Cav's Place

About two weeks ago, my grandpa died. I’m talking about my mother’s adoptive father, who therefore wasn’t even a blood relative but nevertheless was the only one that I ever saw as my grandpa, seeing as my mother’s real father died young, so long before I was born, and my father’s father, who died in 2010, was a dreadful drunkard that I never wanted to have anything to do with. More importantly, he was in fact the only relative that I actually respected and considered that I ever learned something useful from.
I certainly haven’t seen him after 2003, and in fact most likely not since 2001, if not even 2000, since that’s when I was first allowed to completely avoid family gatherings or any other such events and, unless I’m forgetting something, also the last time I saw any relative other than my parents, completely tearing myself away from everyone else because I generally didn’t want anything to do with them anymore and from him because I couldn’t readily see him without going there and therefore bumping into others as well. However, I guess that only serves to allow me to remember him as he was, without having memories created during the final years of his life soil that image, seeing as even in 2006, when I got thrown back here, I was hearing things that made it quite clear that he was on his way to becoming merely a shadow of his former self.

But let me leave what I heard about the man he became during these final years aside, especially since I constantly made a point of not hearing anything about him during this time. Instead, let me focus on the man he used to be: A man who helped and inspired nearly everyone he ever came in contact with; a man who, until these final years, would not bow down to anyone or anything while at the same time not trying to make anyone bow down to him; a man who earned the respect of everyone whose opinion could in any way be considered relevant without ever demanding it… A man who deserved to die as he lived, either while helping someone or while working on something that someone of his age would normally shy away from, and not as a lost old man, frail, sad and bitter after years of suffering, without even being told exactly what his condition was and after being tricked by the other relatives into accepting treatments that made him drag on for a while longer because everyone knew that, if he’d have been told exactly how things stood, he’d have said that he lived long enough already and rejected such continued disgrace.

Actually, without including any of the work he did into it, I could probably summarize his attitude and the influence he had on others into three mental images:
He was the man who, particularly on birthdays, instead of a typical “happy birthday” or of a more common reply to being wished such a thing, would say “may what I wish for you happen to me and what you wish for me happen to you” and then watch to see who seemed upset. I believe that I can safely say that this is probably what inspired me to come up with the things I say on such occasions as well, even if they’re not in the same vein.
He was also the man who always prayed while standing, never kneeling. When I was confused by it when I was little and asked grandma why did he do that, she told me, in a very sad voice, that it meant that “he thinks he’s bigger than God”. However, over time I understood this to be his way of avoiding conflict with her over the issue while at the same time showing that he’ll never bow down and quietly stating that he wasn’t sure that such a being existed. As a result, seeing as, even if it was never expressed in so many words, that was my first contact with such an opinion, it probably was what led me to start analyzing the matter of religion on my own from a very young age instead of just accepting everything that was shoved down my throat about it.
Perhaps most of all, he was the man who, at one point during the Revolution, dismissed all of grandma’s attempts to stop him by simply repeating that we were running out and he had to make sure that we won’t risk starving if it’ll drag on and went to get some food. When he returned with what he had gotten, he was moving as if in a dream, was staring at a fixed point in space and appeared to have a red mark across his nose. After setting everything down in the kitchen, the first words he said in reply to grandma’s desperate attempts to find out what happened were “I’m only alive because I sneezed”, eventually explaining how he was walking down the street and at one point a bullet grazed his nose just as he had stopped to sneeze. And yet, in spite of that, he got what he went out to get, brought everything back and, most notably, even though so many got “revolutionist certificates” and some are still enjoying the benefits granted by them without ever setting foot on the street during those days, made a point of not applying for one because, in his words, if I remember correctly, “I went out there to feed my family, not to fight”.

