Cav's Place

Having some curiosity about this ever since release, I jumped at the chance when I saw this edition given away for free and I’m not sorry I did. Of course, it’s a collection of very realistic short stories and my main focus are high fantasy series, followed a long distance behind by a few other forms of literary escapism, so it’s not anything I’d particularly like, as the rating shows, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t meet my expectations. At times, it even exceeded them.
As for the stories themselves, the vast majority certainly seem extremely real and paint a pretty accurate picture of “democratic” Romania. A few do seem to be akin to those pictures mentioned in “Buried”, somewhat falsified, forced, in order to better present the desired concept, but the result justifies the approach and the overall image depicted still holds true. Things change, of course, and some did since the end of the period covered by the stories contained in the book, but in our case few of the changes are major, and even fewer for the better.

Rating: 3/5

There will be a lot of talking about this, Japan will most likely present an entirely different version of events, courts, judges and many lawyers will most probably be involved, possibly some international bodies as well, but for the moment the most information about what happened today is coming from Sea Shepherd and, while I wouldn’t necessarily put a few convenient slips or embellishments past them, I’ll definitely take their word over that of the Japanese whalers at all times. Not to mention that they seem to have a significant amount of evidence, so you can also see some additional pictures or, if you want, read the slightly more detailed version written by Paul Watson. And there’s also an article they linked to, which mentions some initial reactions from Australia.

If you don’t want to click any of that, the short version would be that, angered by the fact that their use of pretty much everything at their disposal short of live ammunition was failing to make the Sea Shepherd fleet back down and allow it to refuel, the Japanese factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, repeatedly rammed the Sea Shepherd vessels, as well as the tanker that was there to refuel them, the Sun Laurel.
By the end of the conflict, the Bob Barker had taken quite a beating, with a radar destroyed and many areas sustaining significant damage. At one point it was almost tipped over and taking water to the engine room, also being left completely without power for 30 minutes. The Sun Laurel apparently lost one of its lifeboats and mechanisms required to deploy the other. It is now being escorted away from the area by one of the Sea Shepherd ships, after members of its crew tossed them a message in a bottle stating that they have no desire to refuel the whalers, weren’t told where they were going or why by their captain and are unable to call home.
Probably after its captain and crew realized the extent of the damage caused and heard the Bob Barker’s distress signal, the Nisshin Maru turned and fled, and the Japanese quickly announced suspending this season’s whale hunting operations. Despite the sustained damage, two Sea Shepherd vessels are tailing it, however, in case it’ll turn around and try something else. At the same time, the Australian government claims to be trying to gather all the facts and the opposition has formally requested dispatching a Customs vessel into the area, to take control of the situation.

As a personal comment, I have to say I’m not surprised in the least by this turn of events, because the Sea Shepherd fleet truly is strong enough to get the job done this time around, but at the same time the whalers had noticed that they were shying away from potential collisions after such maneuvers had allowed them to refuel two of their vessels and transfer a killed whale, so it was clear that they were going to try it again. Thankfully, the captains of the Sea Shepherd vessels had backed down before only to maintain their ships in the best condition to put up a good fight when it mattered most, and this time they stood their ground and won the day. Now let’s hope they’ll win the war as well.

I said I won’t write two personal posts in one week unless I have to, but now I pretty much have to, because the replaced HDD lasted all of three months, and this time the signs of failure appeared very suddenly. Yesterday all seemed fine, today I first noticed a slight delay when I right clicked once, and then some 20 or 30 minutes later it locked up again, the exact same way it used to the last time it failed. Initially, I was able to reboot normally, as it recovered after a while, but then the only way seemed to be to press the reset button, so here I am on this old IDE one again.
Still as before, the failing one seems to work fine as long as you don’t touch whatever areas are flawed, but one of those areas affects a part of the system partition and another seems to affect the “safe” partition. Then again, that means that the actual data partitions are still fine at the moment, so after also copying the few things I had recently thrown on the desktop there to this one I turned that one off, hoping that this will prevent the damage from spreading and the data will still be recoverable in case I’ll end up being so unlucky that this one will fail now too, before I’ll get a new one, because that’s the plan. I will send it back for repairs, because it’s still under warranty until the start of April and it’s their job to fix it yet again, but I’ll only do that after I get a new one, so I won’t have to rely on it again after I get it back.

