Looking at my calendar, things are kicking off tonight already with final food shopping, first get-together tomorrow.

Unless the web itself is acquired by Google, or my country collapses, I won’t be posting much, and I guess you won’t be bothered to read much. Which is why the temporay shutdown.

Have a great season, whatever that means to you.

Put things in perspective. Enjoy. Relax.

I’ll see you in 09.

It was in fact a city game where you use GPS phones and chase each other.

Game is called The Target. Basically that’s cops and robbers: teams of cops have to chase the robber. He has to “steal” virtual objects, then “commit” virtual crimes. Cops have to prevent that.

We met up in Antwerp’s nerd capital: gaming center Outpost, where card games and role-playing still rule and where the LAN gaming rooms are teh awesumest.

The phone was a Nokia Navigator 6210. A pretty nifty device, although I felt it was a tad unresponsive at times.

It has 3G (HSDPA) but I doubt we had full access to that and were on EDGE most of the time. I did like the 2.4″ LCD screen though.

Great fun was had. Now letting us keep the phones after, that would’ve been a great Christmas bonus though.

Unfortunate.

Take the Food & Drink category. Winner here is Recepten Magazine which has no search or RSS but does offer “a newsletter every 15th of the month”. Wow. And look at that dashing header design.

Newspapers brings us the best of current affairs analysis and interactive user media with HLN, our very own tabloid. Belgian Pride.

Not a winner by the way, but worth your while, is the news portal Krantenkoppen (Headlines) wich mashes and aggregates all the content fit to serve. It does it like this:

In Leisure and Hobby, obvious winner had to be Tuinadvies (Garden Advice). They even have a print version! With 2,500 subscribers. They also use Comic Sans! Yay.

Sorry. A couple of the winners or runners-up are interesting enough. But these results fill me with shame.

More of what our cutting edge web looks like? Have a laugh here.

I promise: later this week I’ll show you some cool Belgian sites. We’re not fully retarded you see.

Hellmann doesn’t try to outline the genre though. Instead he offers a typology of themes. Those include:

• utopian and dystopian societies: ideal or horrific futures for mankind
• space opera: space travel, the final frontier
• monsters and mutations: made by man or caused by his scientific experiments
• invasion: attacks and threats from aliens
• robots and androids: benign or malevolent A.I.
• time travel: humans visiting the past or the future
• disasters: from meteors and dying suns to atomic threats and mad professors causing tsunamis
• alternative or parallel worlds: the what-if scenario

That list seems to make sense: I was able to think of several movies that fit at least one theme on there. But then I ran into what is often referred to as: The Problem - a.k.a. Star Wars.

Star Wars doesn’t really fit in. It’s not based on science, doesn’t involve humanity or alien threats to earth. No one travels through time, it’s not based on a what-if premise and no mad scientists threaten to destroy the planet.

In fact, going by that list Star Wars has nothing to do with scifi but everything with fantasy.

So, maybe if scifi deals with external conflicts between man and the outside world, fantasy deals with the internal struggle of a fantastic society in turmoil.

Then, if scifi is based on the “scientification” of known (or imagined) technology, then fantasy features the magic and esoterism of a force (the Force?) beyond that of human rationale.

And finally, if scifi is about humanity trying to fight off non-human interference, fantasy is about non-human worlds seeking unification within their own systems of variant societies.

Think of it: a lot of scifi ends in a conflict that sees humanity overcome an unnatural “alien” invasion and destroy its opponents. Fantasy - for what I know - seems the kinder counterpart, often ending with an acceptance of each other’s natural differences.

Perhaps, we simply have no idea what space travel or a close encounter or actual contact would be like. Or what it would do to us.

Perhaps, we need the “Overview Effect” to take over first, then see how scientific scifi is, how fantastic fantasy has to be…

Twones would like to be aggregator, social network, tracker and a place to discover new music - all in one.

It will store whatever you listen to, both online and off. It’ll suggest new music and friends. It’ll be a place to share and store your musical bookmarks: from bios and concert reviews to Wikipedia pages and Twitter conversations…

Sounds good.

Hadn’t used it much before when it was in alpha but no doubt will now.

I may see you on the other end after I’ve shared one of my ten invites.

Find me and I’ll send one your way.