Cav's Place

I seem to be finishing Modern Times missions at a rate of one per day. Granted, finished the eighth on Monday and the ninth only yesterday, but that was because I didn’t play the two days in between, so finishing the tenth this evening leaves me with two missions and three days until the end of the month. Keeping this pace up in what should be the hardest part of the campaign doesn’t sound particularly likely, and if I’ll be alone at some point this weekend I likely won’t be playing that day, or at least not much, but it doesn’t seem entirely impossible anymore, while until just a little earlier this evening it did.

Otherwise, this week’s run was Tuesday and the time was a pretty nice 20:35. Still, that meant another somewhat disappointing final part, as the intermediate times were 4:31, 9:47 and 15:49, respectively, so I was slightly faster in that last part than two weeks ago, when I set the current record for the lap around the lake, but still significantly slower than when I set the current overall record, when I also needed 15:49 to cover the lap but then was 14 seconds faster in that final part. And this time I didn’t have any issues to use as an excuse, unlike two weeks ago.

My neck isn’t getting any better, on the other hand, and I’m noticing other likely related things that make me worry even more. Now I’m trying to pretty much not move it in any way that causes pain and see if that helps, since when my back is acting up the pain’s bad enough to force me to do this and it gets better after a few days, while now since it was manageable I not only didn’t care to spare it but actually moved it quite a lot in ways that hurt, thinking I may either snap something back in place or warm up muscles or tendons, if that’s the issue. But since that always only made it worse when the issue was my back, why’d it be any different here?

Significant changes to the Eurovision voting system were recently announced and they’re quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, separating televoting and jury scores was something that had to happen ever since it became a rule to have both in each country, and a format that only reveals the winner at the very end and also allows for the illusion that the public makes the difference is obviously good for the show. On the other, however, having the jury scores read individually while the televoting ones are only shown quickly and as totals at the end, with the details only available on-line later, feels completely wrong. And worse is the fact that the juries will continue to score the contestants according to the final rehearsal, so for something other than what the public sees before voting, and therefore said scores read individually will not in any way be based on the evening’s actual performances.

But I got a little ahead of myself and should probably state what the changes are as well. Not that it’s not pretty obvious from the above, but this year countries will no longer offer a single aggregate score, resulting from putting together the jury and televote scores, with the entry that had a better televote score coming out on top in case of ties. Instead, the two scores will remain separate, resulting in the total number of available points doubling, likely more than ten entries receiving points from most countries, and also a smaller chance of any entry finishing with zero points.
Each country’s representative will still present a single score, and actually only the winner will be read out loud, the remaining nine places being only very briefly displayed, for even less time than those outside the top three were displayed so far. However, this single score will be only the result of the jury vote, which will still be given after the last rehearsal and therefore both known to organizers even before the competition and not in any way influenced by or relevant to the actual competition.
The televote result will not be presented as individual scores from each country, though those interested will still be able to check the table on-line after the contest is over. Instead, only the total number of points received by each entry from the televoting process will be read by the host at the end, starting with the entry with the least number of points and ending with the one with the most.
As such, with half the total number of points being presented in the final few minutes and the most important ones, those making the difference at the top, only revealed in the final seconds, the winner won’t be known until the very end. And, since the scores presented at the end are those resulting from the televote, it will appear that the public decides, doing it the other way around giving the impression that the juries would decide in case the winner wouldn’t be the same entry which was leading before these scores were added.

