After some time in Russia, we can say we're starting to get used to it.
We've been here less than two months, but it feels ages, with all the things that have happened and we have done. Lots of people say that time perception depends on how many new things you do during the week (if everything is new, time feels longer), and moving to another country with a new different job definitely stretched our time quite a lot. Now, after almost 2 months, things are starting to get "normal"...and even then, there is new things happening every week, job-related or not...
First, we finally got a nice apartment in the centre of Adler, and did all the paperwork and payments necessary to rent it. It was not the original one that we wanted, but now we think this one is much better, since it came with almost everything (furniture, dishes, pots, etc.) and it's right next to the office and the main streets and markets. There were a few missing things, but we bought those.
We live in the same block as lots of other people from work, and it's nice to be able to visit them, or invite them, and do something at random, with no need to plan in advance, or spent time getting there first. Reminds me of some friends that all live in the same area of the city, and I understand them much better now, why they're always meeting without planning, it's quite natural if you're 2 minutes away from them...
The apartment is really big, it has several terraces, rooms and toilets, and we have adapted things to our liking and moved furniture a little. The main terrace, that has an extra kitchen apart from the main one, has sights to the sea, and receives a lot of sun. Even in a cold day, if it's clear enough, the place feels warm and nice.
We have received our things finally (the same day that we decided to buy and mount furniture for the TV that was coming....furniture that came with no instructions whatsoever about how to mount it, a thing that may require another post...), and we feel like at home now.
As I already said, Russian is a very curious place. There is a clear cultural shock. With people in the office we have not many problems, since these positions imply a certain level of education or experience that also guarantees a bigger mind, and a person who probably has travelled more or entered in contact with more different cultures. However, that is not necessary the case with random people in the street, and this is kind of noticeable sometimes.
In general, Russian society reminds me at the moment of Spanish society, 20-30 years ago more or less...it's clearly not an undeveloped country, and the culture is similar to the occidental one, but there's still a long way to go to resemble other european, cosmopolitan places like the U.K., Sweden or Denmark (they have their faults, but in some aspects they have incredible advances). Spain is not there yet either by far, but in some aspects Russia seems to have a lot more room for social and cultural improvements, apart from things like infrastructures, public transports, etc.
For example, we already commented that traffic is awful. The principle behind it is that everybody is on its own, and to help other cars is to show weakness. A social improvement would be the change of this mentality to something where solidarity is more important....if drivers were nicer, everybody could probably move faster around intersections.
Other things that we've noticed is that everything is under construction right now. Our current building itself is half finish, even if our apartment is clearly done. It seems people are preparing for Olympics and there's a rush to build more of everything. After all, Adler is very, very small, and Winter Olympics are supposed to happen in here...they need more roads, more hotels, more shops, etc. The current shops and restaurants also need to get bigger to compete with all these new ones. The end result is that we have the feeling sometimes of living in a construction site all the time. Even the office has this problem, the official desk were we are supposed to have a little place is in a building that only has the 6th floor finished, and the other 5 are a mess of unpainted concrete and dust. Our other workplace is not much better...it's more finished, but every day you find cables hanging from somewhere a hole in a wall that opens to the street, and other such things.But well, these things just cause minor inconveniences...
Major inconveniences are caused by the fact that all these constructions are messing up some basic services (like Internet). It's normal that, when it rains or it's windy, cables break, things flood, and electricity wavers or stops for a while, water doesn't reach our floor, internet does not work...
So far every week I think we've had some interruptions in the electricity, even if just for a second...and other times we had electricity, but the company that provides internet did not.
In general the effect can be a little bit annoying, but oh well....
For the moment, we're quite happy living in our apartment in Russia^^
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Monday, 26 November 2012
Elections
So, there were elections in Catalunya, and the results are....curious. They´r not good, but they could be worse.
There is a majority of votes towards the right or centre-right side of the political spectrum, which is always worrisome....but it´s true that, in general, the left parties got reinforced after elections, and won some territories. This was casued by a bigger participation mostly, but also by some changes in votes.
First of all, CIU. This is Catalunya´s main right party, and they have always played with catalanism to obtain things for themselves. In the past they did some good things, but also plenty of bad things, like helping private schools only, and big companies and such things. Lately, they did mostly bad things, like corruption repression and huge social cuts. Right now, they were governing without a majority, which means they had to pact to achieve things. They didn´t like that, and when it was clear that people were tired of some of the problems that come from being in Spain and wanted independence, they claimed that they were the most independent of them all, and organized this elections, with the message that independence would only be possible with them. They tried to hide all the bad things they had done, and present independence as the most important thing to vote for right now.
Luckily, things went very wrong for them. They have lost a big chunk of people in the parliament, and they have been weakened. They still have more than twice people in parliament than any other single party, but they cannot reach majority by far, and they need to pact.
ERC, catalunya´s main left catalanist party, got the next best result.ERC is truly in favor of independence, and for one people didn´t get tricked, and they got the majority of independentists votes instead of CIU . PSC followed them (spanish centre party, they are a little lost at the moment with no clear ideas), and then PP (spanish right party, same ideas as last 70 years). Then ICV (catalunya´s left party, got reinforced with some more people than before), C(catalunya´s right party in favour of Spain, won some votes against even asking about independence) and CUP (a new party from the left that wants independence while paying lots of attention to giving lots of social rights, and therefore got lots of new votes) took the rest of the people in the parliament. The result is that CIU has 50 people, ERC 21, PSC 20, PP 19, ICV 13, C 9 and CUP 3.
To have majority you need 68 people at least, so it´s easy to see that there are 4 main possible combinations: CIU+ERC, CIU+PSC, CIU+PP and PP+ERC+PSC+(ICS or C).
Some people, usually from the right political mindset, think that this is terrible. After all, it´s true that it´s really hard to do things if you have to make sure that some other party needs to agree on them with you. However, that´s something that really expresses democracy. If you can rule alone, you usually rule by yourself. You can claim that half of the people wanted you to rule (which is false, since with the laws around votes you can usually win elections with 20% of votes or less), and that means any decision you take is right. That ignores all the other parties that people also voted. The result is that, if you don´t need to pact, you can be a dictator until next elections, deciding everything on your own. And lots of people call that Democracy with a straight face. However, when you need to pact, it´s possible that the smaller parties force some changes down your throat. That is great, it makes you learn to dialogue, to compromise on things, to have to open your mind a little bit, or to just accept that you cannot do whatever you want responsibility-free until the next elections.
PP, being Franco´s heirs, and ERC (being part of Franco´s opponents heirs), will probably never agree in anything (they´re almost opposites) , so the last combination is not possible (or the probability needs to be calculated with a supercomputer, to fit all the decimal zeros it has before any other number).
This leaves the other 3 possible combinations.
CIU could pact with PP and they would probably agree on most things except independence. However, this is a very important point, CIU already has agreed on start the process of consulting with votes in a referendum about it (PP is completely against it), and in Catalunya if you ally yourself with PP in an open way you are committing political suicide. They could probably ally themselves with PSC. They do not have that many differences, and PSC is very lost at the moment and could probably adapt to CIU. However, either CIU would reject the idea of independence, which would be another suicide, or PSC accepts to make a referendum and policies from the right, which would give unclear results for them, but it´s probable that they would lose votes too.
CIU and ERC are the more probable initial pact. ERC has a problem, and that is that some of its members forget that "E" is from "Esquerra", which means left in catalan. ERC sometimes gives priority to give more independence to Catalunya than making social policies. This means that they could rule together for a while. CIU could pact with PP from time to time to approve their worst policies against social rights (no matter how publicly they fight and insult each other, CIU and PP are really close to each other and help each other again and again, even if they try to not advertise it), and if ERC doesn't get angry about it, things would continue like this. However, ERC has said that social policies will be a priority.
Will ERC be able to make CIU swallow a number of social reforms to, at least, get closer to the social situation we had before CIU ruled, with a better healthcare, education and other social objectives? Will it manage to stop the rampant corruption and repression, or will it join in the game?
We will see...but it might be interesting after all....
There is a majority of votes towards the right or centre-right side of the political spectrum, which is always worrisome....but it´s true that, in general, the left parties got reinforced after elections, and won some territories. This was casued by a bigger participation mostly, but also by some changes in votes.
First of all, CIU. This is Catalunya´s main right party, and they have always played with catalanism to obtain things for themselves. In the past they did some good things, but also plenty of bad things, like helping private schools only, and big companies and such things. Lately, they did mostly bad things, like corruption repression and huge social cuts. Right now, they were governing without a majority, which means they had to pact to achieve things. They didn´t like that, and when it was clear that people were tired of some of the problems that come from being in Spain and wanted independence, they claimed that they were the most independent of them all, and organized this elections, with the message that independence would only be possible with them. They tried to hide all the bad things they had done, and present independence as the most important thing to vote for right now.
Luckily, things went very wrong for them. They have lost a big chunk of people in the parliament, and they have been weakened. They still have more than twice people in parliament than any other single party, but they cannot reach majority by far, and they need to pact.
ERC, catalunya´s main left catalanist party, got the next best result.ERC is truly in favor of independence, and for one people didn´t get tricked, and they got the majority of independentists votes instead of CIU . PSC followed them (spanish centre party, they are a little lost at the moment with no clear ideas), and then PP (spanish right party, same ideas as last 70 years). Then ICV (catalunya´s left party, got reinforced with some more people than before), C(catalunya´s right party in favour of Spain, won some votes against even asking about independence) and CUP (a new party from the left that wants independence while paying lots of attention to giving lots of social rights, and therefore got lots of new votes) took the rest of the people in the parliament. The result is that CIU has 50 people, ERC 21, PSC 20, PP 19, ICV 13, C 9 and CUP 3.
To have majority you need 68 people at least, so it´s easy to see that there are 4 main possible combinations: CIU+ERC, CIU+PSC, CIU+PP and PP+ERC+PSC+(ICS or C).
Some people, usually from the right political mindset, think that this is terrible. After all, it´s true that it´s really hard to do things if you have to make sure that some other party needs to agree on them with you. However, that´s something that really expresses democracy. If you can rule alone, you usually rule by yourself. You can claim that half of the people wanted you to rule (which is false, since with the laws around votes you can usually win elections with 20% of votes or less), and that means any decision you take is right. That ignores all the other parties that people also voted. The result is that, if you don´t need to pact, you can be a dictator until next elections, deciding everything on your own. And lots of people call that Democracy with a straight face. However, when you need to pact, it´s possible that the smaller parties force some changes down your throat. That is great, it makes you learn to dialogue, to compromise on things, to have to open your mind a little bit, or to just accept that you cannot do whatever you want responsibility-free until the next elections.
