Summer in Rio and Buzios

We're reaching the end of Summer in the south hemisphere, and I wanted to comment a few things.

First of all, Rio gets really really hot.

I commented before that in "Winter" we could already reach 30 degrees in the sun. However, that was Winter still.

In Summer, in the sun, it's closer to about 40-45.

However, since humans adapt to everything, we're already rather fine with the situation. When temperature goes back to 32 or around in the street, we can already tell that it's "fresh", or "not so bad today". And at night we consider them "cold" if it is less than 26.

Anyway, it does feels hot. And here the pool comes into action.

Let me tell you: It is fucking awesome.

Elay and my wife enjoy it almost every hot day, and I only go there during the weekends, but when the heat is almost unbearable, when the simplest task makes you sweat, being able to just submerge yourself and cool your body is great. Especially because I go to the pool from my apartment in my swimsuit, without needing to change, and in 2 minutes I can be back taking a shower. We pay more condominio than other people because of the pool, but it's totally worth it.

As a side effect, Elay has learned how to hold his breath underwater and how to swim with floaters (even if he doesn't speak any language that we understand). And we are developing a brownish skin tone as well, which maybe its not the healthiest thing, but it seems better than the nuclear "pc-screen-at-night glow" white that we usually have.

While all this was happening, we reached February, and the city went crazy. We were told, and it feels like this, that the new year only starts after Carnival, and it is a quite accurate description.

Offices closed earlier, and all buildings put extra protection against their glass to avoid accidents. Streets were cut, and crime rised worrisomely.

We missed the worst of it because we went to Buzios for 3 nights.

Buzios is a resort town in the lake  area east of Rio. It is not far in distance, but with the current infrastructure of roads it takes still 3 hours at least, if you do not find traffic jams. We found traffic jams and it took us quite longer to get there.

The place is a tourist area, full of little houses and hotels but with lots of greenery and space between them, and with plenty of Atlantic beaches. It reminded us of plenty of other resort areas we had visited. It had touches of Eivissa (not many people,a few small streets, you can always see a house or hotel around...), Adler (small streets with dirt, tacky souvenir shops, shady tours all around, physics-defying 5D cinemas...) or other typical resort/beach towns.

Our hotel was in a hill, 10 minutes away from a very big and calm beach. We were not very happy with it. It could have been great, but it was advertised as a 4 star hotel with several services, and it was not 4 stars and it didn't have those services. Going with lower expectations, we would have had no problems with it, but you cannot promise what you don't have and expect people to be happy.

It did have great views, an awesome pool and quite a calm atmosphere, that is true. We ended up going to the hotel pool most of the days (it had great views too), and walking for a bit in the centre at night, to have dinner.

We also went to the beach once, to mark it as "done", but we realised we don't enjoy beach that much. Especially a beach with no services like showers or toilets...but also the beach atmosphere was not that good. Tacky is the word to use again, a little bit like in Adler. The sand was awesome, though, very fine grains that felt quite good to step on (although we ended up with sand everywhere, another thing we don't enjoy). The water felt cold after being used to our building pool of 26-30 degrees, thanks to the sun, but we discovered Elay doesn't mind at all (to the point of craziness, because he was clearly cold but still running towards deeper water and getting mad when we had to grab him back and dry him).

Anyway, it was actually quite relaxing, in a "doing nothing" kind of way, having a beer from time to time, swimming and just relaxing far away from the city. The natural aspects of the area are awesome, with lots of exuberant vegetation, clean beaches and little hills and mountains for you to explore.

I don't know if we will return to this area (because with Elay there are not that many things to do for his age there, later on he could actually enjoy it), but we had 3 good nights there, and we managed to avoid the chaos that ensued in Rio during the carnival.

All in all, we're happy with the experience

Watching The Hobbit

Lots of things have happened while here in Rio and back in Barcelona during Christmas, but I will comment them only if I feel like it...

What I want to comment today is about the Hobbit, and also about Lord of the Rings movies, because we recently watched this edition of The Hobbit. I have to say we enjoyed it very much, even if some things didn't make much sense...and I'm not talking about missing things because this edit removed plenty of them, I'm talking about added things.

I have always been a fan of Lord of The Rings. And I'm not saying "always" lightly.

When I could not read on my own, my parents had talked about these books, and had read fragments to me. I remember they read Shelob's chapter, and I could not help but want to know more about what was happening, seeing how creepy but interesting it was, and seeing how there was a giant spider (I was also quite fond of big spiders). Considering I started to read when I was 4, this should have happened some time sooner than that.

I don't remember when I first read the hobbit, but I know it was in preparation for the Lord of The Rings. And I was warned: The hobbit is much lighter in comparison, and much easier to read. However I wanted to give these books a try. I believe I tried to read a more serious Tolkien book with some short stories also in preparation, but they were depressing or uninteresting and I did not finish them.  I do know when I read Lord of the Rings, and I was eight. It was not an easy book, and the beginning was incredibly slow, but I finished all 3 books and I loved them. Tolkien's books have its flaws, but they are also pretty awesome, and I was completely addicted to its world and story. I actually convinced at least 2 people of my similar age to try and read it, after "selling" to them the story.

After a few years, I know I decided to read them again. And again. And one more time. I didn't really repeated The Hobbit, but I read Lord of the Rings 4 times, and every time I read the initial verses (were the rings of power are mentioned) I had goosebumps. I believe it started to be a yearly tradition. However, when I was 16, I was starting to practice and use English more and more. I started reading some small books in English. And then I decided, as a challenge, to try to read Lord of the Rings in the original language.

This was almost like reading it for the first time again. It was hard, it was slow, but it was an incredibly learning experience. Tolkien does not write in an easy way, and I remember reading a whole page and realising I had understood two things from there. Anyway, I managed to finish it. And then, in later years, I re-read it again, also in English. I believe I read it a total of 4 times too, and maybe I'm missing one....

