Cav's Place

Too lonely to sleep, or to think, or to dream… Apparently even to spell, considering how something I wrote this morning, after giving up on the idea of trying to sleep for a while, ended up… So I’m sitting here and thinking about what might have been and what most likely can never be, and imagining things that seem wrong even to me.
And there isn’t even anyone to talk to. And I don’t just mean that nobody understands, they never do, but that there really isn’t anyone to talk to these days. What makes it even worse is that dad is away this week, but the creature’s still here, so the house is usually very quiet but I’m not alone, so I can’t go out of my room and wander around or try to fix myself something to eat or do other such things. That caused me to go and talk to the creature twice already, yesterday and today, both because there’s really nobody else to say anything to and because I went out of my room when everything was very quiet and therefore just had the urge to stay out there and try to think of something to do, which meant it didn’t feel right to just crawl back into my room after noticing her there. The obvious result was that I felt like I just crawled out of a pile of shit when I did eventually get back to my room…

On another note, I believe I got clear confirmation that Elena G. did actually place me on ignore, but I still don’t know why. It’s awfully frustrating and the only thing I can think of is that none of what she said when we previously found each other on-line, especially in 2005, was true. So I’m once again wondering if any even remotely positive thing that appeared to ever happen to me was actually true, because it certainly seems like nothing good can happen to me, at least not when it’d involve another person, and whenever I think some such thing did happen it’s actually just me imagining things and letting any faint traces of optimism left within me cloud my judgment.
This obviously means I’m once again wondering if I didn’t imagine my relationship with Andra as well. I mean, it certainly doesn’t seem even remotely possible that something like that could have happened to me. There are clear memories, files, pictures, even a couple of movies, but it just can’t seem real anymore. Or maybe those things did happen, but I was lied to and played all the time by her as well, as it apparently is the case with everyone else… I can’t think that of her, but I can think it of the situation, so I don’t know…
A more rational perspective would be that all the people I ever knew were coming from somewhere and heading somewhere else, so they just came into my life briefly when they happened to pass by the place I’m floating about in, then moved on, usually heading towards places I know for a fact I never want to reach, leaving me behind. Perhaps in most cases they didn’t actually mean me any harm, they just didn’t care how their actions would affect me, perhaps not even noticing that they were, and likely still are, much more important to me than I ever was to them. But I don’t think that makes much of a difference. Why would it be any better to refuse to fix the harm you unintentionally caused, once you’re made aware of it, than to cause it on purpose in the first place? The end result is the same…

I should start by saying that this post should probably contain a lot of links, but it won’t contain any. There would be too many articles to choose from if I were to start searching, each with its own focus and perhaps even bias, so I prefer to just post how I see things and let any potential readers who might somehow be interested search and select according to their own preferences and desires.

Sunday was the second round of the Romanian presidential elections, the opponents being incumbent president Traian Basescu, supported by the Democrat-Liberal Party (PDL), and the president of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), Mircea Geoana. As all the other parties united in an effort to get rid of Basescu, Geoana also enjoyed the official support of PNL, UDMR, PRM, PNG, PNTCD and PAS, as well as the unofficial support of the Greens, which angered me terribly. On top of that, the major private media groups maintained and even worsened their usual obviously hostile attitude towards Basescu during the campaign.
Basescu won the first round with 32.45% and Geoana was second with 31.15%, but all the support received from the other candidates helped Geoana to an 8% lead, 54% to 46%, in a poll published between the two rounds of elections. The accuracy of that poll can be disputed, but I don’t doubt that he was indeed leading at the time and only lost that lead right at the end, after participating in the televised debate. Actually, exit polls can’t exactly be accused of wrongly saying that he’ll win because he did win, albeit by a very small margin, inside the country, and the votes coming from the Romanians living abroad made Basescu come out on top overall.

