Accidentally added Chemical T

The 6,5

2011-07-07T02:08:00.002+02:00

Here's my go at a literary translation Dutch to English. I received a 6,5/10 for it.
Is that reasonable? You be the judge.

Cheers,

Obama Speech Analysis

2011-05-11T00:07:00.007+02:00

I took the liberty of analyzing the first four paragraphs of Obama's speech on Osama's death. Since the presentation of my findings has been held yesterday, I can now share the results of my analysis with the world. Enjoy.

Oh and here's another finished project I've been working on yesterday and the day before. Enjoy that too.

Cheers,

Welcome in Amsterdam

2011-04-27T23:49:00.004+02:00

The sign, sigh.

I wonder how much effort the translators put into this. All I can say is the following: dear cab drivers, either have a linguist take a look at your concept translation, or lrn2english yourselves. It is obvious that these people were thinking in Dutch during the compiling of this English text. There are a lot of dutch-isms.

From top to bottom:
- Welcome TO Amsterdam,
- On the right you can find the official Amsterdam Central railway station taxi rank/the official taxi rank of Amsterdam Central railway station,
- Maximum or max flag down rate or (less common and natural) flagdown rate,
- Decimals are indicated with periods in English, not with commas. Prices/distances should be (€)X.XX and not (€)X,XX. At least they are consistent with this mistake.
- Make sure the taxi meter is running,
- Maximum tariffs or (yet again, more accurately) rates by July 1 (or July 1st),
- As a customer you may decide yourself which taxi you are going to take/you want to take,
- You are not obligated to take the first taxi in the array/line-up. (I personally would only use row for a queue of people or when it's not about waiting for turns.)
- When present, the taxi host can assist...
- Personally I wouldn't use 'Journey guaranteed' since journey, in my point of view, indicates it's going to take awhile and involves long distances. Aside from that, without the word 'is' in between the subject and past participle, it sounds more like a slogan than a promise or guarantee (haha). Instead I would have made the title say 'Your ride is guaranteed' or 'Rides are guaranteed'.
- Taxis, obviously. Also, I'd use 'allowed' instead of 'permitted', feels more natural.
- Personally, I'd use license plate instead of licence plate. Technically licence is not incorrect—it being Canadian—but it looks like crap.
- Call the National Taxi Complaints Office at/on 0900 202 18 81. Saying 'call me at telephone number' is rather redundant. Hey, look! They wrote "0.13 euro" correct!
- More information regarding traveling by taxi in Amsterdam...
- You can call the ATCB at...
- ... or visit either of the ATCB offices at Amsterdam Central on platform two or outside in the Noord-Zuidhollands koffiehuis.

Now, when can we expect the reprint?

Cheers,

Safety Mechanism

2011-04-12T06:12:00.007+02:00

A speech I wrote, explaining why bearing arms should never be legalized in The Netherlands.

Click on the picture for the speech.

Bad shape

2011-04-03T22:24:00.010+02:00

Passing the 4.2km mark.

Today was the first day in weeks I took part in a fitness run. The last time I ran was the same run, only during winter. That time was all but pleasant. For good reason I started calling this particular fitness run the "Trauma Run". Together with my brother, and this time with proper food in my stomach, I gained enough courage for a reattempt.

Looking back, it is noticeable that it's been too long since I went for a run. Even after putting aside that I had only slept for 3.5 hours thus not being in optimal condition, I'm still not amazingly pleased with the results. To put it like I did on my Twitter, "I'm in peace with it."
Fact: I'm in a worse shape than a year or two ago. During secondary school I ran around about 3km in 12 minutes. More recently I remember running 7.5km without walking. Today was only 5km and I walked once for about 50 meters. In the end it almost took me a staggering 27 minutes from start to finish. It's no surprise though if you think about it, considering that nowadays I can travel by train or bus for free, I eat too little and the only exercise I weekly participate in is bowling.

I want to regain a proper shape. That, and I want to get a better grasp at running. By a better grasp I mean not just technically, but psychologically too. For instance: I'm not sure whether my arm movement is proper and whether my steps are the right size. For a fact I know that I'm losing the running mind-game. Halfway through after suddenly being able to see far ahead, I broke down and had to walk for a bit. At the finish however, I still had plenty of strength for a final sprint. To me that simply strikes as odd, and for me to become better at running, I need to gain experience.

I consider this fitness run to be a benchmark. From now on I have told myself that I will exercise more. Hopefully I can once in awhile do this with some friends of mine too. In a couple of months I shall look back at this run and compare the results and the feeling during running.

Yes, that's a trash bag.

Cheers,

Comeback?

2011-04-02T22:54:00.005+02:00

I'm the guy left.

It's been a really long while now, hasn't it? One year and several months ago, I wrote my last blogpost about a day of internship at my primary school back then. Time has passed and a LOT of things have changed. If I were to sum it up in one sentence, it would have to be that I have matured. Let's talk about this maturing a bit more into detail.

First of all and most shockingly, I quit PABO (after successfully finishing first year). I do no longer wish to be an elementary school teacher. In fact, the year at PABO made me realize how much I actually dislike children. They yell, they are unintelligent, they're reckless and most of all; childish. All issues I cannot stand. Don't get me wrong, I can be childish too sometimes, but in my case, it's in a frequency that is still cute or fun, and not in an annoying one. Now that is said, PABO has done a very important job; it forced me to grow up and act like an adult... and I have, ever since. I (for) now study Language and Communcations at the University of Amsterdam. This new course has been very depressing to me, and I fear it's only a matter of time I quit this course too.
Second of all, I am more into anime than ever before. Not necessarily watching anime -I still tend to fire up a game instead of an episode-, but I work for a non-profit organization (stichting Tsunacon/Tsunacon Foundation) promoting the modern Japanese culture, a.k.a. anime and manga. I am one of the managers there. The last big event that was held by stichting Tsunacon was the 2011 anime convention at Sliedrecht, where we managed to entertain over a thousand visitors for about ten hours straight.
Thirdly, and it's not a joke: I have a girlfriend. I have had a girlfriend since January 18th this year (officially that is). It might sound obvious, but I love her and she fits me like one side of a zipper does with the other. Other than getting a girlfriend, I made a couple of new friends and have become closer with my true friends circle.
Fourthly, did I ever mention Woopyland? Well, I now run that joint. The old "King Woopy" left after losing his interest, and gave me full admin rights. At first it was a tough going running Woopyland. A lot had to be done, but I couldn't do any of it. After hiring Chris (yes, the one I visited in Texas years ago), Woopyland V3 development had started. Hopefully, before the summer vacation, the two of us have developed and polished V3 and will have released it.

The list goes on. Like I said, a lot has changed since my last blog article. In the next couple of blog articles, I will probably discuss more changes in my life. Otherwise, you'll notice what I'm into nowadays simply by reading what I talk about. For now. let me help you out just a little bit...

What made me write this blog article? One of the main reasons would be that I've had plenty of spare time recently, and am in a phase I want to share my vision on stuff happening in my life, and perhaps educate my readers a bit while doing so. Since one of my good pals Leofox started his blog, I became interested in continuing mine too.

For continuous updates on my life in Dutch, visit my Twitter.

Cheers,

A day in the life of an intern-teacher

2009-10-14T13:37:00.003+02:00

Intern's log, Earth date October 13th, 2009:
I arrived on time today, but didn't do a lot before class started at about 8:35. I noticed that H and I were the only two interns around, A - the usual third intern - wasn't there. When the class was finally quiet, they were given the scheduled language test. During the explanation and Q&A I was sitting at the instruction table the entire time, watching how, but more important, what questions M - the teacher - replied to. One of the kids asked what 'dingy' (groezelig) meant in a question where they had to sort words from weak to strong. I was surprised to hear that word in a test for third grade, because honestly, I didn't know what it meant either. M however, who is a bit older and wiser, explained what it meant to the kids and with that, spoiled a bit of the answer already.

After they had completed the test, I collected them and started 'grading' them along with H. The kids started doing arithmetical calculations together with M. Once again, during the explanation I sometimes dropped my green pen used for grading and paid attention to how she helped the class with the exercises she had given them. After paying a bit of attention, I continued grading the tests and was surprised at some of the mistakes kids made! I mean, there have been made plenty of non-surprising mistakes, like wrongly-written words (missing a consonant 'aleen' or having one vowel too much 'leege'), but there were also surprising mistakes, purely made because of lacking concentration and/or attention span. Even with the explanation of the word 'dingy' (groezelig), spoiling its place in the list, some of the kids misplaced it, and put it after 'gross' (smerig), which was in fact the strongest word in the list!
Another example of stupid mistakes were the wrongly contradicted words in the 'write the contradicting word' exercise, simply because the kids didn't read the sentence properly. Instead of writing 'light jacket' (lichte jas), some kids wrote 'white jacket' (witte jas), simply because they read the word zware (heavy) wrong, and mistook it for 'zwarte' (black). It wouldn't have been a surprising mistake if they had to rush finishing the test, but they had all the time of the world!
Still though, I can't fully blame the kids for not acing the test (some kids however, did!). The formulation of some of the questions was horrid. During the grading, I was angry at the answer booklet for saying that the first part of zonneschijn (sunshine), zonne was. Now I got angry at that because if I were the one making that test, I would consider the first part of a word, the first syllable, making the answer zon. Same goes for voetbalschoen (football shoe). Apparantly the first part of that was supposed to be voetbal. Isn't voet (foot) by itself a word too, and the first syllable for that matter? Rather strange formulation if you ask me.

After the class finished the mental calculations, the kids had to complete their day tasks on their own. The teacher went to the hallway together with a couple of pupils to practice the tables (or whatever), leaving H and me with an, at first, quiet class. When I noticed the class started to lose its concentration, I started walking around to answer questions and keep the kids quiet. It mostly went fine at the beginning, but there were a couple of kids that have a hard time concentrating: F, P, S and SS. At first, I just asked them to keep quiet and to work for themselves, but when they still had bursts of non-coneentration (leading to shouting and stuff) I decided to sit next to P and S, to keep them quiet and working. On a certain point it started to work, and I made a deal with P and S that they would try their best to stay focused. I have to say it worked rather well for quite some time! Same goes for F, when I talked to him a bit and told him to work by himself, he soon was little annoyance to me and the rest of the class.
SS was a whole challenge by itself. After telling her she had to work quietly and not talk to the rest of her group, I started a conversation with her, saying things I shouldn't have as well. For instance, I told her I tried my best to keep the others quiet as well, and that I am a teacher for sake of the kids, not for my own. In her eyes I saw that she didn't liked the conversation (I honestly thought that she wanted to cry) and decided to talk even more 'recognisable'. I made her replace her table and for a moment, thought the talking worked. After four minutes or so I noticed that she had replaced her tables again and started feeling irritated myself... this waswhen the teacher walked in and started talking to the entire class.
During the conversation (which was about me and how I'm a first year student), I slowely realised I must've done something wrong for her to have that kind of a conversation:

You kids must know that Ifar is studying to become a teacher just like me, and is here to be taught by teaching. This goes well for most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't go well as well. We've had this conversation before, but I want you to always remember he's there for you.

When the conversation was over and the kids were eating, I got one of the toughest feedbacks I've had during my entire period as an intern.

The reason why some of the kids weren't listening to you that well was because your relation wasn't good enough with them. You have to work hard on creating a good relationship with the pupils. You can only demand things like silence from kids if they feel like you're their teacher and accept you as one.
I saw you had trouble keeping SS quiet. What you did wrong is to tell him you tried your best to keep the kids quiet, but that he had to be quiet for it to work as well. This is talking about how you experience things as a teacher. If you tell the kids this when you don't have a good-enough-relationship with them, they take no message of it. Especially SS is one of those kids that doesn't simply take you for granted, take no message of what you say, and as a result, does exactly the opposite of what you want him to do, simply because you and him aren't close enough. He just doesn't consider you someone to listen to. After trying once or twice to keep him quiet, you'll just have to ignore the problem, and hope for the best. You can't want what you can't accomplish.

Honestly, this struck me hard. It was a moment of pure realization, allowing me to add 1+1. It didn't only explain that incident, but the entire madness considering some of the more difficult kids to handle. What struck me even worse was the fact it wasn't completely my fault for not getting them quiet. Before that conversation, I always thought it was my way of talking to kids that was the problem and that is was simply solved by watching the teacher handle problems and copying her way. However, in the actual reason I have problems with those kids, there are factors I can't control myself like the amount of time I spend with the kids, or the way the kids are themselves. I realised it wasn't a simple change of plans that would make the kids whisper instead of talk... that it wasn't a simple change of plans that would make the kids walk in pairs and not behind me when walking towards the swimming pool... that it wasn't a simple change of plans that would shush the kids and make them pay attention while I explain them 1 on 1. There's more behind it, way more.
It really saddened me that I got to know that after commanding, just talking about what I want and why I want it doesn't work as a second option. For that to work I would have to create a relationship that wasn't possible... Yes, the feedback was fierce, and yes, it lit my mood for the rest of the day: I was broke and became powerless. After the break was over, I noticed some kids weren't really reading their books how they were supposed to do it. I walked to them and told them they had to be quiet, but when it didn't work I decided to ignore it. While walking back to my table, I quickly turned around to peek what they were doing. Apparently they thought it was funny, so I quickly decided to play along with it by taking a few steps and turn around to check up on them again, and again... I got their attention and got them quiet for awhile when I was back at my table. I helped Y with the tables and was called to accompany the kids the kids to the swimming pool. I obviously wasn't in the mood for it anymore, but I went along anyways (I mean it's my duty after all...)

During our way there, I felt it went okay. At the end one of the kids started crying because of a weird situation regarding plays... I didn't understand a lot of it, but noticed another kid did understand what she was on about. I told her to come to me whenever something bad happened again, but furthermore I just let the other kid consolate her, because quite frankly, it worked. I also got told from two kids they had pains in their leg and weren't sure whether they could swim or not. I asked if they wanted to give it a shot, and they replied with yes. I did tell them to come to me when they felt like they weren't able to swim anymore, because I didn't want them to drown. I told the teacher about them and she nodded. I assumed that was an okay and continued to walk to the dressing rooms. The kids preparing for swimming went perfectly fine! Dressing up was done quickly and in a way that didn't annoy me or anyone around the dressing rooms. Even loo visits were done according to the rules!
During the swimming, one of the kids who told me his leg hurt, came out of the water and told me he couldn't bare it anymore. I went to the teacher to discuss it, and after she looked at the place it hurt and gave an okay, went to the dressing room for him to change into his usual clothes (which I simply wouldn't have come up with if it weren't for the teacher saying to dress up - lol). After he was done dressing up we went to watch the other kids at the side of the pool and chatted quite some time... I was desperate to work on my relationships with the kid! Although it was mostly gibberish I replied with (I was all like 'oh really? Interesting...' and 'I didn't know that'), I noticed the kid had fun talking to me and went on and on about animals I didn't know about. I let him talk all he wanted until I was summoned to help the kids dressing up again for our way back to school. That too went fine.

Walking back with the kids felt weird though. They were all jumpy because they had been active during swimming, and with the fierce feedback I got back at school in the back of my head, I just didn't feel like it was worth commanding kids to walk faster, stop messing about and stop walking behind me... For instance: T and F were seriously messing around on our way back by niggerknocking, running everywhere like mad men and igniting scratch fireworks. After trying to make them stop two or three times I just gave up hope and ignored their misbehaviour, exactly like the teacher told me. In all honesty, having to ignore their misbehaviour out of powerlessness was a real difficult thing for me. I can see why teachers sometimes can't bare their job and have to quit or take a break with it.
It was after school time when I told the teacher what kind of bad things I saw the kids doing while walking back (like T picking up food that wasn't his from a stand and throwing it back, or the fact they were igniting those fireworks). She told me immediately inform her during the walk so she could talk to T about it, and that now it was too late. After some discussing about the future exercises I had to do for my college school, I went home at four o' clock, being totally exhausted a fierce day of work.

Cheers,

Tough end of the week

2009-10-11T23:59:00.005+02:00

Guys, it's been quite an exhausting weekend. Starting off with Friday, the day I've played Halo 3 like a mad man. Apparently the Matchmaking competition on Friday afternoon and evening are fiercer than during the rest of the week. I kept my head well above water, but because of fiercer competition than usual, my R.K/D for my double account went from 2.10 to 1.67, which is a rather sad development actually.
Anyway - it's a surprise I was able to play so much Halo 3 on Friday, because I was well-tired from having slept so little the night before. Thursday was another insane day: Double M and I decided to enjoy our PT-card and "abuse" it to catch random trains to random places. Starting at about half past 2, ending at half past 6 we were in trains all the time, travelling through Utrecht, Den Haag and Schiphol Airport. After all the random training, we went bowling together (yes, more bowling). You can imagine all that being quite tiring, I hope. Nevertheless, it was a great day and we had lots of fun together. At about quarter to nine I left Double M behind at the bus stop, after which he randomly decided to call me while waiting for the bus to arrive, simply because he was bored. He told me he had to use the bathroom from when I was there still, so I teased him with that, making him swear at me! :)

Saturday and today

You've all read about yesterday already, a special day of going out for some bowling, the Amstelveen way. Once again I want to say it was a great day - and that I didn't go to bed after the bowling, and instead tried out my luck on Halo 3 some more. Because of that I went to bed at about 1 o' clock.

Now the day I wanted to write a little more about was today. After 6 hours and a little of sleep, I had to get out for my paper round: Limited Edition. It was really tough for me to get up because of my lack of sleep the days before, however, after some struggling I succeeded in it and got up to dress up. Once I stepped out my front door into the cold, the tiredness got a grasp on me: I just couldn't cycle with a proper pace, and the sliding in of the papers into the mailboxes was a slow going too. Right after being back from the paper-round, just when I wanted to go to bed again, I realised I didn't know what time I had to bowl today, but instead of calling someone to ask it, I told my mother and went to bed (to get out of bed at around eleven to be at the bowling centre at quarter to twelve, the time I thought the tournament started today).
Apparently while I was asleep, my mother did some phoning, because at around ten to ten she woke me up to say my bowling started at quarter past eleven and that I had to get out on time. I was still rather tired so I nodded I understood and decided I would get out at about half past ten to be at the bowling centre at around eleven, which in my idea, was a fair time if bowling started at quarter past eleven. The plan would've worked, if it weren't for the fact I overslept it a bit.
At about twenty to eleven I woke up. I looked at my clock, noticed what time time it was and jumped out of bed. Instead of breakfasting properly, I rushed in some plain bread and a cup of tea, after which I dressed up and left home at fourteen to eleven. On my way there I was cycling with an unusual pace (faster than my regular pace but slower than my "in a hurry" pace). I arrived at bowling a bit before eleven. Right on time! However, I was a bit lucky though, because some youngsters were bowling already, but they were part of the series before the one I had to play in (it was randomly selected who played in what series).

Once I arrived I realised something else: my bowling ball was in Koenn's locker, and I didn't have the keys for it! Now that's a bummer right there. After I told a couple of people about it, Marriska (she handles the regular Thursday youngsters bowling league) started talking to people for a spare key. After awhile I was told they had no spare key for that locker and that they were going to initiate plan B: they phoned Koenn's dad to tell him the sitch. So they did and so they were told Koenn was just on his way to his mother. No problem, they'll just call his mother then, doesn't she live like 200m away anyway?! So they did, and so they were told he was in some village far away from Seandamn, eating pancakes and that there wasn't the slightest chance of him arriving at the bowling centre on time to open his locker and unlocking me bowling ball.
While that last phone was being taken care of, Steven told me I could borrow his old strike ball so that I had at least one strike ball to do the job. I gladly accepted the offer once I got told about Koenn eating pancakes. However, Steven did warn me that he didn't know how the ball would act though, because he hadn't used it for awhile. I told him not to worry and that I'll figure something out.

Bowling began, and Steven and I were put on one lane, together with Wesley. It promised to be a fierce battle for the first spot, because the Rietvincken and Jordy Oomsch were back, just for this tournament (which I hated, a lot).
During the entire half-finals I didn't know how Steven's old strike ball worked, and because of that, resulted in me scoring pretty average (some would say bad) games: 149, 149 and 134. It actually pissed me off that in every single way I threw the bloody ball, the ball would hit the first pin, but never wipe all of the pins! During the second game or so I did throw a strike with Steven's ball in a way I thought I could repeat. The frame after the strike I tried wiping the pins the same way I did in the frame before; by actually making the ball sweep myself instead of hoping for the right spin. However I did not throw a strike that frame. No biggie right? I'll try repeating the strike the next frame. Well... I guess not! I just couldn't strike for the rest of the bloody game, and most of the next and final half-finals game for that matter. Lucky for me however, was that I earned a spot in the top ten, so I passed on to the finals! However unlucky for me was that the games people scored in the half-finals were going to be added to your total during the finals. This meant that I had an unfortunate 100 points gab or so to fix in the finals. After we discovered the finals were going to be held in over more than two hours, Steven and his family decided to go home for a bit. I didn't want to stay either so I "kidded" that I would join them going to their home. They actually took it serious and asked each other if they agreed on me going along and they did, so I joined them!

A couple of things about Steven's house and neighbourhood I found out about: it's a nice neighbourhood, their house is really tidy (like... nice!!) and their computer screens are small! Once we were all in they asked whether I wanted a drink and something to eat. Since I only ate one plain slice of bread at home and drank one cup of tea, I was in fact quite thirsty and hungry. I felt rapacious, but I said yes to everything and got myself two bread rolls, a bit of explosive water and a cupcake later on. It was nice to eat something, although it was quite a strange feeling having to do it on a plate with a placemat underneath it, around the dinner table... Ah well... I guess there has to be a first time for everything.
Because of the surprising thing I found out about him yesterday (Steven drinks beer!) and discovering the beer in the fridge, we started talking some more about beer. One of the many things the conversation stumbled across to, was the discussion on how 'pussy' the beer I had drunk over at Double M's place was. Steven concluded the beer I drank (coincidentally they had a bottle of the same beer in their fridge) was considered 'pussy'beer (Hoogaarden Citron). The funny thing is though... that that kind of beer actually was one of the only beers I didn't consider gross... just for the fact that it didn't taste like beer to begin with!

After we were done eating and drinking, Steven and I went to his room and computed a bit and played some Wii Sports Resort Bowling, of course. Speaking of which... wow they messed up ten pin bowling. Some of the most unrealistic throws happen in that game. While in real-life you would throw 8 or 9 pins with certain throws, they messed the falling of the pins up in Wii Sports Resort and make you throw 5 or 6 pins that way! Also, splits are way more common than usual and the throwing itself is really dumb as well!
Lucky for me I got the hang of it quite soon and started throwing baggers and all... to end the game with less than 200 because of the crappy way the Wiimote translated movement to the game. Apparently the way to throw in Wii Sports Resort is the same way as in the original Wii Sports Bowling, except for the fact you have to position yourself to the left a bit more. Steven was surprised I found my line in the game that quick, because he hadn't even figured out his line yet after playing the game quite a bit more. After finishing a couple of games and realising it was time to go already, we stopped playing and quickly put on our jackets and shoes again and left for the finals.

During the finals, in which Steven and me were separated, I kind of discovered how to throw with Steven's old strike ball, and started throwing more strikes. During the finals, I ended up with the most points after the three games of the entire youth. However, very unlucky for me, I had to catch up way more points than with the gab I won with during the finals, and ended up in fourth place.
After the finals, Steven thought he had lost by 14 points for a really long period of time (we had to wait for the no-tap to end after our finals for the prizes) and was really anxious for the scores. He actually was angry at himself for not sparing in the last frame. However, he was really surprised when during the award ceremony the audience was told he actually had won the tournament and had to come forward for hip cup and picture! I bet he was really pleased about winning after all, too bad I can't know that for sure because I didn't wait for the winners to get back from the photo shoot. When he was waiting for his picture to be taken, Isaid goodbye to his folks and left for home at about quarter to five... just when it started to rain, dammit!

Once wet at home, I turned on the telly for a bit and decided I was too tired to stay up and went to bed for an hour or four (just when I got me chips and meat from me mother). After waking up, my chips were gone, and all that remained was my meat and cauliflower?!? While writing this blog article I still have the cauliflower to eat, but I'm already finished with the meat. Anyway - I'm going to enjoy my meal for a bit longer and head to bed. I have had a tough weekend and have school tomorrow.

Cheers,

St-t-t-trike!

2009-10-10T22:31:00.005+02:00

Party- and bowling centre "De Kegel" in Amstelveen.
This is where we had to bowl today.

Hello everybody,
I've had a fine couple of days. Last school week was a rather busy and boring one, so I didn't really want to bother myself and you guys by writing a blog article about it. The only school thing that perhaps was worth mentioning was the Thursday Leerpraktijk class. During this class, I had a small presentation about Dalton (which went well, thank you very much) and the rest of the time in class I was messing about with one of my classmates, kind of pissing off the teacher (I had fun doing it though, it was a challenge to see how far I could go).
Furthermore, I managed to upload the new Jisezistic jargon, now containing more than 100 words and more explanation about telling time and another couple of things. You can find the updated jargon here. I've also been playing plenty of Halo 3 lately, and yesterday I heard Pikapan Voeby's voice for the first time in my life! He talks just like he types on WLM, brilliant! All of my current Halo 3 in-game video clips can be found here.

