Cav's Place

This book is just a maelstrom. It brings the whole series together, all the characters together, for one fight, one purpose, one deciding moment. There are still far too many lucky coincidences, far too many characters survive when they shouldn’t have, too many things happen that shouldn’t happen, the writing still isn’t as good as it should be… But there comes a moment when none of that matters anymore, when you see how everything comes together and are drawn inside that maelstrom yourself. The ending may be something of a disappointment for some, myself included, but… One hell of a ride. One hell of a ride.

Rating: 4/5

I guess that’s all I can say about this day, and likely about how the whole week will go. Then again, there’s not much else to say about most of my life, is there? Well, all right, there would be other things to say, but hardly any of them good in any way…
I sent another long message to Ami, who either way is terribly busy this month, to babble about some more worries that are either utterly stupid or utterly pointless… Or both… I guess it’s at least somewhat different from babbling about a game or some random thing I saw, but probably even worse. Who the fuck knows anymore? I sure don’t… And I doubt I’ll ever know or do much of anything again, at least not until there’d at least be someone to hold me through a night and tell me it’ll get better soon, it’ll be all right. Someone I’d believe when telling me that. And I can’t think of anyone who could do either of these three things. Especially the last one, since things never get better… They only got better once, and even then only to get so much worse later.
So here I am not doing shit about anything. Didn’t even read what I meant to today, didn’t even touch that games played page, only played a little, only managed to write a little late at night… Watched something, which took a fair bit of time, but nothing much came out of that either. Waste of time, space and resources. My days, me, whatever…
I was even planning to write two non-personal posts this week, because for quite some time I was barely struggling to have one non-personal one per week, the other being personal, but that’s obviously not going to work. Not like anything I do ever does.

The last post was the 500th on this blog and I think it’s time to write a little about the plans I have for this site’s future, especially since last night I think I just finished the actual code for a new section of it. I’m not sure if I’ll also manage to enter all data to my satisfaction by the end of the year, since I’m taking it so very slowly, but I think I will. As soon as that happens, you’ll start to notice changes around here.
Right now, if you go to www.cavsplace.com you automatically get redirected to blog.cavsplace.com, since this is the only fully functional section of the site. But that will stop as soon as there will be some other active section that you may want to get to, so from that moment on you’ll see a simple splash page if you visit www.cavsplace.com, from which you’ll be able to get to any of the active sections. And the sections themselves will need to link to each other, likely through some sort of navigation bar placed at the top, though I’m not fully certain of that yet so it may not get implemented at the same time as the splash page.

There are currently two other sections in the works. I was only thinking of one at first, but the other just sort of happened and in fact I started to work on it even before doing anything for the one I had planned. Still, once I did start working on the planned one I pretty much gave up on the other, so don’t expect to see it go live anytime soon, especially since there’s a whole lot of tedious work involved when it comes to adding content to it, not to mention a fair bit of coding left to do as well. However, unlike the planned one, this other section easily can and very likely will go live even with only a small part of the planned content, but until then I’m not even going to say what it’s about.
But let’s move on to the section that was on my mind since getting my own site, which is about all the games I ever played. It’s been quite some time since I started trying to remember them all and the full list currently exceeds 150, though I’m only absolutely sure of about 130. First I took to adding them to my list of games played on IGN, along with a rating and a brief note for each, and then, around the start of this year, started rating them on MobyGames as well. Thankfully I also saved my IGN list in a file, so I didn’t lose anything when they decided to destroy pretty much everything that was nice about the profiles you could make on that site to accomodate people whose attention spans can’t exceed half a second. So the new section of the site will basically just be a list of those games. For each game you’ll get a link to its entry on MobyGames, the ratings just as I entered them on MobyGames, for the categories displayed there when you try to rate the respective game, and a brief note, which is the one I entered on IGN if available or one written when adding the game to the list if I hadn’t added it to IGN before they destroyed the profiles. The script also calculates and displays an overall score for each game, which is a weighted average of the individual ratings entered. In case of the games I also wrote reviews for, you’ll also get links to those, both on the blog and on MobyGames. Some changes will obviously need to be made to some of the ratings, and possibly even some of the notes, once I’ll see them all side by side and be able to compare better, but that will come later.
Right now, both of these new sections are written pretty much entirely in JavaScript. The other section actually requires a little bit of JavaScript, but the games played one does not, so I may decide to eventually port them both, excepting that little piece of code, into Ruby on Rails, since my host supports it, to avoid issues caused by the way different browsers interpret JavaScript, but that’s not going to happen too soon. (Speaking of such issues, thanks go to Shiri for some testing in Chrome, which apparently has some serious quirks when it comes to dealing with JavaScript.)

I’ll also need to do something about the blog’s theme at some point, but probably not too soon. It’s very old and, though so far it worked, likely thanks to being so simple, who knows what problems may arise whenever a new WordPress version comes along. I still want it to look basically just as it does now, but I probably should get a newer simple theme, to make sure the code itself is better suited for new versions of WordPress, and then modify just what I have to in order to make it look as this one currently does.
What I do need to do is make all the sections of the site use the same style, which implies using the same style sheet for the whole site. The new sections already do, so just the blog is left. That’ll also mean adding the blog’s specific style code into that style sheet, which should in fact make it even easier to change the blog’s theme when I’ll finally get around to doing that as well. By the way, the font used has been Segoe Print ever since I first started the blog at the old address. If you see something else, such as Comic Sans MS, it means you don’t have that one installed. Due to some of the reactions it can generate, the new sections no longer try to use Comic Sans MS if Segoe Print is not available, but the blog still does at the moment. This will be taken care of when I’ll make it use the same style sheet as the rest of the site.

