Cav's Place

This week is one of action against CISPA, the new “worse than SOPA” bill that’s being pushed through the United States Congress as yet another part of a global effort by governments and large corporations to control the Internet. Perhaps most notably, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has set up a page that lists the organizations that support this protest, offers a brief explanation of what CISPA means for regular Internet users and allows people to quickly send protest messages through Twitter. They also posted a message detailing other actions you can take.
Of course, this is largely aimed at United States citizens, since it’s not an international law, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it won’t affect you if you live elsewhere: The companies behind most of the very popular sites that a large majority of Internet users use are based in the United States and therefore fall under the incidence of such a bill, so it will affect you just as well. And we do need every voice this time around, individual actions becoming even more important because this bill has been tailored in such a way as to gain the support of the large corporations that operate on-line, so we shouldn’t expect any backing from them. As such, you absolutely must add your voice to those that call for this bill, and any others like it anywhere in the world, to be scrapped.

While I’m at it, I should add that there have been some new positive developments on this side of the pond, in the fight against ACTA: After the previous European Parliament rapporteur on ACTA resigned in protest back in January, the new one has now also strongly advised against ratification. This should mean that we are now even closer to the treaty’s rejection, though there are still battles to be fought and the industry’s powerful lobbyists will be formidable adversaries until the end.

Last but not least, you may want to check out The Guardian‘s “Battle for the Internet” series, which is supposed to continue until the end of the week and present the various battlefronts of this modern war. Regardless of how good or bad the articles will actually end up being, such an effort should at the very least serve to once again remind us that the fight is global and we’re all in this together. The focus may be CISPA this week, but Internet users are facing a constant assault all over the world, not only in countries governed by authoritarian regimes but also in many that are traditionally seen as bastions of freedom and democracy.

My ISP had issues, so I had no Internet access between 11:30 PM yesterday and around 12:30 PM today, which made me lose the qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix, since it started at 9 AM here. Was even starting to fear that, with the Orthodox Easter being tomorrow, the situation could stretch on for days. Luckily, it’s fixed now, but I’m posting this now just to be sure I won’t end up being unable to, in case it’ll somehow happen again. It’s not like my chances of somehow managing to come up with another non-personal post today or tomorrow looked particularly good, so might as well, especially since I’ve been thinking about it for about a month now.

The basic idea is that I’m obviously unable to keep writing even one serious non-personal post per week at anything close to my current standards anymore, but I somehow need to find a way keep writing non-personal posts anyway, because as of now I’m completely out of “slots” for personal ones and I do intend to stick to that rule. As such, the only solution appears to be to lower the standards and more or less say that anything counts, even if it’ll be nothing more than a couple of paragraphs about something that got my attention.
Of course, I’ll still try to do the best I can, and in fact truly intend to write that new post about tackling overpopulation next week, even if I’ll manage no more than a few paragraphs at a time and need multiple days to do so. However, it’s just pointless to keep struggling like this all the time only to somehow manage, usually on Sunday, to throw a crappy post together. After more than six and a half years, I truly am unable to do much of anything anymore and there’s no point to keep struggling against this reality.

This could be a very long post, seeing as it’s a personal update covering six different events that took place over a span of about two and a half weeks. However, perhaps largely because I don’t see myself as being capable of writing quite that much even when it comes to personal issues anymore, I’ll try to keep it from getting away from me. As such, it’ll probably be more of a brief summary, or in fact six brief summaries one after the other, but this should at least allow me to finally post some details about these things after putting it off until so many have gathered.
To be more specific, I’ll say that the three protests I’m talking about are the two against fracking that were organized here on March 23 and 30 and the fourth one against ACTA, organized on March 31. Then I went to a hypermarket twice, on April 2 and 3, to buy some things, and finally ended up going with dad to have an ultrasound two days ago, on April 10. So, even if two and a half weeks passed between the first and the last event in this series, the middle four took place during a five-day period. As you can imagine, that was extremely draining, though seeing a doctor was probably still worse than all of them put together.

