1st January 2008

Happy New Year everybody.

I Wonder...

.....If there is a polite way of saying "My mistake, whore!"

Website

I found a beautiful website while scanning my daily feeds. Its the site for an upcoming videogame titled 'Edge of Twilight'. What makes this site great is the short loading time even though its built using flash. No unwanted mouse-over noises. Overall colour scheme is subdued and your attention is drawn to the type by blue luminescent broken and weathered egg like object at centre of the bottom third of the screen. My only gripe is the scroll bar, its too narrow to be easily located by the mouse pointer. When you drag the slider in the scroll bar, the text does not scroll smoothly.

The site gives a brief lowdown on what the gameplay and story is like. Some wonderful concept art is also uploaded. The main character Lex isn't all that appealing.

I've Had It!

In the words of late Hunter S. Thompson they/it must be 'fucked, broken and driven across the land'.
Gathering wind for plan B.

Where is The Love?

Chimps on Acid

Colour and/or its choice are subjective. Some people have an eye for colour harmonies. Some sadly don't. But there has been a disturbing trend that's been assaulting me over the past 10 years. If you are a synesthesiac and you could taste colours, you'd be left nauseous by the trend. Somehow our (Indian) movies go overboard in their use of colours. Any 'blockbuster' hindi 'movie' would have a song sequence that would make poke your eyes out. Am I colour phobic? colour conservative? Nope, I'm colour judicious.

Now this unsettling colour splashing is gaining momentum. Switch to any Malayalam TV channel, the hottest things are American Idol clones with the exception of focus on singing. The stage design and its colour scheme (if any) hang there like a bad trip frozen in time. Now to add some dynamism to the stage they use coloured lights that swirl around the stage. One does wonder if the light controls are manned by chimpanzees in perpetual states of epileptic fits. How does this setting help the show? The contestants come on stage wearing their best and the whole fucking effect is wrecked by bad lighting and a crystal garden of a stage.

What is more sinister is that people watching these shows are exposed to atrociously jarring colour schemes. Some of the gullible types will think that this is awesome because its on a popular TV show. Soon you have other channels cloning this crap. In a few years time you'll be forced to buy black & white TV sets.

The point of the stage is to provide a platform for the performer. A point of focus. A large stage doesn't do anything for a show that requires a 8x8 squarefeet. Coloured lighting is used to enhance the subject on stage, tempo etc. Thats all there is to it.

Chuck out the chimps in the art department(?), hire somebody with some kala-vaasana (sensibility) to do your stages. There are millions of them in Kerala, for art is embedded in the Keralite Haemoglobin.

Marx Brothers in 'I'll Say She Is'

All you need

The greatest movie you will ever see in your life time. Rent or pirate it. Watch it. Then fall on a knife and die like you should.
The movie is titled ' Young Frankenstein'.

Notice

Will be electronically unavailable for a couple of days. Shifting to a new appartment.

Masochist Exercise: Fountainhead

After giving things a lot of thought, I've realized that I've changed quite a bit as a person over the last 10 years. I'm definitely not the man I was 10 years ago. As an unprecedented act of masochism I'm going to re-read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. I had nothing but loads of bile & gripe juice the last(also the first)time I read it in 1997. I couldn't stand it when her character's wings were ripped off by her childishly cruel pen/mind. Another novel that had a pathetic character was Somerset Maugham's Razor's Edge. But Maugham's stuff was 20,000 leagues apart from the Rand's stuff.

The reason for re-reading Fountainhead, is to celebrate the completion of a 3D model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water Building (a.k.a. Kauffman's House). The architect loser in Fountainhead was said to be modelled after Wright. Wright was also an interesting character in real life. He was more of a wash-out architect, who towards the fag end of his life was responsible for some strikingly modern buildings. The only people who will disagree with the last sentence are the teachers of architecture and the guys at the Frank Lloyd Wright trust/ estate/ buiding conservatory. Art is subjective.

I'm eager to see the new things I rediscover this time, even though Fountainhead is a fucking tedious read.

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [Live]

Ryuichi Sakamoto composed & performed this moving theme song to the movie "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence". There is also a song sung by Sylvian set to this piece, its titled Forbidden Colours.

Brown Puris

Brown Puris (slightly over golden brown stage) remind me of cane toads.

