Jar Of Eyeballs

Here’s a must watch for everyone with decent taste in music: Digg Dialogg next tuesday, april 7. Kevin Rose, one of the founders of Digg and co-host of the awesome show Diggnation, will interview none other than industrial rock legend Trent Reznor, lead singer and founder of Nine Inch Nails.

Here’s how it will work. You have until next saturday (april 4) to submit questions you want Kevin Rose to ask Trent Reznor. Now don’t start asking ridiculous questions (there’s a nice selection of examples in the comments over at Digg), I don’t think he’ll ask him why he’s so awesome.

I’m a big NIN fan myself. Personally, I think Pretty Hate Machine is and probably always will be their best album. Many fans don’t really seem to like their more recent albums, and I have to admit, The Slip is a bit below average. With Teeth, however, kicked ass bigtime! The best thing about them, though, is the fact that they’re giving music away for free under a Creative Commons license, wich means I can use it as a videogame soundtrack without getting into any trouble! Oh, and they’re giving away hundreds of gigabytes of high definition footage of concerts on BitTorrent. The downside? My broadband connection is capped at 25 gigabytes per month. It’s better than it used to be (a few years ago it was 10 gigabytes), but it would still take months to download it all.

I signed up with ping.fm a few hours ago. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a service that allows you to send updates and messages to all possible social networking websites, such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, if you want to post a status update to both of these websites, instead of logging into both of them and sending it twice, you can do it directly from ping.fm.

The best thing, though, is that there are lots of ways to post things. Besides logging into the website, you can send them by instant messaging, sms or email. That last one is definitely the best option! Here’s my problem: I don’t have internet access at work, and for some reason I can’t log in to Twitter anymore with my mobile phone (I should really get a new one, I still own a Samsung X640). I do have email, though, and now I can post Twitter updates during the day by sending an email to ping.fm! It’s even possible to upload pictures to Flickr or write complete blog posts for Blogger or Wordpress.

The thing that kept me from using services like this until now is the fact that you have to provide them with your login and password for all services you want to use. Smells a bit fishy, but ping.fm seems to be quite well-known and popular, so I guess they are thrustworthy enough. At least now I don’t have to wait until I’m home again to post updates!

No, this isn’t about the movie (haven’t even seen it yet, should really go rent it or something). It’s about my first Instructable! Instructables is a user-submitted howto website. It contains tutorials about almost everything you can imagine, including food. Ratatouille is a French vegetable stew. It contains tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant and onion. It’s very tasty and healthy as hell. I like it either with a grilled tuna steak, or with some bread and parmesan cheese.

Since one of my hobbies is cooking, I’m gonna publish some of my favourites on Instructables. This recipe is very easy, and I have included a lot of pictures so it’s very easy to follow. I chose not to put the full recipe here because the article would be too long, and at the moment it would get a lot more views on Instructables (wich can lead some traffic back here, wich is always a good thing).

Ratatouille recipe on Intructables.

This is one of my all time favorite movies. It’s a scifi-horror movie, starring Sam Neil and Lawrence Fishburne. Although it was quite a box office failure, it more or less achieved cult status later. When you read reviews of this movie, there are two possible conclusions. The reviewer either loved it or hated it. It’s one of those movies you either watch once and then never talk about again, or watch over and over again.

So here’s the story. Spoiler alert is up, so be warned! In the mid-21st century, the research ship Event Horizon is exploring the solar system. When it reaches the orbit of Neptune, it disappears without a trace. Officially, the ship’s reactor exploded. Unofficially, the ship was testing an advanced propulsion system that allowed faster than light travel. Seven years later, it appears again and sends out a radio signal wich only contains screams. A rescue team is sent to the ship, along with a scientist who designed the ship.

When they arrive at the Event Horizon, they find the crew dead and horribly mutilated. When one of the crew members explores the engine room, he gets sucked into the engine’s core (wich contains an artificial black hole) and a violent explosion damages the rescue craft. He is recovered from the core, but is in a coma. Soon, everybody starts having terrifying hallucinations. After the person who was sucked into the core wakes up and throws himself out of an airlock without a spacesuit, someone comes up with a theory: the ship is haunted by something it brought back from wherever it had been for the past seven years.

The crew manages to repair the rescue craft, and when they are about to leave things really go wrong. The commander intends to destroy the Event Horizon after leaving, but the designer of the ship won’t let it happen. Posessed by the presence that haunts the ship, he plants explosives in the rescue craft, killing several crew members. The survivors then decide to blow up the Event Horizon and use the crew quarters as a rescue vessel, but the now insane scientist activates the engines. He tells the commander what had happened. The propulson created a gateway to another dimension, wich he describes as a “dimension of pure chaos”. The entity that took posession of the ship caused the crew to go mad and kill each other. Now he wants to go back and take what’s left of the rescue crew with him. After a fight the commander manages to set off the explosives, splitting the ship in two and sacrificing himself.

This definitely isn’t a movie for the faint of heart. It contains a few incredibly bloody, gruesome scenes. The first one is when the rescue crew recovers a video log entry of the original crew’s fate. It shows them mutilating each other, almost ripping each other to pieces. You don’t really see what’s actually going on, wich leaves a lot to your imagination. The second one is even more brutal. During the fight between the ship’s designer and the commander, he is shown a vision of what awaits them in the “dimension of chaos”. What follows is a short burst of incredibly bloody shots of him and his crew getting tortured and mutilated. It’s one of those gore scenes that makes you jump up and go “Holy crapfuck what the hell was that?”. If your guts can take it I recommend watching it in slow motion.

In my opinion, Sam Neil’s performance was the best of the entire cast. He plays professor Weir, who designed the ship. At the start of the movie, he’s a quiet, depressed person, troubled by his wife’s suicide. Throughout the movie, he transforms into a mad scientist, ending up as a posessed maniac. Towards the end he becomes a very, very terrifying, almost demonic, character.

Two things that bothered me a bit. When they arrived at the ship, they noticed the explosives in the corridor that connected the engine room to the rest of the ship. Professor Weir tells them they are meant to split the ship in two in case of an emergency, wich makes it very obvious how the movie will probably end. Second, when the commander tells one of his crew members about an accident where he had to leave someone behind to die in a fire he tells him he swore he would never leave someone behind again. A dead giveaway he will sacrifice himself!