Category: General

Like I’ve been mentioning at points, I have a bunch of ideas toward a new comic series. Unfortunately, I can’t draw. I thought I could fix it by reading a little as to how the real artists and animators do it, and it turns out some of them first form a clear reference sample of all their characters in various situations (poses, emotions), and them use those as standards, as needed in the story.

Easy enough, one might naively assume. I decided to attempt an as-yet-unnamed character based on Amy in (my favourite, by far) Scary Go Round. Here is our “Amy” look-alike giving directions.

After a bunch of attempts, it is clear. I cannot draw. Notice however, strict adherence to “rules”, like the rule of thirds. The head, the torso and the legs are each a third of the total height of the character.

I am my complete lack of surprise.

(This is a guest opinion piece. Whose? It doesn’t matter. I may or may not agree with the words that follow. If you find them offensive, you have no concrete reason to hate me, because I probably didn’t agree with anything said. All occurences of “I” below are used by our mysterious guest commentator, they don’t mean me.)

It was unbelievably cold. It was late, and I still had a hard night’s work ahead of me. I decided to tank up on food and drink to fuel me through the challenges ahead^*. It was then that I saw it, a lone poorly published news paper. Curious, I peek into it and read a most intriguing article about standardised testing, and coloured people. The only thing that was common between my beliefs and the article, was that tests were hate-worthy.

It began pleasantly enough, building a case as to why standardised tests (and I extrapolated that to tests in general), are evil. How they fail to truly measure the intellectual capacity of the testee (I don’t really know if that’s a word, but that hasn’t stopped me from using such before). It then branched off into a slight history lesson dealing with the origin of tests as a measure of intelligence. All was fine, until that point, where the author emphatically exclaimed all tests were formulated by people forward (rich, white) in society, and how the tests were biased to suit their ends as a result. He then proceeded to explain how today’s tests, such as the SATs have been derived in some form or the other from these original tests, hence “inherently” biased. In order to support his claims, he spouts statistics pertaining to how well forward (rich, white) people do in comparison to backward (poor, black) people — how most results always seem to claim (say) 89% of the blacks are morons. He went further establishing a correlation between income and scores, as in quantitatively stating how an increase in parental income of so much results in so many more points on such and such test.

Then, by his insane logic, all one needs to do to ace any test, ever, is to be born/adopted by billionaires (who’re white, of course). Anyway, moving along because things don’t stop there, there is more.

There is a class of people, called the somethings (I should know the word, but it’s late, and I’m tired to look it up) who honestly believe some classes people are “inherently better” than other classes. Furthermore, they will go to extreme lengths, like trying to exterminate all the “weaker sections” to rid the world of all their evils — stupidity, poverty, forced prostitution … . Think Hitler. Now, according to our author friend, all this testing business is some sort of giant conspiracy involving people of this sort to establish the social hierarchy they desire — as biased tests imply poor scores for the black people, poor scores imply a lack of earning potential, lack of earning implies poverty, and poverty, by definition, leads to poor test scores repeating the vicious cycle.

Enough, that’s about all I can take.

You know why tests are bad? They’re bad because you cannot test “how much or little a kid learnt” over months and years in something like a couple of hours. And even given more time, you definitely cannot really test them over a broad enough spectrum to honestly evaluate how much they know. They’re bad because when you’re young, you should be out playing and exercising your creativity and curiosity, not cramming for some algebra test. They’re bad because they have so much riding on their outcome, that some kids cannot take the pressure (one no kid should ever be subject to in the first place) and end up cracking. They are bad because they attempt to force kids to learn in a very unnatural way. Kids are inherently curious, infinitely creative and naturally absorb anything thrown their way. The only inhibitor here is you forcing things down their throats threatening consequences of a bad test score.

Tests are not bad because some sets of people do them worse than others. It’s the same test. It is just as hard for everyone. If one set constantly does worse than the others, there is only one explanation — They are inferior, intellectually.

I will not go as far as to say, and therefore do not deserve to exist.

I’m too lazy to bag my own groceries.

^*Instead, of course, I ended up writing most of this piece.

