Month: August 2005

Update: This article is now in an easy to read and print PDF!

This is probably going to end up being an X-rated[0] post, but that’s only because of the nature of the subject in discussion. Any resulting distress—or titillation—is decidedly inadvertent. Kids, close this browser window. And parents concerned about “the sorts of content irresponsible people put up corrupting their kid’s innocence”, please, just go away—spend more time with your kids.

Additionally, at some point I got tired of typing this piece up and just published it “as is”. It is noticeably raw and there will be periodic revisions to it as I re-read it in the near future.

All this began a short while ago with a seemingly innocuous query pertaining to supporting children of hapless circumstance. Being that I had already done some research on the issue and actively do my small part, I was approached with some questions on the nature of the relationship I have with the children I support. These revolved around my ability to take part in decisions involving their lives, and more specifically, the degree to which my support resulted in me being considered a legal guardian[1]. One thing lead to another, and before long, I was introduced to a world of issues revolving around a tiny segment of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). To be more precise, it was the IPC 377, which I’ve stated verbatim below.

IPC 377. Unnatural offences

“Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with 152 (imprisonment for life), or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.”

I don’t entirely know whether to laud the British genius who came up with this[2], laugh, or cry. But before that, as a mathematician (and as one who makes sure he knows and follows the letter of the law, even if not in spirit), I need to go, “It’s nice that you give me a sufficient condition, but what is the necessary condition”? And before that, as a wannabe comic, I need to go, “OK, I get it. Penetration is wrong. So does this mean lesbians are good to go? What if they haven’t heard of dildos?”

The point being, genius, before you go about detailing to me what constitutes “carnal intercourse”, you probably should explain what you mean by “against the order of nature”. If you’re taking the trouble to explain something, you might as well start with the bits that cause the most confusion, or at least follow the order in which your own nebulous words appear on paper.

Rather than get terribly wordy[3] sorting out what is wrong, and who has the right to judge what’s wrong, I’m going to borrow lyrics (emphasis mine) from the chorus of a particularly poignant song, the opening track on Blur’s Parklife, Girls & Boys:

Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they’re girls
Who do girls like they’re boys
Always should be someone you really love

Re-read that last line. That’s it people. Just try to take a step back and see the big picture. Can’t you see?

Given that we’re an inherently selfish and needy species, and it’s plenty hard to find another compatible person who makes you happy—and to whom you repay the favour—why further complicate things by narrowing your selection pool, be it by race, gender, language, age or anything else? And, if this journey of being happy with someone else, at some point, involves “relations in ways against the order of nature”, how is it really against the order of anything if everyone involved is willing, happy, and no one is hurt?

Besides, who’s really fit to judge whether another’s ways “are against the order of nature”? Me[4]? You?

How can you look at another with a straight face and tell them their harmless choices are “wrong”. And go further by declaring that, being evil, they are consequently unfit to raise a child?

———fin———

Epilogue and extraneous blabber: The author of this piece is clearly not a lawyer or sociologist or even an informed commentator. He chooses to make stuff up in order to support a point, and then proceeds to ramble on; drowning the point he envisioned making in the first place.

With the number of references to “freedom of penis use”, you can clearly see this article was penned by a man. Also, in the following, there will be numerous additional references to the penis. It’s like, being a man, I have to be obsessed with it, and I am trying to purge my system so I can move onto other things.

I know this seems unrelated, and it mostly is, but bear with me. I recognize FX (slowly becoming one of my most-watched channels) is extremely lenient toward crappy programs, but the geniuses behind FX, please, CANCEL “Starved”. I know I make it sound like the show is entirely tasteless and useless. Tasteless it is, but I did learn that shaving/trimming one’s pubic hair makes their genitalia look bigger. As a bonus, losing a few pounds of overall body weight exposes more turgid tissue usually obscured by flab. Great! Enlargement… without the pills.

