Happy New Year

THABLOIDVOLU

ME 2

1, I

SSUE

2

A NEW YEAR, 3NEW PUZZLES

KIMCH-WHAT?!SERENA PRESENTS 2 RECIPES

A SPECIAL ARTICLE OF SÉBASTIAAN VERSTEEGTHE HISTORY OF THALIA ONLINE

HAS OUR BOARD BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE THIS YEAR?

THE THABLOIDCIE HAS NEW MEMBERSHELLO AND GOODBYE

BY THE CHAIRMANJAN VAN BOMMEL COLOPHON

THABLOID21st volume, issue 2January 2019

OUR EDITORSMichael AlkemaNoël BangmaElianne HeuerTaras KhrystenkoJan MartensJoris ReichertJustin ReniersSerena RietbergenLuna-Elise SchernthanerAniek den TeulingNienke Wessel

DESIGNTim van AltenTom EversJob DoesburgAyala HoeksNick van OersNienke Wessel

THANKS TO28th board ThaliaSébastiaan Versteeg

POSTAL ADDRESSThaliaPostbus 90106500 GL Nijmegen

EMAILthabloid@thalia.nu

WEBSITEwww.thalia.nu

Dear Thalians,First things first. I want to use this by the chairman to thank everyone who has sup-ported me the past two months through the terrible loss of my father. Thank you all!By the time this Thabloid reaches your doorstep, it (almost) is Christmas. Now I have been thinking of what I would like to have when Santa comes around and I ac-tually made a small wishlist.

Platinum Rank in LoLDear Santa. Could you pleaseeee make me platinum in League of Legends. I know you know I belong in platinum and not in gold. We both know the only reason I am not in platinum is that my boosted teammates (Pjenenwijf, justmovieminer, AH Premium Lager etc…) keep pulling me down. Please Santa, save me from these fools and put me where I belong next season.

Meet&Greet with Didier DeschampsDear Santa. One of my biggest heroes is the coach of the French national football team, Didier Deschamps. This man has such a perfect vision and most important-ly even more charisma than Leonardo Di-Caprio. I would love to meet him in person some time, so that I can actually take the sip of beer I have to drink when I look at him together with him.

Less sjaarsDear Santa. I recently made a big discov-ery. Sjaars are annoying! They have a big mouth, bad attitude and are forcing me to play League of Legends with them, which makes me waste xp on Runescape. The sjaars are also dirty. They don’t clean up their shit which leaves voes stuff behind. Santa could you please take them in your big fat sack to the North Pole? Maybe you

can freeze them in ice and send them back here, so we can find them in the supermar-ket freezer in a Captain Iglo fish stick meal. I think I speak on behalf of all the not-sjaars if I say we would deeply appreciate that.

Social experiment succesDear Santa. Some people say that my Commissioner of External Affairs is a so-cial experiment. I doubted that at first, but after he drank 50 halve blaffers* in only 1 weekend, I knew they were right. He is a social experiment. Therefore I want to ask you to make this social experiment suc-ceed. ‘Cause if the experiment fails, our whole boardyear will probably fail.

Let Merol be healthyDear Santa. We all love “Lekker met de meiden” by BLØF. Their lead singer, Merol, was on vacation a little while ago. She post-ed on Twitter that she ran into a vaginal yeast infection there. Considering the fact Merol is very talented and very much loved by everyone, I hope she will get well soon! So please Santa, make her well again for all those fans out there who love her so much they want to play around with her, but don’t want to risk getting a yeast infec-tion themselves.

Tess on BeestFeestDear Lars van Rhijn. Hoe kom ik erachter?Wie schakel ik in?Wie fixt nu eigenlijk m’n beste vriendin?Ik moet het echt wetenIk red het zo nietIk wil Tess op BeeeeeestFeeeeeest!(Anders kom ik echt niiieeet)**

With love,Jankie

* A halve blaffer is a half liter can of beer** Sorry, but Stupid by BLØF has Dutch lyrics

so I modified those in Dutch as well1

CONTENTS

HAIKUDark autumn forestsseldom resemble balancedbinary search trees

Noël Bangma

BY THE CHAIRMAN

SÉBASTIAAN VERSTEEG20 YEARS OF THALIA ON THE WWW

BOARD QUESTIONHAVE YOU BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE THIS YEAR?

TARASARE VIDEO GAMES GETTING WORSE?

