Also kind of depressing, though. I believe that spring is the best time for love. Valentine’s Day is just a couple of months too early, when it’s still cold and dark outside. Spring is where it’s at. The sun, the birds, everybody is happy and most important of all, together. Especially then it haunts you the most that there is not that special one in your life. Call me melancholic or emo, but that is just how it is. I’m not crying myself to sleep, but in my last blogpost I told you guys about how I was going to make a leap of faith and everyday when I wake up I am reminded of how I didn’t do it. And I think that I’ve missed my chance.

It’s the paradox of spring, I think. The time when you should be happy, and you always am. But it makes that glaring hole in your life, the part that makes you just that little bit unhappy, so enormous that it stares you in the face wherever you go. But who knows what will happen tomorrow, when the sun comes up? What paths of fate will cross that day? We can only guess and it’s not up to us to know, but that’s what makes life beautiful, isn’t it? The unexpectedness of life. I don’t even know if it’s a word but now it is.

Let’s just see what unexpectedness tomorrow brings, I can only guess…

I recently quit my study, Gameart. I decided that it was way too specific for my taste and when I envisioned myself over four or five years I saw myself at places I could not reach with that education. Fortunately, it was really easy for me to switch to my current one, Interaction Design, to be precise, for they are both quite alike. While Gameart focuses on the visual aspects of (video)games, Interaction Design looks at the matter from an entirely different perspective. They look at the interaction between man and machine in its entirety and it doesn’t focus on games alone. I really like this broader view of the matter so I am happy I made the switch. I did not have to start all over again, it was possible for me to just follow the Interaction Design lectures straight away without having to catch up on anything, for which I am very thankful.

All this school stuff, it takes quite the toll on my social life. It’s not that I don’t have time for anything at all, but it’s a combination of that and the fact that I don’t really feel like doing anything when I come home from school. I hate it though. It’s not only my social life, but it’s doing the things that I love I just cannot find time for anymore. I used to write, a lot, and in retrospect I haven’t written anything substantial in the past eight to nine months. I don’t draw as much as I used to and I haven’t seen the insides of a cinema in months. I don’t see my father as much as I used to, which is a shame really. It’s not that I don’t want to, but after I come home from school at five or six in the afternoon, I have too much to do to go over and in the weekends I am just too tired. Oh, spring, please come soon.

I have the feeling that the first scent of spring will solve a lot. There is a chance that I’m going to take a leap of faith next week and create my own spring, or so to speak. I can’t say too much about it but I’ll probably write about it if it all works out. I don’t want to sound melancholic, because I am not, I am quite happy with my life to be honest, but I do think there is something missing in my life at the moment and I think it’s my own duty to fill that gap.

Looking outside it is dark. I see vague distorted lights and some black figures that resemble trees. The outside world is entering my room through a thick layer of rain. It would be great if it stopped. It would be great if the sun started shining and in the most cliché way possible, the birds started singing. I won’t wait for it, not this year. I will make it happen. Let’s begin anew. Let’s create a beautiful spring.

There has been a problem with the first PSP that is magnified by the new one in quite an extreme way. You see, the PSP was, especially for its time, an absolute powerhouse. I remember as the day before yesterday I first saw Ridge Racer on the crisp, clear screen of the PSP-1000. It was absolutely a thing of beauty. There were other games on the PSP that were absolutely astonishing as well later on in the handheld’s lifecycle, like God of War and Metal Gear. I use these games as an example for a reason, because they are all handheld counterparts of their big Playstation 3 (and at the time, PS2) brethren. And therein lies the problem. What happened with the first PSP is that developers aimed a shrink-ray at their AAA-console titles and released them on the PSP. You cannot blame them one bit, because it’s the easy way to go and the PSP was absolutely able to make games like God of War look almost as good as their console equivalents. The point is, though, it brings nothing new to the table.