Anyway, what I mainly wanted to discuss was bowling today. Today we had NJTL, it's the same principle as previous year, but there was one slight difference: we have been put in one poule higher. After 4 hours of sleep I went out of bed at 8 o' clock in the morning and started eating breakfast and dressing. At exactly half past eight I was in front of my carpool when my driver and co-bowler (Koenn) showed up. Very tired I sat in the car, trying to relax and prepare for the worst, 'cause I honestly didn't feel very confident about us winning.
We arrived at just past 9 o' clock at the Amstelveen bowling centre and started checking out the bowling alley and everything around it. We dumped our stuff and noticed the bowling alley had a telly with Phineas and Ferb being broadcasted. Me, being still rather childish, started watching it, quickly followed by the co-bowler I just shared the carpool with. It was the episode in which Candace let them make some fancy fair ride in order to understand how the things they build keep disappearing. It was called 'don't even blink' and it was an episode I hadn't seen before. While watching the second Phineas and Ferb episode my other team mate joined us and we completed watching the second one together (partly anyway).
After some time it was time to prepare for bowling. I gave the money to our coach to pay for the league (10,50 Euros... the shizzle?!?), quickly completed watching the second episode, took off my orange sweater and headed for our lane. When we got the sign to start throwing, we did.

There was something new about the bowling alley though since the last time we saw it (previous year). Apparently the pins now had strings attached to them, for whatever reason. How little did we know this would change the entire experience of bowling today!

During the first real game you could feel there was lots of excitement going on between the teams. During the entire game it was a close call between us and the opposing team. Because of the strings holding the pins and the system working with it being in BETA mode, the whining mothers were always ready to complain when something that they thought wasn't fair happened.
In the middle of the game the lane of the opposing was acting a bit weird: instead of going to the first throw in the new turn, it skipped it and immediately went to the second throw. They had been warned for it (it happened to our lane a couple of minutes earlier), but weren't paying attention and had to re-throw that particular turn. During her re-throw, instead of the 9 she threw before, she threw 5 pins. The mothers started yelling they didn't agree on what was going on, while in fact, it was her own fault for not paying attention AND for failing taking advantage of the chance to improve her 9 by a strike. The mother disagreed so badly with the way things went, they just had to get the league organisor to express their feelings toward the situation. It started becoming a crowded and I started falsely crying to express how totally retarded I found the entire situation, and apparently while in the process of doing so, insulted one of our opponents when I said that the mothers were whining. I kind of apologized but still she didn't like me any more. At the end the 5 stayed there as the first throw, but when she only threw 3 her second throw in that turn, they changed it to 4, making it a total of 9 pins instead of the 8 she actually had. I didn't like it but was told not to care any more.
However, the excitement during the first match wasn't over just yet: the question who would win the match couldn't be answered until the very last throw by my team mate Steven. We were losing by 6 points in the last throw in the last frame. If he threw less than 6, we would've lost the points (scoring 399), if he threw 6 it would've been a tie at 400 and if he managed to throw 7 or more we would've had fun and win the points. Our entire team (that means including coaches and family that accompanied us) almost couldn't bare the fierce tension when Steven was preparing his throw. When the ball hit the lane I noticed it fell in the dead MIDDLE of the lane... and, because of that, I thought the ball would OVERSHOOT/SPIN the first AND second pin and score less than 6. The seconds between the ball hitting the lane and hitting the pins, probably were the slowest couple of seconds of the entire day. The ball kept rolling and rolling as we waited for the ball to overspin... and waited some more... and some more... until fractions before the ball hit the pins when we realised the ball had no spin whatsoever. The ball hit the second pin and Steven threw 7 points. We won the game by 1 point. The feeling we that rushed through all of us is probably something I'm not going to experience for quite some time again. Now it was time for some relaxing because it was our turn to go on a break.

After having recovered from the stress caused by the last couple of frames in the first game, we had to start with our second game. Honestly, I wasn't really confident that we would win. I mean, winning by 1 point is pure luck and looking at the how our opponents were throwing, we wouldn't have that kind of luck again. I can't remember a lot from the second game, except for the fact we didn't win - like I expected -, making the overall score 2/4 points. Now my confidence was a complete loss.

The third game started. The first thing that was funny about this game was in fact the first frames of both teams. The opposite team started throwing. The first of them threw a strike. It was my turn to throw, and guess what? I threw a strike too! They said something about copying them and their second girl walked up the approach. She threw a nine. It was now Koenn's turn to throw, and he threw a nine as well! This was getting a bit awkward now... Their second girl finished her turn and hit the only pin left and had a spare. Now guess what? So did Koenn! The crowd was starting to get a bit giggly now and their third girl stepped up and had a go. She had a bit of a slow start and threw an eight. Now I know you think you know what is going to happen now, and you're right: Steven threw an eight as well, and not just that, the exact SAME pins were left behind on both the lanes. The opposing team's third girl finished it off and so did Steven. The entire first frame was exactly the same on both lanes! Gosh if that is what is in stores for us this is going to be yet another close game... am I in the mood for that much tension?

Not done talking about that game yet, though! During the seventh frame or so, the scores were almost even when the opposing team missed a spare. I threw a VERY UNLUCKY 4,7,9,10-split (more difficult in real life than it looks in that picture!) on my first throw in the seventh frame. The entire audience noticed it and opinions were soon divided in two: my audience was like 'ah... bummer, can't be helped', while the audience of the opposing team was like 'that's fortunate for us...'. I, myself, was rather bummed when I saw the nasty split popping up. However, because we needed every point we could get to catch up with the opposing team (who had won the other two of its games) I wanted to get the most out of my 4,7,9,10-split. On my second throw I aimed for the 4 and 7 pins so I would at least get 2 pins out of 4.
I threw the ball... but when it hit the lane I noticed my aim was off and that my ball wouldn't even hit the 4-pin... I was sobbing a bit and kept looking at what happened. Indeed, the ball span past the 4-pin and barely hit the 7 pin, just like I expected. The 7 pin went flying behind the other pins from all the way from the left to the right. I had thrown one pin out of four, right? Or did I? Now normally if a pin flies through the cage, it doesn't mean anything special: the pin gets send flying and is collected in the cage, and you score only one point... but didn't I tell you about the strings the pins were attached to? Because these pins were wired, OUT OF NOWHERE we all saw the 9-pin fall. Apparently the wires got mangled up, making the pin fall out of the blue. At that point it was a bit of a "whatever"-moment, nothing real special since it happened before random pins fell because of the wires, until again, out of nowhere I saw both the 4 AND 10-pin fall as well! ALL the strings got tangled up with each other, making them all fall like in a magic trick! I had converted the 4,7,9,10-split! At the point of realization I turned around and yelled out of joy with my hands in front of my mouth out of disbelieve. I just couldn't believe it!
Apparently the entire audience was focused at my lane because suddenly everybody started clapping and yelling... I was the center of attention for a whole minute or so! I threw a once-in-a-lifetime spare (well not necessarily once in a lifetime, but once in a lifetime THAT WAY). It was a good tension breaker, but we still had some catching up to do.
Continuing with the game: Even this one was exciting until the very last frame. Both Koen and me did a good job: I threw 163 and Koen 167. Once again it was up to Steven to secure our win and finish the job. He had to throw at least a spare and something to secure our victory. During the last couple of shots it was dead-quiet in the audience. Even I held a moment of silence to make sure Steven could concentrate well! His first throw wasn't a strike, but at least pins remained that were doable to spare. He concentrated again for the second shot... and threw the spare! He had a total of 160 now. His final throw was another 7, so he ended up with 167 as well. We had a total of 497 (barely not touching the 500 border - which would add extra bragging rights) and won by about 12 points from our third opponents! This was going great!

Our last game was up against another team that hadn't lost that day before. They already collected a total of 6 points, while we only had 4. Because we looked at their scores in the games before they were our opponents, we weren't going to be surprised if we lost from them too... then again... we just won from another strong team, so perhaps we still had a chance?
During this game nothing really spectacular happened except for some "string"-only spares (the opposing team had more of them) and the fact I threw badly... however, I can tell you we WON that game as well, partly because Steven threw an amazing 191 game! We broke their winning spree! Hail us!

This was probably one of the most thrilling days of bowling I will have in quite some time and I'm NEVER going to forget about that 4,7,9,10-split and the way I converted it. I can tell you we were all really satisfied about the results of bowling today and are looking for the next time of NJTL.

Tomorrow we have another tournament going on with bowling, this however is local - meaning it's in our own bowling centre in my home town Seandamn. Can't wait to win!

Cheers and until next time,

I passed grade 6 (again)

2009-09-30T19:27:00.002+02:00

That's me in Grade 6. Even back then I had nice teeth.

So the blog article from yesterday turned out to be quite intriguing, didn't it? Figured so. A total of 26 tweets collected in a time span of exactly 24 hours. It could've been more though, but my blog turned out lucky when I started working on my Jisezistic Jargon. Working on my Jargon did decrease the amount of tweets I made the last couple of hours. I went to bed at quarter to two at night when I felt like I was done for that night.
Speaking of the Jisezistic document... here you can find it: the first ever publicly accessible document about Jisezism (except for the website Tante Tuk, Double M and I once had, I think it died of AIDS). In this pdf file (a Google Document) you'll see a list of over 40 words (soon to be more) explaining how Jisezistic people talk and type. Learning those words is a MUST if you want to understand what I'm saying on MSN! On MSN I speak fluent Jisezistic.

Jisezism is not a new occurrence though. During the existence of CRG, there have been a couple of quotes containing the Jisezistic language. Now, because of growing demand and popularity I've decided to help you guys UNDERSTANDING these quotes by releasing this words list, along with some general rules regarding 'fails'. Telling time and other important stuff will be added later. If only you would check the file out by hitting the link...

The Dutch Test

Also discussed in the tweets yesterday was the Dutch test I had to take today. In those tweets it mostly said I hadn't studied for it yet, which was the truth, by the way.
Today, after visual arts class we had a lecture, but instead of following it, I joined Kaasbeer who headed home. He lives in Amstelveen, so we hopped on the metro and headed for Amstelveen Westwijk. During the metro ride we chatted a bit and had plenty of laughs. At Amsterdamn RAI the metro had an usually long pause. What turns out? Policemen were checking the metro for a criminal or whatever, because we saw security, safety and patrol officers getting in and out of the metro by the minute. After finding nothing, the metro continued its travel, with a delay of 15 minutes or so. We continued studying whatever was in our Dutch book.
Arrived at his metro station, I had to walk to his apartment, which turned out be quite a walk by itself. He was lucky he had that bike of his. After arriving we started lunching, talking, studying and computing.
During this entire period we had plenty of laughs and fun, until I noticed it was already 15.25 when the test started at 16.00. I told him I think we had to go. Apparently not being aware of the time... he was like: nah... we'll go in fifteen minutes or so; we've got plenty of time! I told him I would think it would be better for us to go at that time, because the travel was 20 minutes by metro, the walk to the metro was five minutes or so and there would be added another 10 minutes for walking from Spaklerweg to school... He decided to come along as I was being a bit hyper about it and we left his apartment.
We were right on time to catch the metro of 15.36, and once the metro started driving, I told him what time it was and he didn't believe me. Apparently he thought it was 15.00 instead of 15.36, and after he checked his cell phone for the right time, I heard him yell 'what the fuck? How the hell is that possible?' when he noticed I was actually right about the time. Immediately he wasn't that sure whether we would make it or not. We started calculating times and concluded we would arrive too late at the test. I laughed at him telling him I now knew why he was late for plenty of classes, he laughed too.
Once at Spaklerweg we noticed we weren't going to be THAT late, we just had to make sure we put a little tempo in our walking. So we did and we only arrived late by a minute or two. We were still allowed to make the Dutch test, pfjew.

The Dutch test went okay. I passed it with about an 8,5 out of 10 (or so the teacher said). I wouldn't say I'm not pleased with it, but I expected a nine to be honest, I thought it went amazing... I was done after three quarters of an hour while we had about one and a half hour to complete it. I guess I don't need that much time for Dutch. I'm happy to say my Dutch language skills are at grade 6 level - just like my maths which I passed too! Hurray!

I'm now allowed to continue with my course "Primary School Teacher".

Until next time (see you in October!) and cheers,

Tweet tweet

2009-09-29T00:12:00.022+02:00

I-phone picture of the camp fire at the BBQ. Yes - the quality sucks but the fire was nice.

Honestly, there is no good excuse for me writing no blog articles whatsoever. My life isn't that boring you know! The past weeks I've been teaching grade 3 (awesome), I went to a midnight barbecue and had plenty of laughs, been making some new Rendered Videos, I've been throwing awesomely good at bowling (200+ games!), I've been living my life, I've been playing Halo 3: ODST, I've passed my maths test (and have a Dutch test tomorrow - it's passed midnight here -), I cut my hair, I've posted a new link in the galleries part of this blog, I've been... well what haven't I been doing? The reason why I never write blog articles is because I never bother making an article about small thing, just 'one' thing nowadays, because for that, I think my blog isn't popular enough. Instead, I tweet about it. Even for that I feel like I'm not popular enough, but at least it's way less trouble than writing an entire blog article.

Anyway, I got inspired to write this blog article because I have this urge to "twitter spam". I tweet TOO much about every random thing that's on my mind. Now it doesn't really hurt anyone... except for my 18 followers (of which 9 or so are advertisers) and anybody in my MSN list because of my WLM plug-in. Now to be honest, I want to tweet about even more than what's currently in my tweets, but even I sometimes grab a hold of myself and stop myself from posting the most rubbish tweets... that and the fact that I sometimes need more than 140 characters to explain something...

Now I'm going to do this experiment. In this blog article, starting from NOW, I'll be posting everything I want to tweet about in THIS blog article, instead of my twitter. Let's see how much I actually want you guys to know about.

Lift-off

0.12 am - Wow - Just posted another blog article and guess what? Internet Explorer messes up the lay-out, big time!

0.18 am - STOP MESSING UP THE BLOODY LAY-OUT YOU BLOODY PIECE OF MICROSOFT TRASH. Guess I'll have to fix the lay-out later when I use FF again.

0.25 am - Going to bed now. Remind me to post the Bungie Rendered Videos in this blog article.

7.07 am - Woke up. Going to school in under half an hour. I can almost use my public transport card for free traveling across the Netherlands... just... two... more... days...

7.54 am - We've been standing still in this train for way too long now. What is happening at Amsterdam Sloterdyke?

7.57 am - Barely made the tram that departed at 7.57 am, while in fact I should've taken the tram that departed at 7.47 am. Stupid VIRM!

8.20 am - I arrived second in my class, after Hannan (another intern), I guess calling the voice mail I might arrive a bit later had no use after all...

10.00 am - We went to the park to collect leaves for Hannan's task. I had a nice chat with the other intern from my school (El Nino - lol) :) I got a tip from Amanda (ANOTHER intern), mind my word choice.

11.15 am - Wow some people really have trouble learning the multiplication tables. I've tried so many different strategies onto tackling difficult multiplication exercises like 9x9...

1. when calculating 9x9 after 8x9
8x9 = 72
72+9 = 81

2. 8x9 = 72
72 + 10 = 82
82 - 1 = 81

3. 10x9 = 90
90-9 = 9x9 = 81

4. 8x9 = 72
Make it 80 (+8), how much do you have left?/have you got enough? Yes, 1 left.
80+1 = 81

5. 9x9 = 80 something (like 8x9 = 70 something)
You add 1 because 10-9 = 1 (10x9 = exactly 90; 10-10 = 0)
80+1 = 81

6. 9x9 = (5x9)+(4x9)
9x9 = 45 (half of 90) + 36
45+36 = 40 + 41 = 81

... and yet it did not feel like they quite got the hang of handy ways of calculating the exercise. Those people will seriously have to practice the multiplication tables! I will make sure to help them next week by playing multiplication games with them!

12.00 pm - I'm just done reading a story for the class. Two tips: talk with your face FACING the class instead of looking down to read the book and talk a bit slower so you don't skip words.

1.15 pm - Swimming time, I'm coming along to guide the class through traffic and speed them up with dressing up (because otherwise it will take too long).

3.05 pm - Back from swimming. The guiding went okay although I really had the feeling I was being strict, but I also felt it was necessary because people kept wondering off, hitting each other, not paying attention in front of them... next time I'll be taking more action and talk less to make them try and stop. I guess I'll just have to make them hold hands, talk softly and let them walk next to me if they're not hurrying up enough... let's be the less nice teacher... It did help I knew the names now btw!

3.40 pm - Going home. I did fine said the teacher.

4.06 pm - Dammit! I just missed the train from 4.04 pm, since when are those goddamn trains on time? Now I have to wait 13 minutes for the next train.

4.30 pm - @ home. Going to update my blog article and chat some more on MSN.

6.20 pm - Done uploading most of my rendered videos to my Youtube account. The play list can be found here. Please don't mind the spelling and grammar mistakes in the description though, I'll fix those when I feel like it.

6.31 pm - Two things: 1 - I'll have to study the Dutch test for tomorrow and 2 - The Public Transport Card that will be legal for me to use in two days will make me able to travel across the Netherlands for free, w00t!

7.14 pm - "Hi it's Vince with slap chop....!" Thanks Double M, for getting that song stuck in my head again. Good thing I found a download link for the .mp3 file. w00t.

7.37 pm - More nostalgia. Checking old youtube videos I once posted on my account...

7.47 pm - My blog has been visited for more than ten times today :) Apparently making actual blog articles DOES increase the popularity of this blog. Spamming the link to this blog article to everybody in my msn list apparently helps too though... Also - Boeing 7.47 PM time.

8.09 pm - Today's new millennium has started. And how... I know the reason for some of the FFFs - I cannot load my way too big Woopyland inbox, containing thousands of old PMs sent to me by fellow Woopyland members. I guess my inbox does need a bit of a clean-up. I bet I waste 2 mb of Woopyland space in just my inbox size.

8.13 pm - I just got a brilliant idea for another page in my blog, or wherever... I'm going to finally start making a Jisezism dictionary (jargon)! Everytime I come up with a Jisezistic word (like 'gamla' or 'FFF'), I'll put it in there and explain the Dutch and English meaning of it.

8.36 pm - Xbox time... for a bit. Just to keep my xbox blog a bit interesting to read...

9.15 pm - Xbox time is over... Firefight on normal (on your own) is properly difficult. I managed to get some fancy medals today though.

9.41 pm - Started writing the Jisezistic jargon. Not gonna use Google Docs, I'm just gonna put it in a .pdf and update it every month or so.

11.25 pm - Haven't touched Dutch yet. Will do later. Still working on the Jisezistic jargon. It's a hells job, but someone has to do it.

0.12 am - 24 hours have passed and I've stopped myself from writing a total of 26 Tweets about today by posting them in this blog article. That's more than 1 tweet an hour. This does result in the conclusion that I'm a twitter addict. From now on I'll be posting tweets again at my twitter page. Expect a new blog article about my Dutch test and my Jisezistic Jargon later today (that's still in september yes!)

But for now... Cheers,

Passing time

2009-09-09T08:55:00.004+02:00

Part of my school I'm currently at.

Hello to the little people who actually take the time to read this blog. I'm writing this blog from the mediatheek at my new school in Amsterdam. Here follows some confidential information about my almost daily routines. Wake-up time: quarter past seven in the morning. Breakfast time: approximately 25 minutes. Travel time: approximately 45 minutes. Two class hours (one class): approximately 90 minutes. Amount of time I'm too early at school because of a false schedule change: 90 minutes. Pissed-off meter: a very dangerous 8.5/10.

It's like this: yesterday we heard there was a schedule change made. Normally, "statues & shaping" class (lol) starts at 10 am. Yesterday however we were notified that that class has been rescheduled for 8:30 am. We had no idea why and didn't agree with it because we had the follow-up college at 11:30 am, just like how it was supposed to be. Angrily we headed home. Little did we know that we would get screwed over this morning.

Except for Mr Kaasbeer, everybody was bang on time, all tired from having to wake up so early. We waited and waited... while in the mean time it had become quarter to nine. After a little while, a person showed up: "Which class are you?" "1F, madame..." People started paying attention to the female now. "Well in that case I have something to tell you guys. The schedule change was a mistake. It was supposed to be for next week regarding the trip to Rotterdamn. The teacher will be here at the regular time of 10:00 am." This didn't really lighten up the mood... and now we're all spread around the school, pissed off and waiting for the visual arts class to start. I had to sit and stand in a way too crowded train because off that mistake! The thing is... I didn't like visual arts to begin with... I mean... look at how crappy my drawing skills are - this just makes it worse.

Anyway - I just want to tell you a little bit more about our class. It's a good class. Although less of a good class it used to be. During introduction day we only had 16 people and everyone talked to everyone. Day after day, more people drippled in, giving us a total of 29 people now. That's almost double the amount we used to have! But that's not the entire problem... If we were still a close class class I wouldn't care, but the fact is that all the newcomers have formed groups. The two Turkish people sit next to each other during every class... the people from the ex-1E class are still a separate and noisy group... also the people from the original 1F have been separated partially as well. It's a lot less fun and close now, but I still manage to chat with all the groups. I think I already talked about the sweet girl Suriname... I sit next to her quite a lot and it's just tons of fun...

Yesterday we had Dutch, maths and our coach's class. In every single class I paid little attention and just had a lot of fun jokin' about with the girl from Suriname (and others as well by the way). The material we had to study was easy anyway and the teachers explained it all in such a way you could easily joke about it. It was fun, but I was glad when we could go home.

I'll see you guys later, I'm going to "enjoy" the rest of my time off.

Cheers,

(PS: Bowling tomorrow w00t!)

The last days of holidays

2009-08-22T19:48:00.000+02:00

Hello everybody, I'm typing this message on my old laptop. This is not because my newest one is broken, it's simply because I feel like it. This night I was trying to fix the slow booting up of this baby, and apparently with some succession. Using CCleaner, I have deleted a lot of "boot-up-at-start" entry keys of unused programs. Also using CCleaner, I deleted lots of old (trash) files on my computer AND uninstalled some of the useless programs on my laptop. My laptop is now ... well not really quicker as ever before, but at least it's decent speed.
Speaking of sitting in front of my laptop: I should actually have gone out and chill somewhere outside (I mean... the weather is just delli!), but haven't been able to do that because I feel a bit sick. It's not something that just happened to happen today, but I have been feeling a bit ill the last couple of days anyway. Today I've got stomach aches, headaches and something a little more disgusting... >_> I honestly hope it's because I have the swine flu, but I doubt it. It's great to spend my last couple of holidays at home! Not! I guess I'll be going outside ANYWAY later today!

The last couple of days were a bit... wèèh. You're probably wondering what I have been doing in the period between my latest blog article and now? The first thing I promised to talk about was the cinema. Let's do that first. Bare with me, it's a loooong "summary".

It was Saturday previous week. My friend Double M (here is an archive picture of him) came around seven PM to pick me up for the film: we were going to visit Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, simply because we still had two free tickets laying around the house. I couldn't wait to go, but had to eat dinner first (which wasn't even cooked yet!), so instead we started talking at my place. During the conversation, I was on my laptop instant messaging people about my plans of going to a movie in an hour or so, while 'double M' sat straight ahead of me in a chair looking at nothing at interesting at all. After I got my plate, I started rushing eating my white beans in tomato sauce and potatoes. A couple of minutes later, we left, heading for the coaches to Amsterdamn Sloterdyke at the train station near my place. No trains were heading for Amsterdamn because of rail works. These rail works I'm talking about tend to be a bi-weekly thing or so, pissing everybody in the area off because of the delays it causes. Once in the coach Double M showed me the vodka he bought. Sweet! One litre of 40% alcohol! Not that I'm a drinker or anything, I'm nothing like that, but that day was a special occasion... it was... uhm... our... my... birthday celebration! Yeah, that's it! My birthday celebration!

Blablabla travelling... blabla more delays.... blabla crowded and noisy people in the train... blabla and there we were, Pathé Amsterdamn Beylmer, right on time! We got our tickets and spotted the "security". By that time, I really thought they were going to check Double M's bag and spot the vodka. Luckily they didn't bother: "chillout!" We headed for our seats and unpacked the crisps, vodka and coke (that's the soft-drink I'm talking about!). I was anxious to drink the vodka, not really about watching the film - but hey, it was free!

The film started. Like Pikapan Voeby said to me on MSN earlier that day, the thing I thought during the opening minutes was wow, but I didn't want to actually say it to actually prove Pikapan right. During the opening sequence there were a lot of good special effects: the collapsing bridge in London (a bridge I have walked on in the past) and the skulls flying through the sky for instance. By then, I was completely sober so I actually was paying some attention. Then the fun started: we opened the bottle of vodka.
The 'good' thing about vodka is that you can mix it with any soft drink you want. This is good because the vodka itself doesn't taste like anything other than alcohol; which by itself is just disgusting. To mix it, I drank some coke and let Double M (by now you're probably aware this is a nick name) fill up the can with vodka when it was half out of coke. The first sip I took was on the coke bottle lid. On that surface, there was some pure vodka that almost made me throw up when I drank it. Gosh, pure vodka is just horrible! The sips after were vodka mixed with coke, so those sips tasted a bit better.

