Cav's Place

You could say that this happened to me once before, but I think I’m already past that level and it’s only day three. I’m talking about me getting rather hooked on a trailer for a game and watching it a rather insane number of times for at least a few days in a row. Should go without saying that I’m also sending the link to pretty much everyone I’m talking to.
The trailer in question is the Final Fantasy XIII international trailer, which can perhaps make it all even weirder since I couldn’t play it even if I wanted to, seeing as it’s only for consoles, and I wouldn’t particularly want to anyway, considering how frustrating I find JRPGs or any other games that use that kind of combat system or gameplay in general. Then again, the Final Fantasy series is known for good stories, which made me struggle through the only two titles that have made it to the PC, namely Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, not to mention that I also played Septerra Core and am now playing Anachronox, which both use that kind of gameplay…
Getting back to the trailer in question, I find it highly unlikely that anyone will come up with a better one this year, despite the complaints that many seem to have about replacing the original Japanese theme song in general and the exact song it was replaced with in the international version in particular. Not impossible, certainly, but highly unlikely. This is simply something that makes you say that games are truly becoming movies that also allow you to get involved in the action, even if that action often detracts from the story. And that impression is only strengthened once you also see the longer TGS ’09 trailer.
Judging from what I see here and what I know about the Final Fantasy series in general, I’ll say that the story of Final Fantasy XIII will be one worth watching, though the game itself will likely be frustrating at best. It would probably turn out really well if made into a movie, as long as they’d do it properly that is…

I must shamefully admit that I first heard of Sea Shepherd a few months ago, when I happened to stumble upon the last few minutes of an episode of Whale Wars on Animal Planet. Actually, at first I was simply amazed that such green warriors exist and that, instead of dealing in secrecy and fearing discovery, there’s even a show about them. The embarrassment came a little later, when I tried to find out more and realized they’ve been doing this for over 30 years and that the show wasn’t exactly new either.
My embarrassment aside, this is the kind of people we need if we are to get anything done for the environment and the other species we share this planet with. Petitions, speeches and peaceful protests only go so far, and unfortunately we’re long past the time when we could afford to wait for such methods to work. People have made it clear that they won’t listen if you talk to them nicely, so such methods, and far worse, are what’s required now and I’m very pleased to see that at least a small number of people are willing to do what needs to be done.
As for Paul Watson himself, he does seem to have egocentric and even dictatorial tendencies and openly advocates making up facts, figures and stories when you need to draw attention to an issue and persuade people to agree with you, which makes him less than trustworthy. In an ideal world, he’d be a real problem. In this world, however, it makes him the right person for the job, because his attitude means he’s trying to beat the powers that be at their own game and may even have a chance to do so, or at least a chance to win as many victories as any one man can.

But the recent major event is the ramming of the Ady Gil, one of Sea Shepherd’s two new vessels which were supposed to take part in this year’s fight against the Japanese whaling fleet and potentially their “secret weapon”, considering the capabilities of that ship. That article includes the video captured from aboard the Japanese ship, and there are two other videos available, one captured from aboard the Ady Gil and the other from aboard the other Sea Shepherd vessel that was in the area at the time. There is also a side-by-side comparison of the two relevant videos, since the one captured from aboard the Ady Gil ends just before the impact, as the cameraman scrambled out of the way.
What is obvious is that the Ady Gil turned on its engines just before the impact, which the Sea Shepherd statement said was an attempt to get out of the way by going in reverse. However, it appears to be going forward a little at the last moment, thereby making the impact even more damaging. For me, that wouldn’t be so surprising, firstly because I’m not even sure how well can such a specialized vessel go in reverse, making an attempt to end up alongside the Japanese vessel by steering sharply away while going forward sound likely, and secondly because it’s very hard to both make up your mind and make your orders understood when a much larger vessel is seconds away from ramming into you, while under water cannons and through that dreadful noise generated by the Japanese vessel’s LRAD. Yet there are others who claim that the Ady Gil deliberately caused the collision in order to have something else to blame the Japanese for.
Another thing that seems pretty obvious is that the Japanese vessel did indeed steer towards the Ady Gil, which should make those claims I just mentioned quite pointless. In order to observe this, you should ignore the videos filmed from aboard the two vessels involved, because they can only reveal one ship’s movement relative to the other, and focus on the one filmed from aboard the Bob Barker, which is the other Sea Shepherd ship that was in the area. If you look carefully, you can see the Japanese vessel steer towards the Ady Gil before the Ady Gil starts moving forward, and that’s made obvious by the fact that the Japanese vessel starts leaning in the opposite direction, which is how large vessels behave while turning.