If you’re wondering how I jumped from our topic of discussion to FX (apart from ADD that is), I recalled another program on the channel “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (slowly becoming one of my most-watched sitcoms).

Anyway, the culprit thought being, is it really that wrong if someone (no names) finds a transsexual extremely attractive? What if “she’s” really really hot? and the whole clearly-has-a-penis thing doesn’t seem terribly consequential?

Again, no names. Just arbitrary curiosity.

Why are you looking at me like that?[5]

———fin, really———

[0] Though I have decided to take the high road and not work in crass related Family Guy humour, such as the following.

Peter: So uhh, Mr. Pewterschmidt, the big race is tomorrow eh? Bet you’re gonna need some strapping men to help you with your boat.
Mr. Pewterschmidt: Are you calling me gay?
Peter: No. No. I just; I just thought you might want some extra seamen on your poopdeck.

Like I said, I skillfully avoided working it in.

[1] If you really look into it, this is one of the few areas where it is legally favourable to be born female. A man, I guess they conjecture, just isn’t responsible or nurturing enough to bring up kids. Even more than one man, a partnership, isn’t apparently sufficient.

And yet, single angels like Angelina Jolie (you know, the woman who tied vials of blood onto her necklaces) get their pick of, not one, but two or more children. The logic there being, I guess, women are “implicitly nurturing”.

[2] The Indian Penal Code came into force in 1862 (during British occupation) and is consequently based on British criminal law.

[3] Even more so than it is. I was considering apologising for the general verbosity and the time you’re probably wasting reading this. Then I realised that pales in comparison to the time I spent writing this up. If you’re in a hurry though, here’s the meat:
a. Being gay is not a choice, and it isn’t evil.
b. Being a man (single or in a homosexual partnership) doesn’t make you incapable of being nurturing toward, caring for, supporting or raising children.
c. “Starved”, the “comedy” on FX, still sucks.

[4] On almost any metric of morality you pick—degree of cruelty to animals or people, (lack of) usage of drugs, alcohol or nicotine, fraction of earnings or time devoted to charity, nature (or rather lack thereof) of illicit carnal relations, … anything other than modesty—I am sure comparing me with an average person will result in me coming out the saint. Does this mean I can judge what’s right and what’s “against the order of nature”?

Why? Because I can probably convince you and a handful of other people I hold the moral high ground? Come come now, even I am not that presumptuous.

[5] And no, if you’re concerned, this is not some grand “Hi world, this is who I really am” coming out of the closet piece.

(This is not one of those hit-generating stunts. I promise. We all know how well those work.)

I’m redecorating my modest home, and I have one prominent empty wall to fill. I’ve always planned to (but never gotten around to actually) populate this with a collage composed of somewhat-large prints of my better pictures in cute frames that I’ve already picked out.

Where do you come in?

I am shooting for 8–12 pictures, and I obviously know which ones I really like. But these aren’t what the general populace usually coo over, and I need your input in deciding which ones get to go on there.

So if you could go through my gallery, and pick out your favourites, I would be most grateful.

Anything would do. Favourite, top few, top ten, anything. Comment here or e-mail me.

This weekend was good for the pseudo-intellectual amongst the gaming community. The source code for Quake III‘s engine was released. Here are some steps and notes to getting it compiled on your friendly GNU/Linux box.

(Remember, this is just the engine, and you do need to shell out the $10 or whatever and get your copy of the original game, for the game data.)

Steps:

0) cd /convenient/directory/
1) wget --passive-ftp ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/ source/quake3-1.32b-source.zip
2) unzip -qq quake3-1.32b-source.zip
3) cd quake3-1.32b
4) find -type f -exec dos2unix {} \;
5) cd code
6) chmod +x ./unix/cons
7) ./unix/cons -- release
8) cp -r /where/you/installed/the/game/you/bought/baseq3 ./install/
9) cd install
10) ./linuxq3

Corresponding Notes:

0) Pick a directory writable by you. Duh.
1) Make sure you get the latest code by first browsing the ftp site with your web browser.
2) -qq keeps things very quiet.
4) Make sure all the evil DOS carriage return characters are removed and the text files are UNIXified.
6) Make the install script executable.
7) -- release ensures you’re building the “final release” version of the code without -Werror turned on. Which means it will complain, but not balk, on warnings. You could also do ./unix/cons -- release gcc="/opt/intel_cc_80/bin/icc" g++="/opt/intel_cc_80/bin/icc" for, you know, Intel goodness.
8) Move the game data over from the original game’s install.
10) Start fragging!