But let me start from the beginning. You could find the partial results of exit polls on-line during the day, since it’s illegal to broadcast them on TV or radio but there’s no such law concerning the Internet. Those results showed an obvious bias, depending on which TV station would be broadcasting it. But the most interesting moment was around 7 PM, when the results for 5 PM were posted. The site that I was checking, belonging to one of the TV stations that has known ties to PSD and an obviously hostile attitude towards Basescu, stopped updating the results of all four polls, deciding to focus just on the two that gave Mircea Geoana the best results. In addition, and this is the key part, those same two polls were being quoted on the site of a magazine belonging to the same media group, and the numbers appearing on these two sites as the results at 5 PM were different. The magazine’s site was listing Geoana as leading with 51.2% and 52.0%, respectively, while the other site was listing him leading with 52.5% in both polls. At the same time, a mere 50.4% for Geoana at 4 PM was rumored in other places, and it’s known from past elections that PSD’s share tends to drop later in the day.
Then it started getting really interesting. At 9 PM, the polls closed and the TV stations broadcasted the exit poll results for 7 PM. The two TV stations with known ties to PSD said 51.6% and 51.2%, respectively, for Geoana, the state-owned TV station said 50.8%, also for Geoana, while the one TV station with a known bias towards Basescu claimed a deadlock, 50.0% for each candidate. That prompted both candidates to give victory speeches. Basescu started his before the exit poll results were displayed, calmly warning his supporters that the numbers they’re about to see are fake, because PSD influenced at least two of the results so Geoana will have at least 0.5% added to his score, assuring them that he won “just like in 2004” and urging them to be calm and wait for the official results. Geoana, on the other hand, was extremely happy when he saw the numbers on the screen and gave an enthusiastic, and lengthy, victory speech.
Around 11 PM, the final exit poll results were made public. In the same order as before, they were 51.2%, 51.0% and 50.7% for Geoana, and 50.4% for Basescu. But the first partial parallel count results from the parties directly involved came just before that time, when PDL claimed that Basescu is leading with about 50.7% and PSD that Geoana has “somewhat more than the 51.6% estimated by the exit poll” after counting 15% of votes.
Some time later, PNL announced that, according to their own parallel count, Geoana is leading with 51.4% after counting 20% of the votes. But that was the only real announcement they made that night, only quietly releasing a brief statement a couple of hours later, saying that Geoana is still leading with the same 51.4% after they counted 41% of votes, then being completely silent until morning.
The rest of the night was spent by PDL and PSD trading conflicting parallel count results, as follows: PDL were the first ones to make another announcement, claiming that Basescu had just a little under 50.4% of votes after the vast majority of votes had been counted. Then they made another announcement, saying that Basescu was marginally leading, with 50.03%, after counting 99% of votes. PSD answered that immediately, saying that “not even NASA could count that fast”, and claiming that, according to their own parallel count, which was then at 35%, Geoana had 51.1% of votes. Then, close to 3 AM, PDL announced that Basescu was leading with 50.14% and that the only votes they couldn’t already count were those cast by some of the Romanians living abroad, especially in the Americas, where the polls were still open at that time. They also invited PSD to some talks about the most effective methods of parallel counting of votes, as a reply to the claims that nobody could count that fast, and said they’ll make the final results of their parallel count public around 11 AM. PSD countered by saying that their own count was at 62% and Geoana was still leading, with 50.8%. During all this time, members and supporters of PSD and PNL, including Mircea Geoana, were celebrating their victory.
Around 3:30 AM, a very tired, but also very happy, Basescu left PDL headquarters, once again stating that he won. No further announcements were made until morning, which was to be expected in PDL’s case, but is quite surprising when it comes to PSD, since they still had a lot to say… Unless they found out things that they weren’t willing to make public, that is.
Around 5 AM I went to bed, not before thinking that PSD should be releasing another statement, in the early hours of the morning, claiming that Geoana had about 50.3% after counting about 80% of the votes, and wondering if they’d notice the pattern and admit the possibility of defeat. Later I learned that the first part of my estimate was perfectly accurate, but that they still didn’t admit that they could have lost the elections. PDL did keep their word, though, and released the final results of their parallel count, which gave Basescu 50.33%. I don’t know the exact time of this announcement, but it was at some point during the morning.
At 8 AM, the first official results were published, and they showed Traian Basescu leading, with 50.43%, after 95.4% of votes had been counted. As further results trickled in, around 11 AM, a visibly depressed Geoana returned to PSD headquarters, refusing to answer any questions. The tension was mounting and PSD was starting to claim that Basescu won by fraud.
At 3 PM, the provisional final official results were announced and they confirmed PDL’s parallel count. Basescu obtained 50.33% of votes, defeating Geoana by exactly 70048 votes. This victory was thanks to the Romanians who voted abroad, because Geoana received 14738 votes more than Basescu inside the country, but only 31045 out of the 146876 votes from abroad. I should point out that Basescu’s clear victory abroad is no surprise, because he even obtained well over 50% there in the first round, competing against 11 others. The number of voters could be a little surprising, because it’s about 50% higher than the one from the first round, but it was to be expected because those people knew their votes would truly matter this time and various sources stated throughout that day that the Romanians living abroad were encouraging and helping each other to vote, to have their say.