Hair Raising Issues

Woke up accidentally about 3am today morning. I found that I enjoy life more when I'm alone and waking up in the wee hours of the morning while everyone is in bed, gives me an inexplicable burst of energy. Today I decided to apply it to work that lay yawning before me. But before work, I spent a couple of minutes in front of the mirror. Its official I have a couple of grey hairs. I also may be balding. I like my hair, its 7 inches long measured downward from the point where the back side of my head joins my neck. I'm ok with the balding and greying (I'm an animator and its a tedious life). However I'm not ok with both of them assaulting me at the same time.

From a genetic POV, I cannot predict whether I'd go totally bald or grey. My paternal grandfather was completely bald by 27. My father started balding and has mysteriously stopped. On my mother's side, the males had their hair intact but it just turned white in their middle-age. Where do I fall?

I think the only reasonable way out is to dreadlock my hair. Dreadlocks would essentially lock my hair in place. The dreadlocks will overwhelm any apparent balding effect. But this could take about 2-3 years for full effect if I dread it naturally. The artificial method of back-combing & waxing is out of question. Till then & later, I can scare away the children and adults around me. Maybe I should adopt the saffron sadhu look, so I don't scare off clients. I could walk into meetings with packets of Kalkandum and pass it around like prasaadam.

The Running Man

In the early 90's I was exposed to anime and some phenomenal stuff at that too. What attracted me to it was the attention to details. One could follow shadows into the furrows on a character's brow; split screen action shots and many other gimmicks. If you've seen the cartoon series Samurai Jack one can see each and everyone of these cliches in one episode. Today the anime scene sucks and can be compared to Bollywood movies- garish in use of colours and unrestrained melodrama.

The Running Man was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Its split up into two parts and uploaded onto youtube by someone considerate. Yoshiaki Kawajiri was also behind the Ninja Scroll series and the 'World Record' episode in the Animatrix. Enjoy the wonder that was yesterday's anime.

Part 1
Part 2

Genesis - Carpet Crawl

Then:

Bearded chap singing is Phil Collins!

Now:

This clip has annoying audience voices in it, but the quality of sound is pretty good. You can see the cops standinng guard in the front. It must be cool to be a cop at concerts from a voyeur POV. This a reunion tour of sorts, why can't these chaps come to B'lore?

Q: How Crap Can Software Get ?

OR
Q: How much does crappy software cost?

A: $999

The piece of shit is called Photoshop CS3 Extended. Adobe recently came out with a new version of Photoshop. They claim its optimized to run all the new hardware, platforms & most decent configs of today. The first sign of trouble was when they released 3 versions of the same product a la Windows Vista fashion. Most of the features work just fine except for the brush tools. There seems to be a 2-3 second lag! When it comes to digital painting thats a lot! Its like watching dubbed Hong Kong Kung Fu movies (i.e, the lip-synch is way off). Brush tool is pretty important tool & personally something I used the most.

Adobe guys had released a Beta version last year. The forums are clogged with frustrated complaints & queries regarding this matter. 2007 saw the alpha release, with the lag issue intact and few months ago they released a patch for machines running with 4GB upwards of RAM to rectify the lag situation. 4GB RAM! Obviously someone forgot to optimize!

$999 my left foot. Not even worth pirating.

UPDATE: An unusual tip from one of the threads. Place a piece of paper on the tablet's surface. This gives you paper like texture & associated friction. So the effects of drawing on a slippery surface of the tablet is reduced

Thieves & Murderers

Last year February, on returning home I was greeted by a concrete maw. On inspection I discovered that the 'brass-slot' fitting on my letter box was nicked by some bastard. The letter box is built into the wall in front of my house and the brass-slot assembly was fixed onto a black marble slab accommodated in a recess on the outside of the wall. So if you came to drop a letter you saw a brass plate with a slot and the word 'LETTERS' embossed on it. The whole brass plate was unceremoniously ripped off the wall.

Couple of evenings later on a walk, I found more concrete maws all around my neighbourhood. Talking to one of those effected, I learned that brass fittings like these slots and taps are the hot property amongst petty thieves in the city. You can buy a peg of brandy or a can of industrial glue for the money you get in a brass tap exchange at the scrap-yard. As we were discussing various thefts, we heard a commotion. One of the residents a few houses away had managed to catch one of the thieves red-handed - a kid about 13 years old. By the time we ran to them, the kid bit the guys hand and escaped. Smart kid. I hate smart kids.