Filtering out the noise, so you don’t have to.^TM

2004 has been gone for about two weeks now, and rather than bitch about the things I absolutely hated last year (which is arguably a lot more fun, but it does involve a lot of work to get right), I’m going to be a little different and list things which I actually enjoyed tremendously. They aren’t all from 2004, but that was when I got to experience them.

If you’ve experienced them earlier and find what I say redundant or boring, I’ll refund the amount you paid me to write this piece. And in the following, I use the word “best” loosely.

Best Talk — Free Culture — Lawrence Lessig, OSCON 2002

It’s a fabulous talk. Apparently he’s given many more like so, but this is the only one I’ve had the pleasure of hearing. I’ve read a book of his by the same name. (It was sent to me for free by the FSF out of the kindness of their hearts.) I hope that one day I can give a talk like this. The topic doesn’t matter, whether the audience agrees with me or not doesn’t matter — I’d just like to match up to the delivery style.

You should probably listen to it, not because of how cool it sounds, but because the topic is insanely pertinent to you, whether you know it or not.

Best Photo Gallery — India 2004 – Another try — Maciek Da

This person has other fantastic galleries as well, but this one almost brought me to tears. I cannot believe my country could be seen in such a beautiful light. Its existence and consequent inspiration is one of the primary reasons I’ve upgraded my photography hardware, trying to get it to be suited to portrait photography. More importantly, upgrade myself to be more people friendly. I know I can’t come close, ever. But it will be a fun journey trying to get there.

Best Article — How Long Is Your Digital Trail? — Regina Lynn

In this day and age, it is easy to get disconnected when you don’t want to, and so hard to disconnect when you need to. This article is requisite reading for anyone of my (our?) generation.

That’s all I need to say about it.

Best TV Show — Coupling — BBC

If you have access to an untainted BBC channel, or a store that sells DVDs, this is something that you shouldn’t miss. From characters brilliantly sampling all extremes of the human psyche, to hilariously crafted (non-punchline-oriented) dialogue, to fun insight into gender differences, to the best use of “not-necessarily-linear-or-single-or-forward-time-based” story progression (you have to see it to know what I mean) … to so much more, this show has the finest bits of just about everything.

Plus, I must admit it is a pleasure to hear “normal” (Commonwealth) English for a change.

Best Movie — I Heart Huckabees

An oddball story, with a weird feel, with curiously different characters, with a fun soundtrack and a warm fuzzy ending.

Makes you laugh. Makes you ponder. Makes you laugh some more. What more could you ask for?

Best Music — Mozart: Concertos for Flute and Orchestra

I know I’m a little (OK, a lot) late on this one, but MY GOODNESS. I cannot put down in words how I feel about these, but such pieces [~9.24 MB, MP3] “speak” for themselves, almost literally.

Best Book — On the Shoulders of Giants — Edited by Stephen Hawking

When I was a few-year-old child, I remember telling my mom how wrong a time I was born at. I was bitching about how everything that could be invented or known, already was, making my task near impossible. My task being “further relevant contribution” to the intellectual community.

This book contains translations of some of the greatest works of all time in the field of physics, and carefully weaves connections between them articulating how later scientists use the insight gathered by their predecessors and extreme intuition to put forward even more brilliant theories explaining phenomena around us.

I have to admit there is quite a bit in the details I don’t have the ability to read yet. But mark my words, a few more classes in “Tensor analysis on manifolds” and I will be at the point I always wanted to be. To be able to understand, and if lucky, extend on past their glorious work.

Best Game — The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker — Nintendo

What more can I say about this game? I would say it is worth it to buy a GameCube to play just this one game. I’ve, in time started building a small game collection, but this is one game I can never get tired of.

The universe they’ve built inside is extremely huge. I’ve “passed it”, what, two times now, and still I keep playing it to go out and explore. And still find new hidden gems! The story is brilliant, the characters are cute and you get “into them” easily, the musical score is stellar, the capability to just run around and find things is almost exhaustingly spectacular. It is probably one of the best games I’ve ever played, across platforms, rivalling other greats such as Grim Fandango.

I beg to differ; I am a sociophobe. I don’t hate social events or gatherings or people in general, I FEAR them. I fear awkward social situations, I fear groups of people I don’t know, I fear… pretty much everything that’s pertinent to having a life.

