melkathi

Started fooling around a bit in Satellite Reign. It is shaping up to quite the awesome game. Tried to be all clever and stealthy. Infiltrate the surveilance compound for the district and mes with the face rec software to make cameras less effective. Snuck past two cameras and one guard. Dashed towards the stairs and last minute noticed a guard walking up those very stairs I was aiming for. Hid in a corner. Guard walked past. I dashed down the stairs. Spotted a second guard comming my way. Tried to hide behind some boxes as the door to the generator room was too hard to hack. Was spotted. Guard opened fire. I returned fire. Guard dies. Other guards hear the noise and come arruning. More guards die but raise the alarm. More guards come arruning. My agents all die. Clone new agents. Upgrade agents. Try again. Manage to open the generator room door and hide in there while a new patrol (now two guards at once) walk past. Get almost to the main building. Get spotted by a surveilance drone... Dash into the nearest building and get stuck on a walkway overlooking the compound with five guards covering the building door. Try to shoot my way out. Fail. Clone new agents. Try again Hack the door controls for the back door into the compound. Leisurely stroll down almost next to my target. Sneak past a camera. Walk up to the main building's door. Forget to set two agents to hack the two terminals at the same time. Try that again. Lone guard spots us. Gun down lone guard. Second guard comes to check out the noise. Soldier keeps guard pinned down while Hacker and Support open the building gates. Infiltrator dashes inside and completes the mission. More guards come arruning. Soldier draws fire. Support deploys some healing nanos. More guards come running. Decide to just make a run for it. Dash up the stairs and out the back door. Holster weapons and try to meld into the crowd. Surveilance drone simply hovers over compound wall and starts firing. More drones zoom in from all directions. All agents gunned down...

Spoke to Paypal customer support today. I went in expecting Steam support quality of "support" The guy actually was awesome. Tried to fix the issue. Failed. Told me he'd have to escalate it. I said ok. He said: but let me tell you what will happen when I escalate. The techs wont fix it either, instead send you a mail suggesting you should delete your account and make a new one. So my suggestion is, since you have a 0 balance right now, I wipe your credit card data from this side to make sure it is purged from the system, delete your account and then you make the new one without waiting days for the tech stuff to simply suggest the same thing. Sounds like a plan

Would it mean we get Sweet Home Alabama as a national anthem? We could initiate preliminary talks.

It seems quite clear that Varoufakis did not resign but was resigned. The scoop for a while had been that Tsipras wanted to get rid of him but had too little control over his party/government to just do it. The timing for the resignation is perfect. While the NO won, participation wasn't high. By having V for Varoufakis resign, Tsipras created a day after where everyone won. The NO voters won because NO got over sixty percent. The YES voters won since one of their central goals, getting rid of Varoufakis, was met. And Tsipras won because he re-established his position in the party - for now. And Varoufakis won since he managed to go while he still could present the whole thing as him being awesome. Now he can get his tenure at Harvard and travel the world delivering speeches about how he'd have saved Greece if only the evil lenders had let him.

So NO basically won. 68% among the under 35 with a vast majority among the students. All the kids living off grandad's and grandma's money. Above 55 it is 63%+ in favour of Yes. Funny that. Oh, and Monte. N17 and the Conspiracy of the Fire Nuclei both no longer operate and have been jailed. There is no real far left terror group at the moment. All violent potential currently comes from Golden Dawn and groups to the right of them (scary *****ers when admiring the SS is seen as too soft). And some uncoordinated vandalism by anarchists. Though we'll see how that all changes the more the ties between the left and the far right are strengthened. If you remember the assassination of the two Golden Dawn members last year, the terror group that claimed responsibility was a fake. Their letter was wrong on every level. The details were wrong. And the style was wrong; the person who wrote it was very obviously simply copying info they found online. A bad fake. Bah. Why am I against gun control?