During the general exam to determine university entrance after high school, the English section had an experimental listening part (it was the first year they did something like this) where you were supposed to listen to a conversation and answer some questions. Funny enough, the topic of the conversation was the Lord of the Rings. I answered 70% of the listening part, correctly, before hearing a single English voice in the room.

And then (well, actually after my second time of reading it in English), the first movie came out. The first one was not so bad. There were some changes, that you can understand because lack of time, and some extra things that, while annoying, didn't really detract much (some people got really angry about Arwen saving Frodo, but that's small details.I find more troubling the fact that they turned Gimli into an idiot and other such things). However, the second and third movies (although enjoyable) resulted in plenty of things that made no sense and denied huge important ideas that were in the books.

After watching extended editions and the interviews with writers and creators, I'm surprised at the stupidity of the people behind it. They did a good job, and then they screwed up huge basic principles. For example, the ring is not the ultimate evil: The ring is the ultimate temptation. Therefore, you can wear it to escape enemies and even kill them while you're invisible, and as long as you don't claim it for yourself, nothing really bad happens to you, no whispering, no fire eye. The ring acts slow and over time, but it can be beaten. Not all humans will act stupidly and demand it (Faramir gets over it from the start, not after dragging the hobbits almost to Gondor). Frodo is weak from carrying the ring, but that does not mean he's a mumbling mess without wisdom that will believe Gollum before Sam, and he's spiritually powerful. 100 Humans cannot beat 10000 orcs, a big fucking forest of living trees does that for them, killing close to 8000 of the orcs, and there were actually close to a 1000 humans in the first place. Ents are slow deciding, that's why they decide correctly on the first place, and they don't rush to action after just seeing some fires around the forest, as if they were not aware of that. Merry injured a spectre because his fucking sword was an ancient magical dagger, otherwise he would have just died. The good guys do not always need to fight, and plenty of times their victory is spiritual, without violence involved, and they respect ambassadors and Mouths of Sauron enough to not kill them when they're just discussing things. And so many other things....

Anyway, I did enjoy the movies, but plenty of these points make my blood boil, because they show such lack of basic reading comprehension, such idiocy, that it's hard to believes. Extra love stories and action scenes can be almost forgiven because it's Hollywood, but some things add nothing, mess shit up and make the story a lot worse.  

So, when the hobbit movie was announced, especially after hearing they would make three of them, I was not especially thrilled, to say the truth. I saw it as a cash grab, and I didn't want to waste so many hours of my life and ticket money in that.

However, recently I saw a post mentioning this Tolkien edit. After reading what was removed, it seemed like it could be quite a nice movie, so we gave it a try.

There is still bullshit. There are moments that make no sense. There are modifications made by people who were checking their mobiles or driving while reading the original book, apparently, But the end result is a very entertaining film, long but not stretched, that manages to explain quite well what happened in the original book while keeping you interested all the way.

Don't watch the three bloated movies, download this version and watch something much more close to what the hobbit was.

(And to finish this geeky post let's put some music ) 

Natural Things

Elay has been walking around for sometime now, which means he touches everything.

This is an evident problem because some things are fragile. or organized, or dangerous, and we cannot let him touch and grab them (and he gets mad when we don't let him do so, but oh well...).  This means following him around and supervising what he does if he wants to walk around the place.

A few weeks ago I tried to show him xbox games, to see what he would do, and let him touch the controller so he would see things moving in the screen whe he pressed buttons. He was not that interested actually, and I don't know if he did fully grasp he could make things happen through the controller. He was happier biting the controller, and then going to the big TV and slapping the screen (which then we had to go and tell him no, he could only touch it softly...even if he tried more times and we had to kept telling no).

This made me think about tablets, phones and other new devices. In lots of modern technology, they defend natural ways of doing things. And our son clearly showed that it is natural that, if you see something in a screen, you interact with it touching the screen. Consoles have also used this concept with movement recognition (Kinect, Wii), in which you use all you body to do something. It's really a natural way of interacting with equipment.

Do you know what else is natural? Dying of appendicitis. Another example? Cyanide can be found in nature. "Natural" things are not necessary "good", or "better" than artificial things.  Some natural things can be improved in a huge number of ways.

Interacting with technology has been evolving through the years, and lately everything has a touchscreen, some have voice-recognition, and some even have movement recognition. Some of these are based on science-fiction work (like the famous mobile air screens in Minority Report). And they look cool, and we definitely should think if it is possible to make and create ways to make it, becasue in some applications it may be useful (like 3D modelling in the middle of the air).

However, practicality should always be in mind. Touchscreens are good for mobiles, because they open space for the screen while allowing mobiles not to have a keyboard. They are good for saving space, which is an important trait in a mobile device. Tablets have a similar principle, if you want to easily move around with them and see videos and play point-and-click games, they're good. Nevertheless, touchscreens are not precise. If you need to select text, or press a small button, touchscreens suck. Because our fingers are thick and imprecise, and the only way they can be useful to select is if the thing being selected has, at least, twice the surface than your finger, not leaving margin for error.

Touchscreen in cameras? Terrible idea. Touchscreen in PCs? Even worse. Touchscreens in gaming? Really really stupid, outside point-and-click games with big thingies to click. The aberration that represents a Windows Server Operating System with touchscreen interface (when servers don't even have touchscreens)? Let's not even waste words...

Same applies to kinect and other movement sensors. To do physical activities it is a good idea, and for some party games as well. However, any shooter where you need to move yourself in front of a camera is a really bad one where you cannot reach immersion at all.