The first protest against fracking was the worst. It included a march as well, which was a first for me, and the starting location, where we stayed for about one hour, was not the place where the regular protests take place, so I already had reasons to be wary. In addition, the organizers came prepared with a pretty large number of banners and enough sheets of paper with slogans written on them for pretty much every participant, seeing as I counted a total of about 70 people, which meant that I felt pressured to do more than simply stand around and shout or chant when I agreed with what was being said and those around me did the same. However, I obviously had no intention to be any more visible than being a part of such a small group already made me, so I refused when I was handed one of those sheets of paper. Unfortunately, that drained me so much that I turned away when those who were gathering signatures for an independent candidate for the upcoming local elections got to me even though I actually intend to vote for him, if he’ll gather enough signatures to run. I wanted to sign, still do, but I simply couldn’t see myself as interacting in any way with anyone at that point anymore.
Once the march started, I waited for about a third of the people to start moving before I moved myself and then just planned to walk with the group, staying more or less in the middle in order to reduce my visibility as much as possible. However, I suddenly found myself very visible and needing to interact when I felt a tap on my shoulder and when I turned I saw a guy who asked me whether I wanted to “befriend Alex”. Confused, I asked who and why only to have him shove one of the sticks holding up the largest banner into my hand, point to the kid who was holding the other one and then leave. At that point, there was little I could do but hold on to that stick, which resulted in something of a tug of war between me and the kid, as he wanted to go to the front of the column, where that banner actually should have been and also where children were specifically being asked to go, and I obviously had no intention of doing so.
By the time someone else finally asked whether I wanted help and took that thing away from me, I was moments away from a major breakdown, looking desperately around for a familiar street that I could just run away on. Then again, I’m still amazed that I managed to somehow hold it together as long as I did despite being very visible and needing to interact, both with the kid, who kept trying to tell me where to go, and with others who occasionally told me to hold it better, seeing as I obviously was holding it wrong and sometimes also bumping either it or myself into others. And I’m probably even more amazed that, at least for a few minutes, I managed to hold high the sheet of paper I was given by the guy who took the banner from me, though soon enough even that was too much and I didn’t do that anymore either.
Thankfully, shortly after no longer holding the sheet of paper above my head, the kid came to take it away from me as well, so I could finally drop back and try to recover, as much as I could possibly recover while still in the middle of a group of people. Still, it was enough for me to be able to get back to shouting and chanting in earnest once we reached the end of the march, for the 15 or 20 minutes until the group broke up because the protest in that area was only authorized until 6 PM. Granted that I then ignored the calls to regroup in the usual place and continue protesting there and just got the fuck away, but at least I somehow made it that far…

But I said I’ll just write summaries and that was more than a summary, so let me quickly move on to the second protest now and say that I only stuck around for about one hour because I didn’t like the crowd. There were slightly over 100 people when I left, but they were mixing issues a lot and some even seemed downright suspicious, so I spent most of that hour wandering around and waiting for the situation to change, rarely joining in the shouting or chanting. But at least I wasn’t the only one doing that, because I noticed that the regular protesters, those I already knew from the previous protests, seemed to share my view and were also largely just wandering around or even breaking off from the group and apparently waiting for something to change.
I should mention that the original plan for this second protest to include a march towards the presidential palace, which I didn’t mean to take part in because, unlike the previous one, it was bound to result in problems with the police. From what I learned afterwards, it appears that some 30 or 40 people, probably the regular protesters, actually did start marching shortly after I left, though the rest stayed in the square. As such, I left pretty much when I would have left anyway, the difference being that the crowd largely stopped me from actually participating at all.

As for the third protest, which was the fourth in the series of protests organized here against ACTA, I unfortunately have to say that it basically was no protest at all. I was there right on time, as usual, but only saw around 15 people, the number only reaching around 40 an hour later, at 7 PM, and passing 50 around 7:30 PM. I did try to give it an honest chance and stayed until 7:45 PM, seeing as the original “schedule” said that the protest will end at 8 PM, but I could do little more than wander around, not even shouting anything more than a few times because there were rarely more than one or two people doing so and therefore joining them would have made me too visible. I didn’t even write anything when that girl who usually does this came and asked me to write a quality that I think Romanians have, or at least one that I think we should develop, in fact probably being quite rude to her in a desperate attempt to make her leave me alone before the interaction would make me lose it completely and run away.
Overall, it was an unpleasant and very disappointing experience, probably made worse by the fact that one of the regulars actually asked whether we should call it quits, seeing as nothing was actually happening, only to be shouted down by another. Since, perhaps with the exception of the guys who had decided to put on some music by playing it on a phone and amplifying it through two loudspeakers, nobody was really doing anything, calling it quits and trying to plan better next time was the reasonable course of action, but after he was shouted down almost everyone stuck around anyway, still doing little more than wasting time. A few of the regulars tried to put up some papers with slogans written on them around 7:30 PM, but by that time it was too little, too late.