What Nintendo did with the DS, is create a unique selling point; the two screens (and the touch-screen for that matter). What this most importantly meant was that every game that was to be released on the DS (or whatever revision after that) had to be adjusted (or even created from scratch) to use the DS’ qualities in an original fashion or, for that matter, use them at all. It’s true that not every developer made the best use of the touch-screen or the two-screens and most of them just tacked on some features like a map-screen in racing games, but the point is that they had to do it.

Another Code, Ghost Trick, Nintendogs, Brain Training, Professor Layton. All games that were made for the DS and what it could do. Can you, dear reader, give me just one example of a game made especially for the PSP that made special use of its unique features? I would be amazed, for the PSP didn’t have any. The analog nub was not a special feature, not only because it didn’t really work at all, but because it was just mimicking the D-pad. With the PSP2, Sony does exactly the same, creating a device that can do nothing special or unique.

What? They have a touch-screen on the back? Their screen is also touch-sensitive? Of course, that is true, but then you don’t get what I am talking about. It’s about what you as a developer HAVE to use. You don’t have to use the backpad, you don’t have to use the front touch-screen. With the DS, you have to make use of the two screens, you can’t just have only one screen functioning. With the iPhone, you have to use the touch-screen, because otherwise you cannot control the game at all.

The gaming landscape is changing rapidly and Sony is completely ignoring it. The time that consumers want to be amazed by AAA-titles on their little portable screen is over. A handheld is made to be played in short bursts and the best developers for the DS understand this perfectly. Just take a look at the list of games I posed a paragraph earlier and you will see what I mean. Sony did not understand at the time that big-screen gaming is only for, well, big-screens. You don’t want to play Uncharted on a 5″ screen, I don’t care how sharp, crisp (or whatever marketing term you want to use) it will be. It’s made for the big screens. Consumers don’t want their AAA-titles shrink-rayed for a handheld, they want games especially tailored for playing on your little portable that you can play for a few minutes while riding the train or waiting for the bus.

I would like to pose one last example to illustrate what Sony is absolutely failing at. A few months ago, Apple announced a service called Game Center and illustrated this with a tech-demo from Epic Games: Project Sword, a medieval Oblivion-esque epic RPG. The same day, Epic released a tech demo for the iPhone called Epic Citadel, where you could roam around a deserted castle, just taking in the beauty of the environment. It was amazing and the press just couldn’t stop discussing what the final product would be. Everyone drowned in amazement (not in a positive way, mind you) when the actual game, Infinity Blade, was not an epic exploring RPG, but a simple hack ‘n slash title that was based around (mini)boss battles. I just couldn’t stop smiling. Yes, they understood it.

A few days ago, with the announcement of the PSP2/NGP, Epic Citadel was shown once again, this time running on Sony’s new portable. It was upgraded with actual civilians walking around and snow falling. They ended their presentation by saying that this was just a glimpse of the epic RPG that would be released somewhere next year. No, you fabulous idiots, you just don’t get it do you? Infinity Blade was created for a portable platform. Short, 5 to 6 minutes bursts of smooth and amazing-looking battles. Now they want to bring a complex, epic experience to the small 5″ screen of the PSP2? Oh wow.

I think I have made my point. Sony tried to innovate by making exactly the same device as a few years ago. Normally I love paradoxes, but this isn’t one. It is a contradiction, and one that I hope will be slapped into Sony’s face in the upcoming months before they realize it’s too late. I’ll just wait and see….and play on my 3DS.

What we’re witnessing here is an almost perfect replica of the situation in the handheld gaming industry 5 or 6 years ago. The DS and PSP were announced and the international press decided that the DS was the end of Nintendo. We all know what happened next. What strikes me as odd is that it seems that Sony doesn’t learn from it’s mistakes and releases an almost identical handheld in terms of target market right now.