This year in march another thief hit my house. He made of with a tap from the terrace. I noticed it only when I ran out of water. I had only filled the tank up that very morning! Got the pipe capped promptly. So what next? Yesterday it was raining heavily. With the noise as a cover these guys manage to thieve some pipes & fittings from my neighbours terrace. If these fucks had been a bit enterprising they could've swiped the house clean as the neighbours were at their relatives in another part of B'lore. One of my pipes was out of place.

Scenario: You hear some noise & rush onto the terrace to see what is happening there. You see a chap frantically trying to extract a brass tap. In the spur of the moment, you bum-rush the fool off the terrace. He is splattered on the ground.
Question: Do you get off murder for protecting one's property?
or
Do you do time for murder?

Genesis - No Reply At All

I just love the keyboard & brass theme that keeps rolling from the start this song. This one is yet another eel of a song.

Cunt

MacArthur Park

Recently I listened to a version of ' MacArthur Park' by Beggars Opera, on their Pathfinder album. ' MacArthur Park' is one of those songs that begs to be covered (with one exception of course, I'll come to that in a bit). The song was written by Jimmy Webb , who also wrote ' Witchita Lineman'. Jimmy Webb, in my opinion is a great songwriter with an amazing knack for writing haunting songs. Only problem is that his songs largely depend on a singer with a certain je ne sais quoi to bring out the song's phantasmagorical essence. For ' Witchita Lineman' it was Glen Campbell; ' MacArthur Park' had Richard Harris. The song was released in 1978. The Richard Harris version sounds like an ancient Vampire (probably royalty) reminiscing about a delicious meal, in the form of a comely human female, he had ages ago. Unfortunately this rendition gets a tad melodramatic when these lines come around:

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

The music is haunting and the song is long (over seven minutes). Nevertheless a gem. The Beggars Opera version is bit longer than the original with an extended intro. The mournful quality a la Richard Harris has been diluted to 50% and the lyrics are slightly different. According to Jimmy Webb, Richard Harris could never remember the right lyrics and it was a bother trying to correct him. Now the exception: Watch out for a shorter version of the same song by Donna Summers. A disco disaster that killed this delicate long suffering song.

NB - The song in this Youtube video is the Richard Harris version.

Still Indexable!

The Geese & The Ghost

Sketch Mode Initiated

Weather Forecast

Today will be a very gusty day. With windspeeds high enough to break heads using broken mango tree branches. Wear your helmets!

Oblique Strategies

Oblique Strategies are these cards with simple messages on them. I've found these very useful when I'm painting myself into corners and in effectively dealing with blocks. Think of these messages as situations that force you to think out of the box. Here are two links.

Link1 has a detailed history of the cards. Interestingly Brian Eno had a hand in the creation of these cards.
Link2 leads you to a Mac widget version of these handy cards.

On Pathetic Attempts at Go & Verse

Black, here I go!
Little did I know
I can't go out
White has my goat!

Genesis - Land of Confusion

An old favourite with wonderful lyrics. Puppets in the video were created by the guys behind the show Spitting Image .

Sour Girl

Love the band, love the song and love the twisted teletubbyesque woodland creatures.

Nightmares

I'm back on a roll. Went to sleep at 3 a.m. and woke up by 9:45 a.m. today. Within this period I had four different nightmares. Dreams being volatile, I've forgotten one of them. I'm sure I'm missing out on details on the three described in this post. So here they are in full ascii glory before they evaporate.

The First nightmare, starts in a carnal tangle with a person I know (name withheld deliberately). After sometime I proceed to the kitchen get myself a drink. Ms. X joins me for some water and asks me to fetch something from the fridge behind me. Just as I open the fridge a black figure appears close to the fridge. On a closer look, its a woman in a burqa and her face was not covered. Her face was all wet & shrively as though she lived in a pickled state in a vat of formaldehyde. As she opens her mouth her head falls off her shoulders onto the ground and bursts open. Ms. X & I scream in chorus till I'm conscious.

The Second one is pretty fuzzy. I get home to pick a book and hear some noise upstairs. I climb the stairs to notice a family ransacking the first floor. One guy notices me & promptly cuts me down with a koduvaal (machete like knife).

The 3rd nightmare is the weirdest off the lot. For some reason I find myself in an advanced level Kannada class. The instructor shoots off & I can't understand a thing. Suddenly I'm aware of a motion. I look out of the window and I notice that the class is moving. Someone tells me we're on a ship. Then the ship lurches to one side & you can see the sharks in the water. Then the boat lurches to the opposite side. By now I'm holding onto the window frame. The Boat lurches to the first side and some fat dude squashes my fingers & I'm out of the window in the water. The water is too cold & I wake up.