Sounds bad. I wonder to what extent the current gov't has actual support from the armed forces. Have you heard anything about Academi (formerly Blackwater)? http://beforeitsnews.com/global-unrest/2013/02/greece-blackwater-mercenaries-guarding-govt-and-overseeing-police-coup-feared-2453458.html https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=el&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsbomb.gr%2Fpolitikh%2Fnews%2Fstory%2F296524%2Fapantisi-dendia-sti-voyli-gia-tin-blackwater I'm guessing the "domestic enemies" he was alluding to are supposed to be Golden Dawn fifth-columnists and such? Actually no. It was meant to rally that part. That is the scary part. The government has the support of the far right. The No vote afetr all is the supposed far-left SYRIZA and their far right coalition partner ANEL (independent Greeks), alongside the radical leftist ANTARSIA and the nazis from Golden Dawn. As someone from ANTARSIA told me: "The purity of the NO message is underlined by the fact that not even the Nazis dare oppose it but feel forced to support it". Apprently those of us who are saying YES are worse than Nazis *nodnod* It's the general theme they have been pushing these past few days. The announcement by the Minister of Defense should be read as "If the YES vote wins, don't worry, we can stay in power." So, yup. The probable NO victory today is a great victory for democracy /end sarcasm.

Just because our Minister of Defense announced the other day that the army stands ready to defend "us" from domestic enemies?

Very low participation today it seems.

The Yes crowd wants to see them gone but knows we don't really have any worthwhile people to put in charge. Honestly, Venizelos is probably the best man we have right now. But he could never unite a government behind him anymore. When PASOK had to decide for a new party leader in 2008 they started an internal slander campaign against him that he'd never recover from. But as a friend of mine said the other day over a game of Blood Bowl Team Manager: "You know I have always voted conservatives, but not even I will pretend that Samaras could lead this country." The thing is though: the previous government was terrible. And one had to ask "How much worse could it get?" Well, now we know. Right now the Yes supporters are not asking for a good government. We'll settle for our simple bad one please. Just take away the dreadful one.

I am firmly on the Yes side. My social circles are split between Yes and No (though more in the No) and some undecided or abstaining. The people I know that vote Yes do so for one or more of several reasons: 1) Knowing the party and the people in the government too well 2) Being in the private sector 3) Having been in the "party" since forever (which I guess comes close to 1 above) Which all boils down to not trusting this government to do a thing right and hoping a Yes vote will get rid of them. The No crowd among my circles seems rallied around: 1) Wounded National Pride 2) Bravado 3) Having no worries as dad pays the bills anyway Mind you this is my circles. I am certain there are people who have reasonable cause to vote No. I even have a friend who seriously believes that a No here will change the whole of Europe for the better. The uncertain / abstain crowd basically has one line of thinking: If we are voting on whether or not we accept those specific terms, how can the referendum be held when the deadline for those terms is already passed and those terms are no longer on the table? If the question is moot, how can one vote at all? Overall, the No crowd is far more social media savvy. They are also far less opposed to cyber-bullying. Or real life bullying. The other day a friend was chased and verbally abused all the way from the metro entrance to the train platform for throwing a No-flyer into the bin.

Heh. My mother (who is visiting at the moment) just came back from Lidl. There were three bags of rice left in the whole supermarket. Pasta was mostly sold out, with only two kinds left and those again only a couple of bags each. She said that the place basically looked like the aftermath of a crowd on a panicked stockpiling mission. What people think really depends on where you are. SYRIZA's core voters are better off inteligentsia (my architect colleagues), civic servants (who migrated over when the socialist PASOK party, which had been buying their support since the junta, fell apart) and teachers. So those are fervent NO supporters. They are starting to lose ground with the teachers since they assigned Baltas as minister of education - he has never hidden his disdain for the common teacher and for public education, and has been a slap in the face for the people who fought to have the party win the elections. Private businesses and especially the tourism industry are mostly in the YES crowd. The tourism industry here is ironic. The NO crowd talks about the raise in tourism taxes being a reason to say no, yet the ones who'd pay that tax support the yes *shrug*. Probably alongside my line of thinking: "Lower taxes don't do me any good if I have nothing to be taxed".

Before Bruce asks me to post in here as the off-topic resident Greek: Hi! And that's mostly all I have to say. But... My family has always been extremly politically active. We left Synaspismos when the party mutated into the dreg that is now known as SYRIZA. Many other traditional left families have done the same. As a result there is little of the Left left in that party. A reason I keep out of such discussions. It is a party that labeled itself as Left without any relationship to the believes or ideology. They are an opportunistic pack which realized that a left party was easier to usurp. Yes, because the Greek Left is what Monte described: a bunch that got stuck at student union rethoric level. Greece is a small country. We know each other. Heck, I had lunch with some of those ministers, lounging in a beautifull garden of a mostly illegally constructed summer house. So I'll not try to talk all high and mighty about what economic policies are right or wrong. Pretending to know better than you lot because I live here. But as a friend I'll say this: don't believe much the Greek government is saying. They are untrustworthy, power hungry twerps. Heck they openly admitted only calling for the referendum to sort out inner-party conflicts.