HELLO, GOODBYE

SERENA RIETBERGENCOOKING WITH KIMCHI

ANIEK DEN TEULINGA DAY AT THE UB

JAN MARTENSPPUZZLES

MICHAEL ALKEMAYOUR FRIEND; THE SMARTPHONE

1

5

15

3

11

9

10

17

7

2

HAVE YOU BEEN NAUGHTY OR NICE THIS YEAR?BOARD QUESTION

3

I am very much inclined to answer this question with a 'yes', however Nienke has threatened me not to do so, so I won't. Looking back on the past year, however, I think that 'yes' would be the only correct answer. Although I want to remain modest, I think that I have been a nice boy at many times during the past year -

ik ben de beroerdste niet, after all. But on the other hand, unfortunately, I also know that there have been many moments where I really misbehaved. Or rather, I have heard from friends that I misbehaved. The question is, does this make me a naughty boy? You could say so. But on the other hand, if you ask me, the fact that I am ashamed of this compensates

a lot, right? Or not? In my family, for example, we have a saying "the opposite of 'good' is 'well intended'"...The fact is that, like everyone else, I always try to behave well and I am ashamed if it turns out I did not.There are, however, a few exceptions. An example of this is that one occasion with a bucket of gin tonic last year, where I absolutely misbehaved but I have not regretted it for a second. Or sometimes there are times that I myself don't even think I misbehaved, but the public opinion afterwards was that this was the case. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, good! Long story short, regret remains a difficult concept, just as subjective as the terms 'naughty' and 'nice' in this board question. Where people directly involved can find something 'nice', third parties sometimes refer to this as 'naughty'. Thus in short, I think 'yes' is still the only correct answer (sorry Nienke, but I have zero regrets).

JOB

Nice? Yes. As always. Naughty? Perhaps… I think that is up to Saint Nicholas to decide. I can't think of many occasions where I've been that naughty.. I mean, is writing a Thabloid article 2 hours and 46 minutes after the deadline a naughty thing? It sure isn't as naughty as the previous deadline I 'made' (sorry Thabloidcie). Maybe I

was naughty that time during the orientation week when I decided to water the vegetation at the Keizer Karelplein with some organic liquids. But come on… Why should being naughty be a bad thing? Can't we

GIORGIObe nice while being naughty to some extent?In fact, I think the right dosage of naughtiness is a wonderful addition to being nice to the rest of the world. Being nice doesn't always mean being all honest and goody-goody. Some teasing and misbehaving from time to time is that thing that gives life a bit of flair. Just that bit of flair that makes life not only nice, but also exciting and interesting.Think of a world where people are only ever nice, but never naughty. There would be no fun stories to tell after a BeestFeest, no fancy quotes page in the Thabloid, no Janneau (<3), hell, no memes would even exist. I think everyone should stand still for a moment and realize that being naughty is a good thing rather than a bad thing. After all, who doesn't like taking things that aren't yours?

33

Yes ;P

But to be fair yes is my answer, I guess some people will say I have been nice, some will say I have been naughty (my eldest sister, is most certainly one of those). I may or may not irritate her and maybe some other people with terrible puns and way too old jokes.I may find too much joy in irritating people!But I am mostly harmless, I'd say, so I am: innocent

AYALAI, ofcourse, have been very nice. I might be a bit annoying and clumsy sometimes when I drink a little too much, but it's all in good fun, of course. The only one who ever got hurt from me being clumsy is, well me. So maybe I’m a little naughty to myself, but santa wouldn’t mind that, hopefully. Outside of my

drinking habits I have been behaving very nicely of course. Als long as you don’t ask the rest of the board (and also don’t look into my Osiris). You could almost say that I’m a perfect role model for the nice people.

JANNEAU

Nienke specifically told us to not answer “yes” to this question. Let me just say that I’m captain of my own ship (piloot van m’n eigen leven jwz) and that I can answer anything I want. But since I’m not the worst person in the history of board questions (ben de beroerdste niet hè), I will still answer this question

JANKin a proper way. The fact that I could just answer yes to this question, and that I’m not doing so, says something about how nice I am. Nienke actually said that if one of us answered yes, she would write an answer on behalf of that particular person herself, so I am actually relieving her of that. The funny thing is that after you have read this whole answer, you will read it again, because you missed my actual answer to this question, only to realise that there is no real answer and the closest thing to an actual legit answer is actually “yes”.

