Cav's Place

Writing something’s even harder when I seem to be struggling with panic attacks again, but I can at least try to write about these, seeing as they started last night. It probably was just after midnight when I suddenly got very dizzy for a moment, there was the obvious adrenaline rush, which caused a momentary feeling of panic, and then the usual vicious circle of getting scared that something was wrong, feeling worse because I was scared, getting more scared because I was feeling worse and so on. That only subsided shortly before I went to bed, but then the panic came back some hours ago, and I’m not even sure if this time it was preceded by a moment of dizziness or it caused it, because it was far less noticeable and not exactly unusual for how dizzy I normally get during such attacks.
Rather long time since this last happened and at least the intensity is relatively low this time, in the sense that I’m not convinced that I’m just about to have a heart attack or a stroke, but it lasts a long time and trying to keep it somewhat under control is using up even what little energy I still have, so if it was next to impossible to get anything done before…

The thing is that I should be getting stuff done now, seeing as I’m trying not to do much on the computer to avoid putting any more stress than I have to on this old HDD, since I don’t have a backup anymore. I definitely should be writing that review for Two Worlds II now, while I’m waiting for a replacement and not even thinking of playing anything else, and the fact that I have a pretty thorough list of what I want to say in it means that it shouldn’t be that hard once I manage to get started, but getting started is always the worst part.
Meant to finally continue reading Tongues of Serpents too, thinking I’ll get through it in a few days now that I’m not doing much else, but then I gave up again after only a couple more chapters and I really can’t say why. It’s definitely not the book’s fault in any way, and I definitely like to read and want to read, but… I can’t get myself to do anything at all anymore. That’s all there is to it and you can see that in what happened to my MobyGames submissions as well, where I had managed to somehow claw my way back and end up being only a month behind the “schedule” I had set for myself at the end of September, but then hardly submitted anything at all during October, so now I’m a good two months behind with only two months left until the end of the year.

But let’s see if I’ll manage something over the weekend. I mean, I certainly need to post one more thing, so maybe I’ll somehow manage to make it something non-personal… And possibly submit at least a few more things on MobyGames as well, like I somehow managed to do today, though it took me significantly longer than it normally should have.

Even if these news pieces are about a week old now, I just noticed them yesterday, when I checked my e-mail and saw them linked to in the Access newsletter, and they’re definitely worth drawing more attention to. If such things are allowed to slip past, we’re not even talking about trading privacy for security anymore, but about giving both of them away, with the authorities clearly having the potential to become a much greater direct and immediate threat than the criminals they claim to want to stop through these measures.

The first piece has to do with the United Nations calling for an international framework for Internet surveillance, requiring ISPs and also messaging and VoIP providers everywhere to store information in case the authorities want to review it later, but also calling for mandatory registration in order to use any public Wi-Fi networks and more cell phone tracking… Plus, of course, some mention about acts of terrorism depicted in video games, which includes video games that may be created by terrorist organizations for the purposes of attracting or training members, but extends to any depiction of a violent terrorist act in a game, particularly if the player is allowed to play the part of the terrorist as well.
Of course, the European Union already passed, and required all member states to adopt, a data retention law that requires information regarding on-line and phone communications, though not also their actual content, to be kept for a certain amount of time, while in the United States most providers seem quite happy to voluntarily practice such surveillance, whether they claim to do it in order to look for possible terrorism or for copyright infringement, even before the laws making such practices mandatory are properly adopted. Yet even in these parts of the world, which certain individuals in positions of authority still try to convince us are “free” despite all the evidence that says otherwise, the measures are obviously not enough for the United Nations, which wants everybody treated as a criminal almost from the moment they enter this world.

But the worse part is actually in this second piece of news, which is coming from the Netherlands. Apparently a proposed law would give the Dutch police the right to conduct remote searches, install malware and delete “illegal” files on computers, regardless of location. If the target computer is in another country, it is “preferred” to request assistance from that country’s authorities, but if the computer’s location can’t be determined or if the local authorities refuse to comply with a request for assistance, it will be perfectly acceptable to break into it directly.
As that article points out, such a law gives Dutch police the right to enforce their laws on any computer user in the world, and also to attack cloud storage services or infrastructure meant to protect privacy. It’s an absolutely appalling proposal, obviously made worse by the fact that it comes from yet another supposedly “free” country, and it therefore must be struck down by any means necessary. If they’ll be allowed to get away with this, imagine what they or others like them will think of next!

