Small Steps And Acts

I have time for another political rant.

Some days ago I read in a newspaper that the main "left" party in Spain (well, for the past few years they have acted like a right-wing party mostly), called PSOE, had a big meeting to refund themselves with new ideas and objectives. And the list of ideas is quite impressive. For example, they are proposing to made a law regarding salaries, so the highest salary in a company is not more than 12 times the lowest salary of that same company. This is not the only proposal, and in general they sound better than what they've been doing till now.

The problem is credibility: First, while ruling in the past, they betrayed the socialist principles quite often. They've also had several important corruption cases, and when European government demanded some actions from them, they easily followed whatever they were told even when clearly their voters would be against it. Second, even right now they have all these nice ideas...while keeping the same people in positions of power, and maintaining the idea that no one inside their party can go against whatever has been decided in the party. Basically, the party works like a small dictatorship, and you should follow orders from above.

The other main party, PP, has the same dictatorial behaviour plus they're directly heirs of the Spanish fascism. Compare Spain with other European countries, and the extreme-right parties are non-important. That's why because the supposedly "moderate right" party of the country is actually this extreme right, fascism reborn with the same people or their relatives.

Both main parties have lied, favoured their rich friends, accepted bribes and corruption, and did other things thinking only about themselves. That's why when they propose changes, it's rather unimpressive: Not following their own electoral program is the norm. Particularly with PP, if you want to know what's going to happen next or what's really going on, just assume the exact opposite of whatever they say. As per PSOE, if they really apply these changes, it would be great, but right now before we believe them they need to prove themselves, and that's achievable by not having people there that don't even have studies, they're just relatives of members in power or they've been working their way up the party all their life without any proof that they're even competent at government or able to do anything whatsoever apart from licking asses.

Apart from that....PP lately has approved some terrible laws, against protests and against abortion, similar to Franco's laws.

However, there's not much more to say...while these people are in power, and the same people decide their successors, these parties will not change, and we should not be surprised with a fascist country (version 2.0). If they were truly refunded, by kicking out anybody with some power inside the party, maybe something would improve, but as it is, it's not believable that anything will change.

So, what can we do?

Well, the problem of writing rants, or making websites and posts to warn and criticise some parties is that people with the same ideas are the ones that will read those rants and articles and websites. No matter how angry we are, how much proof do we have of the wrongdoings of some parties, the people that may actually change their minds will never read those. Internet works that way, you're more likely to form communities and follow news about people that match your opinions, so you can all agree while being angry at those other idiots that don't know what they're doing....which is a problem that closes your mentality to new ideas, of course....

We have a problem with advertising. In order to change mentalities, we should try ways to make these messages arrive to the people that will never check this blog, for example.

I believe we should print papers with single simple messages. If there's walls of text, nobody is going to read them. With simple message stating simple truths, maybe some change is possible.

For example, a simple message would be "If you don't vote or vote null or with a white paper, PP and PSOE (or the big parties in general) get more members of parliament". This is a simple message, easy to read, that is also true. Another example: "The current voting laws favour the big parties. PP is ruling the country with 53% of parliament having only 30% of voters' support". Even another: "With the money the government gave to the banks, public healthcare and education would not need cuts". And so on.

Then, we distribute the papers. Put them in walls, give them to people, even just leave them on the street. Yes, not very eco-friendly, but well, it's less echo-friendly to have our current politicians...

And, here's the key point: These papers needs to be distributed in towns (cities as well, but towns should be the main focus). The current electoral law is rigged so areas with small population represent a big chunk of the parliament. The theory is that this way no area is left without representation. The practice is that these areas are designed to maximize member of parliaments form the big parties.

Well, let's hit them where it hurts. Let's distribute these papers in small towns and populations. You visit grandparents in some small nice town in the mountains? You bring papers. You go on vacations through the Santiago way? You bring papers. You need to travel across Spain for work? You distribute papers along the way.

I'm not sure about the legality of this, but I believe it may be possible as long as all messages are true and simple. You don't write "all politics from PSOE and PP are corrupt", since that's not true and can be considered defamation...you write "PP and PSOE have X members of their parties accused of corruption", which is true, and does not declare if they're guilty or not, just shows that's it's a problem affecting lots of them.

Maybe I'm idealistic, but I believe that by putting a lot of focus in towns, something may change. Even if little by little...

Spain's problem is misinformation, false advertisement and lack of evident choices. This is a strategy from the big parties. Well, we should counter-act it. If we start now, maybe next elections we manage to kick some people out of their permanent seats...

Castle And Good Stories

We're reaching the last stages of the project, and soon enough we'll be very busy at work. At home, we're taking care of Elay, and enjoying his first reactions to us (smiles, laughs, sounds, and the funniest of them all: raising arms and legs and rolling to one side when very happy).

With all this, we still have enough free time and we do stuff that we like. Recently we finished watching some series, and since there were no new chapters of any of the series that we still follow, we decided to start something new. We decided to give "Castle" a try, since I had heard it was decent enough.

I enjoy browsing this website called TV Tropes. IT's an informal wiki that compiles Tropes. Tropes are tricks and patterns used in all kinds of fiction, or even in real life. For example, the "Evil Genius" Trope is the one where we have some kind of inventor that has some secret lab and performs experiments that will enable them to rule the world or achieve some other selfish objective. It's an easily recognizable pattern, a building block for stories. Using tropes is inevitable, even when you're subverting them by showing how ridiculous they are.  You may use new ones or more obscure ones, but still any story can be analysed in some way using Tropes. And using Tropes is not bad, or it does not make a story bad.

With that in mind, Castle sounds like this: A famous and rich male writer that lives with his mother and his daughter writes about murders and has similarities with Stephen King partners with a female police detective  thanks to his friendship with powerful people, and together they solve murder investigations with the help of other detectives and forensics.

This is a truthful explanation of the series, and it sounds unoriginal and repetitive, like a detective novel mixed with CSI.

However, this show is awesome. We're completely addicted to it.

The trick here is that the premise is rather cliché, but its all in the execution, and in the characters. The characters are alive. They are funny, they are likeable, they have flaws and qualities...they're very human, and they feel very realistic, they seem real. You can imagine people reacting in the way they do.

The show also tries to be realistic in how to investigate crimes, with a few exceptions or pokes to "super agencies" shows where they have computers that do everything. Mixed in all this are lots of jokes, an incredible amount of pokes and funny references to other shows (since the main actor was in Firefly, there's looots of pokes about this) and pop culture (like the x-files special episode about aliens with Bishop) , and in general a very funny feeling, even if there are dramatic moments too.

This shows that good stories do not need to be original, and they don't need to avoid common Tropes. Good stories take these Tropes and use them wisely for the best effect. When it's done correctly the story will be awesome, even when everybody knows what's going to happen.

For example, one of the last chapters that we have seen was not as good. The reasons for that was that it didn't make much sense, characters didn't behave as normal , and the bad guy had all his plans too perfect while nobody figured his intentions, while they're usually smart in other episodes.

This episode was an exception in this show, and we still think most of the rest is awesome and totally worth watching, but it servers to proof that it doesn't matter how typical a show may seem, it's all in how its done...