I personally have no intention of buying the PSP2/NGP at launch simply because I know the fate of my old PSP-1000. It hasn’t been touched in a year, because there are simply no games on it that I even remotely care for. On one side this is a personal problem, but on the other side it isn’t. You see, there was an enormous lack of something during the original PSP’s lifetime and that was innovation, not in terms of hardware, but in terms of software. Not for one second will I state that Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training was my favourite game on the DS, but it did something that no game on the PSP ever did: sell a shitload of consoles. The Professor Layton games helped as well, nintendogs, etcetera. Correct me if I’m wrong but if we look objectively at the PSP’s database, we see that there are no real system-sellers. Of course, we have games like God of War, Metal Gear and perhaps even Gran Turismo, but we know all those already from earlier installments on the PS2 and even the original Playstation. You know as a company that you’ve made a brilliant piece of hardware when new quality IP’s simply burst out of the ground, as with the DS. The PSP just lacked these kind of new IP’s.

Now we all know that history isn’t always a flawless blueprint of what will happen in future, but still. What does the PSP2 offer that the old one didn’t? It has a sexy screen and it’s super powerful, but that’s called evolution. The PSP was as good as the PS2 at the time and the screen was supersexy by 2004′s standards. It has some slide pad on the back that is used in a way that Sony used to hate; as a gimmick. Climbing in Uncharted? Looks really uncomfortable and unnecessary. It feels really tacked on and that is a shame. It’s the same with the touch-screen on the front and the two camera’s. The touch-screen serves no real purpose because it isn’t an essential part of the handheld as it is with the DS and, yes, the iPhone. The touch-screen is half of what made the DS the multi-million seller that it is now, the same goes for the iPhone. I wasn’t even aware of the existence of the touch-screen here on the NGP until I saw someone rubbing it to make Nathan Drake jump over a tree, which looked ridiculous and if I may add, really pace-breaking.

The iPhone is a brilliant multimedia-machine because it can do everything, basically. It’s a phone, a great mp3-player, a gaming device, a fine internet machine, you get the point. The DS is great because it doesn’t anything of that, just like the 3DS. It is what it’s supposed to be and Nintendo is really aware of where it should be in the current videogaming market. The new PSP just kind of floats inbetween the two, and that’s not a place where anyone can comfortably be. I’d love to be proven wrong but I have the feeling that Sony is walking the same steps they did with their first portable. We all know this won’t be the end of Sony and their cross-platform gaming platform seems interesting but probably not sufficient to battle real innovation. If you have no appealing games, I sure don’t want to be play them anywhere on anything. I don’t want to play them at all.

Een jaaroverzicht is ook te vinden op vrijwel elke nieuwswebsite, dus dat is niet zo interessant. Een jaar is immers 365 dagen, een rondje om de zon, dat is alles. Wij noemen het jaar, voor het gemak, c’est tout. Toch kan het interessant zijn, daar iemand toch even die dagen heeft afgebakend, om even na te gaan wat er de afgelopen 365 dagen is gebeurd en hoe dat invloed heeft gehad op mij en anderen.

2010 was een misschien wel heel belangrijk jaar. Een jaar waarin mijn leven een keerpunt maakte, of nee, waarin mijn leven juist scherpstelde op een doel. Het begin van een lange, zeer specifieke weg. In september begon ik aan m’n opleiding op de HKU, Game Art. En nu al, maar enige maanden later, heb ik al weer een hele andere kijk op wat ik aan het doen ben. Ik zie tientallen mogelijkheden, verschillende toepassingen van games. In kunst, in educatieve vorm, etcetera. Heerlijk!

De afgelopen weken waren de fijnste en mooiste weken die ik in tijden heb beleefd, maar toch vormen zij niet het hoogtepunt van mijn 2010. Het hoogtepunt was met een niet onverdienstelijke voorsprong 11 juli. Nee, mijn beste lezer, de WK-finale was niet mijn hoogtepunt van 2010. Op 11 juli 2010, om omstreeks een half uur voor middernacht stond ik in Rotterdam, in Ahoy om precies te zijn, op het North Sea Jazz-festival, bij het concert van Stevie Wonder. In de kleine twee uur dat hij optrad zat de zaal in een achtbaan van emoties waarbij het voelde alsof Stevie alleen maar voor jou speelde. Ik kan tot op de dag van vandaag niet geloven dat ik Stevie live, in het echt, heb gezien, maar van wat ik me nog kan herinneren was het ronduit hemels.