On top of that, he was always busy with something, truly enjoyed what he did and was actually good at almost anything he set his mind on. People often told him to “leave something for others to do too” while he did his best to repair any broken appliances or other electronic equipment that anyone he knew had even without being asked, do the labor-intensive jobs around the house or garden, including fixing the roof or climbing on ladders to pick fruit well into his 70s and perhaps even early 80s, or go to friends to help them with what they needed. Despite having worked in printing and therefore having retired many years before the normal retirement age due to the toxic environment, he also held on to a part-time job as something of a consultant until he was around 70. I never knew exactly where he worked then, but I knew that he was going once per week to train employees on using equipment and at times even being called in to solve problems that nobody else seemed to figure out the solution for, until he resigned because he said that the young employees were starting to learn to use the modern equipment faster than he did and therefore he wouldn’t be useful anymore.

Unfortunately, as I said, age eventually caught up with him and by 2006 I heard that he was going blind and was falling on the street or even around the house. I heard that once, when he was told that he shouldn’t keep going out on his own because he’ll fall, he replied by saying: “Yes, I’ll fall. And then I’ll pick myself back up, brush myself off and keep going. And then maybe I’ll fall again, and I’ll pick myself back up again, and still do what I must do.” So his determination appeared to still be there even years after the problems started, but his body couldn’t keep up anymore and that was taking a serious toll on his mind as well. In fact, at some point I accidentally saw a picture of him on dad’s computer when I was using it to try to fix something and I’m still trying to erase that image of a fat old man, still at the head of the table but looking sad and lost, from my mind.
When other problems started becoming worse and worse, what I happened to hear being said about him made me try even harder to avoid hearing anything about him anymore. Eventually, despite having always almost completely refused to have anything to do with doctors, he had to give in and allow himself to be taken to a hospital some two years ago. A large tumor was removed from his abdomen and tests revealed that it was cancer but, as I stated above, I heard that he wasn’t even told exactly why he was going into surgery and the full truth was kept from him afterwards as well in order to have him accept the treatments. Heard that my dad saw him crying and begging for the pain to end while visiting him in hospital and was shocked that this man who had pushed through everything and hardly ever complained had ended up in such a state.
Worse, what I still heard during these years seemed to indicate that his mind was going as well, with people saying that you couldn’t get along with him anymore, he wouldn’t discuss anything, was increasingly bitter and demanding and eventually, during the final six months or so, when he was almost completely bedridden, often tended to just lie there with his back towards anyone who happened to be around and not show any interest in anything anymore, simply waiting for the end.

A man like he was shouldn’t have ended up in such a state. He should have died some ten years ago, while he was still strong, or at least some five years ago, when he still had his dignity. Or, at the very least, he should have been allowed to ask for and be granted a quick and painless death two years ago, but of course that’s still illegal for reasons that make absolutely no logical sense.
But at least it’s over now and he’s free of the pain and of the indignity of it all. And, even if the man he used to be no longer existed within his body or his mind during his final years, it will be that man who will live on in the memory of all those whose lives he touched.

For that reason, I think it’d be appropriate to end this on a more cheerful note, with a memory from an otherwise typically dreadful family gathering, probably either his birthday or name day, when I guess he was around 70: While everybody was eating and chatting away, we suddenly notice him slip under the table without a word. Everybody is looking around in confusion for a moment until my uncle, who was in the best position to see exactly what was going on, starts laughing and we all realize that grandpa was doing pushups. Uncle’s reaction after he managed to stop laughing for a moment? “Gramps, the missus left a long time ago.”

Sorry, but I’ll keep comments off for this one.

Back in 2010, I bought a few issues of a gaming magazine from here for the full games it came with. After also reading through them, I was largely left with two things: The confirmation that I shouldn’t go anywhere near the Mass Effect series, after they thoroughly trashed Mass Effect 2 in a ten-page review that largely pointed out the same issues that I thought would be deal breakers, and the need to at least give The Spirit Engine 2 a try, after seeing it get a very positive review in the freeware section of one of those issues. But, of course, knowing me, I kept putting it off until April this year, when I finally decided to download both games in the series and start by playing the first. And, overall, I’m certainly not sorry that I did.

