I must confess. I have joined the dark side.

The dark side of Moleskinerie, to be more precise. As mentioned here, I recently purchased a Moleskine diary. It’s a pocket-sized monthly one. I was expecting it to be larger actually, but I guess I’ll go for the large version next year. However, this one is really convenient as it doesn’t take up a lot of space, obviously. About half of it is monthly planners, and the other half is a notebook. I’m not creative at all when it comes to artsy-fartsy stuff and I can’t even draw a stick-man properly, so I guess I’m mostly sticking to writing. However, it might suddenly bring out an artsy side to me that I’ve never known about, lol.

I quite enjoy looking at other artsy moleskines, and I came across calligraphy. For some reason I own six fountain pens, amongst them one for italics. Most of these are old and some of them are from elementary school, but they still work!

I forgot how nice it is to write with a fountain pen, so perhaps I’ll ever manage to create something fancy like this kick-ass artist.

I tend to keep a lot of old stuff, such as tickets and leaflets from trips I’ve made, old concert tickets, personal diaries, but also the planners I’ve used through the years. Today I came across my old planners again and was amused at the ‘evolution’.

The first planner I ever got was for my first year in high school, 1998-1999. I chose a “pop music” planner with lots of pictures from pop groups that were popular at the moment. I don’t think it too long before I completely destroyed the thing and started adding a shitload of photos from music magazines, (uhm, my music taste was quite horrible at that moment) lots of scribbles from myself and friends, hearts for my boyfriend and anything remotely interesting I came across.

The next one for 1999-2000 was mostly a plain planner, which I gave a new shiny blue cover and again added lots of photos from magazines and print outs. Looks like my taste in music improved at least a bit during this time!

The following year was a Southpark planner. It’s a ring binder and basically I could re-use it, but buying a new agenda for the next year seemed a much better idea. I remember getting into a fight with my mom about it, because she was paying for my school stuff and this one was twice as expensive as the amount she gave me for it, lol. It was a day-by-day diary, something which annoyed me so after that I went back to weekly agendas.

After that one, I stopped messing up my planners and decorating with anything I could find. The next three years I had rather plain ones. The red one was my first year of university (Academy for pop culture) and which I got for free somewhere. Surprisingly, I found some images in the 2002-2003 one: photos of J-rock artists. So I guess I started to become interested in Japanese music in 2002 already, for some reason I thought it was a few years later.

Then, my planners became even tinier, because they were far easier to take along. I also changed from school planners to yearly ones. They only have meetings and deadlines inside, no pictures. The one from 2009 and the one from 2011 are Barbapapa planners because I’m just so mature, lol. I got both of them in Japan and they are monthly planners, which I ended up liking much more than a weekly one. Around the same time, I’ve also started to use Google’s Calendar, which I really enjoy because it’s just so convenient and I can also maintain a diary for JaME.

However, the tiny Barbapapa one I have now has starting to annoy me lately. Even though my handwriting is tiny enough for it (it’s 8×12 cm), halfway through this year I suddenly got the urge to get a new one. Although I’m annoyed with myself for changing in May, I’m hoping my pretty new Moleskine monthly notebook will live up to my expectations and hopefully bring some creativity back, too.

The Netherlands have been doing extremely well in the World Cup so far, winning every match. Tonight, we’ll be playing the final against Spain, which we’ll hopefully win. I decided I should get myself an orange t-shirt in order to support my country, seeing as I have no orange clothing at all. Of course not just any shirt, but I wanted a t-shirt of my favorite player, Giovanni van Bronckhorst. I believe this is his last match for the Dutch national soccer team and he’s the captain, so I thought it would be extra nice to have a shirt with his name. So off I went, to all the little tourist shops with soccer t-shirts and sport stores in Amsterdam.

However, it turned out that I wanted something that didn’t exist. I went to like, ten different stores and NONE of them had a Van Bronckhorst t-shirt! There were lots of Sneijder, van Bommel, van der Vaart, Robben, van Persie and Kuyt, but none of van Bronckhorst! He’s the captain of the Dutch team, why not make t-shirts with his name???