PP, being Franco´s heirs, and ERC (being part of Franco´s opponents heirs), will probably never agree in anything (they´re almost opposites) , so the last combination is not possible (or the probability needs to be calculated with a supercomputer, to fit all the decimal zeros it has before any other number).
This leaves the other 3 possible combinations.
CIU could pact with PP and they would probably agree on most things except independence. However, this is a very important point, CIU already has agreed on start the process of consulting with votes in a referendum about it (PP is completely against it), and in Catalunya if you ally yourself with PP in an open way you are committing political suicide. They could probably ally themselves with PSC. They do not have that many differences, and PSC is very lost at the moment and could probably adapt to CIU. However, either CIU would reject the idea of independence, which would be another suicide, or PSC accepts to make a referendum and policies from the right, which would give unclear results for them, but it´s probable that they would lose votes too.
CIU and ERC are the more probable initial pact. ERC has a problem, and that is that some of its members forget that "E" is from "Esquerra", which means left in catalan. ERC sometimes gives priority to give more independence to Catalunya than making social policies. This means that they could rule together for a while. CIU could pact with PP from time to time to approve their worst policies against social rights (no matter how publicly they fight and insult each other, CIU and PP are really close to each other and help each other again and again, even if they try to not advertise it), and if ERC doesn't get angry about it, things would continue like this. However, ERC has said that social policies will be a priority.
Will ERC be able to make CIU swallow a number of social reforms to, at least, get closer to the social situation we had before CIU ruled, with a better healthcare, education and other social objectives? Will it manage to stop the rampant corruption and repression, or will it join in the game?
We will see...but it might be interesting after all....
Saturday, 3 November 2012
First week in Adler
After some time of instability, we're finally living in Russia. Right now we're still in the hotel, but this Monday we're supposed to sign the contract for our apartment.
The first impressions have been good, but Russia is indeed a curious country. The place where we will live, Adler, is quite small. It has 3-4 big streets, and the rest of the town is made of little passages and houses. There are a lot of little shops, and we have two shopping malls, that can be reached by a 10-minute walk.
Traffic is awful, there's way too many people using cars to move around, and they drive aggresively, plenty of times ignoring preferences, lights or lanes, and always competing for spaces with other cars. The result is that you can see daily deadlocks in the main street, created by cars trying to turn while other cars are in the way, with no one giving away any ground, and other similar situations.
Luckily, as mentioned, we do not need to use the car in here, we walk everywhere and it takes only a few minutes.
If we feel like going to a bigger place, Sochi's centre is 40 minutes or so (if there are no big traffic jams/deadlocks) away from here using the public buses. We've been there only once, but it's true that feels more like a city. However, if we analyse it, it's a similar situation than in London, where the centre was 40 minutes away, and around our house there was almost nothing, just some shops.
The apartments we can rent are pretty awesome and big, and the one we want to have will give us enough space for guests and parties (so we hope to have people around from time to time). We're meeting new nice people who already live here, and the feeling is similar to London, or to Sweden, where you usually keep meeting people in a similar situation, and since we do not know much of the place we band together. We've already gone to a couple of parties where we've met co-workers, Russians or from other parts of the world.
The hotel we're using right now is quite nice, but it has a major drawback: no internet in the room. This means that we need to go downstairs every time we want to connect, which means that we cannot check things as much as we usually want, or watch series and such things. Anyway, soon enough we'll be able to get internet in our apartment, and we're told it works well enough.
The weather, at the beginning of November, has been quite amazing, sunny and nice, while being temperate and not very hot. At night it's colder, since weather is drier than in Barcelona, but it's still very nice for the month. Before arriving here we had to stop one day in Moscow, and we were at around 3 degrees, it was raining like hell, and when it stopped raining it was to start snowing...
All in all, we believe we can live well in here, we'll see how it goes^^
The first impressions have been good, but Russia is indeed a curious country. The place where we will live, Adler, is quite small. It has 3-4 big streets, and the rest of the town is made of little passages and houses. There are a lot of little shops, and we have two shopping malls, that can be reached by a 10-minute walk.
Traffic is awful, there's way too many people using cars to move around, and they drive aggresively, plenty of times ignoring preferences, lights or lanes, and always competing for spaces with other cars. The result is that you can see daily deadlocks in the main street, created by cars trying to turn while other cars are in the way, with no one giving away any ground, and other similar situations.
Luckily, as mentioned, we do not need to use the car in here, we walk everywhere and it takes only a few minutes.
If we feel like going to a bigger place, Sochi's centre is 40 minutes or so (if there are no big traffic jams/deadlocks) away from here using the public buses. We've been there only once, but it's true that feels more like a city. However, if we analyse it, it's a similar situation than in London, where the centre was 40 minutes away, and around our house there was almost nothing, just some shops.
The apartments we can rent are pretty awesome and big, and the one we want to have will give us enough space for guests and parties (so we hope to have people around from time to time). We're meeting new nice people who already live here, and the feeling is similar to London, or to Sweden, where you usually keep meeting people in a similar situation, and since we do not know much of the place we band together. We've already gone to a couple of parties where we've met co-workers, Russians or from other parts of the world.
The hotel we're using right now is quite nice, but it has a major drawback: no internet in the room. This means that we need to go downstairs every time we want to connect, which means that we cannot check things as much as we usually want, or watch series and such things. Anyway, soon enough we'll be able to get internet in our apartment, and we're told it works well enough.
The weather, at the beginning of November, has been quite amazing, sunny and nice, while being temperate and not very hot. At night it's colder, since weather is drier than in Barcelona, but it's still very nice for the month. Before arriving here we had to stop one day in Moscow, and we were at around 3 degrees, it was raining like hell, and when it stopped raining it was to start snowing...
All in all, we believe we can live well in here, we'll see how it goes^^
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
Independence?(2)
I want to dedicate a second post, because I want to talk more about current situation...
All this bad comments, together with the fact that the amount of money that Catalunya was giving to the central government was much more than the money returned in inversions for Catalunya, made Catalan people mad. The growing feeling regarding money was that other Spanish regions, like Extremadura and Andalucia (that do not have a strong economy) , or even Madrid (who has) were getting most of it, and they didn't have to work as hard as Catalunya because they were getting money anyway. This may be a lie, but people from these regions have explained stories and it may not be completely false, even if it's not true for most of the population of these regions. This idea was also used by Catalunya's right party, CIU, to spread hate towards Spain as well, even if in lesser measure. Another nationalist party from the left, ERC, also shared some of these ideas and spread them.
There has been comments, and one thing that is true is that Catalunya gives more money than any other "rich" region present in other European countries, and the proportion of money that gets back is also much inferior.
Summing up, PP and sometimes PSOE were accusing Catalunya of being different and wanted it to become more "Spanish", they were ridiculising Catalunya's culture, and spreading hate against this region around Spain, while taking lots of money to spend in other regions. CIU and ERC took the chance to show that Spain wanted to eliminate Catalunya's culture while stealing money from it at the same time, even if their campaigns were not as brutal or hateful.
This resulted in more and more people getting angry at the central government, and starting to think that maybe Catalunya would do better if it was independent from Spain.
The people who live in Catalunya are very diverse. There's lots of immigrants, since Catalunya is one of the richest regions of Spain, so there are more job offers and opportunities My father is from Andalucia and came here when he was young, searching for a better place to live. This happened from all around Spain, and right now Catalunya has lots and lots of people that were not born Catalans.
However, these people have felt they have found their home, and have made a place in Catalunya. Therefore, they got angry too, because now it was also their culture, even if borrowed later in their lives, and their efforts and money. There a lots of immigrants, event from other Spanish regions, that became more radical than traditional Catalan families and supported the idea of just breaking up relations with Spain and declare independence. All these people, wherever their origins, started to realise that Spain seemed to hate them, so they wanted to separate from that.
People who supported independence were actually a minority for a very long time, they were just very noisy. But all these problems created more and more supporters. Every new stupid article done from central Spain by PP supporters explaining how terrible was the situation in Catalunya that you needed to learn another language to live there (something that clearly seemed to be a bad thing for them) created more independence supporters. Every new comment that Madrid was getting some extra highways free to use while in Catalunya people had to pay in order to use 20-year old ones increased the independentists' numbers.
Recently, Catalunya tried to make a new set of ruling laws for the region, and this set of laws was approved in a referendum by Catalan people (even if participation was low, which rests importance to the results), but PSOE gave problems to it, and PP directly went to the tribunals saying it was anticonstitutional, to try to modify it, which in the end is what happened.
Things have just been escalating since then. Right now, as I commented in the previous post, since there's no money and we keep hearing how it has been wasted all around Spain, the financial problem is one of the big ones. At the same time, PP and PSOE have continued to attack the culture, and have tried to take more control of Catalunya's government.
The end result? The demonstration of 11th of September. Between 1.500.000 and 2.000.000 people went to the streets asking independence. This has never happened before. Consider that Catalunya's total population is around 7.000.000 people, and that of course not everybody who might have wanted to go was there. That basically means that, probably, more than half of Catalunya's population wants to get rid of Spain, while the other half may be divided between indifferent people and people against separating.
CIU is using this to try to get more votes, when they have destroyed lots of public services, as if the only important thing right now is this. We should not fall for this trap, and even if it's true that they might support independence, which I doubt, they are the ones that have worsened a lot the situation in Catalunya, by giving money to their CEO friends. I repeat, we should get rid of them and not fall for their simplistic tactic of saying next elections are about Catalunya's independence only. However, given the chance to ask people if they want to be independent we should take it, just to see what happens. That's democracy, even if PP insists, as a Lawful Evil character, that it's illegal. Well, it may be illegal, but that's only because the system is corrupt and not democratic enough.
And well, what can I say more? Spain's governments really worked hard for it during lots of years, we should honour them and leave....
What I didn't explain about Catalunya is that, for the past 20 years or so, there has been a strong campaign in the rest of Spain to promote hate against it.
After Franco died, as I mentioned, Catalunya got some independence back. This was respected, and while some people still claimed they wanted more, the vast majority of the population was happy with the state of things regarding Catalunya's management. There was a number of laws protecting the Catalan language and culture, to make sure Franco's effords to eliminate it were undone, and the degree of independence in government was enough to manage most things.
However, Spain's right party, called PP, started a campaign defending the unity of Spain, where Catalunya was a target because of their use of Catalan and independence tendencies. PP promoted the idea that in Catalunya everybody hated Spain and Spanish people and culture, and that Catalan people were rude towards Spanish people and didn't try to communicate.