But let’s take it from another angle and look at what each side would have to gain and what would they have to lose from this.
Sea Shepherd is certainly gaining a lot of publicity and support, while they also manage to tarnish the Japanese fleet’s public image even more. That would seem like a lot, but the price seems to be too high. The loss of a very special vessel, worth two million dollars, on its first mission doesn’t sound like something desirable, especially when this would require the owner of said vessel, who donated it to Sea Shepherd along with his services, to basically sink his own masterpiece and risk six lives in the process. But the greater loss is the loss of potential, because the presence of the Ady Gil meant that they had the upper hand on the Japanese whaling fleet for the first time, as the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker could have kept the two Japanese security ships busy, leaving the rest of the whaling fleet open to attacks from the very fast and maneuverable Ady Gil, which would have had a very good chance to destroy their nets, jam their engines and cause all sorts of other problems.
The Japanese, however, seem to have very little to lose as a result of this, since their public image is bad enough already, the risk of being held accountable for the action appears to be pretty low and the large difference in size between the two vessels made the ramming about as safe as any such operation could ever be. On the other hand, making sure that the Sea Shepherd fleet does not outnumber their security vessels is a huge gain for them, preventing just the scenario I described at the end of the previous paragraph.

Taking everything into consideration, I can conclude that, while the Ady Gil did make things worse by trying to move at the last moment, the Japanese vessel had both the motive and the intention to ram them. On the other hand, I also have to admit that I will not stop supporting the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society if I’ll later find out that they somehow staged this whole incident. I’ll say it was a very stupid move, considering what they could have used the Ady Gil for, but I’ll forgive them simply because they are on the right side of a good fight and this world needs many more like them.

The story continues, though it may seem a little too fragmented at times. The deeper plot is still very obviously there for anyone who is interested in it and I really want to know how it will all turn out in the end. I must note that the beauty of the world is seriously lessened, though that is perfectly normal considering what’s going on.
One real complaint I have is the fact that basically every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, which makes it feel more like a writing exercise at times. But the moments when there’s a break in the action in order to make room for character development are quite brilliant.

Rating: 4/5

There may be some potential to Sarkozy’s proposal to tax major Internet advertising companies in order to raise money to support creative industries, if done for the right reasons and approached from the correct angle. Unfortunately, the reasons are all wrong and the approach is incorrect, so it’s simply yet another attempt to support industries that no longer have a real place in today’s world and help a select few hold on to the vast wealth they’ve been acquiring by exploiting others’ work for so long. Plus, more than likely, it’s yet another method of cultural protectionism and possibly also isolationsim, which is pretty much what you’d expect from France.
But something could be achieved by selecting the few good parts of this proposal, improving them and then implementing them correctly and for the right reasons. And by “good parts” I mean redirecting a part of the advertising revenue generated by people accessing certain types of content on-line to the creators of said content and creating a system through which people without credit cards will be able to easily send money to content creators. Sure, the proposal doesn’t exactly specify those things either, but it contains concepts that could be improved in order to become what I said in the previous phrase.

To go into more detail, I believe I mentioned the first idea at least once before. It can certainly be argued that a company that earns advertising revenue as a result of people viewing a page that contains content created by someone else is making money off others’ work, so a significant portion of that revenue ought to be directed towards the creators of said content. This is very different from the idea listed in the proposal, which would involve a tax on all advertising revenue generated by certain companies which would then be directed towards certain industries as a whole.
This method seems to me to benefit both users and content creators, because users would no longer face penalties for posting songs or movies or books or other such works on these sites and the authors would earn some money as a result of people listening to or watching or reading their works. It also seems very fair, since currently these sites do earn money from such content, albeit indirectly, but the authors earn nothing and the users who make the effort to upload the content are even liable for punishments for doing so. But all of this is only valid as long as the revenue would be directed straight towards the authors and nobody else…

