Cav's Place

After the significant changes implemented on August 27, the regional-pricing floodgates truly opened on GOG.com. In fact, at least two dozen games that used to be flat-priced before those changes suddenly became regionally-priced as of that moment, without this being announced or explained in any way, a couple of GOG.com employees merely apologizing for it when pressured by the community. 35 games were also removed from the catalog a few days later, as their publishers demanded regional pricing for them as well but GOG.com didn’t accept those terms as they were older and they claimed to only allow this for new titles back then.
Since then, the number of regionally-priced entries in the catalog grew to 72, though 11 of those only have lower prices in some regions, most notably in Russia, nobody paying more than the standard US price. Worse, if initially any new regionally-priced release was specified as such in the relevant news post, after a while they started to “forget” to mention this, only adding the notice and apologizing after several complaints were posted, and then, as of the November 20 release of Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, they changed the wording of the release announcements to no longer specify a standard price or include any mention of regional pricing if applicable. In addition, on December 4, two of the games that were removed over regional-pricing disagreements were added back on the publisher’s terms, so there are regionally-priced older games in the catalog now as well.
As such, we now need to rely on the relevant MaGog search, which gets updated automatically twice per day, or the forum thread and related mix, which are updated manually by someone who over the past few months turned from one of the leaders of the “resistance” against regional pricing to saying that he’ll continue to provide information for those interested but having the entire catalog switch to this pricing model is unavoidable and attempting to keep fighting against it is pointless fanaticism. And there’s my mix as well, aimed at those who want to extend a potential boycott to the actual companies that back this change instead of limiting it only to the specific games it currently applies to. Keep thinking I should make a thread for this, but don’t know if I will because I don’t know if I’ll keep updating it when I’ll no longer be able to add to the post I’m currently using for this list.

That said, all of my respect and support for GOG.com, which was truly enthusiastic at one point, went down the drain. However, I’m rather out of alternatives, since I know of no such shop that still rejects both DRM and regional pricing. ShinyLoot has flat prices but offers an increasing number of games with DRM, merely allowing users to filter them out instead of taking a stance against the concept. FireFlower Games, which I only recently learned about, seem to share GOG.com’s strict anti-DRM stance and also claim to donate half of their annual profit to projects that benefit the environment and game development, but they add a VAT that seems to be fixed at 25% for customers from European Union countries, even if they’re based in a European Union country themselves, namely in Sweden. DotEmu may stick to DRM-free games, but they have no issues with applying regional pricing to the entire catalog. And Games Republic, which never had any stance regarding DRM, also seems to have recently switched to the standard regional pricing model for their entire catalog after initially advertising flat prices. And none of these ever supported any payment method that I could use anyway.
As such, GOG.com remains the only such store I can look towards, in the sense of still being somewhat less evil than the rest for the time being, but definitely nothing worth supporting in any way anymore, which does make me look towards “the high seas” once again. On the other hand, some developers may be worth supporting, so I may still consider purchasing games from them if neither the developer nor the publisher have any games on GOG.com that are regionally priced in a way that causes anyone to pay more than the standard price, but if before these latest changes my price limits were 10 RON for impulse purchases and up to 50 RON for games I’d really want, now I’m saying I won’t normally touch games that cost more than 10 RON unless they’re at least 80% off, and even then the absolute upper limit will be 35 RON and it’d have to be something I’m sure I want to buy. And these price caps refer to the total amount I’d end up spending, including Paysafecard‘s hardly negligible currency conversion fees, so today 10 RON would mean $2.52 or €2.11, while 35 RON would mean $8.81 or €7.39.