With a few exceptions, Castle is very well done.

World-Building and Bioshock

Apart from taking care of our baby, working and a lightning trip to Moscow and Barcelona, I've been trying to play Bioshock Infinite lately.

I heard and read reviews about this game, and there has been lots of posts, screenshots and gifs around the internet. Just form the beginning, the game can catch your eye by looking like this:

It's not only graphics, which are really good...is the world that they're showing you. A world of fantasy, a floating city with rails connecting sections, huge statues, a thriving population, shops, houses...all this mixed with steampunk technology. It looks awesome.

However, this is not all, by far. I started playing and was immersed in a complex and weird story, starting with an introduction that takes a long while before you even fire a single shot (apart from firing in little fair tents that have games of marksmanship). This introduction is incredible, makes you feel inside this place...but more important, makes you believe such a place exists.

Maybe a great part of what makes art amazing is its ability to create worlds that do not exist. You can see that in movies, in literature, in dance, even in music and paintings...they can show reality, but they can go further than that, and show you the realms of the imagination. These realms can be amazing, scary, dark, cheerful, modern, dream-like, happy...and in these realms you can make your own rules, in history, in economics, or even in physics.

Games are art, even if not recognized by everybody, and good games create such worlds while putting you in control of someone or something inside that world.

When these worlds are created with art, it is very important that they're created well. A bad painting, that messes up proportions just because of lack of skill will remind you that it's just a painting.  You may enjoy it, but reality will point out the problems it has, and you will return to your own world much faster. You can apply that with any other world-building work.

That's why world-building is very important. The most clear example you can find are novels. Novels, by its extension, have lots of time to create a world. It's hard to put a lot of details in a movie that last 90 minutes, but in a book of 500 pages you have time to develop a universe inside. Books have a lot more margin to define this world, which can be slightly or a lot different than our own.

And nothing will make a story lose its appeal as a badly-build world. I believe Terry Pratchett (or somebody commenting on his work) once mentioned that his created city of Ankh-Morpork submerges you in it because you don't need the protagonists to be there for it to work. If the hero was not walking around, doing hero stuff, its inhabitants would still work, and live, and eat food, and buy things, and all that. That created world is so rich that when the heroes stroll around it, it's easy to believe you're there with them. It makes sense internally. Does it matter that magic is real, the earth is flat, and that the sun orbits earth in there? No, because its consistent with itself, and it works...if you imagine a world described as it is in the books, you can see that it's solid, it has its own life.

Now, that may sound blasphemous...but let's have a look at Tolkien. Let's concentrate on Gondor. What does exactly that region do? It basically fights the Dark Lord, permanently, always at war for who knows how many years, all their people soldiers, all their people closed inside their walls. Now, Tolkien has great world-building skills, and this world is rich and varied. However, Gondor in particular makes little sense, and personally that's why it seems also like the most boring part of the books, when Gondor defends itself or attacks (when Rohan helps it's fun, but while there's only Gondor, it's boring), because I cannot help but wonder how the hell it's still standing, or how people manage to live there.

Now, you can maybe say that Tolkien explained these details in some other work, or that some things are implied without being said...however, I still think that Gondor, in the Lord of The Rings, is not well made, and it fails to stand on its own logic. People would not live there if it wasn't for the plot.

There are lots of lesser books that nevertheless grasped quite well this concept of World Building. For example, the Belgariad and the Malloreon are not greatly written, or very original...but its characters are much more alive than some of Tolkien's characters, and there's a lot of details to simple facts...like the fact that, if somebody's going to wage war, that someone is going to provide food for the troops, and then if you invest in some cheap food, you may get huge rewards...or, that a moving war front needs a constant supply of materials, which needs to follow you and form a chain with the origin of the supply. That gives a lot of coherence to the book.

Before I mentioned that movies do not have as much time for world-building...but that does not mean they should not have a good one. The easiest way to see that a movie is full of bullshit is if the world is rather inconsistent with itself. Take Star Wars prequels, where in a galaxy of millions of planets, that have billions of people and species in each planet, there's like 6 characters that are always present when something important occurs, no matter the place. That's laziness right there, and returns you to reality fast enough to scream bullshit.

Games are in a middle term, taking longer than movies but not being able to say as much as books do. In games, immersion is very dependant on that world-building. The first Bioshock game was impressive, the water rendering was amazing, physics involved in its movement were pretty awesome, and the introduction was very surprising...however, the supposed "city" did not seem a city at all. Even considering that an underworld city needs to have small corridors, it never felt like corridors, just a single endless corridor that railroaded you from place to place, with a few exceptions where you had a couple of different rooms to visit. Also, everybody was an enemy. For a city that was supposed full of people, even after a disaster, it felt empty, lifeless....and the fact that the corridors were not a labyrinth, or a grid, removed the feeling of being in a city, putting you back in reality and saying "Game with linear design".

Bioshock Infinite, in just the first hour of gameplay, shames the first Bioshock by showing how it's done: It moves you to a great city in the sky, with people, with attractions, shows, shops, toys, children and adults, subculture, rebellion, social problems, radio shows, music.....in general, life. You can see that people live there, you believe so, because it makes perfect sense, internally. The game still has a linear design, but by defending these flaws as part of life in there, such as the fact that private houses are closed, or that flying streets sometimes are not connected and may have timetables or change depending on the moment, makes you ignore the fact that you're basically moving from point A to point B in a straight line.

You feel in a city, with people living there, and you see that it does not require your character for it to make sense.

This is world-building when done well. Great stories and great art will always have great world-building. And Bioshock Infinite does it very well indeed....

Country Full Of Idiots

We've been rather busy these days, as it's to be expected. However, we're managing so far, and enjoying our new life :).

In this period, there was a piece of news that I wanted to comment when it appeared, but I didn't have the time or the inspiration at the time, so now it's rant time. The article can be summarized in these graphics:

The first one shows average results in reading comprehension by country. The second one shows results in mathematics.

Any statistic like this needs to be taken with some scepticism. One never knows the exact details of the tested group, and if everything was fair and really representative. However, we can believe real situation is something close to this.

What this shows is that Spain is full of idiots. Maybe great people, but still idiots. This explains why governments don't know how to solve problems. Even if part of what's happening right now was done on purpose by our government to help their rich friends, there are things that escape to their control, that show they're not smart enough to find a solution. This is paired with a stupid society, and the result is that the stupid society keeps voting for the same idiots all the time.

For a while, I've been thinking that there are two new laws we should use. In each case, I can think of a soft way to apply it, and a hard way.

The first step that we need to improve things in Spain is to demand by law that any person in the government or in parliament has some kind of university studies. If a person doesn't have high-level studies, it means that this person has not shown to have learnt any complex knowledge, ever. If University becomes a privilege for a few selected ones, this could be discussed, but if we manage to keep it public and available to most, this needs to be a requirement.

In the soft way to apply it, any university degree would work. It would at least show your ability to complete more things than compulsory studies, and it would show you're able to learn and understand harder concepts than what a 16-year old knows. One could argue that a degree does not grant you intelligence, or experience, or the best decision-making....but it shows that the person who got the degree has dedicated some effort to it, has learnt something, and that it has been enough to actually pass some subjects and (probably) do a final project. That's how it works in most real-life jobs, at first nobody knows you're good or bad, so the only thing you can give as a reference are your studies. Politicians should be no different.

