I need to cut it out with these lame titles. Anyway...

Ascent Media, the company who encoded the awesome HD-DVD version of Beside You In Time have won the DVD Association's Excellence Award for HD-DVD Encoding Excellence! Again, another reason to own this awesome disc recapping the 2005-2006 With Teeth tour!

Thanks to bmoloney for the news!

I wanted to post an update about the Hotline shirts and things in general over at Faction, who's handling the shirts. After a bit of a mix-up at the printers that resulted in a delay, they've been working around the clock to sent out shirts (which consequently has slowed response time to emails), and have thrown in free 'Art Is Resistance' and 'Bureau of Morality' stickers and pins with the orders to make up for it. (Check pics of the operation here, if you like behind-the-scenes stuff)

The bottom line here is that every order of a Faction shirt that is not currently on presale will be shipped by July 4. Presale shirts will be shipped as soon as they are received from the printer. I've got an Art is Resistance shirt and on top of being one of the most comfortable shirts I own, the ink job is really nice, I expect to get a lot of wear out of this - at least, until someone says something about it to me on the street :p Anyhow, I'll wrap this up by pointing out that two new shirt designs have been added, the first in a series based on each of the songs on Year Zero.

As you probably saw in the news feed to the right, NIN is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv on September 5, 2007. In related news, we received an email from Anna directing us to hkclubbing.com with some details on a show happening the following week, specifically in Hong Kong, China:

As always, we'll keep you up to date as more information becomes available.

Stuart Russell wrote in with his Korean girlfriend's translation of the Seoul concert flier we posted about the other day:

Nine Inch Nails concert: September 11th at Olympic Park in Seoul, Korea. Tickets go on sale July 19th.

We have been waiting long for Nine Inch Nails music (unpredictable, strong and exciting). We are addicted to their music. This is the beauty of noise. They are the kings of Industrial Rock. We want to taste their music performed live. They represent depravity, desperation, emptiness and fear inside the human soul. They are a genius band (more stimulation, more intense, more addiction) in these modern times. Trent Reznor provides this fantastic music. They are dreaming of the freedom of music.

Genius musician Trent Reznor has previously worked with Marilyn Manson among other side projects. Unique, fantastic sounds are gathered to make music. Trent Reznor leads the group and writes everything, including the music and vocals. They are the best industrial musicians in history and are the kings of this genre.

But compare that to the translation we got from Stephen's Korean coworker:

Olympic Stadium / 9.11.07

The show we've been waiting to hear for a long time. Nobody will know what this music will be like, but you will get addicted!

The king of industrial rock will show you what industrial rock music is.

NIN are genius musicians of this century!

The new material is strong and stimulating. You will fall in love with Trent Reznor's music.

If you are dreaming of freedom of music you should get into industrial rock!!

I guess everyone can agree that Nine Inch Nails are the genius kings of industrial rock and the right band for anyone who dreams of freedom of music.

Rich linked us up to The Faint's website, where their news from two days ago has them back from tour and in the studio working on a Nine Inch Nails remix. Interesting...

Also, if you got an email from me about a week ago and you haven't written back, please get in touch sooner rather than later.

I know I keep posting about this but I really hope to see more submissions coming in, and now we've got extra incentive for you to send yours in. Now the first place winner will be taking home a prize pack of three shirts, Year Zero, and Beside You In Time, courtesy the wily folks at Hot Topic. Runners-up will also win one of several shirts provided by Painful Convictions and, well, me.

Piggy sent us this link, which suggests that tickets for this fall's concert in Seoul, Korea, will go onsale on July 19. Unfortunately, I don't read Korean so I'm afraid we don't know what the rest of the flier says. If anybody out there wants to send in a translation, we'd appreciate it!

nika wrote in from Hungary to let us know that Aaron North's interview with Total Guitar is available for perusing at The North Side, which has, since the end of 2005, been following the Buddyhead co-founder and current NIN guitarist/acrobat quite closely. Check it out when you get a moment, it's a pretty good read covering a lot of stuff you probably hadn't heard about before. Thanks to the folks at North Side and to nika for pointing this out!

