Marek

It's a clip from a show by Chris Morris. Spaff loves Chris Morris. Just nod and smile.

The one thing that's on my mind is what kind of wankers must work on a show like that.

Wow, it's like... some kind of Throwback™.

I get the impression that Sands of Time not selling is partly a myth. I think it sold poorly over Christmas so everyone thought it wasn't selling well. But a few months later it was at 2,000,000. That's a very good number.

Sigh. We ran out of toilet paper AGAIN. Jake, I thought you were supposed to go shopping today?

True. Didn't know about the startup money until now. Hope you're right...

Edit: whoops that's irrelevant now.

The TROS is where John de Mol once started out, and where his sister worked up until recently. Talpa is going to be very similar to the TROS: "fun for the whole family", and it will no doubt be cheesy, low-cost and horrible. There was even some discussion of TROS merging with Tien, which sadly didn't happen. I expect Talpa will be the same story as when Veronica, SBS or Net 5 launched. You watch the promos, you think it will be the best channel ever, but after a year you realize it was just a trap. Veronica/Yorin, SBS and Net 5 all crumbled to mediocrity after their first year. So Talpa will have the Soundmixshow, Beau, Big Brother, Bridget Maasland, Ivo Niehe, Harm Edens, Spijkerman, etc. What else is new? It should be noted that Harm Edens without Dit Was Het Nieuws is horrible (see: that awards show he did with Bridget), and Spijkerman without his cabaret team is also horrible. Basically all Talpa does is destroy great programs on other channels. The only thing worth watching will be Barend & van Dorp, but only for the first year. After that a new duo will take over. So... WHY BOTHER? Sorry. I don't share your optimism.

3voor12 has been bummed up the gop multiple times due to budget allocation problems. The top brass got all confused because 3voor12 is so many things, and like... should the money come from the internet budget, or from the radio budget? Is the site a companion to the radio program, or the other way around? People just couldn't figure it out. I don't think the Dutch public broadcasting bureaucracy is quite ready for more cross-media programs. It's only because of 3voor12's extreme persistence that they get things done. I see a little bit of the old VPRO in 3voor12 and think they're pretty much awesome.

A while ago I had a dream in which I was running through an endless tunnel painted in rainbow colors. I was being chased by hundreds upon hundreds of tiny golden retrievers. I played Nintendogs only once I swear.

Also...

Yeah seems shitty. Either you need to kill the omroep system and turn them into production houses for BBC-like channels with a central management, or you need to keep the current situation. Anywhere in between = failure. Why do you want Nova to move to Talpa Erwin? Talpa will be horrible. It will be basically like the TROS, except it will broadcast all day long. I expect whatever Spijkerman comes up with will be their only worthwhile show, much like the TROS' Dit Was Het Nieuws.

The company I work at is looking for a new programmer to join their game development team. Programmers have been known to exist in these parts, so I thought I might help my co-workers by posting the job listing here. (Sorry if this is of no interest to you.) Here it goes: Yeah, raw words.

Of course you can still drop 'em a note in case there's internship positions available. I just got my work schedule for Monday and the first thing it says is APPLE PIE MEETING 09:30, EVERYONE ATTEND. Mmm, apple pie.

Well... there's the regular Woedend!, and Woedend! Games, which is a new company that shares the same office space. Woedend! Games is working on an undisclosed PC title. It's not a typical "hardcore gamer" game. It's for a very different (young) target audience. Based on what I've seen they're doing an amazing job with it. The guys on the team have a lot of industry experience and it shows. I am not on that project though. I work on different web-based games at the regular Woedend! The atmosphere here is superb. We had our 5 year celebration recently and it made me smile and feel priveledged for being a part of it. I especially like the management. They have a sense of humor and a great "no bullshit" mentality, probably because (as the weird name of the company suggests) they started the company sort of on a drunken whim and gradually built it up from there. No crazy startup capital or anything, just a lot of hard, honest work.

I kept seeing that guy at E3 and thinking how little he looks like that drawing.

What what? He's getting his own show? This is terrible! The others are totally replaceable to my mind, except probably Samantha Bee. But Steven Colbert is pretty key to the Daily Show. He's the guy that's actually funny, and occasionally causes Jon Stewart to be actually funny as well. Bad bad idea...

They mean it will be revealed in the magazine. Gitaroo Man is a really awesome rhythm game for the PS2. I'm sure the story appeals to you: The game is really fucking hardcore motherfucking hard by the way, especially towards the end. It's also a lot of fun.

As a kid I never bought any games at all, not even those games by developers I wanted to support (I hadn't even thought of that). I just got the games on DAT tapes that were sent around in piracy rings along with long matrix printed contents lists, and I just streamed off what sounded interesting. That's how I discovered Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. I used my allowance money to buy LEGO, not games. I guess it was too hard for me to acquire LEGO illegally. Now things are different. I make plenty of money, so I get virtually all my games legally, which is the right way to go and is also infinitely easier. Occasionally I sell used games to buy other new ones. That said, I wish games cost around the same amount as a DVD, as that would surely lead to more impulse shopping. I sometimes buy a whole bunch of DVDs just because I feel like it, but I usually only buy one well-researched game title at a time. Piracy to me was always about the money, never about principles or lazyness.

Well, this is kind of fun. Maybe a Katamari-esque surprise? In Chibi Robo you apparently play the role of multi-purpose household appliance slash problem-taker-awayer. Apparently the project was doomed until Miyamoto offered to fix it up and make it a second-party title. The graphics style puts me off a bit, but the idea sounds nice.

HARDCORE!

Flight school is ass. But once you learn to fly those damn things it's pretty awesome to steal a private jet at SFO and just fly around.

Ah OK. That would still be bad news though, as Steve Carell is basically worthless for the show these days. Produce Pete was never funny. Carell was good during the Iraq war when he was the default correspondent to be embedded with some random infantry brigade and had to talk over a videophone with 10 seconds delay. I don't like Ron and Ed that much. I do kind of like Samatha's "I'm a crazy person!!!11 " type of humor. Colbert is totally awesome though. I really like his diction and composure. It's like he's constantly selling you on some kind of ridiculous idea.