Considering the new developments, what I should be writing today is another post about GOG.com, stating what my attitude towards them is now and making some more suggestions that will go nowhere, and perhaps also mentioning a couple of potential alternatives, though they could hardly count as such. But I’m not feeling well and there’s some ski jumping to watch, and after that I guess I’ll have to shave and see about preparing for tomorrow, so all I’m going to do right now is throw another brief personal post here, just to be able to say I have two this week as well.
At this point, I don’t even know what I’ll be attending tomorrow, if anything, because there are two protests that I know of against the new “Big Brother” law, which was just adopted unanimously by the Senate, scheduled at the Parliament for 11 AM and 12 PM, followed by multiple events commemorating 25 years since the Revolution. Those should take place in and around University Square between 3 PM and 1 AM, but the issue is that many activists want to turn it into a protest in the evening, some insisting on this vehemently and lashing out furiously at anyone trying to say otherwise, while the revolutionists’ association organizing the main event, which has all the required approvals to close traffic in the area for the duration and do everything listed on their schedule, asked everyone else to leave all other matters and unsuitable attitudes aside that day. Needless to say, I expect things to turn quite ugly and when I’m not even sure I want to be there in the first place, I actually don’t know what I’m going to do.

But, as I was saying, there’s some ski jumping to watch, so I guess this is enough for now. It may help if I’ll manage to take a nap after this and shave later, but with the way I’m feeling right now and how early I’ll need to be up in the morning, tomorrow will be difficult either way.

After adding WP-SpamShield in late August and seeing that it didn’t let anything through in all this time, I have now decided to stick only to it and get rid of Akismet completely. Of course, the amount of spam received also dropped significantly, from that spike of over 1000 such comments per day when I made that change to low enough numbers that the listed average just dropped under 250 per day now, and this includes that first period. As such, just for personal future reference, I’ll just add that Akismet lists a total of 135335 spam comments blocked, to which a small number caught between the time of the last database backup before the old site vanished and me getting my own domain should be added.
But while I’m on this topic, it’s referrer spam that’s becoming quite annoying lately, since you actually need to handle that on a case by case basis and at this point I have three referrers I’m blocking from my site, two of which being added very recently. However, they seem to have gotten smarter now, actually spamming Google Analytics directly by adding the codes on their sites and therefore generating fake hits without ever visiting yours. Of course, there are ways to stop that as well, but this is getting quite ridiculous, don’t you think?

I guess that’s about it, and I do hope the post won’t attract even more of them. After the two long ones posted last week, this will have to do for now and then I’ll see what the second one for this week will be about, because the odds of actually putting together the two serious non-personal ones I keep saying I need to get around to are pretty much zero. But at least I seem to still be playing The Witcher, so I’ll probably get back to doing that right now.

Largely for personal future reference, I’m taking this opportunity, at the end of a 2014 during which we had three rounds of elections and which followed a 2012 during which we had three others, to post a list of who and what I voted for at each round of elections ever since I turned 18. Or ever since I turned 19, more specifically, since the 2003 constitutional referendum was shortly after my birthday. Even delayed moving in with Andra by a few days for that, since the original plan was for me to go there just before it but I wanted to make sure it’ll all go well, without complicating matters by voting on an additional list, in a city that’s not the one I was registered as living in.
The 2004 parliamentary and first round of presidential elections marked the first and only time I had the right to vote and chose not to, since I was living in Iasi but never changed my address, so was still registered here in Bucharest, meaning I’d have needed to wait for hours in the main train station and fill in a form in order to vote there. Still feel rotten about that, but at least I went through it two weeks later, when I did vote in the presidential runoff. Obviously, I also didn’t vote in the 2004 local elections or in the 2005 early elections for the position of mayor of Bucharest, triggered by Traian Basescu becoming president at the end of 2004, but that was because the only way to do that would have been to come back here for the day, as you only have the right to vote at local elections in the place where you’re registered as living.

2003 constitutional referendum: Voted “no”, not because the new Constitution was worse than the old one, but because it was far from good enough and our authorities absolutely needed to change it to respect international agreements, so a vote against that proposal would have forced them to very quickly come up with a better one.
Of course, with all parties pushing for the changes in every way and the referendum stretching over two days, there was absolutely no chance of any result other than a landslide “yes” and some of those who wished for the same things I was were campaigning for a boycott instead, hoping for a turnout of less than the required 50%, but I couldn’t not vote and therefore went there to be one of the 8.94% who cast valid “no” votes. Besides, the number of valid “yes” votes was only 6030 less than the required turnout, and there were 148247 invalid votes, so obtaining the required turnout even in face of a complete boycott of those who didn’t quite agree with the proposals would have been no problem.

