Sunday Blues

Another father-son moment:

"You've been buying english newspapers for a week but I've never seen you read them. Are you reading them or are you wasting the money?"

"Yes dad I am reading."

"Well then go read it now. Don't watch TV all the time."

"But I've read it already!"

"Everything?"

"No I just skimmed it..."

"Then read it again, this time, in detail."

"But dad! I-"

"No buts. Go. Now. And hand over the TV remote to me."

Perfect Sunday.

***

This holiday thing is getting a bit exhausting. Then again, I'm not exactly on a holiday, there's no next semester for me, I'm technically a B.E grad once I get my provisional certificate. And then I am falling into a deep and empty void of nothing.

Seriously, will this holiday ever end?

***

In my quest to avoid boredom in the unconventional way (conventional way would be watching TV, gaming and just sitting on the couch and staring at the roof), I have been experimenting for the last few weeks. I've been trying sketching, my childhood hobby, but my nemesis, an 8 year old who claims to be my nephew is interrupting the process. I was going to make my comeback in deviantART with my drawn and inked Batman sketch, but the brat tore it off while I was sleeping and took it home to stick it in his wall. He'll probably show off to his friends that he drew it.

But I got my revenge. I've tuned out all the cartoon channels from his TV set. You don't wanna mess with the Eggman. I'm pure evil.

Next is my new found passion to read newspapers. Not that I didn't have newspapers before but now I'm buying english language newspapers and tamil activists might protest against me for not helping tamil to grow. Sorry, but tamil newspapers are marginally costlier with less content when compared to english dailies. And the editorials in The Hindu are a learning experience. Do you know that 80 crore people in our country live on Rs. 20 a day? That's less than how much we spend for a coffee at a coffee house in the city.

Then came cooking. It actually started out like this. When I try to watch TV at around 6, my mom will snatch the remote from me and watch a cooking show (somehow all channels have a cooking show around that time), and I thought 'What the hell? Does it matter what I watch, as long as I watch it in a TV?'. TV is entertaining and educational. Even Kalaignar feels that way.

Then I started coming across many cooking recipes while browsing for playboy centerfolds arts and paintings, and I took it as a sign. I cooked Paneer Shabnam and for the first time I liked something I cooked myself (except Maggi noodles). Then I tried to cook Chinese with Schezwan Noodles but I didn't get the sauce right. Its okay, baby steps.

***

This anti-corruption thing is actually gaining momentum and the only thing its missing is a skinny bearded yoga guru who can't stop blinking his left eye. Actually we do have one of those, and its name is Baba Ramdev, who is fondly called 'dhongi baba' by Mahatma Gandhi's grandson. Aptly named one would say. I don't like anyone uses religious means to a political end. Dhongi baba is making ridiculous demands half of which cannot be done overnight and the other half is too silly to even consider a possibility. You've gotta blame Congress though, for acting like a wuss with him from the very beginning. He's a yoga instructor for heavens sake! You don't send 4 cabinet ministers to make nice with a guy like him. 

If you think he's doing something noble, let me tell you this. The Ramlila grounds, which was used for the protest, was actually booked by the dhongi baba claiming that he was going to conduct a yoga campaign. He tried to make under the table negotiations with Congress and if Congress ministers didn't read out his letter in the press conference on the night of the hunger fast, the so called fast would've ended in a day. 

BJP thinks its right to back him, but its gradually giving its ground as the opposition party to these so called civil activists. Its one thing to support Anna Hazare, but if BJP gives support to ignorant manipulators like the baba, it will be hard to please him if/when BJP comes to power. A word of caution to Congress: an RSS backed religious leader is a loaded weapon with a hair trigger.

***

Okay I've written something about current affairs. Now will you believe that I've been reading newspapers?

Until next time.

The Eggman.

The Lesser Evil

MMMMUUUUAAAAHHHH :*


This kiss is for Mylo, my dear computer, who's SMPS was fried by TNEB's notorious voltage surge last Friday. She was finally fixed today and during the last 4-5 days during which she was knocked out cold, I missed her very much and realized how much internet is essential to us and how costly GPRS is.