I vividly remember this one incident. I was 4, and this good friend of mine (yes, the one who’s GETTING MARRIED at TWENTY-THREE) had a birthday party to attend later during a day I was at her place, playing. So, of course, I was invited to go along. Note here, a party, with a bunch of people I don’t know. (Friends’ friends do NOT count as people you know.) So I freak out, and invent a clever lie—amounting to something like “Oh, but I’ve gotta go, my mom is waiting outside to pick me up”. I then skip out, walk an insane distance (we didn’t live close at all, and it is not normal (and quite unsafe) for a few year old to tread the journey, let alone unsupervised) and reach home. There, I conveniently invent another lie about how her mom dropped me off, and had to rush off somewhere for an appointment so couldn’t come in.

Perfect, I was a born evil genius.

Of course, there was quite a bit of confusion later, and I was given a stern talking-to, when people found out what I’d done. But it was worth it, I avoided the new crowd; I was safe.

Yes, I’d rather be hit by a truck while hobbling across a street than meeting a bunch of kids and trying to have a good time.

Fast forward twenty years into the future.

Contrary to popular belief, I get invited to random parties all the time. Some arbitrary person’s friend’s roommate’s sister’s something, sure, why not invite the one guy whose ONLY FEAR IS BEING INVITED? Being older, the fear is just the same, and unmitigated. But my methods of evasion have gotten more and more sophisticated with time.

Being the budding psychologist that I am, once in a (long) while, I do beat the fear (when the circumstances are a little more ideal) and go ahead with whatever it is someone’s planned and thought of inviting me for. Why? Because I don’t want them to stop inviting me, dimwit—I just fear going. I do this just enough to keep my name on whatever guest lists, but still fear it mortally.

Like recently, today evening actually, there was this thing that basically involved “a great drunkening”. This eventually boils down to random folk, quite a bit of alcohol, and me getting into insulin shock because I hate bitter things, and I down more Sprite or whatever than my body can handle.

Now that I’ve grown in sophistication, I’ve stopped explaining to people I can’t make it because:
a. I am very uncomfortable around them, and fear them
b. The concept of getting drunk does nothing for me
c. and so on.

So my new found excuse is hinting something along the lines of “I’m a recovering alcoholic, please don’t tempt me”. I don’t actually say it, or use the term “AA,” but I weave around that with words. They tack on a few assumptions and voila. This way, I am not bugged to explain what my beef with them or alcohol is, and I pick up sympathy points from the most arbitrary people.

You’d be amazed how nice people who’re sorry for you can be.

Point being, I’m sure as hell am not antisocial. I’m a sociophobe.

Get your terms straight.

Today, I got my hair cut. And this time, it was “for real”. Here it is, err was. I’ve never plaited my hair before, but the hair-dresser lady thought it would be hilarious if it was before she cut it. I concurred.

If you’re reading this, please inform anyone else who knows me and might be interested. I’d rather not give them a rude shock personally when we meet.

Enough said.

During this recent break, you know the one we had for winter, I saw a ton of movies. As usual, I enjoyed making fun of most of them. A lot of people relate pictures I take with movies. For instance, when people see this one, their first reaction is “Oooh, just like in Signs“.

I hadn’t seen Signs before, so my only response would be, “I guess”. But that recently changed.

Amongst the many movies I caught up on this holiday season, Signs was one of them. Now there are one class of people who go “Oh, it’s so cool. Everything in the movie had meaning. The girl and her issue with water. The boy and his asthma. The baseball batter and his quitting/being kicked from the team. …”

I am not one of those people. All I have to say is this.

“Why would an alien race whose bodies disintegrate on contact with water want (or try) to take over a planet WHICH IS OVER SEVENTY PERCENT COVERED IN WATER? WHAT IF IT, oh, I don’t know, RAINED?”

Because they’re retarded, that’s why.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere. And rationale behind stuff I wrote elsewhere. Semi-interesting reads for people interested in my extremely slowly growing photography skills. Speaking of photography, a couple of new people are looking into using delineate’s code/style for their site.

The more the merrier.

I have exhausted my quota of writing for the day I am afraid.

Not to be ignorantly insensitive about the N. Korean scheme of doing things, but hey, that’s what I am going to be.

Guess where yours truly would probably put to death in some horrible fashion?

