Category: General

I’ve not been able to write too much recently. I have at least 4 unfinished posts which ended up stranded cause they were insanely boring (and pointless) even though they seemed like great ideas when I started. So I’ll stick to life news, since boring as it may be, the primary objective of this place is to chronicle my existence.

I’m heading to Boston Monday for the week, for another talk. And I think I might be there this summer too – it’s like my life is not complete and will not move on if I don’t spend a week a year in this place. But it’s awesome, so all’s well.

I am not taking the EOS 20D because I don’t trust myself yet to not screw up when something pretty worth taking comes along. Plus, it’s heavy and after half a day of walking around town with it, my arms hurt like as I’ve stressed myself working out. I mean, how I think they might hurt if I stressed myself working out, if I ever tried.

For the first couple of days, I’d been keeping myself busy with other things and didn’t make time to try out the new camera. I didn’t make the time to, or … I didn’t want to? I don’t know, I’d been overly ambivalent about the whole denting my life savings exercise, but all that changed late last evening. After 83 test shots at home and familiarizing myself with some settings, I stepped out into the darkness and biting cold to take a bunch of pictures. I am pleased to report I am very impressed.

Here’s one of them. There was no noise, no blur, no struggling to auto-focus, no chromatic aberration, no spherical aberration, no dead pixels, no nonsense. Just a clear capture of exactly what I saw. All I had to do before uploading it to delineate was scaling. There was no need for the usual subtle tweaking of any sort.

Here’s a crop of the unscaled image for those curious. And for those who aren’t as well.

Sometime early afternoon, yesterday.

arbitrary person: Dude, it is going to snow soon.
me: Quiet down foo, it is over 50 degrees (in the devil’s own unit) outside. It isn’t going to snow.
ap: But dude, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. You’ve gotta have “first snow” by Thanksgiving.
me: STFU.

Sometime late afternoon, when me steps out and into a shiny white powdery coat of snow.

me: Ayee! God damn it.

^*YACE — Yet Another Conversation Excerpt

– Site 1
– Site 2
– Site 3

I had at least 3 more, but I’ve forgotten them. Which is why I’ve now linked to these two… before I forget. People who attribute original sources rock.

This is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on slashdot in ages. It’s a picture of how a rock might be rendered in three modern game engines, along with the real rock, for comparison.

And have felt, touched, and started using:
– this camera body
– with this lens
– storing images on this card.

First reactions? It’s insanely heavy, and I still feel poor.

Recently, I’ve been playing quite a bit of Resident Evil. I mean, I’ve been playing it so much that you could say I am quite hooked on it. Rather than give my standard-styled opinion on things, this time I’m going to take a sort of comparative approach. So here it is, Capcom’s Resident Evil for the GameCube (RE) as seen from the eyes of one who holds Lucas Art’s Grim Fandango for the PC (GF) as the gold standard, even across genres.