Maar zoals dat gaat was 2010 niet alleen maar blijheid en vrolijkschap (nee dat is geen woord, maar ik vond het gewoon leuk). Ook dit jaar zijn ons en mijzelf weer mensen ontvallen. Op persoonlijk vlak ben ik mensen kwijtgeraakt, maar ook de wereld is een paar grootheden minder. Het is afschuwelijk om te denken dat ik over een jaar weer terugkijk op 2011 en dan ook namen noem van mensen van wie ik nooit had gehoopt ze ooit te moeten missen. Daarom wil ik hier nog niet aan denken, zorgen voor later.

Er zijn mij mensen ontvallen, maar ik heb ook heel veel mensen ontmoet op de meest uiteenlopende plekken en situaties. Mensen waarvan ik zeker weet dat ze, op wat voor manier dan ook, een rol zullen gaan spelen in mijn leven en waarbij ik ook blij ben dat dat het geval is. Ik weet zeker dat als zij dit lezen, zij weten dat ze tot deze groep behoren en ik hoop ook met die mensen een goed nieuw jaar in te gaan.

Maar nu dat 2011 nadert met nog maar zes luttele uurtjes op de klok kan je gaan filosoferen wat er het komende jaar zal gebeuren. Ik hoopte vorig jaar nog dat Jezus terug zou komen, maar hij heeft het ook in 2010 weer af laten weten, de smiecht. Misschien in 2011 meer geluk. Wellicht onthult WikiLeaks een lawine aan documenten met daarin ontmoetingen met buitenaardse wezens of eventueel staat Rafael op uit zijn graf in een overvol Pantheon. Het leuke aan het leven is dat er zulke vreemde dingen gebeuren dat je ze zelf nooit zou kunnen verzinnen, en het is dan ook hopen op veel van zulks het komende jaar.

Wellicht is 2011 het één na laatste jaar van ons bestaan, dus laten we er ook nu weer een prachtig jaar van proberen te maken. In een tijd dat de complete wereld zich tegen elkaar keert is het zaak om samen te zijn en elkaar lief te hebben en dat is wat we ook in 2011 moeten doen. Ik zal hetzelfde afsluiten als ik deed op 27 december 2009, want ook nu geldt dit nog;

Denk op het moment dat de klok 12 uur slaat voor één moment aan de mensen van wie je houdt en om wie je geeft. Als iedereen dit doet moet het een prachtig 2011 worden.

Om 12 uur doe ik mijn kogelvrije vest aan en stap ik naar buiten. Ik luister naar de knallen en ik kijk naar de kleuren in de lucht. Een overweldigend concert van geluid doet de ramen trillen. En dan, na een paar uur, niks meer. Alleen maar rust. Een doodse stilte.

Een stilte voor de storm.

That said, I was wondering about something just now. When I was in high school, we had every year several days that were centered around a certain sport or exercise. You could choose what to do; tennis, golf, you name it. Obviously, most of these things were pretty dull and that resulted in most classmates not going and staying at home. Which was forbidden. You see, you had to go to these lovely events or you would be punished severely. Now what I, in retrospect, don’t get, is this; why is it that schools can decide that you have to do these things, that you must, while you are the one paying them money?

This probably comes out of nowhere, but think about it for a moment. I understand that it’s mandatory to come to class everyday and attend all lessons, because that’s quite the convenience if you want to graduate eventually. Aforementioned days though, are not a thing that just anyone likes, on the contrary. When we knew that these kind of days were coming up, we quickly decided to ‘go to the dentist’ or be ‘horribly ill’ that day. There were instances that when you actually showed up, you even had to pay (additional) money to participate in a certain sporting event. So you had to pay for something you hated to do, on top of what you had been paying your school (or what you’re parents had been paying your school).