What worries me now is that I took too long installing Windows and all the updates again on this one, only installing BitDefender when it was all done, quite a few hours later, and it said it detected three threats while installing, requiring a reboot to clean them. I had noticed some strange behavior before, the computer taking a very long time to reboot, with the HDD appearing under a light but constant load on the shutting down screen, but I didn’t connect it with a potential threat until I saw that. Worse, it didn’t say what the threats were, only saying it had moved them to quarantine, but there was nothing in the quarantine or in the logs after it was installed, and nothing but a couple of tracking cookies showing up on a full scan either, so I have no idea what it did and what those threats were and I’ll keep wondering and hoping it wasn’t anything that stole any data I had here or typed during that time, as I did do a few things…

Now I guess I have to pick a new HDD ahead of the scheduled upgrade, wait for it to arrive and meanwhile hope there won’t be any more issues… And that those threats were nothing important. The best case scenario would be that they were false positives, or perhaps some other tracking cookies it noticed during that scan, though I don’t see why would it scan for those before installing, but it’s the same version I installed quite a few times before and this never happened, so not sure what those false positives could be…

Considering what’s going on outside my window, I ended up spending quite a lot of time this week making plans for things that’ll almost certainly never become reality, such as the house I’d like to live in and the garden I’d like to have. Of course, I regularly spend a good part of my time making impossible plans and it’s hardly the first time I focus on these particular ones either, but this time I was particularly thorough, looking up information about plants and planting and actually getting around to drawing the house plans. Good thing, actually, seeing as that made me aware of some serious problems my last stable plan had, which I had somehow missed while I was only relying on mental images, and I came up with something that’s definitely better. Unfortunately, it’s also 25% bigger, taking it from just below what I’d consider optimal for two people to the top of that range, but it doesn’t exceed it, so it’s still fine.
There are some more immediate plans as well, still related to what’s going on outside, but since they’d require getting out there and doing things I’ll be seen doing and asked about, they’re extremely unlikely to become reality as well. Unlike the house and garden ones, they’re not entirely impossible, but I’ll be very surprised if any of them will come to fruition, whether I have anything to do with it or, most probably, not. Most likely, nothing good will happen this year either, what was nice about this place continuing to degrade, which has been steadily happening for the past few years.

Otherwise, I seem to only be capable of writing serious non-personal posts if they stem from an argument on an important issue, and I didn’t exactly have any of those this week, so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be writing about over the weekend. I had some things to add to the previous post, had actually been ready to write a second part to it on Monday, but my Internet access was down a good part of the day then, the people from the network I’m now in saying they suspect RDS had a hand in it, so I put the idea away then and didn’t get back to it since, seeing as it wasn’t a current argument anymore. It’s still the best chance I have to actually write something, however, so unless something else happens to pop up once again, that may well be what I’ll end up doing, albeit knowing it’ll end up worse than what I’d have written then.
Yes, I know I still have that post about the computer upgrade plans pending, but quite frankly there’s too little to say about it now that I largely switched next year’s plans to this year and pushed what was originally planned for this year to the next. And that’d just be another personal post anyway, and I don’t want to have two of those in the same week. I have plenty of “slots” left for it, sure, but I’d rather not use them up unless there’s no other way.

And last but not least, judging by the logs, somebody sure seems to have found me yesterday, so hello there. Saw anything particularly interesting? Is it safe to assume we used to know each other?

