for a nice post to the main site.

This is that post. It was well-received, and a lot of mefites who had not posted their music to Projects (and thus had slipped under my radar vis-a-vis the construction of the post) spoke up in the thread with links to their work.

Somebody eventually (inevitably?) suggested a compilation album.

Fast-forward a couple of days: I decided, after ensuing discussion, that I was going to take charge and make that compilation album happen. And so I said as much in Metatalk, the site-discussion/administration/bickering/etc backroom of Metafilter.

And it’s basically been madness ever since. I’ve received music submissions from somewhere upwards of forty mefites, and submissions are open for another week yet. I’ve heard a whole lot of good music so far—certainly more than will fit on a 74 minute audio CD. Which makes my job as editor less than easy, but that goes with the territory—if the decisions are hard, it’s only because there’s so much good stuff to choose from.

I did some napkin math and figured out that, if everything moves at breakneck speed with no bottlenecks or hiccups, this thing could be ready for release as soon as mid-June. Realistically, it could easily take longer, but, hey, I’m an optimist.

We haven’t figured out to whom the money will go, yet, but we’ve decided that proceeds will go to one or more charitable causes.

In the mean time, we’ve opened the pre-orders for the disc. So far the project has raised over a grand in pre-orders and donations, which is fantastic—we’ve easily hit half our budget for the project in about three days. Now, as long as we can mop up the other half in the next month and a half…

What? You’d like to pre-order, and support this crazy project and whichever good causes its profits are directed toward? That’s fantastic! You should really go here then.