Not the crappy Michael Douglas film but a brilliant short story by Arthur C. Clarke which was later adapted into an epic movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley fucking Kubrick. The very movie I got the header image for this blog from.
Read it here.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Dinner With Friends: My name is Wiseguy
9:00 pm
Dinner, with friends.
9:07 pm
AG sits across me but I'd prefer he sat somewhere else so that XY would sit across me and I could look at her instead.
9:25 pm
There are nine conversations happening between eight people, I'm in two of those, only one of these is going two ways but it's only about deciding what to order, AG is not a part of any of the nine. And there are awkward silences interrupted by more scattered, simultaneous conversations.
9:45 pm
My food's not here yet, the talk's all about work and gossip, I'm bored. So is AG by the looks of it.
9:47 pm
Me: AG..
AG: Yeah?
Me: AG!
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Dinner, with friends.
9:07 pm
AG sits across me but I'd prefer he sat somewhere else so that XY would sit across me and I could look at her instead.
9:25 pm
There are nine conversations happening between eight people, I'm in two of those, only one of these is going two ways but it's only about deciding what to order, AG is not a part of any of the nine. And there are awkward silences interrupted by more scattered, simultaneous conversations.
9:45 pm
My food's not here yet, the talk's all about work and gossip, I'm bored. So is AG by the looks of it.
9:47 pm
Me: AG..
AG: Yeah?
Me: ......
AG smiles, passes his hand through his hair shyly.
9:50 pm
Me: AG
AG: C!
Me: ........
AG smiles, he's enjoying this. I must play it cool.
9:53 pm
Me: AG
AG: .......
Me: AG
AG: What?
Me: ..........
I sense a little irritation. Are we ready? Must test.
9:54 pm
Me: AG
AG replies with a cold stare. Yep, we're ready. All systems go.
9:55 pm
Me: AG!
AG: Fuuuuuuck! Kya hai bey?!
Me: AG, OG, lo ji, suno ji,
main hoon manmouji,
main hoon manmouji,
karta hoon main jo woh tum bhi karo ji,
one two ka four
four two ka one!
My name is Ga'-an*
My name is Ga'-an
sau kilo ka vazan,
mera naam hai Ga'-an
AG: FML
-------------
More Dinner With Friends
*The G in AG rhymes with Lakhan. Not exactly though but the sound's pretty much similar.
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Friday, December 10, 2010
Make Music, Not Powerpoints
This is what I've spent a lot of my time at work playing with. Months, definitely.
I make arrangements which make me feel like I'm Daft Punk. Or a guy who makes elevator music or the music you hear in retail spaces.
Here's the ToneMatrix created by André Michelle, from his laboratory of genius inventions. Hope you create beautiful music with this.
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I make arrangements which make me feel like I'm Daft Punk. Or a guy who makes elevator music or the music you hear in retail spaces.
Here's the ToneMatrix created by André Michelle, from his laboratory of genius inventions. Hope you create beautiful music with this.
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Friday, December 3, 2010
Feel Lucky Punk?
A year and a few months ago, I started the cricket blog. I had a vague idea of what I'd be writing there; the first few posts there show me going ahead although not in one direction all the time.
Friends wouldn't visit despite all the posting on FB, there's only so much cricket a non-fan can take. So the idea was to lure poor suckers to the site.
I had this great idea about using this scene from a movie I love, Dirty Harry.
I searched and I downloaded this image:
That wire in the background sure looks ugly. So I had to remove it. Thanks to my limited Photoshop skills, the building facade behind the wire which I would've had to patch up would've looked pretty bad as well. So the building had to go. I magnified the image till I could see warts and all, then went about selecting and erasing little corridors around Harry Callahan's frame. Select. Erase. Repeat. Ah, all cleared. Now just select a whole bunch of the building together and delete it.
Since there's no backdrop, I didn't see the need for the colour. Too gaudy that colour on a white background. Desaturate. Adjust contrast till it can pass off for stylish.
I put a nonsensical blog post together but couldn't work the immortal line into the body. The 'feel lucky, Punk?' question. So I added that to the image. And I added a 'Well... do ya?' for good measure to reinforce that question. In bold, stencil font. To look bad ass. Hey presto this image:
I searched a combination of related keywords, alternate versions of the dialogue, etc to find that no one had done this version of that Clint Eastwood image ever. My retelling was completely new, original. When you consider the size of the Internet and the amount of data present, putting something old in a way that's never been done before feels good.
Do you feel lucky punk is the name of the image I created and it's the same in the meta tags of the image. I got quite a lot of hits thanks to that image, very crucial to the ego at that fledgling stage that it brought visitors to the blog.
It did well for itself, it appeared on page one of Google Images for Do You Feel Lucky Punk, it was the first result on page one at a point, I'm not kidding. Then it spread. Other much more frequently updated blogs used the image, their greater frequency automatically rating the image they've used higher. And they didn't simply link to the image. They went to the trouble of saving a copy and re-uploading that to their own blog like any blogger would.
The same license I had to take an image from a movie and turn it into a new piece of content is the license bloggers have to use the image off my blog. To add to that, my domain mapping with WordPress expired sometime around June this year and due to a combination of events, I couldn't renew it.