This was used to show, then, that Spain's left party, called PSOE, collaborated too much with Catalunya, and Catalunya was not doing anything for Spain. The logic was that PP would put a stop to that, so you should vote it. Of course, the things they were saying were not true, but PP, as heirs of Franco, didn't care much about such things.
PSOE didn't help, since part of it was also not happy with Catalunya's degree of independence, and there were regions were PSOE was also promoting this type of hate, by comments and declarations.
This started mostly at the end of a big period where PSOE was ruling Spain, in 1996, and increased even more when PP ruled, between 1996 and 2004.
All this bad comments, together with the fact that the amount of money that Catalunya was giving to the central government was much more than the money returned in inversions for Catalunya, made Catalan people mad. The growing feeling regarding money was that other Spanish regions, like Extremadura and Andalucia (that do not have a strong economy) , or even Madrid (who has) were getting most of it, and they didn't have to work as hard as Catalunya because they were getting money anyway. This may be a lie, but people from these regions have explained stories and it may not be completely false, even if it's not true for most of the population of these regions. This idea was also used by Catalunya's right party, CIU, to spread hate towards Spain as well, even if in lesser measure. Another nationalist party from the left, ERC, also shared some of these ideas and spread them.
There has been comments, and one thing that is true is that Catalunya gives more money than any other "rich" region present in other European countries, and the proportion of money that gets back is also much inferior.
Summing up, PP and sometimes PSOE were accusing Catalunya of being different and wanted it to become more "Spanish", they were ridiculising Catalunya's culture, and spreading hate against this region around Spain, while taking lots of money to spend in other regions. CIU and ERC took the chance to show that Spain wanted to eliminate Catalunya's culture while stealing money from it at the same time, even if their campaigns were not as brutal or hateful.
This resulted in more and more people getting angry at the central government, and starting to think that maybe Catalunya would do better if it was independent from Spain.
The people who live in Catalunya are very diverse. There's lots of immigrants, since Catalunya is one of the richest regions of Spain, so there are more job offers and opportunities My father is from Andalucia and came here when he was young, searching for a better place to live. This happened from all around Spain, and right now Catalunya has lots and lots of people that were not born Catalans.
However, these people have felt they have found their home, and have made a place in Catalunya. Therefore, they got angry too, because now it was also their culture, even if borrowed later in their lives, and their efforts and money. There a lots of immigrants, event from other Spanish regions, that became more radical than traditional Catalan families and supported the idea of just breaking up relations with Spain and declare independence. All these people, wherever their origins, started to realise that Spain seemed to hate them, so they wanted to separate from that.
People who supported independence were actually a minority for a very long time, they were just very noisy. But all these problems created more and more supporters. Every new stupid article done from central Spain by PP supporters explaining how terrible was the situation in Catalunya that you needed to learn another language to live there (something that clearly seemed to be a bad thing for them) created more independence supporters. Every new comment that Madrid was getting some extra highways free to use while in Catalunya people had to pay in order to use 20-year old ones increased the independentists' numbers.
Recently, Catalunya tried to make a new set of ruling laws for the region, and this set of laws was approved in a referendum by Catalan people (even if participation was low, which rests importance to the results), but PSOE gave problems to it, and PP directly went to the tribunals saying it was anticonstitutional, to try to modify it, which in the end is what happened.
Things have just been escalating since then. Right now, as I commented in the previous post, since there's no money and we keep hearing how it has been wasted all around Spain, the financial problem is one of the big ones. At the same time, PP and PSOE have continued to attack the culture, and have tried to take more control of Catalunya's government.
The end result? The demonstration of 11th of September. Between 1.500.000 and 2.000.000 people went to the streets asking independence. This has never happened before. Consider that Catalunya's total population is around 7.000.000 people, and that of course not everybody who might have wanted to go was there. That basically means that, probably, more than half of Catalunya's population wants to get rid of Spain, while the other half may be divided between indifferent people and people against separating.
CIU is using this to try to get more votes, when they have destroyed lots of public services, as if the only important thing right now is this. We should not fall for this trap, and even if it's true that they might support independence, which I doubt, they are the ones that have worsened a lot the situation in Catalunya, by giving money to their CEO friends. I repeat, we should get rid of them and not fall for their simplistic tactic of saying next elections are about Catalunya's independence only. However, given the chance to ask people if they want to be independent we should take it, just to see what happens. That's democracy, even if PP insists, as a Lawful Evil character, that it's illegal. Well, it may be illegal, but that's only because the system is corrupt and not democratic enough.
And well, what can I say more? Spain's governments really worked hard for it during lots of years, we should honour them and leave....
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Independence?
This is going to be a long rant about the small region I'm from, Catalunya. Recently there was a demonstration there asking for independence from Spain, and it was a huge success when it comes to people going there.
To understand this, we need some background. We'll start loooong ago. In the middle ages, before the muslim invasion of the iberic peninsula, there was no spain. It was after this invasion and the reconquer (around year 800) that several kingoms appeared in the spanish region, and they evolved into 2 main ones as they conquered more territories, Castilla's kingdom and Aragon's Kingdom. Aragon's Kingdom was formed by the union of two other kingdoms, and one of them was Catalunya, so Catalunya was an important part of that one.
Castilla and Aragon joined in a big kingom (around year 1500 ), while retaining a lot of independence from each other. Each had its own rules, laws and governments, but shared some of the big decisions, and formed the spanish kingdom. This point already proves one thing....in recent years, Catalan people, me included, have said sometimes "Catalunya is not Spain". Well, this is evidently not true, Catalunya formed the original Spanish kingdom, and it was a big important part of it. However, it was an important part of it while retaining a lot of independence, that is also true.
Years passed and Castilla prospered more than Aragon, since Castilla controlled the newly-discovered American regions, while Aragon had it forbidden to try and colonize these territories. Castilla became more important in Spain, and Aragon lost power and territories. Meanwhile, Spain participated in a lot of wars(most of them organised by Castilla), and Castilla wanted Aragon to participate in money and people too, since its independence meant they didn't have to help as much. In one of these wars, against France (around year 1600), Castilla sent soldiers through Catalunya, and they started to act like an occupying force, destroying fields and doing whatever they wanted.
Catalunya revolted, and allied itself with France, becoming part of it for a short time. However, France started to act exactly like the rest of Spain, with the French army acting like Catalunya was enemy territory and central France denying Catalunya's independence agreements and trying to centralize all government. Therefore, in the end Catalunya became part of Spain again (after Spain conquered it from France), losing territories to France. Spain agreed to respect Catalunya's laws, so at this time it retained a certain independence.
However, shortly thereafter (1700), there was a new civil war to determine the new Spanish king, and in that war Catalunya decided to support what would eventually be the losing side. The winning side supported absolutism, so the new king was not happy with Catalunya's (and other regions') attitude, and removed all forms of government independence, together with trying to eliminate other languages from being official, centralising universities, and putting military in charge of the regional government.
It was at this time that the idea of Spain, and Spanish people, was really created. Before that, the Spanish kingdom was considered a union of different kingdoms, with one common king.
In the next century (1800), even if it didn't have any independency in its government, Catalunya became very important again, since it managed to industrialise itself, a thing not many spanish regions achieved. This created a lot of new rich people that were unrelated to the old noble system. These people became very important inside Catalunya, and their families have been always very influential since that moment. These new rich people were the ones that created the political idea of catalan nationalism: Basically, the idea of becoming more independent again, promoting Catalan, the catalan culture and the old catalan government institutions.
This also shows one thing...Catalanism was invented by rich industry-owners (CEOs, let's say) that basically got enough time to think about these things, in a period where normal people were just happy to be able to eat and were working 12 hours per day at least in factories that resembled slave colonies. At that time the worker's political ideal was to join all states and get rid of the rich and noble people that were oppressing all of them, and Catalanism was the opposite idea.
Later on Catalanism was adopted by workers, when it became part of a political party that supported workers as well, and then we're already in the 20th century, with Franco, its repression of anything not Spanish, and all that.
After Franco died (from natural causes without ever stopping to rule, a thing that should be considered the most shameful event that has ever happened in Spain), Catalunya became an "autonomous community", which means it had a certain degree of independence.
All this was just a long introduction, to mention a number of things:
1-Catalunya's Region (more or less) was almost independent until 300 years ago. It was at that time that Spain introduced the idea of "total unity" and "centralisation", trying to make all regions the same and controlled from the centre.
2-That doesn't mean Catalunya was not part of Spain before that, it was actually one of the main "founders". It just had a lot of independence when it comes to government, and it had its own culture and language, different from Castilla.
3-Catalanism was an invent of posh people, that originally had no space for worker's rights or anything similar. This idea, originally, was more important that people having better lives.
To all that, I would like to add that nationalism, or feeling proud of being born somewhere, it's rather stupid in my opinion. You may be happy to have a certain culture, with the ideals and thoughts it brings, and you may have a certain language and want to use it normally, in everyday conversations with other people that speak it, but being proud of being Catalan, or Spanish, just because, doesn't make much sense to me. It enters in the category of being proud of a number of people playing some sport, as if they cared about you or you had raised or trained them personally.
All this would point to the fact that I may not want independence, but I actually do. It's just that I didn't mention many good reasons yet.
Right now, the whole region in Spain has a huge crisis (it affects all Europe, but Spain is one of the worst areas). Spanish government is controlled by two main parties, that are completely corrupt (at least at the high levels. Little towns may have decent politicians). One of them is a direct descendant of Franco's friends and ideas, and the other, even if more moderate, cares only about themselves and don't do anything, just small little things to pretend they are a leftist party, when they're just moderate right.
The "left" party lost a lot of supporters recently, because people who may support them want social policies. The "right" party, however, has a number of loyal unwavering supporters that vote them no matter what, around 10 million Spanish people, close to one fourth of the total population. It's impossible to improve the situation without turning these two parties into more minor ones, or make them actually work for the votes. And these 10 million people won't change the support.
In Catalunya, that party got around 400.000 votes, which represents around 5% of the total population. Catalunya has a third "nationalist" party, currently ruling, that is also very corrupt and has a lot of permanent followers, but there is more variation and more parties have power, less extremism, and this "new fascist" party doesn't have that much of a support.
Summing it up, it's easier than different parties take control of Catalunya's government. However, if the laws do not allow to do much, and the central government decides what to do, and centralises power more than before, these parties won't have much power to change things. If Catalunya was independent, this wouldn't be the case. Sure, we'd still depend on Europe, but with smaller population and more variety things like Iceland would be easier to happen (where the population took control of things, put order to the political and economical corruption, and now it's getting out of the crisis).