I remember the Saint Nicholas borrel of 2015. That year I was a benefactor of Thalia. At the time I misbehaved with a lot of handsome Thalia men, this is no secret. As a biologist, I liked being among all those smart and handsome men. Since the man:woman ratio was very low, we women naturally got a lot of attention

from men. I took advantage of that at the time.

IRISHowever, wisdom comes over the years, even with me. Saint Nicholas gave me insight in my life; I really could not go on this way. I put my ‘naughty’ image aside and have behaved very well the past years. Instead of going out with men, I now drink wine with the women of Damesdispuut Myosotis. Also, I switched from BeeVee to Thalia and I really started studying. Of course, I sometimes misbehave, but I think my lifestyle is much better now. I’ve become a ‘nicer’ person, even if I say so myself. So Saint Nicholas, this year I expect, of course, a somewhat more subtle poem.

4

Once again we can, with due pride, welcome three new members to our beautiful committee. We now are officially the biggest committee of Thalia, and we're proud of it! Three new wonderful Thalians have acceded the group of the best and worst procrastination, of telling Nienke how beautiful her hair is today, of creating pure literary art, and of receiving Russian summaries of the meetings. However, we are very sorry to announce the leaving of our loyal writer Koen. After years of contributing to the Thabloid, he decided to retire from this heavy job.

KOEN VERDENIUS

De af ge lopen twee-en-een-half jaar heb ik met veel ple zier on der deel uit ge maakt van de Thabloid com-missie. Ik heb veel ple zier ge had aan het schrij ven van de nodige onzin. Ook heb ik erg genoten van de vaste column “Thalia vertelt” die ik een tijdje geschreven heb. Echter merk ik toch dat de motivatie steeds verder weg begint te zakken. Verder is het zo dat ik nooit echt voor deadlines stukken aanleverde, maar dit begint tegenwoordig wel heel extreem te worden. Na twee jaar is de creatieve koker ook een beetje op, en wordt het ook meer van hetzelfde voor mijzelf. Daarom is het denk ik een goed moment om afscheid te nemen van de commissie. Wel wil ik iedereen bij de commissie ontzettend bedanken. Als we samen niet elke keer met elkaar er de moeite in zouden blijven steken (hoe lastig het soms ook is) zouden we niet zo’n prachtig blaadje kunnen produceren week na week. In het bijzonder wil ik de arme zielen bedanken die elke keer met veel geduld al mijn spelfouten eruit gewerkt hebben. Ik denk dat commissie er verder prima voorstaat op dit moment, dus ik kijk er naar uit om nu zonder er zelf moeite voor te doen dit leuke blaadje de rest van mijn studie gewoon te blijven lezen!

Bella ciao,

Koen Verdenius

HELLO, GOODBYE

5

NOËL BANGMA

Hello my dear reader, I’m Noël. Maybe you know me already; I’m usually in Mercator and quite easy to recognize with my huge headphones. I’m one of those people that play chess, so let me know if you’re in for a game. Besides chess, I’m a huge metalhead, though mainly forms of death and black. So far, all of my contributions to the Thabloid have been poetry. I think I will try to continue this trend, but also expect to hear my opinion on laffe chess moves and positions in the future.

JORIS REICHERT

Hey there! I'm Reichert, Reich, or as some of you may know me: Joris. A lot of you will already know me as I’ve had the luxury of enjoying to be with Thalia for some time now. Even though I didn’t write for the Thabloid that often last year, I really enjoyed writing short stories, so I’d figured to join the Thabloidcie to do just that. I might also express my opinion every now and then on developments within Thalia, such as sweatpants or playing cards without proper boxes for them. I hope my writing will bring you a spark of inspiration. If that fails, I hope the cringe will be compensated by it being food for discussion.

LUNA-ELISE SCHERNTHANER

Hi! I'm Luna, recently promoted to second year student of Computing Science. You can find me by listening for someone laughing really loudly at bad jokes. If that fails, look for my weirdly coloured hair, though it is mostly grown out at the moment because I have to save up (please hit me up if you have a cool idea for my next style!). My creative writing skills are not too great, so my role in the Thabloidcie is more about checking submitted articles and working on layouts. This Thabloid is the second that I have worked on and I look forward to many more to come in the future. I hope you, dear Thabloid reader, have had a great start of this academic year. Enjoy this second-of-the-year edition!

