The Other Blog

I may want to post things about my travels that I'd hate for my grandmother to see. This is where they'll be. ... Also a ton of mirrograms

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Oh yes, we're back, Bu oh so tantaltsingly briefly. I'm flying to Bangkok in 10 hours, so I'll be even less inclined to post here from here on in.

One of the coolest experiences of this trip was going to the Beatfarm festival. The incredibly chill organizers picked me up ffrom the train station and I helped them set up fencing and tenting required for hte stages. 

I met some really great dudes, was baked the whole time, and got to chill wiht Boogie Belgique and oaktree, two incredibl talents.

So here's a quick tour I did of the beafarm premises.

Tally Ho!

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Antwerp has a pretty neat street art scene. There's some rather unique murals showcasing that unique Belgian comic book art style. I had been planning on going to Doel, a town near Antwerp that was slated for demolition, and then stagnated as its occupants refused to leave. Graffiti artists started showing up and adorning the abandoned bits of it. It's supposed to be a pretty crazy place.  I'm not even sure if it's still standing, as the last mention of resistance is from 2008, and the latest news on Wikipedia is of a memorial being removed in 2011.

If I remember correctly, I went to the train station and they told me I would have to take a bus to the middle of nowhere and then walk for about an hour and a half to get there. Which is about the time I decided 'fuck it', I'll just get high and chill in the inflatable space-structure of lights and soothing electronic music directly adjacent to the train station.  Anyway, I probably would have done shrooms, got lost, died horribly, and proceeded to haunt the krokodil-addicted final inhabitants of a decrepit graffiti-plastered ghost town. That's actually a pretty kick-ass fate. Until it all gets knocked down and you're haunting some nicely coloured bricks and used smack needles.

Lovely

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Keep on spinnin', God.

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Alright, as promised one life-span ago, things to avoid doing in Amsterdam:

1. Don't go to the Stedelijk (the modern art museum) expecting to have you stoned mind blown to the high heavens. There's nothing to bring you down like browsing through like 10 different rooms of 60s-80s furniture.  Or maybe you have no culture and can't appreciate these fine, probably avant-garde 30 years ago chairs.

2. Don't try and orient yourself. Just give up. Seriously, it's not going to happen. Amsterdam is so fucking disorienting. Even when sober. Which is also not going to happen. It's a bunch of horse-shoe shaped streets divided by canals, so following a street that was totally going in the right direction when you started will have you heading in the opposite direction halfway across town.

3. Don't walk home alone at 4 AM. I know it makes no sense that darkness and absolutely no people around would make it even more difficult to find one's way, but there it is. 4. When asking the one stranger that you come across for directions, don't answer truthfully when he asks you if you're totally alone and whether your friends know where you are. Don't stick around if he starts asking what you can give him in return for some guidance.

5. Don't let late-night drug dealers almost talk you into a deal and then bail at the last second, prompting the dude to follow you for about 5 blocks, incessantly trying to get you to purchase his sketchy-ass Scarface-boxed 'MDMA'. 

6. Amsterdam has a ton of tourist-trap head shops with huge displays of commercial drug analogues. Don't buy the ones containing LSA (derived from plants such as Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, Oluliuqui, and Morning Glory). LSA sucks. Ingestion of this chemical can cause moderate to severe nausea, childlike helplessness, pretty underwhelming visuals, interesting to overwhelming introspection, and your lovely friend and host to utter guttural and demonic sounds that you later find out was just Dutch, but seriously that shit sounded arcane. 

7.  Don't climb on stage at an Odd Future concert if you're overweight and in a dinosaur costume. Security will body-check you over the heads of about three rows of hard-moshing, 'Free Earl' t-shirt-wearing, incredibly white teenagers.

I know that last one is pretty specific but I'm just watching out for you, you adventurous dinosaur-fetish freaks. Whoah, this just came to me, would people who fuck wearing dinosaur costumes be called Scalies? I'm totally coining that. Close call people, I almost googled 'Dinosaur fetish subculture' without going into private browsing. Bad news, these people totally exist. Worse news, the term already exists so I have no coining rights to it.

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I'm too damn tired for an actual post so here's some pictures I took at the Van Gogh museum. It's a pretty neat exhibition that focuses heavily on his process and the evolution of his painting style. Mmm lookit dem textures.

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Bern goPro shotzzz

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Okay motherfucker, time is up, you are posting another goddamn thing if it kills you NO. DO NOT TAB OUT TO REDDIT. I WILL SEND YOU TO /R/SPACEDICKS AND BACK IF I HAVE TO. Fine, this really isn't that hard anyway. Why am I so god damn lazy anyway? The wonders of classical conditioning, you salivating schmuck.  Beautiful, so let's move on to the next thing I promised to post about approximately 80 billion years ago: The wondrous Zurichian (google gave me fuck-all for 'pertaining to zurich' so it's a word now; you're welcome) chamber of acoustic bliss. Mmmm, low-light iPod-quality photos. You're really spoiling us here, [insert name of famous photographer ironically]. Witty. How many famous photographers can YOU name off the top of your head? ... That's what I thought.