2004 presidential runoff: Voted for Traian Basescu, after spending a couple of hours in line at the main Iasi train station. Recall trying to analyze his alliance’s program, but couldn’t say anymore whether I believed I had any real reasons to vote for him specifically. What I definitely had were plenty of reasons to vote against Adrian Nastase and PSD and in favor of whoever seemed capable to stand up to them, so that’s what I did.

2007 presidential impeachment referendum: Voted “no”, and this time it was clearly a vote for Basescu, as he was not only truly battling PSD and their allies, but had also given me the impression of being a reasonably good president overall up to that point. Unfortunately, the amount of support he received at that time got to his head and his behavior and decisions started changing for the worse.

2007 European Parliament elections: We finally had a Green Party (PV) and they managed to gather the required number of signatures to participate, so I obviously voted for them. They ended up last, with all of 19820 votes, representing 0.39%, but for me they were obviously the only possible choice even if only because of the group they’d be part of.
Frankly, I don’t recall the voting system referendum that took place on the same day, but I must have voted, and in that case it must have been a “yes”, considering that the alternative was this mixed system we have now. In fact, I do remember advocating the system proposed through this referendum in 2008 as well, before actually realizing the sort of disaster it’d bring, as it’d have eliminated all but perhaps three parties. The bottom line is that they’re both bad, but in different ways.

2008 Bucharest local elections: Voted for PV all the way, so for mayor of Bucharest, Bucharest General Council, mayor of Sector 3 and Sector 3 Local Council, and at least they weren’t quite last anymore, though the results were still embarrassing. Listing in the same order, they received 1350 (0.25%), 4827 (0.91%), 247 (0.22%) and 521 (0.46%) votes, respectively.

2008 Bucharest mayoral runoff: This is another case of not clearly remembering who I voted for, but it must have been Vasile Blaga, since Sorin Oprescu was always supported by PSD and could therefore never be an option and I never cast an invalid vote.

2008 parliamentary elections: My first vote in parliamentary elections was under the new mixed system. In addition, these elections marked the first and so far only time when our Green and Ecologist parties ran together, under the name of the Green-Ecologist Party, and needless to say I was one of the 852 people from my electoral college, representing 1.68%, who voted for their candidate for the Senate. However, they did not have any candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in my electoral college, so there I voted for PDL’s candidate and former Minister of Environment Sulfina Barbu, who also won the seat.

2009 European Parliament elections: After going their separate ways once again very soon after the 2008 parliamentary elections, the talks of merger falling through, neither PV nor the Ecologist Party (PER) managed to gather the required number of signatures to run in these elections, and I clearly remember sending some angry e-mails to both of them to ask how could this happen. What I don’t remember quite so clearly is what I actually voted under those circumstances, in the sense of not having that specific mental image of the moment, but it must have once again been PDL, likely just as a way to oppose PSD, and I do seem to recall including the fact that their lack of activity forced me to do so in those e-mails I mentioned.

2009 presidential elections, first round: With Remus Cernea running for PV, these elections marked a moment when I knew and supported both the person and the party I voted for, and I also got more involved in the matter than ever before. Later events made me question that stance and at times, when the Greens ended up rejecting Remus and when he later ended up working with USL, I felt embarrassed and soiled by having supported them in the past, but things have gotten better after initially getting much worse, so at the moment I once again feel rather fine with being one of the 60539 people, representing 0.62%, who voted for him back then.
As for the parliamentary reform referendum that took place on the same day, I voted “yes” for both switching to a unicameral Parliament and limiting the number of seats to a maximum of 300, though in my view such a reform at a national level should, and must, only happen once we’ll have regional Parliaments as well, which is another thing I strongly advocate. And yes, that referendum had the required turnout to be valid and voters overwhelmingly backed both proposals, but the results were simply ignored.

2009 presidential runoff: Voted for Traian Basescu again. As the lesser evil, obviously, but I did what I could to try to persuade others to do the same, simply to avoid the other option. This also meant that I went firmly against the stance of those I supported in the first round, who publicly supported Mircea Geoana, but someone backed by PSD is definitely never an option.