– RE’s genre is technically “survival horror”, while GF is a “traditional adventure” game. But they’re actually closer than their genres might indicate.
– There is much less talk in RE. In fact, there is almost no talk at all (discounting the grunts and moans of the zombie folk). It’s all text you need to read when you’re out exploring.
– There is absolutely no real music to speak of in RE. GF had extremely immersive tracks that fit the scene’s mood perfectly.
– RE’s puzzles are, in general, infinitely easier. Plus you have your trusty map that tells you whether you’ve finished everything important in a region, so that helps. And oh, if something moves, push it. It is bound to solve something.
– As far as I remember, only one (annoying) puzzle in GF involved timing. RE has more such, but only because you might get mauled while attempting to do something.
– RE has very little by way of range of characters. You have a few human males and females, that’s it. Oh, and the zombies and other monsters.
– The control scheme in RE is the most stiff, antiquated and retarded I’ve ever used in a long time. Basically your character can do a standard up-down-left-right, but in some sort of super stiff and clunky way. GF’s controls were nothing to write home about (if played with a joystick), but RE is just poor. After being spoiled by z-targeting in action-adventure games like Zelda, being unable to control the camera is downright lame. But I guess it’s a necessity given most things are pre-rendered for a given camera position and orientation. Which naturally leads to the next point.
– RE is graphically very pleasing (and so was GF at its time). I am quite impressed by the lighting, shadowing and general effects in RE. It is also very scary once you really get into it. But then again, while GF was spread across a variety of rich (, colourful and pretty) lands and times, RE is pretty much all in one mansion, over a night. Also, it would have been nicer if the characters in RE turned their heads and focussed on the interesting things in a room, rather than make the items shine, which seems out of context, atmosphere wise.
– You can die rather easily in RE. In GF, you can’t die. (Which is good since you’re actually “dead” before the start of the game.)
– More importantly, you don’t particularly care if a character in RE dies. Sure, she’s kinda pretty, but it’s no big deal when she gets mauled by a zombie and blood flies everywhere. GF on the other hand, though I knew nothing could go wrong, I almost cried when I thought Glottis was going to die.
– Trying to model reality closer, there is a limit to the number of things Jill can carry in RE. Manny Calavera on the other hand could carry infinite things in his suit. (Which sucked later on because you couldn’t do the “attempting to use all items in all possible locations” and hope to solve anything.)
– GF is quite linear whereas RE seems to have quite a few story branches. Each time I start from a restarted point, things sort of head in different directions. Which means, it isn’t as simple as remembering where a zombie is, dying, coming back there and taking him out with ease in the next life, like in say, doom.

All in all, RE is still a great game and loads of fun, in a freak-you-out-scary way at points. It’s just when it is compared to an absolutely stupendous experience, like GF, are its flaws apparent.

More succinct ratings will be available on the GameCube Page.

You come across a variety of different sorts of people everyday. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just, well, they’re all substantially different.

Some people you meet, you’re definitely “cooler than”, so you inherently know you can do better. In a “there is no way you could possibly want to be with them forever” sort of way. And then there’s the other half of people, who’re clearly waay out of your league. Intelligence, grace, talent, finesse, … however you choose to judge these things. In the sense that there is no way you “could possibly be with them forever”. (The astute will probably realise all I am really doing is noting that they now know they’re cooler than you and wouldn’t want you, and suitably paraphrasing.)

That covers just about everyone. Now however close they might seem, no two people are exactly equal. By which I am trying to say you can find the most subtle (and probably trivial) thing and throw them in one of the two preceding categories. And now, those two categories really do cover everybody.

And everybody conveniently happens to be a large set that also, not surprisingly, contains the set of all women.

Which now means you’ve essentially proved there is an extremely good chance you’re ending up all alone, or not-alone and unsatisfied (like all those hot underpleasured Ukranian housewives who mail me often).

And that’s something to think about.

Or not, if you don’t like the idea of giving up hope on concepts like “eventual perpetual happiness”.

– Bearer of not-entirely-pleasant news

(Since everyone loves them.)

me: and what do you think you’re doing?
she: oh, nothing. i’m just talking to him.
she: well, ok, not really just talking.
she: it’s not like he’s married or anything.
me: well actually, he sorta is. which is why i asked you what ..
she: it’s not fair! he doesn’t have a ring on.
me: ah, sit down naive child. there is much you need to learn about cultures other than your own.

just spent 2.5 grand on “impulsive” camera related purchases. Guess who doesn’t feel all that good about it.

And I thought I could buy excitement. I should be excited but instead I am all guilty. I am sure things will change when I really learn to use it and so on, but for now I just needed to tell people I did it.

So I feel they approve of my spending habits or something. I don’t need it, yet I do.

No one will wonder or particularly care about this subtle change, but I just made it so that from actuality you can get to the static portions of the site, but from the static portions (like photos) you can’t wander into actuality.

This change was effected because there are times when I’d like to show off photos or delineate but I haven’t for reasons like so: You link someone to delineate.wahgnube.org, out of curiosity, they wander onto wahgnube.org. And then BAM! actuality, it’s right there. And that would be very bad.

Like I started off saying, you won’t even notice this nor would you care. So move along, there is nothing to see here.

