Cogs can think.

Now this is something I haven’t talked about a whole lot. In fact, few people know of this desire that I have. A desire that came out of nowhere. A desire hindered by several obstacles I won’t be able to overcome.

For reasons unknown to even myself, I’ve gotten this idea in my head that I want to move to New England (CT, perhaps?). I haven’t ever even been there, so this desire makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There are so many obstacles blocking this desire that it makes little sense to even take it seriously - I’m happy where I am now, I get homesick quickly, and moving to the US would mean taking a few rather large steps backwards in civilisation compared to The Netherlands.

Most of all, however, I can’t leave because I’d miss my parents, my best friend, and my other friends. How in the name of fcuk can I leave any of them behind?

This whole thing just doesn’t make any sense. I’m attributing it to a case of late onset idiocy; I never went through a rebel phase when I was a teenager because… Shall we say, more serious concerns demanded my attention between the age of 8 and 20. I guess this is some lame pathetic attempt by my psyche to catch up.

Jesus Fcuk, I can barely spell “Connecticut”.

Outside, The Netherlands has turned white. A sheet of snow covers the country, from the farms in my hick town, all the way to the stately homes near the canals in Amsterdam. Traffic jams are twice as long as usual, public transport has come to a screeching halt, and the newspapers, television news programs, and blogs are filled with pittoresque imagery of people of all ages and descents playing in the snow.

Children are throwing snowballs in my street, dads grudgingly huddle up in their warmest coats, pulling sleighs with cheery children to the park across the street. And women and girls always look better in winter attire. It’s a rare sight, sadly.

Do you know what’s my favourite aspect of ice and snow fever? The fact that nobody is talking about immigration, Muslims, and climate bullshit. This is one of those rare occassions when it suddenly feels good again to be Dutch, when all of a sudden, you no longer have to be ashamed to call yourself “Dutch”.

It’s as if the cold, -10/-15 degrees, also has a much-needed cooling effect on the heads of the people in this country. No longer are we talking about closing the borders, about prohibiting headscarfs, the climate religion, Geert Wilders, and all those other things that shouldn’t be typically Dutch, but sadely enough, are - or better yet, have become.

This is the time when those thoughts of America are nothing but a distant strain of fog.

Sadly, sanity does not last forever. It might last through Christmas - meaning, the first white Christmas since 1981 - but after that, it’s over. We’ll return to criminalising and demonising people simply because of their religion, and we’ll continue to make plans and spend boatloads of money on a problem with no scientific base whatsoever.

I’m only 25, and I already long for the days when we didn’t need snow to be cool.

Finally someone who understands science - something politicians and those climate hoaxers certainly don’t. And dear lord, it has to come from a fiction writer.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

And yeah, I’m getting the defr… Defib… Chest paddle electric things to try and reanimate my blog.

So, I thought I’d give Grand Theft Auto 4 another go after I tore it apart in my review. And you know what?

The game is still a fcuking piece of shit. I have NO fucking idea why the press gave this game so much acclaim.

The missions are all strictly linear, without deviation. This means that the world gets “reset” as soon as you start a mission. This may seem insignificant, but it makes GTA4 nothing more than a stricly linear progression of missions where you are nothing more than a string puppet.

In Saints Row 2 (A MUCH BETTER GAME), missions are not linear. In Saints Row 2, you can be clever. In games like this, you can bet your sweet ass that a simple objective like “kill guy Abc in building Xyz” will end in him escaping the building and driving off, where you have to follow him. I hate sequences like that, so I get clever and use my Latin/Greek-school educated überbrain: in Saints Row 2, I usually parked stolen cars in front of all the exits before the mission started, blocking the thugs from escaping. This way, I could kill them inside, and not be forced into stupid car chase sequences.

In GTA4, by contrast, you sure can park cars in front of all the escape routes, but because everything gets reset to a prescripted setup as soon as you start the mission, it’s all for naught. You are forced to play the mission in exactly the way as the guys at Rockstar set out for you - to the fucking letter. Deviation is not possible.

So, while GTA4 might give you the illusion of being in a sandbox, the sandbox is nothing more but a glorified mission hub where you play a few strings of strictly linear missions where player ingenuity is not welcome. My überbrain gets to hop up and down impatiently, brimming with ideas of more clever ways to finish a mission, but GTA4, the mother of all sandbox crime games, just won’t fcuking let me.

