Cav's Place

I dare everyone who hasn’t already done so to watch Earthlings. More specifically, I dare you to watch it start to end, in a single sitting, without taking any breaks or pausing it and without distracting yourself, covering your eyes or ears or doing anything else which would allow you to avoid receiving the full impact.
After you have done so, assuming you were able to, I want you to answer one question: How does being a human, and a member of this society, make you feel right now? (If you were not able to watch it as I dared you to, I assume you have already answered the question…)

I put in the Google Analytics tracking code on April 12th, 2007. Since I’ve been checking the statistics more than usual lately, because I’m trying to figure something out, and it’s been two full years anyway, I meant to post some of the information here. It’s hardly relevant in any way, but I guess I just wanted to post something. I actually wanted to post it last night, but I didn’t exactly feel up to dealing with numbers at that moment…
I am going to post two different sets of statistics, one being for the full two years, April 12th, 2007 to April 11th, 2009, and the other only for the past month, March 12th to April 11th. Once again, it has no relevance, it’s just something I meant to post…

* Please note that the top result represents only the “main” Google entry. There are several others, mainly caused by people who first viewed a page in the Google cache, so the total percentage is even higher.

I logged on to Yahoo! Messenger around 9:30 PM and saw her on. Or, at least, I saw someone appearing to be using a mobile phone to receive messages on her old account, which I didn’t delete from my list when she switched to the new one. Did send two messages, one after about ten minutes and the other shortly before midnight, but of course there was no reply. Being almost certain that she wasn’t going to say anything, assuming it really was her, was probably why I managed to get the courage to do it in the first place… Can’t say it doesn’t hurt to still be ignored, far from it, but at least it’s a very familiar kind of pain. A reply might theoretically have brought some joy, but that would require changes which would be nothing short of a miracle. Anything I could realistically expect her to say would have likely meant even more pain, and less familiar or even completely new kinds of it as well.

That might be enough for me to call this day scary, interesting, perhaps even somewhat important, but not weird. But I am calling it weird because some other things have happened and there seem to be too many coincidences for a single day.
For one, I got a friend request on a site I hardly ever use from a person who had basically vanished quite some time ago, likely over a year. We first talked some four years ago and bumped into each other a few more times since then, but never stayed in touch for long, so I wouldn’t think much of it if it would have happened on any other day.
Then OkCupid put someone from Iasi in my “quiver”. Since what she wrote in her profile was interesting enough to get my attention, that might have been enough to consider it one more of these strange coincidences. (For anyone who might somehow end up here and not already know the story: That’s because Andra’s from Iasi and that’s where we lived when we lived together.) However, I noticed that I was listed as having edited her profile, but I can’t remember when or why. This might make it count as a double coincidence, since it happened today.
Finally, a guy started chatting with me, also on OkCupid. I’m quite sure it’s the first time someone sends me an instant message out of the blue on that site. He was saying that he read my profile and some of my blog and thinks that we’re very similar, or at least that I am the way he used to be. Then he started asking if I’d be willing to make use of a chance to change, become less fearful and less stressed and be able to enjoy the little things in life more. I asked if he was trying to sell me something and he said he’s not literally selling and doesn’t have any specific thing in mind, but wants to tell me about various things he tried in order to change. He didn’t really get anywhere with me, but we did have a little talk about various theoretical concepts such as how much can people change, the value of pain, caring for others and sacrificing yourself. This might have been rather weird any day, actually.

Putting it all together… I’d say there are at least two too many coincidences for it not to seem at the very least weird.
But, in the end… I only care about her… And I’d still really want to know what’s been going on since I last heard anything about her but am frightened of the prospect at the same time.

Actually… Right now I’m in another of those moments when I’m wondering if we even were together, if it wasn’t all just a dream. Was even talking to someone about it last night, and then I sent Andra an e-mail mentioning it as well. Thought I might as well, since I’m quite sure she has me on ignore so it wouldn’t get anywhere anyway. This only adds one more coincidence to the list, doesn’t it?

