Posts tagged random crap

the inevitable filler

Jun 14th

If I had given it another 6 days, it would have been all of 2 posts over the last month. True writer’s block, I guess.

In past times, I’ve been able to resort to movie reviews, memes, random thoughts on tech and… you know, those items that apparently interest almost no-one but me. To fill space up. To have something to put in here.. the empty text box under ‘Add New Post’ that I have opened in a new tab every single day.

I kid you not. I’ve had this page open for one full f*ckin’ week. To no effect. Words I put down seem cliched at best. Lamenting the lack of inspiration. Lamenting the lack of time. Lamenting a deadline.

Y’know. Something similar to what you’re reading. Right now.

Well if its to be a filler post, a filler post it shall be. No point delaying the obvious.

Read On… »

Twitter twitter, tweet tweet twe– : As I knew would happen, post the initial high-throughput tweeting that happened after joining the damn site.. things have dulled, to say the least. A large portion of my tweets are RTs, to my frustration (I might have mentioned this in an earlier post, come to think of it). Original content comes rarely… mostly because I really don’t have that much to say. Life is not so exciting as to make things like free wifi interesting enough to tweet about. It feels like I’m not exploiting the service as much as I should or something, but I have no solution in mind.
Lights, camera, action!: The dullest summer yet as far as new movie releases go. Iron Man 2 was worth it for the phenomena that are RDJ and Scarlett (double props to Scarlett)… but that’s been about it, really. Even on the Hindi movie front. Whether we talk of good movies or awful/awesome movies. There is the highly anticipated ‘Raavan’ to come.. we’ll see what happens. Frankly more interested in ‘Raavanan’ due to the Vikram factor, tho. Testament to how dead the summer is movie-wise.. not a single movie comes to mind from the past month-and-a-half. ‘Inception’, ‘The Expendables’, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ are still yet to come.. so things may look up. We’ll see.
Dim lights, remote, sofa: Thanks to an awesome Sony Bravia EX308, I’m slowly making inroads into my massive to-watch movie list. And I’m worshipping the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature (baked right into the TV). HD movies right in my living room! Including those random foreign selections that I keep looking for. TV serials too. See, movie studios? Piracy is so easily avoided when you make it easy to do things legally. I want to say that your 28-day moratorium on Netflix acquiring your new releases is a bad thing… but for the kind of online content made available in return, I’d say Netflix got the better deal. OK, getting too niche, moving on. Am I going to review any of the movies I’ve watched? Possibly only to say that ‘The Hurt Locker’ deserved every accolade it got. And ‘Death at a Funeral’ is pretty damn insane.
Tchuk-chuk-click: Despite owning my most awesome computer for a while now.. no games have made their way onto it! In fact, I recently realized that my 6-month hiatus from having a proper powerful machine has really taken a toll on how much I exploit my machine. A lot of the stuff I normally have on my PC has just not made its way onto it. Shocking for me, uninteresting for you. Will things be rectified? Stay tuned over the summer (for those who didn’t get it, the title for this bullet point is the cocking of a gun.. with an empty bullet chamber).
Search, search, search again: Batting a perfect game as far as paper acceptances go (on a side note, the phrase ‘batting a perfect game’ is highly misused today). But, as with everything else, at some point ‘rock bottom’ has to be replaced with ‘top of the rock’. That said, a recent experience has shown me just how much I can do something, and yet not really be bothered by the possibilities associated with it. Such is life. In case some of you are wondering why I’m being cryptic.. well.. get with the program.

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back, nothing to say, random crap, sorry

of savita and sacrilege

Mar 15th

Posted by SEV in staying.general

4 comments

‘Tis a little hard to come up with a good way of intro-ing topical posts, while including my own snarkiness in the mix.

Nevertheless, here goes nothing.

It sort of splits up.. oh, you’ll see.

************************************

Read On… »

The infamous Savita Bhabhi was moved to the more focused Kirtu.com. Yes, focused. Only pr0n comics of Indian origin. The market has been created, it is now time to really take advantage of it. Eh?.

What will it cost me?
For all our loyal fans, we have worked out a very special offer today. If you signup this month, you can become a Kirtu.com exclusive member for only 9.95$ a month. This offer will only be available for the first 100 members, so hurry. Once this offer is over, new members will have to pay 15$ per month.

[Link]
Yes, its paid. Paid. The desperation of the average Indian male may convince him to loosen his purse strings, while he loosens his pants.

They even have “sneak peek” comics on the front page for those of us who want to make sure that Savita’s “class” has not been lowered (or raised, depending on your POV) as a result of asking us to pay for it.

This paywall happened over 2 months ago. Well before all the hoopla regarding partial feeds recently. That they’ve not taken down the paywall probably means that at least a few people have shelled out. And thats all it takes to keep the site running, really.

After all, how many ads can you target to the average desperate f*ck?

That’s rhetoric, stop answering. And no, I’ve not subscribed. I wouldn’t have even if the Mrs didn’t exist. I prefer my pr0n to be free.

