June 30, 2007
Genesis - Land of Confusion
An old favourite with wonderful lyrics. Puppets in the video were created by the guys behind the show Spitting Image .
June 27, 2007
June 26, 2007
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
June 24, 2007
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!
June 23, 2007
June 21, 2007
Grow One!
Real men grow beards.
Check out the galleries at The Beard Community for inspiration you metrosexual!
Check out the galleries at The Beard Community for inspiration you metrosexual!
June 18, 2007
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.
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.
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.
June 15, 2007
Porque te vas
A lively pop song 'Porque te vas' by Jeanette featured in a 70s Spanish movie. The horn section is just amazing.
June 14, 2007
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).
Don't forget to keep an eye out for two emotional guys in the audience (timestamp: 1:01).
June 12, 2007
June 10, 2007
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
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
June 06, 2007
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.
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.
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