The latest issues of "Game Informer" magazine has an entire section dedicated to the advertising phenomenon that ARG's have brought about. Included in this section is a mention of the Year Zero ARG, featuring a couple websites that were part of the ad campaign. Thanks to Rich, Jessiaremidorius, I____, and oldmanpolk.

Also, Joey sent us in some nifty pictures of his custom made Art is Resistance BBQ to help relieve our summertime slum of news.

Finally, it seems the band Deus Machina really digs their NIN, both past and present. Thanks to our friend Mutato for that local story.

As Leviathant likes to say, news is slow around here, so no better time to have a garage sale. I'm selling off a lot of my old NIN rarities. You can venture over to my Garage Sale site to see what's up for sale. Currently both the Broken and Pretty Hate Machine longbox sets are up. More items will be added daily.

If traditional message boards aren't your thing, you're too cheap for The Spiral, or you're just a Google fanboy, then this fan club on Google groups may be for you. A fellow named Trevor asked if I could post this and drum up some interest. I personally think the Google Groups, while excellent as an archive of historic Usenet posts, still has a way to go. But as I said in my last ten posts -- news is slow right now. So while the NIN camp quietly gets stuff done, we'll continue to toss scraps your way to feed your addiction. We stuck around through the break between The Fragile and With_Teeth, you can make it through this quiet period.

According to our Quantcast profile, lots of people search for "Trent Reznor girlfriend" and also end up here. Great. (Google says most people get here searching for some combination of the words nine, inch, nails and nin.)

Anyway, what I'm really getting at is that Kelly from AOL music wrote in to let me know that Trent's found a place in their feature on Music's Sexiest Single Men!. Can you tell we're having a bit of a slow spell?

Neekau found a really cool feature at the website for Digital Domain, the company who did the video for Only from With Teeth. The all-flash site doesn't make it easy to link to internal sections, so what you have to do is visit the site, click on "Features," then "Behind the Scenes," then click on the screen shot from the video. This loads up a page with some text about the filming of the video with David Fincher & Trent Reznor, and streams a video. Be patient -- the behind the scenes stuff comes after they show you the whole video.

While there is no voice-over, text overlays explain what's going on to make the video appear as it does. In one section of the clip, they show they use the individual red, green, and blue channels, as well as a balanced composite and a matte for hair, in order to create the 3D Trent in the Pinpressions box. (Psst, Digg this story)

Over at our NIN merch store at Goodrock.com, they've added a bunch of stickers and a 1" pin -- although no pictures are up yet. They should be getting a batch of Hand That Feeds black shirts as well as the green "DNA" shirt, but as you will see, those aren't up there yet. Apparently the company making NIN shirts "are among the slowest and worst companies [Goodrock] deal[s] with. we struggle to keep that stuff in stock," which is kind of unfortunate, but I guess that's how it goes right now.

With the recent release of more multitrack files at nin.com, now's probably a good time to update you on something we had mentioned a week or two ago: Painful Convictions is still looking for the greatest Nine Inch Nails remixes to be featured on this site so be sure to submit yours soon. Over 100 remixes have been submitted and the number keeps growing! Submit your remix to Painful Convictions and in cooperation with The NIN Hotline you will be entered in a content to win one of several NIN shirts.

Each remix will be put up against a panel of seven judges to determine if it will make it onto the site. If your mix passes, then it will be featured here for streaming and download! For more information, as well as a form where you can very quickly submit your remix, visit http://www.9inchnails.com/remixes/.