6

Sometime ago, my family had some friends over: a married couple and their two children who used to be my classmates. We were quite excited to see our friends again, since we had not spoken to them in a while. So in order to prepare for a good evening, we had made some nice food, put on some good background music and turned on a delightfully tacky fireplace video. The conversation started out quite nicely, but about 15 minutes in, I noticed my old friend quietly taking out her phone. Throughout the evening I do not think she ever put her phone down again for more than 5 minutes. The entire evening she spent talking to her friends on WhatsApp and Facebook. Luckily she was not alone; her sister had also found her way to posting inspirational minion dankmemes on Facebook. My suggestion of doing something, like a card game or so, was returned with two horrified faces of disbelief; you don’t expect us to engage in social activities, do you? When it was time for them to go home, I amusingly remember them saying something along the line of: “This was fun, we should meet again soon”.

Not only my old classmates think it is nice to spend their time with others by looking at a rectangular piece of glass. My last visit to my family ended up with my aunt not being able to go 10 minutes without looking at cat pictures, while my uncle was determined

Now, arguably, having your smartphone fill in time were you usually would do jack is not a bad thing per se. It is more that people become dependent on their smartphone, mostly without taking any notice. Having a gap in engagement nowadays will have everyday people yearning for their smartphone in the same way that an Italian person might yearn to his lovely meal back home when he is forced to eat some of that disgusting stuff that Dutch people insist on calling food, like ‘zuurkool’.

So is it actually a bad thing that people are constantly on their phone? Well that really depends on the situation; some messages might be really important, others might not. Constantly ignoring people that want to chat with you might not really be the nicest thing ever. It also depends on the frequency people are checking out their phone; every once in a while should not really be a problem, but not being able to turn off the screen might give the impression that people prefer talking to someone else that is not physically there instead of talking with you. So is there a moral to this story? Well no, not really, do what whatever you want, I am not your father. Cheers!

in showing off more than +300 photos of different buildings in LA. Luckily my grandma did not get bothered by this behaviour of my family; she was too busy humiliating other people on Wordfeud with her iPad.

For some time now it seems like the usage of smartphones in the company of others is getting more and more accepted. Whereby a few years ago my father would yell at me for checking out text messages during dinner, he is now the one that insists on Googling every point of discussion that occurs at the dinner table. Varying from person to person, but everyone is to some degree just drowned in their screen. The cynical person would perhaps suggest that you need to have some friends in order to be busy on your phone, however my many hours on Reddit beg to differ.

Part of the problem is that a smart-phone provides just an incredibly easy way of gaining access to instant gratification. Having conversations with friends, using social media and even playing games; it all can be done within seconds. This easy access is just seductively handy to drive away any gaps of engagement in your day. Feeling bored while traveling? Need some time to kill before an appointment? Having a giant shit on your toilet after a visit to KFC? Your smartphone is always there to provide you with your favourite Nicholas Cage memes!

YOUR FRIEND; THE SMARTPHONEMICHAEL ALKEMA

7

KIMCHI FRIED RICE(1 serving)

INGREDIENTS:• 180 g of rice• 4 bacon strips• 250 g of Kimchi• 2 strands of green onion• 2 eggs

RECIPE:1. Cook the rice according to the given directions.2. Cut the green onion thinly, cut the bacon strips in pieces and mix the eggs.3. In a pan stir fry the bacon.4. Add the cooked rice to the pan and stir fry.5. Add the eggs, kimchi and green onions.6. Add some red pepper sauce for wanted spicy goodness.

Last time I promised you all some in which you can use kimchi, since it’s a dish most of you aren’t familiar with. You can always add kimchi to any dish you already know, if you enjoy the flavour. You probably all know some people that add tomato ketchup or mayonnaise to every dish. Well, there are people who add kimchi to about anything. Seriously though, I have seen peo ple adding kimchi to pizza or pasta.

I’ll show you guys 2 dishes that are built around the kimchi. These dishes are super easy to make and have a high comfort food factor. Sort of like a Korean variant of cheesy mashed potatoes, or whatever your standard comfort food is. Both of these dishes take about 15-20 minutes to make.

COOKING WITH KIMCHISERENA RIETBERGEN

Still have too much kimchi left? I know I do.. Try adding some kimchi to your cup noodles. Yes those you can get at the vending machine near the Noordkantine. It will add a wonderful flavour and texture to your otherwise super salty noodles.

