Rotwang

If you're not already familiar with the many subgenres that exist, you should watch Ormion's Introduction to Psytrance video series. Personally I recommend you check out Kindzadza.

It still is. Right, and the sequel got an HD remake in 2011. I don't know why they didn't remake the first one, it's more deserving (though arguably a remake would be completely redundant).

Repton rules! I wish they'd remake Repton 3 for smartphones. Anyway, my top 6 (because I was doing a top 5 and then I thought of another game that needed to be included but didn't want to get rid of any that were already there) games would probably go something like this: 1: MDK 2: Half-Life / Half-Life 2 3: Batman: Arkham Asylum 4: Zelda: Link's Awakening 5: Painkiller 5: Wario Land I'd like to talk a bit about MDK, and why it's so great. This game came out in 1997, back when many shooters were still using 2.5D graphics such as the Build Engine, and those that didn't generally had dull-coloured worlds with small, repetitive textures. MDK, on the other hand, looked amazing. True 3D, colourful graphics, and vast levels with a huge amount of variety. And it wasn't just technically impressive, it still looks good today. Have a look at this mirror room, for example. How awesome is that background texture? Imagine seeing that room in 1997. MDK effectively pre-empted all the things that are good about modern games, and none of the things that are bad. Levels didn't seem like levels; they seemed like real places with a purpose, albeit some strange alien purpose. It had a sniper rifle before Goldeneye, complete with bullet cam. Music would fade in and out between sections rather than just be constant throughout a level. It had localised damage models (you could shoot off enemies' heads and in some cases their weapons too). It had enemies with personality, who would interact with one another before they saw you, and would taunt you if they thought they were safe. It had doppler-shifted sound effects. It had variety - puzzle sections, platforming sections, vehicle sections and more. It had some of the most unique items ever (e.g. there were no keys, and doors were instead opened with the world's smallest nuclear explosion, complete with tiny mushroom cloud). It had background detail and set pieces galore. And it had too many memorable sections to count. It didn't have long, tedious cutscenes, or annoying dialogue, or chest-high walls, or limited ammo which need to be continually reloaded, or a ploddingly realistic running speed, or savepoints. I love this game so damn much.

Thanks.

New Overdream track? Cool, listening now.

Wherever you want. Trusting your judgement is much easier than me trying to figure out how to categorise a bunch of releases I've never heard. On previous occasions the same release has been voted for in both uptempo and downtempo categories; this isn't a problem. Yes. No, post as many or as few as you want. At most 10 votes per poster in each category will be counted.

very good point. the aesthetics of "dark" are broader than some pure darkpsy fans might think The aesthetics of darkpsy are broader than some darkpsy haters might think.

I guess in the case of vinyl there just isn't the market for it. CD mixing soft/hardware exists so vinyl isn't required for DJs any more, so the question is why is vinyl still thriving in other genres? I think there are a number of reasons for that; there are audiophiles who insist they sound better, or at least sound different; there are some artists (e.g. Autechre) who have a sizeable fanbase who are willing to buy every available format to hear the difference, own the artwork or just for the sake of completeness, but psytrance doesn't have a sufficiently large and dedicated fanbase for that. And I think that there are some genres where vinyl is just fetishised because of its historical role in dance music, but psytrance fans don't really do that either.

Done.

It's time to vote for your favourite uptempo and downtempo psy albums of 2013. You can vote for up to 10 albums in each category; your first will be awarded 10 points, your second 9, and so on. Cast your vote by replying to this thread with your votes written in the following format (the label is optional, but if you can be bothered to put it in it will make counting votes easier): Uptempo: 1: Artist - Title (label) 2: Artist - Title (label) 3: Artist - Title (label) 4: Artist - Title (label) 5: Artist - Title (label) 6: Artist - Title (label) 7: Artist - Title (label) 8: Artist - Title (label) 9: Artist - Title (label) 10: Artist - Title (label) Downtempo: 1: Artist - Title (label) 2: Artist - Title (label) 3: Artist - Title (label) 4: Artist - Title (label) 5: Artist - Title (label) 6: Artist - Title (label) 7: Artist - Title (label) 8: Artist - Title (label) 9: Artist - Title (label) 10: Artist - Title (label) You have until the end of March to vote. If you change your mind after voting, don't make a new post - just edit your existing post. Also, if you reply to a post in this thread then please remove any votes from the quoted material (I will be copying and pasting the thread into an automatic vote-counting doohickey, so if votes appear twice they may be counted twice).

Sorry, nobody's got round to starting the thread yet. I'm at work right now but if nobody else has done so by the time I get home I'll do it later.

Sufi music, you say? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVCmSBuZFQ0

Could that be because it is Avangaro?

I don't know what they are, but are you sure they're from 97 and 99? They sound later.

But Amazon MP3, iTunes and Beatspace Digital all say Avangaro.

Pretty much, if my layman's understanding is correct. But the cool/scary thing is that your brain hides the moment when your eyes were out of focus by retroactively replacing it with the image it sees when the clock comes into focus. In other words your brain is continually lying to you about the passage of time. More here.

Here's a fun perception of time experiment you can do on your own: find a clock that counts seconds. Look away from it, at something that's a different distance so that your eyes refocus, then look back at the clock. If you do this a few times, you'll probably notice that sometimes the second hand/digits seem to hang on the same value for slightly longer than a second, as if the clock only starts ticking after it notices that it's being watched. Do you know why? Hint:

Nobody seems to know for sure whether that Parasense album is called Avangaro or Avangard.

So then do the experiment and post the results.

If the lens has been wiped since last year then it will have different surface ridges which will give rise to differently-shaped halos around lights. You can test this - find a cloth that's designed for cleaning glasses or lenses (don't use a regular cloth or tissue, you could damage the lens) and give it a wipe, then take some more photos. You'll probably find that the stroke of light will have changed shape again. I predict that if you wipe the lens from side to side rather than up and down then the stroke will end up vertical (though it may not if e.g. there are vertical ridges in the lens due to the manufacturing process or something). But you reject perfectly adequate explanations based on today's science. That's not open-mindedness, it's just a different kind of closed-mindedness.

Perhaps because the lens has been touched in the time between when the two sets of photos were taken? Anyway, I thought your point was that the light being bent towards you from the region where lines appear either side of the lamps was a real phenomenon, rather than just the result of lens flare, wasn't it? But if that were the case then why would the lines become vertical when you photographed them in portrait mode?

Which is what I predicted in post #27 based on my guess that the lines were caused by a smear on the lens. So it sounds like the evidence suggests that the smeared lens theory is more likely than the psychic motherboard theory, doesn't it?

No, I'm not saying that. The way it works, very roughly, is that General Relativity treats spacetime as a four-dimensional curved differentiable manifold. Time is just one of the dimesions. The manifold ends at the Big Bang, as far as we know. I'm afraid not, I learned about it from lectures as well as a few books, but I can't think of a single book that I'd really recommend as an introduction.

Because "before" usually means at an earlier time, but if time started with the Big Bang then there is no earlier time than the Big Bang.