Cav's Place

The planned post that was supposed to go into more detail about the existing three green or ecologist parties that at least some people are actually aware of in Romania will get delayed until next week because I noticed two days ago that, assuming I won’t forget and won’t sleep through it, on Monday I might just be able to find out something more about exactly what the Greens’ Movement did to get itself registered. I mean, I assume I already know the general idea, but the details aren’t exactly clear. Then again, they seem quite guarded about the whole thing, which is the main reason I’m terribly bothered by it, so they may not offer much additional information anyway, but it’s worth a shot.
I should probably be using at least a little of this additional time to look for more information about these parties myself, because I’m otherwise largely relying on memory to plan that post, but of course I’m not doing that. It’s not supposed to be a scientific paper, after all, so what I have will probably be good enough and it counts as one serious and non-personal post per week, so at least I’m no worse off than I’ve been for the past several months.

Meanwhile, I’m really trying to get back to playing Risen. I had sort of given up for a while after realizing that I must help the Inquisition if I want to play as a mage, since I really didn’t want to do that. I hoped that mages would be pretty much independent, so it was a huge disappointment… Not to mention that you seem to even get more experience for helping the Don’s men, on top of the additional gold which at least makes perfect sense, realistically, so that’s yet another very good reason to avoid helping the Inquisition, on top of the, shall we say, matter of principle. But I guess this is a case of being forced to be pragmatic and doing what you have to do to get what and where you want.
It’s really unpleasant, but I’ll be sort of holding my nose and getting it done. I actually bought it, after all, so really should at least play it. Not that I exactly have a good record when it comes to actually playing games I legally purchase, seeing as I still have the full editions of Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind installed and far from finished despite having purchased them four and a half years ago. Morrowind was actually started and abandoned in the spring of 2008 and I haven’t played it again since, though I quite enjoyed it up to that point. I blame that almost entirely on the respawning enemies.
Really, I should stop writing about needing to grin and bear it for a while and just do it. But there’s a reason I have all those other games, whether bought or not, installed and abandoned as well… I’m playing chess against the computer though, if that counts, but still generally get fucked over even on medium difficulty. In fact I just finished the 900th game since I bought this computer, in the spring of 2008, and the statistics say 339 wins, 102 draws and a pretty depressing 459 losses, so exactly 51% of the total.

While wasting time, I happened to bump into another really good artist, Mario Wibisono. Thinking to add a few of his works to the Fantasy Art Gallery, though some are futuristic and realistic, having nothing to do with fantasy, and even those that could count as fantasy rarely fully fit the genre. And of course I know there are lots of really good artists out there, but I need to just happen to stumble into one when I’m in a very specific mood if I’m to start looking for more information and go through their works, and it would appear that I bumped into one of his works at just the right moment for that to happen. So I’ll think about it. I did change the gallery code recently, after all, just to make it easy to add new artists and images, the former code making that extremely tedious, so should take advantage of it, even if I’ll later have a change of heart and decide to remove him after all.
And since I’m speaking of programming, I should also add that my last talk with Mada, to use the name she seems to strongly prefer, sort of reminded me that I wanted to actually write a simple theme for the blog instead of using this really old one that I modified way back then to make it look more or less like I wanted it to. The result of looking into the matter is still the same, namely that I’m baffled at the complexity and the possibilities for even a basic one and just want to throw the idea away and never think of it again, but I might just try… Eventually…

And for something for the “oddly enough” category, I got a spam comment that advertised an “unique producer of quality fake documents”, if you can believe that! Then it listed a few types of documents, several countries they could supposedly be for and some contact information. Seriously, don’t even know how to comment on this. Weren’t such operations at least supposed to be more or less secret? Or is it in fact a trap for those who could be interested in puchasing something like this?

Anyway, I lost plenty of time writing this, so now I can once again put the idea of getting back to playing Risen today aside because I should start thinking about what to write next in that other thing I’m working on. At least that’ll count as doing something, as little as it may be, so the day won’t be quite completely wasted. It’s only, you know, wasted to a pretty regular extent, give or take a little. And for a day that I was thinking I could get to spend alone but didn’t turn out like that, that’s good enough…

Since, through essentially a trick that I have very serious problems with and will write about in more detail later, Remus Cernea‘s new party, the Greens’ Movement (MV), is about to be legally created under the official full name of Greens’ Movement – Agrarian Democrats (MVDA), it may be a good time to go through the history of green and ecologist parties in Romania, sad as it is. The information has been gathered from a few sources that should be trustworthy, but it has also been tied together with a fair amount of guesswork, so if you have more accurate facts or simply additional verifiable data, do correct me.