Ideally, communicating with technology is just a translation between what our brain wants to do and what the technology needs to do. the perfect communication would be to have thought-activated things that really do what you want them to do. This is actually hard and complex, so instead we use interfaces like a mouse, or a controller. The idea is to translate our thought into a minimum of actions (like moving muscles). A touchscreen can be a good interface, but the mouse is a lot more precise and with less movements. If you want to select text, the mouse is almost perfect, because it offers a huge amount of precision and control in a flat area and using a very limited number of muscles. For example, if you want to apply the the idea "select text", you need to slightly move your hand until the cursor is on top of the text, and then press slightly with one of your fingers on the mouse button, while again moving slightly your hand and maybe your arm. The more muscles you need to use to translate ideas to the machine, the worse the interface is because the brain needs to do more work and use more parts to transmit simple ideas. Therefore, mouses to use in the air, while you move your hands, are idiotic unless you want to manipulate 3D objects. Since computer screens are usually flat, moving your hands in 3D is stupid. you will end up moving them in a 2D plane in front of the screen, and for that we already have the mouse and without needing to raise arms. To select text with a 3D mouse or system where you wave your hands in the air, you need to move all your arm until the hand is in a position that the computer recognizes as being on top of the text, then signal with the hand by moving one or more of your fingers quite a lot, and then waving your arm around. If the way to select is a touchscreen, the process is quite similar. This is quite less efficient than using the mouse on top of the table.

The same applies with games. The Xbox  controller layout is almost perfect in allowing you to do plenty of actions,including moving two joysticks while pressing buttons. Changing that for a touchscreen or for a movement detector is replacing small finger movements with full body and arm movements, and removing the chance of activating different buttons or actions at the same time.

Again, I'm not saying in all situations it is stupid to use these "new" interaction technologies. I'm just saying that, for example, if you make a dancing game, by all means use a movement sensor. If you're making an RPG with a first person view, don't bother and give me a controller with 10 buttons that I don't need to look at to know what I'm pressing.  Just because you have a movement sensor, don't force it on everything you do.

This is especially annoying regarding bad quality touchscreens for devices that have screens too small for fingers. For example cameras and video cameras. Lately some of them have touchscreens to interact with them, when a small joystick or 4 arrow buttons would be extremely more efficient and easy to use. 

And then there is this trend to force touchscreens on normal PCs or even on servers (again, why the hell did you do this, Microsoft??), which needs its own category of stupidity, because normal stupid look like genius by comparison...

Voting as a Protest

This Sunday (9th of November), lots of people voted in Catalunya about independence. However, this can be considered a demonstration more than anything else.

We've talked several times that currently the Catalan government is really pushing for independence, to hide their own mistakes and corruption, and to try to get some extra votes. And we've mentioned in other posts that there is actually a big proportion of people that do want to become independent, for a big number of different reasons. And how Spanish central government is acting really really stupid about it,  as in all things they do.

Now let's explain what has happened in the recent months, because it's the kind of thing that is hard to believe....

Catalunya's government and quite a lot of the Catalan political parties decided it was time to vote. Scotland had done the same, so they felt prepared to organize voting. They established the 9th of November as the date.

First thing that happened is that Spanish government, rules by PP, said that this is illegal and antidemocratic. We've mentioned before, but the kind of people that say voting is antidemocratic must have the most twisted minds of the world...or more likely, the stupidest.

However, it is true apparently that there's some part of the constitution and actual laws that say referendums (as in legally binding voting processes) can only be organized state-wide, by the Spanish government. Never mind that other times referendums like this were asked at levels different than state-wide and nobody complained about it, but well...

So, the Catalan parties cannot organize a referendum legally. Ok, that is fine. What they did then is prepare a law saying that they could organize a public poll to consult people about things. Of course the purpose of the law was to vote and see if people wanted independence, but the law itself just provides a way to vote about stuff, without this being legally binding but allowing the use of official census and public workers.

And then the Spanish government said this was illegal as well and anti-constitutional, and that "democratic, law-abiding citizens" would never participate in the voting. They started a legal process to stop the voting, and even if it is not clear what will be the judges verdict, the result is this poll was basically blocked from happening any time soon (judges are slow, it could take a year or more for a verdict)

This is the point that surprises me. Surprises me because the rest of the European Union didn't tell Spain to shut the hell up and let people vote. Sure, this may be kind of an internal Spanish matter, but we're talking about a theoretical "democratic" country saying that it is illegal to make official polls, basically. Serves to show the type of "Democracy" that the European Union also supports...

Anyway, I was expecting a bigger outcry from all sections. Especially the people that do not want an independent Catalunya.

If I really, really wanted to stop independentism, some years ago (when it might still be possible to do so, because now I don't see it working) I would have made negotiations and concessions to Catalunya, and then I would have allowed them to vote, while campaigning in favour of the union of regions. That's more or less what happened with Scotland. If then you convince enough people that it's not worth the risk and we can obtain good results together, you have killed the independentism movement for the next 20-30 years.

When somebody ask, you can always say this was recently voted, and the results were clear. You can vote again in some time, but you cannot vote every year until you get the result you want, and therefore people against independence would have a strong argument to forget about it for a while and things would calm down.

At this point I don't know if its pure incompetence or machiavellian planning: Incompetence is easy to understand, because the Spanish government has proven to be useless so many times in less than 3 years that I lost count. However, it can also be that the Spanish government is quite happy with the independentists. After all, they are an enemy. Something that people can join to fight, and something that is not the main parties' cases of corruption. Every day there's more and more people from the two main parties being arrested, accused or even condemned in the tribunals, and independence is a nice distraction.

Then again, they say to not attribute to malice what can be explain by simple dumb stupidity...

Anyway, the Catalan government organized another poll, unofficial, without census, done by volunteers. Of course such a pool cannot be very useful to ask officially for independence, but well, it server its purpose to get the pulse of the people....

And the Spanish government and other central parties still complained about it and tried to stop it.