At the other extreme of India, from a couple of months back, the front page of TOI that is alongside stares at me in the face.

[Link to TOI, TOI.com article]

Lets see. There was once this guy who decided to petition that photo ID cards need not have proper photos of the person being ID-ed.

He told people around him, and they agreed that it was a good idea. He then petitioned.

Nobody tried to reason with him that the EC and High Court judgments already made on the matter multiple times actually made sense. Due to the beauty of democracy, he was allowed to file petition and waste the Supreme Court’s time with the matter.

His argument?

Counsel for petitioner M Ajam Khan had contended that asking ‘purdah-nashin’ women to lift their veil for being photographed would amount to sacrilege as their photographs would be seen by many men working as polling agents and electoral officers.

Well truly. Women’s passport IDs being seen by men. Sacrilege indeed.

The SC told him to stop acting like an idiot, and think about what he’s asking them to agree to. Which resulted in:

When the petitioners again insisted on protection of the religious sentiments, the bench said: “If someone comes to vote in a burqa and the photograph was also taken with a veil covering the face, how would anyone identify the voter?’’ Explaining that right to vote was only a statutory right and not a fundamental right, it said: “Right to contest an election is an extension of the right to vote. Can anyone contest an election saying a photograph of her face be not taken?”

[Emphasis mine]

To me that last underline is a goldmine. Imagine, if you will, the world where burqa-clad women can vote with burqa-clad IDs for burqa-clad women who are standing for office.

We’ll never know who won and due to whose vote. Ever.

Actually, that may be an improvement to what we have now. Just sayin’

************************************

And thus:

Savita Bhabhi walks into the voter office, wearing a burqa (Why? The first four times she left the house unclad – without a burqa, perverts – she ended up with (in order): the milkman, the sweeper, the man at the corner waiting for a bus, and the bus conductor. Realizing that the only way out is to ensure that the average Indian is not titillated more than necessary, she adopts her “disguise”). The voting officer won’t let her vote without removing the burqa. Savita resists. He insists. She resists more. He insists more. She gives in, misunderstands, and takes off the entire ensemble, burqa and all. The officer yields to baser instincts and the polling booth cover, for a change, houses two people for a while. Unknown to her, the polling booth camera films the whole sequence. Which is then sold on the internet via Kirtu.com for $10 a month. Meanwhile the SC has to contend with the plethora of cases petitioning to allow no heterosexual acts in voting booths as it would amount to sacrilege, even if the woman in question is Savita.

Savita is just sad that voting happens once every 5 years. Piracy is easiest to combat when new content can be released on a regular basis. There are only so many milkmen, neighbors, and cousins that one can take advantage of.

Meanwhile, a frighteningly large number of voting officers are hit on by homosexuals. For god knows what reason. Maybe just because they can.

Actually, making Savita the poster girl for encouraging voting (Savita saying “I voted”, while licking her thumb) might be one of the more brilliant ideas I may have had.

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controversy, india, random crap, shitty, silly

clubbing together a month’s worth of everything into one big gigantic post

Dec 22nd

Posted by SEV in staying.general

1 comment

This is the 4th attempt I’m making at trying for a halfway decent beginning to a post. Have I really been reduced to saying such banalities? I can’t quite believe it. When I look at my front page, most of my recent posts are about movies. Reviews, basically. Most of my recent posts have also ended with a sign-off saying that I will have a proper update soon. This post, by virtue of being an “update”, doesn’t count as a proper post either. I have notes here, there and everywhere galore… none of which I have really expanded on. Hell, when I was going through my drafts I realized that I had a started a post last winter which I never got round to finishing.

I’m not happy with that start either, but its a start.

Read On… »

After a while of working on research topics with no apparent end in sight, I had the one-two punch of back-to-back deadlines. My first reminded me of the good old days of last year when I spent every waking moment on work. A lot of my moments were spent awake… to the extent I had a major first-year-PhD flashback when I pulled an all-nighter so as to somehow, anyhow get the paper in shape (it didn’t quite succeed, but anyway). The result of my next deadline was here for all to see… meaning I’m on track with what I expected to finish by now. The missus might say otherwise, but she doesn’t really count. She’s supposed to keep the pressure on, I’m supposed to fool around and ensure she has something to do

It is a gratifying feeling to receive recognition for what you have done. It is gratifying to realize that hell, you really have learnt some things during the course of your degree so far. It is beyond awesome to live well up to the expectations that you had set for yourself for a particular goal. Enough back-patting, all of this just means I have so much more expected of me in the time to come. There are caveats to everything you do. After all this back-to-back work, it is hard to fall back into a normal groove. Sleep doesn’t come easy, your body craves being completely spent when it hits the bed. Sleeping the sleep of the “mentally dead” is a pleasure that you shouldn’t get used to.