Moving on to the first shopping trip, the original plan was mainly just to pick up some things that I needed and was running out of, plus perhaps some sweets, because I hadn’t touched anything containing sugar for some two months in order to help my body try to get rid of the yeast infection that had become noticeable again after that bad cold I had. However, I also asked dad whether I should pick up anything else and he left me a list and the money for the items on it, plus around 50 RON more. Since I already had enough for what I actually needed to get, that gave me the possibility to get some more things, especially since he also bought two items that I originally planned to try to get myself if I had the money to spare.
The problem was that, once there, I soon panicked and kept meaning to just abandon the whole idea and come back without buying anything. I wandered around the place for quite some time, trying to decide what to do, until I finally found an empty aisle and could take some time to recover. Afterwards, I just picked up a basket and tried to put what I meant to get in it while I could still hold it together, adding quite a few things that weren’t on either list at first but which would be useful anyway, seeing as I’m talking about food that I actually wanted and therefore knew wouldn’t be left to spoil even if nobody else’d touch it.
Now I should also mention that the reason why I went back a day later was because I had seen a training suit that seemed good enough while also being surprisingly cheap and I’ve been looking for one for quite some time, seeing as one of the two I wear around the house when it’s not really hot has been basically falling apart for years now. I could have had the money to buy it then, if I wouldn’t have picked up some of the things I added on top of what I had on the two lists, but I correctly estimated that the three bags I had on me would be just about filled with the other things I was getting and I obviously am not going to get plastic bags from shops, so carrying it would have been something of a problem and I decided to leave it for later.

Leaving that for later actually proved rather fortunate, as apparently dad had forgotten to add something to the list, so when I went back the next day, after getting some more money from him, I could add that as well, on top of the training suit. Then, since I had enough for it, I threw in some more things, such as a new cap to finally replace the one I’ve been wearing everywhere for so many years, a little more tea and food and also a couple of cheap items that I had meant to get the day before but for some reason decided not to. Somewhat unfortunately, I also added some more sweets…
The problem was that, despite spending some 50% more on the first day than on the second, it was only when I added the two together that I got shocked by the amount, despite dad seeming surprised by how cheap some of the things I got were compared to what he’s used to paying for similar or even identical items bought from the supermarket across the road. Then again, I was particularly bothered by the amount I spent on the entirely unnecessary sweets, which added up to 14% of the total. That’s especially weird when you consider that it’s usually me who frowns at the fact that there are too many sweets around the house most of the time, not to mention that I was obviously very bothered by the fact that dad got some really good things during those two months when I wouldn’t allow myself to touch any of them. Of course, this would also perfectly explain my little binge, which in truth doesn’t amount to that much, but I’m usually very careful with money, so I was really bothered by it.

