The funniest Mass Effect 2 moments. Spoiler alert, obviously.

Tali and Garrus about the good ol’ times.

And the most epic of wins, Joker and EDI during the Collector attack on the Normandy.

The funniest Mass Effect 2 moments. Spoiler alert, obviously.

Tali and Garrus about the good ol’ times.

And the most epic of wins, Joker and EDI during the Collector attack on the Normandy.

I’m in love.

Seriously. What a great song, and blinky-blink, what a beautiful woman. If this doesn’t make you happy, then you might as well kill yourself now, because there’s just no pleasing you.

Class. She has it.

And here we are, the new year barely under way, and the government is about to fall apart. Good times, good times.

After years and years of blocking an investigation into the Dutch involvement in the illegal war in Iraq, our prime minister grudgingly buckled under the pressure early 2009, and ordered an independent investigation, the outcome of which was presented yesterday.

It was a bit of a shock. The report was extremely critical: the war was illegal (and as such, we should have never given our support to the US), and the Lower House was not given all the information the government had access to - which is a major political offence in this country. This harsh outcome came as a total surprise to the government, even though most of the rest of the country already knew this.

The outcome was indeed a shock, but the situation only turned full-scale ugly when the PM held a press conference yesterday, during which he basically declared the entire report to be nonsense. What made it worse was that he spoke for the entire cabinet without actually conferring with the three parties that make up the cabinet. One of those three is extremely pissed off about that.

The problem is that all these three parties are currently extremely unpopular, and as such, they are willing to swallow a whole lot of each other’s stuff to prevent elections from taking place. We’ve had numerous sticky situations, but they were all resolved because of the mutual fear of elections. This time, however, it could actually happen. One of the most despised governments we ever had could fall today.

It’s about fcuking time.

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”.

There’s kind of a running joke between my best friend and I. Whereas Renate is pretty much a tomboy (although you can’t tell by looking at her), I’m more or less the opposite, immortalised by Renate’s brilliant remark: Thom, sometimes, you’re just like a guy.

It really doesn’t help that my favourite TV series of all time is… Gilmore Girls.

It’s the setting, the acting, the colours, the ever-present feeling of absurdity, like everything and everyone in Stars Hollow is slightly off-centre - Burtonesque, really. And, of course, the dialogue, which is so incredibly well-written, witty, well-executed, and filled to the brim with obscure references to films and music nobody knows. It’s brilliant.

Ever since Eugenia started talking about colour grading, I realised that the crew of Gilmore Girls really know their shit in this field. Every setting has its own grading, making colours pop out, or wash out, in sync with the people and topic of the scene. Emily and Richard’s house in Hartford feels slightly washed out, dark, and imposing - like a thick layer of whale blubber draped over the viewer, pretty much the sensation Lorelai has when she needs to go there. Stars Hollow, on the other hand, is packed with colour, making the town feel alive, happy, and safe - the complete opposite.

This extends to the music, which, throughout the entire series, remains mostly simple - acoustic guitar, a base line, and maybe some other minor instruments, augmented by variations of “la la la la” - you get to know this music, and you know what type of scene is about to come after hearing the first few chords.

Then there’s the characters. This series has some of the best characters from TV history. The main characters are all very well rounded, with detailed histories, but on top of that, Gilmore Girls is packed with incredibly funny flat characters that play a big part in that whole absurdity thing I talked about. Taylor, Kirk, Babette, Patty, Michel, the troubadour - these people are caricatures of themselves.

However, the main attraction of this series is, of course, Laura Graham herself. I don’t know where they found her, what she did before being Lorelai, or even what she’s doing now, but she fits this role so well it makes me wonder if it’s even a role at all. I’m generally quite intelligent and understand the difference between role and actor - but in the case of Lorelai, it’s like role equals actress and actress equals role. It’s not an easy one to portray, but she does it so well, so natural, so… Effortlessly - as if Lorelai is based on Laura herself.

Whether she’s happy, sad, or angry - she’s a joy to watch in whatever she does in this series.

And of course, the whole setting of the series is fascinating. Lorelai, from an old, wealthy, and Europeanesque New England family gets pregnant at sixteen, runs off to a small town, away from her old-world restrictive parents, and finds her place there, raising her kid on her own in this town where everybody seems a little off, a little crazy. She vows to do everything different from her mother, but as time goes by, Lorelai is more like Emily than she’d like to admit, and Rory is more like Lorelai than she cares to admit.

Don’t get fooled by the girl designation of Gilmore Girls. This is top-notch television, and you owe it yourself to watch it, if only to experience something truly unique. I’m currently re-watching all the episodes again.

Right now, there is only one person in this country whom I’d accept as prime-minister.

Neelie Kroes. She’s the kind of iron lady we could really use - immense body of experience, stately, intelligent, charming (in a weird way), and she’s dealt with a world far harsher than politics: business. Most of all, however: I don’t think she’d give a rat’s ass about someone’s religion. If you’ve broken the law, she’ll deal with you - Muslim or no. And that’s really the attitude we need over here, because we’re getting ever closer to a new Kristallnacht.