So while I’m not sure where this rant originated from, seeing that I’m not in high school anymore, I still stand by statement.

There will probably be another blogpost in a few hours. For now, enjoy Stevie Wonder ft. George Michael! This is madness!

I’m not going to deny it, I don’t really like a certain part of my family. You see, my parents are divorced and my mom married another man. I do like him, his family though, not so much. For a reason unclear to me he decided to invite both his grandchildren to a day at our local Zoo, called Artis (in Amsterdam) and me and my mom came along. It was all fun and games for after five minutes I decided to take another route. I went on using my Sony DSLR to its full extent and at the end of the day I had taken an odd 450 photos. I will take a look tomorrow if there is a good one in there and I will probably post it on this blog by then.

While all of this was no really interesting but quite exhausting, I decided after we had returned home, to put in one of my newly-bought movies. Last week I decided to buy some new Blu-Rays for I had this giant list of movies I still wanted to see, but somehow I just didn’t get to buying them. Last week’s purchases consisted of District 9, The Hurt Locker, SE7EN and Zodiac, which I just finished watching. And holy mother of God, that was amazing. I really like David Fincher movies, like Fight Club, Benjamin Button and the aforementioned SE7EN. All of his movies are, if those are right words to put it, really tidy. Expertly directed and filmed, it all just feels like it should feel and that makes for a very relaxing viewing experience. This was also the case with Zodiac. The story involves around the Zodiac serial-killer, who sends cryptic messages to various newspapers and police forces while killing random people for apparently no reason. Zodiac stars one of my favorite actors of, well, all-time, Robert Downey Jr. and although his role isn’t that large here, he’s still brilliant. Now, while Zodiac is pretty dialogue-based, there is an ongoing feeling of utmost suspense, which is great. It takes almost three hours to get to the end but it never gets boring, it really keeps up its pace. I truly recommend it to anyone who likes movies in general. So, watch that.

Just after finishing Zodiac, I decided to take a quick look on the internet and to my not-so-great surprise I found out that Irrational Games, formerly 2K Boston, announced their new game today. I knew they would be doing this but I kind of expected them to disclose everything tomorrow. I was though, pleasantly surprised. Their new game is called Bioshock: Infinte (I am not sure if the colon should be there or not) and it is basically Bioshock in the sky. It takes place in a giant city floating in the sky and it has a Steampunk/Art Nouveau/Neo-Classicism/Art-Deco-style going on. It’s really hard to put your finger on but it looks great. It’s not a secret how much I love Bioshock (and its sequel for that matter) so this is the greatest news I got all week. The great thing about Bioshock was that after we (Steven, a friend of mine, and I) finished it, Rapture and its story stayed with us for many months after that. I can only hope Bioshock: (?) Infinte will have this same effect.

Not much to think about today, huh? Well, take your thinking time off then and pop in Zodiac or play Bioshock if you haven’t already. That’ll probably keep you busy until my next blog.

Three years after the release of ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a plane crashed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundreds of miles south-west of Iceland. All the passengers died but one man. This man went down into the dark depths of the sea where he found Rapture, a sub-aquatic elysium created and envisioned by Andrew Ryan, the eventual fusion of reality and fiction. A man who thought, just like his real female counterpart, that a man should be entitled by the sweat of his brow. A man who thought that the current world could not hold place for such a world, such a society that he imagined. He built a city that was not a collection of buildings, but a spectrum of ideas, ideas that turned out to be nothing more than a utopia, just like the Ayn Rand envisioned. A utopia that turned out to be Rapture, the most horrible place on earth and underneath it.

