Every once in a while I tend to think about love. Every­one who’s fallen in love before knows that love’s a very com­pli­cated issue to deal with. You get all these feel­ings and you start to think about many things quite dif­fer­ently. Most of the time, there’s only one thing on your mind: the one. Pretty roman­tic, isn’t it? Well, being happy is but one side of the coin.

The peo­ple you love are the peo­ple able to hurt you most. That’s pretty much the whole down­side but it’s noth­ing to be care­less about. If you’re tied up chances of break­ing up some day are really huge. And then it starts … the once lovely per­son you’ve been dat­ing for quite a while gets awk­ward. Per­son­ally, I believe that peo­ple can still be friends after they broke up. It def­i­nitely isn’t unusual for peo­ple to become friends after that. It doesn’t always work out this way, though. Things are really start­ing to get weird when you get to see each other again and again, maybe even have to work together.

Most peo­ple aren’t able to sep­a­rate their love life from the rest of their life. Their feel­ings pre­vail over rea­son and they’re unable to see each other for some time. If they have to, there are some things to deal with such as pride or still not sub­sided feel­ings. It’s mak­ing life even more dif­fi­cult than it already is. Ah, there’s noth­ing you can do about it … you can’t manip­u­late other peo­ple to han­dle things in a way you’d approve of. I don’t wanna hurt my ex-girlfriend any­more but I’d appre­ci­ate if she wouldn’t block every attempt of being friends. I fully under­stand that she’s vul­ner­a­ble as far as I’m con­cerned but I can’t see why we can’t be friends. It’s been half a year now and she’s act­ing like I’m infec­tious. I guess that’s some­thing I’ve to cope with. Frankly speak­ing, I don’t care the least why she’s act­ing the way she does. I sim­ply don’t like the state of affairs between us. It seems kinda unfinished …

Now, that's a game. I really enjoyed play­ing God of War. It's one of the best action adven­ture games on the PS2 up to date. For a review, check out GameSpot or IGN. It's one of those games where you enjoy every step. There's an excel­lent com­bat sys­tem, plenty of upgrades, and lots of chal­leng­ing puz­zles, and it's backed up by a bril­liantly work­ing story. Very high qual­ity stuff, indeed. OK, I won't bother you with details you can look up for your­self after I've pro­vided the links.

I guess you want to urge me to make a point. Fine, here we go: I seem to really have an affin­ity for anti­heroes. I really like those kinda mean-spirited guys most peo­ple would describe as unlik­able, ruth­less son of a bitch. They add some qual­ity to a story. You see, there's noth­ing like absolutely good or totally evil in this world. We judge things upon our per­cep­tions which are influ­enced by our upbring­ing, our teacher, our idols, our friends, our sur­round­ings. Even good char­ac­ters can do evil deeds and vice versa, in order to achieve a thing or two they believe in.

You may now under­stand why I feel so bad about those shiny and pol­ished heroes. They sim­ply are inhu­man. There is always more to 'em than meets the eye but no mat­ter how hard you try, the author won't let his main char­ac­ter down and you almost never get to know his dark char­ac­ter traits. Well, that's why I like Kratos. He's a tor­tured badass, a very capa­ble war­rior in com­bat and he's using every­thing he can think of to reach his goal – for­get­ting the sins of his past.

There'll be a sequel named God of War II: Divine Ret­ri­bu­tion and it's cur­rently slated to ship in Feb­ru­ary 2007, for the PS2 again. Lots of video mate­r­ial can be found here, and some scans are located here (thx to dragon_x_2 from the Offi­cial Prince of Per­sia forums). I'm already look­ing for­ward to play­ing it. What's cur­rently known makes the impres­sion of an even bet­ter game than the pre­de­ces­sor was …

Rela­tion­ships aren’t easy to deal with. On the one hand, you’re happy to be with the one you love. You try to do your best to make your part­ner happy. You’re sac­ri­fic­ing minor things to live together, to enjoy things together. You make choices that affect your rela­tion­ship every day. You’d even give your life for the one. You instinc­tively know that he/she is the one. It’s a feel­ing of con­tent­ment, of completion.