The linearity of missions pokes through in an even more fcuked up way too. I’m currently trying to complete a mission where some guy is holed up with a whole bunch of his lackies. His lackies are easy to kill, but at the end, he escapes the building (HOW FCUKING UNEXPECTED OF YOU, GTA4), and hops into a boat, where you have to follow him on a bike. When I started the mission for the first time, I noticed the boat and realised he’d use it to escape, so against my better judgement, I decided to move the boat into the middle of the ocean, and destroy it. Pointless, of course, as the boat magically reappeared when the bad guy got there.

Anyway, when he gets on the boat, you are supposed to jump on a motorbike and follow him along the coastline. Another linearity limitation: you must follow the exact path as set out by Rockstar. Any deviation from the bike path set out by Rockstar will make you fail the mission. After trying this for the umpteenth bazzilionth time, I got pissed off, and decided to get him before he could enter the boat.

At one point during the chase, he jumps off a building. So, I jump too, and aim to land directly on top of him. He falls down, I get up and think: I got you now you sorry fcuk. I was already waving the flag, but I was too early. As it turns out, you are not allowed to kill him yet. He was invincible. I emptied my entire machine gun on him, but he wouldn’t die. He can’t die. The guys at Rockstar do not want you to be clever or good at the game - they want you to do the fcuking impossible motorbike chase.

And then you fail the mission for the 398573495730495872349075349796760158734674363426th time, and you have to start the entire 20 minute mission all over again because the guys at Rockstar were too busy coming up with ways to make your cousin Roman AS FCUKING ANNOYING AS POSSIBLE to still have time to implement a fcuking CHECKPOINT SYSTEM. On top of that, the bad guys all magically respawn, but your own used ammo and health does not. Meaning my bank account is now empty, so I can’t restock on ammo and health, and there are no other missions currently available to earn any money.

These issues come on top of all the problems I already touched in the review. GTA4 is an utter and total piece of shit - sure, a pretty piece of shit with sparkly diamonds and realistic lighting effects - but a piece of shit still. People are so busy jerking off to the graphics that they forget that the gameplay is so utterly constrained, broken, and idiotic.

Grand Theft Auto 4 is still one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Then again, I’m the idiot here, and Rockstar is laughing its ass all the way to the bank - I paid 64 EUR for this shit.

BioWare talks about Mass Effect 2; Mass Effect 1 was probably my most intense video game experience ever.

Fiona Shepard is ready for the story to continue. BioWare, take your time with ME2. It should be perfect.

I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

[…]

There is another historical base to the Dutch social-welfare system, which curiously has been overlooked by American conservatives in their insistence on seeing such a system as a threat to their values. It is rooted in religion. “These were deeply religious people, who had a real commitment to looking after the poor,” Mak said of his ancestors. “They built orphanages and hospitals. The churches had a system of relief, which eventually was taken over by the state. So Americans should get over ‘socialism.’ This system developed not after Karl Marx, but after Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi.”

The best article I have EVER read about my own country - and it’s written by an American living in Amsterdam. If you ever want to get a good idea of how a modern welfare state has NOTHING to do with “socialism”, this is it.

REALITY CHECK.

Hundreds of thousands of people die because of normal, regular influenza every year.

There have been 8 confirmed deaths because of swine flu.

Conclusion: we are all acting like a bunch of fcuking retards.

Today, my house got broken into. My brand new laptop was stolen, along with my flatscreen TV, digital camera, external hard drive and some clothes. Wanting to drown my sorrows in the Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream in the freezer, I opened the door to find that it too had been stolen. FML.

I love that website.

I’m no longer much of a football fan - I used to be, but I lost interest in the sport right around the time I developed my brain and realised just how much of a sham it all is. And it doesn’t have brooms.

Still, that doesn’t make it any less insanely cool that the club from what is basically my hometown Alkmaar (born, but not raised, did spend most of my teen years there, and my high school is there) is now the national champion - AZ Alkmaar has won the Dutch Premier League championship, breaking the endless hegemony of the “big three”, Ajax, Feyenoord, and PSV Eindhoven. Before this season, AZ was also the last to break that hegemony, in 1981.

AZ is only a very small club, which makes it all the more impressive. I’m very happy for them, as well as all their fans. Congratulations!