In 2007, 2K Games released Bioshock, a game that would live to be more than just a First-Person Shooter, it would be regarded as an idea. With its utopian architecture, and with as an initial concept Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Rapture was the ultimate playing ground for gamers who wanted more out of their virtual worlds than just enough places to hide in and shoot from. In the first Bioshock, players explored the vast depths of the sea, surrounded by the squeaking windows and rattling floor-boards of Rapture, travelling to places like Fort Frolic (that will always be remembered as one of the greatest gaming moments of our time) and Arcadia. It was the consensus that Bioshock was not only a great story of an idea that turned out to be one’s downfall, but also a story of betrayal and freedom (or not), which, as most critics agreed one, was one of the most innovative and influential stories ever to be written for a videogame.

When in 2008, 2K Games announced that they were working on the sequel to Bioshock and that it would be released in 2010. While the rumor mills were spinning loudly, gamers all over the world talked about what was the most important question of all. How can one make a sequel to an almost-perfect game. A game that, as message boards all over the internet shouted, did not need a sequel.

However, after the release of Bioshock 2, on February 9, 2010, gamers all over the world dove down into the dark depths of the Atlantic Ocean to the utopian city of Rapture once again, this time as a Big Daddy. On the fateful night in 1958, the beginning of the end, as one might say, the Big Daddy known as Project Delta is forced to commit suicide by the hands of Sophia Lamb, the mother of Eleanor Lamb, your Little Sister. When you wake up 10 years later, it’s your duty to get back to Eleanor and save her from her mother’s protection for you cannot survive without her, for unless he reunites with her, a fail-safe will trigger which will put him into a coma.

In the years of Project Delta’s absence, Sophia Lamb has taken over Rapture through a cult called The Family. Lamb, being the entire opposite of Andrew Ryan in all her beliefs and philosophies, saw the death of Andrew Ryan by the hands of his own son (which you witnessed in the first game) as a gift from God. She took over Rapture and sent the now-older Little Sisters as newly-designed Big Sisters to the surface to kidnap little girls from all around to the world. At this exact moment, Project Delta wakes up. Through visions of Eleanor, the player will explore all-new parts of Rapture in search of his daughter, while dealing with members of ‘The Family’.

Standing in the shoes of a Big Daddy is one of the most paradoxical situations I have been in. While Big Daddies seem almost invincible, if we look at the battles in the previous game, Project Delta seems as weak as Jack was in the first Bioshock. However, when the player Big Daddy gets out his giant drill and rips open an annoying splicer’s ribcase, it’s hard not to feel excited. The feeling of enormous strength and power, while also sensing the inevitable danger of Rapture that you definitely should be afraid of, is in a sense that what Bioshock 2 is grounded upon.

Just like in the first Bioshock, players have access to not only a large collection of Art Deco-styled weaponry, but also a vast selection of so-called plasmids. These plasmids range from simple fire bolts, that seem to just have come strolling from an Oblivion-type game, to the brilliant Telekinesis, which pulls pretty much everything in sight, ranging from a corpse to a hat, right up to the player to use against Rapture’s most gruesome inhabitants. This time around, the plasmids are upgradeable, just like the weapons are, which makes for some strategic choices in terms of the kinds of splicers you will encounter and what kind of environments you will encounter them in.

Being a Big Daddy, one of your duties is to take care of Rapture’s Little Sisters. While in the first game there was a choice of either harvesting or rescuing them, now the player can still harvest the Little Sisters, but you can also put her on your back and bring her to the nearest vent or letting her actually collect ADAM. This, though, is not an easy task. It consists of a few parts, first of which is to actually find a body with enough ADAM to harvest. When the body is found and the Little Sisters is harvesting the ADAM, the player Big Daddy has to protect her from the incoming splicers that try to protect their dead friend. This can at times be quite hard, but nevertheless fun, for it brings some challenge to the table that both Bioshock and Bioshock 2 at times lack.