One of my HDDs is quite clearly about to bite the dust, making very worrying sounds and twice freezing my system intermittently while it sounded like it was trying to get unstuck. It’s possible that it’s the old one, which I only put in for backup purposes, meaning that I won’t need to go through any hassle or reinstall anything but will be left with no backup in case this one will bite the dust as well, which is a prospect I’m not keen on, considering how frequently these seem to fail. There also seems to be something with the month of October, because the previous failure, in 2009, was also during this month. And the one before that, in 2007, was in November…
Now, of course, I have learned my lesson and have a script that backs everything up daily, with the important stuff copied manually once per month in a third place as well, so I won’t be losing anything unless they both fail at the same time and be able to get back the vast majority of the important stuff even if they do, but reinstalling everything will be quite a hassle, plus that I’ll be waiting for a while before getting a replacement. Actually, I’m quite sure that they’re both still under warranty, even the old one having some weeks left, but that was bought from a shop that went bankrupt since, so that’s no use and only the “active” one may get replaced like this. However, if I won’t be able to “revive” it long enough to wipe it clean afterwards, I’d rather not send it and just get a new one instead, which will solve the matter faster but be limited by the available funds.

Oh, it’s just freezing up again. All right, I need to get this posted quickly, because I want to run more tests on both of them and see what happens. If it’s the main one and it’ll fail, I’ll leave this as it is. If not, I’ll get back and edit this with some more details and what my original plan for getting a new HDD was.

Edit: Well, it is the main one and booting off it isn’t exactly an option anymore, but the other partitions are still holding just fine and I can access most of the boot one too, as long as I’m not trying to run things from it and don’t touch the portions that make it struggle and eventually hang. So I’ve been spending the past several hours installing things on the backup HDD and seeing how that holds. Will probably send the main one to be replaced next week and then decide what else to do… Sure hope I won’t end up with this failing as well till then, because it is five years old and has some issues of its own.

As the title suggests, this post will deal with multiple recent events that have to do with gaming, even though they may not necessarily be directly related to each other. Most of them are connected through the use of Kickstarter, but I’ll also mention the latest announcements coming from GOG.com, since they were only made yesterday.

If you have any interest in the matter, I’m sure you already know that Project Eternity has become the most funded Kickstarter game, raising $3986929, which is $650558 above the previous record, set by Double Fine Adventure back in March. In addition, in the last Kickstarter update they mentioned that by 8:30 PM GMT the next day, which was Wednesday, they had been sent $176279 via PayPal as well, making for a grand total of $4163208 from a total of 77667 pledgers, and that amount may still increase, since they still accept money through PayPal.
What this means is that all stretch goals have been reached, including the crazy four million dollar one that they had put up mere hours before the deadline, so the game is scheduled to be released in April, 2014, on Windows, Linux and Mac, in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Polish. It will feature a large game world with a longer story and more areas and factions than originally planned, a second big city, six playable races, eleven playable classes, many customizable difficulty options, several companions with their own personalities and stories, the Adventurer’s Hall, where players will be able to recruit mercenaries to customize their party as they see fit, a house and a stronghold that the players will be able to obtain, crafting and enchanting, live instruments for the soundtrack and a dungeon with 15 levels, 16 if they’ll get 40000 fans on their Facebook page… And Chris Avellone will be forced to play Arcanum, since he somehow hasn’t so far.