What I want to point out is that PDL’s parallel count was proven right and the exit polls were proven wrong twice before: Once was during the 2004 presidential elections, when the exit polls said Adrian Nastase (also from PSD) was the winner, but it actually was Traian Basescu, a fact that PSD fairly admitted at the time. The second time was during last year’s parliamentary’s elections, when the exit polls said PSD had about 3% over PDL, but the official results showed a negligible overall difference and PDL actually won the most seats. In 2004, PSD had the government. In 2008, PNL had it, with a silent support from PSD. So I feel that any accusations that this caretaker PDL government could have arranged things to go their way are countered by the fact that the same thing happened twice before, when they couldn’t have been accused of this. The only difference is that PSD accepted the results the first two times, albeit more grudgingly last year, but this time they decided to challenge them.
I also want to remind people of the interesting difference between 5 PM exit poll results, depending on who quoted them. On top of that, there was an interesting moment yesterday. The one person who asked for patience and caution Sunday night on the TV station that gave the most optimistic exit poll results for Geoana, though she works there and the policy quite obviously appeared to be a different one, was asked by one of their news anchors why did she do that, what did she know that others didn’t. She answered that on one hand she had seen this before and knew the effectiveness and accuracy of PDL’s parallel counting system, and on the other hand she has various sources, as any good journalist, and knew how things really stood with the exit polls. I don’t know how much she’s risking for saying that, but I think it’s about as close to confirming Basescu’s claim about PSD interfering with the exit polls as you can get without saying it in quite so many words.

Now PSD has filed an official complaint and is asking for the elections to be repeated, because they claim that they have evidence of 136000 illegal votes, which could obviously change the result. The question is how many of those votes, if indeed they were somehow illegal, were for Basescu and how many were for Geoana. Because there’s no way to tell that, and if you can come up with so many names so fast it can be assumed that you already knew where to look, which may mean that they’re sacrificing their own people to end up with the required number to back their claim. I support this statement with a quote from an important member of PSD who let it slip yesterday that “PDL’s theft and fraud machine […] worked better” and then refused to answer the question which obviously followed, when a reporter asked if that choice of words means that they have a “theft and fraud machine” of their own.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that PDL stole some votes, but I’m certain that PSD did the same. And considering the fact that PSD is still the largest party in Romania and that each electoral committee contained just one person from each party, which meant one person from PDL alone among those from PSD, PNL, UDMR, PRM, PNG and sometimes even some from the smaller parties as well, I find it rather hard to believe that PDL stole more than PSD. And, either way, the fact remains that I see PSD as clearly the greater evil, so until an option that’d actually be good would present itself I have to support those who somehow manage to keep PSD away.
But let’s wait and see how this will play out…

Some time ago, a newspaper from here published a list of questions that, they said, everyone should ask themselves. They probably just needed to fill an empty spot on the page with something, picked this list up from somewhere and published it, but I thought the questions were interesting enough, though nothing new, so I split them, since the article often used a single phrase to ask more than one question, translated them and saved them. And now I’ll get to actually answer them here…

Am I a nice person?
Not really. I believe I’m a very just and honest person, who also cares a lot about certain issues. That means that the vast majority of people tend to put me in positions that leave little room for niceness, especially since my proposed solutions, or even the issues themselves, are often very unpopular.

