this weekend, i attended revision, a demoparty. revision is the successor of breakpoint, which in turn is the successor of mekka & symphosium. these events were held over easter from 1997 on, and i attended a few of them (between 2001 and 2005).
after the end of the breakpoint era last year, the revision was moved from bingen to saarbrücken, germany. a city i haven’t been in for quite some time. the party was held in the e-werk, an old power plant.

the weather was really good, it was sunny most of the time except a thunderstorm one evening and a few rain drops. this time, i stayed in a hotel and didn’t sleep under the tables, which resulted in much more sleep for me, except that breakfast at the hotel was pretty early compared to the times i usually ended up in bed asleep. but at least i got decent sleep and didn’t look like a zombie after two days.
it was really nice to meet some friends again, most of them after a long time, in particular trigger, kojote, t$, dynamite, and some more.

the following photos show a bit of what was happening. the first and third photo shows people watching a compo (unfortunatley you cannot see anything on the bigscreen, otherwise everything else would have not been really visible), and the fourth shows the underground hallway to the restrooms.

one afternoon i went on a walk with kojote, looking at some interesting buildings in the neighborhood. here are some impressions:

overall, i have to say that it was partially exhausting, but nonetheless another nice experience. the next time i’ll just stay some of the days, i guess. maybe i’ll drop by at the buenzli this year, since it is not very far from here.

here’s my project 52 shot for the fourteenth week. the topic was

wetterfrosch.

this topic was harder than it sounded. i don’t have any frog available (to honor the german word “weather frog”, often used for weatherman), so i had to use something different. during the last weeks, i had some ideas, threw most of them away. eventually, i had the next two project 52 photos done, while this one was still missing. then, while attending revision this weekend, i made some nice shots, some of them i’ll upload later. one of these was a nice pic of some dandelions, without a macro though (that would have been even better), which looked rather nice in the end. so i chose that one for the fourteenth week, as the weather this weekend was really fantastic, and for me the dandelions represent good weather. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, iso 100, aps-c.

this saturday, i happend to end up in herford enjoying the beautiful, almost too warm weather. in herford, we first took a look at the marta museum. it’s architecture design is pretty interesting, except for the back side, which is white, flat and absolutely boring. we didn’t went into the exhibition though, just looked at the public parts of the building.

after that, we walked a bit around the historic center, which has some really nice buildings, and had some ice cream later on.

today, we visited a water reservoir not far from here where we used to make bike tours or just pay visits to when i was really young. here are some impressions.

today i was in our local church here in seppenrade to take a photo of the crib, which will be removed the next days due to planned constructions. it was rather dark inside, which resulted in some nice photos:

a happy new year to all of you!

today i did a walk outside, enjoying the beautiful snowscape with a litte bit of sun.

tuesday night, i attended a concert by the chilenian progressive doom metal band mar de grises, the islandic viking metal band sólstafir, and the finnish death doom metal band swallow the sun, held in the matrix in bochum. i went to this for two reasons: first, to see swallow the sun another time; last time i saw them was last year before christmas in leipzig. the second reason is mar de grises. i was really glad to finally have a chance to see them.
i arrived slightly late, due to bad weather, which was no problem since the concert was opened by two local bands i didn’t really wanted to see. the first one seemed to be a doom band, and i didn’t really like the second band’s music style. they both were ok, but i would have rather not seen them and heard mar de grises playing longer ;-) both opening bands were pretty much ok though, compared to many other openers i’ve seen so far…
while the openers were playing, i checked out the merchandizing booth. there was nothing new of interest in the swallow the sun section, so i inspected the mar de grises section. they had a special edition of draining the waterheart (including a 16 minute bonus track called unconscious passenger), the new album, some t-shirts, and two albums from other chilenian bands, one of them a funeral doom band called lethargy of death, a project of one of the band members. i bought the digipack, the new album, the lethargy of death album as well as the last available unconscious passenger t-shirt. some money invested well, i hoped. (and so far, i’m right about this :-) )
after the two openers, mar de grises started playing for 45 minutes. i was in the front row, which was no problem since the location wasn’t exactly stuffed, and nobody tried to be at the very front. in fact, i was like two meters away from the stage. unfortunately, the audio quality was really bad. i don’t know whose fault this was, if it was the mixing, the location, or whatever, but it was just bad. i was happy that i knew many of the songs they played, so i knew what it was supposed to sound like, so it was more a problem for sólstafir, since i heard them the first time…
well. despite the poor sound quality, mar de grises‘ performance was great. i really like this band. following mar de grises, sólstafir entered the stage. at that point, i wasn’t feeling very well, thanks to all the fucking bastards smoking inside the location. you can’t really enjoy a concert with itching eyes and having a headache. i really miss the nonsmoker protection laws i experienced in canada and other parts of europe…
i didn’t like sólstafir‘s performance too much, but i’m not sure whether this is just related to the horrible air and the awful sound quality, or if it’s their music. some time ago i listened to a couple of songs of them, and i don’t remember being disappointed back then. so maybe i have to give them another try…
finally, swallow the sun started playing. they played songs from all over their albums, which was really nice. some of my favorites, such as the giant, were played as well!
unfortunately, it seemed that the crowd got thinner and thinner. when they went off the stage before the encore, luckily enough people were still there to make some noise. they came back pretty fast, before the people started making noise and launching an awkward silence. they played descending winters, and after that the concert was over.
well. if the sound and air quality would have been better, this concert would have been really great. but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case… (but that’s not the bands’ fault…)

in the beginning of april, we did a trip to the bastei. i never got around uploading some of the photos. so, finally, here are a few impressions.

here are some impressions from a stop-over in schirgiswalde.