Angelastic

Do you remember last February 29 , when I decided to get back into creative writing by writing something each week for a year, inspired by souvenir playing cards and letters of the alphabet ? Probably not; I didn’t publicise it much. But it worked; I did, in fact, get back into writing, and although some of the things were hurried and disastrous and a lot of them were not very good, a lot of them were passable and some were very good. One was published in Offshoots and another in a Valentine... Read Full Story

My boss gave me a new car for Christmas, the very day that I got my new camera, which can take high-speed video. So it seemed natural to combine the two. The soundtrack is ‘A New Car’ from the album ‘Brontosaurus’ by Da Vinci’s Notebook. Paul and Storm (the comedy music duo formed from roughly half of Da Vinci’s Notebook) said they wouldn’t sue me for using it. The new camera is a Canon PowerShot S100, in case you’re wondering. Most of setup at the beginning was shot with my Canon... Read Full Story

Last weekend I was on my way to a concert in Lausanne when I came across a building with a light show projected onto it. I stopped to film it in high resolution with my fancy new camera. Later I added appropriate music to the different scenes, to make it a bit more interesting. Here is the result: Most of this music is explicitly released under a Creative Commons license, and most can be downloaded for free (there are links below), and most comes from artists who generally don’t mind... Read Full Story

This is a mash-up of my first ad for hair gel and the picture Len drew for my video about Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week project . I imagine that the two parts would be on sequential odd-numbered pages. Filed under: The Afterlife Tagged: advertising , hair gel , JoCo , Jonathan Coulton , Len Peralta , superhero , superheroes , superman , Thing a Week Read Full Story

Do you remember Anniversary Cards , in which I wrote a ‘Roses are Red’-style poem for each of the songs Jonathan Coulton wrote for his Thing a Week project? Well, recently Jonathan ran a Thing a Week Redux in which he reposted each of the Thing a Week blog entries five years after the original, with some new commentary. Just like during the original Thing a Week, I didn’t get around to reading it very often. However, as I was catching up with it around five weeks from the end, I got the idea... Read Full Story

In the film Spider-Man 3, escaped convict Flint Marko jumps over a fence marked: Danger Particle Physics Test Facility Keep Out And ends up getting caught in a some kind of beam and becoming the Sandman, a being made out of sand who can change his shape at will. I watched it in the theatre with about a dozen people from CERN (all of them named Maikel ), and one of them exclaimed, ‘Run to building 40 , get a coffee!’ Unfortunately, you won’t turn into the Sandman by sneaking into... Read Full Story

I’m a bit of a free music junkie. Free as in beer (or doughnuts, since I don’t like beer) is good, free as in speech is better, but this post is about the free as in doughnuts kind, which costs nothing until you get a taste for doughnuts and then end up buying out the whole Krispy Kreme, travelling around the world to have different doughnuts with different people, and getting too fat for your iPod. Download free music responsibly, kids (okay, I guess the beer metaphor would have made more... Read Full Story

I’ve been involved in control systems for various amazing things for the last six and a half years, and the other day I finally hit upon a way to explain what that is. In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler. Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few... Read Full Story

I’ve been involved in control systems for various amazing things for the last six and a half years, and the other day I finally hit upon a way to explain what that is. In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler. Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few... Read Full Story

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, if only because it was an excuse to make a fort out of language books. Here is a video of my reading my poem Séjours linguistiques (originally titled ‘Discours inférieur’ in order to have a tenuous link to the playing card of the week.) I would have used the song ‘Carambar’ by Jérémie Kisling for the end credit music, simply because it’s the rhyme scheme of that song which inspired the poem, and it’s in French, but he didn’t reply when I asked for... Read Full Story