What do I have to be grateful for?
Being in reasonably good health and having access to medical services if needed. A mind that works well enough, though certainly not as well as I’d like. Being provided with a roof over my head and something to eat and drink, even if it’s perhaps not what I’d want. Having a decent computer and Internet connection. Enjoying a reasonable degree of safety, both at home and when I decide to go out. Not being required to get in contact with people I wouldn’t feel comfortable around, excepting my parents, but I can usually avoid bumping into them around the house too, though I don’t like what I need to do in order for that to happen. Not being required to directly fight someone in a position of authority in order to be allowed to live in my own world, such as it is. And, obviously, that I was in that relationship with Andra, even if simply because it proves that something like that is not impossible for me.
Basically, I have to be grateful for having the first two levels of Maslow’s pyramid reasonably covered. It’s hardly enough by any standards, but you realize things could be much worse when you think of how many people don’t have any of this…

What’s missing in my life?
Pretty much everything placed on the other three levels of that pyramid, as well as an even better coverage of the first two? That’d probably be the general idea…
But if you want to be specific, what I’m sorely missing right now is a relationship. Not just any relationship, of course; I think anyone reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. Being with her again, living together and everything working out so we’d both be reasonably happy and even closer than we were back then. Otherwise, a best friend that I’d be insanely close to and could also actually spend time with often enough. I could also say I’m missing a chance to create that major positive change in the world that I keep hoping for, but if I had her and a true best friend in my life and things would be working out extremely well with them, I think I’d manage something, somehow, someday…

What should I change in myself?
As long as I don’t hurt others who don’t deserve it, it seems wrong to say that I should change anything. I am who I am and that’s who I’ll keep on being. Society should find a way to allow me to make use of my skills just as I am.
I could say that I’d like to be able to express myself much better and perhaps to be more driven, so I’ll need less time to actually start doing what I plan to do, but again, if these traits just don’t come naturally to me and their absence doesn’t exactly hurt anyone but myself, I’m just the way I should be. It could also be nice to stop being so afraid of people, so I could actually do certain things that require contact with others in the rare moments when I want to do such things, but the truth is that this fear also provides me with a good excuse not to do things that the vast majority consider “normal” but that I wouldn’t want to do anyway, so it’s a price I’m willing to pay for at least as long as society will continue to have such expectations of me.

What should I change in my life?
See what I said is missing in my life, but I don’t see how I could make those things happen. I tried all I could think of and I’m still here, after all.
Something that could change even without Andra or a true best friend would be my living arrangements, because I certainly don’t want to live with my parents. But I obviously could never even last a month by myself, so that’d require moving in with someone who’s at least a friend and I certainly don’t have any that I could live with.

Am I honest?
Absolutely. Usually too honest for my own good, but I’m glad of it.

Do I know how to listen to others?
Unfortunately, not really. There are so few people I’m talking to that I’m often just waiting to say something during a conversation, especially since none of them understand what truly matters to me, which makes me feel the need to let even more things out as I try to lighten the burden.
That changes if I can truly relate to what they’re saying, but that’s not too likely since, if they can’t really understand me, chances are that their problems are very different from mine and therefore I can’t exactly relate to them either. On the other hand, people often say things that I’m very much against, in which case I’ll react accordingly. If neither applies, then I’ll listen to the problem and try to come up with a solution, but that doesn’t usually work well because people rarely like my proposed solutions, not to mention that sometimes they’re simply not looking for solutions at all.

Do I know how to help those in need?
See what I said above. If I’m not against their desired outcome, I do my best to offer a solution, but often they either don’t like it or say it’s impossible.

Do I judge those around me?
Absolutely, but I really do my best to judge fairly. We all judge, so the criteria we base our judgments on make all the difference.

What will I do in my life?
That’s a really good question. The only thing I know is that at some point I will die. Besides that, I seem to be quite stuck in my current situation and see no way out unless what I said is missing in my life will no longer be missing. So, as things stand, it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much besides suffering.

I think I’ll stop here, for now. These questions probably deserve better answers than I’ll be able to provide if I just force myself to answer all of them in a single sitting, so I’d better continue at some other time.

