The Biggest Narcist in the World

Today I read about Erik Nordenankar, who did a pretty cool thing: he developed a GPS transmitter with elongated battery life, put it in a shock-proof closed case, printed out very detailed instructions (places and coordinates) and handed the lot to the world-wide delivery company DHL.

By using the acquired data from the transmitter he could set out a trace of the case's journey afterwards. To say it in his own words, he used the briefcase as a pen, and our planet as a canvas. The result is amazingly detailed, although it's a bit pretentious to throw bags of (sponsored) dollars around to paint the biggest self-portrait ever made.

All info and some nice videos can be found on the website: Biggestdrawingintheworld.com

I would have gone for a crudely drawn fallus (testicles left and right of the african continent, shaft crossing the meditteranean sea, ending in the Scandinavian area). Just to see the looks on the sponsor's faces.

Beats it

Since I moved my audio mixer to my student room in Leuven, mixing attempts have become more frequent. I'm not a professional DJ, I just like to recycle the tunes I love in a new way. Recording and after-editing was done using Audacity.

Any help at identifying that unknown Tiga track would be great :)



Playlist

• 0:00 : Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat (from the album Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release)
  
• 0.00 : Faithless - God is a DJ (Rollo Live dub from an Athens 2004 bootleg)
• 1.40 : Kraftwerk - Radioactivity (from the album Minimum, Maximum)
• 3.20 : Moby - .257 (from the album Last Night)
• 5.48 : Junior Senior - Shake Your Coconuts (DFA Remix)
• 8.20 : Hot Chip - Over and Over (taken from the 2 Many DJ's Essential Mix)
• 11.42 : Tiga - Unknown track (taken from Live set)
• 11.42 : Soulwax - Another Excuse / NY Lipps (from the album Any Minute Now - Nite Versions)
• 15.13 : The Chemical Brothers - Do It Again / Electronic Battle Weapon 9 (from a We Are The Night b-side)
• 18.40 : Daft Punk - Around the World - (from the album Homework)

Update: this mix was posted on the Tempo Music Deal website, a Belgian mixing contest. Go here to listen, vote and win me that car.

Towel Day

Thanks to fellow blogger Pelle at Blikkendoos.be, I will never forget that the 25th of may is from now on Towel Day. In order to celebrate the festivities, I went for a Vogon-green one.

Don't hesitate to post your pictures of Towel Day madness, but make sure to cut off the parts future employers could use to identify you. Much like I did.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

And then, on one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.

This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
(...)
This is her story.

One of the best prologues of a book ever, and it's from So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker trilogy.

If you haven't heard about these books before, you should go out and recklessly buy them. If you have seen the movie, forget it - reckless buying is the way to go here, too. If you have heard about it and already own a copy ... well, backup is nice.

Mind you, don't buy any translation. Some of the jokes depend heavily on the English language and Adams' clever way of twisting it. Honestly, it's the best birthday gift I ever got :)

• Wikipedia on The Hitchhiker's Guide
• Wikiquotes (lots of good ones there, but some of them might spoil parts of the books - read them first.)
  

Plain Talking

I will go to hell for this. Especially for the over-use of the vocoder / beatslicer. Whoops ! Most of the effects were done in Audacity with the help of the ZynAddSubFX software synthesizer. Both are freely available open-source products.



Elements you might recognize:

• (vocals / synth) Moby - Lift Me Up (from the album Hotel)
• (bass) Trentemöller - Into The Trees (Serenneti Part 3) (from the album The Last Resort)
• (bass) Justice- Let There Be Light (from the album Cross)
• (weird double kicks near the end) The Chemical Brothers - Electronic Battle Weapon 9 (from a We are the Night b-side)
  

Steamworks

Steamworks went live today. I've requested my API key, have you ?

On a lighter note, here are some interesting articles I've stumbled upon during the last few weeks. Cracked compiled a list of 7 commandments all video games should obey. (#3 is my favorite). Another - more serious - article was posted on Eurogamer by Rob Fahey, concerning the interactivity and freedom users get from the latest closed console systems. It really is an interesting viewpoint on how the gaming industry should evolve.

User-created content on the Internet, everything from YouTube to Flickr, from blogs to MySpace, from Flash games to MP3 mash-ups, is absorbing more and more time from the generation videogaming would like to have called its own. If this industry is going to sit back en masse and act as though encouraging a select few to put shareware-style games on consoles is enough of a response to this revolution, then gaming risks taking a serious blow - knocked off its perch, ironically, because the most interactive medium of all refused to let its audience interact.