These dreams always start of pleasantly however strange they are.

Pic via

Digital Eel

A couple of years ago, I had a chance to play this wonderful demo of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. Yesterday I got my hands on a demo of its sequel Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. These games were developed by Digital Eel. While my experiences are based on the demos, they were thoroughly enjoyable. The game has a bit of everything, perils of outer space, trade, diplomacy, space warfare and most importantly loads of humour. The user interface was menu driven, pretty and mostly convenient. The sequel sets you on a course to gather goods from different sectors in space & return to your employer within a specified time. The warfare is real time, pretty intense & the demo didn't actually let me get into the thick of things partly because my space craft was ill equipped for warfare. Check it out!

Cornelius - Fit Song

Grow One!

Real men grow beards.
Check out the galleries at The Beard Community for inspiration you metrosexual!

A Tip

In an attempt to keep my blog relevant and useful, I've come up with a plan:
Everybody who reads this post is urged to leave a useful tip in the comments section to this post. Alternately, you could leave a link to a post about a useful tip you've on your blog. By 'useful tip' I mean anything that you have implemented and was actually useful to you. Here is my tip:

Leave a candle and a box of matches on the floor, in a corner of every room in your house. You never know when the bloody power is cut. The 'kits' location is easier to shout out to guests & family members affected by night blindness stranded in a room upstairs. Also they can't drop something thats already on the floor.

Extremely Colourful Schemes

Looking at pictures with too many bright colours usually leaves me visually violated. This is probably why I don't enjoy psychedelic poster colour schemes. Under such schemes, abstract forms are much easier to look at than definite forms. As a result I tend to keep my colour schemes conservative. Sometimes I worry if this move is actually shutting me out from creating unique visuals. In a bid to force myself into uncomfortable places and derive lukewarm masochistic pleasure, I created these -
Shifts & Rotations
Neon Runner
Coral
Apart from wilder use of colours, these pictures are left handed finger paintings (i.e, using my laptop's track-pad) and done in the wee hours of morning whilst trying to sleep. 'Coral' is also another attempt of mine to mess with your eyes.

Porque te vas

A lively pop song 'Porque te vas' by Jeanette featured in a 70s Spanish movie. The horn section is just amazing.

Sweet Victory

From the Spongebob Squarepants cartoon. Premise: Squidward's cousin, turns up in Bikini Bottom (the town the cartoon is set in). There is this one-upmanship thing going on between the two. The cousin challenges Squidward to lead his own music band. Squidward tries desperately to teach his band (comprising of local idiots) to play and he finally gives up. After a dejected Squidward leaves the scene, Spongebob pep talks the group & they practise all night long. Next day at the arena:



Don't forget to keep an eye out for two emotional guys in the audience (timestamp: 1:01).

One Man Band

Pixar's Short titled 'One Man Band'. The little girl's expressions are priceless

Somethings to look forward to

Three games to look out for:

Bioshock
This is yet another FPS but with a ROM full of quirks to interest the easily bored gamer. As much as I hate Ayn Rand's writing, marrying some of her concepts to an FPS (as is evident from this article) is something I'm extremely interested in. Judging from the screenshots, gameplay video its gorgeously Art Deco.

Fallout 3
A teaser video

Project Offset
These guys have created a game engine from scratch. From the tech demos on the site, it looks impressive. A reason why this game interests me is its phenomenal Art Director - Khang Le

UPDATE: More Khang Le

Mind-room : 309/E

Recently on a holiday, I realized how much I missed my hostel room back in REC. It was room 309 in E-Hostel building. Got this room by chance. Rooms were allotted by a lot system - you were given a unique number, a lot was drawn and if your number came up; you picked your room. Back then I was aiming for the room 108, as I had managed to hold onto that number during the last 2 years. Luck would have it otherwise, my number was drawn a little too late and didn't have much choice. 309/E was a friend's room, familiar and well maintained by him. So I shrugged and moved into the room.

It was a small room, about 8' x7' with pink (YUCK!) whitewashed walls. I was told that the previous fucker had got the wall specially done a year ago. If you chipped the pink whitewash, a much worse colour came through - pistachio green whitewash (Double YUCK!). You got a cot, table & chair, a built-in cupboard, ceiling fan, a window in the east wall and a door in the west wall. Floor was old school red-oxide floor, pitted like the face of the moon. In-fact some craters had to be filled up DIY style with candle wax. Sounds like a goblin's cave.