In a not-so-shocking update, my laptop actually failed on me 12 hours before my big day. I’m not even kidding. It says a lot that the failure didn’t make the slightest difference to my prep, but I had my revenge. I ripped it apart within the hour of finishing the proposal I then spent a week modding it with copper and putting it back together. Happy realizations struck: (1) HP laptop architecture could not be worse, (2) I need to blog a long post about how to do what I did, (3) I should have done this ripping-apart 6 months ago. As it is, the damage appears to be too extensive despite my best efforts. I have to bake the motherboard next. You read it right. Bake. The. Motherboard.

For the first time in 4 years, I have no machine to call my own. And it sucks. Sucks. I have a machine which I could borrow so that I’m not completely bereft, but it feels like something is missing nonetheless. I’m looking forward to building a new machine from scratch, if nothing else the HP rip-apart showed me that I really miss that side of engineering. Plugging, modding, figuring out how things go together – the whole shebang. How much I rely on the cloud can be seen in how little I needed to set up on this borrowed machine. On the flip side there are some things I distinctly feel unable to do, and I’m really getting into the mood to do them (photography updating, for example). The heart wants what it can’t quite have, I guess. But then maybe I’ll end up doing it all online, and really move into the cloud. Sounds like a pipe-dream to me.

I have way too many feeds in my Reader. It took me concentrated effort to catch up with a lot of it after the weeks of work, and that was despite at least checking the basic news feeds once a day. Man! I did not see this happening when I started with RSS a long long long time ago. As the missus asked, why not just mark a bunch of them as read? Or better yet, remove ones that I’m not really “reading”. I’ve done this. I honestly believe that I need to keep up 227 subscriptions on a constant basis. I need help.

This post doesn’t even begin to start on some interesting techie things I have thought about. Will I ever concretize that stuff?

And this theme fuckin’ rocks. That is all.

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back, computing, phd, random crap, realization, rss readers, theme, thoughts, updates

notes: copyrights and comics

Sep 23rd

Posted by SEV in staying.interested

6 comments

[Thoughts due to: io9: Who Created Spider-Man? ]

It is a deal-breaking case that has been filed against Marvel Comics, probably fueled by the recent success of Siegel vs DC for the Superman copyright (and the acquisition of Marvel by Disney too?). My own WTF was fueled by whether Spidey even belongs to this dispute (he probably doesn’t). The Superman case in itself is not completely without wtf-ness given the way the rights to Superman have been split up [link]:

Read On… »

…the Siegels have recaptured the rights to the first two weeks of the daily Superman newspaper strips, and portions of Action Comics and Superman comics. They apparently now control all depictions of Superman’s origin story, which means they now own Krypton, its fiery destruction, Jor-El and Lora, and Kal El. In 2008, the Siegels recaptured the rights to the Superman character (which includes his costume and his alter-ego of Clark Kent), Lois Lane, the Daily Planet, its gruff editor, and their love triangle. DC still owns Jimmy Olson, his ability to fly, Lex Luthor, kryptonite, and Superman’s expanded powers and origins.

Plus ALL rights revert to Siegel/Shuster (?) come 2013. Keep in mind this ruling is in spite of multiple previous rulings that the DC owned the rights to the character, and the fact that the creators had actually legally signed away the rights for $130 in 1938 “forever and all time”. Plus multiple previous not-so-small settlements by DC to the creators due to legal disputes. Admittedly I’m taking a simplified view of things, there are deep implications to the settlement.

The Kirby case, on the other hand, is a lot more wide-ranging for Marvel. Kirby worked on almost ALL Marvel’s characters (unlike the above case which is just about Superman). The dispute is over the copyrights and not trademarks, so the movies may remain unaffected (meaning the large majority won’t really care), but the comics may be significantly hit. One interesting point is that the original Kirby dispute was to do with his artwork – he never did get back all his original artwork from Marvel. Very little is said about who owns the character work he did (unlike Siegel who definitely signed his away).

Another thing that jumped out at me was that Kirby did not want to battle it out in court over copyrights. And now, suddenly, cases are being filed all over the place. I’m not really sure what the justification is when the original creator had no wish to do so. Would Kirby’s work be worth anything if Marvel did not publish/market it? Remember that Kirby has been paid for his work, has creator credit in most cases, and all this copyright business was nowhere even a year ago – when Marvel’s properties were just hitting the market. The timing for the case is impeccable given the Marvel movie roster and the acquisition.

Filing cases against the biggest players in the business is a routine matter now – maximum damage is guaranteed. For e.g. M$ has had issues with integrated browser and desktop search – even though Apple/Linux installs have the exact same strategy today! I agree that Marvel/DC may have shortchanged creators, but they must also be given credit for making their characters successful in multiple arenas. Worse of all, targeting their copyrights will first affect the fan-base that makes the movies possible – us comic book geeks. Why? We won’t get the characters we have supported any more. Is that really what their creators would like to see of their legacy?

My new series of posts via Reader. As promised. You’ve been warned.

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comics, random crap, views