On a certain point during the film, where we both weren't fully sober any more, the boy said that "there is some toothpaste there," pointing to the girl's cheek. Double M whispered to me that "it's not toothpaste" (one of the most cliché jokes, but hey, we weren't sober any more!) and I started laughing out loud! About halfway through I had to take a leak. About three quarters through we were out of coke and had a tiny bit of vodka left in the bottle. I took the bottle and poured some vodka into my plastic "explosive water" bottle and starting drinking out of it. Somewhere near the end of the film there was a scene in a blue cave - no idea what they were doing there - where Harry Potter was looking in the water and saw a reflection. I looked down to look for my plastic bottle and I suddenly heard a scream. Was this the moment Pikapan Voeby warned me for that I should've gotten scared? Because if it was, I didn't! The only thing I did as a response, was looking up to see what was the matter. Somewhere in the film where the guy said he was the Half-Blood Prince Double M shouted 'OH SNAP' (a classic internet meme) and I started laughing out loud again. At that point I was rather tipsy. When the lights turned on I had no idea where my explosive water (a cheaper version of Spa Red) bottle was and noticed a big mess of crisps, coke cans and other plastic bottles around our seats. Me being the nice lad I usually am, wanted to clean the mess up but Double M made me leave it there and said the cleaners would deal with it. I felt a bit guilty but decided to walk.
Outside, near the Pathé exit, we sat on a bench type thing and started "chillaxing" a bit, just as an in-between of seeing the film and going back home. I started looking around and couldn't help but to laugh at the fact I was tipsy. Getting home wouldn't be much of a problem though because I was still in a clear state of mind.

I remember that before we took a couch back to Seandamn, we were in two different trains. Now I can't remember the exact path we took from Amsterdamn Beylmer to Amsterdamn Sloterdyke, but I do remember that when exiting the first train there was a queue of people wanting to exit through the same door. I was at the start of that queue, holding down the both the "open train doors" AND "close train doors" button. I did the thing earlier that evening, on our way to the cinema. That time, Double M nearly got a heart-attack when the doors closed (slamming him) when he was exiting. This time however, I didn't hit Double M, but the crowd behind me. We got lucky though: in the second train we hopped on we came across a female security guard. She started talking how we the people behind us in the train cabin (waiting to get out) wanted to beat the crap out of us because we closed the doors in front of their noses. I wasn't really paying attention to her (I heard her, but didn't realize she was talking to us) until she asked whether we "smoked a joint" or something... when I looked up and was like "how does she f'ing know that?!" (not that I actually smoked a joint or so, but being drunk and looks a bit like being high). Double M told me to "chill out man! It's easy to see and there's nothing wrong with it." I was really surprised though, because I honestly thought it wasn't that obvious I was drunk, or tipsy, or whatever I was. I kept talking to Double M about it the rest of our way home, that is how surprised I was!

Once back in my home town train station I decided I didn't want to go home yet because I didn't want my parents to get the idea I was really drunk. So instead of walking home, we started laying on a sloped meadow next to the provincial road. We started talking some more until we decided to finally cross the street and climb up the tree near my house (I can see it when I look outside while typing this). I went up the tree while Double M stayed down because he got stung by nettles. After being bored of sitting in the tree, we went to sit on the bench even closer to my home, and - after that - at about half past 12 at night, we headed home. By that time we decided Double M would crash the night at my place, apparently because there weren't any trains heading for his home place anymore. Before dratiscally sleeping on my living room chair, we even had some fun at home and talked about what to do next time.

In the morning the next day, I accompanied Double M at the bus station while waiting for the bus to bring him home. We talked a lot and waved him goodbye when the bus finally arrived half an hour late. When the bus left, I headed home and went in bed again. After I woke up from that... Hell started. Hangover time!
The rest of the day wasn't much fun because of my headache and almost throwing up... I mean, the hangover could've been MUCH worse, but for a first time, I thought it was sufficiently bad. I'm curious when I go out again!

Finally, you're done reading that! Wasn't it fun? Now obviously that was the biggest event the last couple of days, but what more have I been doing? Here's a quick list of things I've been doing in the last couple of days:

- I have completely been ruining my biorhythm. Some days I got out of bed at 3/4 o' clock in the afternoon and went in bed at 6 am,
- John returned from Indonesia. We shared experiences and headed for the city to buy a diary for next school year,
- I have been playing some more Halo 3. Not much though because my brother has no work any more and keeps being in his bloody room, which has the Xbox in it,
- I have been feeling ill the last couple of days. I don't know why, but it started out with headaches, tired eyes and ended up with ... well... stomach aches and the belongings (lots of toilet visits that is),
- I have been spending plenty of time on the Woopyland vent server (which is good fun at some times),
- I have been watching the Berlin Championships as well... quite tense some times,
- I have had webcam sessions with my friend Joey, that ended up with some pretty scary pictures,

- I have started reading the books for my academic placement test. I'm going to college next school year, remember!?

Since it's still nice weather outside I would like to go and play hide 'n seek again, but for the moment no one is interested in it since we're all just back from our world travels.

I'll be looking forward to keeping you guys up to date again. Cheers,

Only in America, huh?

2009-08-11T21:42:00.018+02:00

Cheese!

Me in front of the Gulf of Mexico, with a (fake) cheesy smile. Oh and if you happen to discover what's wrong with the picture, yes I already know about that dammit!

If you'd like to view ALL (shared) Texas 2009 pictures, please refer to the "My Photo Albums" in the sidebar, or alternatively, click here, here and here.

Hello everybody. This is me speaking here, safely back in the Netherlands. This time I have survived a flight of more than 10 hours (it was a bit more relaxed this time - better service and two empty seats next to me!), 9 hours of waiting in London Heathrow (booooring), a one and a half flight to Amsterdam (tiring...) and a border baggage check.

Speaking of the border baggage check: haha, that was funny! The customs and border protection guy just HAD to take me out for inspection of an entire airplane. The reason why I think he took me was because I was wearing my Halo cap the American way (facing down at 150 degrees) and sunglasses indoors (yes - it's stupid, but it was part of my big re-entry). The first thing he was, was surprised about the fact I had a gentle voice and was nice. You could see his attitude change when I started talking more. He asked me something: "Do you have anything to declare?" I replied with: "What am I supposed to declare then?" He gave me a couple of examples: "Cigarettes, alcohol..." Me: "Oh no I don't have anything like that..." He already picked me out of all the people on the plane, so he wanted to finish the job. He asked me to come with him and I did.
He opened the first side pocket... The first thing he picked out of the side pocket was a zip line bag with dirty underwear in it. You'd think he could expect that, but his face was frowning anyway. He continued to check the side-pocket rather quickly and closed it just as quickly. He opened the other side pocket. In that pocket I had my manga. His first response was "Comic books... or manga, whatever they call it nowadays." My first response, seeing how the mangas were ruined because of the travelling, was: "Oh, would you look at those ruined covers...". He scrolled through one of the books to check if there wasn't any contraband hidden in it... I'm sure he noticed it was all about bunnies and stuff - because once again his face started frowning. He decided not to check the other two books and opened the main bag, he took out my jeans (without inspecting any pockets or whatever) and put them on the table carefully so they didn't unfold. Within a couple of seconds he mumbled "Powerpuff Girls... uhmm" and took Bubbles' head half out of the bag. He looked at me for a short bit and started checking again, seconds later though (without moving anything) he put my jeans back in and mumbled "No-one has to see this" and gave me back my luggage. Guess I wasn't as tough and American as I looked from the outside with that Halo cap and sunglasses, am I right marines?

Texas sure was one hell of an experience I will not forget soon. Even the way back home was an experience by itself... Gosh how I'm going to miss that lifestyle for a bit.

Anyway - This blog article was about the "What the-" moments in America. These moments were the moments that attracted my attention in a ridiculous way. In most of these situations I immediately started comparing America with the oh-so-brilliant Europe. Let the list start:

- Texan traffic rules & drive style
Texan traffic rules are scary. If you stop at a red light and you want to turn right - you can do that whenever the coast is clear even if the light is red. Uhm... WHY? Sorry, by clear I meant clear enough... So every time a car passes and there is a big enough hole between that car and the next one, you can start gunning hoping to keep up with the car in front of you driving 40 miles an hour before getting smashed by the car coming straight at you at 40 miles an hour not paying attention because his bloody traffic sign is green!
Not just that, but there is a policy on Texan roads. Because there are stop signs at almost every bloody intersection (stop signs mean you are OBLIGED to stop - just as in Europe), the policy is "first stopped, first go", no "coming from right takes the precedence", so when you're driving straight on an intersection you'd better watch out because the people from the left might've braked earlier and WILL start driving when they see you slowing down. This might work, if the car that's driving and you are actually slowing down to STOP.
You know what's even worse than all those intersections with the obligating stop signs? The ones without. Holy shit you'd better watch where your driving because you'd better be sure that when you're earlier at the intersection (or driving way faster), the other cars are going to stop for you and vice versa. The first to come can continue driving, the others have to stop.
The mixed intersections are "fun" as well. For example the ones with the T-intersections. The car driving down the road that ends has to stop. Sure, sounds like a plan... But then you can have to problems: The first problem you can face is the same as the traffic lights, drive whenever you can but make sure you won't get bashed by the cars that don't have to stop, and the other problem is the cars that are heading to your road. This is a problem when for instance - The cars don't have their blinkers on, you'll never know that you're able to turn because you think he just slows to let you pass but you're not sure so you HAVE to wait for them taking the turn... and when the cars DO have their blinkers on because you're never sure they will actually turn or they decide they'll go straight anyway why speeding so you HAVE to wait for them taking the turn... Confusing? God yes. And dangerous as well, especially if you realise 16 years old can drive cars too. And trust me, the distances in the USA are so big, when you're 16 you HAVE to drive a car or HAVE to be driven by yomamma everyday to get where you want...

I just realised there was another thing that bothered me during the drives in America. In Texas, you're allowed to call while driving, not only hands free! I find that dangerous. It distracts you from what's in front of you. What's even more annoying though is, is the front-seat/back-seat talk or the fiddling with the dashboard. DO NOT turn your head away from the road while driving... PLEASE! You might just hit that bouncy part in the road with full-speed and BASH into the car in front of you because you haven't paid attention... I mean, seriously!

And there's another thing I just realised I can't get a grip on. Why are you allowed to overtake vehicles both on the left and right side of the vehicle? Why aren't you limited to overtaking them left (using the faster lane)? In the Netherlands we drive at the right of the road, meaning all the exits on our highways are at the right side as well. If you happen to drive in Europe, you mostly have not to worry about being overtaken in the slower lane. This makes it safe for vehicles that are in the speed lane to change lanes to the right rather quickly so they're able to hit the exit. In America however you'll ALWAYS have to check your rear-mirror to make sure there aren't any speeding vehicles to your right that will be overtaking you shortly. This sounds more dangerous to me. I wouldn't like being overtaken by cars on the slower lanes.

- American/Texan roads
One of the first things I noticed driving on Texan roads was the fact they were really... bouncy. Gosh when you're used to the European roads you can just feel your food going the wrong way once on American roads. You'd think it's just a matter of getting used to, well, you're wrong. This was NOT just something to get used to, because during my entire stay we drove a lot and the rides didn't get more comfortable as the days passed, not even mentally...
Then there's another couple of things about American roads: there's a lot of 'em, they're grey and the lay-outs are confusing. Absolutely not something I want to drive on, but had to because the distances were too big to cycle (and the weather was too hot).

- American cars
Not done yet roasting the American traffic circus. The first thing that attracted my attention when I landed were the American cars being parked and driven all over the Houston airport. No wait, that's a lie, the first thing that attracted my attention was the heat.
Anyway... continuing with the roasting of the American cars... They're all the same couple of colours, white, black or something in between (booooring), there's a shitload of trucks and the cars in Texas all look old and dirty.
But that's not all. The place where I was at featured little Japanese (and even less European) cars, only leaving room for the killermachines America produces. Quite frankly, the American cars aren't safe if you compare them to European cars. Moreover, they're not even safe for American women! Chris' mother told me that if she would get in an accident, the seatbelt would break the spines in her neck and the airbag would finish the job this because she's so "damn small".

- Free soft-drink refills
I wish we had those in Europe... goooosh! It's funny how in America, the cups you get if you order something are size large anyway if you compare them to European cups... but the fact that in most restaurants you can have as much of the soft drink you ordered, is just plain awesome! I found that out the fourth day or so when we went to Wal-mart and ordered food and drinks at the McDonalds in the same building. When walking towards an empty table somewhere in the back, I noticed the soft- drink machines were in reach of the consumers. I told Chris the following: "Hey, the machines over there are placed really dumb... anyone can fill-up his cup whenever the employees aren't looking! Now that's funny!" Chris was all like... "What the-? That's the purpose of 'em, you can refill as much
Another small detail is the fact that everywhere you go, you can ask for water. Ordering water in restaurants is always free of charge and you get the water in cups as well. The machines to refill as much as you like here, it's free!" "I was like... Wow, that's not like in Europe... I wish we had that." Chris explained: "Companies like McDonalds order so much soft-drinks at the same time they pay so little for it they can give you free refills without losing profit, I mean... drinks are the cheapest part of a meal." Now that's quite something.
Also - If you order water, get it in a cup and refill the cup with Dr Pepper... you just got yourself free soft drinks, w00t! Not that I did it or anything, I mean... one full cup of soft drinks/water is already hard to completely drink, but another one after that would be too much to handle! Chris' reply when I told him that brilliant scheme: "You cold do that yes, but most Americans aren't bastards like that - that's just rude." I guess it's just me with my greedy Dutch way of thinking, now isn't it?

"Ifar has been here for a couple of days now and the most exciting thing he found out about America is the free refills..."

Chris, Texas.

- Ice-tea, sweet tea and tea
One of the biggest points of discussion was the confusing things the Texans all call tea. I mean... what the hell is up with "sweet tea"? The first time I drank sweet tea, the sweet tea did NOT taste like tea at all. In fact, it didn't taste like tea so much that I thought it was much like the European ice tea (which doesn't taste like tea either). At that time I started yelling "Sweet tea is not TEA" Apparently Chris did not like that, because immediately he went into defensive mode. During my entire stay that discussion has been held more than once. In all honesty, that discussion had been held SO much that it even started to annoy Chris!
Anyway, I think I got it all figured out now: In Europe, sweet tea does not exist, it's called ice tea here (and is waaay less sweet). In Texas, sweet tea is like ice tea with a lot (and I mean A LOT) of sugar added. It's similar to ice tea, but way sweeter, and doesn't taste like ice tea at all... so that's why I didn't call it tea in the first place, just how I don't call ice tea actual tea. Also, in Texas ice tea is in fact, plain ice-cold tea. Disgusting! I mean, who would want to drink cold tea anyway?

"Sweet tea is a southern US thing, they dont have that in the north. I call it sugar water. In the north, they have ice tea which is good, like raspberry or peach tea."

Nacht, WLM on August 14, 2009

Another cold drink that struck me amazed was ice coffee. It is exactly what it's called after, cold Starbucks coffee, available in a lot of the supermarkets. Honestly, thank God we have nothing alike in the Netherlands as far as I know. I cannot imagine it becoming a hit - it's revolting.

- The toilet paper
Yes, another point I'd like to discuss with y'all (Y'ALL, Y'ALL, Y'ALL, Y'ALL, Y'ALL) is the toilet paper in America. Currently you're probably all like "What The-", but I can tell you I had the exact same feeling when I confronted myself with it the first time during my stay. The American and European pieces of toilet paper seriously have different dimensions. In Europe, the height of every piece of toilet paper is way larger than the American height. Over in America, the pieces of toilet paper are perhaps half as big as the European when you rip it off the roll. This was weird. During my stay, instead of folding TWO toilet papers as I normally would in Europe, I had to fold FOUR of 'em - two on each side. Bloody ridiculous!
But that's not even all! In restaurants and fast-food buildings there are NO RIP-OFF lines on toilet paper, so every time you try to rip some off you don't rip off a square or a rectangular, but more like half a circle... you CAN NOT wipe your butt with toilet paper in the shape half of a circle! ARRG!

- Costs studying in America
Another surprising fact I taught during my stay in Texas were the ridiculously high price tags of studying in America. Everybody knows we Europeans normally think of American teenagers to be dumb, and now I have a slight idea why that is. Apparently, in order to let someone go to high school for a year, it costs the parents ten thousands of dollars to get everything settled! I mean... WOW. Just... wow. In Europe (there we have the comparisons again), a year of college costs about 2,000 Euros. In Europe, or more specifically the Netherlands, about 70% of the people have had/will have a diploma of college. In fact, most of the parents/the students themselves in the Netherlands can afford their college bills. I can imagine that, with the high price tags in America, a lot of the families don't have enough money for the young ones to go to school.
The best thing... it's good for me to understand this, but that doesn't make the average teenager in America any smarter. There are still plenty of BabiiCandiis (mirror) spread around America because they... oh wait... BabiiCandii is from a rich family... uhm... I guess there's still plenty of more reasons why teenagers are dumb in America. Moving on.

- School dress codes/regulations
Next up... the school dress codes/regulations. This time I'll be going straight-to-the-point: they're hidious. I mean, I've heard of uniforms (I'm pro uniform) before, but strict dress codes like the ones they have at the school Chris is going to? In fact, there were so many I forgot most of 'em and can only tell a couple. For instance, the clothes have to be either brown, tinted, black or white (grey is not permitted!), there can not be any logo bigger than SMALLxSMALL inch (another damn thing about America... the tools for measurement are all different) or are allowed to be really big as long as the clothes say Alvin or has the mascot in it, meaning gay-ass cheerleader shirts are permitted everywhere at school... the button-up shirts must have a collar, kids cannot go off-campus during school times and will receive heavy penalties if they're caught outside the school premisses...
I mean... what the hell is up with all that...? I can't imagine rules like that would be accepted at Dutch public schools. Is the criminality/wannabe criminality that much of a problem to make school prison-like?! I guess it's just practising before the kids run out of money and become drug dealers, winding up in prison - at least they know what the prison is like already. PS: Ratting in the Netherlands will NOT give you a reward whatsoever!

- Tax free prices
Something a little more peculiar. The first time I went shopping in America, a lot of products had weird price tags on them: $4,77... $2,82... $1,89... Apparently, the price tags in stores in America are all excluding the taxes, I found this weird. Over at the Netherlands, all the prices are including taxes. At the time I found out I started laughing out loud. Why would it be like that in America? Chris told me it was a normal thing to have. I disagreed... and after he told me, I still laughed at the tax free price tags several times.
After awhile though I figured out the explanation. America is a big country with 50 different states, all with different rules and laws. In fact, it is so big that the taxes are a local thing! To put the price tags of nationwide products INCLUDING taxes would automatically make those products more expensive somewhere where the taxes are higher than in a place where the taxes are low. By putting all the price tags excluding taxes will keep something nationwide the same price everywhere. You pay taxes at the end of your shopping, at the counter. There your taxes will be added to make the difference.
In fact, by figuring that out, I also found out why new console games are all $59,99 in stores in America, because even in those commercials, the prices are excluding tag, making them about $64,94 with taxes in the Houston area... almost the same number in EUROS we pay over in Europe.
Oh by the way, by knowing the explanation now, it doesn't make me less laughy about it though! I still find it weird to see price tags excluding taxes.

- American brainwashing
Probably not the actual last thing, but the last thing I can come up with that bugged me about the American lifestyle was the continuing brainwashing an average American has to withstand during a regular day. It is not a secret to say they're being screwed daily. For instance: the American advertisements on the telly are purely to psyche you into believing the products that are offered actually work. Every single commercial is someone introducing himself as an expert, followed by him or her talking about the product and telling it's why it's so great... but don't just take their word on it! Listen to the happy customers they certainly did not hire you to talk! Another instance: shopping. While in Europe you get one big bag to put all your groceries in, in America they have these tiny little bags in which you can only put three or less articles in. So instead of leaving with one big bag, you're supposed to leave the store with this great feeling you bought a lot of crap because you have ten small bags!
That's probably just a beginning! I mean I'm sure there are plenty of other ways they're probably screwing the American people over, but I only noticed those two ways the worst.

That was a lot to read now, wasn't it?! Enough about America - It was a great experience and the boxxy full of stroopwafels and liquorice (containing the photo card and post card) is on it's way. I hope you enjoyed the flowers.

Also by finishing this very, very long blog article I'd like to notify you guys I'll be taking a break of writing articles for a couple of days because of me wanting to enjoy my holidays for the rest of the little time I have left. This will result in that I won't be writing a specific blog article about the trip to the cinema I have planned in a couple of days. I'll write a short summary about it at the end of the holidays.

The flowers Chris' family has received from us.

Cheers,

17 years and two day ago...

2009-08-07T23:55:00.003+02:00

Kale and Mallow, "ahh that's cute."

It was August fifth 1992. Half past 12 GMT+1 I was born after a hard labor. The third and final kid of my two parents. It was the night after my aunt and uncle celebrated their engagement. My mother had to leave the fiesta and go to the hospital because of her labor becoming tougher on her. When the news came out I was born, my aunt and uncle thought it happened on their day, while in fact it was just after midnight the day after. For the rest I can't remember anything about my birth... I mean... that's 17 years ago by now.

Yup - yesterday I celebrated my birthday here in Texas. The party was quite small-scaled though. Of the 5 friends that I have in Texas (Chris, Matt, Ethan, Nathan and Aleks) only two went bowling with me (Chris and Matt). Aleks was supposedly coming as well, but when we called him around 3 o' clock we got notified he was sleeping. All the other calls after that were left unanswered. Since I've been bowling for quite some time now, you'd expect me throwing 200 games all the time. This obviously, was not happening. Because of the holidays I hadn't practiced bowling anymore. Long story short... My bowling was bad. I remember throwing more less 100 in the first two games. After the first two games my scores slowly went up and I ended with a nice game of 155 (that was the fifth game). Seriously, the lanes were crap and the resetting of the pins was slow, the bowling alley was obviously made for slow-mo bowling and socializing. Chris went bad the entire day and tried to blame it on everything except for his mathematical calculations and himself. Matt became second all the time and threw a couple of spares during the stay. I left quite satisfied I guess, but I really wished the party was more crowded.

So what has happened more in the last couple of days? I touched the Gulf of Mexico, went to the Kehma Boardwalk (rode a rollercoaster, overcame my fear for Drop Shots and went sight-seeing in the tower), went to Fry's, Sam's Club, Pharmacies, Banks, Wal-Marts (again - will go again in a couple of minutes) and whatever more. Did I tell you about the time I went to Houston downtown and saw this BEAUTIFUL panorama view of Houston and environment? Well - Now I did. And another good thing to know is that there's a city under the city of Houston. There's an entire network of tunnels with shops, stalls and areas to relax and consume beverages. We also went to the Natural Science Museum. All I can say about that is... wow. There were plenty of nice gems, the butterflies were sweet and the 3D Imax movie about sharks was childish, but really well made.

Let me write down the variety of all the f00dz I've been eating since my stay in Texas: Greasy hamburgers, waffles (not stroopwafels - lol -), chips, fries, seafood (including crab, oyster and shrimp), chicken, salads, strawberries, bread, steaks, pasta (including macaroni, spaghetti and lasagna), Mexican food, not-so-greasy hamburgers, potatoes, rice, apples, birthday cupcakes, Mc Fluffy (is that how it's called?), cinnamon crackers, sandwiches, some other sandwiches, pecan nuts and probably some more I forgot... Texas has been such a great place to stay. I mostly drank Dr Pepper though, sometimes water, smoothies, or (ice(d)) (sweet) tea.

Tomorrow will be my last day before leaving, I'll be packing, washing, making sure I have everything I had and all the stuff I got during my stay with me when I'm dropped off. Once at the airport I'll be dressed in my Legend of Zelda shirt, Halo cap and fresh black jeans - all of which I got for free from Rebecca. Thanks SO much Rebecca, you're really kind.

Now the last thing I want to do is take a look at my wish list I made before I got here:

- Fire a gun V
- Drive a car X
- Go sight-seeing V
- Go bowl (and win) V, play golf X and play table tennis X
- Own Punisher in Halo 3 V
- Make a Halo 3 clip V/montage X
- Make a kick-ass Halo 3 map V
- Walking around at Wal-mart, buying something V
- Get something expensive for free like a laptop V
- Play Tales of Pirates X
- Meet his friends V
- Eat a big American hamburger V
- Get dressed as an American (gangster)V
- Destroy something and record it X
- Play an actual Uno game V
- Take a picture of me with Penisher and his friends and family V

Overall it's a good score. I have actually fired a couple of guns at the shooting ranch, I even had a couple of bullseyes while I was at it! I haven't driven a car, but then again, I find it a bit scary to even sit in a car while either of Chris' parents drive the car. Driving a car on the American roads with the American traffic rules would scare the living crap out of me. The American roads are way worse than the European ones (here they're are white/gray and bumpy with bad lining). I've seen enough sights - more sights than I could imagine. I haven't played table tennis and/or golf because there are no table tennis tables outside, and it's HOT to stay in the sun the entire day playing golf, and we had other stuff to do anyway. The white shoes I got were from Wal-mart, I paid them myself (one of the only things I didn't GET). Tales of Pirates isn't really one of our interests anymore. Like I said before, I've met a couple of Chris' friends. Matt, Ethan and Nathan. I count the hamburgers at Burger Shuttle as greasy and the ones I had at Whataburger BIG. That makes a big greasy burger in total.