The links for fckingblog.com all became invalid, now having been replaced by fckingblog.wordpress.com. The image whenever it showed up in Google Images would have led to a broken URL, leading to unfavourable ratings on the search ranking. But other images from around the same time Do You Feel Lucky was posted still kept bringing in visitors. I have no idea how to salvage this image in that situation. From then the race was lost, the clones took over. I searched images for do you feel lucky punk and this very image came up on three different blogs (cropped version in the third one), I'm on page four of the results but I'm yet to see a thumbnail with the link to my blog under it.
I've had other images bringing me in traffic and one relatively recently posted image is very close to overtaking Do You Feel Lucky on the all time list. I hope it does feel lucky because I thought it deserved to have it's story told.
Tweet
Friends wouldn't visit despite all the posting on FB, there's only so much cricket a non-fan can take. So the idea was to lure poor suckers to the site.
I had this great idea about using this scene from a movie I love, Dirty Harry.
I searched and I downloaded this image:
That wire in the background sure looks ugly. So I had to remove it. Thanks to my limited Photoshop skills, the building facade behind the wire which I would've had to patch up would've looked pretty bad as well. So the building had to go. I magnified the image till I could see warts and all, then went about selecting and erasing little corridors around Harry Callahan's frame. Select. Erase. Repeat. Ah, all cleared. Now just select a whole bunch of the building together and delete it.
Since there's no backdrop, I didn't see the need for the colour. Too gaudy that colour on a white background. Desaturate. Adjust contrast till it can pass off for stylish.
I put a nonsensical blog post together but couldn't work the immortal line into the body. The 'feel lucky, Punk?' question. So I added that to the image. And I added a 'Well... do ya?' for good measure to reinforce that question. In bold, stencil font. To look bad ass. Hey presto this image:
I searched a combination of related keywords, alternate versions of the dialogue, etc to find that no one had done this version of that Clint Eastwood image ever. My retelling was completely new, original. When you consider the size of the Internet and the amount of data present, putting something old in a way that's never been done before feels good.
Do you feel lucky punk is the name of the image I created and it's the same in the meta tags of the image. I got quite a lot of hits thanks to that image, very crucial to the ego at that fledgling stage that it brought visitors to the blog.
It did well for itself, it appeared on page one of Google Images for Do You Feel Lucky Punk, it was the first result on page one at a point, I'm not kidding. Then it spread. Other much more frequently updated blogs used the image, their greater frequency automatically rating the image they've used higher. And they didn't simply link to the image. They went to the trouble of saving a copy and re-uploading that to their own blog like any blogger would.
The same license I had to take an image from a movie and turn it into a new piece of content is the license bloggers have to use the image off my blog. To add to that, my domain mapping with WordPress expired sometime around June this year and due to a combination of events, I couldn't renew it.
The links for fckingblog.com all became invalid, now having been replaced by fckingblog.wordpress.com. The image whenever it showed up in Google Images would have led to a broken URL, leading to unfavourable ratings on the search ranking. But other images from around the same time Do You Feel Lucky was posted still kept bringing in visitors. I have no idea how to salvage this image in that situation. From then the race was lost, the clones took over. I searched images for do you feel lucky punk and this very image came up on three different blogs (cropped version in the third one), I'm on page four of the results but I'm yet to see a thumbnail with the link to my blog under it.
I've had other images bringing me in traffic and one relatively recently posted image is very close to overtaking Do You Feel Lucky on the all time list. I hope it does feel lucky because I thought it deserved to have it's story told.
Tweet
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Dinner With Friends: Chicken where it shouldn't be (Little NSFW)
A night in a different city, on a dinner with friends. A city I'm in on a work trip, just for a day, so this dinner is pretty much the only time I can spend catching up with friends.
We decide on a place where we can eat and talk. Eat eat, Talk talk and also Afford afford. Sad thing we couldn't Drink drink or even just drink.
It's all looking good and it tastes fine but then wait a minute, what's this? The friends inform me the paneer is normally rubbery. Haha, guys but this one's a bit too much.... hold on.. can't be.. is this.. yes it is..*spittle flying.. it's CHICKEN! What. The. Fuck!
We decide on a place where we can eat and talk. Eat eat, Talk talk and also Afford afford. Sad thing we couldn't Drink drink or even just drink.
It's all looking good and it tastes fine but then wait a minute, what's this? The friends inform me the paneer is normally rubbery. Haha, guys but this one's a bit too much.... hold on.. can't be.. is this.. yes it is..*spittle flying.. it's CHICKEN! What. The. Fuck!
Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com
A good read this: Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com
One of the many, many, many articles you find on this topic, especially on sites like WSJ, NYT and the Guardian etc where the Internet is still thought of as a big confounding monster while Indian sites focus on the outrage on day to day issues.
I agree that making people sign in/verify an identity would make them more responsible in their comments but it's not a rule that applies everywhere. It's that very anonymity that also sees some people express strong thoughts, share stories which they wouldn't share otherwise. Heck, people will help people or at least take that first step towards helping others anonymously but not in the view of others.
Do the negatives posed by trolls outweigh the positives? Leave a comment. Gangbanger, I'm looking at you.
*******
Originally posted this on BCC! by mistake because I didn't select which blog I wanted to post it to on Blogger from the tiny dropdown box in the top corner where I would've totally seen it. Thank you Google Chrome's Blogger Extension, you take me three steps ahead and two steps back.
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