***

 

This image was made when JJ became CM of Tamilnadu the 2nd time and it was actually used in the ADMK website. Who would've expected those fellas to have a sense of humour?

On the day of voting I was very much indecisive about who I should vote. No doubt ADMK is as corrupt as DMK is. But the deciding factor was that the whole of Karunanithi's family is knee deep in the muck of corruption and it seemed that it might be good to give JJ a chance and see if she has seen the error of her ways.

I am pretty sure everyone except ADMK was surprised by the fact that they actually won. Even though everyone hoped that DMK shouldn't win, they thought it was impossible since DMK has proven its mettle in rigging elections. Alas, if it wasn't for BHEL's homemade electronic ballot device, DMK might have won this election (I've always wanted to use the word 'alas' in a sentence). Kudos to the election commission for conducting this election with least noise and hindrance to the public and at the same time having 80% voter turnout. with respect to voter turnout, any number above 50% is good.

To make a list of surprises,

1. ADMK's huge majority
2. DMK's low vote share
3. TN people's nerve to stand up against corruption
4. The look on Vadivelu's face

 Actually, Vadivelu's face should be on top of the list.

***

It has become almost a common thing that all major games these days cannot be fit inside a commonly available 4.7 GB DVD. Games like  GTA 4, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Total War Shogun 2 well exceed the 10 GB mark while most other "serious games average around 6-8 GB. However there are some games which can be fit inside a CD and still get higher ratings in comparison to these games. And I'm not talking about Super Mario and Contra. Here are the top 5 so-called casual games of the recent times that pwned the serious games.

5. Angry Birds

One of the highest selling iTunes app of all time, when Angry Birds for PC came out I found that it had the niche to bring out the person inside you who never gave up from beating the level even after seeing the game over screen so many times over and over. The objective of the game is pretty simple - knock out a bunch of funnily drawn pigs perched precariously on top of unstable structures. The difficulty ramps up pretty smoothly and you should be a master of projectile physics to get 3 stars in every level of the game.

4. Plants vs. Zombies

 Plants vs. Zombies was the first game that I've played in the tower defense genre. Brain eating zombies have taken over the planet and you have a bunch of plants that can protect you from them. You get easily hooked to this game as I found that my time was better spent playing this game than to prepare for TCS placement test (oh, that explains why I didn't get placed in TCS).

3. Anomaly: Warzone Earth

 Anomaly is a hybrid of strategy tower defense games. The alien invasion theme also follows in this game but all instead of zombies you have huge mechanical things that zap your ass to kingdom come and instead of plants you have tanks and missile launchers and people talking in British accent. This is a thinking man's game and the gorgeous visuals will protect you from your friends making fun of you for playing children's games.

2. World of Goo

Being a casual game hater for most of my younger and ignorant life as a gamer, World of Goo was the first casual game that I played because of the rave reviews it got. It was designed by 2 programmers who used to work for the gaming mogul Electronic Arts. They started a company called 2D boy and their first product was this game. The game used simple mechanics such as gravity and wind. Numerous tiny balls known as goo balls can be used to construct makeshift towers and bridges and they should be made so that they lead to a pipe's open end. Structures should be made with minimum number of goo balls because the more goo balls you save yields you more points. All this means endless hours of puzzle solving fun.

1. Super Meat Boy

Forget about everything I've said above. None of these games even come close to greatness as Super Meat Boy does. THIS IS THE SHIT.


***

Yawn. Oh so sleepy. Until next time.

Super Egg Boy.

I'm ba...no I'm not gonna say that again

This is strange. I've been here before. Oh yeah now I remember, its my blog!

I know what you're thinking and I can explain why I haven't been blogging. Its just that for the last one year I was tailing Osama in a special joint operation with the CIA and finally we killed that douchebag. So now I finally got some time to blog.

No! I was just being lazy you know...playing video games, watching TV and movies and other stuff and I forgot to write about all the embarrassing stuff I did in my everyday life.