Dress up as an American gangster has one of the funnier stories behind it - we were walking down 'the strand' and walked past this boutique where they showed pictures of people dressed. Rebecca remarked I might just take a pic of myself while I'm here. I looked around and found the pictures quite funny. Between the pictures I saw one of a person dressed as an American gangster. When I mumbled it actually was on my wish list to dress up as an American gangster, Rebecca decided I just HAD to get one of those pictures. I was like... okay.. why not and we stepped in. It took AGES to make the pictures, but Chris' family is really patience and even when the pictures were taken we continued talking to the boutique holders. We were in that store for more than an hour. Now there is a peg on their world map that points to a place about 14 kilometers above the star called Amsterdam in the Netherlands. As for the destroying something, the reason why we haven't done that is the same as with the golfing, it's just too hot to spend the entire day outside trying to record us destroying something from the messy garage. Also - I think that hurricane Ike left enough destruction behind as well, so there's no need in destroying even more in this part of Texas. During my stay I've taken enough pictures of the family and me and I've played an Uno game on the Xbox - it's just as rigged as via WLM.

This blog article is long enough by now. I've had enough of writing it. Cheers,

The American Dream on Holidays

2009-08-02T22:09:00.001+02:00

I wish I had a better title for this blog article, but frankly... I don't. I don't know, I just can't think of a joke. Not that it matters, it's about what the blog article self is about right? Well - I won't disappoint you, since this is me writing a blog article while being in Texas.

Yes - I actually went to Texas. A couple of weeks earlier I talked about the possibility of me going to Texas. It started out by dreaming about it, continued with talking about it and making a wish list and ended up with my entering a plane to Houston after having waited for more than 13 hours at London Heathrow.
Speaking of which: On July the 23th it was the FIRST time I got on a plane from Amsterdam to London. It was a great new experience. Not precisely a nice one - but a good one anyway. The headache you get during take off and especially landing makes me feel sleepy. Furthermore, the crackling noises, flickering lights, trembling wings kind of scared me. Luckily nothing has happened with the plane though. The second plane trip was hell too - over 10 ten hours in a plane traveling over the oceans and whenever I fell asleep, I would wake up not even 1 hour later. During the plane flight I have seen one movie in total: Hannah Montana the Movie. Surprised? I'm not. Oh, I've also seen one or two Friends episodes and A LOT of flight info. The first thing I noticed when I landed my plane? The American cars. Haha! They're all white, all trucks and all PLAIN. Second thing: Geez it's humid out here.

It took at least a half of an hour for me to check-in. During the entire time I stood in the line I was quite scared I wouldn't be accepted into the USA. I don't know why - but I'm only sixteen years old and traveling on my own, so that might've been somewhat suspicious. Anyway - I had everything in order, put my finger prints in the system, let them take a picture of me and explained I only had licorice with me. The not-so-wordy custom and protection guy let me through. I was officially in the USA. Hurray!
I was really anxious to meet Chris (Admin Zeph, Punisher, Penisher, Atrum Zephyr, ...) and I didn't want them to wait for me for ages. After actually being in the USA there was another thing that made me nervous - the baggage handler. After waiting more than 3 minutes I really thought my baggage didn't arrive in Houston. I wouldn't have thought that if it weren't for the fact I let them handle my baggage all the way from Amsterdam, but I did, so I thought perhaps something wasn't allowed by the LONDON customs. Ah well, after waiting about 4 minutes, swearing to myself the same bags have been passing by a couple of times now, I finally spotted a bag that looked a bit like mine. I took it without looking properly at it. After another minute I actually realized I took the right one.

The last thing I was nervous about was the fact I wasn't even sure if Chris was (still) waiting at me after I got to arrivals. I looked around and at first glance I didn't see him - he wasn't between the people cheering at the arriving people nor at the suited men with random nameplates with them. I really wanted to surprise him with my arrival, but when I randomly looked to my left I saw him standing and looking at me, waving in a rather silly way. The first thing the father was did was asking if I'd like a drink, while Chris took my baggage (weighing only 9 kilos!). After having talked a bit about stuff I can't remember we went to the garage and towards Chris' dad car. I didn't have to pay for my coffee, he did... Even the continuous driving after arriving was an experience by its own. I had to continuously talk English and I went American car spotting, HAHA the American cars are a joke! Chris' dad let me use his phone to call my brother at home. I found it funny to speak in Dutch with my brother, even if it was only to annoy Chris. Anyway - after the serious talk was done and my brother kept repeating "shoarma" whenever I said something, I hung up on him and waited for the adventure to continue.

Seriously though - the (spoiled) American life is good. Cheap, lots of variety... During my first week of stay I've been doing lots of good things with Chris and his folks. For instance: I've been sight-seeing quite a lot, I went to the Galleria in downtown Houston with Chris and hismomma, I went out for dinner and breakfast a lot..., I went to a gun show, fired guns myself, I went to "The Strand" (Yes, it's called like that... and yes it does mean "the beach" in Dutch) and made pictures of myself dressed as an American Gangster, went to Wal-Mart and Blockbusters and probably some other stuff I can't think of right now... There's also a couple of things I haven't done yet, like driving a car, going to NASA and make a podcast.

Chris' parents are really nice to me, they don't shout to me, communicate with me like I'm Dutch (meaning they explain words if I ask them too), ... The thing what makes them really nice to me is their generosity. I brought 70 dollars with me to America on July the 24th. Currently it's August 2nd and I still have about 60 dollars left. I haven't even been to an ATM yet and they have paid tens and tens of dollars on me. Excluding the out-for-dinners that I didn't pick, they also paid for my entry to the gun show, lots of souvenirs... It's crazy up to a point I feel a bit... sad I can't return the favor for now someway. I'm just trying to be polite as a thank you. Once I'm back I'll send them a vase full of flowers. The only ten dollars and eighty cents I have spent in America was for my pair of Wal-Mart White Shoes. I like those and they're cheaper here than back in the Netherlands, just like a shitload of more things.

Speaking of souvenirs, I got plenty of them already... F00dzors (Texan liqourice), comic books (three manga), photos, shooting target, a shirt and probably a couple of other things too...

Anyway. I think I'm done writing a blog article now, I haven't been paying attention anymore anyway because I've been playing Halo 3 during the making of this blog article. Hopefully I'll soon be updating about my life in Texas soon.

Cheers,

Still alive!

2009-07-11T01:42:00.001+02:00

Just like I said on my twitter a couple of minutes ago - I'm still alive. Lately I have been enjoying my holidays. Going to bed at absurdly late times and going out of bed at even more absurd times (like 3 pm). After my grandfather's birthday dinner last Sunday and the graduation ceremony the Friday before that, I haven't had anything scheduled until my departure at July 23th, when I'll be going to Texas. Yeeeha! Howdy how Chris!

The graduation ceremony itself was quite dull. After a rather dull movie clip (I hoped to God I wasn't featured in it, and luckily I wasn't) there were about a hundred students that one after another went on the podium to get their diploma. One fancy suit after another walked up the stairs. I didn't feel like doing any effort the final day I'll be seeing secondary school pupils, so I got up the podium in my standard red T-shirt and jeans that were half nibbled. Fancy aye mate?
The best thing about the ceremony was what happened afterwards - I got to speak with a lot of my teachers and got to tell them the honest truth about everything I hated, liked and am going to miss about their classes. I also spoke to meneer Kool (my chemistry teacher) who was all proud of me scoring an 8,4 for my retake (which he believed was an 8,7 - in the end it turned out to be a mistake). I had a great conversation with all of them, and I am going to miss some of them when I'm gone. BUT: not all hope has been lost. After my PABO education I can continue to educate myself into becoming a proper secondary school teacher. I will deffi be staging at my old school then, so that my teachers will become my colleagues then!

The last couples of days have been ... draggish. I've been going on TPT a lot and played a couple of hours on my Xbox 360. Speaking of which: I made a second account for XBL Gold and got my hands on a couple of thousand Microsoft Points to spend on Premium DLC like the Burnout Paradise Island and Bungie Pro. Brilliance.

Looking forward to Texas, the new year and all the time I'll be spending on my Xbox 360.

Cheers from,

Leave out the first part though.

"The sun is shining... I feel good..."

2009-07-01T19:54:00.004+02:00

"And no-one's gonna stop me now."
(Is that how the song goes? I quite forgot.)

Just another Wednesday in my sad, boring, schizophrenic life. It started out a bit unusual though: I woke up at 11 o' clock. Wait what? 11 o' clock in the MORNING? Yes, really! Why is that so unusual? Well, it is because it's quite early in my "school's out"-days. I woke up so early because I wanted to play on my Xbox before having to go over at my friend's place to install his Xbox Live. I fired up Halo 3 and starting playing with my friend Austjavi. The games were okay I guess, but after three or four games, I started to lag like hell. I wasn't able to play Halo 3 properly any more, thus losing a couple of MLG games (like I give a shit anyway). After I started to get annoyed by my lag - and making my friend lose a couple of games - I turned off the Xbox 360 to see what was the matter. What turned out? My father was uploading about three gigs of athletics photos onto his site. After waiting for his pictures to have been uploaded, I fired up the game again and joined the same friend in some awkward infection type games. Honestly, at first I found it quite funny, but it really got on my nerves after awhile.

At quarter to 1 PM my friend came over to check whether I was still able to get his Xbox 360 Elite up or not and to get it connected with the internetz. Yesterday, he said he would come over at around 1 o' clock, so I was still in my yammies and told him not yet. I wanted to stay home for a bit more. I played two more matchmade games (without lag!) and set off for my friend's house down the street at about twenty past 1. Within minutes I set up his XBox 360 Elite and registered his account to XBox Live. My work there was done, but I stayed until 2 o' clock to download a crap load of updates, until I got kicked out of the house because he wanted to go shopping with his two friends.

Back at my place I fired up Halo 3 (again...) and played some matchmade games until my dad notified me that I still had to visit the City Office to return my passport request form and write down my autograph and stuff like that. On our way there, we discovered I didn't have a picture of me with me, so just as we arrived and got our number, I had to dash my way back to home (like... 2 minutes away - lol -) to get a picture. When walking up the stairs I heard laughter coming from upstairs, it was Baihui who was just ringing my doorbell to play some Halo 3 with me. I explained why I couldn't play Halo 3 at the moment and he randomly decided he would come along with me toward the City Office. Great fun. Apparently he was home alone and bored anyway.

While we got our number at about half past two, we were finally helped at three o' clock. While waiting I measured myself: 183 cm (that's not the size of my (e-)penis, I wish! It is in fact how tall I am!). Because I was wearing pretty high sandals, I took off 2 cm, resulting in me being 181 cm tall... I've grown since the previous time I was at the City Office, because on my ID it says I'm 178 cm. Anyway - we got served and were back at my crib at around half past three, where I realised it was July first. Wednesday! Meaning I could call up school to get my chemistry retake grade!

After letting my dad look up the number of school - I dialled it and got the receptionist of 't Zaanlands on the phone. I explained her why I called and she looked up my grade. With a voice full of ease she calmly said I had an 8,4. I was a bit stunned... Enthousiasticly I yelled "an 8,4?? REALLY?" She remained calm and said "Yeah - I'm not pulling your leg". I was still flabbergasted. It was EXACTLY what I needed for an 8 on my diploma.

Thankfully I put the phone down and started playing Halo 3 with my friend. I knew I did the chemistry retake well, but seriously... I only had an 8,4 in my wildest dreams, and apparently it's a dream come true. Brilliance.

"In my wildest dreams I get an 8,4, making me pass chemistry with an 8 on my diploma. That would really be SO neat. It isn't impossible, since I had an 8,8 for maths earlier."

- Me in the blog article Chemistry Retake: The Conclusion

What a way to end my secondary school career. I'd really like to meet my chemistry teacher one more time... just to hear his reply when I say I had an 8,4 (he obviously already knows about it because he checked it himself).

Hopefully I'll see him July third. America is getting closer as well...

PS:

Cheers,

Halo there!

2009-06-29T00:53:00.005+02:00

Click to enjoy. Notice the n00b emblem (TIP: It's a pussy, just like me).

Oh, did I tell you I got banned from earning EXP because I was boosting achievements in Rumble Pit? Well, since then I went into Halo 3 care-free mode. Lately I have been playing Halo 3 purely for fun. Of course this has always been the case, I mean... it's not like I was expecting to earn money playing Halo 3, but the fact I won't be able to keep my 2/3 GAMES/EXP ratio up now anyway just made me go into KILL HAPPY KILL LOTS AND DIE LOSING mode.

Now because of that, I started losing RANKED matches on purpose to get lower ranks for easier opponents the next games. It has been working out rather well. In Squad Battle I'm now stuck around rank 7/8 and I can assure you, the opponents are easy. The more easier opponents, the more fun. Since I can't earn EXP anyway whether I win or not, I don't give a crap about objectives and go for the kills, or in some cases, betrayals. Most of the games end in me having +10 (kill/death spread), pissing everybody off and having lots of spree, dual kill and assassination medals... hmmmmm plenty of medals.

My kill/death RATIO before getting EXP banned (playing serious, going for objectives, not camp when my team is in despair) was 1.09 for ranked and 1.19 for social. At the moment they have increased up to 1.11 ranked and 1.24 social. The ranked one is especially awesome, because it's pretty hard to increase because of balancing issues, gametypes and maps.

But that's not all- the actual more FUN I had playing Halo 3 has gone through the roof. I now communicate with the opposing team. Not about how secret our tactics are though, but "how much I suck, what kind of a chicken I actually am and how bad my team is going to lose". In most cases it has actually ended in the other team being convinced my team actually sucks before the game starts. The best thing of all then is, that at the end, I turn out to be the best anyway and win the game (if it's slayer anyway)!

Also - Because I don't care about losing or winning, lately I have been playing with a lot of my friends again I've "outranked" in the past. I wouldn't say I'm better than them, but I always had the feeling I was more serious and focused to win. Playing with those friends online reminds me why they are my friends - They play to have fun, and with them in the party, you can bet it's funny (the actual GOOD friends in my playlist haven't been in online lately - did those block me? Sad face.). It's good to know that they think I'm funny as well and also notice I'm not really a bad player either!
When the opposing team starts trash talking us, I used to ignore it when I was more serious. I was like... screw them, it's sad they play Halo 3 to trash talk someone like me... but now, because I want to have fun, I start talking back and shizzle - making my team laugh out loud and the other team hate me... Now I know this ain't nice - and typically Dutch I'm afraid - but you bet your ass it's fun to teabag a person 16 times MORE than he teabags you, being able to laugh at his corpse 16 times more as well. Back in the serious days (is it that far back already!?) - I wouldn't dare to teabag someone, because you'd never know whether there's another one of that team right behind me, ready to unleash the fury of raining bullets, exploding grenades and badly timed sword lunges.

Now to be honest, my AMOUNT OF GAMES/EXP ratio has gone quite a transformation in the period of the ban. Previous of the ban I had played 2650 games and won 1994 - that's a ratio of a bit better than 2/3 - which in Halo 3 apparently rocks... (I've seen people playing 4000 matches only having 1000 EXP). Currently - my ratio is 2904 games played, and 1990 EXP (I lost four exp in the mean time because of losing game connection and getting booted).

What the hell do I care though? I have more fun playing Halo 3 than ever before! Plus... I have ALL possible Halo 3 achievements except for the Two For One one, which pisses me off actually.

So people, want to have fun playing Halo 3? Join me if you can - I don't care (a lot) about how you suck. I can always use you as bait.

Cheers,

PS: I've also played Call of Duty 4 today online... God what the fuck is wrong with that game?

Chemistry Retake - The conclusion

2009-06-24T20:02:00.003+02:00

Today was my final day I would I ever go to school for doing a test: how did I do my chemistry retake?

I went out of bed at 12 o' clock (I actually wanted to get out of bed at half past 11, but I was too tired - going to bed at quarter past three and all at night) and instead of "reading" bits of chemistry as a preparation for the test, I started watching telly. First some Phineas and Ferb (an episode I haven't seen before - featuring a time machine) and after that some Zach and Cody shizzle.
At about ten to one (about half an hour before I had to leave) I actually started browsing pages, while enjoying my breads with egg spread. I wasn't reading seriously though, because I didn't know where to start and had the idea I knew everything anyway. At exactly one o' cock I stopped reading (already!) and started packing and dressing for the big moment. Overall my overall preparations were... rather poor. The only good things I did were visiting our chemistry teacher twice (Friday and Monday), let him do all the talking and explaining and re-reading my cheat sheets on my calculator. The most important preparation however was practicing a few calculations for my retake, because on the original exam I couldn't do a SINGLE calculation. God dangit, once again I wasn't looking forwards to my exam. All I did was hope it wasn't as tough as the first one.

During my way to school I noticed my bike seat was crappy, it leaned forward making the ride very uncomfortable. The best thing during the cycle to school however was when I exited the tunnel. On the cycle lanes I saw this grey piece of a bicycle. At first look it didn't ring me any bells, but getting closer and closer I recognised what it could've been. I passed it and hopped off my bicycle and inspected my bike at the place where I thought the piece could've came from... and well what do you know: it was actually missing! I decided to pick up the bike piece, realising I didn't notice I lost it... two days ago. That piece of my bike had been laying there for two full nights without even getting smashed or whatever! In fact, it was still very usable. With a smile I started cycling again.

For the rest nothing spectacular happened before making the test... I opened my can of energy drink BEFORE the test (yeah, that is remarkable) so it wouldn't piss people off when I open my can during the test (making a fuzzy noise), and I prepared the test by writing my information done.
During the test itself I realised it was a piece of cake! I didn't have trouble making any (excluding perhaps two or three) of the exercises! Even the calculating went brilliant this time! I hope I have a seven for my chemistry now. In my wildest dreams I get a 8,4, making me pass chemistry with an 8 on my diploma. That would really be SO neat. It isn't impossible, since I had a 8,8 for maths earlier.
At the end of the test I could literally suck the blood right from under my left thumb nail. I had an accident closing my pencil holder, my thumb got stuck between the zip line and the zipper, resulting in quite a painful and bloody accident. I asked how others felt like it went, and they all said 'I thought it was quite difficult'... I feel bad for them (oh wait no I don't), because in their case, their passing depends on how well the test is made.

At the end on my way home I was pleased with the results. Hopefully I can conclude my secondary school student career with a bang. On July first at 13:30 I can call the school, because then they will have my results. The others, who aren't sure whether they succeeded secondary school or not have the right to know first and will be notified starting from 10 o' clock in the morning.

PS: check it out... doesn't it remind you of this page?

Cheers and see you soon hopefully,

Guess I owe you this blog

2009-06-23T02:35:00.001+02:00

Yeah... I was getting quite sad not having blogged too.

Long time no blog right? It's not like my life was completely and utterly dull lately (about a complete month... but whatever), but the reason I haven't been blogging was because it bored me. No one looked at the blog entries, it takes ages to post a blog without spelling and grammer mistakes and quite frankly, I just wasn't in the mood for it all.

Don't worry! I'm back! Not completely as you might have guessed, writing lots of big blogs and shizzle... but I'm back with something a lot quicker... Twitter! Yes! One of the sites I swore NEVER to join, I have joined. Yesterday. Because of that, I'll be posting a lot of SHIZZLE on my Twitter page as well, so that I don't have to post a shit load of blog entries just to put down some links. Because of that, I seriously recommend you guys to visit my Twitter page and subscribe to be updated daily on my daily activities!

Now for the less shitty stuff... what all happened this last month?
- The wednesday after the last blog (geography final) I went to a show in Zaantheater, well, half the show, because I didn't find out on time that I had to get to a show... So instead of being there the full show - I only saw half of it (after the break)
- I passed all my examens, meaning I PASSED SECONDARY SCHOOL! WOOOOOT, ALL HAIL COLLEGE (I'm going to college where you learn how to become a teacher)
- I'm going to retake chemistry tomorrow (Wednesday) so I get a better diploma.
- Been doing my admin job at The PC Takeover, and the second admin... cough Xylogeist cough ruined the porn forum :(
- I'm going to America this summer! YEAAAH... Check out my current wishlist below:

- Fire a gun
- Go sight-seeing
- Go bowl (and win), play golf and play table tennis
- Own Punisher in Halo 3
- Make a Halo 3 clip/montage
- Make a kick-ass Halo 3 map
- Walking around at Wal-mart, buying something
- Get something expensive for free like a laptop
- Play Tales of Pirates
- Meet his friends
- Get dressed as an American (gangster)
- Destroy something and record it
- Take a picture of me with Penisher and his friends and family

- Been drinking to celebrate me passing secondary school - Being tipsy is a lot of fucking fun you know!
- I uploaded two Halo 3 clips at Bungie.net and three youtube clips... For links, check my Twitter page
- I'm going to Walibi World some weekend. My brother promised we will go to make him forget about his break-up
- There was another big TGDPlee discussion... that website is f'ing retarded! A part of the discussion can be found here (Dutch alert)
- A lot of random shizzle I guess.

I love you guys, seriously... Please check regularly both at my Twitter page and this blog.

Cheers,

Geography final

2009-05-26T12:02:00.000+02:00

To be honest with you guys, I was a bit scared for this final. Like I told you before, this wasn't exactly a final I was looking to. To make things even worse, I didn't even properly study for it either! When I finally wanted to learn at half past nine yesterday, I couldn't concentrate at all. After about half an hour of studying I fell asleep until I woke up at 12 o' clock at night. Because I had trouble with that subject anyway, and didn't care what my grade was as long as it was a C, I decided not to study at all any more and just watch the lightning storm happening right outside the living room windows. It was a spectacular view! Every ten seconds the entire neighbourhood glowed bright white a couple of times when thunder bolts found their way through the sky to bash into the building site cranes. If you were one of the two lucky people I had a conversation with that hour you would've probably heard me saying "wow, that one was nice" a couple of times. At one o' clock I went to bed, to finally sleep at two o' clock and to wake up at 8 o' clock in the morning, yeah... I had a brilliant night of sleep.

Anyway, how did the final go? Surprisingly I didn't find it too difficult. The first couple of questions were horrible... if there was one thing I didn't study, it was the creation of gletsjers and stuff. I think I did okay on those questions though.
The second part of the final was about the Nike MNC (Multi National Corporation). There was one question for a mere two points on which my answer was about... ten lines of paper? It was a sick question and I almost broke my hand writing it. I think I did okay on the second part too, just like with the third and fourth part. But... I will never know when it comes down to geography, because the last time I thought it went okay, was when I had a 4,5...

Now I'm going to stop blogging, because I also have biology today, and I really want to read a couple of things from the books again beforing doing that final.

Cheers,

We are the champions!

2009-05-24T18:49:00.000+02:00

The title is a bit of a dejá vu... It's oh-so-true though.

Remember the game contest in the Game Mania held a couple of weeks ago? Friday evening, we went to the store and we overheard there was another Halo 3 championship today, but instead of it being free-for-all, it would be 2 vs 2. That day I made a deal with Roman: If there wouldn't be a lot of new subscibers and if I would subscribe myself, I would join forces with HIM. Seeing how he played previous time, I thought that would be a brilliant idea. Better than playing with my poorer and always discussing brother.
Today it was held. At quarter to two, after drinking a couple of cups filled with tea (I didn't have anything to eat), I went to Game Mania alone, hoping that I would be joined with Roman. First however, to keep my honour high, I had to make up an excuse if the competition was too big, so I could back off if necessary. Entering the Game Mania, I scanned the shop for good players. Quite unfortunately I saw one of the two other best players in the shop from the free-for-all contest.
To get to know my opponents, I started talking. It was two o' clock but the contest wasn't beginning yet. When I told Roman I was alone, he nodded to me and went out looking for another person who was alone (if there wasn't he would join me). There was a match. Within a minute my new team mate started talking. He wasn't a nobody. He had been on the telly playing Halo 3, and won a championship in Germany. I was like... "this will all be fine, we'll easily win" and I subscribed for the contest. However, after subscribing, I heard some tough news. There was ANOTHER person alone. Because of the high advantage we would have being together, he was re-assigned with the other bloke (who was quite frankly just bad) and I got to play with Roman anyway. Now although this was what I came for, I highly doubted I would win from that bloke. I was quite annoyed. Anyway, another familiar face passed by, it was Schoegies brother. I remembered him from a sleepover during Easter two years ago (even excluding this year). The three of us (the best one around, Schoegie's bro' and me) started talking. It was quite an interesting conversation, and I now know that Schoegie's bro is a bit of an ass actually...

Anyway, that wasn't what I should be talking about. During the practice game the Bro and me started playing in Snowbound, the worst thing of all was the fact we had infinite ammo turned on. In other words: the Bro got the sniper and shot gun and started camping in the cave, I had no chance whatsoever. Knowing that, I was quite worried he might win from us 2 vs 2 as well.

