As the rating suggests, and despite everything I’ll say past this point, I definitely liked what actually was in this book. However, what’s missing from it would be enough for another Song of Ice and Fire. Even worse than in the first volume, potentially important characters are barely even mentioned and secondary ones may be introduced and then completely forgotten, entire storylines are reduced to mere glimpses, major plot points may either be limited to a quick presentation of their conclusions or, quite the contrary, completely lack them, and when the time comes to skip forward, the readers are largely left to figure out what happened in the missing years on their own.
I’ll say that the author seemed in more of a rush to see the end than the reader would be expected to be. Worse, whether due to lack of skill or lack of will, this haste doesn’t merely result in compressed action, but often in completely skipped action. Add the fact that some moments are overly simplified, some timing and editing issues and the countless loose ends left after the last page, and I’ll say that this series has the potential to offer a lifetime of work to anyone who’d want to fill in the blanks and flesh it out better… And perhaps somebody should do that if the author himself won’t, because it seems to me that it had the potential to become one of the best fantasy series ever written, which makes it even more of a pity that most of it is missing.
Rating: 4/5
I have to wonder, why do major sites that are also available in the official language of the country they detect you’re in automatically switch to it, regardless of your preferences? For example, lately I see YouTube switching my location, and the site version I see, to Romania instead of Worldwide every so often even after I set it back to Worldwide, and oddly enough even if I don’t clear cookies. Previously, there was the issue with Avaaz sending e-mails in Romanian, which seemed temporarily fixed after I set my language preference to English and also wrote them to complain, but after a while I again started receiving e-mails that are either just in Romanian or in both Romanian and English, with the Romanian version first. And don’t even get me started on the BitDefender site, which seems to constantly check and switch back to the localized version, no matter how much you try to select another.
If it always annoyed me, to say the least, that books aren’t also printed in the original language in every country where translated versions are published or that English versions of software may at times be more difficult or more expensive to obtain once fully or partially localized ones become available, this may be even worse, especially since there’s absolutely no excuse for it. Considering the amount of effort put into the current system that determines a user’s location, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been any problem to determine the user’s system language, or at least browser language, set the default to that instead, and then definitely add a clear localization setting on every site available in multiple languages. On sites that change even more according to the selected location, this becomes absolutely necessary, so all registered users will be able to select the version of the site they prefer to use, including a generic one, without any localization, and make sure that version will be saved, even if they clear cookies, switch browsers or even use different computers.
Today I finally managed to do the last part of a couple of small things I had been meaning to do for about a week, but I’m embarrassingly behind on pretty much everything even for me and I also just realized a couple of days ago that the main non-personal post I’ve been toying with for the past several days would be pointless, as it’d have been based on something dating back to 2011. As such, you’ll just get this quick update now and then I’ll see what else I can come up with by the end of the week.
First, I have to say that the blackout didn’t quite work as planned, as my ISP decided to crash at 2:50 AM my time, so 11:50 PM GMT, and I was therefore unable to set up the redirects at midnight GMT, as I had planned. According to the logs, it recovered some four hours later, but I was asleep at the time, only happening to wake up and decide to check at 8:45 AM. Still, that meant I was able to start it just at 6 AM GMT, which was actually the scheduled start time of the event, and keep it up for 30 hours, as I maintained my own planned end time, of noon GMT the next day. Unfortunately, the site seemed to get fewer visitors during that time than during an average day, but at least a few people saw the message, so it still counts.
Otherwise, we’re getting beautiful spring weather, with highs even into the high 20s, and everything is green all of a sudden, so I’d be somewhat tempted to go finish Century of the Soldier in a park, but after going out to buy a few things yesterday and seeing as I may be going to a concert on Sunday, I really can’t get myself to go out yet another time this week. Besides, I still have over 250 pages to go, so it’s not like I could finish it in one sitting, the current problem being that I even fell behind the number of pages I should read per day to at least finish it in two weeks. Back in the day, I’d have finished an 800-page book in one week without even trying, but now I have to struggle to even read so much that even doing it in two weeks requires real effort.