The pink walls drove me nuts for a week until I figured out an elegant solution - one normal 60W tungsten bulb and one kaandhani table lamp donated by Srikanth. The yellow light made the room peachy in the evenings. Got a nice standard issue grass mat (not the plastic kind). Had a small booze party for house warming and she was ready. Most people complained the room made them drowsy, blamed it on the lighting, mattress or me. A year later the hostel authorities whitewashed it a bluish-white. The room was like a battery charger, I was the battery and I loved the space.

On a mental level the first 2 years at REC saw me going nuts on various levels. Now this space was the mana I needed to further space out. Many of the doodles on moongallery were done in the wee hours by that table lamp. Many a cassette tapes - where worn out on the h-fi. The first song played in that room was a jazz number called The A-Train (Duke Ellington) from a Verve compilation. The last was probably Dio's Rock n' Roll Children.

The most ambitious project taken up in the room was an installation piece. I noticed that when I switched off the lights the graphic equalizer on my hi-fi attracted fireflies. These buggers used to pop in every night and give me a good show. Later on I noticed that the spiders on the top corners of my room were having a field day, wrapping up the unfortunate fireflies that got stuck to their webworks. These guys would last about 3 days, before the died. So I stopped cleaning/destroying the webs out let the webbing grow naturally. Only problem being that I could not switch on the fan as it would destroy the delicate network of web. Soon I had a false ceiling of black web. It was black because I had the habit of lighting up 2 of my fav sandalwood incense sticks daily. So every night for 3 months I had a light show and the spiders had nice chow. I wonder if they ate them or just were light phobic. If I charged those spiders rent, I would've been a millionaire! The whole piece came crashing down on September 11th along with the Twin towers in USA (yes its very symbolic). Some fool popped into the room one afternoon, exclaimed it was hot, switched on the fan and told me I ought to clean the cobwebs!! The Bastard, the roof of my world collapsed. No more astral displays. In another months time my hi-fi set conked out and I was reduced to a trusty 2-in-1 with no fancy graphic equalizer.

Out to Lunch....

.....and other meals for a couple of days. Will be back in B'lore on 6th June.

Notification

Leaving for good......a good 3 days.
Office will be closed until my glorious return.
Till then weep bitches.

Music Over-Compression

Informative video about something that I have never even heard off - Link

Folk for Reader Folk

Last year around June and through to August I was lucky to find some really old folk albums on torrent sites. Torrent sites are like mana from heaven. If you are music lover like me and have trawled the various 'music' shops in B'lore for good ear-food, you'd die of malnutrition. Synthetic pop sludge packaged as high art sit like colourful toads on shelves mocking human evolution & intelligence. Whats more the FM channels blare singles from these albums at rate of a single twice in three hours. Chirpy DJs must be shot as a rule of thumb. So torrent sites along with internet radio (ahem!) come as salvation in these desperate times.

My first noteworthy discovery was Bert Jansch's self titled debut album. Bert Jansch is a Scottish bluesman. He was also a member of the folk group - The Pentangle. A song and an instumental piece caught my ear. The Instrumental piece was called 'Angie' and was originally played by Davy Graham. The song was called 'The Needle of Death' and was about Bert's friend who ODed and died. In an interview, Bert said that he has not played this song in 30 something years. I've found a neat version of this song on youtube by a chap who goes by monicker TheDruidKing (what a voice, man!).
Another artist I've been listening to for a long time is Donovan. His debut album 'What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid' (1965) had this wonderful song 'Catch the Wind'. Most compilation albums have a live version of him singing the song. The vocals on the live version tend to soar as the song progresses. However the album version is much more comatose or dreamy if you like. Unfotunately I can't find the dreamy version. As a consolation I've found a version that lies somewhere between the two versions.

Like all good songs and slippery eels, their tough to pin down and analyse. One starts of following the sheer poetry of folk songs only to get lost forming images in one's mind. When you come to your senses, the song is over and you need to hear it again. Enjoy maadi... there is no rehab for this kind of wholesome addiction.