2012 Bucharest local elections: With some activists throwing a fair amount of support behind Nicusor Dan, I voted for him as both mayor of Bucharest, where he obviously had no chance despite obtaining 8.48%, and General Council member. Sadly, the huge strategy error of focusing his meager resources only on promoting the fact that he’s running for mayor meant that many simply didn’t know they could vote for him in this other position as well, so he obtained 4.71% and therefore fell just shy of the 5% threshold which is required of independent candidates as well. That requirement is completely unreasonable, as an independent candidate can’t possibly fill more than one of the 55 seats, which is less than 1.82% of the total, but when he challenged this law he lost.
For Sector 3, I only voted for PV when it came to the Local Council, where they got all of 1403 votes, representing 0.85%, while for mayor I gave in and voted for incumbent Liviu Negoita (PDL), since the voting system for mayors was changed to a first past the post one and the priority was to avoid Sorin Negoita (USL) from taking over. Sadly, Sorin Negoita did win, and things since then have been perhaps even worse than I feared, especially in terms of his tireless assault on trees, parks and other green spaces. And no, there’s no connection between the two despite the identical last name, but this was definitely used by USL to confuse voters.

2012 presidential impeachment referendum: Once again, I voted “no” even though it was obvious that the vast majority will vote in favor of impeaching Basescu and therefore the only question was whether turnout will be high enough for the referendum to be valid. As such, it can clearly be said that those 11.15% of us who cast valid “no” votes helped the “yes” camp as well, but I will not refuse to vote. Either way, the 46.24% turnout was below the required threshold and therefore the greater evil of handing over all power to USL was avoided and I didn’t have to feel rotten for having helped that by my vote against it.

2012 parliamentary elections: With most parties joining one of the two large alliances, namely USL and ARD, there were few options left, but I was one of the lucky ones who at least had PER candidates to vote for, after PER backed out of the alliance with PV, the Greens’ Movement and USL at the last moment. Not something I’d otherwise care to do, considering what PER tends to stand for here, if anything at all, but at least I could continue to show support for a particular ideology at least in theory and was therefore one of the 1777 voters from my electoral college, representing 2.43%, who voted for their Senate candidate, and one of the 586, representing 2.49%, who voted for their candidate for the Chamber of Deputies.

2014 European Parliament elections: Taking a very firm and vocal stance against the United We Save movement’s call for a boycott of these elections, I once again voted for PV, since at least this time it was an option. They received all of 19148 votes, representing 0.34%. The very small difference between this result and the one obtained by them back in 2007 is interesting, and depressing, especially since they did slightly worse now than back then.

2014 presidential election, first round: With PV not fielding a candidate, PER choosing to take in and field William Brinza, who’s a former very conservative member of PDL, and no others that could at least in theory be said to represent this ideology in the running, I had decided as soon as I saw the full list of candidates to simply cast a valid “protest” vote. The idea was that I’ll look on the last page and, out of those that are on it, pick one of the group of five remaining after eliminating the six seen as relevant by the media, the two nationalists and the Hungarian separatist, even if those five also included Brinza.
Somewhat fortunately, the only one of the five who was on the second and last page was Constantin Rotaru of the Socialist Alternative Party, and I was sort of thinking of picking him as I was trying to actually choose someone to cast my “protest” vote for, before deciding to let the position choose for me. I definitely don’t want to show any support for the sort of Communist nostalgia that this party’s leaders exhibit, but the European group they’re members of does have some interesting ideas, even being at times called “greener than the Greens” recently, and the same thing can be said about their youth organization. As such, I was one of the 28805, representing 0.30%, who voted for Rotaru, who ended up next to last.

2014 presidential runoff: Once again simply voting against PSD and their candidate, I obviously had to vote for Klaus Iohannis of ACL. Thankfully, the greater evil was once again avoided, but now it remains to be seen how much of a lesser one Iohannis will be.