As for the second idea, it’s an integral part of my concept of the Content Creators’ Association. In fact, it’s the most important part of that concept from the point of view of the potential customers. And providing a means for people to pay content creators after purchasing prepaid cards is one of the solutions I’m most interested in, because if implemented properly it’d allow people to make use of any shop they have access to, whether traditional or on-line, to charge an on-line account from which they could then make payments or donations towards any content creator of their choosing, for any product of their choosing or even for no specific product at all, without being restricted by the offers of the shops they have access to or by the payment methods at their disposal.
That concept of mine includes many more ideas, but this is what the users of such content would notice most, because it’d make it much more convenient to make such purchases or simply show your appreciation for a certain content creator. But, once again, all of it relies on the fact that any payments will be made directly to the content creators, so people will stop supporting an industry that’s unfair to begin with and certainly no longer has a place in the digital age.

So now we come to the general issue of the industry in question, which is made up of content creators who, with the exception of the select few who happen to benefit from great marketing campaigns, are paid far less than their work is worth and distributors who earn huge amounts of money off the work of said content creators and pull strings to silence anyone who tries to change the rules of the game, be they regular people who power file-sharing networks or companies who come up with potentially new ways to distribute such content, bridging the gap between the authors and the consumers by getting rid of the current distribution model. And proposals like this, in its current form, serve only to prove that point, seeing as they’re obviously the result of powerful distribution companies pulling strings and greasing the right palms in order to have their desires turned into laws.
But that only means we have some more clear targets to destroy in the battle for fairness on this front. I can only hope that more and more content creators will join the fight on this side of the barricades, breaking this alliance with the distributors which harms them about as much as it harms the consumers more often than not. I’m saying that because, while the fight is against the distributors and I certainly have nothing against content creators, we can’t afford protecting anyone who keeps supporting the enemy anymore. The world would be much poorer and all of this would be useless without content creators, but we need to work together if we are to get anything done. Otherwise, the distributors will win and everyone else will lose greatly.

I think the fact that these issues are being discussed at such high levels from the first days of the year only serves to prove what I was saying, namely that 2010 is likely to be a crucial year in this fight between file-sharers and others who desire a different business model when it comes to creative content and the distributors who desperately try to cling on to the old ways that benefit them so greatly.

The year starts with good news from other worlds. And I mean that quite literally, since the first new planets discovered by the Kepler Mission were announced yesterday. (Kepler 4b to Kepler 8b are the new discoveries. The other three planets were already known to exist in Kepler’s field of view.)
The list doesn’t seem to be anything to write home about if you just glance at it. You have one hot Neptune and four hot Jupiters, all of them extremely close to their parent stars. But that can be deceiving, because you have to take into account the fact that these planets were confirmed using the data gathered over just six weeks and that at least three passes of the planet in front of its parent star are required before it’s taken into account. That currently limits the potential discoveries to planets that are very close to their parent stars, not to mention that the discovery of such planets is favored by the transit method, which is used by Kepler.

Considering that the announcement mentioned hundreds of possible planet signatures that are being analyzed, I have high hopes for this mission and think that, by the end of 2012, it may well discover more than three times the total number of exoplanets that were known to us at the end of 2009. And that’s by looking at just a small portion of our galaxy and using a method that requires the plane of these distant solar systems to be aligned with Kepler’s camera and can cause the rejection of planet signatures due to irregularities or notable events that would cause variations, such as collisions, alignments, large satellites or, yes, even major signs of a civilization.
That said, I think any newly discovered planet is an important event, because for each planet found there must be many more out there that this method in particular and our current technology in general couldn’t possibly notice. So wait and see what else will be announced, even though no planet capable of supporting any kind of life we know of could possibly be detected by Kepler earlier than 2012 (or perhaps 2011, in case of significantly cooler parent stars). After all, the search for a “new Earth” is mainly just marketing, because finding a planet similar to our own hundreds or even thousands of light years away wouldn’t really be of much help. A planet is a planet and all are important in our attempt to figure out exactly what’s out there.