Cav's Place

Yes, I actually went to the protest against ACTA on Saturday and stayed there until around 8:15 PM, when it was announced that the “regular schedule” of protests will begin, as the chosen location was the one where protesters have been gathering every evening for a month straight. This means that I can finally say that I took part in a protest, seeing as there was only one other that I actually went to and then only sort of wandered around the protesters, pulling away when asked by one of the organizers if I wanted to take part and then leaving shortly after that.
I got there around 3:20 PM and ended up in the wrong place, since nobody bothered to specify the exact location and the few others who were already there had chosen to gather in that spot, next to another group of protesters who have been gathering for a month straight and who were also there at the time. I didn’t stay, however, instead getting back into the underground passage to wait for a few more people to gather, coming back out around 3:45 to more or less hide behind the small group that was forming and dodge cameras.
Shortly afterwards, a guy came and told two of the ones who were holding banners that the protest was actually supposed to take place on the other side of the road, convincing them to go there with him after a brief discussion. The rest of us stared in confusion, but a couple of others, who had been there even at 3:20, decided to go after them a few minutes later, and then so did I. That meant that I was in the proper location around 4 PM, trying to find my place among what was starting to become a small crowd, aided by the fact that the others who were still on the wrong side of the road after I left also decided to move over the next few minutes.
While people kept gathering, the vast majority didn’t seem to know what they were supposed to be doing any more than I did, so we were mostly wandering around and occasionally looking at those who seemed more prepared, waiting for some sort of signal, which probably came around 5 PM. By then, a few hundred people had gathered and the few reporters who had been sent there were also trying to catch a few shots and take a few interviews, unfortunately leaving soon afterwards and broadcasting or publishing small pieces that only mentioned what they could see at that time, few bothering to take shots and make estimates later, though the peak was around 7 PM, when the protesters numbered around two thousand.
For my part, I tried to stay close to a tree, for what little protection it could offer, and that made me end up quite in the middle of it all, having to step back a couple of times to avoid ending up right in front of the reporters while they were still there. That also meant that I was only a few people away from Claudiu Craciun, who tends to lead the protests that take place in that location every evening, when he came to help put some order into this one as well. As a result, I was in a group of people who were probably quite used to protesting and were therefore more likely to shout and jump, meaning that I could get carried away with them and actually take part in the protest instead of simply sitting around, as I’m sure I would have done if I’d have been closer to the outer edge of the crowd.
In the end, what I can say is that it certainly went better than I thought it would, the crowd was quite nice and I also managed to withstand the cold reasonably well. Seeing as it snowed constantly and the reported maximum temperature was -12°C that day, obviously only getting colder as the evening fell, that latter part was largely thanks to all the clothes I had on me, among which I could mention two sweaters, two pairs of pants and three of socks, but all’s well that ends well and I’m planning to take part in the next protests as well, on the 25th.

The few days that followed the protest were hard for me, though for different reasons. At first I was worried that I might have gotten another cold, seeing as my throat was slightly sore once again, but that seems to have passed since then and there don’t seem to be any other issues. However, a far bigger reason to feel like shit was Andra’s birthday, when being ignored meant that I probably couldn’t even send her a message despite making two attempts, followed by that annoying and overcommercialized day when everybody gets bombarded with images of happy couples.
Still, something good came out of those days, as looking for something that would keep me busy without really requiring me to focus meant that I ended up making new thumbnails for my little fantasy art gallery, cropping them to fixed sizes instead of simply having the full images resized to a certain width. This will be very useful if I’m to add more artists, because that will require me to make separate pages for each of them instead of displaying all the thumbnails on a single page, in which case I want the script for the new index page to randomly select two thumbnails for each artist, which would look very weird if they’d be of very different sizes. But don’t hold your breath for that, because adding new artists means going through all their works, looking for the best quality versions I can find and then selecting just a few to add to the gallery, which is a process that I’m not keen on starting and, as you can see from the very small number of artists currently included, very unlikely to finish.

Otherwise, still playing Battle for Wesnoth and still struggling with my story. Since I still don’t know how to get from the current situation to the two events that must happen during this part of it, I keep wasting time and space by writing more or less random things while waiting for something to click into place and hoping that someday I’ll get to the next interesting parts that I have in mind. At this point, I’m not sure that I’ll make it that far, but I’ve been struggling with it for too long to give up now, so you can say that I’m currently pushing forward out of sheer stubbornness, even though I need to write about things that my brain’s simply not wired for.