This is a story about the coolest astronaut in human history.

If you haven’t heard of this man yet, his name is commander Chris Hadfield (53), who was the first Canadian to walk in space. Helped by his two sons, he harnessed the power of social media to give millions of people access to space, to the incredible views he was seeing and share basic scientific experiments like showing that you can’t cry in space.

He slowly turned into something like a space celebrity, amassing a huge crowd on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit while doing an IAmA.

After someone coined “Space Oddity” on the Reddit thread, commander Hadfield tweeted three days ago:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World. youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9d…

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) May 12, 2013

Here’s the video in it’s full glory:

Summing it all up

• There was an astronaut in space doing a Reddit IAmA
• He shared beautiful and unique views of the earth using social media
• He had his two sons help him set up and manage his social media accounts and was very transparent about it
• Using social media, he educated people about the effects and brutality of space
• He sung Space Oddity in space and made a video of it

I am overwhelmed. My inner geek, music lover and people admirer were all crying in trinity. Hats off to commander Hadfield!

PS: If you want to learn more about commander Hadfield check out this and this Guardian article.

I have been reading and writing a lot the past 8 months when I came across Noah Stokes’ birthday lists. Inspired by these I figured I could highlight some learnings myself. Scanning through my scribblings I tried looking for the ones that appear to me as important or beautiful. These are probably lessons that have shaped me into who I am, it will be interesting to see how this will look a year from now.

Below is a list of 29 things in no particular order that made the cut.

• Reading is good. Everyone should read more. There is always too much to read and too much to think about, but that is a great thing.
• Whenever you want to introduce something new to your daily rythm, make a commitment to six weeks. Just keep at it for six weeks every day and see what happens afterwards. You’re setting a goal which is not too far away, but once you’ve reached it you’ve made the potential habit an actual habit.
• The other person is never the problem.
• We’re all in our own movies. Communication might get you far but you can never guess how another person perceives things. You’re in your movie and the other is in his/hers. We’re all conditioned by society and our legacy, but this only makes it easier to align our perceptions. You can never be sure you’re completely understanding someone.
• Drink more water.
• Idling is important. Working hard can be fun if you enjoy your job, but you still need to disconnect on a regular basis to maintain a healthy balance. We are not build for infinite endurance. Working on pet projects is not idling.
• Lean into the Pain. Pain is a signal that you’re pushing your boundaries. If something hurts, confront yourself with it and do it again. It will make you stronger.
• Music is all about the experience. Recorded music is just a thin rehearsal of something that has been performed earlier. A live performance generates incredible amounts of energy that inspire and fuel people.
• Reading is brainwashing. Whatever combination of letters you are looking at, your brain will try to parse it. Reading a lot about a certain subject will likely influence your personal development.
• Love is brutal and therefor interesting. The highs are incredible and the lows are painful, but we should not shy away from them. The pain is making us understand more about ourselves, which is all we can do. Everything else is just acceptance.
• Trying to understand love is futile. While Plato might give you some useful metaphors, it will always be bigger and more complex than we can wrap our heads around.
• We need to let go of the idea of always being productive. This is impossible. Try working in small bursts with a high focus. The Pomodoro Technique is an interesting method for this. The quality of our work will also increase when we’re relaxed.
• By trying to understand more of the world, we will probably feel like we understand less. This is one of the great and humbling things about life.
• Alcohol seems like an obligatory addiction of Western society. You will only accept this when you take a break from it and realize how interwoven alcohol has become in our social interactions.
• I love being able to live in a city because I choose to do so, not because it just happened to me.
• A todo list is helpful, but a tada list works better for your mood. Collect all the things you’ve done on a list and reflect on it at the end of the day. You’ve done a great job.
• If you don’t believe in yourself you will never change.
• Try to collect parts of lyrics from songs you like. It will train your ear to listen to music better and you will build up a small collections of beautiful sentences or word combinations.
• We can change our behavior overnight but changing our character is way harder.
• “Just slowly, calmly, harmoniously keep up, keep up, keep up, keep up, keep up, and it will come to you. Don’t hate it. Don’t be frustrated about it. Just keep going.” - Yogi Bhajan.
• Find friends who do work in an entire different field than you. It will result in more interesting conversations and helps you stay curious.
• Buy things at markets or greengrocers. Groceries with a barcode are probably not very good for us.
• Playing video games is actually addictive. It will likely mess up your sleep rythm.
• Spend more time in Rio de Janeiro next time. It’s a great city.
• We are way more vulnerable than you think. Be more careful and listen to your body and gut. This is difficult when living at large. Stop and reflect often.
• Greet kindness with kindness. Even if you don’t feel comfortable, an act of kindness deserves kindness in return. Always.
• Books and magazines (e.g. printed media) will not go away. They will find their niches and keep on being printed, but will just grow more expensive.
• Working with great people is a privilege. Being able to turn these people into friends is an even greater luxury.
• Traveling is good, but we should be aware of Curse of the Traveler. Traveling should be balanced with time you spend in your home. We need time to ground and build persistent connections.