Bioshock 2 is in no way as innovative as the first game was, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant. The story, graphics and sound (which is brilliant, not only because of the perfect sound effects but also because of the amazing score by Gary Schymann) are as good as in the first game. While Rapture’s second story has a bit of a struggle to pick up pace, when it does, it is gaming-wise pretty much the best thing out there. The last two hours are two of the most exciting and impressive sixty minutes I have ever experienced in my life and the game’s finale, as opposed the horrible boss-battle from the first game, is one of the most beautifully crafted interactive moments I have ever had the pleasure of playing. Bioshock has always been more than a game, with questions that outgrew the boundaries of gaming stories, by bringing up questions about love, death and sacrifice.

When Ayn Rand wrote ‘Atlas Shrugged’, she knew that the world she was describing was unable to ever exist. We can only wonder if Andrew Ryan was aware of this as well. Maybe he knew that all of this was coming, that his perfect empire was soon to be crumbling down. But maybe he also knew that Rapture was a gift, not only to his inhabitants, but also to us, players of this wonderful saga. See, though Rapture might have been a utopia, Bioshock certainly is not. Bioshock is everything a game should and can be. Though the perfect world itself cannot exist, images of the world can, and that is why I think 2K Games has all the right to be proud. Bioshock might just be the perfect tribute to Ayn Rand and for that we should be thankful.

There, I said it. The word is out. Many will disagree with me. Many will say that most of his songs are too alike, that it’s just music and isn’t ‘deep’ enough. Many will say that ‘X’ or ‘Y’ are better than Stevie Wonder for they had a bigger impact on music in general.

A few years ago, I think when I was 14 or 15, I decided to buy a Stevie Wonder album. I knew a few of his songs, like “Isn’t She Lovely” and “I Wish”, but that was pretty much it. Of all the albums I could’ve chosen, I bought Songs In The Key Of Life, his 1976 album that changed the face of music forever. I don’t think there was a better album for me to buy at the time, for I already knew two songs and on the album were a lot of songs that I knew, but where I wasn’t aware of the fact that they were, in fact, by Stevie Wonder. “Sir Duke”, “I Wish”, “Isn’t She Lovely”, “As”, “Another Star”, “Pastime Paradise” and “Knocks Me Off My Feet”. I knew all of these songs, but I just didn’t connect them in my mind to the artist Stevie Wonder.

A month after buying Songs In The Key Of Life, I went back to the record store. I went to the, as I called it, Stevie Wonder section, and flipped through the albums. Because I knew none, I decided to just go with the album cover that I thought looked best, which turned out to be Innervisions. Innervisions is arguably Stevie Wonder’s best album. It was his first album that consisted almost entirely of songs that featured social commentary. A prime example was the mega-hit “Higher Ground” which, as you would know if you would read the lyrics, was more a message to the leaders of our countries than a song by itself. “Higher Ground” I also knew, but I wasn’t aware that it was a Stevie Wonder song. The same goes for “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” and “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing”. The great thing about Innervisions, apart from being such an influential album, is that it’s one the prime examples of Stevie Wonder as a brilliant musician. In most of the songs, Stevie Wonder played all of the instruments, except maybe one or two, which was often the guitar. He played the percussion, piano, he did the vocals and backing vocals. He crafted every song as carefully as he did the other and that’s why every single song on the album was a success.

Three days after the release of Innervisions in 1973, Stevie had an almost-fatal car accident. A log from a truck crashed through the windshield of car he was in, while he was sleeping, and sailed squarely into his forehead. After that he was in a coma for ten days. During the coma, everyone was afraid that even if he woke up, there would be a chance that he would’ve lost all of his musical faculty. The first few days, Stevie did not move nor react to anything people around him did, until a faithful day when his friend, John Harris, who knew that Stevie liked listening to loud music, sang “Higher Ground” into his ear. He noticed that Stevie’s fingers were playing along and that was when he knew that everything was going to be alright. When Stevie Wonder woke up, he found out that he lost all sense of smell and taste, which he never recovered, and feared, just like everyone else did, that he lost his ability to play music and sing. His tour director brought a clavinet, one of Stevie’s favourite instruments, to the hospital. Stevie only looked at it, he was afraid of touching it, for then there was a chance he’d find out that he couldn’t do it anymore. When he finally did reach out and played the intro to “Higher Ground”, he smiled like nobody had ever seen him smile before.