Enjoy~

KIMCHI UDON NOODLE STIR FRY(2 servings)

INGREDIENTS:• 2 packs of udon noodles• 6 bacon strips• 250 g of kimchi• 1 strand of green onion• Gochujang/gochugaru/red

pep per sauce• Soy sauce• Honey• Sugar• Garlic• Sesame oil

RECIPE:1. Boil the noodles according to the given directions.2. Cut the green onion thinly, cut the bacon stips in pieces and grate the garlic.3. Make the sauce! Add 1 table spoon of gochujang(or gochugaru or red pepper sauce), 1 table spoon of soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1 tablespoon of sugar, half a tablespoon of garlic and 1 teaspoon of sesame oil.4. Cook the bacon and add the sauce you just made and stir!5. Add the green onion and stir!6. You can add a boiled (or fried) egg to this dish to add more comfort.

9

Sometimes the feeling arises that it’s better for your own sake to leave the coziness and distractions of Mercator, in order to study very hard. No, doesn’t sound familiar? For me, these moments mostly occur when exams are approaching. Read: when I only have one weekend left to study. What do I do then? I go and study in the UB. You know, that large library next to the Erasmus building, where betas never seem to come. Except for me, that day.

10:30h After making my way through the cigarette smoke at the entrance, I already need to make a choice. I can go to the computer room on the left, the large reading room on the right or the study places in the basement. I brought my own laptop, so computer room? No. Since I’m in the mood for some daylight, I head right.

10:35h Have you ever experienced sun lounger reserving at all-inclusive hotels? The phenomenon of hotel guests taking a sprint when the hotel swimming pool opens, then quickly throwing a towel on a sun lounger, keeping a scarce spot occupied for hours, while showing up them selves hours later. A si-tuation like this happened at the UB. A girl ‘reserved’ two study places with her jacket and scarf and then dis appeared. After some time, study places were run ning out. A guy who walked in, desperately looking for a seat, took the scarf away and claimed the chair. The girl came back and told this guy to move, because this was her friend’s seat. The

too, I hear something crunching between his teeth.

14:15h The guy is still chewing. Who on earth takes an hour to lunch? Besides, what food could be so intensely crunchy? I wonder what he is eating that is making such a noise. I semi-casually clap my laptop screen a bit to take an even more semi-casually look at his part of the table, and then I see it: the guy has already munched three quarters of a package of Dextro.

15:30h I spent over an hour practicing for my crypto exam. Nothing re-markable has hap pened since the Dextro boy. How ever, may-be my equip ment is re mar ka ble in it self, con sisting of a graphical calculator, Wolfram alpha and LaTeX. Actually, I don’t think so, everyone seems busy studying, scrolling through social media or just staring into the distance. It is a comforting feeling that I’m not the only one who loses focus at some point.

17:05h Time to go home. In my head I’m already preparing this little story. I wonder if anyone of these fellow students will write about me like I wrote about them now. Maybe I’d go down in history as the girl that spent half an hour on googling what to eat tonight, before she left the library. Chances are, however, that they won’t write anything at all.

guy stayed where he was. The girl snapped at him that it was very ‘asocial’ of him. The irony.

11:15h There are so many people studying from books here! No (il)legally ob-tained PDFs, but real paper books with titles like Or ganizational Inter vention, Ethics and Morality, Hand book Group Dy namics or Sociology In The Eigh teenth Cen-tury. Stu dents are brow sing through their books, high light ing parts of the text eagerly. The girl next to me has been staring at a Power Point slide about “What is mo tivation?” for ten minutes al-ready. I won der if analyzing mo-tivation theories helps with fin ding mo tivation your self. If so, please tell me all the secrets.

12:40h The “motivation girl” goes for a break. She and her friend get up and walk away, leaving their laptops unlocked. It strikes me how many students do this. I feel a temptation to change the wallpaper. Although I would never dare to do it (let’s be realistic), I wonder if anyone would make a remark if I did. Suddenly a warning message pops up on the girl’s screen. The virus scanner has expired.

