Cav's Place

As anyone who’s interested would already know by now, Curiosity has successfully landed on Mars. What’s more, during those first few minutes after touchdown, when it could use Mars Odyssey to relay the data to Earth, it has even sent a couple of small pictures (first, second), showing its shadow and the terrain just around itself and causing all NASA sites that carried any information about it to promptly crash under the strain of the generated traffic. More data should be coming around this time, as the Odyssey will make another pass over it.

The mission itself will take a long time to actually get going, because it’s meant to last for at least about two Earth years but all systems have been designed and successfully tested to function for at least three times that long and the power supply should last for well over a decade. Of course, that doesn’t sound like quite so much when you factor in the fact that Opportunity has been functioning for over eight and a half years, but its primary mission was only supposed to last for about three months, so the results started coming in very quickly because they had to collect as much data as they could while they were reasonably certain that there won’t be any problems.
In fact, what I saw in the press conference just now was that they have a very long checklist that they’ll need to go through in order to ensure the health of such a complex rover and for the next few weeks we’ll probably be getting nothing but the results of tests, which may even stretch on for the next few months, and the base of the target mountain will probably only be reached after about a year. Still, even those test results may mean something, as in order to test the systems they’ll have to be analyzing something, so let’s see what happens… And let’s hope that the nuclear generator Curiosity carries won’t end up damaging another planet as well, because I’m still very uneasy about using something like that and would have really wanted them to find another solution.

Yesterday was scheduled something which was supposed to be somewhere between a protest and a public debate, the debate part being that which interested me, because the “hardcore” group which generally gather at the Fountain in University Square had announced that they were going to present their proposed solutions and also ask any other participants to add their own to the list as well instead of doing nothing but saying who and what they don’t want. So, seeing as I’ve been asking all protesters to come up with solutions all along, I wrote down an overview of the electoral reform I have in mind, which would be my primary request from the current politicians and also my main requirement before I could see any calls for resignation, impeachment and so on as being able to solve anything, and went, wondering if anything will come out of it. Unfortunately, as it could have been somewhat expected, nothing did, at least not before I left, because the gendarmes weren’t about to allow it.

If I include myself despite wandering around instead of sitting with the rest, ten of us were waiting around the metro station entrance when three gendarmes showed up and asked for identification, which made me become even more edgy and eventually wander off for a while. By the time I returned, the three were gone, but two returned soon after and continued debating with the organizer of the event, apparently quite casually, before said organizer led the rest of us to the location where the event was actually supposed to take place, with the gendarmes in tow but taking their time.
Once there, a few guys took to waving the flag they had brought and unrolling the one large banner they had, which was just a call to discuss and debate, without mentioning any specific issues or names. However, that was obviously too much for the gendarmes, who immediately crossed the street to pester the organizer again. Or, more exactly, those two merely pestered him, but then two others came, along with one of those trucks used for arrests, shouting at the poor guy from some 30 centimeters away through a loudspeaker and saying that we had to clear the area because it was an unauthorized gathering and we were supposedly blocking the road and disturbing the passersby, even though we were just a few people leaning against the fence, some even standing on it and therefore taking up no space whatsoever on the sidewalk, and generally being quiet with the exception of the organizer who kept trying to talk to them, while they were standing right on the bicycle lane and shouting through a loudspeaker.
Still, most of us did scatter a little after what appeared to be a final warning and watched from a few meters away as a few guys were still trying to discuss the matter with the gendarmes, until they decided to give up as well, with the organizer apparently leaving the banner there and leading us away while waving the flag and asking out loud what law will they claim he’ll be breaking next if he’ll simply wander through the city waving the country’s flag. The gendarmes were also still following us as well, but we also seemed to have grown slightly in number, with some five or so people added to the group, at least one being a passerby who had apparently decided to join in for a while after witnessing the gendarmes’ behavior.
But that was pretty much the end of it for me. The group seemed to have split, I tried to keep up with the six who were in front, but soon they noticed that the others appeared to have stopped and stopped as well while I kept going. I meant to get back to them, but was already quite edgy because of the whole situation and one guy had also suggested to the organizer that we should go to some sort of bar or restaurant nearby where a lot of people seemed to be and see if we can gather some more from there, and I was really not keen on that. So I kept going, all the way to the University Square, had a look around there as well, then went all the way back to the original location before giving up completely after failing to spot the group again but spotting a couple of cars belonging to the gendarmerie waiting behind trees, possibly just in order to quickly react in case the group would have tried to return.

