Monthly Archive for September, 2004

De Matriks: breng het on

Published on September 28, 2004 in movie. Closed

In our series ‘Low Budget DIY movies’: the Belgian directors/actors Cédric Rossignol and Sam De Martelaere have made The Matrix: The Beginning: a prequel to the Matrix Trilogy. They wrote the script in2 days, shot the movie in 8 days, probably a couple of days post-production. The result is – all considered – amusing.
Some remarks:
don't mess with Ms Payne

  • soundtracks rule. Without music, this would have been amateuristic. With it, … never mind.
  • the dialogues are a splendid example of Flenglish, i.e. English with a heavy Flemish accent. (further examples: beuk.tk and lumberjack.be)
  • the ‘bullet time’ scenes are really well done.
  • the actors/directors/producers are all quite young (the lead actress is 15 yrs old?)
  • the fight choreographies are funny, certainly when Rossignol, the blond guy, who probably is not much into sports except the ones that involve a force-feedback controller, starts his Neo routine.
  • there’s a thin line between slow-motion and just moving slowly.

Visit their site: Cesam Productions

(via VolkomenK*t)

[Listening to: "Maceo The Macks - Soul Power 7" - Maceo - 100% Funk]

I remember house before it was techno

Published on September 26, 2004 in music. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

I remember house before it was techno
I remember house before it had an afro
I remember house before it was deep
I remember house before it was hard
I remember house when house had tempos
I remember house before mpc 60′s
I remember house before house had loops
I remember house before the whole world knew
“Do You Remember House” – Blaze

If, like me, you every often have to explain why you’re into house music, but not techno, and what exactly the difference is between acid jazz, downbeat, deep house and lounge music, you should know about the Ishkur’s guide to electronic music. It gives an overview of styles, genres and sub-genres of house, trance, techno, breakbeat, ambient, jungle, hardcore and downtempo, all defined and annotated by a Canadian guy who compensates his lack of enthusiasm for some genres by a fair amount of sarcasm.

Hardcore is the musical genre with bi-polar disorder: one half is blistering, sadistic anger, a seething uncontrollable rage that seekd to ruin and wreck everything that exists, including everyone else’s fun time. (…) The other half of hardcore is way too silly and stupid to take such anger seriously anymore.
Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music

It even includes multiple sound samples with each definition, so put on those headphones and experience the delights of Nu Style Gabber, Gloomcore and New Beat (yes, we Belgians are still quite proud of that)!

Another, more serious way, of discovering house music is the excellent Jahsonic’s House Music History (some sound bites and really well cross-referenced), and if you really want to graduate from House University, check out House Music 101 (by Appollo). Wanna hear some? Browse through DeepHousePage or just use Smoothouse’s Smooth-o-Matic.

Disclaimer: If Chic don’t make you snap your fingers, if George Clinton can’t incite you to move that booty and Bob Marley cannot make you wave that spliff above them dreadlocks, then you will not get it. Go back to your R.E.M. albums (or Metallica, whatever) and forget about it. You’re a lost case.

Searching blogs for local content

Published on September 25, 2004 in Google. Closed

The Belgian weekly newsletter T-Zine has just published an article about the site of the Belgian National Institute of Statistics (N.I.S./I.N.S.). This government agency publishes census data on population, employment, investments, …
Quickly browsing through some numbers shows e.g. that Belgium has the lowest % of people working between 50 and 64 years old in the European Union (we’re at 40%, Sweden is at 72%), which might indicate that we allow ‘pre-pension’ (retiring at 50 or 55) too easily.

The site also have a very complete list of links to the world’s country statistics, so if you want to know

  • how many inhabitants Belarus had in 2002 (9.940.000 – it’s way bigger than Ireland and I didn’t even have a clue where it was!)
  • how popular mobile phones are in Malta ( 290.000 phones on a population of 395.000: 73% penetration rate – Belgium is at 83%)
  • who the European Internet early and late adopters are (in 2001, Iceland had 69% of its citizens that were Internet users, Greece 13%)

it’s a great place to start. They even have a RSS newsfeed, I kid you not. Do not make fun of Belgian e-government.

On a related topic, I was trying to find out if this mentioning of the site in T-Zine had led to Belgian Blog activity.
Searching on Technorati and Feedster on ‘statbel‘ gave me nothing, so I started looking to other blog search engines.
The results:

Search on … ‘statbel’ statbel.fgov.be George Bush
(Reality check)		 Remarks
Blogdex 0 0 25 results (only shows 1st 25) Not really impressed
Bloglines 108 results 108 results (same) 36.981 results Very thorough, I was suprised.
Feedster 0 0 21.886 results Unreliable (down 50% of the time)
Technorati 0 15 results 1.110 results (last 7 days) Scored bad on keyword, but better on URL search
Waypath 0 0 26.367 results Looks nice, but not impressed with the results

Basically the answer was: no recent related blog activity, but certainly the statbel.fgov.be site has been referenced in the past so Technorati and Bloglines seem to be the better sources for searching.

Next question I asked myself was: let’s say I wanted to limit this search to only Belgian blogs. How hard would that be?

  • In Google one could use “site:.be“, but 1) Google is not ideal for blog-only search, and 2) not all Belgian bloggers have a .be domain (blogspot.com users, for one)
  • Luk Van Braekel has a map of Belgian Bloggers @ lvb.net, but that list of Belgian blogs is not public and is not complete (currently 85 blogs – Luk, you can probably guess how I know ;-) .
  • Blogwise has a list of Belgian blogs, but you can’t search them and the list is not complete (currently 218 entries – LVBlog is not there)
  • one can search on Dutch words like ‘statistieken’ in order to limit the results to dutch-written blogs, but this might also include .nl blogs (God forbid) and excludes Belgian dudes that write in English (pompous bastards).
  • none of the blog search engines supports geograpical searching

Makes one wonder, is there an opportunity for localised (European) blog search?

PS: I’ve added all the above mentioned blog search engines to my StereoSearch page.

The last pinguin to drink coffee

Published on September 23, 2004 in media. Closed
pinguin

Kevin Cornell is an illustrator from Philadelphia and has published his BearSkinRug sketchbook #1 on the web.

This was my sketchbook between July 2002 and February 2003. I have posted the book in its entirity – front cover to back cover. Although a compilation of select drawings would have been smaller (and easier to put together), I felt posting the entire contents was necessary for it to be regarded as a full composition.

An amusing view into the mind and imagination of a talented guy, presented in a very appealing Flash interface.

Also check out his main site on bearskinrug.co.uk, there’s a tamagotchi ice bear on top to keep you company (it eats rabbits and chickens).

(via flabber.nl)