Once you’re done and decide to actually learn something, you browse the code a bit. There are some absolutely intriguing (or horrendous, depending on how you look at it) bits in the code. For e.g., in code/game/q_math.c,

float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
	long i;
	float x2, y;
	const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

	x2 = number * 0.5F;
	y  = number;
	i  = * ( long * ) &y;
       // evil floating point bit level hacking
	i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );  // what the fuck?
	y  = * ( float * ) &i;
	y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );

#ifndef Q3_VM
#ifdef __linux__
	assert( !isnan(y) ); // bk010122 - FPE?
#endif
#endif
	return y;
}

Seriously, what the fuck? I found a paper on-line that made a little bit more sense.

For any society that isn’t shrouded in a reality distorted by mass media, the notion of “who’s sexy” is primarily tied to what’s most favourable, in terms of sustenance and propagation of the species. Subtle, and not-so-subtle indications of fertility—the large forehead or curvaceous hips, strength—lean muscled arms or the chiseled abdomen, health, being part of a good gene pool, that you’re capable of sustaining yourself and a family, that you’ll actually stick around… is a subset of the criteria that matter.

At some point, starting about the time humans began shaping their first crude tools to help them in their daily survival-oriented activities, it was slowly becoming clearer that being strong and muscular has little to with one’s effectiveness as a hunter, one’s ability to defend themselves or their home (or even their country) and least of all, one’s ability to provide and care for their family.

I could proceed with this argument using better clubs, traps and bows-and-arrows as examples, but I am going to fast-forward in time to make a more emphatic statement.

I was watching this documentary the other day on the Second World War. (I am not anti or pro war, so my observations are not too emotionally biased.) Specifically, they mentioned how Japanese heads of armies prided themselves on their armies being populated by soldiers who were habituated in the “ways of the Samurai warrior”. Meaning, because they had discipline, skill, courage, strength and so on, they were invincible.

It’s scary how wrong a society so enamored with technology can be about it.

A few scrawny geeks sitting in the corner of some room across the world, scribbling on bits of paper, figure out how to harness the power of atomic fission (and later fusion) to build a bomb. Where is your Samurai warrior now? Honestly, what chance does he or thousands like him or even millions of him stand next to a fission (let alone thermonuclear) warhead? Sure he can swing a sword or shoot an arrow, but what good is that when your opponent can annihilate your entire country before you can blink an eyelid?

What do you have to say to that? Who really has the power?

So returning to our central theme, isn’t such a even-if-scrawny intense geek type better capable of defending themselves (or their home or intelligently hunting, or intelligently coming up with ways of growing the better crop, or intelligently curing themselves and ones around them of major diseases, or even enhancing and enlarging their erections via chemical concoctions), really your best bet for a comfortable life and prolonged propagation of your species? Therefore, based on our hypothesis, aren’t these the sorts of people you should be finding sexy?

So why is it that Chuck Norris, or someone else like him, still shows up on TV at 3 A.M. and tries to convince you that being beefy is of paramount importance in being found sexy? Why is that even the least bit of anyone’s concern? Isn’t being intellectually forward (and hence all those other things) what people should be looking for?

This isn’t 10000 BC or whatever.

Or however it’s spelt.

Marking this and the other related-religious-event that is the “Gayathri Japam” (or however that’s spelt too), I got a bunch of calls from people regarding “implementation details”. By which I mean, they called me up and gave me instructions on how I should go about doing things, now that I am alone and all.