The hard way would be to actually make some particular degree that is required to be part of the government or to be able to represent people in parliament. The logic, of course, is that having a degree in computer science or art history does not guarantee that you'll be any good at governing a country. The studies itself should include a wide range of things, but economics should be an important part of it. These studies could be considered "second cycle" studies, so you would need first some other degree, and then you could enlist in this course. Again, this does not guarantee a good government, but forces politicians to be smart and put effort into it, not like now where several high members of the main ruling parties and government do not even have studies.

The other step is more controversial, but I believe it's also necessary...basically, I would apply a law that limits the possibility of voting. Basically, with this law, being 18 years old would not give you the right to vote, showing that you're smart enough to vote would give you this right.

Of course this is a very conflicting topic. One could say that being smarter does not indicate that you know what's best for everybody else. There's also the point of identifying what's considered smart. To address how to consider if you're smart enough to vote, again there's two solutions.

The soft way would be to limit voting people to those who have finished successfully the compulsory education. The compulsory education in Spain is at a very low level, but at least it shows you have some degree of studies. Of course this could not be applied for everybody from the start, but a date could be arranged, as in all the people born after a certain year would be required to prove they have finished the compulsory education before they're allowed to vote.

The hard way would be to demand to pass a simple exam before you could vote. This would be done every four years, and it would just require a certain grasp in comprehension and mathematics for example, like in the two graphs I posted at the beginning. I know this system could be abused in different ways, but the current system is also abused, so it's not a big difference actually, the point being that bad governments will abuse whatever system is in place.

Now, before being accused of being anti-democratic, I want to explain my reasons. Basically, I believe that a person should only vote if they're capable of understanding what they're voting for. I'm not saying to force everybody to understand what they're voting for, I'm just saying to prove they could do so.

I really really doubt that a person who cannot comprehend a written text is able to really understand all the implications of an electoral program of a certain party. If someone cannot read, I would be happy to accept their vote as long as they could understand an electoral program read to them. Smarter people may not be able to always know what's best for everybody, and people who may not be as smart should also give their opinion...but as long as their opinion is really their opinion, and as long as they do have an opinion. If huge amounts of Spanish people don't understand anything after reading a text...how the hell are they deciding who to vote? They cannot know if it's good for them or not, because they did not understand it correctly in the first place.

Dumb people are easy to trick and mislead. Dumb people will not understand what are the real intentions of a party, even if they're not lying with their goals. Therefore, I don't see why dumb people should vote. Again, to define who is dumb and who is not, you would only need to prove you're able to read/listen and understand the text, and to do some easy mathematical calculations.

Opinions are great and everybody should have one, but there are things that are facts, and there are cases when something is clearly wrong or clearly right. This is also true in politics, not everything can be defended logically, some facts are true and some are false. Not everybody's opinion should count, if their opinion regarding an established fact has been proven wrong. Emotions are not enough to decide who to vote, they should be accompanied with the ability to reason about it, and then you could do whatever you want. I think I said it before, but you don't ask the village idiot about his opinion regarding your brain surgery. You would only do that if he somehow has proven to have a great amount of knowledge in this topic.....

So why do we let the idiots decide about our life's future, as if it was something minor where all the opinions are good, no matter how stupid?

And Now We're Three

Our son Elay was born 3 weeks and a half ago.

On Monday, 16th of September, a day before we had a visit with the doctor, contractions started apparently and we went to the hospital. Contractions calmed down, but the doctors told us that everything was ready and it could start at any moment. Since even when it started it would take long (4-5 hours probably), I was sent back home, since in Russian hospitals nobody apart from the mother can enter in the normal rooms, and you can only be during the birth by special permission.

While at home, my wife called me and told me that after analysis, doctors decided that a C-section was necessary and actually urgent, and they were preparing her for it. In 2 hours it should be done, and he should be born. After waiting at home for more news, I finally was told that we were parents.

However, given the fragile condition anyone is after surgery, my wife had to be one day recovering before seeing our son. I could not really visit, so I had to wait to see them both. While working and waiting, my wife finally got to be with him, and sent some pics and videos. These days were a little bit frustrating, but the pics were really nice. Both were doing very well, and recovering very fast.

On Saturday they got permission to leave, so I finally went, together with Misha (who helped us by driving us in his car), and I finally met him. It was a very weird and exciting moment, and I noticed I had a stupid smile for quite a few minutes after holding him for the first time^^. After all, before this moment, I was not fully aware that I was a father...I knew I was, but I had not seen him or held him, so the feeling was similar as if he was still inside the belly...

Since that day we've been happily living together, and adapting to this new person^^.

First thing that we've noticed is that he's very funny to look at^^. He's still very small, of course, so he makes all this faces and movements. When he's hungry, he usually sticks out his tongue, makes little sounds and eats his hand. He keeps twisting his lips in weird ways, and he's very awake when not sleeping, looking everywhere. He focuses his eyes on you, crossing them a little and making a surprised face, and he's very funny^^. We have already taken some funny pics^^. At the same time we're trying not to hunt people to show them pics, and we're managing well in that aspect.

He's quite calm, if he's not hungry or uncomfortable he doesn't cry much (he just makes this single cry for attention when he's hungry or when he just woke up and we're not there with him, most of the time). We're lucky so far, and he seems to like to sleep deeply during the night (which means 4-5 hours, which for a baby is a lot), and until there's light, he just wakes up to feed a little and then he continues to sleep. During the day he's awake quite a lot of hours, just feeding and looking all around, with very curious eyes.

We're unsure about resemblances, but then again we're really bad with faces, or we don't care that much about these things...he clearly looks like his mother in lots of things, but recently we saw a picture of me when I was a newborn too, and since then we realise he has also a strong resemblance with me. He's too little anyway, and his features have changed a lot in just a couple of weeks (and will change even more).

He makes quite a lot of funny noises, grunts, little cries and other sounds that are quite cute^^. He moves his arms and legs not very coordinated, but you can notice when he's stressing about something,  because he squirms and moves all extremities. It's quite funny to see how he doesn't control them well enough yet, and sometimes he bothers himself with his hands, or pushes away my wife's breast while being stressed and trying to grab it with his mouth^^.

For the moment I still feel quite useless. My wife breast-feeds him (of course), so at night she needs to wake up, and I'm rather useless and go back to sleep (or not even wake up). Also, I'm still not good at changing his clothes and pampers, mainly because I'm too slow. Oh well...I do hold him, and walk him around the apartment when he's awake, and I managed to put him to sleep several times when he was not hungry. I try to speak with him in Catalan, explaining thingies that we're doing, and my wife is trying to use Russian, but some times we get back to English because we're used to it...

We're still learning lots of things, checking articles and books regarding what to do, what not to do, what's normal, what can we expect, and all those things. We try not to worry too much, and I think we're so far doing good in that side (for example, we know that when he's sleeping is normal to make sounds, and we don't take him any time he makes a little cry, we wait until he's really awake). Of course, things are still complicated and we don't know a lot, but we're trying to learn.