Luckily, since at this point the legal waters were very murky (and getting closer to the dictatorial style) this time this was mostly ignored by the Catalan government and the voting happened.

The results are interesting...only 2.3 million people voted out of 6.2 possible votes, but considering how unofficial and rushed the thing was, it is still a success. Not every town had a voting area, so not everybody was able to vote. Since it was unofficial consulates and embassies would not help with this, and I could not vote either, although some international voting points were created around the world.

80% of voters declared to want independence. 10% declared to want a different status, but not necessarily while being independent from Spain, and less than 5% declared they didn't want any changes. The rest of the votes were not valid answers (maybe we can consider them also supporters of "No", but it is not clear).

This would indicate that most people in Catalunya want independence, but actually the thing is that the people that do not want it were convinced to not vote. So, they had no visibility, no effect on the final result. There's a big group of people that do not want to separate from Spain, but they were not really fully represented in this poll.

The whole thing turned up to be more like a demonstration in favour of a referendum, but still, with more participation a more realistic picture would have been possible. As it is now, the central government will say that not enough people participated (and also that the whole thing is antidemocratic and illegal, as usual). Meanwhile, the Catalan government will take it as support of their work (which is not true, Catalan government is doing a very bad job). The rest of teams and parties will each interpret it as they wish, but it is undeniable that a big majority of people in Catalunya want things to start moving, towards independence or at least towards a more official and definitive voting.

What is more evident here is the parties and people's true colors regarding democracy. If somebody is offended by my following words, sorry, but this is the truth: If you believe voting for something to know people's opinion is bad, you are a defender of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. Simple and clear.

Not everything should depend on the votes of the people. There are things that are right and things that are wrong, and not everything allows for opinions. As I mentioned before, if that would be the case we would not need any experts in anything, we could just all vote and see what the majority thinks.

However, that does not mean there aren't things where it is important to ask the population about their opinions.  And it does not mean that asking everybody about a topic is ever a bad thing, even if the government or the experts decide to do something else afterwards.

This is a clear example, because the "big picture" of the organization of a region is something that you can let everybody decide. Regardless of the actions to take afterwards, voting to see who wants independence is never bad. Wanting to stop the voting is bad. Wanting to stop the voting shows you disregard the term "democracy". It means you believe in imposing ideas. It means you think that ethics are not important, legality is, and therefore as long as something is legal it is ok to do it, and as long as something is illegal you should not do so, without actually thinking if these things are ethical or moral. With this logic, some centuries ago it would be ok to have slaves, because it was legal. And we should not try rescue and free them, because that was illegal (stealing property).

When you are against voting, you're basically defining yourself as this. Maybe you were not aware of it, but that's what you did by thinking voting was bad. And if you don't want Catalunya to be independent, well, promote the "No", because not voting is the surest way to guarantee the region leaves Spain.

And voting is never something permanent. Voting is a continuous process. A constitution does not stay approved after one voting, it needs revisions, rewriting and more voting after some years pass. And this is what "democracy" means, if you don't like it openly promote a dictatorship that fits your world-view better, just don't be an hypocrite about it.

(Ah, as a final reminder, I support independence. Not because I feel specially Catalan, but because I'm embarrassed to be Spanish, and also because it would mix things up and give opportunities to redefine what is Spain, what is Catalunya and maybe a chance of getting rid of a big amount of corrupt bastards on both sides)

Arrival to Rio

I've finally decided to write a little again, because we finally have two basic requirements: a permanent apartment, and our own internet connection.

So, we moved to Rio De Janeiro this August :) .

Our first impressions are mixed, as usual. Rio is a big city, with lots of people, lots of cars, lots of neighbourhoods. It’s a busy city, much bigger than Barcelona. It has lots of mountain ranges, lots of green areas, and lots of residential zones and places to walk around. It’s also a nice change from Adler, since we have more options of apartments, shops, and things to do in general. 

However, Rio also is a very dirty city, with greyish buildings, lack of efficient public transport, old constructions and styles…and there’s a lot of poverty around (no, we haven’t visited any favelas, but we have seen quite a lot of them from a distance), and it’s also less secure than Sochi or Barcelona.

People are really nice here. Most people are helpful and attentive, and they love children. Strangers usually stop in the street to say something to Elay, and everybody treats him quite nicely. Most people smile a lot when attending you. 

At the same time, traffic is terrible and aggressive. They don’t respect pedestrians like in Adler, while driving in a similar way that causes huge traffic jams. Motorbikes, meanwhile, ignore any type of rule, security or common sense and beep around as if that would be enough to get right of way.  Personalities change a lot when they are behind a vehicle…

The weather has been rather nice. You can see it is normal to have some clouds around and sometimes its rainy or stormy, but we arrived in the middle of “deep winter”, and that only meant that it was rainy and that temperatures went below 20° Celsius (even reaching 18° clearly a cold wave). When it’s sunny we easily reach 30°. That’s “Winter”. We don’t want to imagine “Summer”….At least, it seems it is not as humid as Singapore or other such regions...

The first month and a half was not the easiest period. We started in a temporary apartment, but it was booked just for a week. Then we had to move to a second temporary apartment, where we luckily stayed until we found our permanent one. The temporary apartments were…barely adequate, to say it politely, but it was enough for us, for a while. 

We had to do a lot of paperwork. Brazil loves bureaucracy, and the amount of useless papers you need to make is insane. For example, you may need to notarize your signature and notarize documents. But nobody really cares about it, they don’t check signatures and who are you that closely, they just want to have a stamp from a notary. To live here you also need 3 different documents, and to work you need a 4^th one. Most of these documents are fast enough to make, but you need to queue first, and that can take several hours. Which makes no sense, because they have timetables and numbers….

