I just got back from 2 holidays. Yeah, that’s right. Two! So, I’m pretty tired now, and I need a rest. :P

Two weeks ago I visited my AFS brother in Costa Rica. I’ve been there 7 (or 8) years ago, so we didn’t do too much of the tourist stuff. Hanging out with my brother, his family and friends was super great, so I had a great time. It’s a beautiful (green) country, with lots of sun, beautiful beaches and very nice people. I drank some whiskey, learned a bad word in Spanish, and that’s about it what I’m going to share with you (besides from this picture). :P

This last week I went to Berlin, with Daan and Debora, the folks from Alley. We visited Pictoplasma. You may know it from the books, but it’s also a fantastic festival on character design. It’s 2 days of lectures, screenings and a lot of inspiration. I already chose some of my favourites for this week’s web issue on GizMag.eu. I will post more later, you might also find some links on my Twitter and Tumblr. Berlin is a very cool city by the way, definitely worth a visit, I want to go back already…

Check out Le Macaron! It’s the fresh, new blog of Marie Walgraeve, aka Marmushka. She did an interview in the latest PDF issue of GizMag. And now she interviewed me! On here blog she will talk about what inspires her, and she will post interviews from time to time with other artists. I’m very honoured to be a part of it. So thank you Marie!

Check it out: The (sometimes) bearded man begin the Gizmag – interview with Geert Bollen

When I first heard about Tim Burton directing a new Alice In Wonderland film, I couldn’t wait to see it. So the day finally came, and I was ready to be amazed! I’m happy to let you know that Tim Burton still knows how to create a wonderful world with freaky and funny characters. I watched the film in 3D, but wasn’t really convinced that this was necessary. Yes it’s fun to have characters flying around in the foreground, but it was more distracting me from the story, than it was adding something to it.

It’s the first time I’ve seen Mia Wasikowska playing (as for most people probably), but she’s an excellent Alice! The movie has a brilliant cast. The costumes, special effects and the music, it is all very remarkable. Through the whole movie, I felt a big smile on my face, which didn’t want to go away. :)

The story is based upon the books of Lewis Caroll, but it is not a direct translation to the screen, nor it is a sequel or a remake. It starts of with Alice going back to Underland, where she has been 13 years ago. And she has, well, similar adventures as before. I think it’s a wise decision of Tim Burton not trying to adapt the book to the screen. Characters and scenes are taken from both books, so it gives a new spin to the story and shines a new light on the original. I purchased the books a while ago on eBay, and now I’m even more anxious to start reading them.

Not everyone will be as enthusiastic about this film as me, as I can tell from the user rating on IMDB, but hey, not everyone falls in love with the same girl, Alice, right?

If you are on the Belgian mobile carrier Proximus, and you have HTC Magic, you might want to check out the free application Hello Proximus. I just discovered it on the Proximus website. I’m not sure if it will work on other Android/HTC phones, but it’s a must have. You can monitor your data usage, and you can switch off all your data connections. Which is interesting as I’m going abroad in a few weeks, and I will be able to disable all data connections from all applications.

I also have 3G Watchdog installed on my HTC Magic, which monitors my mobile internet bandwidth usage. It’s weird that both application are giving me different results at the moment. Hello Proximus says I used 58% of my monthly bundle, 3G Watchdog says 65%. I’m not sure which one I should trust, but I’m guessing Hello Proximus is getting it’s info from my data account, so hopefully it is more accurate.

Last night we had a good start with our new expo, Random Order, at Alley. Again we had a full house! It’s always nice to see that so many people like what we do at the gallery, but the free beers probably did their part of the job too. So thank you Vedett. :)

Of course this means we had to say goodbye to Them Or Us… I usually buy something from the expo, so every time I can take a piece of it home for my collection.

For this new expo we invited Erosie, Graphic Surgery, Zward and Bier & Brood. While Zward and Bier & Brood provided us with an awesome display in our window, we had Erosie and Graphic Surgery working on a wall painting. Which you can see in this little video.

More pictures from yesterday will be up soon on our Flickr page.

It has been a busy week. But between all the work and being sick, I luckily found the time to finish up the new GizMag PDF (with one mistake though :) but I managed to correct it). It’s another issue I’m very proud of. It has some great artwork in it, and I’m very happy with all the work the artists put in the interviews again. It’s amazing I’m still having so much fun with it after 2 years. And there are some awesome things coming, just wait and see…

Check out the new issue, download it from GizMag.eu. Or check out the Issuu version.

It’s a screenshot from the terrible film “Surfer, Dude”. The subtitles say “There is phone call for you”. I’m not sure who is doing the translations over at Prime (film channel of Telenet), but I do not think this sign (done by a surfer chick) means there is phone call waiting. Hang loose! :)

Oh, and another one, Prime. Be careful how you shorten titles… certainly for family films…

This is a rather bad, blurred, unfocused snapshot of the upcoming GizMag PDF. I know. But I’m very thrilled about it, it’s going to be super sweet! This picture is part of a work from Simon Kim, he was selected from the Society6 Grant I organized a few months ago. He’s very talented, and I’m very excited to show you his interview. I’m not going to spoil anything, so I’m not revealing any of the other artists. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Belgium can’t handle a little bit of snow.

I knew this was coming, but I still forgot about it yesterday… Exactly 2 years ago (yesterday), GizMag went live with its first web issue! In the past 2 years, the magazine gained more visitors than I could ever imagine, which is awesome! So thanks a lot everyone! I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I am going to brag a bout it. :P The last few months the amount of visitors is slowing growing again, and so are the downloads of the PDF issues. When I first started, I told myself I wouldn’t continue if I didn’t get to 100 visitors a week. And I can assure you that we left this number behind us, even on a daily basis, a long time ago.

I’ve been thinking about trying to do some new things with the magazine. Actually a lot of people asked me for a print version, so who knows, if enough people are interested in it… But I’m not promising anything… I think the hand-written interviews are a big success, I get a lot of positive feedback on it from readers and participating artists, and I’m always amazed with the result. So we’ll keep doing that for sure!

For now, keep a look out for the next PDF issue. Which is going to be super awesome!

Update: I did some more digging in the archives, the website was launched on 08/02/2008! :)