It recently dawned on me that I am not a kid anymore. Bluntly put, I’m rather old, and have been around a while. With minimal deductive logic, I realised this meant my parents have been together for an even longer time. November 11^th? 21^st? (something like that — a date I should know, but don’t) last year was special for my parents, considering they’d officially put up with each other for 25 years and all.

I figured they needed some sort of upto-now lifetime achievement award. In my small way, I mean.

So, a while earlier (last January to be exact), I started writing them this letter. It was just me articulating how much they meant to me, and my plans relating to a small token of appreciation I’d prepared marking the occasion. Yes, I wrote — as in using a pencil and paper. As I’d planned, I finished it before I travelled home-home for the summer and gave it to them in person when I was in Madras (June-July, or something).

The plan outlined, as a 25^th anniversary gift, shipping them off to any part of the world of their choice, for as long as they wanted to be there and me footing all expenses.

Needless to say, when I first gave the letter to them proposing the idea, they were all “No way!”, and then that became “We’re so proud (tear, tear), but we can’t take this from you”, which later morphed to “OK, we have these tiny plans” (to do what I don’t remember, except they were tiny), and so on … . Of course, I reject all minor plans holding out for them to crack and come up with something better, after battling all the initial guilt.

By now it’s almost November, the anniversary is looming sometime thereabout and nothing’s happened, so I get a bit impatient. I mean, they’ve seen different places and lived in different places, and it was hard for me to get a handle on what new experience it is they were really interested in having. After some pushing, it’s made clear to me that they’d always wanted to take a cruise down the Nile.

Cool, OK, so Egypt it is. Tataaa. (I can be impatient, yes.)

But then there were a ton of life things… like working people can’t just arbitrarily pack up and leave because their son thinks it’s a good idea, so things were delayed for another couple of months.

So, finally, in a couple of days, my parents are being shipped off to some region of Egypt, and have a ton of plans as to what it is they plan to see and do (snorkeling?) there, for a week and a half or so. They then continue on to other places to meet old friends (something I wouldn’t do, but amn’t complaining that they are) for a while. Oh, and the thing at some point includes 4-5 days on a cruise down the Nile. What they wanted.

Now they’re all in tears all proudlike and I guess, love me.

This, ladies and gents, is how one buys love.

Bookmark, read, learn, and refrain from frequent abuse.

I’ve been extremely … I don’t know the word. It’s like, my mind can’t keep its focus on a given topic or task for more than a minute or so at a time. (Which is obviously why there aren’t any real posts. I take my time to come up with something coherent. For instance, halfway through typing that sentence, I broke, and typed part of a later paragraph.) It is a weird sort of a combination of disturbed and distracted. Even when I’m “sleeping”. I don’t really dream usually, and sleep extremely soundly. But for a few weeks now, I’ve been sleeping a lot (as in timewise) but not really feeling too refreshed. Meaning, arbitrary tossing and turning. And the dreams, for the love of god, I’ve been having this extreme multi-level recursive dreams. You know, the weird ones in which you think you’ve woken up, but really just waking up from a dream within a dream? God they get old real fast.

So, to cut a long story short, since I am incapable of being funny or remotely interesting, I will plagiarise.

There is a good chance you’ve probably seen this before somewhere else. But here is a hilarious clip [~ 34 MB] from one of the September Late night with Conan O’ Brien shows. I insist you should watch if if your bandwidth allows you to.

There haven’t been updates recently because I’ve been doing stuff. My new years eve was spent at this marathon comedy session at a neighbouring comedy club. It was very good, but not awesome. I can’t laugh-laugh at non-relationship humour anymore. Coupling and Sex and the City have spoiled me silly.

I’ve been reading a lot. I can’t believe how much fun that’s been. My current reading list includes books on photography, classics like “Great Expectations”, and ridiculously advanced mechanics books that regard General Relativity style non-linear field theories in physics as “fairly elementary”. Believe it or not, I now actually feel like I’m getting close to entering the “Gates of Coolness”, where I am actually comfortable with my comprehension of things around me and my ability to express them succinctly.

I’ve also begun to see why I’m working on a “Doctor of Philosphy” and not “Uber master of this sub-subset of science”. A lot of things are beginning to make sense, and reading’s helping. Needless to say, I’ve thought of a cheeky title for the dissertation, as well as a humourous disclaimer, but I seriously doubt I’d get away with having them in there.