This is not exactly my only reason, but it's a very important one right now. It may seem "selfish", but the truth is it would be easier to actually produce changes if the different small Spanish regions had the power to do whatever they wanted. And I would like that.
Catalunya's current problems are caused a lot by the current government, that destroyed lots of social victories and then disguised everything as Spain's fault. We need to get rid of them. But getting rid of them won't get us rid of the Spanish politicians, so if this same government manages to separate Catalunya from that other problem, I'd be quite happy . In a perfect world, we would be able to solve Spain's problems, but we do not live in one, so every little thing helps, and I think independence could help a lot...
To understand this, we need some background. We'll start loooong ago. In the middle ages, before the muslim invasion of the iberic peninsula, there was no spain. It was after this invasion and the reconquer (around year 800) that several kingoms appeared in the spanish region, and they evolved into 2 main ones as they conquered more territories, Castilla's kingdom and Aragon's Kingdom. Aragon's Kingdom was formed by the union of two other kingdoms, and one of them was Catalunya, so Catalunya was an important part of that one.
Castilla and Aragon joined in a big kingom (around year 1500 ), while retaining a lot of independence from each other. Each had its own rules, laws and governments, but shared some of the big decisions, and formed the spanish kingdom. This point already proves one thing....in recent years, Catalan people, me included, have said sometimes "Catalunya is not Spain". Well, this is evidently not true, Catalunya formed the original Spanish kingdom, and it was a big important part of it. However, it was an important part of it while retaining a lot of independence, that is also true.
Years passed and Castilla prospered more than Aragon, since Castilla controlled the newly-discovered American regions, while Aragon had it forbidden to try and colonize these territories. Castilla became more important in Spain, and Aragon lost power and territories. Meanwhile, Spain participated in a lot of wars(most of them organised by Castilla), and Castilla wanted Aragon to participate in money and people too, since its independence meant they didn't have to help as much. In one of these wars, against France (around year 1600), Castilla sent soldiers through Catalunya, and they started to act like an occupying force, destroying fields and doing whatever they wanted.
Catalunya revolted, and allied itself with France, becoming part of it for a short time. However, France started to act exactly like the rest of Spain, with the French army acting like Catalunya was enemy territory and central France denying Catalunya's independence agreements and trying to centralize all government. Therefore, in the end Catalunya became part of Spain again (after Spain conquered it from France), losing territories to France. Spain agreed to respect Catalunya's laws, so at this time it retained a certain independence.
However, shortly thereafter (1700), there was a new civil war to determine the new Spanish king, and in that war Catalunya decided to support what would eventually be the losing side. The winning side supported absolutism, so the new king was not happy with Catalunya's (and other regions') attitude, and removed all forms of government independence, together with trying to eliminate other languages from being official, centralising universities, and putting military in charge of the regional government.
It was at this time that the idea of Spain, and Spanish people, was really created. Before that, the Spanish kingdom was considered a union of different kingdoms, with one common king.
In the next century (1800), even if it didn't have any independency in its government, Catalunya became very important again, since it managed to industrialise itself, a thing not many spanish regions achieved. This created a lot of new rich people that were unrelated to the old noble system. These people became very important inside Catalunya, and their families have been always very influential since that moment. These new rich people were the ones that created the political idea of catalan nationalism: Basically, the idea of becoming more independent again, promoting Catalan, the catalan culture and the old catalan government institutions.
This also shows one thing...Catalanism was invented by rich industry-owners (CEOs, let's say) that basically got enough time to think about these things, in a period where normal people were just happy to be able to eat and were working 12 hours per day at least in factories that resembled slave colonies. At that time the worker's political ideal was to join all states and get rid of the rich and noble people that were oppressing all of them, and Catalanism was the opposite idea.
Later on Catalanism was adopted by workers, when it became part of a political party that supported workers as well, and then we're already in the 20th century, with Franco, its repression of anything not Spanish, and all that.
After Franco died (from natural causes without ever stopping to rule, a thing that should be considered the most shameful event that has ever happened in Spain), Catalunya became an "autonomous community", which means it had a certain degree of independence.
All this was just a long introduction, to mention a number of things:
1-Catalunya's Region (more or less) was almost independent until 300 years ago. It was at that time that Spain introduced the idea of "total unity" and "centralisation", trying to make all regions the same and controlled from the centre.
2-That doesn't mean Catalunya was not part of Spain before that, it was actually one of the main "founders". It just had a lot of independence when it comes to government, and it had its own culture and language, different from Castilla.
3-Catalanism was an invent of posh people, that originally had no space for worker's rights or anything similar. This idea, originally, was more important that people having better lives.
To all that, I would like to add that nationalism, or feeling proud of being born somewhere, it's rather stupid in my opinion. You may be happy to have a certain culture, with the ideals and thoughts it brings, and you may have a certain language and want to use it normally, in everyday conversations with other people that speak it, but being proud of being Catalan, or Spanish, just because, doesn't make much sense to me. It enters in the category of being proud of a number of people playing some sport, as if they cared about you or you had raised or trained them personally.
All this would point to the fact that I may not want independence, but I actually do. It's just that I didn't mention many good reasons yet.
Right now, the whole region in Spain has a huge crisis (it affects all Europe, but Spain is one of the worst areas). Spanish government is controlled by two main parties, that are completely corrupt (at least at the high levels. Little towns may have decent politicians). One of them is a direct descendant of Franco's friends and ideas, and the other, even if more moderate, cares only about themselves and don't do anything, just small little things to pretend they are a leftist party, when they're just moderate right.
The "left" party lost a lot of supporters recently, because people who may support them want social policies. The "right" party, however, has a number of loyal unwavering supporters that vote them no matter what, around 10 million Spanish people, close to one fourth of the total population. It's impossible to improve the situation without turning these two parties into more minor ones, or make them actually work for the votes. And these 10 million people won't change the support.
In Catalunya, that party got around 400.000 votes, which represents around 5% of the total population. Catalunya has a third "nationalist" party, currently ruling, that is also very corrupt and has a lot of permanent followers, but there is more variation and more parties have power, less extremism, and this "new fascist" party doesn't have that much of a support.
Summing it up, it's easier than different parties take control of Catalunya's government. However, if the laws do not allow to do much, and the central government decides what to do, and centralises power more than before, these parties won't have much power to change things. If Catalunya was independent, this wouldn't be the case. Sure, we'd still depend on Europe, but with smaller population and more variety things like Iceland would be easier to happen (where the population took control of things, put order to the political and economical corruption, and now it's getting out of the crisis).
This is not exactly my only reason, but it's a very important one right now. It may seem "selfish", but the truth is it would be easier to actually produce changes if the different small Spanish regions had the power to do whatever they wanted. And I would like that.
Catalunya's current problems are caused a lot by the current government, that destroyed lots of social victories and then disguised everything as Spain's fault. We need to get rid of them. But getting rid of them won't get us rid of the Spanish politicians, so if this same government manages to separate Catalunya from that other problem, I'd be quite happy . In a perfect world, we would be able to solve Spain's problems, but we do not live in one, so every little thing helps, and I think independence could help a lot...
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Moving Out
We're finally back in Barcelona, and the last days in London have been quite busy. Moving is always a little bit stressful, and it requires you to do looots of things...
The last week we tried to meet with everybody who's living there, all the time, which required a lot of organising and planning. We more or less managed to see them, but in the end there were some rushed up good-byes and short meetings.
While doing that, we tried to start packing to move out of the apartment. That was quite horrible...
Moving is hard, but moving by using the plane is extra hard, because of the limitations in weight and volume that you have. Even when we already knew we were leaving furniture behind there were lots of things to pack. So, after several failed tries, we managed to send 3 initial packages and start filling the first suitcase. The initial plan was to use 3 suitcases, and that's what we had booked.
After seeing that we were not making much progress, we decided to leave it for the final two days. that's always a nice extra motivation to finish, the fact that there is no more time left. We already had 3 suitcases, but one of them was broken in several spots and we didn't trust it would reach Barcelona with full integrity. Therefore we bought a new cheap one from Tesco, just to survive for this trip, and the night we had to pack everything we threw away the broken one. We checked in to the flight with 3 suitcases, and we were ready to start packing.
We originally came with 3 suitcases, and we also sent 2 packages. We bought some things, but we did get rid of lots of winter clothes in trips to Vilnius and Barcelona, and we sent 3 packages with things we bought while in London. We thought it was going to be the same as our arrival.
Problems started when we finished the first 2 suitcases. We still had way too many things to pack. Clearly it was not going to be enough with one more suitcase. So we got a box from the garage that we still had from a received package and decided we were going to sent another one.
We filled the box, and still there were too many things. Remembering the thrown suitcase, we ran towards the trash, and luckily it was still there. Sure, it was broken, but if we wrapped it in plastic it would probably survive. With 4 suitcases we managed to fit most things, with some left for the hand luggage, but the 4 suitcases weighted close to 24 each. British Airways is generous, but the maximum weight per suitcase is 23, and we didn't want to risk it, so we started a nightmarish process of removing a little thing, weighting the suitcases, putting it somewhere else, and weighting them again.
We finally decided to load all extra kilos in the most resilient one, which reached 28 Kg, and we would pay the 40 pounds charge for one overweight suitcase. At this point it seemed a cheap solution...Only thing left was to add a suitcase to our plane ticket.
So, we proceeded to the flight booking information, and tried to add a suitcase. First, we had some trouble finding a place in the web where the suitcase could be added, but well, we managed to access it after making some google searches. We had the page, and there was a combo box where you mark how many suitcases to add to you booking. The combo box was in the 0 position, so I went and tried to change it....unsuccessfully.
After checking it with several browsers with same results, we read that once you had done the on-line check-in, you could not add more suitcases. That was stupid and made no sense to us...well, except for the fact that if you add them at the airport it was twice the price. This way if you make a mistake they can get more money out of you.
This made us angry, for obvious reasons. It was a cheap trick to get money. Therefore, before surrendering and waiting to be in the airport to add baggage, I went back to the webpage for one last experiment. With Chrome I decided to have a look at the combo box. Indeed, the html code marked it as disabled, and having only the "0 suitcases to add" option. Well, we didn't want that. So I edited it, changed it to "enable", and added a new value in the combo box, a simple "1". With the combo box active, I selected the "1" value, expecting the page to fail in some way.