The games were on. The first game was a piece of cake! We fought against two kids in High Ground, and we won with about 25 against 11. I was ashamed we died so much... The bestest around thought Roman and me did well. Our first victory was in, and we celebrated with a high five.
The second game was just as easy! We battled against another pair of small blokes on Narrows. This was a bit more difficult, yet we won with 25 to 19.
The third game was hilarious, Roman and I got to pick the map and took Valhalla... a surprisingly big map for 2 vs 2. Me being confident of my sniping skills took the sniper, while Roman was going for the Spartan Laser. Not even a minute in the game I saw a hostile banshee flying past, but I couldn't snipe him down. Roman however already had the laser and lasered it to destruction, our first kill was in. The first part of the match was exciting. We either were in the lead with about two kills, or behind by one whenever the Bro got a sniper. The Battle Rifle battles and sniper sniping went on for a long bit, until we spotted another Banshee and Wraith. After destroying the two of them (after a fierce Banshee battle) I got in a wraith myself and decided to have a vehicle war. Haha, it was a brilliant idea! When he covered the air and ground, and I covered the ground and base, we drove and flew towards the enemy base. There we destroyed all of their vehicles, and seeing an enemy shooting our Banshee with a Missile Pod from the base as well, I shot him with the wraith and started camping around their base with the Banshee and Wraith. So we did the entire last part of the game, seeing and destroying their vehicles whenever they spawned, and killing the enemies walking towards their base. They knew stood no chance whatsoever and decided to shout at us for being lame. We replied by laughing our asses off. They were hopeless, the pink team was owning them (we decided we wanted to battle in pink). The third match was won too, ensuring us a place in the finals against the bestest and the noob.

The final was really exciting. Although I can't remember exactly what happened and all, I know it was a fierce battle. The finals would be held in two different maps, one was picked by them, and one was picked by us. They were to pick the first map, and unsurprisingly they chose Narrows (I know why, the spawns are obvious and the sniping is freaking easy). Goddammit I can't remember having such a great match. The entire time it was exciting... They were in the lead, we were in the lead, they were in the lead... Now it's time for my complimenting. Roman really knows how to work in a team. That doesn't make him a Halo 3 God, but it does higher our chances of winning. The last minute was exciting. It went from 24-23 to 24-24, until one of us shot one of the other team, making us win by ONE point. We high fived again.
After that really exciting match, it was our round to pick the map. Although we considered The Pit, Roman had an excellent insight and proposed Construct, because it had no rocket launcher, sniping would be a bit more difficult and the noob would hopefully go up the transporters by himself, making him an easy target.
Once again, this match was very exciting too, in the beginning it was like 9-3, but slowly and steadily the lead got smaller and smaller, until a certain point when it was like a draw. During the entire match there were some beautiful kills from both teams. In the final firefight, after the bestest have fled the site a couple of times (when it was two against one, him having a mauler and the both of us battle rifles) when the score was an amazing 23-23 AGAIN, they were at the yellow teleporter and we were closing up. The fight was fierce, and the first to die was the n00b. Roman having been weakened by the n00b and the Bester, got a lethal shot in the head and died. I having shot, but not having been hit went with all my power towards the yellow transporter, where the Bestest was around. He was shot a couple of times already and I decided I took the risk with my battle rifle and started shooting him. I don't know how, but suddenly he stood right in front of me, with his back toward me. Roman yelled "SHOOT HIM, SHOOT HIM" and I assasinated him into death. We won with 25-24, again.

After talking a bit more, I got my price money and left the Game Mania, having kept my honour high. Roman and I both did a great job. We were the champions.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going outside for some exercising with my friend, having had another exciting championship.

Cheers,

PS: grammar and spell check will be done afterwards.

Representing Seantje

2009-05-23T20:05:00.006+02:00

And how... Remember the bowling league we won? Well, because of that, we were invited to play in the national finals. At half past nine I got out of bed. Not even half a minute later (I was walking towards the living room for breakfast) Koen rang the door bell... It was time to go.
What the hell? This early? With a tired face I replied with "I'll be right there". Quickly I visited the loo, got dressed, took something out the fridge to drink, got my stuff together and ran out the door towards the already droning car. Off we went to Utrecht!

Long story short... It was a mixed final (league 3 was up against league 1 too) and we lost. We didn't win any of the four games we had to play! We just couldn't get in the game. The most annoying bowling game I HAVE EVER HAD was the first game today: X, X, 9-, 9-, 9-, X, 9-, X, 9-, 71. Summing that up will give you a marvellous 138. ALL of the 9 pointers, except for one, had the TEN PIN still up. It drove me nuts. The best game I had today was the second one with a proper 173. Sponsored by Bullit.

Not to worry people, I had great fun again (seriously, I enjoy bowling). I returned home completely exhausted. Speaking of bowling: I'm looking forward to bowl in America with my dear friend Penisher. I'll make sure to pwn him. During the finals today, I overheard a conversation (oh wait, I was part of it) in which one person went to America and scored 60 points above his average because of the easy lanes in America. If the same goes for me, that would mean I'll be getting 230 points in America, wiii! The best part: Americans supposedly are bad at playing in European bowling alleys! That's freakin' hilly to know.

Penisher, please watch out for him. Gotta love America.

In other news, I thought the insane all-nighter with some Tsunacon friends at my place would be held tonight, but apparently that has been post-poned to next week. I just found out about that today, meaning my physical preparations were useless.
Yesterday was a lot of fun outside... but really, those kids can be rather annoying AND liars sometimes! Jesus! Climbing in the tree was awesome, it's a spectacular new experience!

Bowling Ifar over and out. Expect more news soon.

Cheers,

Finally

2009-05-19T22:38:00.006+02:00

A graph showing the amount of deaths by gun wounds and guns in different countries. In the graph it shows that America has the most deaths by gun wounds per 100.000 citizens. Ain't that the truth?

I'm surprised. It all went fairly relaxed. I wasn't really nervous at all once I sat in my chair Monday seconds before receiving the Dutch test papers. This because I trusted I practised enough so I could do my Dutch final properly. After three hours of writing my hands completely numb, I handed over my paper with all the questions answered and one big (yet small enough) summary written. Thanks to the internet I was quickly able to check how I did my final.
Now I wouldn't say I'm getting an A+, I had 3 out of 7 multiple choice wrong (now 2 out of 6 after they scrapped one of them) and I forgot some of the things in the summary. I can't judge how I did the open questions, but I wouldn't say I flunked it. I'm hoping for a 7,9, but I doubt I'll be getting it.

Now onto maths. A bit more nervous because of my "cheat sheets" in my calculator and because I didn't practise for this final AT ALL. In the end it turned out perfectly well though. The cheat sheets weren't necessary and out of the 22 exercises, I couldn't answer just one, and I answered only one partly... For the rest it seems like I answered all the other questions correctly!
I really hope I aced this final, so I can close maths with an 8 on my diploma. That would be awesweet.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to enjoy the rest of this week having no school. I'll have to study geography and biology later this week, though. Damn I'm not looking forward to geography!

PS: 333 views! This blog is now officially half evil. Oh, fun fact: The 333th view goes to a Google bot, yeah!

Cheers,

The day before my finals

2009-05-17T16:02:00.005+02:00

Lately I haven't been writing any blog whatsoever. This can be explained rather easily: it is because it was "holidays", there wasn't much going on and when something happened, I just wasn't in the mood to write about it, simply because writing these blog articles is hard work, too. That, and the fact that this was the "holiday" before my exams... Whenever I think about them, I get a bit nervous. The last two days I've been concentrating on my Dutch final tomorrow. Not that my Dutch is poor, the Dutch final is just a serious pain in the ass. For the Dutch final, everybody has to make a summary of an article. If there is one thing I suck at, it's summarizing. That's why I decided to actually STUDY summarizing the last couple of days.
Tuesday will be my maths final: it's a final I'm not looking forward too either, but I have the feeling it won't be THAT difficult. The maths we have to study isn't really that difficult at all. I will (have to) take a look at it tomorrow after my Dutch final, though. The two finals I am absolutely NOT looking forward to, are geography and chemistry. I can't stand those subjects. English will be like a walk in the park, freakin' easy I bet. I hope I get an 8,4 for it, so I have a NINE on my diploma, that would be f'ing awesome.

My spine is all jittery.

Now onto other news, what have I done the last couple of weeks?

First off: I got my school exams grades back. The two rather bad subjects are... chemistry (6,6) and geography (5,9) (orly?), the so-so subjects are maths (7,1) and Dutch (7,1), and for the rest I'm rather pleased with the outcome.
Second off: I've been playing a couple of games on my laptop and Xbox 360. To be more precise, a couple of Steam games and GTA IV (which is available for Steam on the PC too, btw). Let me show you a couple of highlights:

Actually there's more Peggle there than any other game, but hey, it is the game I played most.

Third off: I've been playing outside quite a lot, more than I wanted actually. Every time I said "I'll consider it" when asked to play outside, the people from my neighbourhood took that as a yes and started ringing my door bell like every hour or so, sometimes 6 times a day, until a certain point when it started to just piss me off, shutting down the bell...

Fourth and at last, I've been bowling again today, this time my mother joined, making sure I would get last place. Today I got two medals. One for becoming last in the league and the other one for becoming last at the "parent-child tournament". I don't care though, I've had a good time again with the assellmannen. They really are quite nice.
Upcoming Saturday I will have to bowl again!

Onto some more news

Remember that I wanted to go to America? Well, although my mother agreed that I'm allowed to when I pass my exams and have registered for college, she's really concerned about the Mexican, Swine, H1N1 Flu, and doesn't want me to go when it becomes a serious threat to Texas. It has already infected some people in the village my friend lives, and I don't want to get infected too when I get there. The worst case scenario would be that we have to post-pone the trip to America... I really want to go though! Hell! The Dutch, old-styled (like it was recorded with a camcorder) rap clip I saw that was filmed in Brooklyn, really made me excited for some reason. It was actually the reason I started playing GTA IV this morning instead of studying for my Dutch final.

Expect more blog articles from now again: my holidays are over and I just HAVE to inform you guys how my finals went... it's really a nervous period. I don't want to fuck these finals up.

Cheers,

Don't laser me, bro!

2009-05-05T20:36:00.000+02:00

SRTACRPG²'s live stream. Those muscles sure look good on me, don't they?

After a couple of days of relaxation and messing around with my laptop, I've finally done something again I can write an actual blog article about: I've been laser gaming with my brother!

Now to start off: Today wasn't my first time, it was my third time in the last couple of months. The two times I've been before the last couple of months, were during the Christmas Holidays and during spring break. In the past it turned out that me and my brother are an almost invincible duo: most of the matches we end up in the highest two positions on the leader boards. Today we were planning on doing the same thing over again.

At twenty to two in the afternoon we arrived at Silverstone, being well... tired. I actually wasn't really in the mood for laser gaming, but I went anyway because I promised I'd go. While having to wait outside, we looked around and saw a lot of potential bastards.
In the battle field they proved us right, a lot of people were being complete idiots during the entire first match (free-for-all). They teamed up and started shooting only the people not in their "team", started yelling when they got killed... yeah, the first match was a bit retarded. My bro' became first and I became second (who'd ever guess that?). The second match was in teams. Me being all woken up now, I started shooting everybody on the other team. Again, my brother became first and I became second. The third match was the most retarded of all, the teams were all messed up and I got shot from everywhere since three people were stalking me during the entire match. I ended up having a lousy 2000 points and on third place, my bro' became first... again (as usual)!

Now I skipped through the first three games because they weren't all that great, so I can talk a bit more about the last three games. They were absolutely hilarious! In the fourth game, me and my brother decided to back each other up, but on purposely take two different colours so we could kick butts everywhere around us. During the entire fourth match, he was still the main target for about 5 people in my team so when we were upstairs, my brother and the other five on my team were always in a laser game fight. Me being a pain in the ass shot everybody around from my brother's team, so the battle would only consist of him and the other five. On a certain point when my brother got a bit into trouble, being shot from his back by my team, I decided to betray my own team twice or so, so he could successfully shoot the other four in my team. It was hilarious when they noticed I wasn't shooting my brother: one of the children (not the one in the five against my brother) that was in my team decided to shoot ME because I wasn't shooting my brother. Lucky for him, he got minus points and I didn't lose anything. At the near end of the 15 minute game, I started shooting my bro' from the back as well while he was being fired at by the other five, on a certain point I even started waving at my own team to shoot at me so my brother could safely shoot them, but they weren't that retarded and didn't hurt me. What a shame...
Anyway, halfway through the game, having shot one specific green guy over and over again, he became mad and started pushing my laser gun away and started pushing me. I didn't accept that, pushed his gun aside and started bickering, saying he should keep his hands off of me and cool down because it's not my fault he sucked. On a certain point the guy flipped and my brother had to come in between us to stop us from attacking each other (read: stop him from attacking me). It was the last game we saw that guy in the laser arena (and at Silver Stone anyway)! It really was a GREAT match and I had lots of fun.

The fifth game was okay too I guess, but another great game was the last match today. At the beginning of that game I kept on shooting at two kids. Whenever they got hit they started chasing me together. Now that wouldn't be spectacular if it weren't for the two seconds of invincibility whenever they were able to shoot again. It would however, that when in those two seconds they kept shooting me and miss, until their invincibility time ran out and I shot them both again disabling their gun for another 5 seconds! This went on for about 3 times and after that they managed to shoot me once, immediately taking a run for it while they could. I, being a bit of an ass again, started chasing them again and shot them while they were running... and again... and again... until they hit me for the third time, when I saw other opponents. With these other opponents, I mean a kid and a mother. Yet again, the same thing was going on: I shot them both, they looked for cover, I came from their behind and shot them again, they looked for cover again and I kept waiting for their lights to turn on again to shoot them again...! Every ten seconds or so I shot them both. They never actually managed to hit me more than 5 times I think... Halfway through that game they had seen me passing by and laughing for about 20 times I think :D In between those easy kills - they got to know the nick name "Micky" quite well - I shot a lot of other people too. I even managed to shoot the one stalker my brother had that game. At the end of the game I turned out to be the winner of that match, my brother being second. I laughed my ass off: those people got owned! In total the green team had 250 points and ours had 20k points :D

I left Silverstone with a huge grin on my face. That was fun! However, I'm not going to Silverstone next holiday, because there's way too much shit going on during every game, like that bastard pushing me whenever he sucks, or when the organiser is joking around with us... Laser gaming is fun but quite a waste of money sometimes. I did like the RAW wrestling video in between the games, though.

I'll be looking forward to writing again! Did you enjoy your spam!?

Cheers,

Sight-seeing Amsterdam on Queen's Day

2009-05-01T00:19:00.005+02:00

I got out of bed at two o' clock. What I thought would become just another dull day (yes it was Queen's Day, but why the hell would I shop for cheap stuff and drink beer to get drunk?) in my ordinary dull life, when John came to my door having this brilliant idea: "There is this action going on that makes a train, bus, tram and metro ticket only €2,50 in total and allows you to travel to all of the stations in Amsterdam. Let's sight-see Amsterdam!" At first I wasn't sure whether to go or not... "I've always wanted to something like that, but on the other hand, it's useless and quite crowded in Amsterdam." After some considering I decided to go along.

The day itself was rather fun, but if I'm going to discuss every little thing in detail it would become a HUGE story, so I'll just talk about the highlights:
1 - We went to my home town's train station at around half past three in the afternoon. We took the train to Amsterdam-Sloterdijk.
2 - The beer bottle in the first bus trip (from Amsterdam-Sloterdijk to Amsterdam Centraal) was the first highlight (second trip). We sat in the back of the bus, with a beer bottle on the ground near the sliding doors. Whenever the bus started turning, the beer bottle started rolling from one side to another making a lot of noise, it was quite good fun at the beginning of our sight-seeing (I never even saw that part of Amsterdam!). On a certain point at some stop, I put the beer bottle right next to the door, so that whenever the door opened, the beer bottle would fall out of the bus. At the next stop, the doors opened and the bottle said "crack" and was split in half outside on the tarmac. Bye bottle! We had great fun! Also, while walking from the Amsterdam Centraal bus station to the Amsterdam Centraal metro station, we saw a lot of exciting orange dressed people and all this trash just flying around on the tarmac. I noticed I didn't had anything orange on, and decided to just pick up the first flying orange hat that someone left behind as trash. I actually wore it too!

Now I'm sure I forgot how we travelled from the other tram station to Amsterdam Amstel, so I'm just not going to bother discussing it either... I'll continue the story when we were at the tram station at Amsterdam Amstel.

4 - The only tram trip from Amsterdam Amstel to Amsterdam Sloterdijk was one of the biggest highlights of the day. On a certain point, just before Museumplein, it started to get really crowded outside, and while leaving a tram station a serious accident involving a kid and a car occurred near the tram. Within moments the slow-travelling cars and tram came to a halt and people started dialling 112... some people in the tram John and I were on even started crying over the accident. John actually was one of the people who saw the kid flying through the air, but was one of the people acting cool: he paid little attention to the accident, unlike everybody else in the tram and around it seeing the accident. The only thing I witnessed from the crash was that I heard the bang. I knew something serious happened because the tram personnel and people in the tram were shocked, but I didn't even bother getting my mobile phone to call emergency services (why would I if about 50 people see the accident happen, it's not like I would be the only caller on anything). I showed no emotion over the crash and when the doors closed, the tram started moving again, the police and ambulance arrived I was kind of laughy about it.
I might sound like a dick now, don't I? Well, no. If I were the only one around I would've helped the kid, and the laughs were partly because I was relieved some people in this country show emotion when they see fellow people in tough situations. However, I'm not a person getting all emotional over accidents and deaths, it's part of daily life and if I were to cry over every accident, I would be a depressed Damian for my entire life. I want to live a fun and happy life, not a sad and emo one.

5 - Once we were at Amsterdam Sloterdijk, we were looking around for a random train going to Amsterdam Centraal or somewhere else fun. While on the platform waiting for a train, we noticed that on the other side of the platform a special coloured train entered the station (an orange one, it was painted that way for the Olympic team 8 years ago). From where I live, I see that train coming and going sometimes too and I've always wanted to get in it. John agreed and said he wanted to get in it too once in his life span, and we decided to run for it and catch that train! For the first (or perhaps second time) in my life, I was in the orange train I've always wanted to get in to! The train went to Amsterdam Bijlmer.

6 - Once arrived at Amsterdam Bijlmer ArenA, we decided to check out the Mediamarkt. They sure as hell have some cool gadgets right there! At 6 o' clock, when the Mediamarkt closed, we decided to pick up some food and to get to the Burger King for a Super King Deal (a hamburger, some chips and a coke for just €1,95). The employees there were all walking and running around as if they were busy but still somehow managed to serve us warm food. Pleased with our warm food we set forward to the buses at the Bijlmer station. After quite a long walk we decided we would just hop in the first GVB bus we spotted. I wondered whether we would get in trouble for our food, so I left it closed and just sipped ma coke. When we walked past the front of bus, I noticed the driver nodded his head because of the food we carried. I got the hint (although the nodding wasn't specially meant for me). We hopped in asking whether the day tickets counted for the stations this bus would pass-through as well. He had to read what the ticket said and handed it back nodding his head to go and sit. He did say though that eating wasn't allowed. Because John and me aren't troublemakers, we said to the driver we wouldn't open the bag with the food in it, but that we would drink our cokes. He agreed. The doors closed and the bus left for the AMC hospital, wherever the f*ck that was...
The highlight of this second bus trip was when some person had to get out of the bus and had to bring her market stuff with her as well. The moment she tried moving the box full of crap, a lot of the crap fell out making lots of noise. It was quite funny to watch her struggle getting all the stuff out of the bus.

7 - Once arrived at Hogenvecht train and bus station (one station before the AMC hospital end station) we hopped out and started eating what was in the bag. The idea was to catch our second metro of the day to get back to either Sloterdijk or Centraal (we weren't sure what one we would like most at that point), after walking around having no clue where the entrance was of the station, John had an insight and said it was probably at the other side of the bus station/the viaduct. After getting to the other side, the entrance was found instantaneously, and we walked towards the metro platform.
While walking towards the metro platforms, we threw away our coke cups in a trash bin that was sealed off with a blue trash bag. Because we had absolutely no idea where there was another thrash bin, we decided to just press the empty cups in the opening of the thrash bin so the cups wouldn't fall out with a bit of wind. We didn't actually achieve pushing the carton cups through the thrash bag, though. Seeing another (open) trash bin a couple of metres away inside the station made us laugh. We both agreed that we weren't bothered getting the cups back.

8 - After missing a couple of metros once on the platform, we spotted one we could take and hopped on. The metro we just happened to hop on to went to "isolatorweg" or whatever, meaning it would pass both Amsterdam Centraal ánd Amsterdam Sloterdijk. We thought we had all the time of the world considering where to hop off... however this wasn't the case. When we went in the metro, we went past a lot of black, noisy teenagers with a bad attitude. We even had to walk past this black guy having his boom box turned on at 11. After sitting as far away as possible of them in the cabin, John still didn't feel safe. Me neither. I actually just got told when editing this article, that they were talking to me, but that I didn't reply, resulting in them insulting me. During the metro trip itself I had the feeling I was in the GTA 3 version of Liberty City.
Within moments we reconsidered our plan and decided to leave the metro at Bijlmer ArenA again (just two metro stations ahead... what the hell, did the bus take so long for just two metro stations?). "The metros, really quite ghetto actually".

9 - Once we arrived at Bijlmer ArenA, we took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where we decided we would take the ferry to the other side of the IJ in Amsterdam, IF it were to be free of charge. In the train the highlight was Amsterdam itself too I guess, we were sight-seeing.

10 - Once arrived at Amsterdam Centraal, we sped towards the ferry services, or so we thought. With the hurried fast-pace John and I went right where we should've gone left, thus missing the ferry John wanted to catch. However it was no big problem, once we noticed how quick the ferries went we knew we would be at the other side of the IJ in no time anyway. So we slowed our pace a bit and went towards the ferries. And well what do you know? The ferry service was free of charge for pedestrians!
Once we were on the ferry, it took a couple of minutes before it started sailing towards the other side of the IJ. To our surprise, reaching the other side of the IJ would be quicker than the loading and unloading the ferry! The view on the ferry was beautiful, we saw a lot of smaller boats passing and the river is just lovely to look at too. For a second we had to think whether we were going to take the bus at the other side of the ferry (ending somewhere in the region of nowhere), but John decided we shouldn't and we just stayed on the ferry. The ferry trip was rather relaxing! When walking back to Amsterdam Centraal another almost accident happened when a scooter crossed through a red light. Pedestrians started walking and actually touched the scooter, if he were to push it the people on the scooter would've fallen off. I really wished he had pushed him off of his scooter!

11 - Once back at Amsterdam Centraal we had to think what to do next. We decided to check out on our friend Pao anyway (we scrapped that idea earlier that day for taking the ferry), he was supposedly working on Queensday in his shop in the centre of Amsterdam to earn extra money. We took the metro from Amsterdam Centraal to ONE metro station further and started walking around on Nieuwe Markt. The walking was hell: it really was crowded and the trash on the pavement was horrible. At the end the walk turned out to be useless too: our friend Pao wasn't even at work anyway (that's what we already thought though).
At some point walking towards Amsterdam Centraal, we stumbled across this "new-aged" beggar. He started talking English to us, asking if we needed help... John asked why we would need help and the beggar said he thought we needed help because we were looking around the entire time. I was like, what a friendly guy, and said "Well we're not actually, we're just sight-seeing Amsterdam and going towards Amsterdam Centraal". The beggar changed his story and said something like "Oh okay... Anyway, I'm here to ask people for some money for a place to sleep tonight... I don't want to be doing it with selling dope or anything bad like that, I just want to ask people... I only need one or two more Euros and it would be lovely if you could help me with it." Me being rapacious, I wasn't in the mood for giving him money, so I told him something like "Well actually... I only have 5 cents left. That's actually the reason why are looking for the nearest train station. Sorry..." The man told me that the nearest train station was "just that way" and we continued our walk around the Chinese District of Amsterdam.
During the walk, we went past a lot of stalls selling food and drinks for "low" prices. The funniest thing around there according to me were the beer selling Chinese woman and kid. In some hilly accent they screamed "NICE COLD BEER, ONE EURO FIFTY!!!" a couple of times. One of the people right in front of us screamed "1 Euro!" as if he offered just one Euro for the beer. Immediately the kid started yelling "ONE EURO FIFTY CENTS!"... haha, that look on his face! It reminded us of the 70 CENTS lady the previous time we were in Amsterdam. Brilliance.

12 - Almost returned at Amsterdam Centraal, it was crowded. A lot (notice the period, two different sentences). We went past this boat rental service and had to walk up some stairs I've never seen before while visiting Amsterdam. Once inside the station we had to decide where to go. Both looking at the map we decided to go home.
Inside the train towards our home town, John stumbled across a couple of his class mates and stopped walking to have a chat with them. I, on the other hand, saw one of the people I dislike a lot in the same cabin, so I continued walking to the other cabin. After waiting a bit I decided sit on the stairs, still being able to see John through the windowed doors separating both the cabins. After he spotted me a couple of times, but not coming, I decided to walk back to him. When I opened the door I noticed a smell like someone had been smoking in the cabin. I noticed one of the person I hated his friends was smoking a cigarette. Apparently I wasn't the only one noticing and when an NS employee walked by, she said he had to put out his cigarette. He said he didn't know it wasn't allowed and looked as if he were going to put it out, but instead, the second the NS employee was gone, he started smoking again... I actually hoped he would get a fine for it, but he didn't... Both him, the person I hated, John's friends, John himself and me all left the train at my home town.

