Projects

Filmography

On my YouTube channel, I have some short films and other stuff that I’ve made over the years. I used to have some DJ sets here as well, but you know…recording rights and all that.

Once a year, for more than 20 years by now (yikes), I get together with some friends for a few days, play games and just hang out. The last day, we have a friendly, creative contest on a given topic. You can contribute with whatever you want, be it a song, a poem, knitting, programming, a game… Looking back at the dozens of entries I’ve made, it often ends up being a short film. I’m not sure why, but there is something with the medium that allures me. The mix of sound, music, visuals to create a tension, an emotion, just the right amount of pause for comedic effect… Maybe I am a theatre kid by heart.

Photography

My Flickr and DeviantArt profiles are a bit dead these days. I used to be very much into DSLR photography (have a Nikon D7000 and various lenses that I love to death), but since smartphones got so good I rarely bring it with me these days. I probably should start it up again, though. It sounds corny, but you really see and appreciate the world in a new light when you try to spot angles and framing for that perfect shot.

I’m not sure what it is about this picture, but I snapped it way back in 2009, in Hemsedal, Norway. There’s something about the crisp sharpness of the snowbank against the blurry backdrop, the subtle movement of the snow flakes suspended in the air… I often return to this as my desktop wallpaper.

Graphic design

This is probably where I started, all those years ago. In all of my various hobbies, this is the part I enjoy the most. Title cards and VFX for short films, post-processing and creating poster art from photographs, album covers for music productions… This is my flow state, where I can lose entire evenings and nights.

At some point, I even created a fake clothing line called Faux Brand. This was such a nice creative outlet, to create logos and graphics for various apparel. It’s a bit dormant at the moment, but you never know.

Maybe you can spot a theme. Almost all of my designs are heavily inspired by music. Global Underground, Thomas Bangalter, Above & Beyond… Can you see it?

Music

According to my Last.fm profile, I have listened to at least 10 500 hours of music since 2007. That’s… a lot. I honestly think this is my greatest hobby, if you can call it that. I have collected CDs and vinyls since my early teens. I have had Spotify since it was in beta, and I definitely make use of it. I have increasingly started to digitize my collection with Plexamp.

A friend once told me something that has stuck in my brain for more than two decades.

“There is so much great music to be discovered, if you just let go of your prejudices.”

Ain’t that the truth.

Music production

I think I started to dabble with music production around 2004, but it was probably around 2007-2008 that I started to take it a bit more serious. Between 2008-2011 I had the fortune of releasing a couple of singles and a few remixes on real music labels, how cool is that?! My proudest claim to fame is Bonzai Records, one of the pioneers in trance music.

At some point, I think I hit that famous ceiling. As a self-taught musician, it became obvious that I had to learn stuff to get better. Ugh. Music theory, mixing and mastering techniques… At that point in my life, I did not have that kind of tenacity.

So I put a pin in music production. Since then, I’ve done the occasional remix or mashup, but over the last years I have gravitated more towards DJing. The kind of pop/electronic/bootleg/mashup sets that Thomas Bangalter, DJ Falcon and 2manydjs can pull off… chef’s kiss Magic. That inspires me.

Most of my productions are available on SoundCloud, if you want to listen. A few of them are available on streaming services, Beatport and the likes as well.

Homelabbing

Is really “LARPing a sysadmin” a hobby? Maybe this is what becoming an adult feels like. Somehow, it feels easier to justify the time and money when your inner voice says “Trust me, this is useful knowledge!

Either way, I actually enjoy it. I run my Proxmox environment on a small ThinkCentre M920q (i5 8500T, 32GB RAM), with storage on an old Synology DS414 NAS. Plex, Immich, UniFi, the usual suspects. My proudest moment was setting up a domain name for internal network usage via Nginx Proxy Manager.

The end goal is probably to have both media storage and device backups going through the NAS to something like Backblaze B2. Cloud storage is expensive, y’all. The more I can reduce our usage of FAANG services, the better.