If the VVD announced that they would put her forward as candidate, the VVD would score votes big time. I’ve heard even the most die-hard leftists speak out their preference for Kroes. It’s really too bad that she accepted a new post in the EC. She should be preparing for the PM post now.

Coincidentally, it would be our first woman as PM.

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.

Battlestar Galactica had very, very few flaws in my book, but there was one thing that always bothered me: the planet Caprica. The problem is that whenever someone on the show said “Caprica”, I thought about “paprika”. In English, you say paprika, while in Dutch it’s paprika. In other words, I was reminded of paprika all the time.

And I really fcuking hate paprika.

That was about my only issue with BSG. For the rest, I’m such a huge fan of BSG that if I’d ever run into Ronald D. Moore, I’d probably start licking his face (assuming Nicki isn’t around, of course). You can imagine that I was really looking forward to Moore’s next endeavour, “Caprica”. Paprika Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, taking us back 58 years so we can witness the creation of the first Cylon, and the run up to the first Cylon War.

In fact, I was so looking forward to it that I totally missed the pilot, which aired 8 months ago.

I only found that out this morning through Eugenia’s blog post. Luckily, though, it turned out that the original pilot had some issues, which Moore and his crew fixed in an extended and new cut of the pilot which SyFy put on their website. Of course, me living in the The Netherlands and all, I’m technically not allowed to watch it from here - but as my friends know, I’m a James Deanish bad boy, so I put on my nerd pants and fiddled with my network settings until my computer thought it was living in California.

I would’ve preferred South Carolina, if only to totally screw up SyFy’s marketing department.

In any case, I finished watching the 90 minute pilot episode a few hours ago, and I must admit that I’m positively surprised. I mean, I always had the fear that the BSG universe would fall into the same trap as Star Trek did (i.e., reuse the exact same character archetypes in different settings 6 times in a row), but none of that happened during the pilot episode: this is a different show, with a completely different setting, and with completely different characters.

And Zoe.

Caprica gets major brownie points right from the start because its actors act natural around all the fancy-pants stuff they have around them. In most science fiction shows, including Star Trek, actors act as if they were present-day humans flung into a modern and advanced world: they explain the workings of tools and equipment ad nausea, which is totally frakking unbelievable and hinders immersion.

You don’t go around staring in bewilderment at your computer or TV every day, now, do you?

The series gets even more brownie points for having that BSG feel when it comes to camera work and music. It’s different, but instantly recognisable to BSG lunatics like myself. Of course, this being a Moore show, the religious theme is present (which I find awesome, as I’m not an arrogant look-at-me-being-all-non-religious-while-at-the-same-time-believing-the-climate-hype type), but the element of racism is present too, and both feel very well done. The special effects are awesome too, and the first ever Centurion is just plain frakking scary.

The only real problem I found was that cheap moment where Daniel Graystone supposedly lost the data of his daughter after loading it into the Centurion. This made no frakking sense whatsoever, as he should’ve kept a backup, and as a major technology dude, he probably had, too. Moore could’ve come up with a more believable scheme here - maybe the Centurion could’ve gone bonkers first, destroying the equipment in the room. The way it happened now felt like cheap cop-out.

Overall though, I most certainly will be watching from January 22, 2010, and onwards. If only to see more Zoe.

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.

You can’t be satisfied with something just because it’s great, it has to be what you intend to do.

Fiona on the original Brion version of Extraordinary Machine. She loves it, but it just wasn’t what she wanted it to be.

I want to make people happy.

Fiona on why she makes music.

My Twitter followers (haha) already could’ve seen it on my Twitter account, but I’m “officially” quitting Apple (just like Adam).

I will no longer buy any of their products. I will no longer use any of their computers, mobile devices, or software.

Some Mac zealots on OSNews often think I’m an anti-Apple zealot, but I’m not. I like Apple’s products. I’ve owned (and own) a lot of Apple products. I bought my first iMac somewhere in 2004, and ever since, I’ve had numerous Macintosh machines in my home. iBooks, PowerBooks, PowerMacs, iMacs, you name it. I’ve bought lots and lots of their software. I’ve been to their press events. As OSNews’ managing editor, I have a review agreement with them.

But I’ve had enough. They treat their developers like ass. They lock down their platform to insane levels. They treat their users like shit. They actually try to enforce their silly, unlawful EULAs.

I still think Apple makes the best general purpose laptops. I still think the iMac is the best desktop money can buy (I bought one for my parents only a few months ago). I still think Mac OS X is a nice - albeit highly overrated - piece of software. Oh, and iWork is still fcuking awesome. But I cannot use their products knowing their anti-consumer and anti-developer attitude.

Apple is rotten. To the core.

It takes blood, sweat, and tears to build an image, Apple. It takes only a second to tear it down. It’s the geek crowd that got you where you are today. Lose them, and you will lose everything.

I must say that it does kind of sting a little bit. The King Of Pop is dead.

Yes, he became a weirdo freak, but he didn’t exactly have an easy life. That’s no excuse, but it is important context.

The world lost one of its greatest artists last night.