The first such party, the Romanian Ecologist Party (PER), was created in the late ’70s, as a response to the Communist Party’s drive for economic growth at all costs, utterly destroying the environment in the process. As you can guess, this was not something that was usually tolerated back then, but the party’s founder was eventually not jailed because the regime didn’t consider PER a threat, plus that even some of its own leaders were somewhat worried by the environmental degradation. As such, for over a decade, PER members attempted to speak out against the regime’s environmental policies, but the need to avoid drawing even more negative attention meant there was in fact very little they could do.

Immediately after the Revolution, in December, 1989, PER started gathering the necessary signatures for official registration, completing the process in early January, 1990. At around the same time, another similar party, the Ecologist Movement of Romania (MER), was formed in Bucharest by another person. Other ecologist parties were forming at the same time in various parts of the country, including another PER, which a splinter group from MER tried to register, taking advantage of the fact that the “real” PER wasn’t yet officially registered. What resulted was a mess typical for the time, during which various people jumped from one party to another, claiming leadership and possibly even acting as the leaders of either party.
Once the dust settled somewhat, PER and MER remained two distinct entities, but the two parties allied with each other and the Romanian Social Democrat Party (PSDR) in that initial mess of a parliament we had between 1990 and 1992, before the first real elections. In the lower chamber, MER held 12 seats, PER eight and PSDR two, making the group the fourth force at the time. In the Senate, however, PER had two seats, MER one and PSDR none, PER and MER allying with the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Christian Democratic National Peasants’ Party (PNTCD) to form a group that was the second force in the upper chamber at the time. Of course, with the National Salvation Front (FSN) dominating both chambers so completely, that didn’t count for much.

When the 1992 elections came along, PER participated as part of the Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR) and was the only ecologist party to still make it into the parliament, obtaining no seats in the Senate but all of four in the Chamber of Deputies. The four were, however, allied with the party that practically led CDR, PNTCD, and together they formed the second largest group in the lower chamber, edging out the Democratic Party (PD) by one seat. Strangely enough, the other parties that formed the CDR seem to have formed their own separate groups, if the official records are to be trusted.
However, exactly what PER stood for at the time is less clear. According to an article written by PER’s founder that I recently read, after that initial mess settled down, some of PER’s leaders were part of the splinter group that separated from MER early on and it was these people that generally steered the party ever since, or at least until recently. He claims that these people, who have also most often represented the party in the parliament, changed the original direction of the party and generally turned it into yet another one that’s just as rotten as the major ones, despite having a much lower visibility and next to no real impact. And from what I know I can agree with what the party was turned into, though I can’t know what the original direction was to be able to say whether that signified a major shift or not.

Moving on, CDR won the elections in 1996, with PER and also something called the Romanian Ecologist Federation (FER) as part of it. PER had five seats in the Chamber of Deputies and one in the Senate, while FER had only one in each. However, in the absolute disaster that the CDR legislature ended up being, there were several changes in the names that occupied those seats and it would also appear that one person from PER ended up as independent of any parliamentary group eventually, though apparently still part of the party. Still, PER and FER were allied in the lower chamber with PNTCD and some of the representatives of the Alternative for Romania Party (PAR), forming the second largest group. However, the group formed by PNTCD, PAR and PER in the Senate was only the fourth largest, FER’s sole representative allying with the other two parties that made up CDR, namely PNL and the sole representative of the National Liberal Party – Democratic Convention (PNLCD) to form the second largest group, edging PD out by one seat.