Like hello, firstly, I’ve not been at home for over three years, if you haven’t noticed. So if I didn’t or didn’t know how to do things the last year, or the year before last, little is going to change with a few phone calls. This stuff is elaborate, complicated, and you know it.

Anyway, I hate it when I’m-technically-not-lying but really-am-in-spirit. I was talking to my thatha (grand dad) a couple of evenings ago, and he goes, “So you know what to do and when right?”. My response? “Thatha, I got a tape”.

See? I didn’t say yes I will, or yes I do know what to do. I said “I got a tape”. (Note, not even “Sure Thatha, I got a tape”.)

I didn’t even say this was one of those religious-implementation-detail-describing tapes, it could have been an old Oasis tape or something. If they proceed to assume I have this tape, and it holds enough information AND I will actually use it, it’s their assumption right? I mean, I didn’t—technically—lie.

I do this sort of thing so often, it’s not even funny. I never say no to people. I never lie. I rarely say anything to anyone that they aren’t willing to hear. Yet I always end up doing exactly what I want, when I want, and rarely what they assumed I would. (My mom was probably the first to catch on, but even she couldn’t do anything about it. Normal conversation at home, since the time I could speak—”Clean your room H”. “Sure thing ma”. (Note I didn’t say when.))

I always get away on technicalities. I used to think that’s smart. A few-failed-relationships later, I realize women, and people in general, don’t want cute equivocation, they want the truth.

Except that they’re comedy shows and an album instead.

But first. It took me a really long time (50+ hours) and I only finished about 84% of the content (the game actually keeps an internal log of what fraction of the game world you’ve truly explored), but I finally finished Metroid Prime. It was awesome overall, though the ending was a little disappointing.

<SPOILER>

The story starts with famed interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran having to go to a planet and destroy an evil creature. Sure enough, the end of the game is when she destroys said creature. The sad part is, there is no glorious ending, she “just leaves” the planet, in a totally professional fashion.

I wanted more of a melodramatic and story-filled ending. Not the equivalent of a 1930s “GAME OVER” screen.

</SPOILER>

Anyway, finishing the game gave me the time time to check out other forms of entertainment, and here are my reviews:

1. “It’s always sunny in Philadelphia”, on FX: I like it. I really do. The cast is primarily composed of the creators and writers, so they don’t look as awesome as regular casts, but I laugh. A lot.

2. “Starved”, on FX: I hate it. I really do. This show is always paired up with the previous one, because it too features its creators in starring roles and is on FX. But it is so… I don’t know the word, probably pathetic. Firstly, it makes fun anorexics, bulimics, anorexic-chocaholics, sexaholics, obese-food-addicts, … . I have no problem with this sort of picking-on-people-with-genuine-issues grade of humour… if it is done right. This show just degrades quickly to cheap gimmicks and some somewhat-serious undertones, which just sickens me. Please don’t watch it, and FX, please cancel it.

OK, losing someone you really love to an eating disorder probably has something to do with it too. Anyway, knowing FX and Fox are so related, they’ll probably cancel the funny show and leave the crappy one running.

3. “Mind of Mencia”, on Comedy Central: I love it. Just as “Starved” tries (and fails) making fun of certain classes of people, Mencia picks on certain (racially decided) classes of people, and does it well. It makes me laugh. Poking fun at hispanics is more of an icing.

4. “Too late with Adam Corolla”, on Comedy Central: I reeeeally hate this show. Adam wasn’t funny in the “Man Show”, and he isn’t funny now. Joke after joke continue to bomb (not a peep even from the studio audience, EVEN WITH THIER “APPLAUD NOW” PLACARDS). At least the jiggling women in the “Man Show” distracted most from noticing the lack of humour.

