Political situation in Belgium

Every day you turn on the news here in Belgium, you hear nothing but the political struggle between Flanders and Wallonie. Endless discussion about who is responsible for what, who needs to get what money and which priorities should be addressed.

it has been several months past the latest elections and still we are without a decent gouvernement. Endless discussion start on various forums and newssites.
Today the person in charge for leading the discussion, the "preformateur" as we call it, made an appeal to the parties to sit together again.

Couple of days ago, Mrs Milquette asked the parties to take their responsebilities. She really has the nerve to demand such a thing after all the trouble she has caused over the past years. She's better known as "Madam Non" here in Belgium, because she never agrees on anything only strives for her own political agenda.
Most of people from Flanders are sick of this entire attitude. For years we have paid taxes to support Our southern part of the country. Yet they keep demanding more and more.

ARENT WE THE SAME COUNTRY?

What is wrong with these people, going at each other? They should be working together to get Belgium back on it's feet, but instead they argue over things that the population doesnt even care about.

If I was the prime minister of this country, my first order of business was to regulate everything around politics. Normal wages for Ministers and their people, not the insane amounts of money they current receive for basicly doing nothing.
The second step is to remove the 5 different gouvernements we have. Tiny country, 10 million inhabitants and 5 FRIGGING Gouvernements. Try explaining that to someone from abroad....

Gamescom 2010

Last weekend I took a close friend with me to Gamescom 2010 in Köln.

It was the first time for to join the gamescom, and from first impressions, I'm happy that I did it.

Several of the well known companies where present at the Gamescom. EA, Blizzard, THQ, Konami and Square-Enix to name a few. Ofcourse we had various indy companies present and some more known names out the F2P industry such as GPotato and Burda-IC.

The first goal on the Com was to walk around and get a good understanding of the size and layout of the Com. With 4 hall filled out we had our trajectory set out. First we did the Xbox stands to see what was new and play with the kinect. After that we tried the Playstation variant.

Several games made their official debut on the com. DragonAge 2, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars : The Old Republic to name a few. We watched the cinematics and trailers presented to us from the games and they simply looked astaunishing.

One thing that put us off, was the noise. The place was crowded and various stands such as RockCat and Razor where pumping up the music louder and louder across the halls to compete against each other. While my common sense agreed with the competition, my ears disagreed for the most part.

One thing that struck me odd was the crowd. The stereotypical view someone has from a gamer, is a real potatocouch, someone who dwells in the basement and doesn't stand sun light. Often having a few pounds overweight as well.

While there were definitly people present on the com that fit the description, the majority of people there were young adults in good shape and even more elderly people who still held laptops, PSP devices or gameboys. The term "gamer" affects a wider population then most people can imagine.

We followed various Q&A rounds of the large developers explaining why they implemented certain features or left them out. A great Q&A occured at the EA stand when they were discussing some of their new games comming out. There the audience really got involved with the discussion and they actually picked people out for good solid questions.

One thing that scared me was the hourly giveaways. Every hour people would swarm in masses to the large game stands in the hopes of getting their hands on some freebies. First they start with some T-shirts. People almost knocking eachother senseless for the T-Shirt, went totally beserk when they threw in free copies of the games.

We had a small let down when we tried to get our hands on the latest Aion beta disks for the next expansion/version. When we finally got close to the stand we noticed there were none left.

When the day came near an end, we had loads of keychains, posters, cards, stickers and other gadgets from the Com. We're definitly looking forward to the next one.

The Last Airbender

So, this weekend I went to the movies to watch "The Last Airbender".

I've seen the entire cartoon series on Nickelodeon, thanks to my little brother, so I had a certain expectation of the movie. While the movie was certainly not bad, I had the feeling that it did not live up to the expectation I had.

Several of the key characters have a lack of depth in the movie. You're suddenly thrown into the world of element bending, without proper context. The story is told at the start of the movie, but it's lacking. Some of the characters are pretty shallow in regards to their background and important in the story.

A big plus however are the special effects. The bending of the various elements was nice to watch, as were the duals between elemental masters. The only downside on this was the bending of the element earth. It appears as if the rendering of those effects took a dent during the making of the movie. All elements are smooth, yet when earth is used the effect seems to "slow down" as if the computer used for making the effect could not render it properly or display it properly.

Besides that I recommend the movie to anyone who is into this kind of stuff. The expectations aren't met, but all in all it's not a bad movie to watch.

p.s I watched the 3D version.