Eric, Paul and "The Methuselah" all sent in news about an interesting piece on Trent Reznor. The independent literary magazine, "The Believer", has released their yearly music. In addition to covering a huge range of topics, this year's issue includes an article tracing NIN's ideological progression from Gothic to Romantic to Freudian through the albums. It's a pretty fascinating read, especially if you're into 19th century literature. You have to purchase the magazine online, but you can read an excerpt of the article for free.

For those of you itching to ruin some more perfectly decent NIN songs that did nothing to deserve it, nin.com has added a new batch of multitrack files to fart around with: The Beginning of the End, Vessel, and God Given. Thank you Seamus, SlingShotSavior, and the_wretched for telling us about this!

This is something I've been meaning to do in one form or another since the inception of the site, but recently, Feedburner has made it really easy to integrate, so I'm going to try it out and see how you like it, should you choose to sign up. You can sign up to get NIN Hotline updates via email here -- you only get mail if we update, and the email comes in the form of a digest -- i.e. you get all the updates for the day in one email, rather than email updates as they happen.

So if you're still not one for RSS news feeds, or simply like reading email more than visiting the website, check it out.

Arturo sent in such a well written email on this topic, I'm just going to copy and paste what he wrote:

Go to it!

Ha ha, just kidding, radio sucks. Nonetheless, there are a few stations who have been bucking the US radio industry standard of "only play the single we tell you to," which I think is pretty cool. For example, Chicago's Q101 spins "My Violent Heart" more than any other track off the album. KROQ in LA tends to favor playing "The Beginning of the End," while 89x in Detroit takes a shining to "Me, I'm Not," but have not been averse to playing "In This Twilight," either. Last but not least, KEXP in Seattle takes to playing "Vessel" as their lead track off the album. I thought all this was interesting -- thanks to everyone who wrote in.

I got an email last week about a site that caught my interest, especially in the wake of CBS buying up Last.fm (I give CBS a year and a half, at best, to completely ruin that site.) Haystack.com already has things started up for their nine inch nails section, where you can share videos, pictures, all kinds of stuff. From what I can tell, the driving point behind Haystack is that you can listen to music freely on the site, while on-site advertising goes to pay royalties to the artists. There are also elements of social networking that are built in to the system, and on the whole I thought it was genuinely interesting. Since news is slow, maybe you could take the opportunity to check it out and find out what other folks who are into NIN also listen to.

So as far as has been announced, Capital G is the current song being sent to radio stations. If your station's still playing Survivalism (or Closer) you oughta call 'em up/email them and tell them to play the new track, change things up a bit.

Sean wrote in to point out that 99.9 the Buzz in Burlington/Montreal is playing "In This Twilight" as "the new NIN" - placing the song in heavy rotation, alongside the still-buzzing debut single Survivalism. This appears to be an isolated thing, but if you've heard any other songs getting heavy airplay besides Survivalism & Capital G in your area, I'd be interested to know about it, both out of curiosity, and because news has been really slow lately.

We received a number of emails about the new ads for the Apple iPhone, where an off-screen user goes through the different functions, including a bit where they flip through album artwork -- and stop briefly on the cover for Year Zero. Thanks to Logicwax, Tom, Stefan K, Bryan K, Jan R and Luis from Spain!

In quite possibly the saddest story we've come across this year, 29 year old Sgt. Robert Joe Montgomery, a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails, was killed in Iraq. At his funeral, 'Hurt' was played. Its a startling reminder of just what kind of impact the war can have on fans like you and me. The full news story can be read at the Scottsburg Courier-Journal site, while ongoing discussion is happening on ETS. Our thoughts and prayers at the Hotline and the greater NIN community go out to the Montgomery family.

Update: Merks on ETS is putting together a collection of letters to the Montgomery family from the greater NIN community. If you are interested in contributing, visit this thread or fire me off an email.

Update #2: If you are interested in making donations to Sgt. Montgomery's family, you can send such to "Robert Joe Montgomery II Trust Fund for the benefit of his children c/o Collins Funeral Home, 465 W. McClain Avenue, Scottsburg, IN 47170".