A lot of things could be said about the current economic crisis, but it’s quite obvious that credit, the concept of spending money you don’t have, was somewhere at the root of it. This makes me feel pretty bad for not writing about this much earlier, before the crisis hit, because I have been firmly against the “life on credit” concept for many years. Still, better late than never…

The first thing to be said against buying things on credit is that the interest works against you, so you end up paying significantly more. This should be enough to make everyone avoid doing so, because it only takes some planning and patience to deposit the money into an account before buying the item, therefore making the interest work for you and ending up actually paying less than the item costs. This means that, if you’d make monthly deposits instead of monthly payments, you could either have more money left for other things each month or be able to buy the next item sooner. Either way, you benefit, there’s no doubt about it.
But you’re not the only one who would benefit from such a behavior. If you’d pay less for an item, it means you could afford either more or more expensive items. Under the current system, that means higher income for the manufacturers, distributors and everyone else involved. However, we know that we’re already using far too many resources as it is, so using even more can’t be a good thing for the Earth, which means that buying more items wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The right thing to do would be spending more for an item, which you would be able to do without even noticing it, because the difference would be covered by the interest working for instead of against you. That way, the manufacturers would be able to afford improving the production and waste management processes in order to be able to help the Earth instead of harming it. And everyone would benefit from a healthier Earth.
The only ones who wouldn’t benefit from this would be the bankers… They certainly like the “life on credit” concept because it earns them a lot of money out of thin air, practically. That said, overturning this state of affairs would only be the right thing to do. Banks could then use the money they obtain from deposits in order to make (reasonably safe) investments, which would once again benefit everyone in the long run. Their profits would likely be much lower, especially since they’d need to pay some of them back to their own “investors”, namely the people who deposited their money there, in the form of interest, but I don’t see any problem there. Some people certainly earn unfairly large amounts of money under the current system, and bankers are obviously part of that class of people…

But if it’d be such a good thing for almost everybody, why aren’t people doing it? On one hand, because they’re simply too used to the current system. On the other, because thinking, planning and having patience aren’t exactly common abilities of humans. What’s more, wealthy individuals tend to also be influential, which means that bankers exercise a significant amount of influence over the authorities, which results in laws, regulations and recommendations which encourage this state of affairs, making the average person even less likely to find their way out of it.
Actually, it’s a vicious circle. Once a person buys one thing on credit, it’ll be extremely difficult from them to turn back. After all, they’ll likely need years to pay back that loan, by which time they’ll need (or at least want) to replace said item. At that point, they won’t have any money set aside for the new purchase, seeing as they couldn’t have paid back the loan for the first purchase and saved for the second one at the same time. That means they’ll need to buy the second item on credit as well, and the third, and the fourth, and… This particular mechanism benefits bankers a great deal, especially because people make that first important purchase while they’re very young, when most are even less likely to think through the implications. They don’t say “impulsiveness of youth” for nothing… Not that more, shall we say, experienced people would necessarily be any better when it comes to this, but there could be some difference.
Credit cards are also a part of the problem, quite obviously. They imply spending money you don’t have even when it comes to daily purchases, not only the major ones. Even if you pay everything back before the bank starts to charge any interest, there are still usually some fees associated with it. But, even without those fees, it’s the concept that’s the real problem. Credit cards simply get people used to the “life on credit” concept, making it easier for banks to entangle them in a larger web afterwards. And the fact that it seems to be so much easier to make purchases if you have a credit card, in some cases even being the only way, only proves what I said about bankers exercising a significant amount of influence over how things work.

So what’s there to do? Seems quite simple, actually… Just plan your first purchase and be patient. Deposit your money into an account and wait until you’ll have enough to buy whatever it is you want to buy. Sure, it means you’ll need to wait a while before you’ll be able to buy that first item, but the constant benefits which result from this behavior far outweigh that small initial cost. It’s the start of a virtuous circle, a “life on debit”, if you will. Banks would then start working for you instead of having you work for them. And the benefits would work their way through the system from that point on, as I have outlined above.
The only major problem with this idea is housing. That’s far too expensive and people would need to spend most of their lives depositing money before they’ll be able to buy their own place. Of course, once you realize that they currently need to spend even more of their lives paying for their house or apartment, it doesn’t sound that bad anymore. Still, it means that people wouldn’t be able to have their own place for a long time, which doesn’t sound good. Solving this problem implies other measures, most of which will be the topic of another post… However, one obvious solution would be to drastically reduce the population, which is desperately needed anyway and which would result in a lot of empty homes and therefore low prices, or even the chance to move in for free. Another would be to have the parents deposit money for their children’s homes, starting even before their birth, so they’ll be able to afford the purchase when the child is, say, 20 years old.