Since I’m always very interested in the inner workings of the games I’m playing, and since the mention of these inner workings was how that review got me interested in the series, I’ll start by pointing out the pretty complex and complicated calculations used to determine skill effects or even character attributes. For example, how does 22 + 3S + 0.23S * 0.5P + 1.66P, where S is skill level and P is party level, sound for merely determining a character’s base health? Or how about the Spook Summon priest skill, which costs 2 mana, takes 5.5 seconds to cast and summons a ghostly creature that will remain on screen for 0.48S + 0.12P + 17.2 seconds (unless it’s cast by the one priest who’s unfamiliar with the spell, in which case the duration is reduced to 0.4S + 0.12P + 16 seconds), which creature will attack enemies every 4.68 seconds with Holy Bolts that have a base damage of 2S + 0.66P + 6 unless a party member’s health drops below 4 + 0.2P, in which case it’ll heal said party member for 1 + 0.2P instead of attacking?

I sure hope you’re not confused already, because you’ll have to keep these things in mind if you want to develop your characters properly and not need to grind in order to make it to the end of the game. You’ll also have to keep in mind the damage type of each skill, because enemies have vulnerabilities, resistances and immunities which you’ll need to account for during battle, some even having abilities that will temporarily change their attributes, meaning that choosing the correct skills to use in the given situation will be crucial in the later parts of the game. And you do have a fair amount of choices, as each character has a total of nine skills which may be used, nearly all of them being unique to a specific class, the sole exceptions being the basic Rifle Attack, shared by riflemen and priests, and the ability to recharge, shared by all three classes.
However, what perhaps makes it even more interesting is the concept of skill chains, which means that instead of picking a single action for each character to perform, you’ll pick a chain of three and the character will cycle through them on their own until you either pick a different chain of the three that you can define for each character at any one time or change the skills that make up the current chain, which you can thankfully do during battle as well. This adds yet another layer of complexity and is extraordinarily useful for priests, whose skills seem specifically tailored for such an approach.

Moving past the mechanics, what you’ll notice right away after starting the game is that, while you get to choose three of the nine available characters to form your party, they won’t simply fill in slots. Each character has a story and a personality, and that’s not limited to the text you can see on the party selection screen, but also includes brief cutscenes depicting where they were and what were they doing before being teleported away by the Spirit, a different approach in dialogues and perhaps even an event or two tailored specifically for them along the way. All of this serves to make them seem more real and worth caring for instead of being nothing more than the sum of their attributes and abilities.

Still, that sum of attributes and abilities is certainly what you’ll be more interested in, especially in the later parts of the game, due to the enemies that you’ll be up against. However, that’s not particularly a bad thing, because many fights are actually quite interesting, many enemies making reasonable use of their abilities in order to be even more of a challenge than their attributes alone would first make you believe and some boss fights actually being quite memorable, requiring you to correctly analyze the situation and react very quickly to the changing circumstances.
Oh, and I’ll add something else here because I’m not sure where else to put it: Many may be bothered by it, but I actually like that the game features no consumable items, requiring you to make do with the characters as they are. I generally just hoard such items in games, doing all I can to avoid using them until perhaps the last few fights, which makes the game much more difficult and frustrating for me than the developers intended, but here I could just play like that without it carrying any penalties.

In addition, I need to mention that the music is nice enough and certainly matches the style of the game perfectly and that the graphics do their job more than adequately, again matching the style of the game and also certainly being varied enough to give a unique feeling to each area and even to each enemy. There’s very, very little that is reused over the course of the game, the “worlds” looking completely different, the enemy types using different models which set them clearly apart from each other, the backgrounds featuring a good level of detail without looping and so on. Which, of course, only serves to prove once again that a lot of care was poured into every aspect of this game.

However, it is unfortunate that, despite that amount of attention, certain issues have slipped through, many of them being serious enough to make the game quite frustrating, particularly after the first two worlds. And here I’ll have to start from the fact that there’s very little information included in the game itself. An enemy’s health is only displayed if you hover the mouse over them, some enemies towards the end have so many attributes that some aren’t displayed at all anymore and you’re left having to experiment and see what works first, skill effects aren’t displayed on the skill chains screen and therefore can’t be checked during battle, you aren’t told exactly what a character being specialized or unfamiliar with a skill means, you don’t have any details about how skill effects are calculated… Hell, you aren’t even told what special effects the equipment has, nothing more than an asterisk letting you know that there’s more to a certain item than the listed basic effect!
Yes, you have all the information about skills and equipment in The Spiritual Compendium, but that’s a separate program which you can’t even access directly while playing the game. What’s worse, even the Compendium can be confusing to use, since the names of many talismans are wrong, requiring you to go by the picture, and only the character portraits are used when specifying what effects a skill has depending on who uses it, which made me go back and forth a few times at first, to make sure I was looking at the right one. In addition, the game reacts to any click or key press even while it’s minimized, so if you switch to the Compendium while playing, you’ll find that things happened while you weren’t looking…