We settled for home. After passing some French people asking where the Golden Tulip hotel was ("Je ne parle pas whatever... I only speak English or Dutch"), we crossed the Provincial Road and were back in my neighbourhood, saying to each other we would look at nu.nl if there was anything written about the car crash that occurred while we were in the tram. Apparently, there's nothing to be found about it... Apeldoorn has been stealing the news :(

The CRG quote based on the conversation with the French people asking the way.

Anyway, I'm exhausted right now. All I have to say for the rest is that I really enjoyed the sight-seeing and that we should do it again sometime.

Update May 2th: Updated the story! Now in more proper English.

Cheers,

I am the champion!

2009-04-28T01:23:00.006+02:00

The news paper article about the championship.

As you could've noticed, I had been playing Halo 3 again lately. This to practice for Sunday, the day I had a Halo 3 championship scheduled. This blog is to inform you about it.
I could be telling you an entire story, probably starting with "I woke up at 7 o' clock for my paper-round", but to spare m'self and you all, I'm just going to try and keep it short.

This Sunday we had this social gathering at our local Game Store. There was a Halo 3 championship for 24 people, for which my brother registered me a week earlier. The day it was planned he said to me that "it would become quite a challenge, because apparently a lot of good people have registered." Because of that, I didn't expect becoming first and I told myself I won't shout whenever I die in the game (saying "It's not like I WANT to live or anything").

Checking out the first two rounds, I noticed there were three other quite good people. At some points, I even thought they were better than me and would beat me if I would get to the final. Talking to one of them a bit later on, he told me (well yeah, he was a bit of a bragger) he was "rank 47 in Lone Wolves, and that when he was practising at home earlier today, he pwned in five games in a row." Looking at the other two, one was extremely lucky playing against n00bs. After TEN kills with the freakin' hammer there were still people bothering walking towards his camp spot at the sniper in Guardian. Although I had a feeling he could beat me, I was seriously doubting so when I heard the final was going to be played in the Pit. Speaking of which, the two other people I thought were doing well had both played the first AND second round played in Guardian. If there is ONE map all "pros" love, and if there is ONE map I can't stand, it has gotta be the Guardian.

Anyway, after a lot of socialising (the people there were really nice), the last match was there, the final: "The battle you've all been waiting for has finally arrived, the final is now going to be played, in this game the best of the best will be fighting for the first place. To make it a bit more exciting this time, the people will need fifty kills" (the other rounds were all until 25 - I won both the first AND the second round in my league; Epitaph and High Ground).
During the entire game, except for in the thirties, I was in the lead. I was the first to hit 25. After I hit 30, my spawns became more and more awful: in plain-sight and with no proper weapon to be found (we all started with ONLY an assault rifle and two grenades)! Either I spawned near the sniper that was taken, or I spawned near no power weapon (I consider the Needlers being a power weapon as well) being spotted within moments. The SEVEN kills lead I had shrank to a zero kills lead. Sometimes I even had one kill less the leader! When I had 38 kills, I couldn't score for a long time at all! At some point I got the needlers again together with a BR. The scoring was on again! At the end, I won the game with a 50-45 lead (it was free for all, the number 2 had 45 kills). I was the champion of Free-For-All Halo 3'ing! I came, I saw, I conquered.

I do have to say, during the entire last round I had a lot of fun. I was surprised when during the game I found out a quite close friend of mine was watching my screen as well. Apparently he came to check out how his brother did and stumbled across me by chance. It was good to see him because I hadn't spoken to him since we discussed the most important essay in my school career together with the teachers. Other than him, my brother and some other folk I never met before were closely following my screen during the entire game. Whenever I died being a bit stupid, I turned my face away from the screen and looked at my friend and my brother saying what I should've done to prevent dying. At the end, it was a great experience! Fun fact: In the game, there was only one red guy, four gray guys ("they are spotted less early") and one pink guy. Guess Who I was? Exactly, the pink one. PINK ABOVE ALL, BITCHAS! Just for the heck of it I turned my guy into pink because a friend I met there for the first time was pink too and I said to myself that "now I'm going to be pink too", while at first I wanted to become orange again because I was orange the first two rounds I won too.

My price for winning the contest? An Afro-Samurai shirt I'm wearing at the moment and a cheque worth 15 euros, of which I got m'self a Battery Pack for the Xbox 360 controller.
After the official contest, me and some others started playing 3 vs 3. My team lost by far, time after time. No surprise there when the other team communicated professionally and my team sucked. After losing the first match, being owned by the number 2 and 3, the number 2 started screaming that "it's unfair, why did HE become the champion when I own him now, I should get the cheque!"... I replied with: "Because playing in teams is a lot different then playing free-for-all, obviously." (replace the word "obviously for something more like twat). It might sound a bit blatant when I say this, but the number 2 guy was the same guy bragging about his 47 rank and the SAME GUY who started shouting (really shouting, the shouting I said to myself I wouldn't be doing because it was a social gathering) when he experienced a lag screen during the first round...

Other short news during the 'play outside again'-season

We went to check out one of the building sites (click for Google Streetview from this summer) here in Seandamn. What is being build there, are three student complexes. Two of the three coming buildings are done for the most of it at this point, and the biggest structure (a flat consisting of at least 11 floors) is in full-construction mode. Me and a couple of friends joined forces and went to visit the flat inside-out on Saturday (which isn't 100% legal I assume), returning yesterday (Monday) to make pictures of the view, which quite frankly, is just freakin' awesome! It's THE mix of Google Streetview (which shows the world from a horizontal position at walk height) and Google Maps (which shows sattelite pictures of the world from above)! Hopefully I will be handed over the pictures soon so I can share what the neighbourhood looks like.

Cheers,

About 70 days, 17 hours and 51 minutes later

2009-04-22T12:28:00.005+02:00

Gotta <3 Soarmams...

More like... two days less, but who cares? I don't care! I'm out! For the upcoming three and a half week I have no more school. Why? Because of the May Soarmams and the exams! Today was the final day I had to "officially" go to school to retake the chemistry test (it went a lot better this time I think)! In about three weeks, the exams start, meaning we get the two weeks before off to study (explaining the other two weeks I'm out).

Now I'm not really in the mood for any more gibbering, so I'm going to enjoy Soarmams, reboot my laptop and after that, watch some more Card Captor Sakura.

Cheers,

Test Weeks Results

2009-04-20T22:45:00.002+02:00

I've already told you guys a bit about geography, biology and chemistry, but how do I look back at the entire test week now I've got all the grades?

Surely it didn't go how I expected it at all, there were a couple of grades I messed up which I thought went quite well, and the exact opposite. We'll start off by giving the more disappointing grades:
Geography - 6,0
Maths - 6,4

The geography test was probably one of the most f***** tests ever given to me in my entire school career. Not specifically because of the difficulty, but more because of all the shit that happened around it and the lack of time during the test itself. Sure, officially we had 80 minutes to do the entire test, but to hell with that! Let's make sure we waste about 20 minutes by handing over the wrong tests, slowly handing out paper and whatever more! Sure, why not waste more time by stopping handing over stuff when one person whispers something about football?
Really, now I got the grade back I have to say: To hell with that gay-ass test! A lot of my answers were correct, but apparently I skipped a couple of questions I didn't see and why not scrap the questions at the end of the test I already did right? Sure! Fair and square mates. Now go and make proper tests for us pupils to take.

Now for maths. I can't judge whether my grade was fair, since we didn't actually discuss the test yet, but I do have to say I'm quite disappointed with a 6,4 for it... I honestly expected something more like an 8. I REALLY had the feeling I did the test well. Every training exam we had to do during class, I understood and did easily without a lot of trouble. Getting a 6,4 for the same kind of exercises, only with a bit more story attached to it doesn't feel like something I should be proud on. Haha - I have to tell you guys that whenever I say I'm disappointed with a "good enough"-grade like this one, I always get complaints from other students having trouble with those subjects. However, the point is, I'm not interested in their miserable behaviour during class and miserable grades, so fuck off and don't bother me, ultimately it's your own bad for flunking tests. Sure, if you're not "made" for the subjects you flunk, you'd be really pleased with the grades I get, but I'm not like that so I have the right to be disappointed, understood?
At the beginning of this year I planned on getting all EIGHTS on my diploma... I can forget that! I'm trying to make sure I get a seven for everything though, that's the least I can do!

Onto the reasonable grades:
Chemistry - 5,2 (I'm going to retake that one)
ICT - 7,1

So, chemistry was done indeed poor enough for me to retake it, but I already expected that. I'm obliged (by myself) to make it at least a 6, because that would mean a 7 for my school exam. All I have to do is make a better cheat sheet on my calculator and read a bit more of the texts we have to study, and it's plausible! I'm not as sick as a dog anymore now, so I won't even lose my concentration while taking the test.
ICT was done reasonably since I'm not getting all emotional over it. Haha, I do have to tell you guys that my average on ICT is a 7,6... giving me an 8 on my diploma (there is no central exam for informatics in the Netherlands)! Ain't that awesweet?

Onto the awesweet grades:
English Writing - 8,7 (actually at least a 9,5)
English Speaking Oral Exam - 8,5
Biology Oral Exam - 8,2

I mean, come on... I spontaneously started jumping around when I read my English grades! I mean, I already told you guys she said I did well, but really THAT well? Hahahaha! I just figured I was lucky to be the first person, and that if she would compare me to others, my grade would become lower... but apparently she considered me the best until the end seeing as an 8,5 for the oral exam was the highest in my class. The second place went to Regina, scoring an 8,2... after that the grades are all in the lower 7 region. Haha, thinking back of the English oral exam makes me smile... every single time.
The English writing test was THE test for all my years of practising English, and I almost aced it! Actually, I would've aced it if it weren't for the "unreadable" words. For every article you could score 7½ points. We had to write four articles, making 30 the total amount of points you can score. I had a total of 26 points. 4 points were taken from me, of which 2,5 were faults of the teacher being unable to read simple words like "arm", "you're" and "because". Another part of the remaining 1,5 points I lost was because, and now I have to think... I wrote "(...) would've been better a lot" according to the teacher. Would I write it that way? No I don't think so! I actually wrote "(...) would've been better, a lot."! That mistake alone was punished as it were a GRAMMAR mistake, giving it a reduction of 1 entire point. 3,5 of the points I lost are now explained. The other 0,5 point? I forgot, but it does say something about my writing capabilities now, doesn't it?
The best thing of all? All my grades English make an average of 8,61 (if the writing test was graded without the "unreadable" words, the average would be at least an 8,85)! 8,61 people!!! That's a 9 for my school exam. If I do the English Central Exam just as good, I would have a 9 on my diploma! A freakin' earned one too! All those years of Englishification (if that's not a word, I now officially made it one), all those years of preparing my oral exam... all those years of speaking, chatting and e-mailing with British and American pen friends... English is such a beautiful language! Also, the teacher is like a hot chick that you can't even touch, she's like this cold ass bitch and she's not ready to suck. Oh shit? Did I accidentally put the wrong lyrics there?

From back in the days (oral exam previous year); written from the top of my head:

Everyday on Discovery Channel from eight 'till nine, you can watch explosions, engineering, crashing, smashing, bashing, hoppin' and droppin', all for scientific purposes. Adam and Jamie, together with their team and their crash test dummy Buster, are experienced myth busters who test myths for a living. See, through ordinary and high-speed cameras, how they collect the myths from internet*, make up a plan for testing them, get and make the stuff to do so and actually test the myths whether they are possible or not!
After they're done testing the myths as realistic as possible, they asses whether the myths could've happened for real by giving it a busted, plausible or confirmed judgement!
I like the programme "Mythbusters" because of its entertaining way of introducing the myths*: the swear filter, the explosions, the sense of humour and the myths themselves.

Comment one - You don't actually get to see them collecting the myths, but whatever.
Comment two - It's funny to know that in my improvisation speech on the Top Gear article I also started talking about "How I like the programme because of its entertaining way of reviewing cars: the explosions (...)", at that time, I had to laugh because I realised it was a reference to the above article.

Oh shi-! I still remember it! The above text was written by me as part of an oral exam, in which I had to speak about my favourite programme on the telly for about a minute. Every kid in my class was surprised when I started my story with the first sentence in my unusually fast-paced way of speaking. The best student would get a chocolate bar after the stories were assessed. I got it!

Looking forwards to Friday, marking my THREE WEEKS OFF SCHOOL to study for the exams. Judgement (or judgment for the American pricks here unable to recognise Chinese over Canadians) weeks are coming! Almost done with secondary school... It's nerve-wrecking. Wish me best of mofo luck.

Cheers,

We are the champions!

2009-04-19T16:28:00.003+02:00

And there we are, on the highest piece of the podium.

When I said I was looking forward to Saturday, I was talking about the National Bowling Trio League for the last time this season, in Haarlem this time. We had a good chance of becoming champions, and I've been throwing 200 games again lately, so it was kind of logical for me to be looking forward to it. If we were to score 2 out of six points We would become imminent champions. However, scoring just 2 out of 6 points would be a bit poor though. Below you can read the "summary" of what happened Saturday:

At quarter past nine my cell phone alarm went off. Crap, why does bowling make me have to get out of bed so freakin' early... I've slept a mere 7 hours perhaps! When out of bed I ate my hamburger, drank me milk and got dressed for bowling. At one minute to quarter to ten Koen rang the doorbell saying our carpool was ready to go. Within a minute Koen, my mother and I stepped in the car and went off to Haarlem!

Half an hour later we arrived, every adult around started smokin' a Bud while Koen and me were going inside the bowling. When we noticed they were still cleaning up the place we started hanging around the bowling automated doors, making them open and close every 8.5342234 seconds exactly. Anyway, once the other teams arrived, the Asselmannetjes (the other part of the Zaandam 2 bowling team) arrived too and we entered the bowling together, havin' smoked a couple of Buds. At 11 o' clock, when the league had to start, we were informed our opponents couldn't make it. At first, we were like "so we're already champions, without even having to play for it?", but because our opponents were lucky, the schedule was changed a bit and we had to bowl against our other opponents for the day first.

To be honest, the first game was quite exciting. The lanes were oiled quite irritating making me unable to throw any strike. After 5 frames it looked like we lost the first game. However, in the last five frames of the first game, the other team started losing their grip and kept failing throwing spares. In the last two frames we managed to overtake them and score our first point! Lucky us!
To be honest, the stress was almost unbearable that game, I lost hope after the first five frames and said something like "if we manage to win this game, I'll get you guys a treat". Thanks to that, I'm now obliged (by myself) to treat my team and the parents tomorrow (Monday). To fully fulfil my promise, the treat is going to be Bullit Energy Drink, Spa Blue and Tucs. This is because I joked something about "loo water" and "being sponsored by Bullit". To spare them the actual loo water, I replaced it with Spa Blue though.

Anyway - The second game. This game was less intense and we managed to win this one too. Without making a lot of strikes or spares, the scores were low but the points were good. Once we knew we won after the second game, we already started celebrating. We. Were. The Champions! After the first two games, we already scored 3 points, while we only had to get 2 for the win.

The last two games, against the latecomers (they were stuck in traffic - a serious traffic accident occured on the high way, apparently having fatalities) sucked. The scores were low, and we only scored 1/3 points. The third game was won with only a difference of ONE point. ONE more pin had fallen at our side. I guess the celebrating made us a bit drowsy...

Anyway, we had a lot of fun yesterday, just as we did all the other times during the NJTL. Standing on that podium having won the league was one of the best things happened at bowling this year. Thanks Steven, Koen, Jolanda, Rolf and Rob! We earned the title. Fair and square.

When we left the bowling, I went in the car with Asselmannen for a change - it just felt like a last honour this year towards Steven, I figured he could use someone to talk to in the car. Also, I wanted the Asselmannen's reflection of the year, what do they think about Bowling in Zaandam and its people? I've heard a lot of complaints from the others already, but I never actually heard a lot of complaining by the Asselmannen. I respected them for that (they weren't going to "annoy" me with all their problems). Although they aren't a whining family, I still wanted to know more about their opinions. I've heard some interesting stuff there, which I shall remember for next time. About an hour later I arrived back home, my mother already being there (she went with our original carpool back to home), having returned from one of the best days of bowling the entire year.

So, that's it about bowling. What more can I say? Well, for instance, I got my geography grade back in the mail. All I've managed to do was getting another motherf****** 6/10. WHY? What the F did I deserve to get yet another low grade like that? Really? I hate the geography tests! I motherf****** hate them! During those tests I write my balls off explaining every F-thing I remember, and yet I only have a 6. The hilarious part of it all is, that I'm one of twelve people having done the test reasonably (having scored above a 5,4/10). The other 16 have flunked it. Haha. Why would you make a test that difficult? It's just to tease us, isn't it?

In other news, I've now watched episode three of CCS. It was rather... cute I guess? Whatever. I still have to watch another 67, hopefully the story will develop in a nice way. Also - I've played GTA4 online for the first time. It's mofo awesweet man. I'm telling you. I really like the cops n' crooks mode. What am I saying? I just love everything about GTA4, except for the fact the GTA3 Liberty City is nowhere to be found... I used to love that Liberty City.

Cheers,

Chemical T made me watch this...

2009-04-15T23:35:00.002+02:00

DIVX quality bitch! Well, not really.

A week ago or so, I randomly decided I was going to watch anime again after being stumbled upon a website featuring five FREE anime buffering sites. Apparently I had nothing to do at that time so I started watching the n0rpz classic Azumanga Daioh (never actually watched the anime).
After being bored after just two episodes (it was the same as the manga - which I've read), I decided I wanted to watch Card Captor Sakura (another n0rpz classic - never watched the anime). I'm now at episode two, and in the following days (I have a four day weekend again) I'll make sure to watch another couple of the 68 I still have to watch... Yes, there are seventy episodes. Seventy episodes is a rather lot, the longest anime I've watched before is Full Moon Wo Sagashite (OH EM GEE I loved that ending), which contained either 52 or 56 episodes. 70 episodes is a new challenge. Anyway, so far I like the anime I guess (I accidentally watched the last episode partly already, how cute!)... but it did contain a wtf moment when she said she was in fifth grade. FIFTH grade?! Although she DOES behave like a fifth-grader, the way the anime has been drawn (back in 2000) doesn't make her look 11 years old at all! Really... Even Sakura agrees with what I'm saying right now:

I'm like, so funny editing that picture, right?

Anyway - I'm going to continue working on the album now. Two songs are done now. That makes two out of eighteen done. Still waiting for those questions from Pikapan Voeby though, they'll be done soon too I guess.

Edit 2:41 am - Apparently she's a fourth grader... I was already doubting, but the first episode said fifth, but both the third and the summary said she's in fourth grade. Just lettin' you all know... This does mean I'm watching the third episode now, after that it's good night for me and I'm going to bed. Haha Rune Killer, it was a funny conversation with you! (Ever heard of CTRL+ALT+DELETE, niggah?)

There's something fishy going on there....

Cheers,

How brilliant.

2009-04-15T12:40:00.002+02:00

First things first: The egg hunt was quite irritating, I started off with a lead against my brother (it was 3-1), but it ended with 10-17 in his favour. SEVEN eggs behind! I looked for about an hour, but the last five eggs were unfindable so I decided to quit, until my mother came home that is... She put all the eggs in the garden so she must have a clue where they are, right? Within moments my mother found another three eggs. However, after another quarter of an hour, she gave up too. The last two eggs are still somewhere in my garden, so if anyone is interested in looking... go ahead and look for two silver chocolate eggs in my garden! And I'll even let you eat them if you find them... Most taste lovely, a couple of molten chocolate eggs.

Next thing: I said I was going to be studying biology during Easter. Well... I... didn't. Saturday and last night were the only two times I studied a bit of biology. Putukrejums would laugh her ass off if she heard it... or would she? I'm writing this blog between chemistry and the biology oral exam I just took, and how do you think I did it? Haha, it went great! AN EIGHT POINT THREE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, HAHAHAHAHA IT'S HILARIOUS. THREE hours of studying in total resulting in an 8,3 out of 10. Hi-la-ri-ous. I'm telling you. To start off the oral exam everyone was allowed to talk about certain aspects in biology for awhile. My subject was "cancer". I talked about it following an article I copypasta'd from the internet (lol). After that was done, he started asking me about the eye. At first I just told him a couple of important things in and around the eye. On a certain point he started asking questions about the eye: one question after another I couldn't answer them, so I asked for 'tips'. Whenever he gave me 'a tip', it immediately activated my memory (I didn't bother reading the chapter about the eye), making me able to reply to the question. After the eye we talked a bit about photosynthesis. For a moment we stumbled across ecology and after that... time was already up! I didn't think it went all too good, but apparently the teacher and the TOA agreed on giving me an 8,3! AWESOME! To make it even better: I asked Putukrejums what her grade was, after weeks of studying and calling me an idiot for not studying... Guess what her grade was? A 6 point something. A 6.something out of ten! HAHAHAHA. That was worth your time, wasn't it Putukrejums? When I get back home I WILL do the thing I promised I would do when I had above a seven. I'M TELLING YOU.
When the teacher told me I had an 8,3... I instantaneously felt above the clouds. My day can't be ruined any more now... unless I really fuck up the chemistry test I'm going to have in half an hour. That would surely piss me off! But if that's the only thing I ruin in my test week, I consider it a well-done test week, since I can redo that chemistry test then anyway...

My test yesterday in ICT went fine too. On a certain point, the teacher went out of the class for like THREE WHOLE minutes. And yet I was the only one remaining of the ICT people, so we couldn't discuss the test answers. When I told the others he was gone for three whole minutes, they were like "SHHIIIIT, why didn't we stay?" I can imagine that sucked, because even though we all agreed the test could've been much worse, a bit of discussing would higher our all grades.

Now onto chemistry! Hopefully I won't ruin it, but all is possible with this last test, since it's a lot about some difficult things (like chemistry maths, which SUCKS balls, I assure you).

Looking forward to Saturday!

Update 16:30 (at home) - Well, I have to be honest with you guys, chemistry didn't go too good at all. It's not like I completely messed it up, but I couldn't answer three questions because I didn't know we had to study that... Furthermore, I was coughing and sneezing the entire time (I've caught a cold) and because of that I couldn't concentrate all the time. We didn't get the promised 120 minutes and the test was too long anyway. Hopefully my grade won't be TOO bad (I can redo it, but I don't want to have a 3 when I mess that test up as well)... Ah well... Now for good news: Test week is done once again! Four days of weekend. Wiiiiii!

Cheers,

Happy Easter!

2009-04-12T15:30:00.000+02:00

I'm rather out of inspiration at the moment for writing an entire Easter Story, so I'm just going to make it easy for myself:

If you're looking for me, I'll probably be looking for Easter Eggs (real ones!) in my garden or studying biology.

Cheers,

Questions and Answers 1.5

2009-04-10T23:52:00.011+02:00

Hello everybody, I had been compromising an interview to hold with my friend Pikapan Voeby. Today he answered them and these are the results. Expect his questions towards me to be posted on this blog soon as well (that would be part II)!

To make this interview a lot easier to understand for our viewers, I would like to have this interview in English, is that okay with you?
Sure.

Wazzup?
Howdy ho.

So, you're the one and only Pikapan Voeby. Do you, yourself, have any idea how I came up with that petname?
Yes it are all parts of my MSN avatars: Pika stands for Pikachu, pan stands for Panda and Voeby stands voetbal (also known as soccer/football).

Well done remembering that! I didn't think you would still remember. Did you have to look it up in your message log? Haha.

As you're aware of, my username is SRTACRPG², remember what that stands for?
You wanted to type starfish but you totally lost control of the keyboard.

Haha. No, it's an abbreviation and it stands for "Scary Rapacious Tea Addicted Corny Racist Part-time God"

Why are we still friends?
I think because we've had many good conversations and we never had a fight in my eyes.

I agree. We never fought :)

Did you ever have the urge of blocking me and never unblocking me? If yes, when?
Nope.

Wiii, same here.

So, what's your judgement of my blog articles?
They're written in very good English and they have a very good sense of humour.

Thank you :) Yours are rather funny as well, considering the randomness. You've confronted me with Boxxy <3 for the first time on your blog!

Now onto you, how do you consider yourself towards others?
Very kind, sometimes very closed: quiet and not very much of a talker.

How's school going along?
It's going well, I have my exams in a couple of weeks, so it's very exciting.

I'm in my exam period as well, I wish you the best of luck!

What are your hobbies?
Playing Wii games, watching TV, playing soccer outside, playing golf, computing, listening to music and thinking.

Do you have a religion? What's your lifestyle like?
I don't have a religion I just believe in myself/Blub my imaginary goldfish.

I believe in the non-existent religion called "Jisezism", it has only two followers.

What does your family look like?
I have a mother, father and a sister, no pets.

What about Blub? Isn't he part of the family?

When do you start swearing?
When there is something very annoying going on, like with a video game. For instance: I keep winning, but then I lose! I really hate that, start swearing and stop playing. After that, I keep hating the game so I won't play it in weeks.

What do you want to do most of all?
Make a huge trip around the world and never come back. I hate all the stupid people who live their lives learning, learning, learning and then work for the rest of it. That is something I want to avoid.

Are you the one?
Nooooo I'm the tenth.

In what do you consider yourself to be the best in in the entire world?
My creativity rules

How many actual friends do you have? Excluding acquaintances and digital friends like me.
Digital I think around 10... However, 3 real good friends.