Once again, last night I was told that the ideals I strive for are nothing but dreams and utopias that will never happen and therefore don’t matter, since what’s important is “reality” and how things actually work now, as if that has any relevance other than to determine what needs changing. The fact that pretty much everything we take for granted today was an impossible dream, or in some cases perhaps a nightmare, until somebody made it reality is, of course, entirely lost on people with this mindset, which unfortunately are the tremendous majority. After all, perhaps the most defining trait of being “normal” is apathy, accepting things as they are and not pushing against the current for a clear cause, whether due to not believing that anything better is possible or simply due to wanting others to take the risk and do the work instead.
The problem with that, of course, is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It takes many, from all over the world, to make something major happen. One can’t do it alone, or with a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand, but those who want to fight are few and scattered while those who won’t are billions, and all it takes to fight in favor of the status quo is to not actively fight against it. Those few at the top, who reap the benefits of the current state of affairs, share a part of the blame, but things are as they are mainly because of the billions who don’t actively fight for change, who tolerate the current situation instead of saying “this ends here, now” and acting on that statement. Their lack of action, their acceptance of the status quo, creates way more than the necessary critical mass in favor of the current conditions and renders the efforts of the few willing to fight next to useless. To use terms that are now widespread, the scheming of the 1% can be defeated, but the apathy of the 99% is a much tougher adversary.

There are, in fact, many ways to create change with sufficient people, but just to name a very obvious and effective one, is anyone honestly going to tell me that if a million people, not to mention more, would sit down one day in the middle of the capital of an European Union country, particularly one of the most important ones, or in the capital of Canada, or maybe that of Australia or even the United States, with a clearly stated and fair demand that would be not only in their best interest, or that of their friends and families, but in the best interest of the large majority of people and of the world as a whole, they’d be ignored? Of course, it’d be even better if this would happen in all of these countries, or even all over the world, but it may be enough if it’d happen in only one of them, especially if that million won’t include only citizens of the country in question, but people from all over the world, and at least a hundred or so from each developed country.
Now keep in mind that I’m not talking about regular protests, where there could be disagreements, nasty elements, agitators, excuses for the authorities to intervene. I’m also not talking about events with a schedule, showing up between this time and that time and then going back home. I’m talking about gathering that critical mass and having everyone just sit there on their butts, calmly, saying they’re not budging unless the powers that be figure out how to meet their demands, immediately and in full, and remaining there until they’d die of thirst and hunger if need be. So are you going to tell me that any of the countries I mentioned would ignore this, or that they’d dare to arrest, kill or let die a million or more, especially if many would be citizens of other countries, if they’d see that they have no way to make them budge or sway them with anything that falls even the tiniest bit short of meeting their demands?
As I said above, if that would be tried by small groups, and when it comes to truly major demands that’d require completely changing the way the world works even tens of thousands would still clearly be a small group, it’d be a complete waste, as at first they’d perhaps be ignored, and eventually they’d be arrested or mopped up one way or another. And, of course, there are parts of the world where even such large numbers may face a similar fate, regardless of the potential international consequences. But if a sufficiently large number of people would be sufficiently determined to do something like this in a country that definitely can’t afford to be blamed for a million or more corpses filling its streets, the authorities would probably try some of the usual tactics for the first couple of days, but then they, and all the others who currently maintain this system, will be forced to give in, fully and unconditionally.

What’s strange is that, for a clear pessimist, I sure seem to believe in the possibility of good things happening more than anyone else I ever talked to, as long as we’re talking about the very big picture. It’s true that, for example, some things can’t be done until their time comes, until we reach the level of technological development required, but it would seem to me that the time for many changes is now, and that one of those changes whose time has come is that which was the topic of the discussion that triggered this post, namely eliminating the finance-based system and the need to earn a living, offering everyone not proven guilty of a serious crime the healthy food, clean water, comfortable housing and quality medical attention required to survive at no cost and switching to a fair resource-based economy for everything else.
After all, contrary to popular belief, if something is as it is, it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. Even if something has been more or less this way since the dawn of civilization, throughout nearly all significant human cultures, it doesn’t have to continue being like this in the future. Once again, everything’s impossible until it gets done by somebody who never heard or, more likely, never believed that… Though what’s most unfortunate is that every single person who doesn’t believe that something is possible makes the task of those who try to prove them wrong ever more difficult.

“Folks have been conned into thinking they can’t change the world, have to accept what is. I’ll tell you something my friends. The world is changing every day, the only question is who’s doing it.” (Reverend Will Dexter – Babylon 5)