TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

According to this report, Holy Double Take, Batman! Here Comes a New Caped Crusader by Marc Malkin of E! Online , Armie Hammer is not only set to play Batman in the upcoming Justice League movie but he's already tried on the suit! I'm very surprised that Batman on Film hasn't reported this as yet (or if they have I can't find it). Seems to me they're spending too much time reporting on every other superhero comic movie and have taken their eye off the ball of late - it's BATMAN ON FILM Jett!. (Seriously. After all the hype leading up to The Dark Knight there's very little post TDK commentary to speak of). Anyhow, BOF has posted a lot of discussion about the proposed Justice League film, most of which suggests the project is still very much an idea that hasn't really even been properly committed to paper. They've speculated about the appearance of Batman in this film and whether the likelihood of two big screen Batman's in cinemas at about t...

Being a Mashable subscriber it has been hard to avoid the stories of protest about the new look Facebook . Apparently a hoard of screaming masses didn't like the new look and were widely drumming up support for the old look to at least remain available. I didn't voluntarily change my Facebook account to the new look since I read it would eventually be changed over for me (why do something yourself if you don't have to). Today I logged into my Facebook account to be presented with the new look profile page and here is my perfectly blunt, no holds barred reaction... All you protesting, squealing, whiny hoards are a bunch of dumb ass, change strangling, time wasters who should remove yourself from the internet immediately as progress and change are obviously too confronting for your nice little comfort bubbles. Seriously. Are you all kidding me? A new, better organised and easier to navigate page is what you were all up in arms about? Facebook profiles were a confu...

The Traveling Painting is a project started by YouTube user, DaliGoddess . It's a fairly simple idea. A single painting is sent around the world, from artist to artist, with each artist adding and filming their contribution then posting their video as a response to the original 'Bon Voyage' to the painting video . A year since the painting began its journey it arrived on my doorstep here in Australia after being sent by a fellow Aussie and expatriate from Norway. Below is my contribution to the project, which I'm posting here because I think it's one of the better videos I've made in recent times. Largely helped by a great old song which I've been itching to use ever since I came across it in the public domain quite some time ago. If you'd like to know more about the Traveling Painting project then these are the all important links to follow: DaliGoddesses YouTube Channel . Become involved: I Want it, I've Got it Video. DaliGoddesses Traveling Paint...

I want to see Blu-ray die or at least see no other newer digital video/storage format succeed Blu-ray. It's time the consumer spoke and said the current format is more than enough capacity and delivers more than enough video quality. Blu-ray, like regular DVD , is a digital format, this means, in its self, it doesn't deliver any better quality. The use of a blue-violet laser, as opposed to a red laser, enables data to be packed more tightly onto the disk giving anywhere up to 500GB of storage capacity . Very attractive when you consider regular DVD have a maximum capacity of 8.54GB. (Both format capacities are achieved via 'layering'). High Definition (HD) video is the format delivered on Blu-ray disks. Currently DVD delivers Standard Definition (SD). HD offers five times the definition of SD making the picture incredibly sharp with vivid colors. It also offers access to substantially better audio than SD. Blu-ray offers quite a few other enhancements for video but the...

I don't expect the honor of being a top 40 video producer on TubeMogul to last long but being number six on the list, even briefly, is nice. TubeMogul.com is where I and other far more viewed video producers upload our videos for distribution to multiple video sites across the web. They've just added a new feature called Market Place which is described as a dating site for video producers . Essentially it gives you a TubeMogul profile page complete with your viewership stats across all the sites you distribute to. Anyhow for a brief second I was the number six video producer on the site but in the space of half an hour had slipped to eight. My total views across all my video sites is still well under the one million mark so I'll be falling like a brick off the bottom of this list. However, momentarily, I was number six all time - which is kind of cool.

Remember the humorous saying; stay alert, the world needs more lerts ? I recently started using Google Alerts and I'm beginning to think this is one lert the world (or at least me) can do without. The purpose of Google Alerts is to enter any word, words or phrases into the alert box and Google Alerts will inform you every time the words appear somewhere new on the internet. I have two alerts set up. One is meant to inform me everytime my real name, David Arandle , is used online whilst the other informs me everytime the phrase, The Extraordinary Tourist, is used. The idea being that I can be alerted when people online write about me (because as a professional artist knowing who's writing about you can be a very valuable marketing tool). The problem being that, ever since I set these alerts up, Google Alert has set about informing me of things that, not only did I already know about but also things that I actually set up and wrote myself. For example, recently Google Alerts in...

The final paragraph, about artist obituaries, in a recent blog post, Google-eyed , by Hazel Dooney in her Self vs Self blog set my mind to thinking in the warped way that it does. First the paragraph in question: As anyone who reads Self Vs. Self regularly would know, I'm a total media tart. I embrace any opportunity to promote my art and myself. Barney writes: " I subscribe to Brendan Behan’s view. He famously said, 'There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary'." I wouldn't even draw the line there . I can imagine the obituary of some poor starving artist including a paragraph along the lines of: "In loving memory of __________. If you had just bought his art while he was alive he might have been able to afford the expensive, life saving, medical attention that he urgently required. Unfortunately it was not to be and he died penniless. Buy his art you bastards so we can afford to pay the funeral bills!!" More fun than obi...

I've just installed Google's new browser, Google Chrome , and I can safely say that this is a browser that had me converted at 'Hello'. To be more specific I was hooked as soon as I fired up the browser for the first time and saw the simple, clean design - before I'd even used it. I decided to write this blog post about 15-20 minutes into my exploring Chrome's features because I'm convinced that Chrome is a better browser than Firefox 3 (the browser I was previously using) which positively looks so 'last year' now. The transition from Firefox to Chrome was almost seamless too. Other than having to relogin to various sites, all my bookmarks, passwords etc. have been imported into Chrome. I'm not going to do any kind of review on all the features of Chrome other than to say, finally, someone's realized that the internet is all about the content and not the browser. A browser should be fast and intuitive. Chrome is both. If you need to know more...

Promoted as the largest rural and agricultural show in South Australia the Gawler Show is always worthy of an afternoon of wandering around - perhaps a full day if you and/or the kids are into sideshow rides and games too. Gawler is my home town, this is my local show. It's run over two days on a weekend (this year August 30-31). There are three things that attract me to these kinds of shows: The art, craft, and other judged competitions The On Stage Entertainment The fireworks. I've never been that big a fan of amusement rides and games largely because they seem over priced and I succumb easily to motion sickness (particularly on things that go round and around). I'm not much into the animals either, cows, sheep, horses etc. though these are a big part of why the show even exists in the first place. (if they had sheep dog trials I'd add them to my must see list - working dogs are just incredible). Winning the art competition is more about the glory than the priz...