Lots of people here are really inefficient. It took us a lot of time to get the apartment, and lots of this time was wasted in administrative steps or going through agencies, which have hundreds of other clients and cannot attend your demands, while a simple direct call to the owners would be enough.

You can also see that there is lots of corruption, since lots of apartment owners want to rent the place without declaring it, and even get angry or increase the price when mentioning that you will do everything legally. 

My office is pretty awesome, new and nice (with cafeterias and a small terrace/garden), and it’s next to the subway so we needed a place connected to the local subway. The subway in Rio is quite limited, it has only 2 lines so far, and they share a big amount of stops. Most of it communicates the “Zona Sul” with the actual centre of the city, so we have been searching apartments in the Zona Sul, Rio’s posh area for tourist and expats. 

Initially we wanted to live in Ipanema, which is extremely nice, but it is also more touristic, less safe and further from work. It is also very expensive, so in the end we found a nice place in Botafogo, further from the beach but still 10-15 minutes away from Copacabana or Ipanema in subway. It is a very residential are, with plenty of shops and a couple of shopping malls around. 

The ideal area, where everybody wants to live now, is called Barra. It’s extremely residential, very nice and clean, with lots of commerce, clean beaches, new buildings, and cheap rents. It’s also 2 hours away from the centre by car thanks to traffic (unless you wake up at 05:30 and go to the centre at that time), and it has no subway, so we discarded that option quite fast. Botafogo is older and not as nice, but our building is quite new. 

In here it is very normal to have common areas and services in the building. You usually need to pay some extra for them, but even in buildings that have nothing you may pay 100 euros or so for them, so it was worth investigating, to find a building with nice services. The one we have chosen has, among other things, 24-hours security, a park for kids, a swimming pool and a gym, so we’re quite happy it^^. We haven’t used the pool yet (we have been less than 2 weeks in the building, and last 2 weekends were annoyingly cold or we had other things to do), but it’s nice to know we can go there if temperatures get crazy.

The apartment itself is quite new, and while not very big, is more than enough for us, while having room for visits too. (So, everybody’s invited^^). 

We haven't done much toursim yet, because with Elay it's not as easy. There are very green and tall mountains (like the Pao de Açúcar or the Corcovado) that make the landscape look awesome, and the combination of these weird mountains and the beaches is beautiful. However, we do have walked around, and gone to plenty of restaurants. Local food is pretty awesome, and the fruits and juices are simply incredible....

After the first days of paranoia, the city does not seem as dangerous as you would think. There is plenty of people in the street most of the time, and the Zona Sul and the workplace are quite busy all the time. I don't doubt that walking in areas with less people is not healthy for you or your wallet, but things are not as bad as one would imagine, and we're told the city has imporved a lot in the past few years.

All in all, it's quite an interesting place :). We'll see how it goes...

PSOE, Podemos and Other Parties

I have not written in a while, and a lot of things are happening at the same time, in the country and in our regular life.

For the moment, I'd like to rant about politics for a bit.

In the end of May, there was European Elections, and the results could be commented, but let's center them to Spain. After years of screwing up big time, the two main parties had lost credibility, and it was expected that they would have worse results than in the latest general elections.

What nobody was expecting was Podemos. This was a new party that got created by people's associations, inspired by the 15M protests against the ruling parties, that had become nests of corrupt politicians in their leading positions.  With only 4 months of life, they got more than a million votes in these elections. Polls say they may get a high number of parliament seats in the next general elections, although not enough at all to rule on their own.

The problem Podemos represents to the current rulers is that they defend popular meetings and popular votes to decide about things, and the people in general, when asked directly , may decide they want to limit the politician’s salaries or that they don’t want a king. Other left parties that are more traditional may not ask directly and are more controllable, but when people actually vote for things it’s really hard to, for example, decide your childhood friend should win a contract to provide a public service through a private company.

Podemos has also proven to be really good at advertising themselves and reaching people that got tired with the traditional parties, to prove some of their points by example (like rejecting to get the full salary of an European parliamentary) and to actually say quite reasonable things that resound with the public.

Of course, after these results, official newspapers and channels have stopped treating them like a joke and started attacking them to defend the traditional parties. The two main parties have been ruling on their own for ages, fighting publicly but agreeing and working together privately at the highest levels, and seeing how they are losing power scares them.

However, the current ruling party (PP) is maybe the least affected at the moment....they are losing votes, but I believe people who voted PP in the past will never change to Podemos (unless we're talking of really, really stupid people). No, the one that is most bothered by Podemos is PSOE.

PSOE, or the Spanish socialist party, was born very long ago, in 1879, and as a truly socialist party started fighting for worker's rights. However, a lot has happened since then, and the party has evolved and changed (as is normal with so much time passing). After Franco's dicatorship, PSOE became one of the main parties in Spain, participating in the transition period, and it managed to become the ruling party a few elections afterwards. At that moment the party was still defending interests considered from the left wing, but it had done several concessions (like accepting a monarchy) and in general moved to the center of the political spectrum, especially regarding economic ideas.

From that time till now PSOE's leaders have been moving to the right little by little. At the same time, they have started to use the same tactics than right-wing parties, where destructive critic is all it matters, and to point to the other as the cause of all problems. It is true that PSOE leaders still defend some ideas from the left, like LGBT rights, abortion issues and other similar things, but these things, even if important, do no deal with the main problem a leftist party should deal with: The abuse that middle and lower class people are receiving from the rich and the company owners. That minorities have the same rights as the rest is important, but if everybody has shit for a job, then maybe this should be the priority of a leftist party.

PSOE's leaders have also been caught in important corruption cases, have helped maintain a monarchy while keeping secret how much does it costs and what does it do, have promoted to important positions relatives and friends, have increased their own salaries and hired consultants while the country was in an economic crisis, has put ex-polititians in charge of banks and big energy companies, has helped the catholic church as if Spain was not independent from religion, and in general has behaved no differently than a (maybe softer) right-wing corrupt party, except for a few issues.