Disney Animation recently published a short film called Paperman. They put the whole thing on Youtube for us all to watch:

Apart from the incredible technicalities & overall mood it gives you, I’m really amazed how they manage to capture the “Disney feeling” in such a short film.

Check out more artwork and background information on the Disney Animation website.

Lately my (online) reading experience has been improved a lot, partly because of Quote.fm. I noticed I was storing a lot of good articles for later use, but wanted to share these with people but at the same time keep a log of what I’ve been reading and what good stuff I came across.

To keep track of what inspired me or what I simply marked as “awesome”, I’m going to keep a log of interesting articles. I’m not set yet on a rythm for this, but here’s a first attempt.

• Employees leave managers, not Companies - An eye-opening view on how managers affect their coworkers happiness in work life.
• A short lesson in Perspective - An amazing read on things that matter in our lives, but in a context that I know: in the worlds of creative agencies, workaholics and self-deceit.
• Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War - The background story on Catcher in the Rye: how J.D. Salinger kept the writings on his body while storming the beaches of Normandy. Truly inspiring, how an artists works changes by the changes of the artist itself.
• Amen! (D’Angelo is Back) - The story of where D’Angelo has been for the last 11 years, and how he’s coming back. Quoting Angie Stone: “It’s not a little bit of God in him. It’s a lot of God in him. Sometimes when you have that much power, Satan works tenfold to break you.”
• The Book that Changed my Life - I’ve been going through Aaron Schwartz’ blog since his passing, some articles are incredible. Here he writes about ‘Understanding Power’ by Noam Chomsky, how the book sheds a whole new perspective on the world and how it crushed him.
• Why we took Cocain out of Soda - How Coca Cola used to be an “Intellectual Beverage” but was soon to become a problem by “The negroes of the South”.
• The Indiepocalypse - We all know the music industry is broken, the Indiepocalypse is upon us. But how did that happen and is it possible for upcoming bands to become successful without signing to a big label?

Enjoy!

The answer turned out to be a bit tedious so I tried fixing that. Say hello to Viewportmarklet:

How does it work?

The tool is build around the assumption that you need an actual letter m on your canvas in the base font size. The width of that letter m is what the browser will use as 1 em.

When working on a frontend project I found myself struggling with the sites current viewport width in em and in pixels. To save myself and others from demotivation problems I build a small tool that helps you to wrap your head around em usage.

View the projects landing page here or check out the repository on Github.

Help me improve it

I know the code is not great but for now it’s helping me a great deal. If you see any improvements or have any feedback, fork away or let me know in the comments!

I like music a lot. I enjoy listening to it, let it grow on me, let it define me for that moment. Maybe I build up a connection to a certain song because of my mood, or because of the memories I’ve attached to it over time.

Discovering music has changed a lot the last years. There are great online services helping you find amazing gems from all over the globe. But I realized one thing: this whole thing around timing and newness of music is slowly fading away. It’s not important anymore if you discover this band right after they released their new EP, or if you heard that song on the radio the first day it aired.

Here are a bunch of music discovery services I use myself in no particular order:

• The Hype Machine
• This is My Jam
• SoundCloud
• Last.fm
• Songkick
• Tumblr
• Grooveshark
• Spotify

Music discovery has become more personal. It became more important to people when they heard a song for the first time, rather then when it was released. A great thing about this is that you can send a rather old song to a friend, but you’ll possibly spark a precious memory or give him/her something new. The song will then grow on that person from then on and it will be perceived as something new.

It has become quite hard to keep discovering interesting music, simply because the internet has become quite good at making music accessible. There is just too much out there!

Organize all the things (songs)

I’ve slowly started to organize my music consumption and discovery, but I wonder how it works for other people. Let me explain how I handle huge amounts of great music:

1. Discovery

I discover a song or an album on SoundCloud, Thisismyjam, or a friend sends me a link. I’ll add the song to my Spotify queue or play it directly. If it’s a SoundCloud link or a song on Thisismyjam, I’ll try to find the song on Spotify. I know, with all these different services it often happens something is not in the Spotify catalogue yet, in that case I bookmark or like it on that respective platform or service.

2. Save to remember

I keep a playlist on Spotify to remember what great stuff I have been listening to this week. Some things might be queued up in there that I haven’t listened to yet but planned to do so. Some things might be bad, some things might be good. Most of the things are new to me. This playlist is always changing. I’m adding and removing things as I go, I regard it as music I have “on deck”:

Spotify playlist: This is what I’m discovering right now

3. Share the good parts

Share the things you like. I found out that when a song really hits me I want to share that feeling. I most likely know some people who might enjoy this song too (since they’re my friends our musical compatibility is quite high). This also creates a moment in my memory where I shared this song with this friend, it’ll likely come up in discussions later when we meet. Also, your friends might be happy that you shared that great song with them. They’ll appreciate the gesture and will probably do the same later when they run into a great song, everyone wins!

In this same mood I usually might find the artist on Songkick as well to track their concerts. Songkick then sends me an alert when the artist announced a tour in my city.