If I say TGDB, you say?
.nl

TGDB front page after being edited by me. Remember that, Pikapan Voeby?

If I say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, you say?
You're superkalafragelisticexpialadociously cute. Sweeter than a 12-pack of juicy fruit.

What's your favourite colour bowling ball?
Blue. Why? I just like blue puh

Well, to be honest, my favourite bowling ball colour is dark red, combined with dark green, because those colours is my bowling ball, and I strike a lot with it (+ emotional values). Also - My second favourite colour would be blue as well, it was my first "used a lot" house ball!

What's your favourite food to throw?
Food, no! "Ranja"! Yes, it's very sticky and red and sticky and red and sticky.

What's your favourite food to actually eat?
Bapao.

Oh gosh! I really like bapao too! Seriously!

What about shoarma?
It's delicious.

It sure as hell is.

I had hiccups while writing these questions for you (2:42 am Friday April 10), aren't hiccups annoying and is it worth time stamping when you have them?
Hiccups are very annoying yes. But when you have them you just have to drink some water slowly and it will disappear.

Hiccup
Leopardskin pillbox hat

Pick a number between 0 and 4
2

Did you pick the number three?
No (haha)

That was a test. You passed! The first time I had to pick, I took 2 as well! We do look a lot like each other. BTW: I expected you to say 3, because apparently tests have found out that 88% of the people say 3 when they are asked the same. The number 2 was taken the least :) Good job, you've proven yourself being special.

What question do you absolutely not want me to ask you?
What I am doing right now.

[Insert that question here]
Filling in your questions, dumbass :P

Who's your favourite TV show character? Why?
Kenny from Southpark: he can let people say "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! You bastards!" just by dying, and let me tell you, he dies a lot.

What's random to you? Are these questions random?
These questions are absolutely not random they are made for me to answer. However, these questions are very creative.

Would you like me to rub your back? (If yes: I know where your house lives!)
Hahahaha! No.

What do you want to become later on in life?
A free man, or someone who works in a depot.

Somebody once told me, the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an ...

Fill in the blank.
Owl.

Well, close, the right answer was "L" (you know, the letter); however, the complete sentence is "In the shape of an L on her forehead."

Any idea where I got that from?
No and I really want to know.

Shame on you! And you call yourself a fan of Smash Mouth? It's from their song "All-star", I think you DID know, but just couldn't remember.

Favourite console?
I have no favourite because that's so 2008: arguing over which console is better

Well, mine is the Xbox 360, puh!

Favourite beer? I mean, come on, you must've drunk some beer already, this is the Netherlands we live in!
Grolsch or Heineken, don't really have a favourite.

Favourite Youtube video ever seen?
At the moment it is Charlie the Unicorn 3, but things can change.

Charlie the Unicorn 3 - "NEAAR NEAAAR NEAAAAR"

This is a question to test your knowledge: What's "Succession" in biology?
Cutting a body open.

No. It's not. It's the term meaning an ecosystem is transforming from a Pioneers Ecosystem in a Climax Ecosystem. The flora and fauna survived the bare conditions and is successfully transforming into a closed ecosystem. Am I right?

What does love mean to you?
It's a feeling that I've got to control because if you fall in love, you're hopeless.

Did you ever love someone?
Yes.

Are you on any sport?
Yes, I play golf.

Favourite song? Favourite animal? Favourite board game? Favourite computer game? Favourite phrase? Favourite favourite? Favourite TV Show? Favourite spread?
Song: Bob Dylan - i want you
Board game: Four in a row
Computer game: Call of Duty 4
Phrase: "Then time will tell just who fell and who's been left behind, when you go your way and I go mine" - Bob Dylan
TV show: Totally Top Gear for the great sense of humour and yeah, just the great sense of humour
Spread: PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!!!!! Sorry... I don't really like it... but what I do like is Jam REAL STRAWBERRY JAM.
Favourite: Song

Call of Duty 4 - In-game screenshot. FIRE IN THE HOLE!

How does your average Saturday look like?
Watching TV, and mostly don't knowing what I am going to do.

So, it's almost Easter, what are you going to do for Easter?
Not much. I don't really celebrate that kind of days.

Oh why not? I'm going to look for Easter Eggs in the garden again! The weather is lovely at Easter.

Still in the mood for another dozen questions?
Nope.

Don't worry, the interview is almost done.

Perhaps a deja vu, but what magical powers do YOU actually want?
The power to transform into a Dino and then scare the crap out of people :D

What's your cell phone number?
I won't say it!

Why not?
It's private and it's mine, lekker puh!

Thanks for your time, I'm going to put this on my blog.

Cheers,

5 days of weekend

2009-04-08T21:47:00.005+02:00

The end of the maths test (3 clock hours in one wooden chair after six and a half hours of sleep and an energy drink) today marked the five day weekend I'm having now :) Although I was about to say nana nana nana to everyone of you, I realised it was because of Easter and Whatever Friday so you guys are all off as well. Thus I only have one more day off then you guys. So for that reason alone: nana-nana-nana (sounds hideous in English).
Anyway, the maths went perfectly well. I was able to check some exercises on the internet. All of the exercises I found, I had answered correct. That means 3/22 exercises correct already (wiii)! Anyway, the other exercises went good too, but one I have wrong, and one I'm not sure, but if that's all, I'm rather pleased! Haha, at the end everybody was like "Oh my god that exam was horrible", while I was like "a piece of cake", although it did take me ALL of the available time... which was worth it, because if it weren't for the double-checking and slow reading of the exercises, I would've made a lot more mistakes. Carefulness is the key to maths (if you have the knowledge of course, and apparently, I do).

In other news: I've played Crackdown again today! Unlocked m'self some more achievements. How I love playing Crackdown in cheat mode, spawning an immense amount of explosive crates in the back of a van, blowing it up with a grenade starting a trail of explosions tailing the vehicle I'm on, blowing everyone up next to the car :D Or whenever I'm driving 200 mph in the race car, spawning a ramp truck in front of the car glitching out the game sending me flying all across the freakin' map (or the exact opposite making me go through the asphalt having to swim towards the beach in the under-urban pool of Glitchyness)! It's SO much fun :D
Speaking of other news, Punisher and me have actually STARTED working on the album now. Expect a new one... soon?

Now to end this blog I have a question, regarding the following clips:

Both of the clips are 2 minutes, so my question is... which 2 minutes of your life do you want back most?

Cheers,

Totally Englishish

2009-04-07T11:24:00.003+02:00

After six hours of sleep and an energy drink: Today's tests at school are English and English! I'm just back from my first test, writing four short essays about newspaper articles. The word limit for each of the "reply" was about 65-75 words. Less wasn't allowed, more was. That's all good and all, but how many words did I actually write every article? Well, two articles were exactly 117 words, and two were 136 words. In those essays I talked about my past, dumb Dutch people, positive discrimination of religious people and a scooter licence. Hopefully I did well on the essays, because it actually tests my skill in writing these kinds of articles.
The next test I'm going to have is an English oral exam. In about fifty minutes I'll be reading an Alquin article about Top Gear out loud to see how my English pronunciation is. People have told me my English is quite good, but this'll be the test I guess. Not just because of the reading, but I must talk about Top Gear for 5 whole minutes as well. I'm not really nervous or anything, more like excited, but I'm damn curious how I'll be doing it.

Tomorrow, unlike what I thought, I have a mathematics test, instead of the chemistry test I thought yesterday. This makes the rest of my day more relaxed as well.

Oh BTW: Bowling yesterday went really amazing (except for the last game of 160 which ruined my average). I bowled a 226 game and 191 game, making my average after two games 208! I'm looking forward to April 18 when we have the last day of NJTL (a bowling league), in which we are first and only have to score 2/6 points if we want to be the definitive champions. More good news considering bowling: Family Rietvienk (still written wrong on purpose) is leaving the bowling after this year! Haha, if Ooms is leaving as well, we'll only have 6 people at bowling next year if no-one is going to join in the meantime! Brilliance.

I'll be writing to you guys later. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow after mathematics.

Update 14:23 - So how did the English oral exam go? Although I found it went rather poor... my teacher thought otherwise, and thought it went quite good. The reading part went okay though, my pronunciation is almost perfect if the texts only contains words I've heard of before. I can read English as fluent as I can read Dutch, with about the same amount of mistakes.
The speech however, was ... not brilliant. Once again the teacher found that it went well (although I was the first of her exam students). I didn't think it went too good at all. I stuttered sometimes and had to think for words... Yet I managed to continually talk (improvise!) about Top Gear for more than 10 minutes while actually I only had to talk 5 minutes... the teacher didn't interrupt me because she thought I was doing well and figured she might as well just let me ramble on.

However, after the official exam has ended, both the teacher and I managed to have a proper conversation about my life experiences for over 40 minutes, all in English! I loosened up a bit (my English wasn't as rusty as in the beginning of the speech) and she listened interested. Ain't that good practice of my English skills?
I wonder what grade I'll get, but I hope it's a good one. Onto maths!

Cheers,

TOPO and Geography weekend

2009-04-06T12:45:00.005+02:00

Me in Tales of Pirates Online (TOPO!)

Now: another article in poor English! (I think)

Long time no update, huh? Yeah I know, missed writing you guys too! However, my reasons for not writing were legit. For instance, I had a very, VERY busy last week: because it was the last week before test week, we had to finish all of the reports, experiments, essays, tests and whatever more. Especially the subjects chemistry, biology and geography were a pain in the bottom.
The second reason was the test week itself: The first test we had to do in this week's test week (which I have done today) was geography... I wanted to write an article about the Sims not working any more and me playing (new online browser) games, but I couldn't because I just HAD to study the 250+ pages geography for today. The test went okay, but it did cost me my entire weekend... (Sorry for not coming outside to play everyone in my neighbourhood!)

In the near future I will have to study for two more subjects (the rest of the tests I can do without serious studying), guess which ones... You're right: chemistry and biology. Together they are worthy of 500+ in pages (DAMN!!)... Also, expect another Q&A, I promised my mate Pikapan Voeby to be answering his interview questions, as long as I could give him an interview as well.

For now anyhow, I'm going to continue playing Tales of Pirates (TOPO was the pun in the title - topography has to do with geography as well, but in this case TOPO meant something rather different) . I've been playing this game since this week thanks to my American friend Penisher. If he gets online he can continue level boosting me!

Cheers,

Googolplex - A Short Movie

2009-04-01T10:07:00.000+02:00

You just have to check it out:

Cheers,

Busy weekend

2009-03-29T00:23:00.001+01:00

It seems like this will become a busy weekend. Yesterday was busy anyway. I went to Amsterdam with my pal John to visit (or as we call it 'irritate') the neighbourhood Chinese by visiting him at work. While at it: Why not take a look underneath as many kilts as possible, seeing as there were a LOT of Scotsmen out there in Amsterdam to watch the Holland - Scotland football game in real life. There were a couple of funny Scotsmen out there, of which one was carrying a scarf saying "FUCK ENGLAND, FUCKING ENGLISH BASTARDS" shouting "Fuck England" the entire time. He got a lot attention by tourists, Dutchmen and even Scots themselves. Anyway - I bought some €0,70 Shrimp Kroepoek and a train ticket of €2,50, so the entire day of Amsterdam cost me a total of €3,20! Ain't that cheap shopping!?

Oh, ain't it brilliant Scotland lost with 0-3 against Holland? Splendid.

However, this weekend isn't over by far, although it has a total of 47 hours (I can sleep one hour less before my paper-round...), I have to do quite a lot of stuff in it. I have to continue working on my geography (write an article about two third world countries), I have to make four chemistry graphs for a grade (which is quite irritating) and I have to finish two biology reports (I had to finish them quite a lot of weeks ago, but my partner kept screwing up... so I have to do it now which sucks as I'm busy).... In other words: Perhaps only two hours of The Sims later today... I won't finish it all though, but I have to start working since the test week is coming my way (Monday April 6th it starts) and I didn't really study enough for it...

Day 43 in the house of Sims (meanwhile I'm already at day 66)

Scottish cheers,

Why not to lift my door

2009-03-26T22:17:00.004+01:00

The mother in her mid-life crisis explains:

All three of the people at home had to use the loo when my son just hád to lift the door (he was jumping while closing the door holding the doorknob) off of his hinges. It took us half an hour to put the door back in place! As punishment I didn't give him the first load of meat. Oh, and when it was his turn to use the bathroom, it smelled like shit because I didn't spray.

So, that was what happened today... It's not really why I wrote the article though, it's just so you know that my life isn't really that interesting at the moment: I've been playing a lot of The Sims Deluxe, I've been practising my exams and I've been busy doing geography homework...

Irritating URLs

So I've been thinking of funny and irritating URLs to make a site on... If I ever plan on making one that is... The first funny web address that crossed my mind was the URL http://www.ilove.sm, but unfortunately, running that website would cost me €300,- in domain hosting each year. When overhearing conversations with friends of mine, I heard the web address "http://www.punt.nl" come across. I found that quite a funny web address too, so I decided to look up whether it existed or not. Guess what... It did! It's a site for blogs, just like this one. I've tried looking up the subdomain "http://punt.punt.nl", but apparently that one was reserved. I've also looked up a couple of variations like "http://komma.punt.nl", but those were already taken. However, the subdomain "http://nlpunt.punt.nl" is now mine! Anybody willing to make blogs there (in Dutch?)

Update 23:03 - Seems like something is wrong with their mailing system. I put a GuerrillaMail.com e-mail address in the e-mail field (I had to test that site out) and all I got was an e-mail containing the subject "Activeer je webblog" with a text "0". I tried that as a password, and it didn't work. I also browsed to the site nlpunt.punt.nl, but I got redirected to the main page. It would've been so funny... :(

It Sims like SRTACRPG² builds good homes.

Why you need friends

2009-03-19T16:20:00.004+01:00

CRG Quote #18 - And that's about two years ago. Still looking BTW.

Part II - My sense of humour

Although I consider myself quite grown-up, once or twice a month I notice I still have a lot to learn about adulthood. Not just becoming independent, as in learning how to cook and cleaning the dishes... but also character-wise. Yes, I'm still talking about my sense of humour.

This night I had my first discussion at the Tsunaforum. People got mad at me because I was making jokes in a serious topic about character flaws. It all looked innocent to me, but apparently the topic starter and the guy I joked about thought otherwise. Me being the selfish jerk started giving an attitude. At the end, thanks to my close friend Sgigie and my ability to listen (Take that, Jeff from TGDPLEE) I managed to get things as straight as I could get them. I now made a bad impression on the forum (which is sucky since I'm crew of the Tsunacon), but I'm doing my best to build up a better attitude.

It isn't a new thing to make people angry at me because of my cynicism and sharp comments. I've had discussions, fights, angry PMs... all because of my insulting way of making myself known. Lately however, I'm becoming more and more mild leaving comments on fora and stuff. The problem though: I keep managing to insult others while I don't even mean things like an insult. As an adolescent, it is quite a difficult thing to spot a difference between good-willing and insulting, especially on impersonal fora.

I'm trying as hard as I can not to insult people with my sense of humour, but sometimes I just cross the line. I have to agree on the fact that sometimes it is my own mistake.
This is where the close friend comes in. Over the past years I didn't have a lot of close friends. When I was young I only had Mitch (the relationship went downhill when he moved to Assendelft), Alison (moved as well), Anne-Mieke (moved as well) and Arjen (moved as well!). However, because of our age we never even discussed bullying or the internet as a phenomenon. I got bullied heavily back then. It was so bad I had anger management problems at school. Whenever it all became too much for me to cope, I suddenly burst into tears and cried my way out of the class room. This apparently became rather liked by every class mate, and over the years I've had several of those outbursts.

Since the secondary school I had Matthew Deboyerse (ha, never met him in real-life) and Ronald (Hejty). Both those relationships are now down the drain thanks to my immatureness and Matthew's failing Kingdom Hearts site. Three other names that cross my mind of stopping their friendship with me are Muffin (he's back now though), Jeffrey and Vincent.
In the period of freshman and sophomore, I started building up this shield against the bullying by either ignoring it in a special way or by saying something very sharp (or something that made me sound uninterested) in return. It was a tough time, even then I still had several outbursts and fights (in which I SUCK BTW). At the end I managed to get myself up to a point of NO CRYING in front of the class. This went parallel with a couple of side effects though. The fact was, because I had to look for comments to return the favour, I became excellent in observing and picking out the confronting things that people found insulting and made them shut up. However, my newly acquired skills didn't only become a "bullying only shield": The more I started to verbally defend myself, the ruder I became towards my friends and people I've never met before. That switch in personality made me the friendless person I am today. The people around the people who bullied me saw me as a bastard and the little friends I had found me a bastard as well.

However, the worst thing... The sharp commenting and cynicism became part of my sense of humour. I enjoyed controlling the emotions people had. Although mostly just part of my discussions, whenever I wanted, I could say something sharp and rude towards the others and have them chasing me. This was all meant innocently though, however the impressions I left behind were nothing like innocent.

It really sounds like a sad story now, doesn't it? Well, if you look at it, it rather is. I've never been able to express my feelings properly, and even today I have trouble telling people like my teachers about why I'm so quiet in class. Along with the bullying, I built up a trauma for starting relations... I figured they would end in the other person leaving me anyway...
Every year again I say my class is messed up. Obviously this is because I can't stand ANYONE bullying like they've been bullying me... but is it really that appropriate to say my class is messed up when I'm not even trying to make friendship with any of the people? Well yes, it is. All those people in my class already have better friends than I can become at the moment. Partly because I won't be able to trust them because of what they did to me, and partly because I would be found a prick for my everlasting (constructive) criticism. I would become the third wheel on their bicycle. Plus - they're not at all like me. I respect the teachers and try to learn something in class, while most of the others are just messing about. This results in me not being able to develop at school.
Or does it? Lately because of me becoming milder, I was able to be part of some old VWO friendgroup. The first couple of days were rather tough for me: I had to use up all my power to keep myself from shouting how ugly they were... Also - Some of the teachers have noticed I'm all alone during class. They tend to start conversations with me and ask me why I'm not sitting next to others. With those teachers I've started chatting after class as well. It might sound nerdy, but it does help them to understand me, and me to understand what to do.

The other part of my sense of humour? Are you really interested in that? Ha. A picture says a thousand words, here's the other part of my sense of humour:

And then I start walking through the city...

You know... I don't know why, but I've always been liked by elder people. It's as if they see me in another way than the inexperienced teenagers I live my life with currently. Apparently, the older you are, the more life experience you have, and the more you realise why people like me are who they are. Also, most of the time when I'm being a bit silly when they're in the neighbourhood, they start laughing instead of frowning.
One other positive thing with my sense of humour is my writing skills, my way of writing is liked a lot by all sorts of people. It's a mix of seriousness and humour. I've been granted high grades for all my essays because it has always been "interesting to read" and "explained brilliantly"... Just sayin'.

Lowering the shields - Hoping for a better future at High School.
Last year I've met a couple of good friends. Three names that pop up are Pikapan Voeby, Chris and Sgigetegevowo. How did they become good friends you might ask. Well, they accepted my sense of humour and played along. It's quite ironic to say that at first, I only added Tuthola Sgigie because I wanted to complete a discussion about tgdplee with her on MSN. On a certain point, when we started talking about chemistry, I began to like her more. Even today she's still my friend and helps me straighten out things over the months.
I'm honest with you guys: You need an older and wiser friend in puberty to set you on the right track if you're going too far. At first I didn't think I went too far with my comments at the Tsunaforum: I figured it was at Tsuna level. However, when she said she agreed with the bloke against me, I started thinking that what I did could actually be wrong. I listened to her criticism and decided to change a couple of things. After that I took myself on a higher level and changed even more to make it even less insulting. If it weren't for her, I wouldn't have taken the first step.

Join in some other time for part III: My quest for a girlfriend

One more song I like to end the blog article with.

Mr. Roboto performed by Stix. Labeled by A&M.

Cheers,

Desktops over the years (part I)

2009-03-18T01:52:00.000+01:00

So I've come up with this new idea for a blog article. Nothing spectacular has happened in the previous days except for the fact we're going to buy headsets for the walkie talkies (they are rather loud even with the volume turned all the way down, IT CAN'T MUTE!), so I figured, why not take a look at some of the best desktops I've had over the last couple of years? No? Well, screw that. I have an hour to fill, and writing is one of the only things I can do at the moment.

We're going to start with my first own owned PC, it's the year 2004. The first ever recorded desktop I have is the one below. The background is Card Captor Sakura, the pictures you see all refer to different usernames (even back then I had several of them already!).

The program used for all those pictures is Desktop X, of which the icon is shown on my desktop. Other things worth mentioning are the "Winamp", "The Lost Fairy" and the SmartFTP icons. Back then, I still used Winamp as my music play program. The fact is, I even broadcasted some of my Japanese shitty music on the Kingdom Hearts Belgium online radio... The site has been dead now though for years. The Lost Fairy was a story I was writing back then, one of my first attempts of writing an English story! The story has never been finished though (I wasn't even done with chapter two). A part of the story is quoted (unedited) below:

This is a story of a fairy that is lost of her dad and her mom, she misses her little brother (David the fairy) worst.
One day on a walk with the whole family she fell in a black spiral hole, when she wake up she was on a strange island wit very strange trees.
Black with green in top of them!, the only thing she remembered was a snake and a black hole... The other things are how does the father mother and brother look like..
That's the only memory! she makes a drawing of them and with that she tries to find her family back! On her trip she has adventures (I hope one day I've got them here in Holland too :xp: ) and she makes friends!
----------------------------------
The lost fairy part one ''the black hole and her memory's'': When the fairy wake up the same day only 7 hours later she was suprissed and shocked!
''Where am I?'' she asked to herself, she begins to walk on the beach.. The first what she saw was a strange tree.. ''A black tree?''
The tree moves a little, she was scared and she begin running from those scary trees.. ''Where am I, what are those strange trees?, where is my family?''
She begin drawing a sketch of her family. Then she heard a strange voice! ''Fairy!! Fairy!!'' It repeats many many times!, the fairy gets the chils...
''Who are you... Where are you???, what do you want from me?, a poor fairy?'' Then she saw a bear. A black/white bear.. he said: ''did i scare you?''
Fairy: ''WHO ARE YOU???, Why did you do this to me? I was shocked!'' ''Sorry! That wasn't supose to happen...'' ''I'm Tygero, I saw you sleeping''
the fairy was shocked and said: ''Why did you came?'' bear: ''Because i need your help!''

Now isn't that cute? HOP ABOARD THE DREAMLAND EXPRESS.

Anyway, back to first desktop ever recorded. The last mentionable thing was the SmartFTP icon on my desktop. Did I have a site back then? I certainly did. Well, not on my own of course, but as part of my dads website. In this website I would talk about my schedule, upload pictures I made with Counter-Strike and even give English lessons! Yeah, too bad it never became a smashin' hit...

A screenshot taken from the website as it looked.

As you can see I can tell you a lot just looking at a desktop from years ago. I love to bring up these old memories! Anyway, next desktop:

As you can see, it's not an entire desktop, to be more precise, it's a picture taken from a Rainlender Calender. I can tell you a lot about the calender and what it says though. To start off: the background on which the calander is put (the entire desktop picture) is part of a three pictured series cycling every ten minutes. I made that with Unlead Gif Animator, a program I have recently installed even on THIS laptop (aka 5 years later). The speech bubble says: "Put merry christmas in your name", and is set at May first. Why? Because I made a promise with Willeke about that back then. Even now I still remember that promise, and I'm positively sure I DID put Merry Christmas in my MSN name on March first. The second thing is the TODO list, it says "Study Sunday Tango, improvisation". Back then, I was a student keyboard, not a really good one either. Four years later I'm still not a good keyboard player, but previous school year was my last keyboard year anyway, due to exams I couldn't continue. At last there's the EVENTS list. The day that picture was taken, I had a test geography. And the Monday after, holidays started!

Join in next time for some more desktops! (We're going all the way towards the one I have right now, featuring a bunny!)

Cheers,

The CRG albums

2009-03-14T23:54:00.003+01:00

In this blog article I will repost all the links and information of the CRG albums. This because Woopyland is dying and I don't want to lose the results of a lot of my effort and fun time making up the titles and joking around about it.

It all started out as a joke. I wanted to tease the Woopyland member "Damian" a bit by putting his MSN voice clips in songs. I thought of this because he said to me on MSN that "I have not given you permission to use these voice clips [on Woopyland] against me", thus challenging me.

I couldn't actually put the voice clips in a song due to my lack of sound editing skills, so I decided to just steal actual songs from the internet and put another name on them, referring to old and, back then, new memes I wanted Woopyland members to never forget. Oh, did I mention I put the album under his name?
The funniest bit of it all: People actually thought Damian made the album all by himself!

Damian Says - OMG! THIS AN ALBUM?!
The original album.

Direct download link: here

Tracklist
1 - Amarica is the South of Canada
2 - OMG! THIS ME?!
3 - make it go away aj!
4 - You are Whoolie, I am Damian, now we are Enemies
5 - Damian has sent a voiceclip
6 - My mom is here, don't say anything
7 - Hello Kitty FTW!
8 - Dirty little mod aint ya Whoolie?
9 - I wanna see a pic of aj!
10 - I hate you a lot
11 - STOP IT!
(might contain secret files)

CRG - International Pool of Wrong
The first CRG only album. It contains CRG's favourite songs from all around the globe.