Since I started with the conclusions regarding these changes, I’ll now get to the suggestions I’d have, in order to make it work better. Though I must first once again stress that, until and unless it’ll finally be given based on the evening’s actual performances, the jury vote is, in my view, completely flawed and shouldn’t be included at all. There’s absolutely no excuse for doing it this way, and these changes make it even worse, since what will be presented in detail at the end will be something that will have absolutely nothing to do with the evening’s actual competition.
That said, since the amount of time each country’s representative will need to present only the first place in the jury vote will obviously be less than what was needed to present the top three so far, it may actually be possible to present both the jury vote and the televote from each country, especially if more effort will be put into shortening those awkward greetings as well. Not both at once, I mean, but going through the list of countries once in order to present the jury vote and then doing it again for the televote. This will still result in the winner likely being known well ahead of the end, so it won’t be so good for the show, but it would make the most sense and show the viewers what they should be seeing at the end of the contest, which is how all other viewers voted, in at least the usual amount of detail.
Either way, in order to let people see the entire top ten in such a reduced amount of time, I’d strongly suggest displaying the other places, which won’t be announced out loud, much more prominently than before. At the moment I’m thinking a good idea would be to display fourth to tenth place in a larger font, instead of the classification, for ten seconds, then use five more seconds to fade the classification back into view, move the new points to their places and make any necessary changes in the classification, then display second and third place in an even larger font in some free space on screen, probably below the place where the national representative is shown, for another five seconds, before moving those as well to the classification and making any necessary changes that result from this. After these 20 seconds, which should be the maximum time allowed for greetings and building any tension, the winner, which should also be announced around that moment, will also be placed into the classification. If this total of 20 seconds plus any time needed by the animation for the winner is too much, the display time for places four to ten may be reduced to five seconds, and/or the winner may need to be announced before the second and third place are included into the classification, so the entire top three will be included at once.
Then, while I definitely disagree with it, I can suggest a way to slightly lessen the negative impact of the current idea of only presenting the total televote score of each song, and that’s to at least briefly present the countries each entry received points from. For this purpose, a list should show up somewhere on screen, at the left having the number of points received by the entry in question, from 12 to one and color-coded in a way that makes it immediately obvious where the number of points changes, followed by the flags and two-letter or three-letter codes of the countries which gave said entry that number of points, in alphabetical order. This will of course involve filling the screen with only the classification and this list, with no room left to show the host or anything else, and it’ll still be gone far too quickly to catch much of it, especially for entries that receive points from all or the large majority of countries, but viewers should usually be able to gather some information, such as which countries gave the most points to an entry or what a particular country, possibly their own, gave.

These are only some quick opinions and suggestions, and I may have additional or different ones by the time of the competition, but it’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Immediately after reading the announcement I was also considering briefly displaying a map for each entry, with countries color-coded according to the number of points given to the entry being presented as a result of the televote, but it was soon obvious that it couldn’t be made to work.

Since I’m not doing much else and see no reason to think I’ll get any motivation to write a serious non-personal post tomorrow if I didn’t in about a month if you’re lenient and close to two months otherwise, I guess simply mentioning that I at least managed to finish that sixth Modern Times mission a little while ago will be enough to just say I added something here as a second post of the week. At least the Books category means I don’t have to worry about ending up with more personal posts than non-personal posts anytime soon, and there actually are quite a number of old quick reviews I still have to add there.
But speaking of that mission, it was quite annoying due to a major bug that makes you lose instantly if you don’t wait for quite a while before completing the second main objective. Fortunately, a quick search was enough to tell me I had to disable my cannery, as in fire all workers and block the slots so no others will take their place, until the canned goods index rises above 200 on its own, and I also only lost two game years, since I had saved two years before losing by earning $30000 from canned goods exports too quickly. Granted, lost them three times, since I only searched for a solution after the second such loss and then tried to keep half the workers in my cannery the third time, which was also too much, but the fourth time I waited until that index was 300 and after that it was easy, though I did have to do some quite unpleasant things to keep it above 200 for the required five years.

Otherwise, the issues with Emsisoft that I mentioned earlier this week seem to have been sorted out and they admitted they were from their end, so I just had to wait it out for close to a day and can stay on the “delayed” program version just fine. How long until an upgrade will be pushed for this as well and what that may bring, I don’t know at the moment, but this was so far considered to be particularly stable, so hope that won’t change now that I bought it. Had that experience with Bitdefender way back, after all, when the version released when I finally bought it, after using it “pirated” for some two years and being completely satisfied with it, was a mess.

And before I end this I also want to mention that the back of my neck has been bothering me for a few weeks now. Keeps hurting, especially when I wake up but definitely doesn’t actually stop completely at any point. Or, I mean, it doesn’t hurt on its own, if I don’t do anything that causes it to hurt, but if I turn my head in certain ways it definitely does and I can’t quite figure out exactly what hurts. Doesn’t seem to want to get better on its own though…

As it should already be obvious, since that’s when I posted the quick review, I actually managed to finish A Dance with Dragons on Sunday. My eyes didn’t like that all that much and I was having trouble focusing for the last couple of days, and also for some time after I finished, but they have since recovered as well. And I must say I did enjoy the experience of once again reading so much, for quite a few hours per day for more than a few days in a row, and feeling transported into a different world that’s presented in such detail. Which, of course, makes it disappointing that I doubt I’ll be able to do that again in the near future.