And just when you thought that it was quite insane enough, it would seem that airport security is getting even worse. I do wonder if people will finally do something to stop this trend at least now, since plenty seem bothered by it, but unfortunately polls say most won’t, because they’re exactly the frightened sheep those in power wish them to be, believing they have to put up with all these things or the terrorists have won. And, of course, the terrorists do win thanks to that attitude, the only question being which ones.
Still, it’s nice to see that some do take action, through various means. Since this is not only about airport security but about a general trend in society, I can only hope that the numbers of those who act out against such measures will grow and those of the frightened sheep will dwindle, though experience says that it almost always turns out exactly the other way around, with the few rational individuals being crushed by the combined efforts of those in power and the mindless masses.

But let’s stop for a moment and just focus on these measures themselves, leaving the all too obvious greater implications aside. There’s quite enough to say about the risks posed by these scans, plus the privacy worries and discomfort associated with both possible procedures. Not to mention that, from the point of view of security, they still can only really stop copycats, because they only look for potential terrorists that’d use the methods that have been used in the past, when any serious attack planned by a major organization in a Western country is likely to involve an entirely new strategy. So, overall, we have yet another method of greatly inconveniencing, harming and taking away the freedoms of regular people in exchange for an all too small increase in security.
At first glance, it would appear that privacy is the primary concern of those who complain about these measures, along with the discomfort caused by being groped in such a manner if they opt out of the scanner. But different people are going to react to this in different ways, so this sort of response is to be expected from the mainly puritanical society seen in the USA but would perhaps be quite unlikely in more socially (and sexually) liberal countries. In the end, though even this can cause certain problems, excepting the victims of rape or abuse, who have every reason to be frightened by the prospect, being seen as if naked or even groped in such a manner shouldn’t realistically be a major cause of concern in itself. The fact that you’d likely be arrested if you’d show up naked or start groping your significant other in such a manner while waiting your turn is something that needs to be discussed separately, however.
What I see as truly worrying are the potential health hazards posed by those scanners. Even occasional exposure could be somewhat dangerous for certain categories of people, such as those who already have or are very likely to develop cancer or for small children, but imagine what they could do to those who travel by plane frequently. Since we’re talking about radiation, the damage tends to accumulate over time, so repeated exposure leads to ever increasing risks. That means that every single person who goes through the scanner forfeits just a little more of their right to a healthy life each and every time. The fact that people are exposed to similar or even greater doses of radiation in plenty of other places and in plenty of other ways isn’t an excuse, as it only means that we have our work cut out for us if we’re to eliminate such hazards from our lives, so we must make absolutely sure that no more will be added to the list.

Then again, considering the huge environmental footprint of flying, I certainly find pretty much anything that discourages people from using this means of transportation to be rather pleasing for that particular point of view. But, considering the frightened sheep, it’s unlikely that enough will stop flying because of this to have a significant impact, so the potential benefits are slim to none in this area as well.
Still, whether you’re more concerned about your health, your privacy, your personal property or anything else, refusing to fly is the most obvious way to protest against these measures and I strongly encourage everyone who is in any way able to reach their destination by some other means, or to skip the trip completely, to do so for as long as it takes. Even if your country does not currently employ such methods and expresses no desire to do so in the near future, they are likely to end up doing so anyway if this system will be permitted to exist and propagate, so it would also be very useful to send a very clear message to authorities and airline operators everywhere that such measures will not be tolerated, preferably by refusing to use their services until they sign binding agreements stating that they will never make use of these or any other similar methods of screening passengers.
However, if this would be impossible for you or if the impact would seem to be negligible, there are always other ways. The first is, obviously, having everyone opt out of the scanner, which would mean far too many people would need to be felt up for the security staff to manage. The others may be more and more disturbing and, at some point, even more and more illegal, but I also think these would have the greatest impact even if done by a small number of people. I’m talking about things such as farting just when the security agent’s nose is perfectly positioned to smell it, having something perfectly harmless but very gross somehow glued to your clothes in an area that you know will be reached, working out how you could wear something under your clothes that would cause an offensive message to be seen by the person watching the scanner’s screen, starting to fondle yourself or each other while waiting your turn and exaggerating the potentially disturbing parts of the procedure, flashing the security personnel or even showing up completely naked. Who knows, perhaps this way the message will get across before the frightened flock will once again mindlessly smother every voice of reason.

I am noticing more issues with the writing, but that may well be because I’m looking for them more. Otherwise, it’s still a very ambitious story that required an immense amount of work. This time around, the number of answers seems to slowly start to exceed that of new questions, and those answers do make quite a lot of sense, so I’m looking forward to the final book in the series, even though at the same time I dread a potentially disappointing ending or even worse writing.

Rating: 4/5