I must start by saying that the author sure liked to show off his vocabulary and penchant for flowery descriptions. Worse, this bled into the characters, the result being even more jarring because this style is also used to depict the thoughts or speech of those highly unlikely to even know a fair number of those words, much less use them so often. And the fact that the point of view suddenly, and usually very briefly, switches in the middle of some scenes only adds to the confusion.
Other than that, though some events unfold, it doesn’t quite feel like much is happening until the last two chapters, and either way the book is quite short. In addition, some things, such as Baus’ magic dagger, are insufficiently explained and tend to simply appear at certain moments and be ignored at others when they’d definitely be useful. And while I’m at things, should also point out the highly unusual lack of any ranged weapons bar those catapults on one ship’s deck. No cannons, no bows or crossbows, no pistols, nothing, which doesn’t make any sense.
Rating: 2/5
Particularly bad day for me today, but I guess I have to write something, especially since this will be this week’s only proper post. There will be a second as well, of course, probably tomorrow, but since I did add that Books category a while back and am now reading another of those ebooks I picked up for free back in 2013, that will be a little quick review for it. At least it’s short and poor, and I mostly knew that when I started it, doing so mainly just to be able to say I read something this year, so I won’t exactly worry about doing it justice.
Back to this being a particularly bad day for me, of course I sent the usual message last night, but, like any other, that may not have gotten anywhere, and if it did it was ignored as usual. Other than that, I pretty much stayed in bed until past 4 PM, when I got up to try to get myself to write this. My bladder did seem to insist to make me get up a few more times before that as well, but I crawled right back under the blanket each time except for the first. That one, at 9 AM, was actually useful, since it meant I could grab something to eat while my parents were away and also open the window to let some air in my room while I wasn’t here, getting back just seconds before I heard the key in the door. So at least that largely eliminates the risk of running into anyone around here today.
Otherwise, was out three times this week, but other than buying yogurt, butter, this month’s issue of National Geographic and some biscuits on Wednesday, I didn’t do much. Didn’t look more into the available options for Kaspersky either, and while I started the second adventure in The Witcher last week, which is one of the main ones, The Price of Neutrality, I haven’t touched it again since Sunday. And now I’ve been sitting here for over 30 minutes, trying to get my brain to put some words together in order to be able to write this, though I had the first paragraph in mind since before I woke up and know what I should say otherwise as well.
The simple fact that I am writing it, however, is still something. I mean, by the time I finish this paragraph, I should have some 500 words that’ll make some sort of sense and they’ll be written in less than one hour, while in my story I can still barely add about 100 per day, and even that mainly just to say I didn’t completely give up yet, since otherwise what I’ve been writing has little point and hardly ever takes anything forward for a very long time now. Granted, I will get to 400000 by the end of the month even at this pace, but a good part of that could and likely should be cut out while parts that would need to be included aren’t, so the only questions left are still just when will I actually give up and whether I’ll simply delete even what I have so far at that point.
Two days ago, I finally managed to finish The Witcher, after deciding I was strong enough and could do without trying to level all the way to 50, since that’d have been quite tedious. Was level 43 at the end, but that last level was actually gained during the final battle, so the last level that counted was 42, and I also chose to break the curses instead of killing the werewolf and the striga, so missed two important mutagenic potions on the way.
In fact I was rather surprised to finish it that evening, because it was around 6:30 PM when I started the epilogue and at first I quit at that point, not intending to continue. However, I later went back to it, thinking I’ll just try to see what I’ll have to do, and found myself just pushing all the way to the end, though of course I did quit and then get back to the game every 30 minutes or so, to make sure I’ll avoid crashes. That meant that by 11:30 PM I had finished the game, which included having that final talk with Dandelion three times, to see what the choices lead to, and watching the ending cinematic twice, letting the credits roll as well the last time.