Then you have the rather poor implementation of the skill chains, starting from the fact that you’re required to have exactly three skills per chain, without allowing you to select the number if you, say, want to alternate between only two skills, which can’t be done properly with a chain of three. In addition, while excellent for priests, the chains are generally quite a nuisance for mages and riflemen, as they’ll often be most effective if they simply use a single skill repeatedly until the circumstances change. What this means is that, since you have to select each of the three skills in the chain individually, you simply have to do three times the work nearly every single time you want them to change what they’re doing… And in the later parts of the game you’ll want them to change what they’re doing very often, considering the differing attributes and strategies of the enemies you’ll be facing.
Also, while I’m at combat, I must mention that the fact that you can’t change your characters’ default positions can be quite annoying at times, not just because it may require you to switch them around at the start of the first battle from each area, but also because they may be arranged in a way that’ll make switching between those that should be able to take hits less efficient during battle. And, to add this here because I’m not sure where else it’ll fit, the fact that your choice of characters is restricted not simply to three out of nine but to one out of every group of three displayed on the party selection screen may be a problem as well.

Otherwise, I’m quite bothered by the concept of save points, especially when most even cost money to use and they don’t even save the current state of the area you’re in until you exit it! I mean, not only that you may kill a few enemies in an area, save, die in the next fight and then find that the enemies you had just killed before saving are back again when you reload, but you may even clear an area, save, die in the next one and then find that you’ll need to do the previous one all over again as well because you didn’t exit it and then get back inside before saving…

As for minor gripes, there’s the fact that shops don’t buy back items, so you can’t get back any of the money spent on them, that you have very little inventory space, so you can’t keep items around for later use, that the very end of the story just made me roll my eyes and shake my head, and that the game is played entirely in a 490×400 area, selecting the “window maximized” option merely filling the rest of the screen with black. Admittedly, they’re all manageable issues and therefore only minor annoyances which are hardly even worth mentioning when compared to the others, but something could have been done about them as well.

To conclude, I can say that The Spirit Engine certainly has a fair share of significant flaws when it comes to combat and ease of use, but it also has some redeeming qualities and therefore it’s still quite enjoyable and an excellent effort, particularly for what was essentially just an experiment, largely made (with the exception of the music) by a single person and released for free. Actually, it seems to me to be better than the author makes it sound when he openly states that it “suffers from amateurish scripting and graphics, poor coding, a cumbersome menu system and a slow and unrefined combat engine”… And that’s hardly something you’d expect a reviewer to say!

Now let’s see when I’ll get around to seeing what the second is all about…

On July 21, 1969, at 2:56 AM GMT, the first human stepped on the Moon, broadcasting for all to see because nobody’d have believed it otherwise. Of course, many still refuse to believe it, preferring various conspiracy theories that may sound somewhat plausible if you don’t put them to the test, but even the Mythbusters did that and proved that the apparent oddities can be fully explained in the lunar environment. So, as they say: Get over it, we really went to the Moon!
Unfortunately, the problem is that, while we did go to the Moon, we didn’t do it for long, stopping after only three and a half years and not managing to get anywhere else since then either. As such, while it’s now been 43 years since the first human stepped on a celestial body other than the Earth, in December it’ll be 40 years since the last one did as well. Admittedly, there do appear to be plans for manned missions to Mars or various, as yet unspecified, asteroids, but so far they’re only on paper, if even that, and, while I’d like my assessment to be proven wrong, the ongoing trend of slashing funding for science makes that situation unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
Of course, I did recently say that I don’t think that manned missions beyond low Earth orbit are justified at this point and I largely maintain that point of view, but even in that post I did specify that an exception may be made for a permanent research facility located on the Moon, as it could provide some relevant scientific information. However, the bigger problem with the current situation is that which is presented very accurately in the “We Stopped Dreaming” videos narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson: 40 years ago, we as a species, as a civilization, were looking up, dreaming of and planning for the future. Today, after stumbling around for so long, we’re generally just looking down at our feet and idealizing the past.