Direct download link: here

Tracklist
1 - Rewritten By Machine
2 - The outro of My Life As Well
3 - Skämms!
4 - Sips the Armagh Ali!
5 - Wünschen Sie Pommes Frites Mit Dem?
6 - Je ne comprends pas
7 - Mikähänennimensänytolikaan
8 - Langs de Buurtchinees
9 - Wij Denken Geen Mens Te Zijn
10 - Voi Gradiscono
11 - Las Fritadas
12 - Life Sounds Better in English
13 - Only Listen When Mellow
14 - The Square in SRTACRPG²
15 - Arachibutyrophobia
16 - Mol-O-Tov bananatail
(contains a bonus file)

CRG - Ye' Ole Dimes
The second CRG only album, about the classic Woopyland memes

Download link: here

"I see Woopyland as an online dating site for teenagers. You meet a lot of nice folk, get to play with them on Live and at the end get fucked by them thanks to the connection. F'ing twats."
- Whoolie (You can take sentence that more than one way, just like him)

"If someone asks me about Woopyland, I would deny everything and tell him I've never heard of it."
- Zeus

"Woopyland is just a boring site I've made a couple of years ago. I think I was drunk."
- King Woopy

"Who asks for Woopyland?"
- Ualac

Tracklist
1 - The Orange Garbage Truck (2004)
2 - Join the Fun, Join Woopyland (2005)
3 - Copyright Issues (2006)
4 - Dex, Let's Have Sex (2006)
5 - Elven in de brouwerij gooien (2006)
6 - Geen Kunstjes Zoals de Dolfijn (2006)
7 - Pirates & Vikings in Belgium (2006)
8 - Guess, It's a Game (2004)
9 - Not Pokémon, PoKéMoN (2004)
10 - Do Some Belgian Jumping (2007)
11 - Scream, The Game (2006)
12 - 500 Days Jubilee (2006)
13 - One Giant Leap for Woopykind (2005)
14 - Posted by Dex (2006)
EXTRA - One Small Step for a Woopy (2005)
EXTRA - King Woopy and his Crew Salute Goodbye (2010)
EXTRA - Them Who Like Donuts (The Concept of the Woopy) (2001)

CRG - Album #4 -partly leaked-
This album was part of a joke. It does contain actual songs though...

hello this is josef/joseph, im an old friend of whoolie and i found out he started making a new album, crg album 4. it´s just the basics, no titles, no album art, no jokes, no nothing. i though i could share this with you as a payback to what he has done to me at school. i have to make it quick so you can download the album here:

Download link

7 songs. i dont know how many he wants to put in there, but these are the first seven...

In the future, I'm NOT planning on completing album #4. What I do plan on doing, is create an album with Penisher ánd another one all by myself: CRG's Game Over. I'm looking forward to posting it here.

Cheers,

Why not to niggerknock my door

2009-03-12T20:05:00.005+01:00

The ten year old kid explains:

Dear diary,
Today I got really scared. Yeah, I am scared quite often, I know, but today was something else - I got scared by an actual person, not a spider or the Rollercoaster at Walibi World. I'll tell you all about it.

As we were having fun in the neighbourhood at the Seandamn train station, my friend came up with the idea of nigger knocking. I was like... wow that's a sweet idea. We chose a random door and knocked, after hearing the lady walking towards the door we gunned it and laughed our asses off. Excellent first attempt mates! Let's do it again! Hmm, that flat is a good choice, it's on our way to the train station. Let's pick that door. And so we did...

Slowly I went up, my heart pounding. I rang the bell and started running down the stairs. But oh no! The door opened. The one who opened the door said something like "Don't do that bastard. (Niet doen, klootzak)" and started closing the door, but suddenly decided to chase us... I was running as hard as I could, and around the corner I was out of breathe and started catching it. And there I saw his shade... He looked right into my eyes and asked "Why did you do that?" I couldn't listen to him properly, I was scared and catching my breathe. After a few seconds I replied with "It's called knock knock ginger", he replied with "I know that, but why did you do it?" I got really scared at this point and stammered "for fun..." My friend started screaming at me but I couldn't hear him. The last thing he asked was "Is this fun?" I was like NO WAY, but calmly I said "no." He could beat me down any moment now. He looked right into my eyes and said "Don't do it any more." and just calmly walked away.

Wow, I don't know what would've happened if it was his dad, but I got lucky this time... I will NEVER EVER nigger knock that door any more for sure!
Thursday, half past seven.

The way to the train station - The spot where I got scared.

Questions and Answers I

2009-03-12T01:10:00.004+01:00

So I've read this interview on the xbox.com page... now to be honest, I've always wanted to be popular so I would have those kinds of interviews with the silly questions and answers. To get the taste of how's it like to be really popular, I figured, why not answer the same questions myself? Alright - Let's go.

One of my earlier CRG quotes. Today, I have around 14o of them, becoming more and more thought-through.

What's the story behind your Gamertag?
That's a rather long story. Long story short: I've always liked tongue twisters, and my username is one. It's an abbreviation that started out as CRG. Basically, it explains what I was like back then in three words: Corny, Racist and God. Over the time I noticed I was a bit more complicated than that and slow but steadily, new letters were added to the concoction. Nowadays it's SRTACCRPMPG², but I shortened it to SRTACRPG² - Scary Rapacious Tea Addicted Corny Racist Parttime God Squared.

Where do you live?
I like to put it as SeanDAMN, it's not the actual way of writing, but it has to cover the load. It's a town near AmsterDAMN, the capital of the Netherlands.

What do you work for/school?
I'm in my last year of secondary school (eleventh grade). After this I'm going to follow the course on becoming teacher.

What's the worst or weirdest job you've ever had?
Worst: Definitely the paper-round I've had for three years now. Actually, that and the one I've had twice at the hospital are the only jobs I have had for now...

How long have you been on Xbox LIVE?
I've been playing on the Xbox for years now, but I've only been part of Xbox Live a couple of months. My Xbox profile will probably give you the exact date, I, myself, have no clue of it.

Do you have an archenemy on Xbox LIVE?
ArchenemIES - almost every kid in the iTz on Halo 3. Yes, I said kids, because three-quarters of the iTz is twelve year old. I feel pity for the actual grown-ups.

What's your Xbox setup like?
It's on the desk-part of my brother's bed. You know, one of those beds which you have to climb on...? Anyway, there it is. Whenever I play Halo 3, I'm looking at a 24" monitor, with a big pile of games next to it, and a lot of plates on the other side. It's rather cozy though.

What's the best feature of Xbox LIVE?
The fact I can chat with other people during games. Rather useful when playing Team Swat or crossin' around Downtown Paradise asking around what to do next.

I know you love Halo 3 for multiplayer gaming, but what is your favorite single player Xbox game?
Oh shi-, do I have a favourite single player xbox game? Well I guess so, PGR 4.

What do you think is the best game of all time?
I don't have a clue. Names that pop up in my head are Goldeneye on the N64, Tales of Symphonia for the Game Cube, GTA 3 and Vice City, RCT2, OpenTTD and Airport Inc. for the computer and Pokémon Silver for the Gameboy Colour. Oh, and of course: Halo 3 on the Xbox. I can't pick though, and don't ask me to.

What do you think is the best film of all time?
Oi, do you have to ask? I mean, I don't have FAVOURITE films, I have films I like. Films I really liked were Bruce Almighty and the Negotiator. I've probably liked a lot more films, but I forgot their names.

Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
Don't know, never played them. Which is selling best? I'll take the other then.

What's the funniest thing you've ever heard on Xbox LIVE?
Dead silence. Dead silence whenever my team slaughtered the enemy team in a game of Swat or Social Slayer. If you're going to nitpick: The funniest thing I've actually HEARD were the people trying to pronounce my abbrevation right... I mean... Sergeant Acre PG, come on?

What is your greatest Xbox LIVE moment?
I can't even pick in what game I got it... Burnout Paradise or Halo 3... I've a lot of great moments, but I don't place them in my memory to remember forever, otherwise my life would be different quite a lot. Anyway, the contestants: The Invincible and Perfection on Standoff in the warthog (with "friends"), the (not really particular) owning in Burnout Paradise online (with "friends"), the first weekend of Grifball I played with Mephisto and the one-on-one completion of the Halo 3 campaign with my best online friend PwnageMAN (now called x AtrumZephyr x).

Who is your inner rock star?
My inner rock star you say? Well, I guess it's the singer in the Phineas and Ferb song "I ain't got rhythm". I love that song.

Favorite cartoon character?
Haha - Once again, that's a decision I have to make based on emotion, and for now, in this particular age region, I'm not capable of making those decisions because I haven't actually felt memorable emotions (except for when the dog accident happened which was partly my fault in real life, I now suffer a trauma for unleashed animals like cats and dogs). But - Based on arguments I will not tell, I'd have to go with Chiyo-Chan from Azumanga Daioh. The other contestant was Shinobu from Love Hina. Now this makes me wonder... I'm going to check something real quick, be right back. The answer probably will be Card Captor Sakura, but I'm going to check anyway. *after checking* Come to think of it, (for sure) Brock, Misty and (perhaps) Ash in a cartoonish style in a hot spring! Years ago...

Chiyo-chan, I'm sorry.

What superpower would you like to have?
I've always wanted this: The ability to wish for whatever I like and getting it. Over time, I've actually wondered quite a couple of times what it would be like to be a girl of the same age - I wished for the ability to change sex whenever I liked without causing any trouble (the world would change like I've been the sex I would transform into), making me able to live two independent lives. But then again, I always wish for a lot of things, so the ability of making my wishes come true would be the bottom-line.

If you could trade places with anyone for one day, who would it be?
Telling the story above, I'd have to say a girl anyway, but that's all I can think of right now. Probably a successful girl on the television so I can feel what one of my dreams come true would be like: becoming famous being the voice of the people I care about, making lots of cash obviously.

What celebrity would be the worst roommate?
Oh, I never think about celebrities that way. I don't even form an opinion about the celebrities on TV if I haven't met them in real life. I do have to say though: I can't stand smoking celebrities (smoking people in general).

How many people are on your Friends List?
Not a lot, I would say about 60, check it out yourself. I really should clean it up though.

Hot celeb you'd like to be stranded on a desert island with?
Once again, I don't think about celebrities that way.

Princess Peach, as found on SRTACRPG²s extern hard drive.

If you could be any video game character, who would it be?
I'm embarrassed to say, but I've always had dreams about being Princess Peach. Not just Princess Peach though with the everlasting kidnapping and being saved by a plumper (I mean like wtf... Get some inspiration Nintendo), but as Princess Peach in my own fantasy world, AND the ability of wishing of course.

What's the worst food you've ever eaten?
My English vocabulary isn't big enough to answer that question. I know a lot of words, but food isn't part of the English I know. I'll try to fix that lack as soon as I'm getting properly educated.

What's the first video game you every played?
Can't remember - That's a long long time ago. It's a Super Nintendo game... Stunt Race FX? Mario Kart? Mortal Kombat? Something like that though.

What's the last book you read?
The last book I've "read" is De Stille Kracht by Louis Couperus.

If you could go on tour with any band, which would it be?
At the moment I'd say Smash Mouth.

What do you predict will be the "next big thing" in gaming?
The 3D-helmet, making the entire game area 3-dimensional. Seen it in films, want it in real-life. Eat that, laser gaming industry!

What do you think is the best thing about Xbox 360?
The avatars... Joking. Obviously the wireless headset and controllers.

What is the Xbox 360 Achievement that was hardest to get?
For now it's "Two for One" in Halo 3, but I haven't actually tried my best on getting it. It doesn't help that I'm ranked 40 in Lone Wolves though... Oh, and I'm not going to boost it, that's lame!

What would you like to be doing in ten years?
I would like to do a lot of things:

- Be an employee in a big game developer, like Bungie or Criterion Games
- Be a successful TV host (or part of reality show)
- Be a successful singer
- Writing my own books (I love writing!)
- Educating people at secondary school in English

Cheers,

Meanwhile...

2009-03-10T23:51:00.005+01:00

Somewhere in SRTACRPG²s neighbourhood...

HQ: "Everyone in channel 3 - switch to channel 20 to talk to HQ"
Me (Eef): "Affirmative, in channel 20. So what's the sitch?"
HQ: "Eef, what is your position?"
Me: "Checking cross-over. No scum insight."
srtacrpg2.blogspot.com: "I need a situation update! I repeat: I need a situation update!"
Me: "Negative, I'm a bit busy fighting crime, and the forces of evil."
HQ: "Continue your mission recruit, over."
Me: "I will. Over and out."

Sorry lads, no update today. I got m'self a spankin' new pair of walkie talkies and I'm testing them. I feel like I'm in a police programme. To make up with you, here's me smiling with my brand new walkie talkie. Yes, that's an Xbox 360 headset: They work with it!

Screw Team Swat on the Xbox 360 - I'm having lots of fun playing Cops 'n' Robbers with my friends outside.

Hi, my name is Pizza-Boxxy

2009-03-10T00:40:00.000+01:00

Most of you know me as... uh ah uhm, most of YOU know me as Pizza-Boxxy. If you're watching this you probably know me as Pizza-Boxxy.

Yes - That's a pizza box on my head.

So I haven't really blogged for quite some time, this is because... well... it felt like nothing special happened. Yesterday though, enough 'nothing special' has happened to write a new blog. Let's start:

- Remember the most important essay (and now the biggest one too, we added another page!)? I do. In a couple of weeks me and my friend will have a chat about it, but the grade given will probably be in the region of a 7,5/10. Both the teachers were impressed. Looking at the teachers grading the essay (they are really strict), a 7.5/10 for the essay is GOOD. It means we did our job well. Hearing that from one of those teachers satisfied me quite a lot. It's a fair grade if you look at all the effort we put into it. The full chat about the work will be held in a couple of weeks. When it's done, I will hopefully update you guys too.

- Next off; Bowling. How did it go? Well, to be honest, my games themselves weren't spectacular. I didn't throw the 195 average I did on the Monday before. However, Steven (a team mate) was the star of the day with his 244 game. We won 2/3 points, a job well done.

- Back to grades and especially Dutch. Like I already told you, the presentation went AW-FUL. After having this major chat about my grade with the teacher, the definitive grade was a 6/10 (equals a C+). For the circumstances, I was rather pleased. I told her all about me being bullied and stuff and she gave me a couple of points extra because she too felt like I was being limited by the class. I also got a couple of points because of the books I chose to read themselves. Yes, they were rather difficult. However: although I had a 7.5 AVERAGED before that grade, making it an 8 on my exams, I know have a 7,35. This rather pisses me off, because of that I now start off with a 7 on my exams. A FULL POINT LESS. There are no more grades in between the exams and classes - so that's the definitive Dutch class grade. A bit the same for maths: I had a 7.5 before the last grade, and now I'm stuck with a 7.something. I do have two more grades for maths before the exams, so if I could just get a 9 for those I might just keep an 8... I feel fucked, obviously, but I can't do anything about it. What a shame. A 7/10 is outstanding too though, so I'm not complaining too much.

- My brother has found a FULL-TIME job at the hospital where I've been an employee for quite some time too. This means that I'm now, theoretically anyway, able to play on the xbox until five o' clock EVERY day. AWESWEET. I'm now 40 in Swat, going for 45 to continue with Team Snipers.

- Now unto the more interesting things. Two things as far as I can remember. The first thing: Together with two of my friends I'm importing four walkie-talkies. They are supposed to be delivered this week. Oh I've been dreaming of those walkie-talkies ever since I joked about it. Imagine the things we can do with them...! Cheat during hide-and-seek, chat to each other without even leaving our houses (we all live in the same neighbourhood)! Chat to each other during school breaks... Oh we're going to have SO MUCH FUN with them! They have an 8 kilometres range, so in an urban area that would be like 2 km (exactly the distance between my house and school). I'm SO looking forward to it. The only problem... I don't know whether they make it past the border (they're not completely legal... ha ha.)

- The last thing I want to discuss with you guys was... Oh right, I remember. I have updated the log file of the TGDPLEE online Pastebin page, there have been quite a couple of developments since the last time I updated it back in 2008. It received my full attention again a couple of days ago, when I've heard that some of the best known members QUIT tgdplee and that some members are being indoctrinated by the admin Jeffrey. I was there to investigate. My conclusions can be found in the following pastebin page: click . It took me quite some time to explain it all - but you should draw your own conclusions.

I'll end this (corrected) blog by posting another lovely song:

Smash Mouth - All star (Copyright Universal Music Group) - First time I've heard this song it was in a Halo 3 Montage by a Bungie employee, never stopped listening it ever since!

Cheers,

Dutch... I hate it SO much

2009-02-26T22:42:00.012+01:00

"Tha' stinky ol' rott'n eejit" - CRG (talking 'bout the teacher Dutch this time)

I've been depressed a lot this year with school: the essay, Dutch, Dutch, chemistry, maths, chemistry, ... If you think I've had enough to complain about school this year, and especially about my Dutch teacher, you're in for a threat, because once again, I had a disastrous presentation. Guess what: "Ilcker" gets his re-entry in this blog, because this disaster is, again, partly his fault.

So, this time we were supposed to have a 20 minute discussion about 6/5 books we were supposed to read this year for Dutch class. Me being irritated by literature on paper, I decided to rush through the books, and to finish them as quickly as possible. At this season's second holiday I already read two of my three books. The only book I still had to read when the holidays started was a 34 page long one. Meanwhile I had to bring the other two of my books back to the library to avoid having to pay a FIVE FREAKIN' CENTS A DAY FINE. At the end of the holidays I had completed two of the discussions of the books Iread.
At the end of the holidays I completed reading the third book as well and had to bring that one back too. I finished my presentation on Monday. Today I had to present it, together with Ilcker's three books. I expected to be done in about 13 minutes with my part, and I figured Ilcker wouldn't have too much to read, so I expected the 20 minutes to be filled perfectly.

I was in for a couple of nasty surprises though: the first to be that I didn't study my own written text, so when I had to put down my paper with my entire text on it, I becoming stumbling with words. I've always been text-dependant, just like with the MRSA presentation a year ago... 30 minutes of MRSA talking with a lot of help from my text papers... The second surprise was the LOW, LOOOOW pace Ilcker was talking in, he had only TWO papers of information to read, but his way of talking was SO annoying, and it was SO blatant that he took his stuff from the internet in a hurry. I was ashamed, not just because of that, but because of my own really poor performance as well. I couldn't talk normally and when my paper was blown away on purpose by the two in first row, I just stopped talking... I couldn't go on without my paper.
And yet I have the idea I didn't do TOO bad, but hey, whenever I have hope, my Dutch teacher sure knows how to crush it and how to make herself look like a complete DICK towards me. She hits me where it hurts: the performing of my original work. You know what she said? "For now, all I can say is that you didn't use the talents you have for making that presentation." And that can only mean two things:

1 - She thinks I got it all from the internet and didn't read the books, so my performance was bad
or
2 - She's a fucking hypocrite twat. THE FACT I DIDN'T PUT AS MUCH EFFORT IN THIS PRESENTATION AS I DID WITH THE OTHERS, WAS BECAUSE WHEN I DID PUT EFFORT IN IT, YOU CRUSHED IT BECAUSE IS WAS TOO LONG AND TOO COMPLICATED FOR AN 11th GRADER. Now I finally make a crappy presentation to make it understandable for the audience, and it's still not done right :s

I've had it with Dutch class, and I'm not sure whether I feel like going to her lessons any more. This has been another big smash on the forehead by Ye Ole School: And it ruined my entire Thursday (dodnederdag). I'm turning really depressed. The fact I only had a 6,8/10 for maths was a huge shock to me too... There goes my 8 on my exams :( Just like with Dutch now. Whoopdie f'ing do.

For all I care, that's all about school. A couple of other things:

- I ordered walkie-talkies together with my friends - Oh I can't wait for talking with my neighbourhood friends without having to lift my ass while laptoping :D I can then ask them whether they want to hang out with me without even having to go outside! Valhalla!
- I'm now level 38 in Team Swat, thanks Komplot13, and I hope to play Swat with you again soon! :D
- I have bowling again this Saturday! Looking forward to it! It promises to have some high scores, my average at bowling Monday was 195 over three games, with one splendid game of 224! We need to score though, because we still have two times to go and we need to defend our first spot!

Now to finish this for the most part depressing blog, my favourite video clips for the moment:

"Gitchi Gitchi Goo (Means that I love you) - Phineas and the Ferbtones" (Credit goes to Disney)

(I have other great music on my laptop, but it's all in .mp3 and I can't upload that)

- "Mature" Content Warning -

Hosue [sic] - Credits go to all the people in the credits in the clip itself...

The last Resolution

2009-02-19T02:39:00.006+01:00

"Life sounds better in English than it does in Dutch"
- CRG

After all this time I figured... Why not finally write an article about who I am, just a bit more detailed than it was before:

So, my name is Ifar. My birthday depends on what site I'm on, but most of the time it's 08-05-90'. I live in a city in the region of Amsterdam, which is the capital of Dutchland.
So... I didn't receive any requests on what to tell about myself, so I'm just going to improvise and see where we're heading at.

Part I - My cautiousness and strength

First off, I'm a cautious lad. I watch out with every step that I take. To bring it in other terms: I've thought everything through before doing it. This manner of handling has kept me out of trouble a lot of times, but doesn't only have advantages. For example: I don't have this huge social life at school, in some breaks I'm just wandering through the school because I have no place to sit at with friends. It's simple: I can do two things. Either socialise and gain popularity at people I have nothing in common with, or stick with the friends I have which are well... quite limited and imperfect in a lot of ways. I choose the second. Why? Because my friends are real. The negative part of this is, that I got teased a LOT at school for not being friends with the bullies and being 'different' than the rest. This was HELL the first couple of years at secondary school, but at the end, which I'm at now, I have survived. Not just survived, I have become mentally capable of handling rough situations. But that's not the only advantage: ALL of the teachers have supported me through the years and believed every single thing I said to them. This had become rather helpful for raising my grades just a fraction, or when I deny something I actually díd do.
The teasing brings me to my second point. I've been around a lot of people getting teased, including me, my friends, friends of friends and class mates... all endure the same things as me. It's saddening. In the future, as being part of teaching English, I want to counsel people being bullied like me. However, it's good for me to be ambitious on this age, but when I complete my exams this year (and therewith my secondary school) and find the teacher school disappointing, my life-long dream will be shred to tears. If that happens, I have no clue what to do. Luckily, in this big world there are a LOT of options available. If I set my mind to it, I might just become staff in a company creating games. Help making a game is one of my dreams too you know.
Anyway - The teasing really made me a lot stronger. I can handle stress quite well now and even in dangerous situations or scary situations I don't lose my cool. I noticed it myself: A couple of months ago I set a glass thermos flask with a plastic handle on fire. Me having no experience with fires, I calmly walked towards my mum in the living room, tapping her shoulder to ask her what to do "if I set a thermos flask on fire". My mum, being a scared rabbit, SHOT from the couch and started running towards the kitchen. With one sweep she pushed the thermos flask in the sink and turned on the tap. This was just one example. Other examples are when there was a caravan on fire in the neighbourhood, and when I was getting shit loaded with bad comments from class mates when walking towards the "mediatheek" a couple of years ago. Everybody else I know would've lost it there (especially in the last case), but I didn't and it paid off: when I got to a teacher, having filmed everything, a couple of guys of my class got suspended for behaving like asses towards me.

It's good to have this "shield", but I'm not emotionless, whenever I think about my future, whenever I think about the friends I've lost in the past due to my behaviour or them leaving, whenever I think about my past at school I get this weary feeling in my eyes. Life is such a beautiful thing. BEAUTIFUL I tell you. And in my opinion, it's all thanks to myself and my friends and family, not some God watching over me. I'm a guy of science and knowledge, and knowing what I've achieved and what is possible in life, makes me want to cry.

As a side-note: I've seen a lot of different worlds... Worlds in different cartoons, animes, television programmes. Not all of those worlds are happy ones. In the last couple of years, I've been sucked into all these different worlds, and they always seem to be better than how real-life actually is. Most of the time, the stories have perfect endings making you wanna pick a tear from the back of your eye. Along with those worlds, there is the actual world. This is real-life. In my mind, I've been host of my own reality TV show (one of my wishes is to host or produce my own show on the telly), explaining how my life is in front of the mirrors daily. This particular syndrome has a name (which I forgot), one I've been introduced to in the quiz called "That's the question". I've never thought it has its own name and that it wasn't just me, but now I know it isn't just me, I can understand. I can understand people want to produce a reality TV show of their own life. It would be their own little perfect world, as an escape to the harsh reality of emotion. (I'd make sure I had magical powers if life would've been my own TV show!)

Life is full of disappointment, and because I grew up being bullied and poor (not so poor to live on the streets, but barely rich enough to buy a console making me the addicted twat I am now) I know how to deal with it. Lots of people don't know how to deal with it and become prostitutes, criminals, suicide bombers and traumatised for life... All I can say is, I have survived this and in the future I will tend to help these people to become just as strong as me. How's that for ambition?

Join in next time for Part II - My sense of humour

And as an ending to this great blog article, my favourite songs for the moment:

"One Week performed by Steve Frisbie and Max Crowe"

Thanks Docie for this one

"Separate ways by Journey, performed by the Rockoons"