One very funny thing that we've noticed is that he hates not having some clothes on his body, and that he doesn't like baths at all. After the first bath, next time we undressed him he started to cry a lot and to make a devastated face. It was quite funny and heart-breaking at the same time, and we tried to calm him down and tell him everything is fine, but we couldn't help to laugh at his exaggerated reaction. Since then it has been the same every time we change his clothes, clean him while naked or prepare him for a bath...but well, we hope he may calm down and also learn to enjoy baths when he's more aware of his surroundings and he's able to hold his head without problems.

At this point our lives haven't changed much yet, only thing is that we're staying more at home. Since he's so small and sleeps so much, when he's sleeping we keep watching series and playing games, with the only difference being that we check on him, and that, of course when he's awake, we try to talk with him, and give him attention.

So far we're managing quite well with him, and we're starting to have fun together^^. It's quite a weird feeling, to have this little person to take care of and educate later on...but we're enjoying it a lot^^.

While we were adapting to this new life, here in Sochi it has been raining a lot. In the usual Russian way, several old and new roads "forgot" to have any kind of good drainage, and there was severe flooding (even when the rain itself was not that intense). We happily avoided it by taking care of our little person without moving from home, but I did have to go to Sochi once, to get papers from the hospital, and it was a terrible experience that I hope not to repeat...

Anyway, we're quite happy with our new lives, and waiting to discover more and more things together^^.

Metal Gear And Other Classics

Elay (our future son, if he's really a boy) seems to be quite comfortable and hasn't come out yet, although it's a matter of days now.

I cannot help but feel that right now I'm in a waiting state. Any minute now labour could start, so I have the feeling I'm doing small things to distract my attention to this fact. 

One of the things I've been able to do is to play some computer games, on my PC or in Xbox. These are all old games, and I want to comment on them, because they're clearly classics. 

First, on my PC I got some really nice games that I already owned, but that I have now in my GOG account. Among these games, lately I've tried to play again "The Last Express", "Commandos" and "Carmageddon".

The Last Express is a graphic adventure set in the Orient Express, right before the first world war. It has a rich and complex story, with interesting characters and different conspiracies. It tries to show the feelings people had in Europe at that time, and I believe it succeeds very well. The mechanics are very simple: You navigate the train, find clues and things, talk with passengers, and sneak into private compartments. There's also some action sequences in which you need to evade attacks.

The graphics of this game are weirdly awesome. They used real actors and rotoscopy, so the faces are quite alive. The train is rather nice, with lots of luxury touches. This game costed a lot of money to make, and was considered a great game, but did poorly in sales, which helped to end the development of graphic adventures.

I love trains, specially night trains, with their private compartments and bunk beds and all that....and this game gives an awesome impression of being in one. It also puts you in that time period, with loads and loads of extra information, like newspapers, that are not necessary for the plot, but add to the atmosphere. The clues and actions to take are not evident and require you to eavesdrop, sneak around, and use your brain. The game also uses a very unique system of representing real time, with actions happening at certain moments independently from the fact that you are there to see them, and you don't save the game, you can just go back in time to fix something, specially if you fail at some point or do something stupid (and the game gives you freedom to prematurely end it in lots of ways) .

The Last Express is a great game, and it's a real shame that because of its failure to gain money no more similar games were made (a sequel was cancelled, and the game ends leaving some questions unresolved...although it could be considered an ending nevertheless).

Commandos is a strategy game, developed by a Spanish game studio and set in the second world war. You control a small number of very specialised soldiers, and you need to perform missions in which you need to infiltrate German areas to perform key tasks that will help win the war.

In this game you need to sneak around, distract patrols, deploy bombs and other tasks while being undetected, to avoid reinforcements. The graphics area really beautifully done, representing several areas in Europe and Africa. The game is incredibly advanced for the time and for being Spanish, and it's really addictive. You always need to keep all your soldiers alive, and you need to combine them in smart ways, analysing patterns of patrols and using your resources very carefully. It's a very difficult game, but it's totally worth it. There's a second and third part, which are even more detailed, with more options, more things to consider when sneaking around (which makes them even more difficult), and with real 3D scenarios (in the first game you only had a 2.5 perspective that was impossible to change).

The highly addictive and hard missions are combined with explanations of the war's progression and footage of that time. Everything adds up to one of the best strategy games ever, really intense and addictive.

Carmageddon is an (in)famous game. You drive a car, and you kill people and other cars while "racing". You get points and time by doing these things, and you get even more points and time the more brutal the killing has been done. There's no plot whatsoever, and you just go through several stages, gaining ranks and obtaining improvements while stealing other cars.

This game is very, very violent....but so over-the-top violent, that you cannot take it seriously. Even the slightest touch at the lowest speed makes people to explode in a rain of blood and guts, accompanied with the corresponding sound effects, while you get extra points for "artistic impression" and other such things. Even the game itself makes it clear how stupidly over the top is, by showing you a severed hand when using the mouse, and by asking if you're sure you want to go back to the real world when quitting.

Each stage can be completed by killing all civilians, by wasting all other competitors or by finishing all the laps and checkpoints in the stage. Usually, the best way to finish is by wasting competitors (completing the race is boring, and killing all civilians is an insane task when there's usually around 600 per stage and they don't show up on the map). Therefore the main gameplay is to trash other cars, which is not as violent...however, the main selling point, and the thing that was used to try and ban the game in some places was the "killing civilians" part, of course.

The graphics in this game are not that great, the cars are 3d models and the civilians are flat textures moving around. The moment you let an opponent go far away, they become really hard to differentiate from the rest of the environment, and in general everything is a like a big, bright mess.

Even with all this and with no plot, this game is absolutely awesome. It does so many things well, it's impressive. The soundtrack is based on heavy metal riffs and sounds, reminding me of Fear Factory style. The driving is just plain fun, with physic laws be dammed. Trashing other cars is also lots of fun, and the extra pedestrian killing while this happens is just brutal with heavy black comedy style. I always picked the girl driver (because the guy looks retarded), and to hear "sorry!" while splashing the insides of some pedestrian on the road was always so stupid that it keeps being funny.

This game did so many things right, it will always be mind-numbingly fun. Just to take your highly-modified car, accelerate and frontally crash against an opponent, sending both of you flying for thousands of meters and falling on top of some unlucky bystander.

I've been playing these games in my laptop. However, I've also been playing a little bit on my Xbox, where I have finally finished Metal Gear Solid 2, and I've started the 3rd one.

Metal Gear Solid was a game for PlayStation. It follows the plot of two older games, in which the main character, Solid Snake, infiltrates some installation to kill terrorists. This newer version for PlayStation had the same initial plot. The principle is very basic, but things get complicated quite fast, and the plot gets very complex, with interesting characters, while mixing philosophical ideas and in general trying to pass a very anti-war message and hating that you have to defeat some people (while doing pretty awesome war-related things...and somehow it all works and makes sense).