In the end, many things seem simple if you just stop and think about them for a moment. But I keep saying that nobody except ourselves has ever “accused” humans of being intelligent.
A lot of solutions could be found if people would think, plan and be patient, and those solutions would benefit them as well as others and the world as a whole. But getting the average person to do that is constantly an uphill struggle… I just have to hope that someday it’ll stop being a losing battle as well…

I have recently read an article about this issue and it has been brought back to the forefront of my mind. Playing Neverwinter Nights these days, as I have mentioned before, only underlined the problem even more. It might be an old game, but it still counts as censorship when you pick the lock on the door of an occupied room in a brothel only to find a soldier and an “escort”, as those particular NPCs are called, standing in the middle of the room and talking. Somehow, I think the likelihood of that happening in any scenario that holds up to scrutiny is slim to none, and yet that’s exactly what you see in every such room that you break into.
This is certainly connected to the greater problem of censorship, which applies everywhere, but it does seem that there’s a specific unspoken agreement to keep sex away from games. I find that very weird, since it’s a very normal and natural act. Of course, humans aren’t exactly known for making sense…

I won’t do the same thing as the author of that article I mentioned earlier, namely comparing sex with violence, with the implied notion that violence is bad and it therefore makes no sense to allow that and not sex, which is usually not bad. The only possible comparison between the two is when sex meets violence, such as during rape. The author of that article says that “no sane person wants a game where the player can rape or commit sexual violence”, but I beg to differ. Since the player is allowed to steal, murder or, sometimes, even torture, why not be able to rape as well?
That might sound very offensive for some, but it’s not a matter of right or wrong, it’s just a matter of freedom. Games tend to give the player more and more choices, which can only be a good thing, so why not include these as well? What the player does with those choices is their own problem… It’s really stupid to try imposing “real world” laws on games, because they happen in a virtual world, they’re not “real” by definition! And if a few players, out of perhaps hundreds of millions, don’t understand that basic fact and try to reenact what they have seen in a game in the “real world”, again, it’s their problem, not the game’s!
You can’t force games to be “moral” by disallowing certain choices. Deciding which actions are rewarded and which are punished in the long run would be a far better method. Newer games are starting to include long-term consequences of certain actions, so this is where “morality” could come into play. However, this is a completely different issue and not the focus of this post. The connection between morality and the actual focus of this post is that sex shouldn’t be kept away from games simply because some people seem to find the very notion immoral.

Sex could very easily be linked to relationships in games. There certainly are some romantic relationships in some games, and that’s an aspect which could and should be developed even further. But if sex needs to be kept out of the picture, developing credible romantic relationships between characters becomes even more difficult than it already is. Imposing this apparent chastity makes the entire scenario feel quite weird because, you see, relationships do tend to include sex, so why not show it? It would make the experience more immersive and more realistic, not to mention that sex could play an important part in many plots. There could be a lot of things being said or noticed during or immediately after sex, or certain emotionally charged events could logically lead to sex. It’s very silly to cut away the sex and only show the rest, or even cut away the entire scene and find other means of developing the story and the characters, just because some people, which are hardly ever the gamers themselves, would be bothered by it.
Or I could take a more pragmatic view and say that characters in games tend to have certain needs. Since that makes perfect sense, I have a question: If a character might sometimes need to eat or sleep or, as it is in The Sims, socialize, why wouldn’t that same character also need a, shall we say, “release” now and then? Especially when we’re talking about potentially arousing situations… This could also apply to the scenes which take place shortly before or after very dangerous moments, since it is very natural to want to have sex at such times. Once again, it would simply make sense and make the experience even more complete, which can only be a good thing.

I’m aware that many of those who desire to keep sex out of games consider that most gamers are under the age of 18 but, as that article points out, the average gamer is no longer a minor. Not that it’d matter if they were, since sex is a part of the life of people under 18 just as well and, instead of wasting their time and breath trying to stop a perfectly natural and, if done right, beneficial behavior, those who claim to be concerned by this issue should put their efforts into providing teenagers with some real sexual education for a change. That would imply teaching them how to do it right, how to find the optimal balance between pleasure and safety, between the physical and the emotional… Actually, many adults could greatly benefit from such education as well, since there’s no fairy godmother to whack each of us over the head with a wand the moment we turn 18 and magically grant us all the knowledge and experience we had completely lacked until that moment, as most laws appear to assume. And including sex in games could actually be a means of offering such education, to minors and adults alike.

There could be a lot of very valid reasons to include more actual sex scenes in games, but I really don’t think they need to be listed. In the end, the best justification for desiring to see more sex scenes in games is that you don’t need to justify such a desire because sex is just a part of life and, unless something goes wrong, a good one at that. Actually, it’s far more a part of life than many, if not most, behaviors which are usually found in games… And if, whether they’re aware of it or not, many people play games to get away from the bad things in life, the good ones should be emphasized as much as possible.