Update: On another unrelated and uninteresting (to you) note, I was peeking through some webserver logs and here’s a site I found linking to one of mine, a whole lot.

ACT I – Ensures his place in hell

A geek was at a government office earlier today wading through piles of bureaucratic nonsense to achieve one of those simple tasks (the details of which are obscured citing privacy concerns) one achieves at a government office. Anyway, a couple of hours into his wait, he sees one of the women (yes, whom some might find attractive) waaay ahead of him in queue finally get her turn and get all excited. She gleefully runs to the counter and “finishes” whatever it is she came to do in a little while (by their standards anyway) and is about to leave, when the lady goes “25 dollars please” (or whatever it took to get her task done).

She begins to get noticeably flustered, turns all red and starts apologizing. It was soon apparent that she wasn’t prepared with the money. Of course, the geek notices all this and plans to help the sweet woman in distress. He jumps out of the queue, makes his way toward her all determined-like to be of assistance. On his way there, he happens to hear her getting off the phone and say something like, “I don’t know what’s keeping him, my boyfriend should have been here by now”.

No, he didn’t show up anytime soon, nor does the geek think he even did. But that didn’t stop the geek from turning around, voluntarily letting her burn and getting back to his spot in the queue.

The geek then called Satan and confirmed his suite in hell.

ACT II – Exhibits inability to deal with people in real life

(Much time has elapsed since the previous ugly incident.)

It is finally the geek’s turn and now he runs up all excited-like to the lady at the counter. The conversation that ensued went roughly like so:

Lady: “Sir, I am having difficulty reading your form. How tall are you?”
Geek: “Oh, between 6’1″ and 6’2″, I think, like I’ve indicated on the form dear”.
Lady: “No sir, you can only be 6’1″ or 6’2″, nothing in between”.

And now the geek snaps. After eons of waiting have worn him down, his threshold for incompetence and/or stupidity has been lowered to extremely low values. He then launches into a discussion of continuous and discrete values, real numbers, infinitely dense sets, and countable/uncountable infinities (just for the heck of it).

The geek nearly gets thrown out of said government office. Needless to say, he really needs a lot of work on his people skills.

Yesterday:

Today:

More spam is a good thing^TM. That will be all.

I had imagined today’s post to be pleasantly different. It was supposed to be amusing, and induce an ‘awww’ at the same time. But since I couldn’t think of anything of the sort, you will have to live with some poor quality scans of extremely old pictures.

I saw Stage Beauty, and it was funny, sweet, and involves gender bending! Which reminded me of aforementioned poor quality scans of old pictures. Here is a picture of my then-cross-dressing brother (no, not sister, brother) when he was a few years old.

And yes, he (no, not she) was a normal kid at most times.

So probably, feeling shafted for being born a male is a genetically inherited trait. And laugh, it’s supposed to be funny.

– It turns out that the hole in my ear, though not visible, could be felt. After a lot of general probing in the area, some (moderately painful) poking around, and no blood spillage later, I’ve got my earring on again, with help. Apparently, women magically know this sort of thing, and men are disadvantaged so in the real world.

– It’s vaguely interesting (and entertaining) talking to people when they aren’t entirely sober. For instance, potentially useful information like who’s a lesbian and who isn’t can be gleaned without trying. What would one do with such info? I don’t quite know for sure, but the words “narrowing the field” come to mind.

– Seriously now, how is one supposed to honestly answer questions like – “What’d your parents think of you dating someone from a different culture?”? I mean, I have no problems with answering the question. It’s just, at that moment I am reading into what is actually being asked. What would you think is really going on when a woman from a different part of the world asks you how your parents would take it if you were dating a woman from a different part of the world? Then again, she could just be genuinely curious.

– And this is annoying, please stop. One more time someone tells me “Hey, that Indian chick is cute, you ought to …”, I am going to throw something at them. Listen to me carefully, I am only going to say this once. Just because someone is of Indian origin and of opposite sex doesn’t mean I have to like her. (Actually, I ought to have inserted something more strongly worded there, for effect. But you get the idea, back off.)