But hey, the Yashica has a lovely ground glass viewfinder that is peered from above and boy does it look trippy. It’s even got these extra guide line helpers in case if you want to use 35mm film instead of the square aspect ratio medium format film. Lots of grime and dust has also polluted the mirror and the glass of the viewfinder. Awesome artifacts. So I built this TtV (“through the viewfinder”) rig on it from cereal box cardboard and some black duct tape to mount my digital camera above the viewfinder. With the help of a few close up filters and a 50mm lens I can now shoot through the viewfinder with relative ease and end up with digital images that ooze of analog sex. Hot.

Here’s a severed male head floating in space that I modeled… But hey, at least it’s not bald this time!

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Delta as Indicated. Downtempo electro.

Download as 192kbps CBR MP3

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Muses of Helicon. Goa trance.

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A psytrance song that I just recently did:

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Some trance that I had to compose because I was dared to:

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This starts out a bit triphoppy, a bit dubsteppy but ends up being a bit jungley:

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This is a remix of this video’s soundtrack using the above song as a basis for a hiphop beat:

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Ambient:

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Check them out here:
subdivision02
subdivision03
(Java required)

Here’s a few images I created with a custom .pdf exporting versions of the programs:

I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to figure out which picture is which. Oh, and the theme in fast graphics was “over the edge” and time limit was 1h 30min. Talking of fast graphics, here’s another fast graphics thingy (3dsmax + photoshop) I did just for fun a while ago:

I’ve also been playing around with Processing quite a bit lately but in a more educated manner than previously with the help of an excellent book. If you’re a programming noob such as me, I can heartily recommend it. Anyways, maybe I’ll have something cool to show you soonish.

It’s an awesome place.

You can check out all the games where I’ve drawn in but I’ve picked some of my favorite pictures I’ve done this far here. Of course to get the full enjoyment, these should be viewed in context but I think these are kinda neat even as complete non sequiturs.

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I’m actually quite happy with the mix myself and I think the timings were kinda solid this time around too. To celebrate the fact, I decided to do some simple cover graphics from an old Holga photo of mine and name it properly. So I present to you: Subspaces.


Tracklist:
1. Nasser - Timeless
2. Duca - The Tour
3. FM Radio Gods - Musak Attack
4. Gaudium - 4 Outputs
5. Paulina Cewe - Incipit
6. Ace Ventura - Presence (Motion Drive remix)
7. Vibrasphere - Follow Me
8. Quantize feat. Buttersonic - Think Different
9. Ace Ventura - Sao Paulo
10. Protonica - Final Step


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During the last few years, there has been a new surge of great goa trance music, a subgenre many people thought died in the turn of the decade. Only the first song here is still from the 90s era but the rest are newer. Too bad that I don’t have Merr0w’s album yet…


Tracklist:
1. Talamasca - Jungle Storm
2. Afgin - Tribute to the Sun
3. Red Gravity - Momentary 29
4. Filteria - The Snail Keeps on Crawling...
5. Antares - Aurora
6. Lost Buddha - Regeneration
7. Vox - Mayana
8. Artifact303 - Energy Waves (Positive mix)


Download as 128kbps CBR MP3

Even though the name of this DJ set is named after an influental month in the Gregorian calendar, I’m not intending to do new mixes every month. I’m just too lazy to think about any fancier names for the mix. Some of the transitions in the mix can be shocking or cruel and are not recommended for children or expecting women.


Tracklist:
1. Talamasca - Obsessive Dream
2. Ananda Shake - Inside the Sound
3. SynSUN - Dancing Machines
4. Space Buddha - Legendary Lighting
5. Wizzy Noise - Sputnik
6. 1200 Mics - Rock into the Future
7. Astral Projection - The Prophecy
8. Technikal - Summassault (Phil York remix)


Anyway, here’s three mini songs I did with Korg DS-10:

Some dubstep-inspired warble-warble-warble with a subbass sound I accidentally managed to produce:

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Goa trance (be careful with the volume since the levels are quite a bit higher on this song than on the previous one!):

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… I don’t know what this is:

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As a bonus, I’m going to include two of my older tracks from about three years back. These are the most “complete” songs I’ve managed to do. Naturally, these are NOT made with Korg DS-10 but with Buzz on a desktop computer. They are both more or less psytrance-ish.

john peeba – iso pala

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john peeba – hyhmis

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This took a bit over one hour in Photoshop.

http://peeba.gfxile.net/processing/kainalokarvasimu/

http://peeba.gfxile.net/processing/pensseli/

Download as 256kbps CBR MP3

Tracklist:

1. Vibrasphere vs. Ticon - Dewdrops
2. Magic & Witchcraft - Oudoen
3. Gaudium - Set or Reset
4. Koan - Watermarks (Behind Blue Eyes remix)
5. Dualsnug - Deceptive Noises
6. Human Blue - Atom
7. Vibrasphere - Floating Free (Krama remix)
8. Magic & Witchcraft - Between Colours
9. Wizzy Noise - Lost Atlantis
10. Gaudium vs. Dualsnug - Killer
11. Ace Ventura vs. Lish - The Light


This is a sketch of a poster of a movie me and a couple friends of mine have been dreaming about. The perfect amalgamation of finnish craplore and a few awesome movies. There’s of course Uuno and his pals, Härski Hartikainen and Sörsselssön, and his mighty challengers, Conan the Barbarian and T1000. Naturally, T1000 assumes the form of Uuno’s plough. Beheadings will occur. Maybe someday I’ll paint this picture further but we’ll see…

Or actually before the practical stuff let’s be superficial for a moment here and talk about the looks. If you want to be cool, don’t buy this. This is a seriously ugly laptop. And not even in the good sort of nerdy and engineery way the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads are. The tx2500 is just a collection of elements that are considered cool nowadays: silvery plastics, blue LEDs and glossy black surfaces that attract fingerprints miles away. The underbelly of the laptop looks like a plastic version of some amateur modder’s first Quake wall texture: it’s a messy collection of beveled surfaces, grates, screws and it’s got more hieroglyphs sticked on it than the other side with the keyboard on it. The hinge which swings the display around when you convert it to laptop mode also makes the whole thing look more brittle even though the hinge mechanism actually feels quite solid in practice.

Whisky bottle and a robusto sized cigar for scale

This is a 12″ laptop which I think is almost the perfect size for a laptop if you still want to keep it more or less portable. The laptop actually fits into my camera bag very nicely. Typing with the keyboard is also very easy and despite the size of the laptop, most of the keys seem to be positioned and sized correctly. Only the left shift seems a bit slim to me but it took only about three jabs with my pinky to learn to aim at it correctly. The screen’s resolution, 1280×800, sounds quite small but in practice it matches the physical screen size very well. I haven’t yet gotten around into trying to install 3dsmax or XSI on the laptop and I think that with those the display would be almost entirely covered with the GUI stuff. But for 2d applications and some 3d ones as well (like Silo and Mudbox) the resolution works well enough. Actually way better than I expected in the first place since I’ve grown accustomed to the 1600×1200 resolution I usually work with on desktop computers.

Like most, if not all, current convertible laptop/tablet PCs, you can convert this into tablet mode by swiveling it around a hinge and then tilting the display on top of the keyboard. The display latches in place with the magic of some magnetic hooks. Fascinating. The only place I remember seeing such resolute hooks prior to this laptop was in the Hellraiser movies. The Wacom Penabled touchscreen works very nicely. When using the pen, the display ignores all the other touches which is great since I’m used to resting my hand on the drawing surface. To help combat smudges left by filthy hands, HP has even included a cleaning cloth for the screen so you don’t have to stick the laptop in the dishwasher that often. And there’s also a pouch with a zipper included for the laptop if you’re one of those guys who like to bag all of their material possessions individually in the fear of matter meeting antimatter. Anyways, back to the screen. The feel of using the pen is very familiar and approachable if you’ve used tablets before. The somewhat slick surface feels a lot like the plexiglass surface on a Wacome Graphire 3. I have one on my home desktop computer so I felt instantly at home when I did my first doodles in Artrage. The pen itself is very basic. Just a straight ball point pen alike plastic stick with the basic exchangeable Wacom pen nibs, an eraser and a single button on the side. The button (the “right mouse button”) is very hard to press. It’s very flat so it’s quite hard to find and the pressing itself is a surprisingly laborous mechanical process. After using the tablet for a few weeks already, my pen button hit ratio is still around 50%. But drawing and painting with the pointy end is what you will be doing for the most of the time and it is very easy and the overall feeling of it is on at least the same level as on Graphires and even despite the missing ergo-stuff compared to those Intuos pens I haven’t suffered from any discomfort, pain or nausea caused by the tablet’s pen yet. But if you desperately need a more buxom pen, I think there’s one you can order from Wacom.