13:15h I’m quite hungry, so time for lunch. Pro of the UB: you are allowed to eat inside, in contrast to the library in Huygens. The guy on the other side of the table is eating his lunch

A DAY AT THE UBANIEK DEN TEULING

10

ARE VIDEO GAMES GETTING WORSE?TARAS KHRYSTENKO

However, that same ‘League of Legends’ I mentioned has a major flaw you discover by playing the game for some time; the game is never balanced and is not intend-ed to. At some point there exists a meta; an effective way to play and win a game. If more players play this meta, the higher the winrate of games becomes for players us-ing the meta. Thus Riot Games, the company behind behind the game, issues nerfs (downgrades) to items or characters to balance out the game. Except they also strengthen or buff other items and characters at the same time, spawning new meta’s, and the cy-cle starts again. This is reinforced by the fact that from time to time new characters and items are in-troduced who break the balance again. Because the game always changes, players can be forced to play differently every couple of months to still be competitive and play well. But constant chang-es still leave the imprint of imbal-ance; some people can’t adjust quickly enough with the chang-es to play as well, or their favor-ite playstyle is suddenly obsolete and the sheer upkeep of reading patch notes about buffs and nerfs is tiresome and boring; it becomes a chore to do. The constant ‘evo-lution’ of the game is what drove it to be the most played MOBA ti-tle a couple of years back, but last year a good chunk of the player-base got burned-out and quit for the aforementioned reasons.

spawned the hashtag #notmybat-tlefield by veteran players of the franchise, followed by an all-time low for pre-orders and the sud-den resignation of Soderlund.

Next are microtransactions; more and more games introduce the ability for users to buy skins, stick-ers or other cosmetics through and in-game shop, even after you have paid for the full game. Free-to-play games like ‘League of Legends’ sell skins as their main source of revenue and continue to do so by making better skins each time, introducing new/re-making characters to play as and skins to accompany them. But in the latter case you at least get what you buy; some are already accustomed to how FIFA titles allow you to buy packs, which have a chance of receiving a well specced football player. To put it straightforward, it’s gambling with bits, but it is often rectified since you can earn these packs by spending more time grinding through the game. Unfortunately, some games take this even fur-ther; Battlefront II gave you the ability to pay for packs which had the chance to hold better guns or characters that would allow you to dominate the opposition. Elec-tronic Arts, again, quickly removed this from the game but mentioned to reintroduce it later in the game, in a sense spitting in the face of its customers. It’s no surprise that lootboxes, as they’re called, were brought up in Brussels for an all wide ban in the EU; with success.

At one point I realised I had a Steam library of over one hun-dred games, but none of those I was actively playing. Whenever I would quit a game it would be be-cause I could spend my time play-ing something new or better. Yet I’m stuck on one or two games for the last couple of months. This is obviously great for my wallet and my overall productivity, but it does leave me bored at times when I do want to play. But how come there’s nothing for me to play?

I reckon there are multiple rea-sons for this, but the one most obvious to me is that game com-panies have grown enormous-ly and are getting attention on the stock markets, thus receiving more stakeholders who demand that their opinions get stuffed in the game and (mostly) ignoring what the community wants the game to be. The recently released Battlefield V received major flak from the community because of this; the trailer featured female soldiers with prostheses and ka-tanas. The publisher, Electronic Arts, tries to appeal to as many stakeholders as they can, thus en-suring that this game is political-ly correct and fits every category it can be sold to. This idea on its own is completely fine, yet histor-ically incorrect and thus aggravat-ing the veteran player community behind the studio producing the game, DICE. Chief Design Officer Patrick Soderlund answered by stating that if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t buy it. This quickly has

11

has become a very casual way to spend your time, thus attract-ing more potential customers. Streaming platforms, such as Twitch, gain momentum in this sit-uation as it’s becoming more en-tertaining to watch other people play games; good humor, weekly cooking shows, relating and inter-acting with viewers etc. spice up gameplay and show their bright side, thus inspiring people to play them more.

It’s safe to say that I’m not only growing older, but exhaustion of seeing the same formula used by companies over and over again has crushed my interest in most games. Luckily this is reflected by the internet as more marketing teams are failing to appeal to the majority of the players, resulting in hateful comments on social media and loss in overall revenue. Maybe in a couple of years from now, customer based develop-ment will take over again, maybe not. In the meantime I can con-clude that games have indeed become worse; it’s just not worth investing time into most of them.

