My latest headache

About 3 weeks ago I bought a shiny new laptop. Unfortunatley the bloody OS - Vista Home has taken the shine out of it and has reduced the machine to a black body. My pen-tablet works only on the desktop & refuses to work in any other program. Try and avoid this shitty OS till time & program compatibility allows.

Awesome!

Finally somebody does visual justice to the Goldfrapp song - 'Lovely Head'.


Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

Created using processing
And the fundaism can be found here

Dexter Wansel - Life on Mars

Dexter Wansel was session's keyboardist, who in 1976, released a solo album titled 'Life on Mars'. An instrumental tour de force in space age funk (with a few tracks featuring vocals). An album that has to be experienced in full stereophonic glory. For a 70's album I believe it had some pioneering synthesizer effects and sounds. If you like the band Jamiroquai, you need to listen to this. The clip below features the title track. Crank up the volume please!

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?