Moving on to this week, I finally caught up with the running schedule once again, since I was one week behind and ran both Monday and yesterday. Monday I actually ran with only a t-shirt on, the training shirt being tied around my waist since it was warm enough for that, and the time was 21:08, with intermediate times of 4:45, 10:08 and 16:27, respectively. Yesterday, on the other hand, it was rather chilly, cloudy and windy, so I actually ran the first third or so of the route with even my jacket on, which I don’t think I ever did before, and on top of dealing with the rather powerful gusts I had to struggle to breathe, my nostrils getting stuck together. In fact, I almost stopped after the first sector, since I couldn’t breathe anymore, but eventually took a few breaths through my mouth while I stuck a finger up my nose to hold my right nostril open, as that seemed to be the worse problem, and managed to continue. Had to repeat that process a few times, and struggle to breathe in a particular way the rest of the time, but I eventually managed to complete the route. Understandably, the time was a poor 22:03, with intermediate times of 4:39, 10:26 and 17:03, respectively.

But before yesterday’s run I had also noticed that the insole of my right running shoe wasn’t staying properly in its place anymore either, after the left one kept sliding back for months. So, after putting it off for all this time, once I got back I shoved the shoes in a bag, gathered what recyclables there were to drop off on the way, and went to the store I got them from to see how their two-year warranty works… And ended up with a new pair right away, as I was told that they can’t give me back the money, though I had never asked for that, and to pick up something else instead.
I was quite confused at first, since I expected things to go the same way they go when you drop off some electronics that fail under warranty, as in having them keep them for a while and send back either the repaired product or a new one as replacement when they’re done with it, but that’s apparently not how things work here, which was nice. There were only two pairs of the same type of shoe in my size left and, with the exception of the insoles, the one I got may actually look worse than the old ones did, the fact that discount season started a month ago meaning that whatever’s left has been tried on quite a number of times and may be left for a reason, but if something happens I guess I can just replace them again. Hope it won’t come to that, however.

The thing is that I ended up there with a small amount of money on me and considered using them to pay for the difference and get the next model instead, as I tried them on and they definitely felt comfortable and also seemed quite a bit sturdier, but they were slightly heavier as well and the insoles didn’t seem any more likely to stay in place. So I eventually decided against that and ended up going to the same place I managed to get a pizza from the first time, using those money to buy another one, sort of as a way to offer myself a reward for managing something that required interacting with people, albeit one requiring me to interact with people even more. Which makes this the third time I managed to get myself a pizza.
Though it likely helped me get over the moment of shock I experienced when I got back and it actually hit me that I interacted with people not once but twice, I do feel rather bad about it, since I spent money on something that wasn’t necessary. Worse, there’s one thing I’m running out of, as Monday when I went to buy some things I decided against getting some more. But I guess I’ll make do with what I have or even do without for a few days, since I definitely don’t want to ask for any more money for at least a week after this unnecessary expense. If anything, this may make me feel somewhat less bad about the pizza, I guess…

Otherwise, just managed to finish the fifth Modern Times scenario earlier today, so I now have three days to finish the sixth if I’m to do so by the end of the week, since I don’t plan to start it today. Playing may actually help me worry slightly less about the fact that Emsisoft has been behaving oddly recently, seeming to have some strange update issues today, likely as a result of them consolidating the last year’s worth of daily signature files for their own engine, possibly at least in part because I have program updates on the “delayed” setting and they may have forgotten to also do this properly for the version those who have this setting are on. Hope it won’t mean I’ll need to switch to the “stable” setting again to have it fixed, because I heard that, though it has since been fixed, their most recent supposedly stable release was initially anything but and, since that option exists, I definitely don’t care to automatically get the latest version immediately either way.

I once read a review stating that A Dance with Dragons is a 1200-page book containing perhaps 200 pages of action, which with a bit of effort may have even been squeezed into 100. Which is true, and I’ll also add that some of that action is not presented directly, as it happens, but summarized as the memory of one character or another, after the fact. If what you seek is excitement, a thrilling read that makes you forget to breathe as your heart races and you feverishly turn the pages, you won’t find it here.
A book like this couldn’t be the first or the last in a series, and in a less epic one it wouldn’t belong at all. Yet here it does, and that’s because it’s a formidable, mind-bogglingly detailed, example of worldbuilding. Yes, it does contain the next part of the story, as well as occasional humor, wisdom and further evidence, if any more was needed, that the author doesn’t shy away from, well, anything, but its main purpose is to present this world, or at least certain parts of it, in incredible detail and allow you, the reader, to live and lose yourself in it for a while. You’ll probably gloss over much and more, I know I did, but if there’s anything you do want to know about this world, you’ll likely find it here.
It can get confusing though, and not because of all those details but because it at first covers the same time span as A Feast for Crows yet still includes a few parts that would have belonged there instead, and then continues past that point yet still doesn’t present everything, leaving the reader with glimpses of stories, important elements still shrouded in mystery. Of course, that is in part done on purpose, yet that makes it no less frustrating, plus that, for all its size, the ending seems rather rushed and then cut short… Which I understand the author actually admitted it was.

Rating: 4/5