Yet, as I said, the CDR legislature turned out to be a complete disaster, the alliance disbanded and all the parties that had formed it collapsed at the next elections. The only one to still manage to make it into the parliament afterwards was PNL, obtaining a relatively low number of seats in 2000 but recovering afterwards and currently being Romania’s third largest party. As a result, no green or ecologist parties have been represented in the Romanian parliament since the year 2000.
Still, despite the number of votes obtained by green or ecologist parties in Romania since 2000 being extremely small at a national level, PER continues to exist and other parties holding the same values, perhaps even to a larger extent, have formed over the past several years. Occasionally, on a strictly local level, these parties have managed to remain somewhat relevant, PER having a few mayors and some seats in several local councils and even the other, newer, green or ecologist parties having managed to gain the attention of a sufficiently large minority of voters to have a token representation in a few places. For example, at the last local elections, in 2008, PER obtained three mayoral seats and three different parties with green or ecologist values won seats in various local councils, PER having a total of 180, the Green Party (PV) a total of 40 and the Ecologist Alternative Party (PAE) a total of 14.

Since I mentioned these other parties, I should also mention that PAE no longer exists as a separate entity, having recently been absorbed by the National Initiative Party (PIN). However, yet another ecologist party, the Romanian Ecologist Union (UER) does exist, though that’s largely all I know of it, the only times I saw the name outside of a simple list of registered political parties being when PER and PV were discussing their merger, UER being mentioned as potentially also being included in the new party both times.
PV, on the other hand, is a different matter. Founded towards the end of 2005 and officially registered in 2006, it quickly became a member of the European Greens, to date being the only Romanian green or ecologist party to claim such membership. Not that it helped them in the 2007 European Parliament elections, when they ranked last with all of 0.38%. That didn’t stop them, however, and they struggled to grow and become more relevant, but their best result so far was the 0.62% obtained by Remus Cernea in the 2009 presidential elections. As a curiosity, PV has granted its honorary president title to the person who was MER’s sole senator between 1990 and 1992 and FER’s sole senator between 1996 and 2000.

Which brings us to the current situation. With the addition of MVDA, which I will from now on insist on calling only MV, it can be said that Romania has three green or ecologist parties that at least some people know of, and here I’m talking about PV, PER and MV, and one, UER, that hardly anyone has heard of. It could also be argued that PIN now has an ecologist component, but other recent announcements make me seriously doubt that PIN could still have anything worth mentioning in a positive manner, so I’ll leave that out.
The number may soon change, however, because PV and PER are once again discussing merging into a single party, called the Green Ecologist Party (PVE), possibly also absorbing UER in the process. If these negotiations will actually prove successful this time around, we’ll be left with two parties with this doctrine, namely PVE and MV. Close collaborations between these two parties seem unlikely, however, the differences between the two leaderships appearing irreconcilable and in fact Remus Cernea having stated that he wants nothing more to do with the kind of people that make up the other such parties from Romania. More worryingly, at least for someone who would just want to see something done for the environment as soon as possible and at all costs, these differences seem to have little to do with environmental issues and a lot to do with other aspects such as the rights of ethnic Magyars and the extent to which concepts like the separation of church and state and LGBT rights should be supported at the present time in the Romanian society.

But this is already long enough, so I’ll follow with details about the relations and interactions between PV, PER and MV and the similarities, differences and issues between these three parties in another post. That post should also include what I understand of the method chosen by MV to get itself officially registered… Unless it’ll once again get too long before I’ll reach that point.

Once again, it’s Sunday, so I need to throw together a second post this week. But at least I wrote something non-personal a few days ago, so now I can just do what most people usually do on blogs. Personal posts are something I generally wanted to avoid when I started steadily writing in a blog, but we’ve all seen how that ended up, haven’t we? Still, I do manage to stick to my rules. As long as that remains the case, even if just barely and at times perhaps even by cheating a little, this will continue to go on as planned.
You might have noticed that the posts did tend to get shorter lately, which is something I’m rather bothered by. I had a rule regarding the length which I largely stuck to for quite some time, in part because I found that it helped me come up with another angle or another argument which otherwise I was likely to only remember some time after posting and then get pissed at missing it the first time and not feeling like editing to add it later. At least in the recent shorter posts I deliberately left things out, for various reasons, but that’s hardly a good thing either. After all, as I keep saying, the purpose of this blog was to help myself put my thoughts into words. When I’m not doing that, something’s certainly not working.
The other writing is going somewhat better lately, however, which is a nice surprise. It’s largely because I know this part will really need to be rewritten almost entirely anyway, so I’m giving myself more freedom to just throw some ideas out there and leave details and other concerns for later. It’s still a snail’s pace, but I do manage just a little more per day than I used to before and it also gets done noticeably faster. Instead of struggling with it for one hour and a half or two per day, it tends to get done in no more than one hour, and maybe as little as 30 minutes, unless I actually get in the proper mindset to write noticeably more than usual. If nothing else, this makes for less frustration and as a result I also procastinate a little less when it comes to it.

