This video touches a loneliness that lies deep inside of me.
Journal
May 4th, Remembering the Fallen
Every year on the 4th of May, at eight o’clock in the evening, the Netherlands respects a two minute silence to remember those who have fallen. We call it dodenherdenking, or “remembering the dead.” It’s not just to remember those who have died in World War II, but it’s come to mean that. On the central Dam square in Amsterdam, the Dutch royal family leads a cermony that offers flowers at the war memorial which starts the only two quiet minutes that otherwise noisy and busy square knows each year.
I respect these two minutes, even though some people can’t or won’t. I respect them because the generation that lived through the biggest tragedy to happen in the last century is slowly dying and it won’t be long before the last of them has passed away, and then all we have are their stories. It’s easy to say that it’s been long enough, and that it’s time to let it go, but in doing so I think we lose something. We’ll lose a sense of perspective that’s hard to put into words but easy to recognise, that it’s not been that long since we stood at the abyss of complete subjugation and war and that it took a Herculean effort of the combined forces of most of the world’s military super powers to help us step away from that destruction. That it hasn’t been so long since the common person was offered seven guilders and fifty cents to betray the whereabouts of our neighbours and friends, and that more people than we dare to admit took that reward money, simply because it meant their families had something to eat besides raw potatoes and whichever cat wasn’t fast enough to escape a hungry grasp.
We’re fat, lazy and wealthy, and we’re losing our perspective. When all we can talk about is our lease cars, traffic jams, football matches and fashion, it’s good to really stop and remember how close we came to our own destruction and how much we had to do to rebuild our lives.
It’s two minutes. Two minutes where you put your life and personal stuff aside and think about — really consider — the hardships and sacrifices and attrocities of the war and flawed nature of every human being, and admit to ourselves that sophistication and humanity is only a thin veneer and that we can, and most likely will slip and fall into that depravity again.
I will think of the people that were executed in the Netherlands during the German occupation of World War II. I will think of the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others that were considered abnormal who were taken away to concentration camps. I will think of soldiers that liberated Europe and the soldiers they fought to liberate it from. I will think of all the people that worked themselves to death to rebuild this continent.
And this year, especially, I think of all the people that died the last ten years since September 11th, 2001. I think of the absolute destruction and chaos we all sowed around the world. If not personally, then by our mandate. I think of the people that cheered and partied when the news broke that what has become the symbol and figure head of a extremist movement was captured and killed.
“I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
A New Cluster
On monday, before work, I had a another cluster headache attack. It’s been two and a half years since my last cluster, which is scaring me shitless, since the cluster before that was in 2001, seven years prior to the last one. The idea that they’re coming faster and faster is not something that I’m prepared to ponder right now, and I’m just going to conclude that three points on a timeline can’t be considered a trend and leave it at that.
I felt strange as I woke up that day. I was restless and low on energy and I felt like I was perhaps getting a cold or something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but when the attack hit I was slightly better prepared for it. It was a 30 minute, Kip 7 attack, which left me exhausted for the rest of the day. Yesterday, I started to feel weird in the afternoon and I suspected I’d have another attack, so I went home early. Within an hour of getting home, my eye started tearing up and my nose started running and I had a Kip 8 attack that lasted probably about an hour, perhaps a little more.
In the past, one of the things that was always so hard to deal with was their unpredictability. My clusters don’t follow “normal” patterns, neither do the attacks in the cluster. Mine are usually shorter, around the 30-45 minute range, and I don’t get any that are below a Kip 7. My clusters are short and episodic, perhaps a couple of weeks, and I get 3 or 4 attacks a week, hardly ever on the same times. But now, I’m starting to predict them better, which is a huge relief to me. Let’s see how the rest of the week goes.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Review
Kane & Lynch: Dog Days, the sequel to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men was quite a ride. This time around, the story was simpler and the interaction between the two protagonists more interesting and more intense. The look and feel of the game improved greatly, and while there was still some snags with the controls, the overall gameplay experience improved pretty dramatically.
Story
In Dead Men, Kane and Lynch are put together by The Seven, a council of top level, international crime bosses that Kane used to belong to. Kane stole money from them and he has to get the money back. The Seven stage a prison transport escape for Kane, who is en route to death row, where he is to be put to death for past crimes. They put Lynch, a wife-murdering sociopath, in the same transport and make sure that Kane is prepared to get busted out. After the escape, Lynch is tasked to help Kane retrieve the money he supposedly stole, while The Seven threaten to kill Kane’s ex-wife and daughter. Pretty soon both Kane and Lynch get burned by The Seven but manage to turn the tables and start hunting for them all over the globe, this time as partners.
In Dog Days, Kane is reunited with Lynch who now lives in Shanghai. Lynch is working as a thug for some a British smuggler named Glazer, has a girl and regularly takes his medication. Kane has been travelling the world, pulling heists where he could, but it becomes evident from the trailer to the game that the last heist went horribly wrong and his entire crew got killed while he got away, without the money. He wants to do one last job and then retire and so he gets in contact with Glazer, to smuggle some weapons and he is met in Shanghai by Lynch.