Frustrated, I continued my search online. It turns out that on the KNVB (Royal Netherlands Football Association) was giving fans the opportunity to get a t-shirt with their favorite soccer player, but not for Van Bronckhorst because 10 letters was the limit. 16 letters is too long, and even ‘Bronckhorst’ with 11 characters won’t work. It’s a national mystery as to how Van Bronckhorst got his own shirt…

A little search at Marktplaats, the Dutch version of Ebay didn’t help either. Apparently it’s easier to get a life-sized Van Bronckhorst out of cardboard than a simple t-shirt. Fun, but not -exactly- what I wanted.

In the meantime, I’m wearing my nameless orange soccer shirt with a little help of Photoshop…
 
 

Just a few weeks ago I saw someone mention something about Chat Roulette on Twitter. I was bored and curious, so I thought I’d go and check it out, and I have to admit: it got kind of addictive at some point.

For the ones that haven’t discovered the wonders of Chat Roulette yet, it’s simply chatting with a random person with your webcam on. You can either talk or type. If you don’t like the person who comes on, you simply click “next”. That’s all there is really, no one has a profile, and when the other “nexts” you (yes it has turned into a verb!) or your connection dies you have no way of ever encountering the same person again.

So what do I like about it? Well for starters, I’m amused easily at silly things. Chat Roulette is amusing me cause I get the opportunity to talk to random people from all over the world. At one moment I’m peering into someone’s living room with a bunch of stoner heads having a party, the next time I’m talking to a guy who’s playing his guitar and so on.

Though it’s not all fun and giggles on Chat Roulette, half of the people happen to be ugly (fat, old) men that like to take their d*cks out and jack off on camera, regardless of who’s on. What if their boss happens to be on Chat Roulette too, I wonder to myself? There are also a whole bunch of 16 year old boys that ask you to show your boobs. No thanks.

However, next to these, there are a whole bunch of fun people on there. These are some of the people I have been talking to:

• A journalist from Lithuania
• A US-Palestina guy, about the situation in Palestina
• About Little Britain characters with guys from Canada
• About a tiger kite with a guy from China
• Digby the four-armed Australian caveman
• Learning how to say “Hi” in Macedonian (Zdravo! Kako si?)
• Josh the overhead door manager from the US
• Been offered to smoke “special shisha from Paris”
• Listened to Singaporean indie rock bands with a guy from Singapore
• And my Turkish skills have improved enormeously! (Merhaba! Nasilsim? Nerden?)
• Corey, an American soldier on Chat Roulette in the middle east…
• A French guy playing songs for me on the piano

I also came across some famous people, the band Angels & Airwaves fronted by the Blink-182 singer, but I suspect that it was just a prank video, they seemed awfully looped. I also came across the Jonas Brothers once, but they’re a silly prank video.

Somehow, I find Chat Roulette fascinating. I’ve been thinking of something creative to do with it, but I haven’t quite thought of what to do with it though. I did take a lot of screen shots and made some stats based on spending one hour on Chat Roulette.

So here we go!

With ‘wankers’ I obviously mean the guys with their d*cks out. I nexted those. I on the other hand, was “nexted” about 8 times. It seems that’s a low number, because some guys are surprised when I don’t next them; apparently everybody else does. But well, it helps being a blonde girl; I appear to be a rare species on Chat Roulette!

I had a short conversation with 12 guys, from different countries. I asked them about their location and I came up with: Spain, USA (3x), the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, UK (2x) and Denmark. I’ve noticed that usually there are a lot of French and Turkish people on there. I also encountered a guy from Algeria, a girl from Peru, a guy from Singapore, a guy from Japan but it’s mostly Europe and the USA. Though that might be because of my time-zone.

Age-wise, the youngest people were two boys from NYC at 15, and the oldest person was a man of 37, from Turkey. He spoke crap English though, and strangely no one wants to believe me when I say I don’t speak Turkish after I introduced myself in Turkish… Strange, isn’t it!

Here’s a bunch of screen shots I made while being on Chat Roulette, please don’t mind my night shirt ;)