I still remember the first time I played Metal Gear Solid, for no more than 15 minutes I believe. After that, I bought a PlayStation and this game right away, to be able to play it at home (and at that time, that meant spending 90% of my savings...just after those 15 minutes of play).  The second and third part were already made for PlayStation 2, a console I never bought, so I had the trauma of not continuing with the story.

The Metal Gear games are very movie-like. They have great voice-acting, intense action scenes, camera effects and other tricks like that, while sometimes breaking the 4th wall and talking directly about things that the player is doing (and not the character). Their plots are incredible, very complex and plenty of times totally ridiculous, but in an awesome way.

Recently, they made a special version of metal gear solid 2 and 3, plus another one called Peace walker, for the Xbox. I bought this HD version quite fast, but I didn't get around to play them until recently.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is, in a way, a retelling of the first game. The plot is very different, but there's lots of things that are very similar, and that's an actual plot point. The whole game can be easily understood by the following fact: The game's creator didn't want to make this game, he was forced to do so by fan's request, and the game is the way the creator punished the fans.

I'm not saying the game is not good...but, for example, during 90% of the game, the player controls this other character, not Solid Snake, who is clearly not as good. Meanwhile solid Snake is doing stuff around you too, showing how awesome he is (and you cannot control him). That's a clear response to the fact that fans wanted more solid snake. Another poke is the fact that you don't seem to control the actions in the game, you just do as you're told, mindlessly, and the game insults you for that.

There's other things and plot points that help to give this message. The game is still really good, with a difficult story, very confusing and ridiculous sometimes, but interesting. The gameplay is the same as the previous game, with some extra actions you can do now (like aiming in 1st person with any weapon). You still need to sneak around, distract and avoid guards, and such things. However, it's true that it's important to know these facts about the creator before playing, otherwise you could get annoyed about it.

After finishing the 2nd game, I finally started the 3rd. I haven't played much yet, just a little more than one hour, but I can already see that the 3rd one is incredible. It's much better than the 2nd one (I guess this time the creator did not mind), with important changes in gameplay. The most important overall change seems to be that this one explains a story that happened in the past, and instead of controlling Solid Snake, you control his "father" (well, Solid snake is a clone). In just one hour I got quite an awesome feeling, kind of like a Bond movie (after all, the game has an introduction, a break with bond-style credits, images and music-including a female singer, dream-like images and lyrics that vaguely reference the game's name-, and then the real game starts).

One thing it's true about these games....the cinematics are a little too long. It is nice to see a story develop in its own pace, but sometimes you play for 10 minutes and then watch a 60-minute cinematic. It also does not help that you cannot pause them, which makes it annoying since you cannot take breaks to, for example, just go to the toilet. Playing the 2nd game I skipped one or two by mistake, just trying to pause the game.

However, it's also good to see a game that centres itself in the plot, and makes sure that the acting, the graphics and everything else makes you forget you're the player and submerges you into a different world. Even the first game achieved that, and made you forget that the graphics were very simple and the faces were not even moving while talking, they had a fixed expression. When a game makes you forget these things and the memory you have of it is of action-packed scenes, dialogue between people, and a complex, interesting story, you can tell the game is really really great. All metal gear solid games I've played so far achieved this without problems.

And that's all for the moment. We'll see how much more waiting will we do....

The Stroller

Tomorrow we will enter the period in which, if the birth takes place, it will be considered that the pregnancy had normal duration.

Being so close to having a son (probably) is really exciting. They bay has grown a lot and for several months my wife and I can "play" with him by touching the belly in parts where his legs or hands are pressing , and noticing all the movements. It's really funny to notice how he stretches or how he reacts when we touch his feet^^.

We have finally prepared the emergency bag for the hospital, and we believe we have everything more or less ready. We have lots of clothes that everybody has been giving us, several toys and things that other expats have offered  to us, a bed and a stroller.

The stroller took a lot of time and effort. When we first checked what was there in the market, we visited some internet pages, read recommendations and such things. We created a certain picture in our mind, about what exactly did we want for a stroller.

First of all, we wanted a 2 in 1. This model has two different baskets, one were the baby lays on his back and is meant for small babies, and another one that is more like a sit, but that can be rearranged in several ways, for older babies. These two baskets needed to be of good quality and with several settings, while being able to protect the baby from the sun, the cold, or from insects. Then we wanted big wheels, since Adler has quite hard streets, and we needed something resistant and able to move with obstacles and bumps. We also wanted to be able to turn the stroller without having to lift the front wheels. We wanted a basket under the stroller with easy access, and finally we wanted it to be as light as possible (the lighter ones are around 11 Kg). We would also like nice colours in the stroller, but we were more flexible in that aspect. Finally the price should not be very expensive.

This was clearly impossible to get.

First thing we did was visiting all the shops we could find in Adler and Sochi. We actually did several trips to Sochi, to one big shopping centre, so we could see a selection of strollers. However, most shops in that centre had a very small selection. In Adler things were not much better, but there was a couple of shops that had some more strollers.

All of these strollers were not even close to our requirements. Most were transformers or 3 in 1. Some 2 in 1 had big wheels, but could not turn them at all. Even the expensive ones were bad, without turning wheels or with terrible handlebars. One of the most decent ones had a stupid bar that did not allow access to the basket, and most of them were almost 20 Kg in weight.

We have spent close to 2 months visiting these shops, from time to time, and with no luck. After a while we decided to turn to internet, to see if we could order the stroller from there.

In shops outside Russia there were awesome strollers, but also really expensive ones. However, the sending prices were huge, and would take months to reach us. If that wasn't enough, to enter the country we would need to pay taxes, and the price easily doubled.

As per the Russian on-line shops, prices were not much cheaper plus we had no trust in them. It seems in Russia it's still normal to put a website and then cheat and trick people out of their money. In normal countries these practices are mostly eliminated, because they're not productive at all, but well, it's Russia.

We've also heard that deliveries in Russia may take 2 months, and you may find your package open and missing something. Besides, since the country is so big, maybe they don't even send things to the place where you live.

We couldn't trust on-line shopping. We were already thinking we would buy a second hand transformer for a cheap price, and get a good stroller in Barcelona.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we were in one of the baby shops trying to buy other things for the baby, and we checked strollers one more time, just for fun. In the middle of the usual ones, there was one that looked new, decent, and that had all the things we wanted. After asking about it, it turned out it was really new, just arrived to the shop. They had it in a couple of colours.

We checked the stroller, and it was really good. We really liked it. We ordered one in a different colour, and picked it up the following week.

It was a great release. We were not thinking about it, but we were very tired of trying to find the ideal one, and we felt very lucky to have found this by random chance.

However, this showed us the difficulties of buying anything in here. They don't have consistent deliveries, they don't have the same products, they have very limited stock, and you cannot trust on-line shops.

All in all, we're really glad we will not be living here once the Olympics finish...

Spanish Joke

Some time ago, I heard a joke that was applied to Spain, but could be used in other countries as well. The joke goes like this:

"When God was creating the world, he divided it in countries. In each country he put different people, and he decided to give two good qualities to the people of each country:

-Germans will be hard-working and efficient, English people will be polite and educated, Italians will be passionate and funny....

