[You] begin to fast-forward the video at 4x speed, then 8x, then 16x, then 32x – and you realize, with a collective gasp, that that droning sound in the background is not a drone at all but a piece of music played slow to the point of unrecognizability. It’s Beethoven, say, or Jimi Hendrix.

Someone is playing incredibly slow music, like a kind of acoustic glacier, inside the building. It’s avant-garde Muzak.

You go a little crazy upon discovering this, however, and begin to make field recordings all over Manhattan, recording drones. You stand in alleys, beneath trees in Central Park, and inside abandoned warehouses, capturing ambient background sounds on tape. You visit the airport, deliberately seek out traffic jams, and illegally access basements on the Upper East Side.

I love stuff like this. As the blog says: Architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures.

(Via John August.)

The people behind AIGameDev.com, Alex and Petra Champandard, are good friends of mine and live about 200 meters from my apartment in Vienna. They spent a lot of time over the last few months preparing for the launch, and it became harder and harder to go for lunch or ice cream with them… Not even tea with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies managed to draw them out in the last two weeks :). But I am highly impressed by what they have done so far, and I wish them a ton of luck!

At the time I am writing this, you have only 21 hours left to join: After that, no new members for a month or two. And prices will go up, so run!

Anyway, go check them out if you want to read about game design from people in the trenches. And if you like what you’re reading, you can see if they have open vacancies on the same site! Smart.

Joerg Plewe currently is a senior Java and GUI developer and has been in many areas of IT ranging from embedded programming to bioinformatics and games. Joerg has studied physics and used to work with languages like C/C++, Forth, Lisp, Assembly and others in all kinds of environments.

That may be so, but I know Joerg Plewe as the programmer I used to work with over 10 years ago at Blue Byte Software. He is a very serious programmer, and almost talked me into developing an interest in FORTH. The world might have been very different if he had succeeded.

He has a blog over at java.net where he mainly talks about Java (duh), but also about physics/dynamics stacks and cloud rendering.

He is also one of the key people behind Flying Guns, an open source distributed 3D simulation framework (aka 3D action flight sim). It is based on a framework for distributed simulations, all written in Java. Pretty impressive!

(Thanks, Tobe!)