The so called left government here seems to be preparing to do a coup should they lose the referendum even though they are rigging the vote already.

I don't think you are supposed to hold it anyway, rather you should lounge in close proximity and drink cold beverages of your choice.

A few more pictures: From the hotel, having friends round for dinner (the aftermath. Also, this is before the clean-up, that's why there is moss...) http://i.imgur.com/9ZUPtiw.jpg Athens by night: http://i.imgur.com/vCppu23.jpg (I'll need to learn to properly use the camera. Might have to nag Woldan for advice) http://i.imgur.com/gkP0I2Z.jpg

Old potter's / ceramics workshop most likely

Sitting in the bus. 7 hours ride just started so might as well use the bus wifi to upload a few pics. Bedroom upstairs apartment: http://i.imgur.com/TeKkTCS.jpg http://i.imgur.com/nKK4KWm.jpg Upstairs apartment: http://i.imgur.com/i042jAm.jpg Ground floor studio: http://i.imgur.com/hgRLF0A.jpg Bathrooms: http://i.imgur.com/SwduOo5.jpg Doing work in the garden: http://i.imgur.com/Fs1C7Q2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tUW0Bcr.jpg My dudes working on the new gates (yesterday) : http://i.imgur.com/BCIyZIP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gkTt5BK.jpg (which we need to paint tomorrow) And noticing the typo after we put up the sign :/ http://i.imgur.com/ariQdc0.jpg Rest of the uploads failed... meh. Another time

How can anyone recover by arguing on the internet? By realizing that as much as the physical pain hurts, it can always be overshadowed by the sheer amounts of human stupidity out here?

Vases from around 600-800 BC. Wasn't allowed to keep those Old marble gravestone with a relief of the deceased. Wasn't allowed to keep that either :/ Parts of the old aqueduct. Re-buried underneath the foundation. Wasn't allowed to take pictures either and they aren't even giving me the pictures they have to display those All I got to keep were bits of walls and a large build storage urn thingie. Constructed stuff - no artifacts. Getting a proper collector's permit is a true pain. Hard to get and comes with a lot of responsibility. Still, would have loved to keep at least a couple of little things. Maybe next time.

And being an architect I mostly hate their guts for making my life hard

Depends on where you are. In theory most parts of Greece now you have to have the proper permit from the ministry of culture's archeologists that you are allowed to build. In areas of greater itnerest such as the city centre of Athens they (used to) do "patrols". We got stopped before we even started to dig, when we were just clearing out garbage that had been thrown over the fence by passers by. Law says that they have 6 months to check and make whatever decision. Reality is that they do not have the manpower for that... and that they are slower than a webbed, petrified PC, heavily encumbered with too much loot, who had their strength reduced to a tenth the original value by a curse. To clear out the rubble from the pre-exisitng basement and dig ~40cm for the new foundation took a year and 107k euros not in the original budget. We then made an agreement to keep some finds in the corner of the garden, underneath triple (basically bullet proof) glass. With some spotlights for the evening. I had to make a proper architectural proposal which they had to accept. A few streets down, a neighbour heard what I was doing, thought it was a good idea and asked to do the same. They refused, so those finds got mostly demolished and what was left buried under his foundations. In theory they need to do annual checks that everything is ok. Reality, my last check was 2011. But I got a good relationship with the local agency, so I kinda drag them in to make sure everything is in order. I invested too much money to have the thing that is supposed to make my garden special fall into ruin. So for me it took about half a week for them to set up the inspection - which they basically said they only did to put my mind at ease. And a week and a half after that for them to come do the maintenance.

Wrapped up most of my gardening for now. Need to let the soil settle before adding more. Got the archeologists coming 'round tomorrow though to do a cleanup of the dig. Once that is done I'll be pretty much set out back. All I'll need is to actually open and get guests

A bit funny how the IGN guy never seems to understand how the whole thing is scripted.

Good luck! Let us know how it went.

Athens, Greece. Opening my own tiny hotel once I sort a few last things, such as the new bank account and a way to accept credit cards.