you know you're a success when...

people make fun of you.





Long live blogging!

huh?

Immediately following my zombie post, Google Adsense changed it's ads to water purifiers and desalinators. Do they know something I don't?

yet another obsession

Seeing another pattern here... started with Resident Evil and Apocalypse, then Edgar Wright's Shaun & Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, then back the the original master George Romero's Land of the Dead on Sunday, and now back to back Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead (original 1978 version, in German)
Apart from Night of the Living Dead, which I still haven't acquired, there's just Russo's Living Dead series left to watch... and oh yes, I almost forgot, I still have to watch Evil Dead and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness which is sitting somewhere on my HDD.

I remember I did this with books, going through three or four a day when I really got into the mood... movies is something new, though. Call it an unhealthy reaction to unlimited download capabilities. Like net porn, in a way...

Interestingly enough, there've been no nightmares, not even the fun zombie-mod in FPS types which I usually immensely enjoy...

and in the meantime,

can't believe I actually did that... horrify myself sometimes I do

What do you think of me?

Ever wondered what people really think about you? I just got to know. Granted it's not a very large audience - but very telling, especially when just 1 or 2 traits emerge.

It's something called Johari.
Nothing to do with KJo or any associated creatures; It's a prog developed by John Somebody and Harry Someone.

Setup your window, and forward it to your friends / enemies.

If you want to know all the good stuff, go here, and if you want to know how evil you truly are, here.

Me?
You tell me!
Good Stuff Here
Bad Stuff Here

Results so far -

Arena (known to self and others) aloof, selfish, dispassionate	Blind Spot (known only to others) inflexible, violent, vulgar, withdrawn, hostile, inane, cruel, distant, blasé, chaotic, impatient, insensitive, smug, overdramatic, inattentive, unreliable, cold
Façade (known only to self) timid, cynical, passive	Unknown (known to nobody) incompetent, intolerant, cowardly, glum, stupid, simple, insecure, irresponsible, lethargic, unhappy, unhelpful, needy, unimaginative, brash, ignorant, irrational, childish, boastful, imperceptive, weak, embarrassed, loud, vacuous, panicky, unethical, self-satisfied, rash, dull, predictable, callous, foolish, humourless

Dominant Traits

80% of people agree that ashishtewari is aloof

All Percentages

incompetent (0%) intolerant (0%) inflexible (20%) timid (0%) cowardly (0%) violent (20%) aloof (80%) glum (0%) stupid (0%) simple (0%) insecure (0%) irresponsible (0%) vulgar (20%) lethargic (0%) withdrawn (40%) hostile (20%) selfish (20%) unhappy (0%) unhelpful (0%) cynical (0%) needy (0%) unimaginative (0%) inane (20%) brash (0%) cruel (20%) ignorant (0%) irrational (0%) distant (40%) childish (0%) boastful (0%) blasé (20%) imperceptive (0%) chaotic (20%) impatient (20%) weak (0%) embarrassed (0%) loud (0%) vacuous (0%) panicky (0%) unethical (0%) insensitive (40%) self-satisfied (0%) passive (0%) smug (20%) rash (0%) dispassionate (20%) overdramatic (40%) dull (0%) predictable (0%) callous (0%) inattentive (20%) unreliable (20%) cold (20%) foolish (0%) humourless (0%)

Created by the Nohari Window on 18.4.2007, using data from 5 respondents.
You can make your own Nohari Window, or view ashishtewari's full data.

trolling

Once in a while I come across stuff that suddenly makes it all seem worthwhile...


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

he he he.

who's going to remember?

Saw this a while back, and while I laughed my ass off then, seeing it again now made me think.



What's the point? Why am I even doing this? A banner that's seen for barely a tenth of a second for one day... and forgotten in ten seconds if it was ever noticed to begin with...
What's the point? When you get right down to it, what's the fuckin point?

I want to do more than just this.
I want to do stuff that changes the way people look at this medium, that changes the way people live.
Stuff that makes a difference to Life.
An approved 468x60 animated gif on the homepage is not it.

I don't know... just tired. maybe a little disillusioned, but mostly tired.
I need a break.

I think you know me

Welcome, Ashish
You are connected to 50,071,559 people through 227 friends.

Fifty. Million. People.
The Earth's population is 6,525,170,264.
I am now connected to nearly 1% of the Earth. My circle of influence has become globally significant.
Do you realize that every hundredth person I meet on the planet, anywhere, will know someone who knows me?

I am so full of crap, yet at the same time strangely overawed by it too.

this blog is fattening

43% of my readers want to have my baby, and 29% got gas.

either, way, the primary effect of this blog has been bloating.

Should I put a surgeon general's warning on it?

galactic jihad

Thought of the AVP scenario - and the entire furore over what would happen if they reached the surface (cue dramatic, frightening music score) and realized we're perfectly fine. We're way more dangerous that anything they could ever be...

we don't need to worry about them -

as long as we can create them.