The javascript function that got activated by changing the combo worked fine, and informed us that we were going to add a suitcase to our booking. Therefore, we sent the "edited" form. This is the step when your information is processed by the server, so it doesn't matter what you did before, the server rechecks everything. All the editing that I did was just for fun, to see how the form would fail when resent. The only thing, it didn't.
Everything was perfectly fine and in order according to the website. We just needed to pay the online fee, and we'd have a nice new suitcase in our booking. We paid, while being rather surprised....but yes, checking the booking from another computer showed 2 suitcases instead of 1. What we did is illegal, we're pretty sure...but we shouldn't be able to do it, and that's illegal as well, not to protect yourself from these things. We paid everything anyway, we just avoided a trick to get money out of customers...
Just in case, we saved the bill of the new suitcase, finished packing somehow, and next day we went to the airport, with the help of Dani Fernandez. We had printed the boarding passes and the bill, and we went to baggage drop. We had one overweight suitcase, but we knew that and it was fine. The clerk there checked our information, and then told us that we only had 3 suitcases.
We kind of expected that, so with the most innocent face we could make, explained that we had bought the extra suitcase, and presented the bill as proof. We said we did that before check-in, and the clerk decided to make a call, I guess to check our booking somewhere else. When he asked about suitcases they told him that it was 4, and the clerk proceeded to say everything's fine and let us drop everything.
So, there was no technical problem in letting us add a suitcase after check-in. They could have added this option and just resend the check-in information if some part of the booking was changed, but they didn't let us, in order to get some extra money the moment we made any mistake...
Anyway, after all this troubles we managed to safely get back to Barcelona. We've been some time there now, and we're getting ready for Sochi, but we won't move there yet. We'll explain more about all these new preparations some other time, in another post :)
The last week we tried to meet with everybody who's living there, all the time, which required a lot of organising and planning. We more or less managed to see them, but in the end there were some rushed up good-byes and short meetings.
While doing that, we tried to start packing to move out of the apartment. That was quite horrible...
Moving is hard, but moving by using the plane is extra hard, because of the limitations in weight and volume that you have. Even when we already knew we were leaving furniture behind there were lots of things to pack. So, after several failed tries, we managed to send 3 initial packages and start filling the first suitcase. The initial plan was to use 3 suitcases, and that's what we had booked.
After seeing that we were not making much progress, we decided to leave it for the final two days. that's always a nice extra motivation to finish, the fact that there is no more time left. We already had 3 suitcases, but one of them was broken in several spots and we didn't trust it would reach Barcelona with full integrity. Therefore we bought a new cheap one from Tesco, just to survive for this trip, and the night we had to pack everything we threw away the broken one. We checked in to the flight with 3 suitcases, and we were ready to start packing.
We originally came with 3 suitcases, and we also sent 2 packages. We bought some things, but we did get rid of lots of winter clothes in trips to Vilnius and Barcelona, and we sent 3 packages with things we bought while in London. We thought it was going to be the same as our arrival.
Problems started when we finished the first 2 suitcases. We still had way too many things to pack. Clearly it was not going to be enough with one more suitcase. So we got a box from the garage that we still had from a received package and decided we were going to sent another one.
We filled the box, and still there were too many things. Remembering the thrown suitcase, we ran towards the trash, and luckily it was still there. Sure, it was broken, but if we wrapped it in plastic it would probably survive. With 4 suitcases we managed to fit most things, with some left for the hand luggage, but the 4 suitcases weighted close to 24 each. British Airways is generous, but the maximum weight per suitcase is 23, and we didn't want to risk it, so we started a nightmarish process of removing a little thing, weighting the suitcases, putting it somewhere else, and weighting them again.
We finally decided to load all extra kilos in the most resilient one, which reached 28 Kg, and we would pay the 40 pounds charge for one overweight suitcase. At this point it seemed a cheap solution...Only thing left was to add a suitcase to our plane ticket.
So, we proceeded to the flight booking information, and tried to add a suitcase. First, we had some trouble finding a place in the web where the suitcase could be added, but well, we managed to access it after making some google searches. We had the page, and there was a combo box where you mark how many suitcases to add to you booking. The combo box was in the 0 position, so I went and tried to change it....unsuccessfully.
After checking it with several browsers with same results, we read that once you had done the on-line check-in, you could not add more suitcases. That was stupid and made no sense to us...well, except for the fact that if you add them at the airport it was twice the price. This way if you make a mistake they can get more money out of you.
This made us angry, for obvious reasons. It was a cheap trick to get money. Therefore, before surrendering and waiting to be in the airport to add baggage, I went back to the webpage for one last experiment. With Chrome I decided to have a look at the combo box. Indeed, the html code marked it as disabled, and having only the "0 suitcases to add" option. Well, we didn't want that. So I edited it, changed it to "enable", and added a new value in the combo box, a simple "1". With the combo box active, I selected the "1" value, expecting the page to fail in some way.
The javascript function that got activated by changing the combo worked fine, and informed us that we were going to add a suitcase to our booking. Therefore, we sent the "edited" form. This is the step when your information is processed by the server, so it doesn't matter what you did before, the server rechecks everything. All the editing that I did was just for fun, to see how the form would fail when resent. The only thing, it didn't.
Everything was perfectly fine and in order according to the website. We just needed to pay the online fee, and we'd have a nice new suitcase in our booking. We paid, while being rather surprised....but yes, checking the booking from another computer showed 2 suitcases instead of 1. What we did is illegal, we're pretty sure...but we shouldn't be able to do it, and that's illegal as well, not to protect yourself from these things. We paid everything anyway, we just avoided a trick to get money out of customers...
Just in case, we saved the bill of the new suitcase, finished packing somehow, and next day we went to the airport, with the help of Dani Fernandez. We had printed the boarding passes and the bill, and we went to baggage drop. We had one overweight suitcase, but we knew that and it was fine. The clerk there checked our information, and then told us that we only had 3 suitcases.
We kind of expected that, so with the most innocent face we could make, explained that we had bought the extra suitcase, and presented the bill as proof. We said we did that before check-in, and the clerk decided to make a call, I guess to check our booking somewhere else. When he asked about suitcases they told him that it was 4, and the clerk proceeded to say everything's fine and let us drop everything.
So, there was no technical problem in letting us add a suitcase after check-in. They could have added this option and just resend the check-in information if some part of the booking was changed, but they didn't let us, in order to get some extra money the moment we made any mistake...
Anyway, after all this troubles we managed to safely get back to Barcelona. We've been some time there now, and we're getting ready for Sochi, but we won't move there yet. We'll explain more about all these new preparations some other time, in another post :)
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Mass Effect's Ending
Between the Olympics and preparing to move out of this country, some time ago I actually managed to finish Mass Effect 3. I want to talk about it a little, while trying not to spoiler it, even if by now most people have seen it/have heard enough about it.
So, the ending....when the game was released, and the complains about its ending started to be heard everywhere, there was a comment that Bioware was going to release some kind of expansion, or epilogue or something. Since I didn't have that much time to play anyway, I waited for a while...and when they finally released the expansion, I started to seriously play. Therefore, I never saw the original ending, but I did search for it afterwards, and yeah, it was really really bad...
The reason that it was bad it's that in the original one, they don't show anything. This game has a huge detailed mythology around it. The universe where things happen has a huge backstory, you could literally spend hours reading about it in the in-game encyclopaedia. The attention to detail is impressive. Therefore, if you finish the game with a big explosion, a couple of characters surviving it, and a fade to black, that's really an insult. It clearly shows that whoever did the 3 games did not participate in this ending. It has no explanation whatsoever of the consequences of your choice.
That said, the expansion is much better in my opinion. Things make slightly more sense, and you get a little epilogue, where you can see the effects of your last actions. If that was the original ending, there would have been some muttering about the lack of sense, but I doubt it would have reached the levels that the original ending created. And while watching this ending, one gets the real impression that some company directives tried to sell the ending as a DLC, and when the shitstorm hit them they backed away and offered it for free.
Nevertheless, the expanded ending is still...lacking. To explain that, I'll use the review and article made by Yahtzee. For those who do not know him, he's a games critic that always shows the negative points of a game. I like his reviews, even if I disagree with several of them. He did not like Mass Effect, for example, and I believe that he misunderstood the point of the game. But it's still a good article.
In his article, Yahtzee mentions that Mass Effect gets an ending, even if you don't like it, and that the ending serves to finish a story. And no matter what you did before, this way everybody gets the same ending, and the story has a clear beginning, centre and end, which is the same for everybody. He mentions that that was the ending creators wanted, and the fanbase should not be able to change it, because it would create a bad precedent
I disagree with that. Games are interactive storytelling, which is a very modern storytelling technique, that can be approached in very different ways than traditional storytelling. Mass Effect shows a perfect basic example in its ending: Instead of one ending, you have 3 of them. That's something really innovative, that you cannot do in a book or a movie (there have been books that tried to do it, but it doesn't work really well with them). Well, it's innovative in the sense that game are innovative, because almost since they had more complex plots than "eat yellow pills, avoid ghosts", games offered multiple endings.
The problem with that comes when the difference in the ending is like the one in Mass Effect: You have a couple of options, each one gives a different ending. This causes the feeling that no ending is really the true one, because with a simple load you can get back there, choose a different one, and see what happens. It's a lazy basic mechanic, to show off the "interactivity" of a game compared with a movie.
There are games that go further than that and really explore the storytelling capabilities of interactive media. Let's put as an example Silent Hill 2, a Yahtzee favourite. The game has a number of different endings, I believe that there are 3 normal ones, a joke one, only available after clearing the game once, and a 5th one that only appeared with an expansion. Let's focus on the original 3....
Each ending depends on how you played. I don't mean a decision you took, but literally how you played. Did you receive a lot of damage and didn't heal often? Did you spent lots of time checking on a character and trying to talk with them? Did you check certain objects a lot, and ignored others? That's how the game decides the ending.
The effect this makes is that the story is consistent with your gameplay. You can argue that it's actually 3 different stories. Your different gameplay shows a different story. And when you reach the end, there's not a damm thing you can do to change it. That's the one you chose, voluntarily or not. Do not try to reload, it won't change. To see a different one you would have to replay whole sections of the game, or start a new one directly.
This is what games offer when telling stories. The option to have a lot of different stories. You start from a common point, and then each branch goes somewhere different. Maybe some branches cross each other later on, but in the end they do not, each one going their separate way.
Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the first 2/3 of 3, follow this logic. Depending on your choices in the 1st and 2nd game, there's entire characters and plots that some people will never have. And this is awesome. That's what games offer. It's very complex to pull off, and programmers will have nightmares thinking about how to do it. But it has been done, and it's possible to do it.