In other news, bumped into someone from Norway on OkCupid some time ago and so far we seem to be getting along quite well. I guess the first thing that caught my eye in her profile was that she said she’s very good at driving everyone away with her negativity, which obviously meant she wasn’t annoyingly optimistic or cheerful, while I supposedly surprised her by paying close attention to what she wrote and showing no interest in trying to get into her pants in any way. So we probably started from the fact that the other didn’t exhibit certain very common characteristics that bother us very much, added a few shared opinions and common interests, and probably also a general loneliness, though mine obviously far worse than hers, and then we went from there. Eventually, after exchanging other contact information as well, Friday we talked for several hours straight, and quite a lot yesterday and today as well. It’s been a very long time since this last happened, so enjoying it while it lasts.
And then there’s this other person who rather suspiciously approached me some months ago, saying that she really wanted to talk to me but not saying how she knew me because I would supposedly send her packing the moment I’d figure it out. After a couple of chats she pretty much vanished, logged on one more time just when I was about to delete her, then vanished again and logged on again now, a couple of days after I actually did delete her. In the meantime I came up with a pretty solid theory about who she is and how she knows me, but she wouldn’t answer when I tried asking about that, which is really annoying. She does seem like a generally pretty nice girl and her dedication to certain causes, particularly animal welfare and rights, should deeply shame most people, myself obviously included, but I’m staying suspicious as long as the situation remains as it is. Now there is a chance that I won’t get much less suspicious if my theory would prove correct, but confirming it certainly wouldn’t make it any worse. In fact I don’t realistically see how she could make it worse by telling me the whole story even if it’s not what I suspect, no matter what it is.

As for the ranks you see in the title, I’m talking about essentially critic reviews of games that I’m submitting on MobyGames, which are officially called “MobyRanks” on the site. Got a few more in these past few days, but I still have a list of games I’d really like to submit more for, including big titles that I’ll need days to go through everything for. Hope I’ll get to do at least part of it next week and not end up with a perhaps even longer list and still nothing, or all too little, done.
It’s not that submitting these is of that much use, the point of MobyGames being to be a games database, so actual information about the games is most important… But getting an accurate critic score and providing links to as many reviews as possible can in fact be considered a way of providing information about the game, right? One or a few may well be biased, but have enough of them put together and a more accurate picture will emerge. For example there are currently 83 reviews listed for The Witcher 2, there was one more in queue last night when I started and I then submitted 18 more myself, so that’d bring the total to 102. (For comparison, Metacritic only has 73.) That should be more than enough for anyone to pick a few from and form an accurate picture, right?
Unfortunately, as can be seen in the comments on a recent news item, in fact nothing more than an advertisement, posted by practically the only remaining active founder of the site, MobyGames is really going down the drain. There were issues before, which is probably why it was sold in the first place, but the fact that absolutely nothing happened in the nearly one year since it was sold is troubling for many. Of course, it’s nice that at least nothing bad happened yet, but bugs piling up and feature requests going unanswered make some of the most active users decide that they have better things to do with their time than keep struggling there, which in turn means that the other users have even lower chances of getting a reply to their messages and also that the approval queues are likely to get longer and longer, making even more contributors give up. But we’ll see what happens next I guess…

It was announced yesterday that the little rover that could, Opportunity, finally reached Endeavour crater. The actual event apparently took place the day before when, according to the update that was just posted, a drive of 62 meters took the resilient rover to the rim of the giant crater which it had been driving towards for just about two years and ten months, during which it covered some 21 kilometers. The plan ahead is to analyze the rocks found in the area for as long as possible, particularly looking for evidence that water remained on the surface of Mars for long enough at some point in the past for life to potentially develop.
This is something I was hoping to be able to point out last week, when I also pointed out Juno’s launch, instead of adding yet another short post about one specific potential achievement in the field of space exploration. I was basing that “best case” estimate on the previous update placing the rover only 120 meters from the destination on August 4, which is a distance that she is capable of covering in a single day, even if she’s currently driving backwards in order to put less strain on a wheel that has been causing some concern. However, it was unlikely to happen quite so soon, seeing as the terrain close to a giant crater’s rim wouldn’t exactly be the best suited for long and straight drives and the team was likely to be extremely careful either way, not risking any problems right now at the end.