5. “X&Y”, Cold Play: Everyone who’s anyone, including me, loves to denigrate their music using words like “But Chris is whiny” or “It’s a little gay”. But this album is actually quite alright. Actually, just like all the others, the generally-overhyped-album does have one stellar song that makes the 12 dollars spent worthwhile. For me, it’s “Fix You”. That song is just so awesome, Cold Play is forgiven for its otherwise not-rough-enough, not-rockstary-enough image.

If you’re curious, the other two songs from their previous albums that did the same thing were “High Speed” and “Amsterdam”.

God they’re lucky.

I normally resort to penile and other technically-lewd means when I’m unable to elicit laughs in other ways. It is a weakness I will overcome…

another day.

I was reading on the BBC about how Durex plans on coming up with a line of extra-large condoms, you know, for all those well endowed South African men.

From the article “This could help condoms become cool,” he said. “Men will buy them to boost their ego.”

Silly people, size doesn’t matter…

if you’re a lesbian.

In response to an earlier comment. Because you might as well reuse what you type.

Let me start by saying the last post was an exaggeration based off of facts I made up. (As I always do, and will proceed to do in the following. It’s more fun that way.) The only opinion (not different from fact, for me, as explained above) I’m trying to put across is that people here, in large proportions, clearly don’t care about anything that happens outside their little bubble. As a result, they lack a clear understanding of most issues.

This is pretty much everybody, I don’t mean some hicks in some small town. I will be having a conversation with a seemingly normal person, and suddenly she’ll refer to communist+dictatorships in the same sentence, for example. As in refer to them believing they are one and the same thing. Even after much persuasion, it is hard to explain one is a kind of economy and the other is a form of governance, they don’t imply each other and they aren’t “inherently evil”. What does the average person know? They know east Europe, and that they were “enemies” and most of them were “commie dictatorships”. This, by the way, is an example of someone who I think has an above average world view.

The root problem? They don’t know because they don’t care, or sometimes even acknowledge the presence of a world outside theirs. What am I basing that on? Pretty much everything I see. It’d be impossible to enumerate them all, so I’ll pick few very different situations:

»News: Earthquake in, say, Somalia. Tens of thousands dead. You know what shows up on the news? “Local newscaster to have third baby”. And, as an after thought, they will (probably) casually mention other horrific events in different parts of the world, as the 43^rd item on the list.

»Sport: People in this country play games no one else in any other part of the world cares about, have a local set of leagues, have a “champion”, and go about referring to them as “world champions”. Don’t they understand there is a difference between this country and the world?

»REALITY TV: Even picking a more intelligent show (carefully hand picked—out of context—for effect) like the “Amazing Race”, you have characters who end up in foreign lands and scream at the locals for not understanding English! Sure it’s not representative of everybody, it’s just three or four people. But even one person is one person too many.

In the end, that’s all I am trying to say. I always tack on the “please be good to geeks”, because I am one (and I can correlate anything to people ogling over people other than geeks). Therefore I tried to tie it in by saying, if “you people” took as much time (doing something useful) as you do obsessing over what is happening between beautiful people (say Brad and Jen), the world will be a better place.

Unrelated site update: After years (literally) of sitting in some corner of bits of paper, I’ve uploaded some testimonials.

Judging by the kinds of topics I frequently bring up, one would hastily tend to assume I am this callous shallow person without a modicum of regard for anything truly deep—and you wouldn’t be very far off the mark. But sporadically, I do ponder over non-self-centered substantive issues, and I do form strong opinions on them.

Today just happens to be one of those days. And you, my lovelies, happen to be the lucky audience.

I’ve been in this country, now, for exactly three years. This country, which abundantly touts itself the land of opportunity, the home of the free, the blessed land of milk and bee regurgitated nectar… you know. In these three years, I’ve had ample opportunity to carefully observe these people, their culture, and society as a whole in an attempt to answer everyone’s favourite question—what’s the deal with this country?