Now, part of the problem is that there are lots of people in Spain that believe PSOE is the worker's party. And there are a lot of people in the PSOE that also believe that they should work for the workers. When Podemos, or other parties, or me, critisize PSOE, I think it's clear we do not mean everybody in PSOE. However, the current leaders are the ones at fault, and the ones doing it all wrong.

Podemos may be tricking us and become something horrible later on, who knows...but right now them and other small parties are pointing to the problems Spain has and proposing solutions (that may work or not, but that go beyond criticising blindly what's being done by the other party). They're also promoting more democracy.

Meanwhile, PSOE leaders got some of the ideas that Podemos is promoting and started to apply them wrong.  For example, they have chosen a younger party leader, as if age, and not ideas (the guy was involved in one of the banks that have done more irregular things in Spain), was the problem. Or promoting democracy by opening to all party members who is going to be the new leader, but at the same time the leader that actually got chosen and most of the central PSOE parliamentaries are saying that letting people from Catalunya vote about if they want independence is bad and should not be done (missing entirely the point).

This and other comments shows in my opinion that PSOE has not been refunded, and the same people than before have power and are quite comfortable in there and do not want to change anything.

If PSOE would like to be taken seriously as a party again and not keep losing votes month after month, they need to actually do more instead of saying they will do more. They need to condemn corruption by auditing themselves through some third company, by making public all their numbers and accounts and the accounts of their leaders, and by doing internal investigations and actively collaborating with the police the moment someone in their party is accused of corruption, instead of just saying “not guilty until a judge condemns us”, which does not mean you are guilty but gives a really bad image, as if you’re hiding secrets.

They need to condemn the transfers between private companies and leading parties (or otherwise) by actually indicating, for example, that is shameful that the ex-president of Spain Felipe Gonzalez is part of Gas Natural, one of the major energy companies in Spain and part of the lobby who is promoting laws approved by the government that are punishing green energy companies and green energy research while increasing the energy bill and creating an energy monopoly.

They need to actually recognize that they have made mistakes, for example indicating that last time they were in power they screwed up and didn’t prevent the crisis or publicly recognize the start of it, without charging all of the guilt to ex-president Zapatero only.

They need to recognize that they have agreed with PP in lots of things and have voted the same as them especially in Europe or in economic topics, and if they want to differentiate from them they need to stop doing that.

They need to condemn the current pardon system and indicate that too many times the ones pardoned are ex-politicians, cops, company owners and other people that are not the “commoners” by far, and recognize that they have done this in the past to show they will stop doing so.

They need to actually comprehend and recognize that their new idea of a Federal nation was created once Catalunya gave them the option to be independentist or centralist like the PP, and since they didn’t want that association with PP they created this 3rd option never defended before.

They need to open up and learn from the new parties, by publishing their decisions in some public way, showing their decision-taking process and, if they want to look democratic, allowing their militants to participate in those decisions.

They need to do such things and much more, and then we could consider them as a valid left-party alternative that will defend the rights and interest of the middle and lower classes.

However, given the current leaders and their position of power, they’re never going to do that….

Economics, Apartments And MMORPGs

As I mentioned in previous posts, we're currently searching for an apartment to buy. If we don't find anything before we go to Rio it's fine, but we're investigating to see what's in the market, and if there's an affordable apartment that we like, we will not wait 2 years to get it. Right now we've found one that we may like, and we've even made an offer, but things are still pretty much in the air.

As I said, the whole selection process deserves another post, but right now I'd like to talk about apartment prices, their negotiations, and economics in general. And also how the experience of playing in a Massive Multiplayer Online game helps a lot as an Economics case study, for apartments and for the world in general.

Apartment prices in Spain are still stupidly high compared to people's salaries, but right now they're reaching a level where you can consider to buy one without sacrificing your first-born to the bank. Second hand apartments are still the only option because, with a few exceptions, new apartments are owned by banks. Bank managers (as in bank owners and directors, not office workers nor office directors) know that the prices have gone down and nobody is even able to consider paying such prices for new apartments, but if they lower the prices of new apartments they need to write down that they lost money. Of course, they'd prefer to rape their mothers before admitting that they screw up big time and that they have thousands of useless empty houses that give no benefit, so instead they don't lower the prices and maintain a price bubble.

They hope that the prices will go up again and they will get a benefit. This may happen, but it may take 50-100 years (which is how many years may be needed to get back to a situation in Spain where most people not only can easily buy houses, but can also eat afterwards). Meanwhile, our friendly Spanish government gives them our money (recovered from us through taxes) so they can continue operating without having to get money from selling that big amount of useless cheap houses.

So, we're left with the second-hand house market.

In there, things are currently interesting. Prices were not able to resist the evident difference between supply and demand, and they have plummeted quite a lot. Just 7 years ago it was normal to pay 500.000 euros for a small hole in a wall, and now it is reasonable to get decent places for 200.000 or less (depends on size of apartment, situation, age, state, etc.).

Now we're in the process of negotiating the price for an apartment we consider as an option.

Negotiating prices, reading the market tendencies and the economy in general reminds me a lot about the time I was playing Lineage 2. Lineage 2 is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG for short, pronounced like yhatzee does). You have a permanent world where you log in and your character appears. Levelling up and progressing through Lineage 2 is an extremely hard task (or it was when I was playing) that it's not easy achievable. (all the following comments are based on my experiences of the game when I was playing it, before 2008).

