Hilarity

This is why EuroGamer is so bloody good.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B

Also, apparently some Hollywood eejits have bought the rights to The Sims and are turning it into a film. This has to be the most retarded idea ever, as The Sims is basically a game where people can play their lives on their pc, except a little faster and with less chance of being rejected when they try to start up a relationship (that chance must be considerable seeing how they're sad enough to have to resort to a fecking computer game, ffs!) and, of course, the possibility of killing off their character by putting him in the shower and then removing the doors. Apparently the movie is legitimised by nonsensical claptrap:

The Sims has done an interactive version of an old story, which is what it's like to have infinite power and how do you deal with it. Given that that's an old story, you can imagine how easily that would translate to traditional storytelling.

How do you deal with it? Control+alt+del should do the trick. Sadly that won't be possible when watching a film (unless you watch it on your pc, of course).
While the idea is pathetic, the simple idea behind The Sims and Second Life was little better, and those concepts are hardly unsuccessful, so who knows - it might rake in a lot of money. I am, however, sceptical. What made The Sims and Second Life such successes is the simple fact that they're interactive. It may look worse than life, but it appears to the player that the influence is greater; re-decorating doesn't take ages, anyway. A film completely lacks that interaction, and seeing as that would make this either the film of a normal life or the film of the life of some loser who sucks so much that he has to resort to a pc game to have any achievements, sensible people may just stay away and wait for the film of their own life to roll on, a market Hollywood can never reach.

The Day after TOMORROW

Today, in effect.
Yesterday I had my exam and it went pretty well. I don't know if I made it or not, as it was fairly tough, and I'll have to wait until 16 June before I'll hear whether I passed it or not. I'll have to prepare for a possible resit, in any case.
The exam was in Utrecht and it had been a while since I last went there - visiting the city, I mean, not just passing through - and it was nice. Utrecht is quite a charming city with a lot of everything, and probably the Dutch city most closely resembling Venice. Obviously the first thing to do in a city when you're free to do what you want is visit the local bookstores, which I did. I think I spent at least half an hour rummaging through Broese's excellent collection of medieval history books: they have about ten shelves of medieval and early modern history, four shelves of Dutch medieval and early modern history, and then some extra books on those periods classified under their respective countries. Very nice to see such dedication, though I came away without any purchases, as most of their books were either too expensive, not really my subject, or both. I then went on to visit the wonderful De Slegte bookstore, but as I was just ascending the stairs to the second-hand history books I was shoved out as they were closing. I didn't even get to see their assortment.

Also, on Tuesday I went to The Hague to the presentation of the Gruuthuse manuscript at the Royal Library (link on the right, the manuscript is displayed on the Dutch section of the site). This is a valuable 14th century middle Dutch manuscript which was in private hands until now, and boasts 147 middle-Dutch songs complete with musical notation. The songs are artistic in nature, not popular, and most are delivered only through this manuscript, making it one of the most important middle-Dutch manuscripts around - even in the Middle Ages, the Dutch were not known for composing songs in their own language, so this collection is very rare. It also has international importance, as these are among the very few, if not only medieval poetical texts displaying cyclical patterns: for example, many poems start and end with the same verse, and many poems have every verse end with the same line, creating a primitive refrain of sorts. There's also repetitive use of acrostics - one charming poem (Melancolie dwinct mi de zinne) deals with the love of the poet, every verse hiding an acrostic of the person of his affection: Marie.
It was very cool not just to see the old book (opened on the page with its most famous poem, Egidius waer bestu bleuen), but also to hear the experts - including Frits van Oostrom and Frank Willaert - talk about it, and finally to listen to a small group of musicians perform some of the songs, which can best be described as a combination of gregorian and polyfonic music with almost renaissance texts, dealing with love, money, etc.
At the Royal Library they also host a permanent collection displaying some of the prize-pieces belonging to the Library and the National Archive, including the original constitution, the treaty of Münster (ending the conflict between Spain and the Republic), the death certificates of Anne Frank, illuminated manuscripts, etc. Very nice.

After the presentation I walked through The Hague a bit, which was nice, visiting De Slegte, where I was kicked out because they wanted to close (notice a trend?).

TOMORROW

Tomorrow I have an economics exam I need to pass to be accepted to study history at Nijmegen uni. So I've been revising a lot, doing practice exams etc. Nevertheless I got into a rather feeble debate about medieval warfare against someone who admitted to not knowing much about it, as well as another one which was about a lot of things pertaining to medieval warfare, none of which were properly understood by my opponent. He was persistent but the only constant in his arguments was not giving up, and so things dragged on. And on. And on and on and on. And then he got banned for trolling.

Update! Update! Update!

It's been a while, and so I probably should update this. I did just now update the link section, which is now filled with sites hosting dusty manuscripts and their beautiful illuminations. They're really worth a browse - for example, the Heidelberg manuscripts page hosts the famous Codex Manesse. When it comes to the larger collections owned by national library, the Dutch Royal Library has some of the best quality scans, while the French National Library (BNF) has by far the largest collection, and the easiest to search through. Some of their scans are rather small, however, and leave you wanting to zoom in. The British Library also has a lot of stuff online, but last time I checked its search feature was rather lamentable and held all manuscript images into a single database. Bah! The UC (University of California) has a whole host of modern academic studies published online, some limited to students/staff, and others available free of charge to anyone. Very helpful. The Dutch Literary Library has a lot of Dutch language texts online, from the early middle ages to modern times, as well as academic publications on Dutch language and literature. A great collection, though one has to speak Dutch for it to be of any use.

Oh, and the first link, the Siege of Maastricht, is an article I wrote for a gaming site concerned with the historical strategy game Medieval II: Total War. An updated version of the article should be uploaded shortly, and I also hope to get an article done on the Battle of Othée (1408), the exciting conclusion of the conflict between John of Bavaria and his Liégois subjects.

Also, my sister got married! This was of course a joyous occassion, a great party, reception, and dinner, and the ceremony also had an excellent civil servant run it, with a speech actually catered towards the couple, not something I had expected from a civil ceremony. It was also very good to see family again - in the months leading up to my grandmother's death we saw each other only a few times, as she was generally too tired to have any family meetings, and having them without grandmother seemed rather odd.
So I now have a brother-in-law, which seems strange and made me realise I'm now in the marrying generation. Gasp!