Copyrighting Numbers

This post is courtesy T3knomanser

	Remember the illegal number? Well, I converted the hexadecimal number into a set of five different colors (using hex-color codes) and made this lovely GIF to illustrate. Don't use these colors together. If you do, you're breaking the law. Or, at least, you're breaking it enough to get sued for it.

The Future That Was

There was a time when speculative fiction and art were utterly enjoyable and deep. I'm talking about glorious sci-fi visions of the future. Things were definitely positive back then. Tall spires piercing blue skies. Primitive shapes of crafts gliding lazily in the background. Machines that did your bidding without bothering you. Humans striking elegant poses as though they had achieved all they could and where about yawn (which would probably echo through their palatial quarters). These images just wanted one to transport oneself to that moment. There was something to look forward to. Probably the last example of this was the 'Go West' video by the Pet Shop Boys.

The state of such fiction is pretty dismal today. Distopic visions of war, oppression just gang rape anything positive. It is not as if there wasn't any turmoil in Paradise, back then. Imagine a book that just concentrated on the good futuristic life - it probably would be a boring piece of work and would read like a mag that features celebrity homes & gardens. Yawn.... For a story to progress (and sell) drama must exist. Back then, there was something grandly positive to contrast with negatives of future society. Todays fiction mostly starts of in a dismal world with no hope or scope for improvement. You are forced to connect with the protagonist in a crappy situation - who towards the end barely escapes with life and limb. In effect if it was a movie you'd be taken on a wild goose chase with a lot of (usually unnecessary) special effects and amplified sound effects. 'Probably' the coolest thing on screen would be when someone makes a grand entrance and mouths of a corny-as-the-character-can-get catch phrase. Sadly this is entertainment for us today.

Too get a clearer understanding of what the future was like, check these artists out
Syd Mead and a link to the trailer of a documentary on him.
Roger Dean the man behind most of YES album covers. Check out the Up Close and Architecture pages on this site.

To conclude here is a video of the song 'I'm with stupid' by the Pet Shop Boys. This is a spoof of another Pet Shop Boys video of the song 'Can You Forgive Her'. The two funny chaps are the guys behind Little Britain.

Bunnies Dance and Sing

Groove Armada - Get Down

Skittles Ad - Opera Bunny

Cyberpunk & Riddim

In September 2006, I managed to read William Gibson's Neuromancer (thanks to Mridul). A down right propah cyberpunk novel. I usually can't read cyberpunk novels because cutting through all the technobabble is tedious. Neuromancer is supposed to be the grand daddy of cyberpunk, written in 1984 and Its influence on movies, books, comics and video games cannot be overlooked today. The novel is about a bionic cracker who is on a contract to infiltrate some top security organization and in the process steal some important data. At least that is what the book was to me. The cracker has a super-sexy-martial-arts-expert for a bodyguard. In the end the nature of the object of their goal is something that came as a surprise to me. Read and experience it for yourself.

The density of technobabble was just right for me. Gibson does a commendable job of visualizing future technology. Something along the lines of Virtual reality meets Darwinia and the visualizer in your media player. -100 points if you are a fan of VRML. In the novel our cracker has to collaborate with a bunch of Rastafarians residing on a space station called Zion. This bit was the coolest thing to happen to sci-fi in years. Imagine a culture spaced out on marijuana living in space! As I read, I could imagine myself floating about this space station with blocked ears listening to dull throbbing of Dub music. Riddim fueled mellowness.

Which brings me to my most recent discovery, an album by Easy Star All-stars titled Dub Side of the Moon. I'm convinced that this album is nothing but a soundtrack to Neuromancer. This album is a dub version of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon album. What-ifs like what if Pink Floyd was a roots reggae outfit get answered on this album. No shrieking in Patois like in todays dancehall numbers, just beautiful vocals in English (except for one track). The first track starts of with sounds of bubbling bongs, tchk sounds of a lighter and coughs. The ringing counter part on Pink Floyd's album starts with heart beats, ticking clocks and ringing cash registers. The reverb, echo and other feedback effects are not overdone. This dub album is not too abstract and sounds more like a reggae-fied cover of Pink Floyd than a pucca dub album.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I recently finished this wonderful book by Susanna Clarke. Its fiction and reads like an English classic. The story is set around the time of the Napoleonic Wars and its is about two English magicians who are trying to revive magic and its practice. There is a lot of politics and drama between (& surrounding) the two. The good book follows a slow pace. It doesn't drag and the authoress does a good job of keeping you interested with a variety of characters and their actions. The book has a very odd ending i.e., heads - it is a definite ending and tails - could there be more adventures? If its tails, I can't wait to read the next book. If you are into appendices and footnotes, then this book has quite a bit of footnotes referring to fictional books on subjects dealt within the actual story. The footnotes definitely add to 'this thing really happened' sense of the book. So if you are a gullible kid that is very sensitive to media and prone to gunning down mates in educational institutions across the US, I'd like to see you perform some magic. You can read excerpts from the book here.