Largely in Project Eternity’s shadow, a couple of other pretty well known game designers have started a Kickstarter funding drive for another ambitious RPG, called Shaker. Unfortunately, at first the page offered basically no information about the game other than some common RPG features which it was supposed to include, so it was entirely expected for it to have a hard time gathering any funds. At the moment, when we’re about halfway to the deadline, it has obtained about a quarter of the minimum goal of one million, but it may yet reach that target, seeing as Project Eternity’s funding drive has finished and some information has been added to Shaker’s page, starting from the name, since it didn’t even have a working title at first. It’s quite clear that it won’t get anywhere near any records, however, so their announced plans of funding two related games at once, if they’ll obtain at least 1.9 million, will certainly remain only on paper.
Edit: They just announced scrapping the project, saying they’ll come back with something stronger at a later time.

One game that clearly won’t reach the goal, on the other hand, is Nexus 2: The Gods Awaken, seeing as it has only obtained slightly above a fifth of the minimum goal of $650000 despite being three quarters of the way to the deadline. And that’s probably not particularly surprising, because the first game, which is actually still on my list of games that I should get around to playing someday, seems to be a largely forgotten gem from what I could gather, but I do find it rather sad, seeing as this idea of tactical space combat involving massive ships is very interesting and, strangely enough, rarely explored.

At the same time, the attention of gamers who enjoy space combat is probably grabbed these days by Star Citizen / Squadron 42, which is gathering funds both with and without Kickstarter. The Kickstarter page was actually only launched yesterday, so I have to wonder how much did Project Eternity’s success factor into it, because the original plan seemed to be to make a funding drive that works more or less the same way but is managed directly by the developers, who were staying away from Kickstarter on purpose.
Still, the project is extremely ambitious, the minimum goal of two million being by far the most I’ve seen for any such project so far and the top stretch goal of six million being utterly insane, but the scale of the project and the level of detail certainly justify all of it and then some. Unfortunately, the development of Squadron 42, which will be the single-player campaign, seems to be largely left for the stretch goals, the initial plan seeming to focus much more on the multiplayer “living universe” that Star Citizen aims to be, so I fear that the result will be more along the lines of a multiplayer game with something that amounts more or less to a single-player tutorial unless new funding records will be set.

And to finally move away from Kickstarter projects, I must point out that GOG.com seems to have taken a liking to the “pay what you want” model, because after a somewhat failed attempt at something like this for the Divinity series, they now did it more than right for their entire Interplay catalog. I can’t say that I’d personally have any interest in any of those games, but if you do then know that you can get eight of them for as little as one cent, if you pay above the average, which at the moment I’m writing this is $13.60, you get 12 more, and if you pay at least $34.99 you get all 32 of them. Granted that the most notable titles are in this last group of 12, but each of these games is normally sold by them for $5.99, so the total value is $191.68 and you only need to want six of them to say you’re better off purchasing all 32 while this offer lasts.
Of course, even if I was interested, none of this would do me any good as long as they won’t add any payment methods that I’d actually be able to use to buy anything from there, so it’d sure have been nice if something along these lines would have been included among yesterday’s announcements instead of Mac support. Actually, if we’re talking about supporting other operating systems, even if I’d have no use for it myself, I’d sure have liked to see Linux support first, seeing as that would seem to go with what GOG claims to support, while the strict controls and insane prices promoted by Apple, as well as their tendency to sue at the drop of a hat, go completely against those ideals, so I’m really quite bothered by this move.

The latest studies I heard of state that, on average, human bodies start to degrade, both physically and mentally, at the age of 28. Supposedly sustained training can make this degradation practically unnoticeable until around 35, and mental abilities that have been developed at a young age and rely on performing repetitive actions are an exception and can continue to be improved even well into the 60s, but either way I guess I can now quite clearly say that I’m getting old. I mean, it’s not going to be getting any better from a physiological point of view, so there’s something else to add on top of why I won’t be able to do shit anymore, seeing as I can’t even now.
But who the fuck cares? In truth, it just marks the end of one year of suffering and of being “undead” and the start of another. You can say that September 27 should mark that, or August 15, or that day in November that I’m not sure about but is probably 16 or so, but this actually has to do with me and is near enough to the others, actually being between those dates, plus that it actually implies the passage of time while the others largely only imply static memories, so it is how it is.

So, unless you’re Andra and by some miracle actually intend to make sure it will be a happy day for me, kindly take anything, traditional or otherwise, that you may want to wish me today, and shove it, all right?