The problem I faced when I was playing Lineage 2, is that to level up you need to invest a lot of money in resources and equipment. And the process of levelling up does not reward you with equivalent money. Basically, to level up you need to lose big amounts of in-game money. To be fair, there are ways to get money levelling up and hunting monsters, but they require you to play for 8 hours straight, together with more people, and to limit usage of resources to a minimum. Even like this, profits are minimal. In this world it is true that permanent growth is possible, since when you kill a monster more money gets added to the world. Anyway, this creates funny economic dynamics.

To put it in perspective...once you reach level 20, the equipment that you will need to start using at that moment to be able to fight people and monsters of your level costs close to 2 millions in the internal currency. Once you get to level 20, if killing monsters has reported you around 100.000 of the internal currency count yourself as lucky.

As you can see, there is a bit of a gap between standard income and necessary money to survive. This only gets worse in later levels, since after level 40 the equipment you need is not even sold in game shops, you need to craft it from pieces that monsters drop. Getting all required pieces takes usually more time than levelling up to the point where the equipment you were trying to create is now useless to you.

As a result of all of this, the basis of living in that world is player commerce. Players have the option to trade things and even open shops that offer things and services (like crafting services). Capitalism is king, and prices evolve with the time depending on demand and on what is affordable by most players. What's more, thanks to the constant influx of money to the economy from the players, the world is in a permanent state of inflation, with very strange and particular cases of devaluation. The ones that got rich keep getting richer, and new players will have it very hard to reach a stable economic situation where you don't need to save every single coin.

This really teaches you the workings of the real world, if you want to survive inside the game. For example inside the game I managed to establish a small business of selling helmets. These helmets were needed to complete a set that gave some extra stats for players between level 40 and 52.

However, I did not own any helmets. I did not have the pieces and materials that allowed you to build such helmets. I did definitely not have the ability to even finish building these helmets.

What I was doing was buying materials in a city, for a price that I knew was rather cheap. I bought them in bulk, and when I had my calculated quotas of materials then I proceeded to contract players who had shops to create composite materials. Finally, I contracted someone who was able to made the actual helmet from the composite materials and pieces.

Once I had the helmet (or helmets), I proceeded to go to another city where this helmet had the biggest price (because prices changed from city to city, given the fact that reaching each city required different levels and hours of play). In there I opened a shop and sold the helmet.

Recollecting and buying all the composite materials and pieces, and then contracting other players to build composites and the final helmet was a long process, and it costed around 1.2 millions in the game currency.

However, the completed helmets were sold for prices between 2 and 3.5 millions (depending on the moment). In the worst case, I got 166% of the invested money back. In the best case, 290%. And I did absolutely nothing. I was just an intermediate that knew prices of materials and prices of the finished item, and knew which margins were acceptable. Sure, I wasted a lot of in-game time on this, but it was usually time I was studying at university, and meanwhile my computer was on with the automatic shop activated so other players could sell me materials or buy my helmets.

Sometimes I got people competing, trying to sell helmets next to me for 1.5 million and similar things.I just bought all their helmets with my investment money and sold them for 2.5, getting me an easy, fast and clean benefit of 1 million per helmet.

So, this game showed quite easily a number of points that you always need to consider in doing businesses and buying things, especially when their prices do not match the price of materials used or hours invested in them:

1-Living is expensive, and working hard does not guarantee that you will have money or that you'll be able to afford necessary things.

2-In order to win lots of money, you need to start with lots of money.

3-Without laws regulating business, established companies can ruin any competitors by just buying their stock to resell it at inflated prices or by selling at a loss until the competitors run out of business.

4-Try to avoid as many distributors, agents and other intermediaries between the maker of the product and you. Each step makes the final product stupidly more expensive than the real cost of making it.

5-Monopolies will abuse their position of power and inflate prices.

6-Even with inflated prices and monopolies, customers will call bullshit when the price is too much, and they will opt to live without your product if necessary.

There are more lessons that you can take from the game, but there's no need to list all of them. It's just to show that these games are great examples of pure capitalism (and how incredibly crappy it is for everyone that doesn't have a great idea or control over some particular market). It also shows the catastrophes that can happen in such unregulated markets. (there's a lot of other MMO games that can show you examples of this).

Regarding apartments, what the game taught me is that the price of such things is as much as people are willing to pay. Building an apartment does not cost their actual prices. The apartment prices depend on the idea of a fair price that most people will have in their minds, and prices will change only when people think they should change.

At the moment, every week or two I get notifications that some apartment I was interested dropped 10.000 euros, or even 20.000.

I believe that no matter what newspapers and government are trying to advertise, people still can't pay for apartments, and what's more, people still believe they should not pay for such prices and that prices will go down. There's a big advertising campaign to change people's minds, but I don't believe it's working yet.

I want an apartment where we can live, and I don't care if the prices will drop more, or will increase later. I just want our own place. However, it is an interesting moment to buy, and it is funny to see all the people trying to convince you prices might rise a lot any time next week...

Maybe I'm wrong and prices will really increase soon....but somehow I doubt it.

Double Fine And Broken Age

A few weeks ago I was finally able to play Broken Age for a little bit, and I thought I wanted to explain the story, since we're rather proud to have participated in it :)

For those of you who do not know, Double Fine is a games development company created by Tim Schafer. Tim was one of the people working in LucasArts when they developed some of the greatest graphic adventures ever created, and he did or participated in most of them. However, one of the last games, Grim Fandango, didn't do good in sales. This, accompanied by other great graphic adventures that failed to produce money, caused big studios to abandon this format of gaming. 

After Grim Fandango, Tim went to create Double Fine, and they produced a number of games. Their first one was Psychonauts, another great game (this time a platformer) that did not do so well on sales at the beginning and did not help the company in stabilizing its situation. 