And now I’m left with the ultrasound. You see, I had asked for one some months ago, when my right kidney seemed to be telling me that I should have it checked out, but since dad just gave me the option of going with him instead of dragging me there, of course I didn’t go. However, when they went to my grandparents on Saturday he left me a note saying that he’s scheduled for another one Tuesday morning and that I should be ready to go out the door at 10 AM if I want to come. Of course, the very mention of something related to doctors resulted in me having a breakdown and I needed some time to turn the panic into rage and eventually recover after deciding that there was no way I could possibly end up going, which was still what I thought about it Monday evening.
Well, that changed many times before I went to bed that night, as I kept changing my mind about it every few minutes, with all the inner turmoil that caused. However, when I went to bed I was once again set on not going, so didn’t even set my phone to ring in the morning… Only to find myself waking up and needing to go to the bathroom at 8:55 AM, likely because of the large salad eaten the night before. That made me think that I should try to go after all at first, but by the time I was back in my room I had changed my mind yet again and curled in a ball under the blanket, afraid that he’d take the fact that I went to the bathroom then as an indication that I meant to come along and will come in to ask what am I waiting for when the time will come to leave. However, I then changed my mind yet again a few more minutes later, somehow managed to get dressed and, after changing my mind twice more, eventually went out the door with him.
Of course, I was frozen in fear all the way, which was certainly not helped by the fact that the place seemed to be quite far and dad obviously didn’t know exactly how to get there at first, so he drove around for quite some time before figuring something out. We then also had to wait for a while and he went in first, so I had even more time to think and worry about it, packing myself as tightly as I could and doing my best to look as far away from anyone or anything as I could. Granted that he didn’t actually mean to go in first, but he just softly asked for my jacket, without doing anything else when I just squeezed myself in an even tighter space and ignored him, and I obviously wasn’t going to go in if I was given the option to wait longer.
Still, I ended up inside after he was done, and he had probably told the doctor something, because she tried to reduce the interaction to a minimum, only saying something when she needed me to do something. Of course, he denied it when I asked him afterwards, saying only that he told her to let him know if there’s anything wrong, but he may have made up some lie about some other problem I supposedly had, so he will avoid the “embarrassment” of just saying that “at this age” I was still scared out of my wits. That’d seem to fit what I know about how he is, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it unless I’ll have some evidence of the contrary.
But at least that’s over with and, thankfully, there seems to be nothing wrong other than a little sand in my left kidney. Now that’s surprising, since the one that hurts from time to time is the right one, which is also the one I was told I had sand in the last time I had an ultrasound, at the end of 2004, and the one I was told was out of position the first time I had one, perhaps some ten or so years before that, but I can only be glad that it seems to be perfectly fine now and try to shrug it off if it’ll hurt again. I’ll even try to go with the fact that she said there’s really nothing wrong except that bit of sand and ignore the fact that my prostate showed up as being significantly bigger than dad’s, which would be quite worrying at my age. I looked up how big it should be and was certainly concerned when I found that, while two of the dimensions are close to the norm, the smallest one is nearly 50% above what it should be, but since she said it’s fine, I guess it’s fine…

So much for keeping it short… Certainly didn’t mean to get significantly above 1500 words, but here I am just getting over 3000 now. This also took me some five hours to write, just so you know, and now I’ll be going through it again to make corrections, so I’ll probably add at least another 30 minutes to that, if not another hour. And I didn’t even write something non-personal, to say that it was worth the time spent on it… Not that I’d still be able to spend so much time on anything non-personal, unfortunately, as you can clearly see by the scarcity of such posts and the fact that I haven’t even written that one that has to do with overpopulation that I’ve been meaning to write for about a month now…

Watched CD Projekt‘s “Spring Conference” three days ago and the plans revealed in the part that had to do with GOG.com made me want to send them an e-mail with a few comments. However, I didn’t do it so far, so I won’t have that as a “skeleton” to base this post on, but I’d like to write it to explain what I was thinking about anyway. Perhaps I’ll even manage to write and send the e-mail afterwards, doing it the other way around and summarizing the post into the e-mail instead of expanding the e-mail into the post.

So everyone will know what I’m talking about, I’ll say that I’m referring to their decision to create new price points, namely $14.99 and $19.99, in order to be able to offer newer games. In itself, that’s very reasonable, but when you look at the specific games that use these new price points and see how much they sell for in other places, you’ll start to notice a problem. Granted that it may be too early to get a good idea about what will end up happening when at the moment there are only two games with a base price of $14.99 and two others with a base price of $19.99, but when people are correctly pointing out that you can purchase The Whispered World and Assassin’s Creed (Director’s Cut Edition) elsewhere for half the price, if not even less, something’s very wrong.
In their defense, GOG.com representatives state that their releases include a lot of additional content, in fact calling the games that will be released for $19.99 “Premium Editions” and making sure to stress that the bundled soundtracks alone would otherwise cost about half as much as the entire bundle costs if purchased from them. However, while this would explain the price in these two cases, it means that, instead of getting the “free goodies” that GOG.com is known for, the customers will essentially be forced to pay for the sountrack as well even if they’d only want the game, which is terribly unfair and just plain wrong.