But now I have realized the truth. I'm a grown up now (sort of), so I shouldn't spend my time playing games and watching TV. I should take charge of my life and perform some responsibilities. Here's what I'm gonna do now. I'm gonna find a job, maybe do some research about higher studies, try my luck with GRE, apply to some universities abroad and decide what I'm gonna do with my life. 

Oh wait a second...I got a job, I aced GRE and I have applied to some foreign universities! So I guess I'll just figure out what I'm gonna do with my life...I'll just stay home, play video games, watch TV until I get my call letter. But I guess that's what I was doing already.

***

Hope that answered what I've been doing since my long absence from blogging. Right now I got almost everything an early ty-ager would want from his life. I am twenTY one, making me a TY ager. See I just made up a word for my convenience just like that guy in that HTC Pulse mobile phone ad who makes up a word called zoot for the convenience of a game of scrabble. Do ad film makers actually think before making ads like that? Isn't it just ridiculous, thinking that if you have a mobile phone with an internet connection you can do anything? Maybe even start a revolution to topple a government? (an exception would be Libya...think about it for a second, their government was so weak that a social networking site was responsible for its downfall.)

Another ridiculous one is the Kellogg's Special K ad in which they say if they eat that stuff twice everyday for two weeks you can lose *upto* two pounds. Then the narrator with the cool voice says that research has shown that by having healthy eating habits people can become slim. Now, the people who watch this ad maybe stupid, but they gotta be real dumbasses if they haven't figured this out themselves. If that piece of information was found out using research then the researchers were real dumbasses.

But the ads which really make my blood boil are the cosmetic ones which really sound as if to make women have a really low self esteem. There's this anti-ageing cream ad in which two couples are having dinner together and one of the women tells the other that there is no need for such creams at the age of 30. 5 years later the woman who uses the advertised cream is living happily with her husband while the other woman is sad because her husband doesn't pay attention to her enough. And the happy woman says its not too late and gives her the cream. What is wrong with this ad? First of all, here's a little information for some woman out there, if your husband doesn't pay attention to you, its probably because your his wife, its bound to happen. You can dress skimpily, that might help (but not in public places, that's perceived a little differently). Second of all, if your husband does not love you because your old, then he probably didn't love you for your character, you should figure that out yourself. So you can divorce him, get yourself an older husband who will find you new, and your ex-husband can get himself a newer wife who will eventually get old, but hey, you'll still get half of his assets and alimony!

And oh the fairness creams! First they said you didn't look fair so you needed to use that cream. Now they're saying that your face is fair but your body doesn't match the fairness of your face so you need another cream for that! Now if these ads were shown in the US or any other country with black people having an appreciable amount of self esteem they'd have sued these companies for offending them by pointing out racist differences. Well if these ads could be applauded for not showing any sort of discrimination then that would be gender based descrimination because there are fairness creams for men also. As Virat Kohli points out, performance off the pitch matters just as much as on the pitch in his Fair and Lovely ad. If Martin Luther King thought that having a darker skin complexion is in someway not good then black people might still be considered inferior to white people. Which is in fact true in India as I know of some people darker in complexion made fun of because they are darker in complexion. Black chicks would dig them if they went to the US or the Caribbean.

So what I am trying to say is, ad makers should take some social responsibility when making ads and not just do what they are told to. The whole strategy of advertising is to make people believe that people think they need something even if they don't and scare the living shit out of them into making them buy. If you look at the moral of the story for each ad film this is what it will be: If you are not fair then use a fairness cream; otherwise you'll never get a date, never fall in love, never get married and you will die a virgin. If you don't have this mobile phone then you won't be able to update your facebook status and your other friends with cooler phone will think that your so yesteryear. If you don't have a pension plan, after you retire, your children will abandon you and you will live in the streets. If you don't have insurance you will die and your family will be left nothing.

Hope you think about why you are buying something before buying it before you fall for this corporate conspiracy.

***

"I decided to keep this post short, so that I don't run out of stuff to write about next time. And hopefully next time wont come a month later."

This was how I ended my last post on Feb 2010. I'm frankly surprised you haven't killed me for my lies. I'm even more surprised you have taken the time off your day to read my blog. Thank you very much. I'm hoping to blog even more. Lets see how that works out.

The Eggman.