I try to say a lot while saying very little. Get used to it.
Posts tagged random crap
of savita and sacrilege
Mar 15th
Posted by SEV in staying.general
‘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.
************************************
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, f
rom 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.
clubbing together a month’s worth of everything into one big gigantic post
Dec 22nd
Posted by SEV in staying.general
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.
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.
notes: copyrights and comics
Sep 23rd
Posted by SEV in staying.interested
[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]:
…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.
continually making random posts means i’m degenerating to traditional blogging
May 27th
Posted by SEV in staying.general
Moving sucks. SUCKS. Period.
And that series of long titles has been in honor of Dinosaur Comics. Bloody frickin’ awesome:
How he manages to get something pretty rockin’ everyday from the same 6 sets of images.. and not make it completely random is beyond me.
On a side note, and going back to the moving thing, I have way too much stuff for a person who’s lived here for less than 3 years. Seriously.
shera-wat the f*ck
Apr 28th
Posted by SEV in staying.aside
Coming on the heels of Dr. Shilpa Shetty , we now have this.
Like why?
Now not only does my current objective have no meaning, but the place I live in has the absolute lack of sense to honour Ms. Sherawat.
p.s. I like my wordplay in the title. A lot. Go figure.
p.p.s. Yes, I only put the picture there coz her dress starts at her navel. Go Figure.
no posts would be better than this post
Mar 17th
Posted by SEV in staying.general
I wish I could post about something interesting. Sadly, since I’m all out of ideas.. I’m just going to rant and make snide remarks about news items.. which are not necessarily news anymore.
By some quirk of fate, most news items I have read in the last few days have all been randomly crappy. There was talk about how a company that received $165 mil in aid decided to give out $170 mil in bonuses (I may have those numbers reversed) – for all those awesome executives that managed to ensure that it was heading to crash-ville at 100mph and severed brake lines.
Then there was the dude who decided to sell India back something that was stolen from her, dilly-dallied.. and finally decided (after getting cash down for them) that he wants them back.
The BJP master plan to get all the votes again is an instant classic. Promises include lotsa free things for the poor (which I guess they have to sell so that they are poor no more) and winning the IT competition with China. I am regretting my decision to better myself and get rich now. Methinks it would be a good idea to go back, post-PhD, earn nothing, and freeload off the government. Of course, I have to have a daughter.. given this awesome scheme (also BJP). The Congress has been basking in the limelight of their amazing achievements over the last 5 years including how they facilitated making a movie about slumdogs. It is a contender for the anthem too. See now, this is not good. The BJP is taking this ’slumdog’ moniker away from us! Do not vote for them!
Random cases continue to be filed in India – the latest is how ‘Slumdog’ managed to get an answer wrong. Seriously? When I say it was ‘well-made’, I’m granting it HUGE leeway in the story department. This is, of course, on the heels of the barber hair-stylist controversy. I just wish I could be around when the case is finally dealt with.
The iPhone 3.0 will finally have copy-paste. Apple has managed to make a smartphone that is slightly more on par with current state-of-the-art. Joy! I can see the fanboys salivating about how Apple has managed to re-invent the idea already. Funny how they are playing catch-up to the Pre. Meanwhile, Macbooks are pretty much the best machines in the market (in terms of price and components). Someone please give me a viable alternative. Please. I don’t want to settle for second-best.
Hot on the heels of the genius of Dev D, Anurag Kashyap has managed to release ‘Gulaal‘. While not as overwhelming, it is nevertheless a fine effort by a fine filmmaker. Kashyap has the potential to really make a difference in this industry, I’m hoping he is finally allowed to. I hear rumors that ‘Paanch’ may be released too. Way back then, the censor board decided that the Indian audience cannot handle it. Its good to know that they think we’ve grown up. Don’t get me started on censorship in India. I do not expect a ‘Dev D’, but it would be interesting to see what Kashyap started as.
I can’t think of any other irritating news that all of you have already read, so I’m just going to go back to doing something else. Maybe inspiration will strike soon. This ‘newsreader’ bit is pretty silly.