Essentially it comes down to the companies trying to make as much revenue as they can by any means possible. Other methods used by companies are to post-pone pieces of the core game by releasing them later as Down-loadable Content (DLC) often for half the price of the actual game. Or console users (using dedicated software from Microsoft or Sony) having to pay for access to the in-ternet with monthly subscriptions. Or placing games for pre-order before the game even is released. The most money grabbing meth-od of them all would be early access; releasing an unfinished game with the promise that it will be finished in due time. Sadly, most small companies follow this path, filling online stores with un-finished promises. Some of these developers, as in the case of ‘The Stomping Lands’, start of from a popular genre and disappear mid development phase. The survival (zombie) genre has been exhaust-ed because of this and is shoved aside by most players nowadays.

All in all, this often results in me playing indie-developer titles; they’re often not graphically stun-ning or have longevity in the sto-ry or gameplay, but they’re made for the sake of enjoyment; they’re replayabe, relaxing and satisfying. A corporation quickly loses touch with their player base as they get more demands as they grow; gaming

12

!"#$%&"'%(&)*#'!"#$%&'($'())*($*$+$,+$)-(.)'+,/+(0,+(1$%2(-"%&'+("#())*("#3"''$*.(4""/(0)(5)0/$64)*(7)/)307$60(0$)(.))*("-('3)%2+(

(

)*(+)(./")$)*(4""/(0)(5)0/$64)*(0$)())/0)/(.))*(+").,*.(

!!!"!#$%#&'

()*+,(-./"&0

!"#$%&#'()#*+#'%",

!

"##$!#%%&!'(($"##$)&*!'(($!)&!+(&$!,*!-.##*!'(($!'&$

-*."#)/0%/*"1#2*.#3(4*567!

8%9:;))#<)"'/*+7###!"#$%&'()*+%,-)+!"#$%#&'&'#"&$$()*+,--./-0123(4567839:4.0,

;;;.;-2(-0<

3=67839:4.0,

!"#$%&"'%(&)*#'!"#$%&'($'())*($*$+$,+$)-(.)'+,/+(0,+(1$%2(-"%&'+("#())*("#3"''$*.(4""/(0)(5)0/$64)*(7)/)307$60(0$)(.))*("-('3)%2+(

(

)*(+)(./")$)*(4""/(0)(5)0/$64)*(0$)())/0)/(.))*(+").,*.(

!!!"!#$%#&'

()*+,(-./"&0

!"#$%&#'()#*+#'%",

!

"##$!#%%&!'(($"##$)&*!'(($!)&!+(&$!,*!-.##*!'(($!'&$

-*."#)/0%/*"1#2*.#3(4*567!

8%9:;))#<)"'/*+7###!"#$%&'()*+%,-)+!"#$%#&'&'#"&$$()*+,--./-0123(4567839:4.0,

;;;.;-2(-0<

3=67839:4.0,

The start of November 2018 marked a new step in Thalia’s digital life. The web site’s template was refreshed, ma king it possible for us to fully open source our code. You might not have noticed this, or maybe you did. Thalia has been growing and so has its technical infrastructure. This made me look back on what our as-sociation has achieved in the past years.

To put our progress into per-spec tive I’d like to go back in time. That’s because the first men tion of the ‘World Wide Web’ is in the annual report of ‘94/’95, no ting that Thalia was one of the first as-sociations of the KUN (Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen) to enter the ‘electronical highway’. All those years ago, they had their first dis-cussions about pri vacy and even helped the ‘School voor Informati-ca’ set up their first home page.

Fast forward a few years: 1998. The first year that the Wayback Machine crawled our website hos ted at ‘http://www.sci.kun.nl/thalia/’. Black is beautiful is what they must have thought. Un for-tunately the images are not avail-able, but at least we know that there was a rap dictionary. For-tunately, in 2002-2003 the web site was finally renewed after troub les with finding a committee to do all the work. This was the first ver-sion that had user ac counts, an online members di rec tory, admin-istration options and mailing lists. It was also at that time that we moved to http://www.thalia.nu/.

source of this timeline: it’s 2014-2015 and I as a freshman joined the WWW-commissie to provide a modified ‘huisstijl’ template for the Concrete5-based system the committee had been developing since 2012-2013. We managed to finally launch a shiny new web-site on June 30th 2015 hosted by our own servers: Ivo and Fred. We were ready for the future and we finally had those online event reg-istrations we wanted in 2007, al-most 10 years later.

Roughly one year later: the Iden-ti ficaatcie had been developing a mem bership app after the fail ure of the IRMA cards and it’s deve-lopment was heavily influen ced by the website and servers. Hence the Iden tificaatcie and WWW-com missie became the Technicie. After joining forces we rea lised that we didn’t like what we were wor king on: the app wasn’t used and Concrete5 was just slow and annoy ing. The only major new fea-ture we added was the pizza or-dering module. It wasn’t easy and fun.