As a quick reminder, we’re talking about a rover that landed on Mars at the start of 2004, meant to cover no more than one kilometer and operate for three months, but which has so far continued operating for more than seven and a half years, covering 34.5 kilometers and returning an amount of data not even dreamed of at the start of the mission. That’s like a car guaranteed to function for five years or 100000 kilometers still working after 150 years and 3.45 million kilometers covered, with no maintenance or repairs whatsoever! And it’s certainly not over yet. The team does have several reasons for concern regarding the health of some of Opportunity’s components, but so far everything can be mitigated with care and patience, none of the potential issues being any threat to the actual survival of the rover.
Considering the sheer size of this crater and the amount of science that can be done there, Opportunity could well spend several years analyzing it, making it highly unlikely that she’ll ever leave it. However, simply getting there is already a tremendous achievement which needs to be added to an already long list, and if she will be able to survive until Curiosity will join her on the surface, which at this point seems quite likely, the achievement will be even greater. At this point, any further observations made by the rover are really just a bonus, but I’m sure they will nevertheless prove to be a very significant bonus.

Once again, Opportunity and her now “deceased” twin, Spirit, are proof of what we humans are capable of when we really try. This is just yet another piece of evidence, if any more were needed, in favor of the idea that we need to put far more effort, not to mention funding, into space exploration, in order to actually achieve what we already know we could achieve… Not to mention that, seeing as the fact that Opportunity is powered by solar panels instead of a nuclear power supply allowed the mission to be extended so much, this is also a very strong argument in favor of using safe and renewable energy here on Earth…

Yesterday, at 16:25 GMT, Juno was successfully launched on its five-year journey to Jupiter. The launch, originally scheduled for 15:34 GMT, was delayed by an anomaly noticed during the final programmed launch timer hold. After several extensions of the hold, what was originally feared to be a helium leak in the rocket’s Centaur upper stage was proven to be a small problem on the “ground side”, which could be quickly mitigated inside the launch window, which ended at 16:43 GMT.
Now, after receiving confirmation, some two hours after launch, of the successful deployment of all three solar arrays, we pretty much sit and wait. The flight plan reveals that the spacecraft will cruise for a little over one year, reaching a point past the orbit of Mars, then make some maneuvers designed to put it on course for an Earth flyby and gravity assist on October 9, 2013, which is required in order to finally reach Jupiter and, assuming nothing goes wrong, achieve orbital insertion on July 5, 2016. Once in orbit, the spacecraft is scheduled to complete 33 highly elongated polar orbits, each lasting 11 days, making for a total primary mission duration of almost exactly one Earth year. At the end of the mission, Juno, by then likely exhibiting some degradation as a result of being exposed to the powerful radiation generated by Jupiter, will be crashed into the planet.
The mission goals are to look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties, including the amount of water present, while also mapping Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields and studying how the planet’s enormous magnetic force field affects its atmosphere. The probe may be able to determine whether Jupiter has a rocky core or it’s entirely made up of gases at increasingly higher pressures, its observations helping scientists narrow down the field of planetary formation theories, or perhaps come up with new ones if none of the existing ones seem to fit the new data. As a result, this mission is not only about Jupiter, but about advancing our knowledge regarding the formation of solar systems in general, whether we’re talking about our own or the countless others we’re discovering at an ever increasing pace.
Juno is also important because it is the first spacecraft that will use solar power at such a great distance. Unfortunately, unlike what can happen with those sent to the rocky planets, the damaging effect of Jupiter’s radiation means that using solar power won’t allow such missions to the giant planet to be extended far beyond the original plan. However, the fact that such a mission is possible at all proves not only that the approach is feasible, but also that solar power can be a very good solution even here on Earth. After all, to put things in perspective, Jupiter receives around 25 times less solar energy than Earth…
As a final “oddly enough” note, the mission planners managed to fit a few items inside the spacecraft that aren’t exactly required to achieve the mission objectives. I’m talking about a plaque dedicated to Galileo Galilei and three LEGO figurines depicting Jupiter, Juno and, of course, Galileo Galilei.