Mass Effect 3 should not let you choose and ending. It should not translate decisions into little points that showed how close or far you were from completing the game. It should have taken all these plots and subplots, and offer you N different endings, each one depending on who you saved, who you killed, and who you met. But I guess it would have been too brave to do that and tell players that if they wanted a different one, they better started Mass Effect 1 again....and that was an incredible missed opportunity to show games' true potential.
So, the ending....when the game was released, and the complains about its ending started to be heard everywhere, there was a comment that Bioware was going to release some kind of expansion, or epilogue or something. Since I didn't have that much time to play anyway, I waited for a while...and when they finally released the expansion, I started to seriously play. Therefore, I never saw the original ending, but I did search for it afterwards, and yeah, it was really really bad...
The reason that it was bad it's that in the original one, they don't show anything. This game has a huge detailed mythology around it. The universe where things happen has a huge backstory, you could literally spend hours reading about it in the in-game encyclopaedia. The attention to detail is impressive. Therefore, if you finish the game with a big explosion, a couple of characters surviving it, and a fade to black, that's really an insult. It clearly shows that whoever did the 3 games did not participate in this ending. It has no explanation whatsoever of the consequences of your choice.
That said, the expansion is much better in my opinion. Things make slightly more sense, and you get a little epilogue, where you can see the effects of your last actions. If that was the original ending, there would have been some muttering about the lack of sense, but I doubt it would have reached the levels that the original ending created. And while watching this ending, one gets the real impression that some company directives tried to sell the ending as a DLC, and when the shitstorm hit them they backed away and offered it for free.
Nevertheless, the expanded ending is still...lacking. To explain that, I'll use the review and article made by Yahtzee. For those who do not know him, he's a games critic that always shows the negative points of a game. I like his reviews, even if I disagree with several of them. He did not like Mass Effect, for example, and I believe that he misunderstood the point of the game. But it's still a good article.
In his article, Yahtzee mentions that Mass Effect gets an ending, even if you don't like it, and that the ending serves to finish a story. And no matter what you did before, this way everybody gets the same ending, and the story has a clear beginning, centre and end, which is the same for everybody. He mentions that that was the ending creators wanted, and the fanbase should not be able to change it, because it would create a bad precedent
I disagree with that. Games are interactive storytelling, which is a very modern storytelling technique, that can be approached in very different ways than traditional storytelling. Mass Effect shows a perfect basic example in its ending: Instead of one ending, you have 3 of them. That's something really innovative, that you cannot do in a book or a movie (there have been books that tried to do it, but it doesn't work really well with them). Well, it's innovative in the sense that game are innovative, because almost since they had more complex plots than "eat yellow pills, avoid ghosts", games offered multiple endings.
The problem with that comes when the difference in the ending is like the one in Mass Effect: You have a couple of options, each one gives a different ending. This causes the feeling that no ending is really the true one, because with a simple load you can get back there, choose a different one, and see what happens. It's a lazy basic mechanic, to show off the "interactivity" of a game compared with a movie.
There are games that go further than that and really explore the storytelling capabilities of interactive media. Let's put as an example Silent Hill 2, a Yahtzee favourite. The game has a number of different endings, I believe that there are 3 normal ones, a joke one, only available after clearing the game once, and a 5th one that only appeared with an expansion. Let's focus on the original 3....
Each ending depends on how you played. I don't mean a decision you took, but literally how you played. Did you receive a lot of damage and didn't heal often? Did you spent lots of time checking on a character and trying to talk with them? Did you check certain objects a lot, and ignored others? That's how the game decides the ending.
The effect this makes is that the story is consistent with your gameplay. You can argue that it's actually 3 different stories. Your different gameplay shows a different story. And when you reach the end, there's not a damm thing you can do to change it. That's the one you chose, voluntarily or not. Do not try to reload, it won't change. To see a different one you would have to replay whole sections of the game, or start a new one directly.
This is what games offer when telling stories. The option to have a lot of different stories. You start from a common point, and then each branch goes somewhere different. Maybe some branches cross each other later on, but in the end they do not, each one going their separate way.
Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the first 2/3 of 3, follow this logic. Depending on your choices in the 1st and 2nd game, there's entire characters and plots that some people will never have. And this is awesome. That's what games offer. It's very complex to pull off, and programmers will have nightmares thinking about how to do it. But it has been done, and it's possible to do it.
Mass Effect 3 should not let you choose and ending. It should not translate decisions into little points that showed how close or far you were from completing the game. It should have taken all these plots and subplots, and offer you N different endings, each one depending on who you saved, who you killed, and who you met. But I guess it would have been too brave to do that and tell players that if they wanted a different one, they better started Mass Effect 1 again....and that was an incredible missed opportunity to show games' true potential.
Friday, 10 August 2012
Sturgeon's Law
Olympics are almost done, and the systems are holding amazingly well, all considered. This translated to the fact that today and tomorrow, when I have night shift giving support to the systems, we won't have anything to do.
After the work done, it's nice to see that for the moment things are easier, but the nights become really really long. Tonight I took the chance of having "free time" to see a couple of Salvados programs. This show is one of the best things that are done nowadays in the spanish TV.
We do not usually watch TV, becasue most of the time we think it's crap. If we want to watch series or movies, it's mutch better to see them when you have time and want to do so, and without interruptions for advertising. I think TV will die pretty soon in its traditional format, since it's so much better to decide for yourself what to watch and when to watch it. We do not have a sintonized TV here in England, and we do not miss it at all.
Anyway, Salvados is a program done by a smart group of reporters. True reporters, that scratch and dig information, make uncomfortable interviews and ask questions that are actually important and nobody dares to ask. Most episodes are very political, and they expose and criticise a certain topic. Even if it's based on spanish problems, with the current economic crisis there is lots of common ground with different people. I would recommend to watch it to anyone who understands spanish (maybe some version has english subtitles, but I do not know).
The result of watching it is the realisation that Spain is currently shit. There are no jobs, the services will become private, everything is going to be more expensive while salaries will drop, and all this crap. There is no apparent solution, and polititians are only offering money to the banks, who do not care about making sure people also gets it. You can watch a couple of the Salvados programs to get the picture....
Spain's problem is quite deep and complex, but part of the cause is the obscene amount of polititians we have, and the system to select them. The main two parties are as corrupt as it gets, and plenty of times I'm under the impression that when they fight, it's just theater, becasue they're quite happy with each other exchanging governments every 4-8 years. I once heard a polititian from another party saying that in Madrid, you could insult a perosn form another party, and when the day finished you could take a coffee with that person in a friendly way. The topics that are treated in there should not allow for that. If you really believe in some political idea, somebody else doesn't, and you reach the point of insults, it's not possible to just have a coffee with them....unless of course you didn't care that much on the first place.
Every time there is an election, I'm expecting people to react to all the stupidity and greediness that the central parliament shows....and every time, milions of people keep voting the 2 main parties only. Even eliminating the tricks that are in place to guarantee that the 2 main political parties win, you would end up with the fact that near 40-50% of the spanish people voted for one or the other. This is extremely depressing, and it's just a reminder of Sturgeon's Law applied to persons. While we have that many people who do not care, or do not think, we'll be in deep shit.
To add insult to injury, one of the parties are the heirs of fascism, and they basically mantain the same ideas, just without adding a dictatorship to it and only using police violence. And they still get 20% of the votes.....this is the type of thing that makes me want indepence for Catalunya. Sure, we have our 90% of shit in here as well, but at least 50% of it is not fascist bastards....
Sorry for the long rant....but people's stupidity always makes me angry....
After the work done, it's nice to see that for the moment things are easier, but the nights become really really long. Tonight I took the chance of having "free time" to see a couple of Salvados programs. This show is one of the best things that are done nowadays in the spanish TV.
We do not usually watch TV, becasue most of the time we think it's crap. If we want to watch series or movies, it's mutch better to see them when you have time and want to do so, and without interruptions for advertising. I think TV will die pretty soon in its traditional format, since it's so much better to decide for yourself what to watch and when to watch it. We do not have a sintonized TV here in England, and we do not miss it at all.
Anyway, Salvados is a program done by a smart group of reporters. True reporters, that scratch and dig information, make uncomfortable interviews and ask questions that are actually important and nobody dares to ask. Most episodes are very political, and they expose and criticise a certain topic. Even if it's based on spanish problems, with the current economic crisis there is lots of common ground with different people. I would recommend to watch it to anyone who understands spanish (maybe some version has english subtitles, but I do not know).
The result of watching it is the realisation that Spain is currently shit. There are no jobs, the services will become private, everything is going to be more expensive while salaries will drop, and all this crap. There is no apparent solution, and polititians are only offering money to the banks, who do not care about making sure people also gets it. You can watch a couple of the Salvados programs to get the picture....
Spain's problem is quite deep and complex, but part of the cause is the obscene amount of polititians we have, and the system to select them. The main two parties are as corrupt as it gets, and plenty of times I'm under the impression that when they fight, it's just theater, becasue they're quite happy with each other exchanging governments every 4-8 years. I once heard a polititian from another party saying that in Madrid, you could insult a perosn form another party, and when the day finished you could take a coffee with that person in a friendly way. The topics that are treated in there should not allow for that. If you really believe in some political idea, somebody else doesn't, and you reach the point of insults, it's not possible to just have a coffee with them....unless of course you didn't care that much on the first place.
Every time there is an election, I'm expecting people to react to all the stupidity and greediness that the central parliament shows....and every time, milions of people keep voting the 2 main parties only. Even eliminating the tricks that are in place to guarantee that the 2 main political parties win, you would end up with the fact that near 40-50% of the spanish people voted for one or the other. This is extremely depressing, and it's just a reminder of Sturgeon's Law applied to persons. While we have that many people who do not care, or do not think, we'll be in deep shit.
To add insult to injury, one of the parties are the heirs of fascism, and they basically mantain the same ideas, just without adding a dictatorship to it and only using police violence. And they still get 20% of the votes.....this is the type of thing that makes me want indepence for Catalunya. Sure, we have our 90% of shit in here as well, but at least 50% of it is not fascist bastards....
Sorry for the long rant....but people's stupidity always makes me angry....
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Integrating
I work in a company that allows travelling and living in different countries. This is pretty cool, but it involves a weird job....integration.
Integration is just a fancy word, of course. Something that sound serious and important while resembling something technological. As with any fancy business word, it comes with a complex definition that has words like "Teamwork","Social skills", "Client-focused" and so on...fancy words to sell what is basically a service.