So we changed everything once again. This time we switched to Djan go. Codename: concrex-it. Even though this also meant a switch from PHP to Python we quick ly ported all the logic we had previously implemented for Con-crete5 and around 6 months later we migrated: 6-12-16. This new backend also included a newslet-ter generator, an im pro ved ad-ministration interface and built-in

That update was not only a digi-tal step but also one for the asso-ciation. The new features in clu-ded the introduction of ‘T-bytes’ (some form of loyalty points) and the backend for the software in Thalia’s own canteen (Thadmin). The organisation wi thin Thalia changed and so did the tools sup-porting it. In the following years a career page (2003-2004) and photo section (2005-2006) were added, further expanding Thalia’s ser vices as an association.

Then, in 2006-2007, there sud-denly is a completely different look. The agenda is improved and the exam bundle and wiki sys-tems are introduced. There even was a poker system for some time according to the report of 2007-2008. However, that same report al so mentions that the code is hard to understand. The event re-gis tration feature they planned to implement was thus never fi nish -ed and other plans were made. Time for something new: Drupal.

It’s 2011 now, the website is hack-ed and defaced. In the mean time the exam bundle was ported to a new Drupal-based system but there was still no com ple tely new infra structure. 2012-2013: the idea of using Drupal is re placed by Concrete5. In 2013-2014 the Iden tificaatcie starts re searching IRMA membership cards, some-thing that will be of impor tance in the future.This is the moment where we can stop relying on annual reports as

20 YEARS OF THALIA ON THE WWWSÉBASTIAAN VERSTEEG

15

localisation. This all al low ed us to introduce a new ThaliApp based on React Native just another 6 months later.

The launch of concrexit is two years ago and we’ve refactored a lot of the code we wrote to make it better for the future. We’re add-ing documentation to make it un-derstandable and have tests to prevent regressions in our releas-es. Next month will be the twenti-eth release since December 2016: almost 1 major release per month in which we’ve closed over 700 is-sues. The ThaliApp now supports event registration, pizza ordering and has a member directory.

All of this wouldn’t have been pos-sible without the servers that we acquired in 2015. These form the backbone of our infrastructure. The website, wiki and smaller minisites are all hosted on these machines. They provide our back-up systems, Sentry error re por-ting, our continuous integration along with Docker as deployment mecha nism. The only thing they don’t run is our GitLab reposito-ries.

I sincerely hope that I can open thalia.nu in 20 years and see something we built the base for, that history won’t repeat itself. We don’t know if HTML will still be used. And will the code still be open source? Will it still be ma-genta? There is at least one ques-tion I can answer for now: Thalia will still exist.

2006

2014

2018

2001

1998

16

PPUZZLEJAN MARTENS

Here are some puzzles in order to kill some time during resits, or at a Spanish beach. If you solved one of them, or all of them, send your solutions to puzzle@thalia.nu. If a puzzle is unclear, you think it is stupid, or you know a good puzzle yourself, definitely also send a mail.

Winners of Thabloid #1 2018-2019:

Kaodoku: Milan van Stiphout Pils puzzle: Ko Stoffelen

Programming puzzle: Jelmer Firet

NAILS PUZZLEGiven you have two nails in a wall. Using rope, how can you hang a picture on the wall such that the picture falls if you remove either one of the nails?

Can you manage to find a way that when you have 3 nails, the portrait falls down when one of the three is removed? Can you generalise this to n nails?

CAR PUZZLEIn what parking spot number is the car parked?

1717

PSEUDOKU PUZZLE - KUROMASUThis edition’s Pseudoku is again a Japanese puzzle, this time the Kuromasu. In this puzzle you start with a rectangular grid. In some cells there is a number indicating how many white cells it should ‘see’. A cell can be seen if it is in the same row or column and there is no black cell between them. The puzzle is to determine which cells should be black, in doing so the following rules should apply.

• All white cells should be connected• All black cells must be isolated ( not connected to any other black cell. )• Numbered cells can not be black• Numbered cells can see themselves.

Puzzle #1 (easy) Puzzle #2 (hard)

1818

Happy New Year

THIS THABLOID HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY

MAIN PARTNER OF THALIA