The next game they developed was Brütal Legend. However, during its development, their publisher (Activision) decided that they wanted a different game, and when the studio declined to change it, Activision dropped them. The studio managed to make an agreement with EA to publish the game instead, but then Activision filled a lawsuit claiming that they had invested in the game and were still interested. Things eventually got resolved, but the studio suffered from it, and the game didn't have all the content it originally should have, and became quite shorter. It still is a pretty good game. The gameplay is a little bit lacking, but the story, cast and atmosphere are really awesome. 

After this incident, Double Fine was in a precarious situation, lacking money and low on morale. They managed to stay afloat by releasing some smaller games produced with the same engine used in Brütal Legend. In this situation,  they remembered that fans constantly were asking them to do one graphic adventure like the ones in the past. Big companies said that this was no longer profitable, and therefore no one wanted to invest on them...but with the internet, there were alternative ways of financing such a project.

Kickstarter is a website that lets you donate money to projects you believe are worth doing and that lack funding. At the time when Double Fine was considering its future, Kickstarter had done some small campaigns, with only one or two very successful ones.

Double Fine decided to make their fans prove what they were saying and proposed to fund a new graphic adventure, using this video to promote the bid. The initial bid was 400.000 dollars, which is quite a big sum, of course...

For some weird reason, I managed to find out about this the same day that they put this video up. I got really excited about this, and I went to check the Kickstarter page. I wanted to donate money so a small, great game company could basically do whatever they wanted with no publishers messing around the final product.

When I entered the page, donations had reached 800.000 dollars. The 400.000-mark had been crushed in less than 8 hours. The Kickstarter server was crashing and didn't handle the load well. In the middle of this, I managed to make a small donation. I explained the story to Olia, and she got excited about it as well, and we started to check the page and refresh to see what was happening. In a few minutes thousands of dollars were being donated to the project. Everybody was crazy about it, the comments of the people participating were awesome, and checking twitter accounts of people from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, they couldn't believe it either.

We actually saw it arrive to 1.000.000 dollars. It was amazing, and less than 24 hours had passed. It felt like  a special moment of partying with the world.

After this, the rhythm of donations slowed down, and days passed without big donations. However, in the month that the campaign lasted, they managed to get 3.3 Millions.

I forgot about this for a long time, and after I while I read that even with that money they had production problems, because they made the game way too big. In the end they divided the game in two, and decided to sell the first part and then produce the second part (that would not require another purchase).

The game came out just recently, and since I was a backer, I had the right to get a copy. I didn't install it in a long while, but some weeks ago we finally tried the game that we helped a little bit to make.

We haven't played much, for obvious reasons....but we can already tell: Broken Age is awesome. The animation, the drawings, the voice acting, the music,  the little details...it's incredible, it feels like playing inside of a painting.

What remains to be seen is if the plot and the puzzles are also top notch since we haven't played much....but so far the feelings we're getting are pretty good.

The most important thing about all that is that it has shown that publishers can be very, very wrong about their opinions. Sure, publishers know a number of tricks that increases your chances of being economically successful, and they may correctly guess that some projects will fail...but this is not an exact science. Publishers are also usually ruled by rich people with very fixed ways of thinking that prevents innovations, or just adapting to new times.  And now there's lots of chances to make something awesome and popular, that innovates in things that nobody has dared to try, and we're free to put such ideas to popular vote in form of donations.

Anyway, Broken age seems like a great game, and  supporting it guarantees that Double Fine will keep producing imaginative, incredible games. 

Back in Barcelona

Having a child and temporarily moving back to your parent's home is quite time-consuming. We've been here for a little more than a month now, but it feels like ages ago, and we've been very busy.

In this time, we've been visiting friends and family. Everyone wants to see Elay, and Elay has a particular timetable that difficuls visiting. (Apart from that, he's very very funny and we're enjoying a lot being with him and seeing him learn^^)

Anyway, we're more adapted to life here now, even if its only temporary: we've managed to be assigned to Rio too, so around July we will move again, for a big period this time.

Meanwhile, we're taking live here as a small vacation, even if we work and do similar things. At work the level of things to do is not comparable to the integration team, and at home we have our parents to help with Elay and to do some daily things.

Living in Barcelona is really really nice. It sounds patriotic, or like those people that say that your original home is where you live best. I don't agree with that, I just think Barcelona is my favourite place to live so far: Adler was too wild, too poor, too corrupted and too much old-fashioned with ideas. London was too big, too gloomy and cold, had too many people and its people thought too much "inside the box".  Vilnius is too poor at the moment, too big for its public transport network and way too cold 9 months of the year. Lund and Malmo are my second favourite places, but the weather is still not as good, and their people are colder too.

Barcelona is a big city but not that big(like Vilnius and Malmo), it has people but not too many (like Adler, Malmo, Lund and Vilnius), the weather is very nice(like Adler), its economy is not very poor (like London, Malmo and Lund), the transport network is really good(like Malmo, Lund and maybe London), it has lots of things to do(like London and Malmo), it allows you to buy things on shops or through internet(like London, Malmo, Lund or Vilnius), it's in the coast(like Malmo and Adler) but also next to the mountains(like Vilnius), it's well communicated by plane and train(like London and Malmo), you can use the bike to move around(like Malmo and Lund, and maybe London), and the city has lots of beautiful areas and places(like London, Malmo and Vilnius).

So, based on a number of things that we subjectively think are best, we can objectively mark Barcelona as our favourite place so far. Scandinavian countries are a close second, and if economy and politics doesn't improve, this will add to the city's drawbacks, but right now it's our favourite place.

One of my favourite things that I've rediscovered is bicing, the public bikes that you can use for free for 30 minutes.

We' be been checking apartments to buy recently (something that may require another post). Everything is very close in this city, and if I go alone it's very easy to grab a bike and go. And the feeling of freedom that you have going around with the bike is one of the best in the world, specially in sunny but fresh weather while you move through big streets lined with trees and grass...

I really have missed using the bike^^