Journal

Goa, Psy, Ambient, Psycore, Darkcore, etc.

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

Since discovering Juno Reactor‘s Beyond the Infinite album, recommended to me somewhere in the earlier 2000s by Pistons over on Dumpshock Forums, I’ve been listening more and more to various flavours of Goa, Psy, Psycore, Darkcore and Ambient music. My go-to sites for that are Digitally Imported Radio and Ektoplazm, the former a streaming radio station with many different styles of music, the latter a free to download music site that specialises in electronica. I’ve discovered gems like Lustmord, who does amazing dark ambient, several great ambient musicians like Steve Roach, Peter Namlook, Ian Boddy and Max Corbacho, some obscure ambient stuff like Ionosphere, and too many goapsy groups and artists to name, with Cybernetika getting an honourable mention.

Some of this music, especially the Psycore and Dark Psy is probably not particularly easy listening, but it really seems to work for me in terms of, as Eva likes to call it, sitting-down-and-getting-things-done music.

Yellowthread Street

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

The Masterpiece, a prestigious building in Hong Kong, peeks out of the fog. This is a beautiful photo I lifted off the BBC today.

The Masterpiece, Hong Kong

Last night I watched the first episode of Yellowthread Street, a television show from the early nineties that never survived into their second season. It’s a police drama starring Bruce Payne, Tzi Ma and Catherine Neilson as they solve crimes out of the Yellowthread Street police station in the fictional Hong Bay in Hong Kong. It’s a show I used to watch every sunday evening, and one that I was in love with. I loved the raw urban feel of the show, the exotic toxicity of the setting and it was likely a precursor to my facination with cyberpunk and urban dystopias. Naturally, the show doesn’t stand the test of time (21 years!) but it has a lot of potential. This would be perfect if it was remade by someone like Michael Mann, who has an intricate and deep understanding of crime. Anyway, it was a fun 50 minutes of nostalgia.

A New Office

by Dennis••1•Posted inJournal

The last week has been an interesting one. I’ve found myself in the middle of my office moving to a new location and as a result of that there’s been a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of arranging. We didn’t move that far from where we were, but the office is so different that we might as well have moved to Mars. Our previous office was comprised of the two top floors on the Brouwersgracht, arguably the most beautiful canal in Amsterdam. The neighbourhood is quiet, rustic and peaceful and it really was a joy to get to work, especially in the spring. (Or the winter, the canal looked particularly pretty with a bit of snow.) The two floors were low ceilinged, small and homey. Our new office is high, open, large and very light. We’re stuck between a busy road and the Ij, a huge ship-faring canal and we look out over teh Amsterdam industrial harbour.

I made a little video to introduce our new office and some of its dwellers.

Today some art was delivered and put on the walls, massive 2 by 2 meter canvasses of, among other things, the Diesel 5th avenue store in NYC and their famous “Be Stupid” slogan. Also, we’re getting a new conference room table today, which also isn’t seen the video above. Anyway, it’s starting to look like a real office now.

Diesel 5th Ave - Be Stupid

A result of all that and more resulted in a chilled out weekend spent together with my brother, coding and working on Corrosion and his school project. I got a lot of sleep as a result and I’m feeling awfully chirpy today. I even decided to borrow a bicycle to go to work and see how that ride would be. The ride went well, and I might do that more often, especially now that it’s becoming rather nice weather.

Funk

by Dennis••5•Posted inJournal

Funk YouIt’s becoming harder and harder to deny to myself that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. For the last few weeks now I’ve felt lethargic, lacking in energy and motivation, which hasn’t done me any favours in terms of work, training or Corrosion. Also, I’ve been foolish with the amount of sleep that I’ve been getting, but when I do get enough sleep, I never really feel rested when I wake up. As everyone knows, I’m a big proponent of snow. It started when the snow went away. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation, but there you go.

As a result, I’ve been struggling through my work days, doing things with little motivation, which makes everything take about ten times longer. Work also threw me a curve ball a couple of weeks ago. (Around the same time the snow went away, incidentally. Hmmm.) Right at the start of our bi-monthly release cycle we had a server migration; three or four different servers were going to be rolled up into one, big, power-server. Unfortunately, as my boss is wont to do, he didn’t think it’d be the big train wreck that it turned out to be and assigned me to take care of many of the problems that resulted from the migration. The Law of Escalation Misery also caused all kinds of unexpected related things to snowball into oblivion, so I’ve spent about three or four weeks out of the eight week development cycle trying to take care of these problems, going back to network- and system-admin work that I’ve been trying so hard to put behind me.

Corrosion has suffered because of a general lack of oomph. I’ve been doing little things, here and there, bug fixes, small changes and additions (like the chat system, for instance) but nothing significant and nothing that I’m particularly proud of. Hopefully that will change again because there’s still a ton of things to do, like expanding the magic system, implementing lifestyles (started on that), crews, Matrix, Astral, new missions, finishing The Arena, etc.

I’m also starting to miss Eva more and more. Even though we keep up pretty good contact over e-mail, ping and we Skype once every week or two, I still feel a gap in my social life with her gone. The same goes for Sam; we’ve had ups and downs in our friendship, but before she left things were finally looking up and we were hanging out a lot. Moulsari’s got less time for me because of her blossoming social life, which is something I’m very proud of her for — that and much more — but it leaves me in the cold a little bit, unless it is to be her punching bag when things aren’t going her way, an ungrateful and dissatisfying job, to say the least, but one someone has to fulfill.

Waah waah waah. I guess life throws you a curve ball every once in a while and it’s all about how you respond to it. Well, it’s looking more and more like spring is coming soon, and even though I don’t have my favourite terras friend in the country, life can’t be all bad. :)