Actually, writing about discomfort, pain and nausea instantly reminded me of the vast customization options this laptop offers for the shortcut buttons on the lid. You know, the only physical buttons you have when you’re in tablet mode? Along the side there are four media buttons (play/pause, rewind, forward and stop) and on the front, next to the media buttons, there are four others. From one of the buttons on the front you can rotate the display which is handy if you want to work on portrait orientation (which is a bit more tricky than landscape orientation because of the much narrower viewing angles there). Another button opens the Windows mobility center where you can rotate the display which is handy if you want to work on portrait orientation. Then there’s a button with which you can launch a software to watch DVDs. I might be a bit behind the times but I’m used to this workflow when it comes to DVDs:

1. Insert Disc
2. Software starts

But that’s probably just me. Then the last button. It opens the HP Quicklaunch software with which you can launch a software to watch DVDs. What the hell? I surely need to rotate my screen more frequently than I need to move around the canvas or zoom in Photoshop so good call there HP. Ability to launch a DVD player in a blink of an eye, AOL Toolbar and syphilis were the top three items on my wish list when shopping around for a tablet PC and HP graciosly fulfilled two of my wishes.

But okay, who gives a damn about the default configuration since you’re going to customize it anyway, right? The funny thing though is that you can’t. There are some menu items somewhere in the control panel that claim to customize two of these buttons but apparently launching a DVD player is still such a brilliant discovery by HP engineers that they won’t let the customizing change things because the customers don’t actually know what’s best for them. Besides, who changes their brush size in Photoshop in this day and age anyway? So it was time to move onto heavier tools. There’s a brilliant application called Autohotkey which lets people do loads of powerful customization regarding shortcuts. The four media buttons were customized easily. I even scripted one of those buttons to alternate between two different keystrokes so I could alternate between two tools in Photoshop with a single button. Sadly, the screen rotate and the Windows mobility center buttons’ funtionality is so deeply buried somewhere that they can’t be manipulated even with Autohotkey. Luckily the two remaining buttons could be scripted with a bit of extra work since they required that I replace an exe-file (luckily Autohotkey has an exe compiler too!) and catch a command line argument to separate the two different button presses from each others.

So there I was, I had six customizable buttons on the lid which is just enough to use Photoshop with relative ease without constant tapping with the pen. After I got things set up in Photoshop just the way I wanted, I flipped the lid to enter the tablet mode just to see that the media keys don’t work at all while in tablet mode. Yes, the laptop disables half of the buttons on the lid, that are most easily and ergonomically accessed while in tablet mode, when you switch to tablet mode. There are some media buttons on the regular keyboard as well that can be accessed with the fn-key so there’s no reason whatsoever for anyone to use the four buttons on the lid, ever, so I would’ve preferred if HP would’ve shipped the computer with a loaf of bread instead of those four useless buttons that sit there mocking and laughing at me. Devices like this are the sole reason why we see so many alcoholics on the streets these days.

I decided I had been suffering a bit too much for my art so I decided to do something more lighthearted instead and I decided to install the drivers for the Behringer BCD3000 DJ console. It’s basically a MIDI controller for software DJing and it has an integrated sound card. A nice piece of kit for its price. This will hardly surprise anyone at this point but of course the sound card part of the drivers didn’t work at all. Neither the regular driver or the ASIO driver. But I was okay with it since who needs audio when DJing anyway? So in addition to the raging alcohol problem I gained from customizing the buttons, I was now starting to think that satanism really isn’t that bad of an idea. Self mutilation and all. Sweet.