“When you stumble a lot, you start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us saying ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.” – Captain John Sheridan (Babylon 5)

Noticed last night that the old version of Google Analytics was removed completely, and glancing at what was written on the right led me to the announcement about it as well, so what I feared had to happen, finally happened. Now, despite having created a dashboard meant to mirror the one I had made in the old version, I’m left scratching my head and spending several minutes to get to the reports that I could see at a glance before, though the old version was in itself worse than the one before it in several ways.
Admittedly, from what I could quickly determine back when I did look through the new version’s features, there were a few useful ones being introduced. However, they’re far from being able to compensate for all the bad changes, and in fact the ratio between good and bad changes this time is clearly worse than it was when the version which has now been discontinued was introduced. But that certainly seems to be the rule when any major site makes any significant changes, as I don’t recall any occasion during the past at least several years when I wasn’t extremely unhappy with the result, or when any of the major changes which I’d have liked to see were introduced.
I guess you get what you pay for, as they say. Or, as I recently saw it written somewhere, if you’re not buying, you’re the one being sold… Then again, it’s not that much better when you are buying either, as products available for purchase, regardless of what we’re talking about, seem to be getting worse and worse as well, whether it’s because they’re made to cater to the lowest common denominator, because the manufacturers are cutting corners to reduce costs, because they’re designed by idiots or for whatever other reason.

If I don’t write this now, I’ll end up being completely overwhelmed by the number of issues and articles I need to mention and follow, because there are starting to be too many things going on to properly keep track of, and hardly any of them are any good. That said, don’t expect this post to be an actual overview of the current situation on the Romanian political scene, seeing as you can keep track of that reasonably well through the articles published in the foreign media. For example, you have the one published earlier this week by BBC, but also opinion pieces published last week by The New York Times or Der Spiegel, to name a few. You can also find all you need about the recent meeting between our prime minister, Victor Ponta, and the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, including the expected conflicting statements released afterwards, when Ponta promised that the European concerns will be quickly addressed while interim president Crin Antonescu retaliated rather violently.
What this post does contain are my current opinions about the situation and our potential future, which you will find are largely in line with those I had regarding the battle between Traian Basescu and PSD and PNL when he was first suspended, in 2007, and also during the 2009 presidential elections, both before the first round and after the second. As you can see from those posts, my support for Basescu largely stemmed from the fact that he was, in my view, the only one on the Romanian political scene with the determination, skill and resources to dismantle the system created by PSD, and that’s very important because I certainly see PSD as the greater evil. Admittedly, my opinion of him has deteriorated noticeably after he returned to office as a result of the 2007 referendum, and certainly even more so after he won the 2009 elections, but it’s still less terrible than the one I have about PSD, if not necessarily also about Victor Ponta personally, or about Crin Antonescu, if not necessarily about PNL as a whole.

To outline my current stance, I could start by mentioning that, after Basescu was officially announced as the winner of the 2009 elections, I went back to Remus Cernea’s Facebook page, which I had left between the two rounds in protest of his support for Mircea Geoana, and said that, now that we are safe from the greater evil, we need to roll up our sleeves and get to blocking the lesser one in order to pave the way towards the possibility of a positive vote at the next elections, because there’s a lot of work to do when it comes to that as well. That should make it clear that, at least for the past few years, I haven’t actually been supporting Basescu, but merely wishing to do what must be done to dismantle a terribly rotten and very deeply entrenched system. I didn’t miss the fact that he was creating his own rotten system to replace the old one but, as the current events prove beyond all doubt, this new system is far less entrenched and therefore easier to remove, which would have allowed candidates that I could actually support for the right reasons to waste only a part of their term in order to dismantle it, eventually reaching a point where they’d finally be able to do something actually good for the country.
However, what we’re seeing now is evidence of just how deeply entrenched PSD’s system is, considering how quickly and how efficiently it sprung back into action after being more or less under siege for all these years. In a way, you can say that the difference is merely a matter of speed, seeing as what USL is doing now may well be very similar to what Basescu and PDL have tried to do all these years, but while they struggled for so long and still haven’t managed to properly entrench themselves, the new USL government, which is clearly led by PSD, has accomplished nearly everything in a matter of mere weeks! That’s what’s truly frightening and why Basescu must keep his position, if only to still have someone capable of putting some hurdles in USL’s march towards full and unopposed control of the country.