Sunday started with waiting for my parents to leave, since they said they’ll be away for some hours but they were still here and not about to head out the door when I woke up. Actually, by the time they did leave I was slightly caught up in something, so it was a while longer until I started cleaning my room, as I hadn’t in probably about a month. Changed the sheets as well, watched a part of the day’s ski jumping event while glancing at a couple of things on-line, then at around 4:30 PM went to the kitchen to eat, returning to my room around 5:40 PM, when I noticed that I not only had no Internet access, but the LED on my switch displaying the status for the port the cable coming from the top of the building is in was off.
That was obviously a serious matter, and I needed it fixed that evening, both because I had no second post on here that week and because the next meeting of the United We Save Community was Monday and I needed to know the details, plus that I had apparently gotten myself somewhat involved in coming up with the rules for a new internal voting system and would obviously not say much of anything face to face, so needed to be able to post my ideas ahead of time. As such, after a few minutes of pacing around the room, I tried to call the people from the network I’m in before the fact that I was about to call someone had a chance to fully hit me and make me freeze completely.
Called the landline, but nobody answered, which was normal on a Sunday, and especially in the evening. Then I called the first listed mobile number and did get an answer, somehow managing to more or less say where I am and what the problem is while stammering enough to need to repeat more than once. It was a brief call, the person I was talking to simply saying they’re not working in the area, asking whose name the contract is on and saying he’ll see if anyone is available to help me.
Then I resumed pacing, with heart racing and almost shitting myself since I had just talked to someone, and on the phone as well, until parents got back around 6:45 PM. At that point, I told dad to call them again, but he tried all the listed numbers, including the one I had called, and got no answer except to be told that one of them is a wrong number. Eventually, around 8 PM, he tried again and did get an answer from the same person I had called, but was told only that other people from the area called as well, so this person who was answering called others to see what’s going on, but he’s not in the area and can’t tell us more himself.
As such, the only solution was for dad to give me his mobile Internet thing, which usually barely crawls when it even works at all and doesn’t take well to opening more than one page at a time. That wasn’t going to help me post something here, since the security settings I have would have made it difficult and, either way, I didn’t want to log on to such an important account off that thing, but I did eventually manage to get a brief post, which I had already written in a file, thrown on LiveJournal. That required struggling for so long I even ended up trying to use dad’s new phone, which he took the opportunity to ask me a few things about, but after being about as frustrated with the touchscreen “keyboard” as I knew I’d be I went back to waiting and reloading on the computer until I finally had something to serve as evidence that I did write two posts before the end of the week, even if the second wasn’t actually posted here in time. Moved it here, with the original date and time, minutes after the issue was finally solved.

When I woke up on Monday, dad said he was told the problem was fixed and that we should reset our switch if it still doesn’t work, which obviously couldn’t be true since the lack of any signal even when plugging that cable into another port made it obvious the problem wasn’t on my end. So he passed on that message and was told they’ll go back to the top of the building later that evening to see what else is going on, leaving me to head for that meeting while being pretty much in the dark and without having sent any more of my suggestions and proposals.
When I returned, close to 11:30 PM and with rather long posts including all that I wanted to say while there already “written” in my mind, I found out the problem still wasn’t fixed, but dad was promised it will be by 11 AM on Tuesday. However, I had little reason to believe that, since he said he was told they had tracked down the cause to some other cable a few buildings away from here, which obviously could not result in this lack of any signal between my switch and the one they have at the top of the building. So I was getting more than a little suspicious and very worried, which also meant I wasn’t in the right state of mind to even put those ideas I had in a file, in order to have it ready to post at a later time.

Tuesday, I set my alarm since I had to be at the dentist again that afternoon and wanted to eat and also have a little time to catch up before leaving. However, the situation was unchanged and dad actually went to ask them what’s going on face to face, but the person at the desk said they’re still working on replacing cables and don’t know more at the moment. Worse, they didn’t seem to know more later either, when he called them again after it got dark and all they could do was apologize profusely and promise to finally solve the issue the next day, without offering more details or reasonable explanations.
Needless to say, I was growing even more worried and was starting to be convinced it’s something they either can’t or don’t want to solve but won’t tell us, simply waiting for us to leave on our own, or perhaps they were going out of business or being taken over. Worse, my computer also froze completely that evening, while playing The Witcher, requiring me to press the reset button and giving me one more thing to worry about. The game does tend to crash and I did notice signs that it was about to shortly before it happened, but completely freezing the system is entirely different, so I ended up afraid to do pretty much anything anymore.
Still, I had a protest to go to Wednesday and didn’t even know the time, and when plugging in the mobile Internet thing I noticed that for a while it claimed a 3G connection that actually worked. Not at that high a speed, but I seemed to be getting a bandwidth ranging between a few and several hundred kbps when what usually happens when it claims the connection is above EDGE is that it freezes or disconnects and won’t reconnect until it’s unplugged and plugged back in, so I made use of that, caught up with a few things and also gave in and logged on Facebook long enough to get the information I needed. If I’d have looked around more, both then and in the morning, I’d have noticed quite a few other actions planned for Wednesday, but I didn’t.