On the other hand, you don’t know if you should involve your part­ner into your every decision-making process, what­ever the rea­son. You want to life your live alone, with­out depend­ing on oth­ers. You may want to spare him/her some sor­rows and/or pain. You don’t wanna upset your part­ner, you wanna guard him instead. Well, if you track it down it’s all about choices.

I don’t like choices. Nowa­days, there are plenty of actions you can choose from. You have to con­sciously decide what to do in most of the every­day sit­u­a­tions you’re con­fronted with. Of course, there are many sit­u­a­tions where you can rely on intu­ition and instincts. But every so often there are moments in life where you don’t wanna have so many options at your dis­posal. There are stud­ies show­ing that this over­sup­ply of choice is really bad. It makes peo­ple feel uncom­fort­able and could result in peo­ple falling back to tried-and-true behavior.

I like to think things over. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, I’m a thinker and not prone to spon­ta­neous actions. Inter­est­ingly enough, the tougher a deci­sion seems to be the eas­ier it is to make a choice. Well, I don’t like a mul­ti­tude of choices when shop­ping. Most goods only dif­fer in the very detail and aren’t really worth the trou­ble to rack one’s brains over the great­est achiev­able benefit.

There’s always the pos­si­bil­ity to break every choice down to two. Yes and no. Black and white. Attack or flight. Just elim­i­nate all the var­i­ous shades of grey. Is this the right thing to do? I’m inclined to agree on that in many sit­u­a­tions. It makes things eas­ier, espe­cially if you like to dwell on ‘em for a long time …

It’s been a long time again. Well, I don’t care any­more. Cur­rently, there are two to three peo­ple read­ing this blog. Even­tu­ally, I’ll get it right and visit more often but at the moment things are com­pli­cated enough. How­ever, what was I try­ing to write? Ah, I remem­ber. I wanted to write some­thing about Smal­l­ville. Fair warn­ing, isn’t it? If you’re not inter­ested in my ram­blings you can still drop outta here. Wow, I can’t remem­ber being that nice.

Now, where should I begin? Let’s try it this way: I started with Sea­son 1 and I thought it’s nice but def­i­nitely not mine. Sea­son 1 to 2 mostly have been the same. Vir­tu­ally no infor­ma­tion on Clark but lots of meteor freaks turn­ing up. Sea­son 3 was kinda dif­fer­ent but not that much. I wasn’t inter­ested in those, really. Thus, my rela­tion­ship with this series really started with sea­son 4. For the first time, I’ve seen every sin­gle episode and I had to reeval­u­ate my atti­tude towards this ‘new’ Super­man fran­chise. Frankly writ­ten, it wasn’t that good either but it’s been way bet­ter than the first seasons.

And then – with sea­son 5 – things started to get very inter­est­ing indeed. More action, more emo­tion, more thrill, more dra­matic, more time pres­sure – quite intim­i­dat­ing way to make it bet­ter. I’d like to say that Smal­l­ville finally has devel­oped and poses as a really enter­tain­ing series. Yeah, grow­ing up comes at a cost, all good things in life do. Choices have to be made … actu­ally, it’s a lot about mak­ing choices. I can’t await this season’s finale episodes and the offi­cial deci­sion to pro­duce another one.

I under­stand that all good things must come to an end. Peo­ple like to move on and try other things. Then there’s the bud­get. We all know what hap­pens to a really suc­cess­ful fran­chise, don’t we? Actor deals are usu­ally made for five years while seven years gen­er­ally is the max­i­mum. Let’s face it: peo­ple are becom­ing big stars and that’s mak­ing them ever more expen­sive until you reach a point where to much money is spent that stops going on screen. There­fore, it’s surely not wrong to assume that there’ll be at least another sea­son rush­ing in – there’s enough unused poten­tial left, enough sto­ries to explore. Think about it. Clark hasn’t fig­ured out how to fly yet. He doesn’t even know that there are some pow­ers cur­rently unknown to him; tele­scopic and micro­scopic vision or Super-Breath, for instance.