The reason why I tell you this is to illustrate what a spiritual being Stevie Wonder actually is. The accident, which he believed was an act of God, made him only stronger in the sense that he knew he was granted a second chance and decided that this was a sign for him to do something or to do more, which he did. When I went to see him a month ago in Rotterdam, during the North Sea Jazz Festival, he talked about apartheid, about handicapped people, about how we should help everybody in the world, about the United People Of The World, how we are all on this planet together and that we should care for it and for eachother. Although I don’t know him personally, I think Stevie Wonder is the only artist I would hug when I would meet him in person. He is the kindest human being I have ever witnessed and when he shouts to the audience ‘I love you!’, you know that he means it, and that he truly loves every single person standing in that gigantic crowd.

When you turn on the radio, there is a good chance you will hear at least one Stevie Wonder song each day. While it may be a cover of one of his songs or the original version, you can bet it’s written by Stevie for he has written more than ninety percent of his songs by himself. That may be why some people say that his music is too much alike. Those people should listen to albums like Characters, Where I’m Coming From or Conversation Peace. Those are just a few that illustrate that there is also a lot of diversity in Stevie’s songs, but that it’s mostly the fault of the audience listening to a lot of the same kind of songs that make people think his songs are alike.

When I was on that North Sea Jazz Festival, and Stevie entered the stage, I entered another world. A world which I didn’t leave for about two hours. It was a world where there was someone on a stage, that played his music only for me, for my ears. He taught me of love and how to live life to the fullest. Everyone must’ve felt that way. Stevie left us with a thought, one that I will leave you with today as well;

‘Use your heart to love somebody, and if your heart is big enough, use it to love everybody.’

‘I don’t read comic books anymore. You shouldn’t read them. You should grow up.’

I am now 18, turning 19 in less than a month and I still read comics. Not a lot of them, really. I still get the Donald Duck every week and I recently read the Watchmen and V for Vendetta graphic novels and I want to expand on this collection a bit with a few Batman comics. I also love Pixar movies, play videogames and build LEGO. And I love it, all of it.

What she doesn’t understand is this: you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy feeling like one. In my normal behavior I am quite grown-up, I hang out with friends, get a drink somewhere, go to clubs, all the things you do when you’re my age. This doesn’t mean, though, that after you’ve passed a certain invisible barrier, you cannot enjoy things you liked as a kid anymore. Another friend, who is even a few years younger than me says the same thing, that certain things are for kids and after a certain age you shouldn’t play with or watch them anymore. How wrong is she?

Fact: nearly 80% of the adult Toy Story 3 viewers cried during the movie. Another fact: nearly 70% of the Toy Story 3 viewers was actually an adult. The average age of the average gamer is 32. The number one reason to buy LEGO for your kids is to build it yourself. People who say that all these things are for kids and are not supposed to be dealt with after a certain age are not only wrong, they are missing out on a lot of treats of life.

What do they enjoy themselves with then? ‘Adult’ movies (not those kind of adult movies, you dirty, dirty reader), books (I know for a fact they don’t read a lot of books) or what? The one doesn’t rule out the other, in the sense that I spend a lot of time with my friends but also love a healthy bit of LEGOïng.

It is characteristic for a young child to act like they’re all grown-up. More so than their friends. They find that they’re too old for things, like role-playing with their friends or climbing in trees. The people that criticized me on my love for aforementioned things are the kids themselves. They find that they’re too adult for ‘kiddy’ things. I can only hope that once they see that they’re missing out on a lot of joy, they will too accept that it’s better to have an inner child, that keeps you young, than to turn sour by their adult standards.