So yes, my favourite place in Switzerland that isn't redefining how we understand the universe can be found under the Grossmunster Church. There you can find this lovely vaulted crypt featuring a bitching statue of Charlemagne dating back to the 11th century. According to legend Charlemagne was the dude to say 'Yo, we could totally use a church right here' about 900 years ago. Then some 400 hundred years later a snickering architect slapped some sky-high tits on it. The reason I want to make sweet architectural love to this room is what happens once you start making noise. Sounds bounce back at you from every angle and if you stand right in the center, even my weak-ass vocal chords can fill the room with a soul-vibrating hum. Suffice to say, I spent about two hours here bouncing music off the walls and encouraging people to harmonize. SOBER. You goddamn hipster.  I don't even care. It was beautiful. 

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The ATLAS experiment, one of the four test chambers located around this 27 kilometer ring, is located right under this gorgeous mural. Part of me wants to relay a ton of awesome facts about this masterpiece, but the rest of me doesn't want to go look all the specifics up again.

So, off the top my head:

The first step of cutting edge nuclear science is to rip all the electrons off of hydrogen atoms using incredibly strong magnets.

Once these protons have been isolated, they're sent off to a smaller ring where they start accelerating. Once they hit a certain energy level, they can be sent into the LHC in packets, where the fun really starts. Actual fun fact #1: Each packet of contains 10^11 protons. That's a lot of elementary particles.

Actual fun fact #2: When two packets are guided directly into each other at the center of an experiment, only 10 of them hit. That's 0.000000005% making contact. In the densest possible proton cloud science can manufacture.

Deductive fun fact #1: Even though there's thousands of collisions per second, they can run this shit for hours.

Deductive fun fact #2: WE ARE MADE OF NOTHING, PEOPLE! WHAT IS REAL? WHAT IS FUCKING REAL?!

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back. And we're gonna start right where we left off at- Motherfucking the CERN!

That's the European Center for Nuclear Research for you unfamiliar folks out there. Why CERN? Because French, that's why. This complex is located right on the border of France and Switzerland and is the only place you can cross the border without dudes with guns getting all up in your business. So, as you probably don't know, it was a teenage dream of mine to visit this place. After reading Angels and Demons (probably my favourite Dan Brown novel), I wound up doing a rather in-depth research project on antimatter as a result and got all kinds of nerd-chills reading up on the shit that goes down there. This place is home to the most incredible products of human ingenuity so far. The LHC and its experiments.The thing that sends protons at nearly the speed of light crashing into each other. For science. It creates energy conditions that haven't existed since infinitesimal moments after the big bang.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with a fucking TIME MACHINE. The greatest scientific minds alive collaborated to create it. They had to lay out design documents for this thing ten years ago. Take a moment to think about how much your 2-year-old computer sucks the fat one. Now imagine figuring out what a computer ten years from now will be able to do.  These guys had to predict a decade of technological advancements and then make them fucking happen. This is how cutting edge science helps advance consumer technology. It's not necessarily the results of the experiments that make your iPhone load porn 20% more efficiently. It's the creation of these experiments that brings about new manufacturing processes, miniaturization, innovative technology design, and all that jazz. So yeah, these bloody geniuses pulled it off, but by the time it was finished, it was still about two years out of date. Which is why they've shut the bastard down for a year for upgrades.

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Update

So i've been madly procrastinating on updating this shit, so here's a brief summary of what's up. I'm in Cannes. It's pretty damn gorgeous. I'm heading to Barcelona next. I was in Belgium before. Riveted yet? I was in Geneva on the first of July so I'm about 2 weeks behind on posts. Here's a list that will hopefully pressure me into actually doing this when I have free time instead of catching up on YouTube nonsense or aimlessly scrolling through irrelevant Facebook posts. Trumpet sound please Things I will eventually be posting about: The fucking CERN (!!!) Zurich and the crypt of acoustic bliss Things to avoid doing in Amsterdam Antwerp street art and architecture Beatfarm and the Belgian Boogie Good night

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I swear if this fucking tumblr app crashes again I'm done

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Bern/Geneva highlights

1,2,3,7: The architecture. Whodathunk that European cities would have nice buildings. 4: Limp-wristed iron bears

5,6: The main park in Geneva has this fantastic area with a dozen giant chess sets. I also learned how to play the (ancient Chinese?) game of go, which instantly became a favourite (5). It’s a really elegant game, check it out if you enjoy strategy.

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This is some kind of thresher or seed distributor, I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that it will consume your soul the moment you let down your guard.