Recently I've been reading (again) Cryptonomicon, one book from Neal Stephenson. In there there was a sentence that explained what this work consist of in a very concise way. I do not remember it exactly, but the decsription is something like this:
We have a big system made of parts. One such part is the network, made of routers and cables, LANs, etc. Another part is the hardware, servers, pcs and laptops. Another part is the software, operating systems, specialized applications, etc. All this needs to combine and offer a number of services to the clients/users.
The integrators are the ones that connect everything together and try to make it work.
This sounds, at first, like a very simple thing that should not require that much efford. Big systems would require more people, but still seems to be boring and low-level job, something that anyone can do. This is specially true right after finishing studies and having worked as a programmer for a while. Programming is the thing that requires the most thinking, and the rest is easier...or is it?
The set of skills you may need is certanly different, but putting everything together is actually pretty complex...For example, you may need to configure two programs, made by two different companies, so they talk between them and do something. One company has made this section of the program to communicate, and they have made it round. The other company has made their own section, which happens to be squared. None of them will want to change their part,so you need to convince one of them, or use some "tape and cardboard" and manage to connect them anyway....
The end result is some kind of frankenstein monster put together with glue and tape, shambling around the place. The bigger it is, the higher the chances are that the stitches will come apart somewhere...and you need to keep running after it, gluing new parts as they arrive, and making sure it's behaving nicely with the clients.
When the monster is very big, as in my case, lots of people take care only of small parts. But the idea is the same, keeping your part alive and healthy, and connected to the body.
The job includes lots of different tasks, it lets you meet new people and it let's you travel. I do not know how long will I want to do this, but for the moment it's a nice opportunity. It's not something I ever imagined myself doing, but it's definitely fun^^
Integration is just a fancy word, of course. Something that sound serious and important while resembling something technological. As with any fancy business word, it comes with a complex definition that has words like "Teamwork","Social skills", "Client-focused" and so on...fancy words to sell what is basically a service.
Recently I've been reading (again) Cryptonomicon, one book from Neal Stephenson. In there there was a sentence that explained what this work consist of in a very concise way. I do not remember it exactly, but the decsription is something like this:
We have a big system made of parts. One such part is the network, made of routers and cables, LANs, etc. Another part is the hardware, servers, pcs and laptops. Another part is the software, operating systems, specialized applications, etc. All this needs to combine and offer a number of services to the clients/users.
The integrators are the ones that connect everything together and try to make it work.
This sounds, at first, like a very simple thing that should not require that much efford. Big systems would require more people, but still seems to be boring and low-level job, something that anyone can do. This is specially true right after finishing studies and having worked as a programmer for a while. Programming is the thing that requires the most thinking, and the rest is easier...or is it?
The set of skills you may need is certanly different, but putting everything together is actually pretty complex...For example, you may need to configure two programs, made by two different companies, so they talk between them and do something. One company has made this section of the program to communicate, and they have made it round. The other company has made their own section, which happens to be squared. None of them will want to change their part,so you need to convince one of them, or use some "tape and cardboard" and manage to connect them anyway....
The end result is some kind of frankenstein monster put together with glue and tape, shambling around the place. The bigger it is, the higher the chances are that the stitches will come apart somewhere...and you need to keep running after it, gluing new parts as they arrive, and making sure it's behaving nicely with the clients.
When the monster is very big, as in my case, lots of people take care only of small parts. But the idea is the same, keeping your part alive and healthy, and connected to the body.
The job includes lots of different tasks, it lets you meet new people and it let's you travel. I do not know how long will I want to do this, but for the moment it's a nice opportunity. It's not something I ever imagined myself doing, but it's definitely fun^^
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Until next time!
A great part of living some time abroad is meeting lots of nice people that become close to you. The bad part is that plenty of times you have to leave them, or they have to leave. That's life, but it's still a sad moment.
9 years ago I participated in a two-weeks student exchange with Sweden, where I met lots of nice people that stayed in Sweden afterwards. Shortly after that I did the way of St. James, a walking route were you make bonds with the people that walk with you day after day, resisting this little nomad life.
4 years ago I went to finish my university studies in Sweden, and the international environment made me interact with people all around the world. There I even met my future wife, and we actually started dating after being apart first...
2 years and a half ago I went to Vancouver to work for a short time, and I met curious people who worked around the world. And just one year ago I joined that people and moved to London to work with some of them.
All the previous times, I had to say goodbye without guarantees of seeing the person again, and in some cases there was a lot of drama involved, because it really felt that the time spent together was great and unrepeatable. However, there is something that I always thought, and that is true: The world is actually very small.
It takes us less than a day to move anywhere in the planet. That is just awesome, and not many people realise about it. Sure, it's not cheap, and it's not something you can do every day...but the point is you can. We're lucky, we can take a plane and in 2-3 hours cross countries and meet again with friends. And the internet just makes everything easier, allowing us to talk with far-away people as if they were next to us.
One of the people I met 9 years ago is still one of our best friends. My wife and I met lots of friends in the end of my studies in Sweden, and we see them regularly, even if sometimes months or years pass between meetings. When we meet, it's like it was yesterday that we last saw them. Living for so long abroad means as well that the friends from our home cities are harder to see, but again it doesn't matter how long, we always meet again and have fun together.
Soon enough we will leave London, and we will move again, to Sochi in Russia. We will meet new people, and we will make new friends. But first we will have to say goodbye here. We have already started to do so.
And we do that with an "Until next time!". Because we will see you again. The world is very small after all^^
9 years ago I participated in a two-weeks student exchange with Sweden, where I met lots of nice people that stayed in Sweden afterwards. Shortly after that I did the way of St. James, a walking route were you make bonds with the people that walk with you day after day, resisting this little nomad life.
4 years ago I went to finish my university studies in Sweden, and the international environment made me interact with people all around the world. There I even met my future wife, and we actually started dating after being apart first...
2 years and a half ago I went to Vancouver to work for a short time, and I met curious people who worked around the world. And just one year ago I joined that people and moved to London to work with some of them.
All the previous times, I had to say goodbye without guarantees of seeing the person again, and in some cases there was a lot of drama involved, because it really felt that the time spent together was great and unrepeatable. However, there is something that I always thought, and that is true: The world is actually very small.
It takes us less than a day to move anywhere in the planet. That is just awesome, and not many people realise about it. Sure, it's not cheap, and it's not something you can do every day...but the point is you can. We're lucky, we can take a plane and in 2-3 hours cross countries and meet again with friends. And the internet just makes everything easier, allowing us to talk with far-away people as if they were next to us.
One of the people I met 9 years ago is still one of our best friends. My wife and I met lots of friends in the end of my studies in Sweden, and we see them regularly, even if sometimes months or years pass between meetings. When we meet, it's like it was yesterday that we last saw them. Living for so long abroad means as well that the friends from our home cities are harder to see, but again it doesn't matter how long, we always meet again and have fun together.
Soon enough we will leave London, and we will move again, to Sochi in Russia. We will meet new people, and we will make new friends. But first we will have to say goodbye here. We have already started to do so.
And we do that with an "Until next time!". Because we will see you again. The world is very small after all^^
Monday, 2 July 2012
Music in games
I'm going to discuss the plots of some games, so be aware that I will post some mild (very mild) spoilers in this post. Here we go.
In Mass Effect 3, there are key moments in the plot where you accomplish something really big. Like the genophage cure and the end of the geth-quarian war. And in these moments the music makes you feel again the wonder of the universe with this simple theme from the first game, Vigil. This music is a reminder of the feelings I got playing the first game, when you have a universe to discover, everything is new, and the great scenery impresses you.
The Mass Effect saga understands quite well the importance of good music when creating a story. Plenty of times I feel that the right theme can create emotions and associate states of mind with characters or scenes. I'm not a big fan of certain typical action movies, and therefore sometimes certain music doesn't even register in my brain as something special. For example, in the first Mass Effect game when you become a spectre there is some intense music I could not care less about. However, some games add... something. This something is hard to describe, I can only refer to it as music that connects with you. Sometimes it's energetic, sometimes it's sad and tragic, sometimes it's a soppy love song, but in all the cases that music reaches you deeply, and affects you. I'll put some examples I have from my gaming life. We'll start with a very old one^^:
Sonic 2: Mystic Cave Zone: Sonic 2 is one of the first games I had with my first console, the mega drive. It was a really addictive and fun game, but it had some difficult moments. One of the first stages that spikes the difficulty quite a bit, in my opinion, was Mystic Cave. The earlier stages were not easy, but this one was full of nasty traps, places where you got squashed, enemies that were following you through walls, spikes...and the infamous pit of death, that was inescapable even when you were invincible, so you had to wait to lose your invincibility to properly die and start again. To add to the feeling, we got this music on this stage. You can clearly hear the evilness of the stage, mixed with the feeling that it's laughing at you. It's really awesome.
Soleil: Boss Music: Since I had the mega drive I didn't play Zelda games...but instead we got this game, Soleil (I think it has a different name depending on the country). I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was really nice and kid-friendly, while having some depth to it. But from time to time, there was some boss fights. The easy ones had special music, but nothing spectacular. And then you fought the big ones, epic fights against powerful creatures, and you got this music, which pumped you up a lot. You had to destroy them, it was urgent, and you had to keep moving and attacking faster and faster...
Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Hell's March: Once I had my first computer, my uncle let me borrow one cd of the first Command & Conquer. It was awesome, and I loved the game. It's true that the game was pretty broken, and both sides had weapons that could destroy you in a matter of minutes even if you had prepared defences, but that was part of the fun^^. After this first game, came C&C: Red Alert. It was still addictive while being a little more balanced, and it came with this music in the intro and during the game. It really motivated me^^.
Final Fantasy VII: Aerith's Theme: Final Fantasies should get a special mention by the number of amazing songs they have, and most of them achieved that something special that I was commenting at the beginning. Whatever you may say about the games, the story they tell is usually quite polished, and the music fits perfectly. In this case I talk about this particular song because of the emotional impact it had. You hear it several times during the game, but the crucial moment, of course, is when Aerith dies. It was traumatizing, after so many hours invested in the game, knowing the characters, one of them died. And then a battle ensues with this music as the background. In one of my replays I went to the bother of getting the ommnislash in disc 1 only to use it against that boss and one-hit the bastard....