I am uninspired, but happy. Actually, I am inspired, just not in a way that I thought I wanted to be. Speaking of which, I’ve almost homed in on the primary trait that’d determine whether I’d love to spend the rest of my life with someone, or not. I can’t word it yet, but it’s now a crystalline concept.

And that feels good.

If you look carefully at the word resolution, it just means “resolve to do something”. No one ever said anything about that something being good. So, I plan to make 2005 the year of superficiality and self-centeredness. Without further ado, here are my resolutions for this new year.

– Since we’ve worked long and hard on our insides (and admittedly peaked), from now on we work on the outside. The deal will be to get trim and toned (whatever that means). There will be major hair related changes, head, face and body.

– Start learning a dance and pottery.

– Start/Join a band and/or get back to practicing/learning, in earnest, vocals/an instrument.

– Make recent investments on photography things worthwile. Actually read technical things and get better, rather than arbitrarily going out and taking pictures. Start shooting portraits of people. On a related note, fix up portion of studio to actually make it a studio. In other words, work on the “starving artist” image.

– Get done with classes and such so I’m a full fledged researcher sort with no real exam style deadlines, unless of course I go ahead with the masters in math as well.

– Work my way out of this creativity rut. In other words, finish at least one major creative project.
* at least one of four books,
* learn portrait photography (as mentioned above), meet hot wannabe model chick
* figure out how to realize the comic (whose pilot and first few slides are in my head and on drawing boards around the house),
* learn a form of animation (and I’m leaning toward stop-motion animation) and exploit it,
* frequent comedy clubs more, and not just as a patron.

– Needless to say, exploit all the above to boost my image, superficially.

– No donating a third of what I make. Because I am a person, and should have needs too. If not, I should fake them.

If you stay tuned, you will see how I fared with last years resolutions. Probably tomorrow, or something.

Since I don’t understand the concept of self restraint, or bankruptcy, I now own this.

I’m so glad this happened.

I was having some issues with her weight and general friendliness. I didn’t particularly peel through the rough exterior to get a peek at her sensitive insides. Though I prided myself at being able to ‘push all the right buttons’, she was a struggle from the get go. It always seemed like so much work to get the response I wanted, and even that seemed unnatural and forced.

I was, at points, beginning to question whether the initial attraction clouded the harsh reality, she just wasn’t right for me. But a most remarkable thing has happened over the past few days. We decided to use this time off to attempt to get closer. I just knew getting away for a long weekend and spending a lot of time together will turn things around. I got to hold her close in ways and do things I hadn’t imagined possible before. It felt perfect. I got to know so much more about her than I had over all the other time I’d spent with her.

I realise how into her I am. How much the ex doesn’t matter. How special it’s capable of being if the settings are right. I am quite certain she’s the one I want.

For now, anyway.

Did I say ‘her’ all along? I meant ‘it’, my new camera. The old one, though still insanely awesome in my heart, is dead. And so begins a new dawn.

Another day, another relationship.

(Yes, I am a geek. And I need a life.)

An earthquake of magnitude 8.9 on the Richter scale (read insane panic and horror) hit somewhere in the sea near north Indonesia. That would have been OK in itself, considering the lives of a few fishes aren’t the highest on my priority list right now, but it caused Tsunami waves crashing into parts of the continent. The current death toll is over 9000 people all over south Asia, over 2000 of that in India, and over 1600 of that in coastal Tamil Nadu (read home home).

From the BBC, in India,

“More than 2000 km of southern coast swamped by tidal waves, including states of Tamil Nadu — whose capital, Madras, was particularly badly hit … water came several kilometres inland.”

I am from Madras. I have family there, people living close to beaches.

“Early morning joggers along the beaches in Madras say huge columns of water surged towards the land without warning.”

I meditated at the beach every morning around sunrise for a good chunk of my life. And no, I don’t jog.

“A nuclear reactor in the state has been shut down after sea water entered an estate housing scientists.”

Yes, we’re semi-advanced, technically.

“Bodies of fishermen are said to be strewn on beaches along the 2000 km southern Indian coastline.”

I don’t know any fisher(wo)men personally.