Ugg I can’t believe I actually wrote this down but ok.


10. I never owned any Nintendo console until the Wii.
I grew up playing an Atari ST on a black & white monitor, which we later hooked up to color tv through SCIENCE. After a Master System and Mega Drive/Genesis, I became a total PC fag because well, you could get those games for free when you were 11 years old; as long as you had a bike, some floppy disks and if you were lucky enough to not get CRC errors in the .arj’s when you got home… I played a lot of NES games on my sister’s bf’s NES for a month or two and that pretty much sealed my Retro console games history.


9. As a kid, I wanted to be a sniper assassin. .
But I hated sports. Once I learned that snipers sometimes have to use knifes in melee, I kinda gave up on that dream. Pulling a trigger to make a lot of money from a safe, faraway distance is one thing, but having to work out in case you need to melee someone felt like too much trouble. Don’t worry, I also wanted to be a Transformer and to pilot Airwolf. And I wanted to be a professional dancer to be in music videos with Britney Spears and then care for her and marry her. Ok, you can worry again.


8. I skipped a class in middle school when I was 10(which was ages 6-12 in Holland).
My parents had me take an intelligence test where I scored… high enough. Playing Civilization for years and reading through the Civilizopedia a lot made me score a couple of points higher. So always let your kids play Civ and Sim City 2000 instead of shooters :P

I never like to talk about it though, because it always sounds so “hey look at me!”. To this day, I still can’t stand people who brag about their university’s level of excellence or whatnot. Either way, high school did not favor the little overachiever nerdy kids. Somehow I ended up in the popular kids clique after 2-3 years, and I failed my 4th year (high school here is 6 years ages 12-18). After another year at that school, I kinda got sick of having to get up at 6:30am everyday to take a 45 min. bus drive to this elite school, and fed up with the arrogant ‘preppy’ kids there, so I went to a more normal school in my hometown for the last two years.

A couple of my middle school class mates that I left when I skipped a year were at that school because I later failed a year. Things going full circle eh? In the end it worked out fine and looking back, everyone just always hung out, drunk booze, smoked weed and played videogames regardless of social circle.

Those years made me into someone who can get along with a lot of different groups of people with different mindsets, even though I really knew where I fit in. Until you realize that it doesn’t matter where you think you fit into anyway. So if you ever worry about something like that: don’t.

I would’ve been done with university and would’ve had a number of years at work if I had just focused on studying, and on being all I could be just to make money. I’m glad I didn’t, because that would’ve led to a horrible midlife crisis in my 30’s, haha!


7. I’m half asian:
50% Chinese, 50% Dutch. Apparently not everybody knows that so well, now you do.

The Dutch part makes me a cheapass and makes me mod consoles, only to waste the expenses I save on playing shitty games for days on end. Especially if they have achievements to rationalize the invested effort. The Chinese part turns me into one of those commy people who believe sacrifice for the greater good is good thing as long as it brings harmony. I guess people on IRC think I’m a liberal but I’m not really much of an American liberal.


6. I bought my sister’s kid a Wii for my birthday.
I figured he would like it because he was 13 at the time, I could almost afford to and since he doesn’t have a father I kinda took the role of the cool uncle who hooks you up with games when you are a kid. I didn’t have one of those, I’d be damned if he wouldn’t have one in his life. He got tired of the Wii games drought and traded it for a 360 last December. Essentially he took a free Wii with games he got for birthdays or family gifts and traded it for a 360 with 8 games, so he got to play a ton of games for almost no cost at all. I don’t think my Dutch part has ever been prouder than when he did that. His little sister just bought a DS and plays The Sims on it, I’ll just wait till she goes to high school so I can teach her how to manipulate boys into buying her good games. Boys are fucking idiots anyway, haha!


5. The house I grew up in had a poltergeist.
There was always something ‘wrong’ with our attic room and nobody ever wanted to be there for too long. Apparently I once came downstairs one night when I was 5, telling my parents there was someone on the upper floor staircase while there was nobody else in the house. My little nephew slept in that room with my sister as a baby and he always kept looking up at one point in the ceiling. Years later, we found out that someone hanged himself in that spot in that room. Suffice to say I’ll never be a pure atheist after that, even do I study psychology and am well aware of tricks of the mind. Some things will just take longer to be explained by SCIENCE, I think. Now give me those medications!


4. I love movies more than games.
With games, at best I get a feeling of “Oh, I see what kind of emotional response you are trying to elicit here, well done Sir”. But they never really touched me or connected with me like only some of the great movies can. I still love games too though ;)


3. I’m a sucker for anything new.
If I still have a great older game to finish, and something new and shitty comes along, I’m on top of it. That’s why I play My Horse and Me 2 when I still have never played any Final Fantasy except for VII and VIII. That’s also why I watch a shitty rip of Highschool Musical 3 when I have 1000 classic movies to watch. What can I say? I’m a whore for new stuff. Come to think of it, that’s also probably a great way to escape from things with the rationale that you got bored of it, rather than sticking with it to the end. Curses, brain.


2. I love Destructoid and I love you.
Cliché, I know. I joined during a tough time while I was working out some things for myself, and it helped me a lot to be around similar and cool people even though it’s ‘just online’. It gave me kind of a solid ground too fall back on at times where everything felt as loose as quicksand. Things worked out in the end, bringing me to:


1. I’m a forever optimist.
Whatever darkness you can go through, there’s always a light to live towards if you allow yourself to see it. Sometimes others have to show it to you, but in the end you can overcome anything as long as you keep faith in the outcome, whatever it may be. Things tend to have a way or working out even if it doesn’t look like it from time to time. I don’t like the word “faith” because it’s been tainted over the course of history, but having faith in something that means something to you is important to stay sane. It can be anything: a need to prove yourself, the idea that you will find that special person one day, that you will find a job that doesn’t suck, whatever.

Of course you always need to stay a realist too, and of course some things are better things to strive for than others, even if that is all subjective. All I can say really is that when one stays true to himself/herself, you’ll be rewarded for it eventually even if it seems silly in the short term and bad friends give you shit for it. Personal faith is like an infinite mana pool to use in personal battles, so it comes in handy when your main stats don’t quite get the job done. Sometimes you just have to grind hope long enough to get to the point where you can use it as a sword for unlimited limit breaks. Sometimes it takes too long and you turn into a cynic, or you don’t get to defeat Ultima Weapon. Don’t turn into a cynic. Defeat that asshole.