Final Fantasy VIII: The Castle: Here again it's hard to pick a song for this game. I didn't select Eyes On Me as the main example because it's a well known song, but the way this song is used is really devastating: The first time it sounds with lyrics, you just rescued Rinoa from a cold death in space. This whole moment is extremely tense, because since Aerith died in the last game I was not confident Rinoa would survive this one. After several cinematics, lots of text and time with oppressive, minimalistic music, when she's alive, you got an airship and everything is ok, this music sounds and it's a really happy moment. This is repeated in the end: You are lost in time, remembering things that happened without being able to focus on Rinoa, as if something is wrong and does not fit. The images speed up, in a sickening way, and then you get an image of her dying in space, as if you didn't save her, with a single feather on a white floor. I thought for a second they would end it like this (it would have been cruel, but it would have been amazing: The whole time after space you were in some fantasy world, completely broken, and you just now managed to remember what happened: Fade to black, and the end...). And then Eyes on me start playing again, making everything right, and continuing to an amazing ending song, that finishes in a high point, as an example of how to do happy endings correctly, implicating the player in all of it while keeping the tension until the very end. And well, after this long rant...The Castle song is the song of the final dungeon. You arrive to a haunted castle, and this cheerful music starts to play....and then, the organ enters the scene, showing you're in a proper haunted castle, full of tricks, corners, mysteries and secret passages. It creates an eerie atmosphere, and makes this section one of my favourites.
Metal Gear Solid: The Best Is Yet To Come: The first modern Metal Gear is an incredible game: With the graphics of the time, it makes you feel you're in some kind of realistic movie, and I recall it as if the squared graphics were actors shown in HD. The gampeplay is based on stealth and combat while the story punches you at every opportunity with the message "War is REALLY bad", without becoming tiresome or overly dramatic. This song, which appears in some key moments in the game, makes you feel the isolation and the cold in Alaska, mixed with the hopelessness of war, punctuated with some hope once it becomes a little bit more cheerful.
Halo: Mjolnir Mix: I didn't play many different games during a long period of time after the first playstation, and I concentrated more on PC games (Lineage 2). When I re-encountered console games, the first one I played was Halo, and I really loved it. It had simple mechanics, a good story and great gameplay. And the music was excellent as well, guiding the story and making battles so much more epic. The key here, I believe, is that it does not use your typical action music. It adds more...well, weird instruments and sounds, more "futuristic", combined with traditional instruments. It manages to repeat what I commented at the beginning, this feeling of wonder towards the universe and the futuristic places that you're visiting, but this time more action-oriented. In the 3rd game, even if the campaign itself is pretty short, the music and the story combine to make playing it an incredible experience.
Well, there's more games that could appear on the list, of course, but these games and musics left quite an impression on me^^.
In Mass Effect 3, there are key moments in the plot where you accomplish something really big. Like the genophage cure and the end of the geth-quarian war. And in these moments the music makes you feel again the wonder of the universe with this simple theme from the first game, Vigil. This music is a reminder of the feelings I got playing the first game, when you have a universe to discover, everything is new, and the great scenery impresses you.
The Mass Effect saga understands quite well the importance of good music when creating a story. Plenty of times I feel that the right theme can create emotions and associate states of mind with characters or scenes. I'm not a big fan of certain typical action movies, and therefore sometimes certain music doesn't even register in my brain as something special. For example, in the first Mass Effect game when you become a spectre there is some intense music I could not care less about. However, some games add... something. This something is hard to describe, I can only refer to it as music that connects with you. Sometimes it's energetic, sometimes it's sad and tragic, sometimes it's a soppy love song, but in all the cases that music reaches you deeply, and affects you. I'll put some examples I have from my gaming life. We'll start with a very old one^^:
Sonic 2: Mystic Cave Zone: Sonic 2 is one of the first games I had with my first console, the mega drive. It was a really addictive and fun game, but it had some difficult moments. One of the first stages that spikes the difficulty quite a bit, in my opinion, was Mystic Cave. The earlier stages were not easy, but this one was full of nasty traps, places where you got squashed, enemies that were following you through walls, spikes...and the infamous pit of death, that was inescapable even when you were invincible, so you had to wait to lose your invincibility to properly die and start again. To add to the feeling, we got this music on this stage. You can clearly hear the evilness of the stage, mixed with the feeling that it's laughing at you. It's really awesome.
Soleil: Boss Music: Since I had the mega drive I didn't play Zelda games...but instead we got this game, Soleil (I think it has a different name depending on the country). I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was really nice and kid-friendly, while having some depth to it. But from time to time, there was some boss fights. The easy ones had special music, but nothing spectacular. And then you fought the big ones, epic fights against powerful creatures, and you got this music, which pumped you up a lot. You had to destroy them, it was urgent, and you had to keep moving and attacking faster and faster...
Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Hell's March: Once I had my first computer, my uncle let me borrow one cd of the first Command & Conquer. It was awesome, and I loved the game. It's true that the game was pretty broken, and both sides had weapons that could destroy you in a matter of minutes even if you had prepared defences, but that was part of the fun^^. After this first game, came C&C: Red Alert. It was still addictive while being a little more balanced, and it came with this music in the intro and during the game. It really motivated me^^.
Final Fantasy VII: Aerith's Theme: Final Fantasies should get a special mention by the number of amazing songs they have, and most of them achieved that something special that I was commenting at the beginning. Whatever you may say about the games, the story they tell is usually quite polished, and the music fits perfectly. In this case I talk about this particular song because of the emotional impact it had. You hear it several times during the game, but the crucial moment, of course, is when Aerith dies. It was traumatizing, after so many hours invested in the game, knowing the characters, one of them died. And then a battle ensues with this music as the background. In one of my replays I went to the bother of getting the ommnislash in disc 1 only to use it against that boss and one-hit the bastard....
Final Fantasy VIII: The Castle: Here again it's hard to pick a song for this game. I didn't select Eyes On Me as the main example because it's a well known song, but the way this song is used is really devastating: The first time it sounds with lyrics, you just rescued Rinoa from a cold death in space. This whole moment is extremely tense, because since Aerith died in the last game I was not confident Rinoa would survive this one. After several cinematics, lots of text and time with oppressive, minimalistic music, when she's alive, you got an airship and everything is ok, this music sounds and it's a really happy moment. This is repeated in the end: You are lost in time, remembering things that happened without being able to focus on Rinoa, as if something is wrong and does not fit. The images speed up, in a sickening way, and then you get an image of her dying in space, as if you didn't save her, with a single feather on a white floor. I thought for a second they would end it like this (it would have been cruel, but it would have been amazing: The whole time after space you were in some fantasy world, completely broken, and you just now managed to remember what happened: Fade to black, and the end...). And then Eyes on me start playing again, making everything right, and continuing to an amazing ending song, that finishes in a high point, as an example of how to do happy endings correctly, implicating the player in all of it while keeping the tension until the very end. And well, after this long rant...The Castle song is the song of the final dungeon. You arrive to a haunted castle, and this cheerful music starts to play....and then, the organ enters the scene, showing you're in a proper haunted castle, full of tricks, corners, mysteries and secret passages. It creates an eerie atmosphere, and makes this section one of my favourites.
Metal Gear Solid: The Best Is Yet To Come: The first modern Metal Gear is an incredible game: With the graphics of the time, it makes you feel you're in some kind of realistic movie, and I recall it as if the squared graphics were actors shown in HD. The gampeplay is based on stealth and combat while the story punches you at every opportunity with the message "War is REALLY bad", without becoming tiresome or overly dramatic. This song, which appears in some key moments in the game, makes you feel the isolation and the cold in Alaska, mixed with the hopelessness of war, punctuated with some hope once it becomes a little bit more cheerful.
Halo: Mjolnir Mix: I didn't play many different games during a long period of time after the first playstation, and I concentrated more on PC games (Lineage 2). When I re-encountered console games, the first one I played was Halo, and I really loved it. It had simple mechanics, a good story and great gameplay. And the music was excellent as well, guiding the story and making battles so much more epic. The key here, I believe, is that it does not use your typical action music. It adds more...well, weird instruments and sounds, more "futuristic", combined with traditional instruments. It manages to repeat what I commented at the beginning, this feeling of wonder towards the universe and the futuristic places that you're visiting, but this time more action-oriented. In the 3rd game, even if the campaign itself is pretty short, the music and the story combine to make playing it an incredible experience.
Well, there's more games that could appear on the list, of course, but these games and musics left quite an impression on me^^.
Sunday, 1 July 2012
Leaving your home
Today my wife and I enjoyed a little trip to Cambridge. It was a very nice day and we really liked the city. We went there by train, from London, and we managed to get cheap first class tickets, which in this case just means slightly bigger seats and no one around you.
There is always a nice feeling when you're leaving for a trip. Specially when you're in the actual transport that will transfer you from your city to another one (or a town, village, etc..). In a train, that moment is when you see through the window that you started moving, and you leave familiar sights behind. It's a very relaxing experience, knowing that you're in your way.
The first time I travelled alone I took a flight from Barcelona to London, with plans to spend 11 days in England. I had reservations with a number of hotels, but I had to find my way and get to these hotels at the right dates, which was making me a little bit nervous. However, the feeling of freedom I got when the plane started moving was amazing. I was really going there, I didn't know yet what would I do during these days, but it was going to be all right. I was on a trip now, for real, and I would find my way.
Today's trip was in a much minor scale. It was just for a day and close to the place where we live. However, I still got that nice feeling of being in our way, the same feeling I get every time the train starts moving, or the plane takes off, leaving home...
There is always a nice feeling when you're leaving for a trip. Specially when you're in the actual transport that will transfer you from your city to another one (or a town, village, etc..). In a train, that moment is when you see through the window that you started moving, and you leave familiar sights behind. It's a very relaxing experience, knowing that you're in your way.
The first time I travelled alone I took a flight from Barcelona to London, with plans to spend 11 days in England. I had reservations with a number of hotels, but I had to find my way and get to these hotels at the right dates, which was making me a little bit nervous. However, the feeling of freedom I got when the plane started moving was amazing. I was really going there, I didn't know yet what would I do during these days, but it was going to be all right. I was on a trip now, for real, and I would find my way.
Today's trip was in a much minor scale. It was just for a day and close to the place where we live. However, I still got that nice feeling of being in our way, the same feeling I get every time the train starts moving, or the plane takes off, leaving home...
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Humans are always special
I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, and I'm probably one of the last people who has not seen the ending yet, even if I have read enough about it to know what's going to happen.
Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.
One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.
In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.
When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....
It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.
There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.
I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.
Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga, But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...
Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.
One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.
In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.
When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....
It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.
There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.
I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.
Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga, But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Introduction
I love to play games, I love to travel, and sometimes I create rants in my head about these and more topics. Lately I had the idea of sharing some of these rants. This blog should serve that purpose, even if no one ever reads it^^. We'll see how it goes...if nothing else, it will be a nice way to order some thoughts^^
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