The list of countries kept going, until it was the turn of Spain:

-Spanish people will be intelligent, good and they will vote the party from the right.

Of course, the angels around God thought that it was a little bit unfair that Spanish people got 3 qualities, and they mentioned it to God. God answered:

-What you say is true. Therefore, Spanish people will be able to choose any 2 of the 3 qualities that they want.

That is the reason why, in Spain, you will find good people that vote to the right party, but they won't be intelligent. You will also find intelligent people that vote for the right party, but they will not be good. And finally, you will find good and intelligent people, but they won't vote for the right party."

I believe that this joke says something quite true. Of course, it defines things in a very "black and white" manner: How can you assess that somebody is "good"? Some right-minded reporters mention that supporters of the left would like to make right ideals illegal, and this kind of joke may give such an idea.

However, I would say that if you replace "not good" for "selfish", "self-interested" or a similar meaning, this is spot on and perfectly realistic.

In general, what does the right parties support? They have always supported tradition, religion, censorship, discrimination, power and money for the already rich and powerful, ignorance among the lower workers, kings and queens (or CEOs), patriotism, repression, more military and more participation in wars, less rights for the people, less freedom for the people, more work for the lower classes, and less money for the lower classes. In Spain (and other countries) you can add fascism, racism, sexism, dictatorial governments and other things that are usually limited to extreme right parties, but that in Spain is part of the main right party.

It would be simplistic to consider all that "bad", but it's easy to consider it "selfish", as in things that may give you some benefit while others get a worse situation.

And who would vote for these things? Well, there will be lots of low-class people that will vote them for their defence of patriotism, religion, tradition, sexism, racism, military issues and discrimination. For example, lots of lower class people may think that immigrants are taking their jobs, and therefore they vote right parties believing they will put a stop to illegal immigrants. Or they may feel that the other parties are not patriotic enough, or that this party will put women back were she belongs, at home in the kitchen and taking care of kids while men go to the bar and drink and smoke. It could also be something more simple and that it can be considered "good", which is to defend their religious believes.

All this clearly shows a lack of intelligence on the lower class part, since intelligent people will notice right away that there is a larger problem here: The fact that this party will basically screw the lower class as much as possible, which should be the main concern. If you think that a government that defends tradition is more important than being able to eat or to have a house, your priorities are wrong, and therefore it marks you as stupid. Same with religion, you can be a nice person, help the poor, try to support your community and all that, but if you vote a party because they support your religion without considering that the same party will multiply the amount of poor people in the streets and the cases of hunger, you don't have your priorities straight and you don't grasp that this party is not following the original meaning of religion, which usually is to be nice to each other. Again, this means you're basically stupid, sorry if it sounds harsh but it's true. Finally, you could believe the right party's messages that say they will make things better for everybody and vote them. This again shows you're stupid, since the right parties have always defended the same, which is benefits for a very few rich and powerful people while screwing everybody else.

However, there is intelligent people too that may vote for the right party. If you're high class it's evident that this party will protect you and your family, and your interests. If you're middle-high class you can also think that this party may not affect you that much, or that you share some of its ideas an the policies that are more repressive and violent will not affect you. This does not make you a "bad" person per se, but clearly more "selfish": You're supporting the repression, the censorship, the decrease in rights, since you're not really affected by it that much and you can more or less maintain your lifestyle.

Being selfish it's not really bad, you need to be selfish in some degree to achieve a certain happiness. Otherwise you'll always be miserable thinking about the things that you could do for others. However, when such selfishness affects such a big proportion of the population, making their lives so much worse, it cannot be considered good. Specially if you can still be perfectly happy and maintain your lifestyle while paying more taxes or keeping your ideologies at your home.

Of course, if you directly vote them to get a lot more richer and to exploit to the lass drop of blood all your workers and lower class, or to impose your morals by force to people against their will, I will directly consider you to be bad. However, I don't believe that there are that many cases of this in Spain, and it's more like the case I explained of indifferent people that gain something while not losing much or not being impacted much.

That's why this joke is so true: If you are smart enough to have your priorities straight and to understand what each party offers and does, and you care enough about other people that you would like to improve rights and freedom of everybody even if it will not affect you that much, I don't see how you can vote for a right party.

One last comment: Right parties are known for his acts, not for his speeches. If a party defends a huge amount of the things the right parties defend, even with some concessions, that party is from the right, even while claiming to be "centre" or "left".

Therefore, in Spain one needs to be careful, since most big parties are rather "right-ish"....

Erasmus Anniversary

5 years ago, (plus a couple of days) I left Barcelona to finish my university degree in Lund, Sweden. That was one of the best decisions I've taken, and I really loved my time there and all the people I met there.

This is not the first time I had a similar experience, and probably not the last.

When I was 17, I participated in an exchange program in my high school. For a week, I had a Swedish girl (Marianne) living in my house and visiting my high school (together with other Swedes). This was the first time I was in such an international environment, and the first time I had to actively use English to communicate. The ones that participated in it also got to skip some classes, and it was really awesome. I made a friend, and I keep contact with her more than with most people in my high school. When we visited Sweden in return, it was also a great experience, seeing another culture and other ways to do things while using another language that was not our own.

That same year I did Santiago's way with my parents. This is a 740 km long route in the north-west of Spain, done in around 30 days. The origin is religious, but we did it just because we enjoyed walking and visiting new places. While doing it we met lots of nice and different people from all around the world, and one of the people I met was a girl from U.K, that introduced me to the fact that English music is fucking awesome. I already knew that, but I was not fully conscious of how bad the music in Spain was, I believe. This also increased my curiosity regarding U.K, and made me want to visit it and even live there some day. After the way, we lost contact with most of the people, even if we still keep in touch with a few. I realised a simple thing there: Doing the same path again would not feel the same way, because the people walking with me would be different. This way was done, and it would be impossible to repeat it. However, that does not mean you need to stop enjoying walking, or that you need to become obsessed with that single time when everything was so good and the people were so nice.

When I was 18, inspired by last year's meetings and trips, I went to England alone, and visited several cities there. I had great experiences, and I had a first contact with a country that has a wide range of defects, but also has quite nice qualities. After the first trip, I returned quite shortly to attend a music festival with the girl we met during the way and other people. It was great, and I repeated the trip a few more years. I lost contact with that girl, but I met great people while in the festival, people I never met again but oh well.

After this I had to study hard at university, but I did manage to make some nice trips, like the year I went to China for a month with some friends. The cultural shock was quite brutal, but it was really interesting and we survived somehow, even when we were basically backpacking around the place and searching places to stay from one day to the next.

Finally, before ending university I wanted to enjoy university life to the fullest before starting to work, and I went for an Erasmus, as I mentioned.

During an Erasmus you meet lots of people from all around the world, and you really have incredible amounts of fun. It is incredible to call some people you know, just grab the bike and go to some party somewhere. At least, to learn if you enjoy these things or not, and also to learn how to live by yourself and take care of things, organise events, meet and communicate, and all that.

I met my wife there, thanks to a Japanese common friend that I met on the very first day, while trying to find a supermarket to buy some basic survival food. We started dating later on, but without living there, without meeting by chance a person who was just also looking for food, that would have not happened. We always have fun with the fact that a Lithuanian girl and a Spanish boy met in Sweden, obviously. It confuses people a lot ^^.