Now I still have the adventures to go through, and yesterday I quickly finished one that seemed like simply a test. After I’ll be done with all of those, I guess I’ll be trying King of Dragon Pass again, though I may install The Witcher 2 at some point to make sure that the save from the end of the first game can be imported properly. Definitely don’t intend to start playing that on this computer though, simply meaning to make another save right at the start with the one from the end of the first game imported, to have it when I’ll have a system that will handle it better.
One reason for the rush to finish the game then was the fact that my Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015 trial expired yesterday and, even though pairing it with Comodo Firewall 8 suited me quite well, I did say that now that I finally moved away from using nothing but Bitdefender for just over ten years, I want to test other products as well. As such, I had to uninstall Bitdefender and install the second one on my list, which was Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2015, and didn’t want to be in the middle of something if for some reason I’ll end up needing to reinstall.
Thankfully, it all went very well and so far I’m seeing no problems, or at least none that I think are caused by this, since a certain site that did tend to cause my computer to freeze for a few seconds the first time I visited it in a day caused it to freeze completely and require a hard reset last night. So the next thing to do, probably next week, will be to see exactly what Kaspersky‘s settings mean and decide on the best ones, since yesterday I just made some changes that seemed right at a quick first glance.
However, before I end this I also want to mention that the issue I had with the Comodo sandbox went away as well, so there’s no need to reinstall that to try to fix it and this should also help reduce the risk of that freeze happening again, as long as I’ll remember to use it. Since there was a program update for Comodo Firewall yesterday as well, I have no idea whether the cause was a conflict with Bitdefender, a bug that they fixed or some settings glitch that somehow fixed itself during the update process, but I can’t say I care that much at this point.
The post’s title says “support”, but in fact it’d be more accurate to say that these concepts are enforced, and forced upon the relatively few who’d truly want something different without being wealthy enough not to care which way the market goes. The numbers I’m going to use are simply meant to illustrate this point and not based on anything, but they should probably give a rough idea of exactly what I mean without simply sticking to abstract concepts, which in turn may make what’s to be done about this problem slightly more obvious… Not that it wasn’t already.
Let’s assume we’re talking about a product sold for $200, at a profit of $10 per sale, and designed to need to be replaced every two years. In other words, the company making that product knows it’ll stay in business by obtaining a profit of $5 per year from the number of people it estimates it can sell the product to. Based on this, a competitor aiming to sell a product that’s very similar, if not identical, to the first one in terms of features but which is built to last an average of ten years will need a profit of $50 per item sold to stay in business, if we are to make things simple and assume that the benefits of getting all the money at once make up for the resulting additional overhead per item, since expenses don’t scale directly and bigger companies that sell more products can save more.
Speaking of this second product, it most probably will not also cost five times more to make and possibly maintain, but may perhaps cost two or three times more. Assuming this latter scenario of triple costs, it would mean that it’d need to be sold for $620. However, it’d need to be sold for $620 to as many different people as those that’d buy the first product for $200, since they’d need to buy it five times less often and therefore the difference comes only from that.
Now $620 per ten years is far better than $200 per two years, but will people see that and will this result in at least the same number buying the more expensive product? Obviously not, so this second company will need to adjust its profit margins accordingly, meaning $100 per item, resulting in a price of $670, if their number of customers is halved, or $200, resulting in a price of $770, if it goes down to a quarter. Which, of course, will only reduce the number of customers even further, and at a tenth they’ll be up to a price of $1070 per item and therefore no longer be worth it simply based on the fact that their product lasts longer.
Once they reach that point, the second company will need to start selling the brand name instead of simply the product, which requires far more, and far more efficient, marketing, which will obviously add to the overhead and drive the price up even further, which in turn will make people who realize the difference between said price and the actual manufacturing costs per item stay away even more. In theory, of course, they could even aim to become an exclusive luxury brand, selling that same product for an outrageous price to a very small number of people, but that’s a poor strategy for survival, since there are only so many spots available for such brands out there and most are already taken, plus that this is not the point of this post, since I’m talking about what the current system forces most people to use and most companies to make.