With the protest set to start at 1 PM, I woke up at 11 AM, noticed the problem still wasn’t solved and then left together with dad, as he had to leave at the same time and we were both taking the metro. That meant I was next to him when he was called to finally be told what to me seemed obvious all along, namely that our cable will need to be replaced as well. Then again, it likely needed to be replaced anyway, considering the poor state I knew it was in after eight and a half years, and when the problem first appeared I assumed it was caused by it failing completely due to the weather we had lately, so in a way this was good news.
Of course, with both of us being away, he had to tell them to wait until later, calling them when he was on the way back, when they said they were fixing something else and will get back to him after they’ll be done with that. Sadly, when he called them again about an hour later, they said it’ll have to wait until Thursday, because it’s already dark and they tried doing what has to be done in the dark and can’t manage it. So I was still stuck on the mobile Internet, but at least it was stable for hours, the available bandwidth seeming very clearly limited to 100 kbps, which was what I had noticed at other times when it claimed a stable EDGE connection as well.
Back to that conversation that took place when dad called again, we finally got a proper explanation, namely that somebody had cut their cables in the area and the cleaning lady had called them that day to point out the pile that had been brought or thrown down. In addition, those cables that went down the side of the building to each apartment that’s in this network were somehow tied to the top so they won’t fall as well, so what happened won’t be immediately obvious. They said only them and the administrator should have the key to the door that allows access to the top of these buildings, so the plan for Thursday included having a serious talk with him to figure out how exactly something like that could happen, plus of course replacing ours as well.

The problem was that Thursday I had to go to the dentist yet again, as she wanted to schedule me this week to fix a cavity discovered on Tuesday, expecting many people wanting to come next week, which is the last before they’ll go on vacation for the holidays. Thankfully, I was scheduled for 3:30 PM, but the problem was that dad had to be somewhere in the morning, so catching us both at home before dark seemed difficult until he said he can arrange matters to come back around noon, which he actually did.
So, to finally bring this to an end, after he had to even remove my window to be able to reach the old cable, we pulled both of them, as in the one coming from the top of the building and the unused one going from here to the other bedroom, inside and got the new one through that same hole and hooked in the same manner in a way that made it stay some distance from any window. That meant that all that was left for the guy to do after finishing the work at the top was to put a jack at the end of it while telling us that, despite its current state, the old cable was very solid while he’s uncertain how long this new one will withstand the elements, but it was what they could find at the moment.
I did ask why did it take so long and why did we get such strange explanations at first and he said they knew what happened since Monday, but they first had to deal with their equipment, which had also been tampered with, and then they were faced with a huge tangled mess of cut cables and had to make some sense of it, probably since some of them may not have been theirs and some of their customers in the area may not have been affected, so they wanted to make sure they won’t make it even worse. On the other hand, though the old cable was actually ours, paid for when I first got in another network after being thrown back here, he not only didn’t charge anything for the new one but vehemently refused when dad tried to offer him something for his efforts.

Of course, the main problem now is that, even though the administrator seems perfectly fine with allowing these cables here and said he’ll try to keep an eye out, there’s nothing actually stopping whoever did it from doing it again, since there are ways to get up there that anyone with some determination can make use of. And the culprits are likely to be quite determined, as this guy said there’s no doubt in his mind that we’re talking about the usual suspects, seeing as they made them an offer to sell the network and they refused, and that they also had cables that they tried to put inside buildings hacked apart. So all we can do at the moment is hope they’ll be left alone, at least for a while…