So, I guess now it’s time for some sort of a conclusion. Drawing with it is really enjoyable and for the same price range you can think if you want to have a 12″ tablet PC or a 12″ Wacom Cintiq, which is in many ways a tablet PC without the PC (many people might disagree with this simplification but luckily I don’t listen to reason). Lack of customization still bugs me but luckily I had an extra Nostromo N52 pad lying around. It’s basically a small piece of a keyboard with a palm rest and a dpad for the thumb designed for gamers but it works with Photoshop and other programs just as well so that solved my shortcut woes pretty efficiently. Although using the Nostromo limits the ergonomy and portability of the whole thing a bit so I think I’ll only be using it at home. As if just using a tablet PC publicly wouldn’t make you look like a big enough of a dork already… And as for the BCD3000 drivers, I’m still awaiting a reply from Behringer but I don’t mind that much really since I’m only a bedroom DJ and I can do the mixing on my desktop computer just as well. So even though this computer made me feel like a Linux user from time to time, I like it very much now but I wouldn’t recommend it to others before HP gets its act together.

Ok, first the fast gfx entry. The theme of the compo this year was “size matters not” and there was 1,5h of time to complete the pic. And, surprisingly, there were only a few boobs and penises featured despite the theme.

I had a bit of a technical difficulty when I started making this piece. When I had managed to draw about two lines on the canvas in Photoshop, I managed to break my drinking glass. So the result was that I flooded my keyboard with coke and rum and shards of glass and spilled quite a bit of it on my display, Wacom, speakers, table and of course the rug on the floor too. After one roll of tissues for cleaning the mess up I had to install the cordless keyboard from my living room PC to this one because the cuba libre soaked keyboard refused to produce any letters and symbols. It settled for primitive “beeps” from the PC beeper and needed a bit of time to dry up. After two days, it is working again, however the keys on the lower left hand side of the keyboard are not springy anymore. The just sorta “gloop” their way up. But despite the wasted fifteen minutes, I’m quite happy with the picture myself.

Okay, onto the “regular” graphics entry. I started doing the picture the night before Assembly so I finished the painting process in five hours and five beers. So because I knew right from the beginning that I won’t have time to do anything awesome I decided to go way overboard with it and just have some fun. And fun I had. In fact, this was the most fun piece of graphics I’ve done in a long time, and even though most of the people won’t agree with me, I really liked the outcome. It certainly could’ve used a few more hours for more careful rendering of the lines and fixing the really messed up foreshortening on the arm holding the mace. And of course some more love for the shading. But anyways, somehow now I really feel inspired to do more surrealist and dadaist paintings. Hopefully the feeling lasts since at the moment I’m just too tired. So even though the picture might not be that awesome, the experience of drawing it certainly was.

Gameplaywise, this map is fairly simple. Three victory areas and no fancy terrain features besides difficult terrain (the squares marked with the little triangles). Although the map isn’t really entirely finished, I’m inclined to say it’s close enough. First of all, it completely lacks playtesting but since I have no easy (or more specifically, cheap) way to print this out, I think it’ll have to wait. And the second thing is that I still should check out that everything looks a-ok on 100% zoom and add some fancy detailing on the victory areas to make them stand out visually. But overall, I’m quite happy with this experiment.

Here’s a close-up shot that shows some of the detailing a bit closer:

If someone happens to own an A1 size color laserjet or printing press and is willing to make a print for cheap, drop me a line ;)

These are from last fall and they are shot with my Canon EOS 5D, using mainly the 24-105mm f/4 IS L IIRC but then again: who gives a damn anymore when you own a Holga?

With blog it’s really a no brainer to bump into the most recent stuff and at the same time there are a few extra goodies like RSS feeds for stalkers and commenting for people who want to sell Viagra knock-offs.

What you’ll find posted on this blog will mostly consist of my photography and computer graphics (2D/3D) and a bit of traditional media too (well, mainly limited to pencil sketches for now I guess). If you want to know who I am, you can check the about page.