The first semester was amazing, but of course most people left, and therefore it's the same as in Santiago's way, not possible to really repeat even if we lived there again.

After the Erasmus, I found a job by pure luck in my current company, that offered me the option to continue travelling. I visited Vancouver, and after some years I had (finally) the chance to go and live in U.K., in London.

While working for London Olympics, again I met people from all around the world, and every week there was some party at some pub (even if I didn't go to most of them, there was the option). It reminded us a lot of an Erasmus, actually. In London there were also people I met in Sweden, so my wife and I managed to keep contact with them and meet them, while meeting others who were there working with me. It was also a great experience. London was not as nice as I thought when I was 18, but it was still pretty awesome, the music still was way better than in Spain, and in general we had a great time there. We got married there, and we have an English marriage certificate, as a matter of fact.

Our London life was strangely similar to an Erasmus, and we enjoyed it  a lot too. Afterwards, most co-workers went to their separate ways, and we had the chance to move to Russia and work for Sochi Olympics.

Here again we have met lots of nice people. Here again we have had great experiences.

Our first son (that's the official opinion) will be born here, in a month or even sooner. We will have fun explaining that we're a Lithuanian-Spanish couple that met in Sweden, married in England and had a child in Russia (obviously).

And here again we will leave and it will not be possible to repeat it, but we will take this great experiences and know that we have enjoyed them a lot.

And later on, maybe there will be other countries to visit, other places to live, new people to meet...

Without travels, without Erasmus-like experiences, I would be different. I am married because of Erasmus. We will have a child because of Erasmus. Without Erasmus I might have done these things...or maybe not. But because of Erasmus, these things have happened. And every trip, every second, or third, or fourth Erasmus or pre-Erasmus we have, we enjoy it as if it was the first, even when the people and the places are different and the same conditions are always unrepeatable.

I believe that all these trips and meetings make you open your views, make you learn new things, make your life change for the better. I believe that everybody should have such experiences, if they could. We would be smarter as a society if we would do so.

Finally, I believe that these trips and meetings are really, really funny and nice^^. So don't miss the chance to do them, if you can.

Time To Fire People

In lights of my future parenthood, we are trying at home to prepare everything to make our baby legal.

We decided to have a baby in Russia while living there temporarily and being Lithuanian and Spanish. That may cause some problems, as you can imagine, and the past few days we have tried to call our different embassies and consulates to understand what will be needed from us to make the governments understand that the baby is ours, that therefore he has a right to be Spanish and Lithuanian, and to obtain a passport so he can legally be in Russia.

I guess it comes as no surprise to anybody that the result is a clusterfuck of idiocy, papers, lack of logic, incompetence, bureaucracy and so on...

It seems terribly hard to comprehend for authorities of any country that you are actually you. I understand that if it was easy to pretend to be someone, there would be a lot of associated problems to that. I also understand that in the dark ages, the only way to proof that you're "You" would be to bring numerous amount of papers and documentation, together with signatures and even some witnesses.

However, for he past few years, there's this little thing called "electronic ID" or "electronic passport", that we have been using. If you know a little bit about cryptography, you can easily see the point...if you don't, trust me on this: A digital signature can be INCREDIBLY hard to falsify, compared to what can you do using dark photos, good handwriting skills and make up. Specially if the digital signature is authenticating stuff like your actual picture and your digital prints.

Given these facts, all paperwork should only require such a digital signature, the same one that is already used in lots of passports and IDs, like my Spanish ID or my Spanish passport. (I mean, these things are already used regularly, we're not talking about science-fiction stuff you can only find in MIT labs).

Anyway, these facts and my latest interactions with certain personnel has reminded me about a core problem that, I believe, is an important cause of such clusterfucks, and also an important cause of corruption, idiocy, outdated systems and other such things in Spain (and other countries): We need to fire people.

Now, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of times I've indicated that the Spanish problem is otherwise, how easy has it become to fire people. This is also true, so let's specify: We should be able to fire people that are really incompetent or useless on purpose, regardless of position or organization. I hope this clears it more. I can think of 3 groups that would require more firing options.

First, there's public administration workers. Public workers, at least in Spain (maybe in some countries it's different), cannot be fired, ever, except in extreme circumstances (as in, peeing over customers may cause them to be fired. Short of that, it's a rather hard thing to happen).

I know public workers that are great people and good at their job. Just these days I've talked with very competent people. However, I've also talked with really idiotic people, who clearly were bothered by the fact that they had to work now, after a question!.

For some reason, it is very hard to fire public workers, and that's a big problem, because we all need a certain amount of "fear" to perform a good job.

Liberal theories tend to support the idea of companies having lots of freedom when dealing with workers. One of the ideas behind this is that, otherwise, workers are not productive enough and the company will fail. Social theories indicate that company bosses, if given enough freedom, will exploit workers as much as they can, making society a much worse place. Both theories, however, sometimes seem to fail to ignore a more basic principle: We people are, in general, bastards that sacrifice someone's else well-being and freedom if it means we get to have some benefit out of it. It is not true of everybody, but given the chance to do something "bad" that brings a benefit to you, a large amount of us will take the benefit. 

If you apply this principle to bosses, you can see that most of them (not all) will exploit workers if they have the chance. However, applied to the workers, it also says that most workers (not all) will actually be not productive at all if given the chance.

Therefore, we need an equilibrium of worker rights and company rights. This equilibrium would mean that the company cannot exploit workers and fire them at will, while workers need to actually work or be fired.

In the public administration we do not have this equilibrium, and without the fear of being fired some people simply refuse to work. I was told by a public administrator that when someone works normally, not overdoing it but not taking unnecessary constant breaks, lots of other public workers usually complain because it makes them look bad.

It has reached a point where I believe that some people try to enter public administration to avoid work whatsoever. This is unacceptable, and it´s one of the causes of the administration clusterfuck we usually suffer.You may be regular at your job, and then you should not be fired. But when you´re consciously doing nothing most of the time, to the point where yearly evaluations could show how little you are really doing, it should be possible to fire you.

There's lots of possible jobs in the world, and there's always something you can be good enough at to be able to work on that, or something that interests you. Even if you cannot work in something that you´re really passionate about, you can always work at some place and do some regular, good enough, job. The problem is when you´re not even doing that...

The second group that could use more firing is the "kings of the hill". As in Firefly: "Sad little king of a sad little hill". Self-important pricks.

There's lots of people in administration and in different organizations that has some position and believes themselves to be very important. And maybe inside that organization they are important, we're not denying that. However, they act as if everybody everywhere should give them respect just because of that.

A classic example is the typical case of an on-line community, where its creator and moderator, instead of taking a more passive approach or attitude, participates a lot and with hot opinions. Regardless of right or wrong, some of these community creators act as gods, banning people who disagree with them, giving extra benefits to the people who are nice to them, and all that.

Applied to something more serious, the big political parties all work kind of like this. Some public organisations also work like this, and the reason sometimes paperwork takes so long is because these people, by how important they are, need to stamp everything with their signature before it can be approved...while being too busy to do that very often, of course (several of these overlap with the first group).