I do want to mention, however, that at this time I’m not completely against Victor Ponta having a role in the future of the country. I’m certainly against Crin Antonescu, that poor excuse of a man has no way to redeem himself in my eyes anymore, but I’m still willing to consider the possibility that Ponta is trying to do some good things. The problem is that, even if he may have some good intentions, he’s constrained by the “old guard” of PSD, which he’s either unable or unwilling to remove. That said, at the moment I wouldn’t reject a project for the future of Romania which might include him, but only if he’ll leave PSD and vow to never again work with those who have masterminded this rotten system that has taken over the country in 1990 and still holds it firmly in its grasp. In addition, he shouldn’t have a leadership position right away, but instead be monitored for some time in order for others to be able to guarantee that he is keeping his word, only allowing him back at the top if time will prove this sufficiently well.

Otherwise, I’m saddened that there are no good alternatives making their presence known, no matter how weakly, on the political scene, but even more saddened that there are so few protesters who still protest against the entire political class. Worse, even they only protest against everyone and don’t offer any solutions, don’t try to create a coherent new system, even if only on paper, in order to have some clear and positive demands to put forward. I mean, I can certainly admire these few who, despite all hardship, keep on protesting against all of them, but I find it very difficult to actually support them when most of the time it seems that the only difference between them and the larger mass of protesters, and also between them and Crin Antonescu or Remus Cernea, for example, is that they say “we must first get rid of all of them and then we’ll figure something out” instead of just “we must first get rid of Basescu and then we’ll figure something out”. When asked for actual solutions, the most likely reply is that they’re not protesting because they have them, but because they want to be allowed to search for them fairly, which is very disheartening when you consider that they’ve been at it for a good six months! You’d think that, if they were capable of coming up with something, they’d have done so already…
As such, at this moment I’m quite at a loss to say what I’m still hoping for. In 2009, as I said, I was hoping that Basescu and PDL would manage to finally dismantle the system created by PSD and then that one of the alternatives that seemed to be trying to make their way onto the political scene at the time would become stronger by the next elections and start having an impact, at least in the sense of holding the crucial swing votes. However, Basescu and PDL have obviously failed to dismantle that system, said alternatives have either failed to get past the concept stage or, in the case of Remus Cernea and the Greens’ Movement, have actually sided with the enemy by fully and officially allying themselves with USL, and the lack of any grassroots movements that actually have some solutions and positive proposals to put forward makes it quite obvious that nothing else worth supporting is about to appear either…

I guess that at this point the only thing I can realistically wish for is a deadlock. Of course, in itself that’s not desirable, especially when the overall situation is so tricky and the lack of a quick reaction may mean disaster, but it would at least serve to block USL from gaining full control and offer some more time for somebody worth supporting to finally appear. If and when that will happen, I’ll want all of them out of office right away, but until it does, I can only vote a clear “no” at the referendum, seeing as Basescu is still the only one who may have a chance of at least slowing down USL somewhat…
Then again, seeing as most of the population has so much hate for Basescu that they’re blind to what USL is doing and also seem to forget what PSD did in the past, it would appear that the only realistic chance for Basescu to return to office would be for a low turnout to make the referendum invalid, meaning that voting “no” would be detrimental to my cause, because I’d be helping USL reach the required 50%. However, not voting would go against my principles, and I’m not about to do that. I’ll do whatever I can to fight against PSD, but going against my principles is not something I can do.