Before taking Kane to his hotel, Lynch asks him to accompany him on a little job he needs to do; having a chat with a local thug who has been talking too much. He needs to teach him a lesson, and before Kane knows it, he’s stuck in a gun fight that goes horribly wrong as they accidentally shoot the thug’s girlfriend, the daughter of an important politician/mafioso. That starts a chase through the sprawl of Shanghai as they are trying to flee the city.
Controls and Atmosphere
The reason I wanted to talk a bit about both the look and feel as well as the controls of the game is because they are very narrowly related. First of all, the game is absolutely beautiful, smothered in neo-noire that atmosphere that’s reminiscent of Miami Vice and similar shows and films. It shows both the glitz and glamour of a large city and simultaneously highlights that the shiny lights are only skin deep and that underneath that lies the filthy underbelly of a wicked, urban sprawl. The colours used in the game are all saturated neon colours of pink, blue and yellow and the setting is very rich and detailed. Also, the surroundings give a sense of endless openness and possibilities without letting you lose track of the path you’re predestined to follow. From the sweat shops you invade to catch a thug, to the low-rent apartment blocks you race through to save Lynch’s girlfriend, to the train yards, docks and airport you have shoot-outs in to get out of the city, all of them are covered head-to-toe in beautiful, rich detail.
The controls are a little tricky, but have certainly improved since the first game. The cover system works better and is more intuitive now, switching from one piece of cover to the next is also a bit more responsive, though the standard settings allow you to use the WASD buttons and RMB to walk and strave, you use the C to get into cover. All good. However, when you duck from one cover to the next, you use C+A to duck left, C+W to duck forward and C+D to duck right. I use the same finger (left-index) to hit both C and D. So a combo of those is a little tough.
The camera angle is also a bit problematic at times, but again, not nearly as terrible as it was in Dead Men. They actually chose a really interesting concept; a supposed third person carrying a portable camera to film everything. That camera man is always just behind whoever you’re playing at the time, be it Kane or Lynch, and sometimes ricochetting bullets hit the camera and make it go static for a moment. The camera is almost always moving, giving it a hard-nosed reality feel to it, and when the camera man is running behind you to keep up, the image becomes blurry and you can hear him panting. Sometimes, in the thick of it, he loses focus on what you’re trying to hit. The lighting becomes bad as fast-paced action leaves the camera struggling to keep up. The camera man is there, but he’s never part of the story. It’s very well done.
Final Thoughts
I thought this game was brilliant. From the rather brutal torture scene that leads into Kane and Lynch both running naked, cut up and bloodied into the streets of Shanghai, love handles and all, to the pixelated faces of the people you shoot in the head, supposedly because the camera man thought it was too gruesome for public consumption. The pace is fast and the panic on the voices of both actors is really well done, their frustration grows as they realise they are getting far too old for their gun-fighting antics. The only real complaint I have about this game is that it seemed a lot shorter than the first one, and that there was absolutely no end-of-game sequence, making the end of the game very anti-climactic.
Happy Queen’s Day! Today Everyone is Dutch!
Queen’s Day, a day of national unity for almost a hundred years now. It’s a day marked by the free market, where people sell stuff on the streets — basically like a massive garage sale. It’s a day of celebratory drinking, much like St. Patrick’s for the Irish, Mardi Gras for the Nawlinsians and Carnival for Rio. It’s a day of merriment and a day of Orange. Amsterdam is the focal point of many, many people and each year the amount of people pushing themselves into the center of Amsterdam swells. They keep coming from further and further away, people fly over as the reputation spreads to other countries.
Interestingly, for the last twenty years or so, as the popularity of going into Amsterdam on the day itself has grown, many people who live in Amsterdam have started fleeing the city and staying indoors until everyone has left again. It gets so busy it’s silly. The people in Amsterdam don’t celebrate Queen’s Day anymore? Sure they do, they just do it the evening before in something that’s started to be known as Queen’s Night and it’s usually a lot more relaxed, since the city isn’t filled to the brim with people desperate to have a good time, hopped up on pills or drunk off their mind. No, Queen’s Night belongs to the people of Amsterdam, the hosts , while Queen’s Day belongs to the guests. (I’m sure this goes for other, larger cities in the Netherlands as well, like The Hague, Utrecht and Rotterdam.)
This year’s Queen’s Night was kind of spurred on by my brother, who was jonesing for some fun. I was looking to skip Queen’s Day this year, having not heard about any parties or events going on. My brother convinced me to go out and have a drink somewhere, so after training I went with him to swing by a BBQ that Moulsari was at, to drop of some stuff that I was holding for her. When we got there, around nine, people were already slightly intoxicated and having fun out in the street, eating sausages, drinking wine. We immediately got taken in and set up with a drink and a sausage. The evening turned out to be a lot of fun, meeting a bunch of people, mostly foreigners and expats, and having a good time.
Today we’re staying in, hanging out, and waiting for the party to die down again, and tonight we’ll move out into the city and see what’s going on. Looking forward to chilling out for a while. Happy Queen’s Day!
