1st December 2023
I was on a trip to Cambodia and when I came home, I decided to search through my collection. My family has a pretty extensive vinyl collection which includes old Southeast Asian music, and I wondered if there was any 60s or 70s music from pre-genocide. I did eventually find some, and some more online as well, which I'll share here with details.
During this time, pop music flourished in the country as the leader of state, and king, Norodom Sihanouk, was a musician and imported music from France and Latin America which then became key to the pop scene in Phnom Pehn.
The following is what I can salvage:
Not much is known about her life or what happened after the Khmer Rouge. We just know that she collaborated with many artists during the 60s and 70s, I don't know when it was made however at least seems to come from a 1973 collaboration with Ros Serey Sothea. The one on spotify is much better quality, however the one below is my recording which is different musically.
Pen Ran is a more famous artist, she has a wikipedia page to her name, with hundreds of songs. She allegedly started her career in 1963, and survived until the Vietnamese invasion in 1978.
Roy Serey Sothea was a very famous artist of her time, having the nickname "Queen of the Golden Voice". She wrote hundreds of songs in Khmer from influences from France, Latin America and eventually British and American when the US broadcasted them on the radio for Vietnam War soldiers. She dissapeared during the genocide, however her older sister Ros Saboreut was an activist that reunited musicians after 1978.
11th June 2023
Did you know that QR codes don't have to be boring black and white? They can be in many different colours! Providing theres contrast! (The following code doesn't lead to a link, it's safe)
Why does it work? Error correction! QRs use a special type of error correction developed in 1960, that allows them to be readable even with a third of it damaged! I will... not show you how to make it, at least here. I link my article here, in the QR code below
Or alternatively, here
And now I assume you've either read it, already know how to, or are too lazy to attempt it, so here's two QR codes for my own site!
5th May 2023
Edit: When I first used this, there wasn't any other way or anyone else talking about free DALL-E, and I was poor af. Now there's Bing Image Creator, so use that .-. I'll leave this as a time capsule
Microsoft Designer is a tool for amateur graphic designers to make simple posters quickly with a format library and stock footage. It also has DALL-E 2 integration, so you can just ask for something and have DALL-E generate three images for you.
Now here's the key to the whole thing... it's free. That's it, just sign up and create the images, doesn't take credits from your account nor is there a limit, or even a DALL-E watermark at all in generated images. Not sure if this is intentional.
Here's a step by step:
1. Go here and log in to your microsoft account while you enjoy the peak of modern web design. It'll prompt you to log in if you try the search bar.
2. You'll come into a screen that will ask you to think of a prompt. This will just attempt to give you a formatted poster for something. Below the text box, there is "Generate Image", click there
3. Just write your DALL-E prompt in whatever text box appears
4. Sometimes you'll have to prompt it twice or thrice for it to generate, but eventually it will, unless theres a problem on your end.
5. Hover over the image and click the zoom icon (may take a few million attempts)
6. Go to the Inspect Element and hover over the image to get the link
7. Go through the link and open inspect element. Remove the width and height attributes and then save the image.
8. Repeat for other images if you want to