However, if we switch from a finance-based system to a resource-based one, and from the need to “earn a living” to each person not proven guilty of a serious crime having the right to use a certain equal share of the available resources, with additional amounts granted to the relatively few whose achievements would have a significant positive impact, things would be very different. After all, while the more reliable item may cost three times more to make and maintain under the current system, there’s no reason to believe its actual resource cost will also be three times higher, and in fact the difference may be marginal, seeing as many products are currently designed to fail, without this necessarily being a result of cutting corners.
The concept of a circular economy won’t change things either, in fact increasing the difference in favor of the resource-based system, because the current model limits recycling to that which is sufficiently profitable in terms of finances, while the resource-based one would pretty much enforce recycling in any situation that brings any sort of net resource gain, which will obviously be returned to the person who sent the product in question to be recycled. Not even products that quickly become outdated in terms of performance will be any different, as recycling them will return the actual net resource gain into the person’s account and not the far lower price that even reselling, not to mention recycling, such a product can fetch now.
In addition, the concept of profit has no place in a resource-based sharing economy, the price of a product always being equal to the actual resource cost, so the far more reliable product which may, perhaps at most, require 50% more resources will cost 50% more instead of at least 3.1 times more, as in the first example. And when you also keep in mind that, instead of overproduction and overconsumption, the goal would be to reduce both the amount of resources used in the long term and the amount of work required for products and services, so people will be able to spend their time on leisure activities, or focusing on relationships, or pursuing various personal interests and hobbies, or of course trying to come up with what may become those significant achievements which would be the only way to increase one’s resource share, it’s also perfectly clear that the more reliable product will also be heavily promoted in every way.
Where we are is a huge distance away from where we absolutely need to be. Far too many people consume far too much even though the vast majority still live in poverty and many don’t even have the most basic necessities met, working way too much to produce even more, constantly making wrong choices in order to actively strive to sustain an economy that’s anything but. Many may not actually be aware that they’re doing so and most don’t believe they have any other options, yet solutions do still exist… Shame that all too few care, and that even fewer would be willing to actually do anything about it before it’ll be far too late.
This afternoon, the total credit earned for running SETI@home just passed three million, and at the moment I’m writing this it’s 3000264, so I thought that was worth a post. In order to see the total amount of work done for the project over the 15 and a half years since I joined it, however, the 1100 SETI@home Classic work units completed before the project evolved and was integrated into BOINC should also be added; and yes, I clearly remember holding off switching over to the new software until I reached such a round number. The exact date I joined is listed as July 15, 1999 by SETI@home and July 14, 1999 by BOINC, which is quite clearly a time zone issue, as my information had to be imported directly from the SETI@home database into the BOINC one when the infrastructure was launched.
Over the years, I only had my computer work on other projects when SETI@home work was not available, so any other credits are negligible, but I’ll list them anyway: 98047, or 98046 according to the BOINC statistics, for climateprediction.net, 10668 for MilkyWay@Home, and what BOINC lists as 9686 for World Community Grid, or more specifically for The Clean Energy Project – Phase 2. However, World Community Grid doesn’t have the same style of account pages and statistics as the other projects, the project itself reporting 67800 points, though it works out the same since the ratio is listed as seven points per credit.
The plan is still to look into adding another project permanently, but I’ll only do so after I’ll get a better computer that will allow me to add other projects without reducing the processing power dedicated to SETI@home, and I’ll only consider clearly “green” projects, which are very few. And yes, I’m perfectly aware that SETI@home doesn’t exactly generate useful scientific results and may in fact never do so, but my commitment to it is largely due to the fact that this project popularized the concept of volunteer distributed computing and evolved into this infrastructure used now by so many others, which may not have existed without it, and for that reason I will not give up on it nor let others take priority for as long as it’ll continue to exist and send sufficient work units.