Now I’m left with that overview of the electoral reform I have in mind, written down and printed out, so at least I finally did that thanks to this… But it’s not like it was of any use, seeing as I didn’t even show it to anyone while there and feel too edgy to even post it anywhere or send it to any of the organizers now. So, in the end, I more or less just wandered around for a couple of hours on a hot summer day without accomplishing anything… Though you can say that I at least attempted to take part in my first protest, or event, on political and social themes, seeing as I have so far avoided all of these, both because I couldn’t join in when I didn’t see actual solutions being brought forward, or at least none that I could actually support, and because these situations with the gendarmes are a given whenever something like this is announced.

Otherwise, today and for the next two days the temperatures are supposed to approach 40°C in the shade again, possibly even going slightly over that value on Tuesday, so I’ll be watching my computer’s temperatures carefully again, especially since it claimed to have very briefly overheated two or three more times even after I tried to clean it inside… And I’ll see whether I can just go on a couple of hours of sleep and wake up around 8 AM, if not even earlier, tomorrow to follow any announcements regarding Curiosity‘s landing.

Today I should have written something about a conclusion, even if only a temporary one, to our political crisis, seeing as our Constitutional Court was supposed to rule on the validity of the referendum. However, I must limit myself to just a simple update, because the Constitutional Court instead announced that it’ll delay its decision until September 12 due to supposedly receiving conflicting information regarding the total number of voters, requesting updated information regarding the voter lists by August 31. Crin Antonescu will remain interim president until then.

To summarize what happened, on Sunday we had a referendum to impeach our current president, Traian Basescu, after he was suspended by the Parliament, which is currently controlled by his opponents, USL. According to the official results, 87.52% of votes were in favor of impeachment, but the turnout was only 46.24% after Basescu and PDL asked their supporters not to vote. As a result, Basescu should normally return to office regardless of the results of the vote, because the law states that the referendum is only valid if the turnout exceeds 50% of the total number of voters present on the lists.
However, USL and their supporters now claim that the referendum should, in fact, be valid because last year’s census showed that Romania’s population has dropped significantly and therefore the lists are outdated and the required turnout has actually been achieved, and they have sent documentation supporting their claim to the Constitutional Court. Yet, even according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there are no other lists and the only confirmed total number of voters is the one specified before the referendum. It may not accurately reflect the data from the most recent census, but the full results of that are only supposed to be made public in late 2013 or even early 2014, not to mention that the current leaders of USL have been quoted at the time as saying that the census was so poorly organized and there have been so many errors that it could never be used to even determine the number of Romanians left.

Meanwhile, while PDL is asking for the government to resign and for Basescu to be reinstated immediately, some leaders of USL are looking beyond the Constitutional Court’s decision and suggesting that a second referendum should be organized, which I always believed to be a probable scenario in case the turnout won’t be reached, as they’re not going to give up before they gain full control of the country and squash anybody who may stand in their way. At the same time, the Parliament did recently grant itself the right to determine the validity of the referendum and, while prime minister Victor Ponta has stated that he will abide by the Constitutional Court’s ruling, Crin Antonescu has repeatedly stated that the only acceptable outcome is Basescu’s impeachment or resignation, according to the vote of the majority.
Antonescu’s stance is mirrored by many others, be they politicians, activists or regular citizens, with the politicians and many regular citizens saying that Basescu should be impeached regardless of the turnout and the activists and the other regular citizens generally saying that, while the low turnout should rule out impeachment, the only acceptable outcome is his resignation, because the majority should decide. However, all of these seem to forget about the 2009 referendum, when the parties that currently make up USL were calling for a boycott but which was actually valid, having a 50.95% turnout. Then, 72.31% voted in favor of switching to a unicameral Parliament and 83.31%, which actually means over 360000 people more than those who voted in favor of impeachment on Sunday, voted in favor of limiting the number of members of the Parliament to a maximum of 300. However, nobody except PDL and Basescu, who has repeatedly offered his resignation in exchange for modifying the Constitution according to the results of that referendum and also reducing the president’s term back to four years, seems to have much of a problem with completely ignoring that majority…

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…