I definitely suck at reviewing books and can't help the fanboyism from setting in. Probably its because I don't want to ruin your reading experience. This book gets a 5 on 5 from me. If you are illiterate and some one is reading this out to you, learn to read for the sake of this book!

Growing Up in the 80's (Part 1): SUPER TED!

In the 80's, I grew up watching cartoons & programs mostly produced in the UK. I've seen most of the stuff produced by Cosgrove Hall and then some. So in a series of posts I'll introduce you to some of the best stuff I have ever seen till date. Around that time a lot of anime-esque shows were gaining popularity and most kids my age preferred watching violent crap like G.I. Joe and mecha shite. I loved the non-violent stuff produced by Cosgrove Hall. I think this was because I started reading voraciously around the time and most of the cartoons were based on popular children's books. These cartoons were unlike the melodramatic soaps (read as pokemon & anime) of today. To start of the series we have Super Ted! He needs no introduction as the following clip says it all.



It still is one of the coolest intro for a cartoon in my book. Note the orchestral score in the background. One important thing about Super Ted is that he looks like an ordinary teddy bear. But at the first sign of trouble he says his magic word & unzips his ordinary guise and becomes SUPER TED! Incidentally, The magic word was given to him by Mother Nature. We never hear the magic word when Ted mumbles it. Ted tells us that it is so because its a secret. The wee bastard!

Ted lives with two friends on Planet Spot - Spotty Man (voiced by the 3rd Doctor Who -Jon Pertwee) and Blotch (a female version of Spotty Man). The Villain is Texas Pete and he is an American and definitely not nice . Pete has two cronies - a timid Skeleton who loves kittens and soft things; The other guy is a fat guy called Bulk (he is the duh-dumb type). The show was originally produced in Welsh and later dubbed into English.

For further entertaining stuff about SuperTed look here and here.

Look

Something for your optic nerves here.

The Elegant Solution

Mridul has alway claimed that I always blame things on pollution. I've never disputed this. Land, air and water, its all filthy. We're living like those fish in 'Finding Nemo'. Our fish bowl is dirty and we've no choice but to breathe, eat and drink it up. The world we live in is doomed. We can attribute this condition to various factors, mostly manmade. OR...

We can blame it on entropy and embrace apocalyptic visions of the Anti-Christ (Where the heck is he by the way?) and laugh like bastards. This doomed schtik has been going on for centuries. Its only us sentient monkeys making a fuss about it as a recent phenomenon. Why? simply because we can. If there existed another sentient species on the planet that we haven't wiped out yet; I'm sure the two would agree its doomed. We are alone & buzzing. History tells us that each civilization was looking for an Elegant Solution to end their problems. In todays terms the Elegant Solution is the Sci-Fi writers idea & the scientists wet dream. The media paints a picture of urgency, they show lab rats frantically experimenting on chimps & chimps experimenting on lab rats. they are all looking for a key. Key to the elegant solution.

Maybe we've to fight fire with fire. Maybe that might actually be the Elegant Solution. Its all futile. Buahahahha!
The Moral still is DON'T shit where you eat.

Precious Junk

I believe that we can all agree on the idea that we live in a materialistic world. I remember going once to my Mom's ancestral home in Pallakaad, Kerala. We had tea in this dining room which had a cupboard with neatly arranged, dusty and delicate china. A grand uncle of mine spent some time in the Far East & he had brought this and many other quality stuff. Quite a bit of his stuff were rumoured to be languishing in the attic of the house (or was it another house?). I'd never been to the attic as I was being constantly bombarded by questions like 'Do you remember me?' by various relatives. And when they got over the fact that the infant me was in-fact a gangly 13 year old, the next relative would pop in for the next iteration of questions. The stuff I saw in the cupboard will never be junk in my opinion for two reasons:

1. They don't make them like they used to. Those china cups were exquisite. The minimalist crock of today would just pale in comparison.
2. I like old stuff.