4. Add to collection

When an album does grow on me or I want to save it for later, I add it to my “collection”. This is just one big uncategorized playlist, but it works for me. I can scroll / browse through it, find the things I was looking for and give them a listen. I keep coming back to this list to find things to add to a new playlist, find that one record I used to play back in 2004, et cetera. Of course you can use whatever music services’ search function as well, but now I’ve applied my personal filter to the music. I’ve heard these songs before and they mean something for me.

Spotify playlist: Albums that Stick

5. Rinse and repeat

Music comes and goes. The first playlist shrinks and grows, helps me to keep track of my discoveries. The second list keeps growing, enriching my musical history. Of course not everything I’ve ever listened to is in there, for that there’s my listening history at Last.fm.

This has been the way I’ve been handling my music discovery, but I know it might not be ideal. There is still no default resource to find all the music you want and I know my method is quite Spotify-centered. Why don’t you add me on there to share a song or two? You can also find me on Hypem, Thisismyjam and SoundCloud.

How do you handle your music consumption? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? Please share them in the comments!

Of course you remember Primer. That film from 2004 that would keep you puzzled for days. After nine years Shane Carruth is back with a new project, Upstream Color:

While most film critics collectively claim one shouldn’t spoil more then the plot outline for this movie that already has been published, I’m going to stop here and wait for the film to play at Berlinale with only this quote:

A man and a woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism

Enjoy.

Last week my friend Peter Bihr tweeted about this Gotye mashup that was being played at the Wired 2012 conference. Yes- we’ve all about died of how many times this track has been played on the radio, tv, well everywhere and ALL THE TIME, but I must admit my interest was raised when I found out Wally De Backer (aka Gotye) was giving this mashup “back to the internet”. You’ll find a writeup of this talk here.

“I’m fascinated that people would spend all day covering themselves in body paint to create this humour, (…) I realised this song wasn’t really mine anymore, but belonged to the internet.”

So he gave it back. He downloaded 350 different adaptations of his own song and remixed those into something new. Here’s how 350 “Somebodies” look when sampled & remixed by the original artist:

(Unfortunately this video is blocked by GEMA in Germany, I’m sorry for the inconvenience)

Remix? Mutate!

This is no ordinary hype. Of course I knew that this terrible ear worm had traveled all corners of the world but that it managed to inspire so many people was impressive. And it’s not just a meme. Nor simple remixes of a sample. If you haven’t seen the documentary Everything is a Remix yet, go do it now. Remixing intellectual property is getting more common these days, but “That Gotye song” goes beyond remixing, this is on a whole new level.

People take the original song as a base version for their creative work to create something new. They adapt and mutate this song to celebrate their own creativity while at the same time inspiring others.

Just look at the numbers (and yes, those are millions):

• The Star Wars that I used to Know - 7.6m views
• That Gotye Song - 6.2m views
• Dutch Choir cover - 1.2m views
• Walk of the Earth cover - 138m views
• Pentatonix cover - 9.2m views
• Ivy & Gold cover - 1.6m views
• Matthias Harris acappella version - 2.8m views

The reach of every mutation on itself as well has been huge. What I find also striking is the amazing quality of these videos. While most of these are sprung out of a fun idea or a want to create something cool, almost all of these mutations look like they’ve been made by a professional studio or producer. It’s quite uncommon to find a video that is not uploaded in HD, some use crazy camera effects and the post production is incredible.

If we call these creators bedroom producers, what happened to the amateur?

The Mutations

I’ve searched for the best mutations that where used in the video above and collected them in a Youtube playlist. Click on the playlist icon below to see all 19 of them.

Every single one of these has something special. The trembling sax, the two macho guys in the car, a complete choir humming the back vocals, 5 people on 1 guitar or that crazy acappella production, amazing!

When pondering about intellectual property, creativity and (viral) networks, I’d say we’re only just at the beginning of something great. Technology will become even cheaper, more and more of the worlds population will be connected to the internet and we all share a common language called music. The future will be awesome.

Have you seen hypes before that grew to a similar size? Which one of the mutations is your favorite?

Browsing my Spotify playlists I stumbled upon this great album again zZz - Running with the Beast. I saw them once years ago as a support act and was really impressed by the energy and performance these guys were putting up.

A bit later they released their album Running with the Beast, for which Roel Wouters aka Xelor has made this awesome video. I agree, it’s pushing quite some moral boundaries but I think that’s mostly because of the switching of contexts, both creative and biological. There is an animal welfare statement on Roel’s website to make sure you won’t loose any sleep. If you want to know more, check out todayandtomorrow for more posters and the ‘making of’ video.

This video is 3 years old so no HD quality unfortunately, but still a great watch. Enjoy.

All things new

This is a new blog. A lot has changed lately which required an actual restart of many things in my life. I only thought it was fitting to reboot this place as well, so I can start anew here as well.

This will be a place for reflection, jotting down ideas, inspiration and summarizing things.

Jekyll & Octopress

I ported my previous Jekyll install to a more structured framework which is called Octopress. It’s still running on Github Pages, but it removed a lot of complications I wasn’t using anyway. Writing and publishing are handled by a set of simple rake tasks and a $ git push. This delightful theme is based on Slash, but I’ll modify it a bit along the way.