The end result is that administration and some other organizations are full of very very stupid steps that do not help, do not give anything, and in this day and age can be easily made more secure and easier to perform by technology.

Therefore, we could improve things by firing some of these positions that are rather obsolete, while also getting rid of very annoying behaviours and attitudes that accompany such people plenty of times.

The final group that we need to be able to fire in an easier way are governmental officials and similar high positions. I'd talk about them, but there's no need: To prove why do we need that, we can always check today's circus at the Spanish parliament, the conclusions of which are that the current rulers will deny doing anything wrong ever, and if you voted for them that's too bad, if you want to change any tiny little aspect of their policies you'll need to wait until next elections.

And Now What Do We Do?

I haven't made many political rants about Spain lately, because there's almost anything new to say....However, today I've read some articles that showed what's the real situation in Spain, so it's worth commenting it now. 

First, for those who do not know, some years ago the bursar of the ruling party (PP) was accused of participating in a corruption case that implicated other members of this party, regional leaders mostly. Investigations were done, while PP and the bursar claimed together that it was all a a lie and they were innocent. However, some months ago, proofs were found about the bursar's culpability, and then PP tried to isolate him and say that what he did was not in the party's name and that he was a liar and bad person in general. 

A few months ago, some papers form this bursar surfaced. It may be that he made them surface himself. Whatever the origin, these papers indicated that, in the last 20 years or so, PP had been illegally financed using donations that surpassed the legal limit. The companies that gave these donations later on got public contracts for lots of money. The papers also showed secret payments to all the party leaders and lots of other people. The papers seem to be from the bursar, and seem to be a secret accounting of the party. 

PP answered saying that the papers were made up to wrongly accuse them. Different tests disproved this theory, and several people inside the party claimed that they received some of the lesser payments that appear on the papers. The bursar also claimed that he did not do these papers, but writing analysis disproved that too. Finally the bursar declared that the papers were real, that he made them himself, and that he paid to the party leaders all this undeclared money. PP is saying that the bursar lies (since, you know, he was lying before too), but there has not been any other explanations or resignations at all. 

Meanwhile, the papers have also shown that the current president of the Constitutional Court, made up by judges which should be independent from politics, since they decide important interpretations of the Spanish constitution, was paying a fee to the party, which is the fee that any party member needs to pay. The judge has admitted that he belongs to that party, but sees no problem in that, since he's not part of the party's directive, and will not resign because of this.

Kind of unrelated to that but also important, just now the Spanish Supreme Court has ruled that a member of PP that has been condemned to 6 years of prison because of a case of influence peddling, embezzlement and other such charges, should only have 9 months of prison and considered some of these charges to be void. This case also affects the king's son-in-law and daughter, but they haven't finished their judgment yet.

This same Supreme Court accused an independent judge of 3 different charges, and considered him guilty in one of them, preventing him from working in Spain. This judge was trying to investigate crimes done during Franco's dictatorship, and was also an important part of the investigations that cause the detention of the PP's bursar. This judge has been investigating and trying to condemn human right abuses around the world, among other things. 

Meanwhile, the other main Spanish party, PSOE, supposed to be from the left, has also a big corruption scandal in Andalucía, a region where they have been governing for the past 20 years or so. Important people inside the party are accused. This same party also gave lots of contracts to the same companies that appear on the PP bursar's papers. Even if there's no proof of anything illegal regarding these companies and PSOE, you can easily see what's more likely.

In Catalunya, it has been declared that the ruling party, CIU, got money from a scandal that has happened in a public institution. The director of the institution embezzled lots of funds, and it seems he used some of these funds to donate to the party. That same party has another 2 cases of corruption going on, where its leaders are implicated. Such leaders also have some Switzerland accounts, apparently. 

Both CIU and PP, one in Catalunya and the other in Spain, have been privatizing our public healthcare. Most of the private companies that are taking the contracts have in their directive ex-members of the party. Another group of companies that have ex-politicians (from PP and PSOE) in their directive are energy companies. This week a new law was created that says that if you want to use solar panels or any other source of electricity controlled by yourself, in order to store this electricity you will need to pay them.

We could continue all day long, and comment about the laws that have been created to lower salaries and make it easier to fire people. Or the incredible number of open corruption cases everywhere in Spain, with the judges that are really trying to uncover them getting dead threats and such things. Or the fact that most condemned corrupt politicians and police officers accused of brutality or torture usually get governmental pardons, bypassing the justice system and making them free. And let's not even get started with the banks and the house prices....

The conclusions are clear: The legislative power has been corrupted. The executive power is corrupted as well, and it's actually managed by the same people that in the legislative power. The judicial power is corrupted in the high courts, but there's some hope in there, since it seems there are still lots of independent judges. Most big companies are the ones corrupting things, and they don't allow competitors. 

Currently PP has absolute majority on the parliament, and therefore any initiative to change things will be cancelled right away. Any explanations that they may give will probably be all lies anyway, as their program showed (they did exactly the contrary of what their program said after elections). Other parties are not better, especially if they're big enough. 

Finally, the worst thing: even with the list of problems that we're mentioning, PP and PSOE would still be the most voted forces if there were elections now. Lots of people got disgusted by their actions, yes, but there is still a huge number of supporters. What's worse, lots of old supporters would rather not vote instead of trying to find a party that represents them better. With most newspapers and news agencies backing these two parties, it's also very difficult to give an alternative that actually reaches people. 

If there were elections right now, it would be messy, but PP could still rule with the help of CIU and probably UPD (another new party who has the same ideology as PP, and its leader also appeared sometimes in the bursar's papers). PSOE could also rule with help, maybe, but the whole point of the problem is that these 2 parties have been ruling for too long....

Some international criminal agencies like IMF and the World Bank are also saying that governments need to be strong, and therefore coalitions of parties are too unstable to rule, basically supporting PP and PSOE by scaring people predicting chaos (and by the way, this argument is also a great way to declare that dictatorships are the best type of government for the economy, you cannot get stronger than that).

After reaching this point, I again see only two solutions:

1-We need a party that is really independent and not corrupt. These parties exists, especially if they have not ruled much yet. This party would need to get enough votes to bypass PP and PSOE (and probably CIU, UPD and PNV too) and get a majority of votes, and then create a new constitution and new laws. In the process, it should also dissolve the current High Courts, and establish that these courts need to be created by the judges only (the constitutional court is formed by the parliament right now, which shows how "separated" are powers in Spain).

2-We do the same as in 1-, but in order to do so first we proceed to kill all the current party directives, courts, bank owners, etc. that have caused this situation. 

However, Spanish population seems to be...sedated, and both 1st and 2nd solution do not seem possible, because people do not seem to care, even when their unhappiness is a direct result of these rulers....Spanish people seem to care only about sports, and everybody is staying at home, voting the same parties, doing the same things, never reacting, never thinking....

This will continue as long as we allow it and support it by considering it "normal", or that it's "Spanish culture". 

Every day that Spanish people fail to react, I get the impression that Spain's solution to lots of its problems is a surgical nuclear strike...