Confession: I am a pack rat. So what have I accumulated over the past few years? Whatever it is it will never have the charm of antique stuff. I tend to debate over purchases for so long that when I do buy the item, I no longer need it! Now this can be very irritating when you do stock taking of one's room like I am now. What a waste of money & space! One such object is my light box which has not been totally useless as I've made it to be.

The story of the light box- I found myself in a 2D animation course about four years ago. The need for a light box was unquestionable. Looked about town for one with a peg bar. No cigar. Ok I'll build one, drew up a design for the carpenter. He came in one morning, I explained the plan to him in grand detail. He knocked up one for me in two days. It looked like a deluxe rat trap! Problem being the angle at which the drawing surface inclined. It proved to be very uncomfortable when one slaved away for hours on it. The minor angle issue aside it was functional, portable and very spartan. I used it less often after I got it home. Consolation-wise I still use it nowadays for art and at night as reading light.

How much of the stuff we have accumulated are actually worth keeping? How much of it is going to last for the next five years? Who knows. Much of the bulk I own is media- books, tapes and CDs. The Choice is clear, either invest in miniature devices that become obsolete in about a years time or invest in something thats like a Soviet juggernaut i.e, hideous in execution but will last over half a life time as long as its not nuked twice to oblivion.

Dali in commercials

Found these ads starring the ever eccentric Salvador Dali.



The next ones' a gem!



Happy bubbles but devoted bubbles!

My Hands are Bloody

I have just killed a stale blog - The Hall of Beard. The blog was dedicated to famous bearded personalities and It featured two - Rabindranath Tagore & Gustav Klimt. Attempts to introduce readers (if any) to Arthur Brown (Musician), Alexey Pajitnov (Designer of the video-narcotic, Tetris) & Jeff Minter (Programmer of many obscure games & the not so obscure light synth) have repeatedly failed. The other motive behind the creation of the blog was to have a memetic affect on people's minds. One rarely sees full bearded men these days.
Rest assured I'm still growing one.

Two beginnings & an end

Fallout & Fallout 2 were two RPG games that I really enjoyed way back. Both games are set in a world that has been ravaged by nuclear war. Lawlessness & mutants prevail. Its a turn based game. There is a rumour that Bethesda Softworks, the guys behind the Elder Scrolls series are working on a Fallout 3. Check out the intros to both these games. The voice on the first intro is Ron Perlman

Fallout



Fallout 2



To finish off this post is the ending of Stanley Kubrick's chilling classic. Its a satire on cold war. The song 'We'll Meet Again' is sung by Dame Vera Lynn.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb



Ironically the ending is the beginning for this post :)

70 years later and still dead !!

Today is H.P. Lovecraft's 70th Death anniversary. Master of all consuming horror and general sphincter laxing paranoia. His work dealt with phenomenon beyond human perception. No matter what humans do we are a doomed bunch as there is a Pantheon of Gods slumbering for eons waiting to be roused. Once roused these powerful beings will have a party that would make the Kali Yugam look like a second of happiness.
Lovecraft's horror: horror :: abstract art: art
For the uninitiated:

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive
The Official Cthulhu Mythos
Cthulhu Universalis


Art Credit: 'H.P. Lovecraft's Birthday Party!' by Toren 'MacBin' Atkins

As it was meant to be

Two Important issues that can never be stressed enough:

sleepnaked.org
Describes the benefits of sleeping in the buff. One can find a link to some research conducted on this particular subject on this website.

Leave no child inside is an article about reconnecting kids with nature. Sadly humans are losing their touch with nature and the environment we're brought up in isn't helping anyone on this planet. Luckily for us in Bangalore we've wildlife at our doorsteps.

Image: cover art for Led Zep's album 'Houses of the Holy'. Designed by Storm Thorgerson

Layout Update

In yet another attempt to flog this dead blog into life, I've been experimenting with colour schemes and layout arrangements. Let me know about how it looks on your end.

Gamma Bros.

Gamma Bros. is an old school style shmup by pixeljam games. You'll require flash player innstalled and Its available as a free download for both Mac & PC here.

A 'shmup' is short for Shoot 'em up. The unique bit about this shmup is in the little details. Right from the 'Thunderbirds are GO!' style intro to the small animations when you change ships. The game has the right pace before things get pretty hectic and some amazing Bosses. Also your vehicle can shoot in 4 directions. Some times the frame rate stagger when there are a lot of ships & pyrotechnics on the screen.