The full blown answer to that question is incredibly verbose and tedious, so I’ll highlight the two fundamental problems which are, not surprisingly, inherently connected. For one, society as a whole is incredibly inward looking. And the second, being smart is not deemed cool. That’s it. I’ve ingeniously distilled all of society’s woes down to derivatives of these two, which in turn share a common root.

To delve a bit into the details, I’ll briefly get into each of these issues, starting with the second one because it is easier to understand, even if I can’t condone it—Being smart is not cool, while being dumb is perfectly acceptable. For example, the average parent here would rather their kid hit a home run in a little league game than get an A in a math test. It gets worse. Hitting the home run and failing the test is great, while not hitting the home run (a failure in sport) and topping the class makes you a geek—uncool. I am not saying being good at sports is bad, just that it needs to be instilled in kids that being well(-enough) read and knowledgeable about things going on is ALSO cool, or at least positive.

Somewhat related to this is our first problem—society as a whole is terribly inward looking—as a direct consequence of ignorance, because knowing stuff is uncool. For the most part, the average person doesn’t know or care about anything outside the confines of their daily existence. You might say this is normal and expected. It is, IF all you do is go about living your life in that little confine. That is in no way the way this country goes about its business. As in it is NOT OK if the average person (and the ones they elect to make major decisions) is retarded like so, and the country goes into war (as an example) and what not trying to impose its whim on nations whose culture it doesn’t bother to understand.

So, in effect, rather than care to understand why people in regions of the world hate them, they proceed to (as they always tend to do) declare these people “hate them for no apparent reason”, or better yet “hate their free way of life”.

I have news for you. No one hates your “freedom”. They hate you. They hate you for effecting arbitrary decisions like the setting up of Israel by displacing people from their existing homes in Palestine.

I don’t have a problem with absolute, indiscriminate (ab)use of power in an attempt to impose one’s views on the rest of the community. If the person doing the imposing is intelligent, it is in everyone’s (the common stupid man) interest to follow orders for a global good. What is NOT OK is attempt to impose views, not realize you’re doing it, have people hate you, not realize you’re causing the hate, and then proceed to follow through with other similar policies and wonder why people hate you so much.

That’s just retarded. Read up on some history or something. Then go out and do whatever it is you do with full and extreme force. Again, I have no problem with extreme violence or anything, as long as the violent party is intelligent about it, and know what it is doing, and why.

So the next time you’re about to exclaim “Just what is the fucking deal with this country?”, calm down, and cheerfully mutter (like you mean it) “Geeks are so sexy”. You know you’ve done your good deed for the day as the kiddies proceed to stay informed in an attempt to impress you. The operative words being “stay” and “informed”.

Good job.

Since I’m having difficulty coming up with topics of conversation—where by “conversation” I mean a scheme where I talk and you listen—I decided to revert to old faithful staples.

I begin with a question. Not a rhetorical question, a serious one. Do women intentionally over-sway their hips when they walk? Or is it one of those natural nature-clearly-prefers-women and loves-to-give-them-trance-inducing-power-over-men stunts I see so often?

If you got that one, here’s another. It’s about pee, so you probably shouldn’t be reading this if you don’t want to. Is it so wrong that some males just prefer peeing sitting down? Or is this just another one of those situations where you can’t win? You sit down, you get laughed at. You stand, you aren’t accurate enough, you end up getting it where you didn’t plan to, and you and you get mocked again. Just great.

What? Put off by questions that don’t follow, what you declare, “appropriate decorum”? Fine. Here are conversation excerpts from the past few weeks, especially picked because I never in my life thought I’d hear them.

“I really need to go. Got to shave my legs. It’s been so long, it’s not even stubbly anymore, it’s getting soft”.

“Anyone who’s even contemplating combing over should shave their heads. Women love shaved heads.”

“That last bus driver was a great shag”.

“Hey, is that a white hair I see on your head? You want me to pluck it for you?”

“Doing the worm reeeally hurt. The last time I tried it, it went well. But I was 9, and hadn’t hit puberty yet.”