Speaking of reading, still didn’t even open this month’s National Geographic, so I should get to that as well, not to mention that my story continues to suffer a lot. Quality was a lost cause long ago, but I once again can’t even manage to get much quantity in, so I’m wondering whether I should try to pick some related projects, such as the maps or a couple of short stories, back up. At the same time, there’s a reason I haven’t done any of those things all these years, so I don’t see how that will change now when it seems that I’m feeling even worse than usual, even physically, my body seeming to want to tell me that it’s about to give. Still, seeing as a worsening of the old bugs experienced on MobyGames means that I can’t keep submitting ranks there anymore, I might as well try to use any time I’d normally set aside for that on some days for this and see if it gets me anywhere.
While I currently see no particular reason to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories that have been floating around over the past few days, the immediate response to the event, as well as past experience, makes it clear that certain elements are now overjoyed at being able to use the tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse for an even further increase in unjustified surveillance and oppresive behavior, mainly in the United States but very probably elsewhere as well, so it’s all the more important to fight now and fight hard against any such measures, and CISPA is as good a start as any.
As such, seeing as the US House of Representatives passed the bill by a wide margin, I have decided to take part in the announced blackout scheduled for Monday, April 22. The entire site, not just the blog, will be blacked out for at least 24 hours, and probably 36 hours. The call to action sets the start time as 6 AM GMT, but I’m not going to set up an automated script and I’ll be asleep at that time, so at the moment I’m planning to start it at midnight GMT on Monday and most probably end it at noon GMT on Tuesday, seeing as I should be well awake by then.
Regardless of where you live, this bill will affect you, so I strongly encourage you to follow the developments and take action. In addition, if you have a site as well, I encourage you to join the blackout, and you could also join the Internet Defense League, if you haven’t done so already. This particular blackout is done on short notice and spearheaded by Anonymous, so the impact will most probably rely on many individuals doing their part more or less independently instead of large organizations and well-known sites taking up the banner.
Yesterday’s announcement confirmed what is by far Kepler‘s best discovery to date: Kepler-62f. The release also mentions six more planets in the two announced systems, and while Kepler-62b, c and d, as well as Kepler-69b, are in very tight orbits and therefore scorched by their stars, Kepler-62e and 69c are also in their stars’ habitable zones. However, they are close to the inner edge of those zones, in orbits roughly equivalent to that of Venus in our own solar system, and considering the fact that they’re 60% and, respectively, 70% larger than Earth, it seems quite likely that they have very thick atmospheres and experience a runaway greenhouse effect. After all, the calculated temperatures are 270°K for Kepler-62e and and 299°K for Kepler-69c, according to a standard method that ignores atmosphere and would make Earth’s average temperature 255°K, while in fact it’s 288°K and increasing.
Kepler-62f, on the other hand, is only 40% larger than Earth and pretty much in the middle of its star’s habitable zone, its position being comparable to being about two thirds of the way between Earth and Mars in our solar system. Of course, it is rather cold out there, and its calculated average temperature is a mere 208°K, but even an Earth-like atmosphere should allow at least a few areas to occasionally be above freezing, and its larger size should normally help it hold on to a thicker atmosphere that’d increase the temperature even more, so it really does seem almost ideal. In addition, the star in question is a K dwarf, K2 to be exact, and that type of stars are considered to be the best bets for life, seeing as they are more numerous and live significantly longer than larger ones, such as the Sun, which is a G2, while at the same time being stable and having their habitable zones sufficiently far away to avoid tidal locking and reduce each individual planet’s risks in the event of coronal mass ejections and other similar events, which isn’t the case for class M ones. To prove this fact, this particular star is estimated to be about seven billion years old and still in its prime, so life has had plenty of time to develop on its planets… Though, of course, at the same time it had plenty of time to be wiped out or, if it followed our pattern, wipe itself out.
There are other problems as well, such as the star’s low metallicity and the fact that, despite being the smallest super Earth found in its star’s habitable zone so far, a rocky planet 40% larger than Earth would have a significantly higher mass and therefore anything living on it would have some problems with gravity. However, seeing as we are still looking for planets that are located within their stars’ habitable zones and are no more than 25% larger than Earth, which is the upper limit for “Earth-size” planets, and Kepler-62f’s exact location within its solar system seems so right for a planet its size, one can’t help but wonder whether there’s somebody there who is, or at least has the capacity to be, looking towards us and wondering the same thing.