Yet again, certain people in positions of authority fail to understand that game worlds are not actually real. They also fail to understand that gamers are generally not like them in that aspect. Or they could just be pretending in order to appear like they actually have something to do and therefore justify their paycheck, of course. That in itself could be somewhat less of a problem if they’d be the only ones having, or pretending to have, such beliefs, but what makes it worse is that certain other people, especially those who are over a certain age and have minor children or grandchildren, end up believing them as well.
Yes, it’s true that a very small number of people may actually make this confusion between a game and reality, but we’re talking about thousands, if not just hundreds, out of the hundreds of millions who play games. In such situations, the person is the problem, not the game. Such people could also be driven to act in certain ways by movies, books, stories they hear or even their own imagination, so they should be kept away from the rest of the population for safety reasons. The rest, however, know the difference quite well, and if some of them try to justify their actions by saying that they were trying out something they saw in a game, that’s just an attempt at avoiding responsibility for their own actions, sort of a modern variant of “the Devil made me do it”.
A special case is that of very young children, who may make this confusion in large numbers. But we’re mainly talking about children under two, or at most under four, who would be quite unable to play games anyway. Only a serious lack of education could make this confusion persist past this age, which means that just these parents, grandparents and other authority figures would be to blame for the situation, because they didn’t adapt the educational activities to present day realities. But even without such education, a human brain that’s not severely malfunctioning will quickly learn to clearly make this difference on its own, so this exception can only be stretched to cover at most all children under four and those children under six or seven who have completely unfit parents or guardians. Past those ages, you simply can’t claim that more than a tiny fraction of one percent of people can confuse games with reality.

People’s actions inside game worlds can be an indicator of their morals, but that’s not a rule, and these virtual actions don’t have to reflect what they’d actually do in real life situations even when they do reveal their morals. A reasonably (or even just marginally) sane individual can use games to release negative emotions, performing violent or otherwise harmful actions in a virtual environment in order to lower the risk of outbursts in real life situations. A curious individual can use games to try out certain actions without needing to use real situations, and real people, to do so. And even a person who has a certain desire to cause harm can find a safe release inside a game world and decide against actually acting on that desire in real life, where being caught could have serious consequences. So, just because game worlds are not real worlds and gamers are fully aware of this, allowing harmful actions in games can actually have beneficial effects in most cases.
On the other hand, a lot of games do penalize unnecessary harmful actions and lead players towards fighting for the greater good. That’s not a general rule, but it’s what usually happens. Perhaps some could argue that there should be a stronger bias in this direction and that the penalties for harmful actions should be greater, but the truth is that games must first be enjoyable. Actually, it must first be possible for a game to be successfully completed, and solving many situations that arise in games would be impossible if the laws and regulations of real life would apply in full. Plus that, while a certain kind of realism is very much desired, a game tends to become less enjoyable if it’s too similar to real life. After all, many people play games (or watch movies, or read books) just for the feeling of escapism that these activities provide.
As such, if games would start implementing these laws and regulations in full and perhaps even stop allowing certain harmful actions altogether, they’d become much less interesting for people. That’d mean that far fewer people would play them, or at least that far fewer people would feel involved in the action while playing them. In this situation, all those beneficial effects I mentioned above would be greatly diminished, but the people who are deranged enough to be unable to tell the difference between a virtual world and the real one would still have plenty of opportunities to act on their insanity. In other words, it’d be a lot of pain for little or no gain.

I wish people would stop worrying so much about what may happen in a virtual world and focus more on what is actually going on in the real one. And when they do think about games, I wish they’d try to make them better, more diverse, more involving, more interesting, more entertaining and easier to obtain for all people instead of adding even more limitations.
That’d be a good use of time and resources, while this is a waste of both at best, and likely has the potential to cause even more harm if more people will learn that they can just blame games for their actions and therefore avoid taking full responsibility. Not to mention that it also provides parents and guardians with an excuse when things go wrong with their children, offering them something to blame for their own failings. After all, we all know that you can safely blame a game for anything and everything you want. It won’t fight back because, you see, it’s not real.

I seem to be gathering reasons to be really angry over these past few days. Or, better yet, people seem to keep providing me with them. There are three major ones just now, caused by three different people. The first two are friends, or at least people I like to think of as friends, and the third one is related to my previous post. I think I won’t use names when talking about my friends. There are few people I’m talking to with any noticeable frequency and they’ll know who each is about anyway, in case they’ll be reading this.