Now this “higher price than elsewhere” issue isn’t new for GOG.com, as some of the games that they sell for $9.99, and perhaps even some of those they sell for $5.99, can be found for less elsewhere, but most of those are old games that they patched in order to work with newer operating systems and drivers. As such, they aren’t only selling the games themselves but this service as well, and for that they have every right to charge an additional fee and add it to the price, especially since the unpatched games themselves could otherwise be unusable or nearly so. However, this is not and probably will not be the case for these newer and more expensive games, as these will generally require no such patches.
What’s worse, I’ll say that in most cases it’s only these more expensive games that they’d even need to justify the prices for, because I personally consider anything up to $10 to be a pretty fair price to pay for the downloadable version of a game that you actually want to purchase, regardless of what other offers are available. I could overthink it and say that it’s probably a perfectly fair price for great single games up to about ten years old and for good ones up to about seven years old, but the price itself is fair and could be maintained for even older games if they’d be bundled with others and/or with expansions, each additional title increasing the maximum “age” of the bundle by up to 50% of the initial value, the exact amount depending somewhat on its quality and length. Yes, that’d also imply forcing people to pay for things they may not actually want, but those things would actually be other games instead of content that’s likely to only be valuable for true fans and collectors. Plus that, as I keep saying, $10 is a fair price, so I can simply look at it in terms of how much can I get for this amount of money, even if I’d only “get” the knowledge that my purchase would support a distribution platform that I otherwise like, while when the price exceeds $10 I’ll be trying to see how little can I pay for the specific game that I want.

Of course, if I’m talking about how this affects me personally, it’s quite obvious that at this point it doesn’t affect me at all. No matter how much I’d otherwise want to support GOG.com for the fact that everything they sell is DRM-free, for all the effort they put into making these older games available and playable, and for their attitude in general, I still can’t purchase anything from them because they only accept credit cards and PayPal, which I don’t use and in fact actively boycott due to their “blockade” against WikiLeaks, but this is an issue for another time. My main concern right now is that this new direction of theirs, which I supported when it was first announced and then liked even more when I noticed that the first of the newer games they added were indie titles, may turn them into just another evil distributor, even if we’re talking about a kind of “evilness” that’d be noticeably different from that displayed by the others.
To put it bluntly, I am not and will not be willing to pay extra for digital collector’s editions of games, particularly if they’ll sell for more than $10. When talking about games that I’d actually want to purchase legally, if they’ll finally meet those in my situation halfway someday and provide some “two steps from cash” payment methods, as I call them, I’ll probably be willing to pay a little more in order to purchase from them, whether because their version is guaranteed to be DRM-free or even simply because my purchase would support a distribution platform that I otherwise like. However, I certainly won’t be willing to pay twice the price of the game itself just to get some additional content that I’ll probably have no use for. So keep this in mind GOG.com: For these newer and more expensive games, I’m quite sure that most people won’t consider it a violation of your business model if you’ll leave out any additional content that you can’t add to the bundle for free. However, forcing people to pay more simply because you want to only sell what essentially are digital collector’s editions significantly mars your image as being a very fair distributor that treats customers right…

It is now five years since I started blogging steadily. Unfortunately, as I already mentioned, the end certainly seems very near. Then again, it wasn’t all that much better at the end of the first year either and yet I still somehow managed to make it this far… Not that it did me any good, as it’s only getting harder and harder all the time and the results are obviously worse and worse.
At the moment, I have four posts in mind, only one of them being personal, so at least the lack of ideas is not the problem. However, the personal one does seem to be the one I’m most likely to write this weekend, as the second of the week. That’d fill the last “slot” I currently have available for such posts and therefore make it quite likely that I’ll stop respecting those rules I have set for myself when I started this blog as early as next week, in case I once again won’t manage to write anything else during the first half of the week then either. My potential “salvation” at this point has to do with something that was announced last evening, which somehow connects with my short-term demands from the software industry and is therefore something I may just manage to rant about, particularly if I’ll somehow manage to send an e-mail about it to those directly involved today or tomorrow, as I currently plan to do.

At the moment, this is pretty much all I can say. My mood is pretty much the same it’s been for over six and a half years now, for the same reasons, but the worries and concerns obviously keep piling up, so it’s a matter of things being pretty much the same, only worse. But that’s always the rule, isn’t it?