Before I’ll get to the actual issues, I think I should list the things that anger me the most. I’m talking about the top two, which aren’t related to what happened now, but should put things in perspective. Past the first two, the ranking may depend on my current mood and what has happened to me or what I heard of recently…
As I said numerous times before, the worst thing anyone can do under the current circumstances is have a child. Also applies to getting pregnant and not intending to have an abortion, obviously, but if there’ll be a miscarriage or the baby will be stillborn then I guess no real harm is done. Also applies to adopting children, because this may encourage those who get pregnant accidentally to carry the pregnancies to term. In the end, I don’t care too much why you decide not to have or care for a child, the fact itself is what matters, because having children is the worst single crime possible when the world is as overpopulated as it is. I may agree that certain extraordinary individuals really should breed, but they should first use those extraordinary abilities to come up with and impose a system like the one I keep suggesting (though preferably better). This is the one thing I will not forgive of anyone under the current circumstances.
The second is breaking up with a person who is obviously still very much in love with you and truly desires to continue the relationship. Exceptions to this are if said person is obviously guilty of one of the very few things that I see as potential justification for ending a relationship, such as repeated abuse, or if there was a very clear and specific agreement at the start of the relationship, understood and accepted by all those involved, specifying other conditions for the termination of the relationship. The agreement won’t make me fully accept the situation though, but at least I’ll no longer see it as unforgivable. Because otherwise it truly is unforgivable for just about anyone. The exception to this is, quite obviously, that I can’t really hold the fact that she left me against Andra and, as much as I’d like to think otherwise, I sometimes doubt I’ll be able to really hold the fact that she left someone else since then against her for any significant amount of time either, were I to learn that she did something like this.
Past this point, it gets much harder to rank… If asked, I tend to say that the third problem is getting a job while still in school, because it puts you in the rat race more than anything, it makes you devote pretty much all of your time and attention to things that have nothing to do with your relationships or ideals (or at least with no ideals that I’d care for) and it means you accept the emphasis that our current society puts on money, which harms everyone who may be fighting for something different, including myself. After all, all you need to do in order to fight for the status quo is to not actively fight against it, and there are few, if any, things that say that you’ve surrendered to this society more than this. I guess I could suffer through something like this if Andra was in this situation, though I’d certainly hate it, but not when it comes to anyone else. Still, it’s not something with permanent effects, so I’ll likely get over what happened shortly after the person either graduated, dropped out, quit or was fired.
But neutering a pet is a huge problem as well, and I sometimes have difficulty explaining even to myself why I see it as slightly less evil than getting a job while still in school. Perhaps because it does at least prevent an overpopulation problem, though the problem itself is far less important than the one involving us humans and this method is completely wrong when it comes to dealing with it. Perhaps also because it has less of an impact on society… Either way, I won’t get into it again, did it plenty of times already. I’ll just say once again that I’m waiting for the day when the birth control methods for pets will be similar to the long-term or even permanent ones used for humans, without altering behavior and certainly without taking away any bodily function other than procreation, and that I’ll maintain my firm opposition to the current method and anyone who makes use of it. Once again, I could get over it if Andra’d be in this situation (and I’m quite sure she actually is), though I’d obviously hate it, but it’s a huge problem when it comes to anyone else. Can be forgiven in time, if the person will no longer support the practice, but never forgotten, because the effects can never be reversed.

Moving on to specifics, the first message I received was letting me know that the person in question just got a job. Since she’s still in school and, if her plans will work out, will still be studying for many years to come, I’m sure you can see why that was completely unacceptable. I knew that she was planning to do this, but I certainly didn’t think it was going to happen so soon and hoped she’d change her mind eventually, before actually getting a chance to do it…
A day later, Thursday, I saw the other person posting a message in which she was basically bragging that her kitten was just being neutered. What’s more, after someone replied to point out some of the potential problems with this procedure and ask her to reconsider, she very happily announced that her other cat is also neutered and is perfectly fine. Perhaps I shouldn’t have reacted quite as I did because I had figured out a long time ago that she supported this, but I pretended I didn’t know just to avoid this sort of argument. Lying to yourself always comes back and bites you in the ass, doesn’t it?
As for the third reason to be angry, that came today in the form of Remus Cernea making his “personal opinion” regarding the second round of elections public. He started well, by saying that he urges all his voters to vote as their conscience tells them to, but then moved on to support Mircea Geoana by speaking at length against Traian Basescu. Well, when the candidate that I voted for supports the one that I’m certain is by far the greater evil, I believe I’m quite entitled to feel betrayed. What’s more, there were certain rumors during the campaign saying that he’ll support Geoana and he repeatedly denied them. It would appear that green lies are exactly the same as yellow, red or orange ones. (Romanians should understand that better, sorry for anyone else who happens to be reading this.)