Visualize the hive. hundreds of aliens, concentrated in a small area. Vulnerable eggs. Facehuggers. and most importantly, the Queen. Very close.
And sealed in the epoxy where he has been placed after capture, an embryo within him, the bomber wakes up. Performs the last rites, says his prayers. And as the first twitch in his chest happens, presses the button, laughing.
Boom.
Scratch one hive.
Reload and repeat.

remembrances of things ahead

Doesn't feel real.
I know about the transit sickness. I was ready for the heat and the cold, the constant rain dripping through the trees, the billions of strange microorganisms in the air, the water, the food, the smell of the air, the headaches, everything... except this feeling of deadly lethargy.

Psi warfare is murder on your head, but I'm starting to think... spiritually.
Crap.

After the last recon, I got out, stumbled into the trees, and just fell into the damp grass and mud. And I'm just lying here now. Wishing my body deeper into the mud, slowly settling in, until it closes over my head, blocking out light, air, life.
Blocking out the tachyon static.
Blocking out the voice in my head that's all the more terrible for being my own, blocking out the deja vu.

I used to laugh at the old time-travel movies at first, until I stopped because I could hear hysteria after a point. They had it so easy... They though you are something separate, standing outside Time, learning from your past and changing your decisions.
They didn't know memory can't make the trip, did they? The first experiments were horrible failures, with the intrepid time-explorer arriving bristling with gear, prepared for any possibility, and his mind the mind of an infant, a foetus.
Blank, brain-dead idiots. Most died.

It works now... in a way. Dunno if it's worth it, though...
I was born with a genetically engineered mutation that lets my midbrain detect positive-energy tachyonic radiation. Tachyons exist in pairs; and sending a negative-energy one back will simultaeously create a forward-energy one coming ahead. And my midbrain can feel them, and after nearly twenty years of training, implants, and force-feeding on identification and translation algorithms, I can understand them. They come through as memory.

So... I can remember what I'm going to be doing in the past, from my remembering that remembrance from the future.

Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

If trying to visualize this knots your thought process into a mobius strip, imagine how I feel. I have to actually do it. And do it fast enough, and well enough, to keep me alive when the bielek are doing their best spread me and my crew all over the sky or ground.
The crew. They're the ones that have it easy. They come in blank and get reprogrammed, born again. All they need to do is sense and move their weapons, their machines.
They don't need to remember. This is their world.
Me? I'm trying to live three lives... What I have, what I had, and, hopefully, if I do my job right, what I will have.
Enough with this shit. My headache's bad enough on it's own.

Sarkar is still catatonic, and it's been nearly three hours. Idiot. When you esp-guide a missile, you become the missile. You need to pull back into your own head before impact. As far as his mind is concerned... he's still a gradually expanding cloud of smoke and metal fragments a couple of thousand feet up. His body's being here in one piece is irrelevant.

Evening

We took the boat through the jungle... there are no roads, but don't let that stop you... the sooner you understand your territory, the better your chances of making it back in one piece. If you're really lucky, still more or less sane.

It's full monsoon, and we can barely tell night from day. It's always a wet gray twilight, with jungle noises and the steady hiss and drip of rain. You can nearly forget where you are, when you are... but deja vu is always there, a fishhook caught in my head, reminding me always of the war spread out over the planet, across most of the millenium.

I wonder what the current inhabitants make of us? We must be their gods and demons by now, present through time immemorial, always at war... I might find a century old-temple today where there'll be a frieze or sculpture depicting the the battle I'm going to fight tomorrow, a hundred years ago.
History isn't what it used to be anymore.

Flashes. Deja vu as it happens. You remember what's happening right now, as it happens. Hopefully, when I remembered it the first time, back at mission-prep base, I understood the situation well enough to prepare myself for it. Not very comforting when you're actually there, rounding a bend through the hanging leaves, wondering if there's razor wire strung across and did I remember it then, and will I remember it now...
which is probably why I'm taking us so slow...
And quiet.

We stopped at a cave on the side for a while, ate. Hundreds of some kind of insects scurried about, underfoot, crunching occasionally under our feet, and for a brief moment some kind of large animal appeared through through the undergrowth, looked at us for a moment, perfectly calm, and melted back into the trees again. Everything seems strangely dreamlike in this light... but I'm definitely hungry.

We reached back to base just in time to see our squad leader get chewed to ribbons in a strafe on the riverbank, dead white lines ripping through the vines on the other side of the bend. They were using glaser-like rounds, and completely silent. Soft thuds as they hit the earth, hit the human body, but when they blossom inside you at mach 5, the exit wound tears out your flesh and bone on the opposite side with a sound like ripping silk. Ripping wet silk. A grisly, poignant sound.
This is what we are.
Bags of blood and fibre. Fragile, delicate, and somehow, twisting the laws of the universe, we have become it's masters... but the universe, too, never forgets to extract that price.

Flash of memory. The fire came from two points, on the bank, but there was a third on top of the rise beyond the bAnk... not a gunport, but something else... communicator, or maybe an OP.
Will not risk it, though; even a single observer could do a lot of damage from that vantage point before we get it. And it's not like there's any point catching it either... there's nothing new, nothing left for them to say.

This is a bonus, the premonition. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have remembered the third point. Or maybe it was the sight of the three, not two, psionic tracker missiles packed in their nest in the boat that triggered the flash. Either way, I'm grateful.
And I get to live some more.

The first two are a classic textbook strike, taking out the gunships under the trees. The third leaps into the sky, spreading it's wings, balancing on a thin blue flame, somehow just clearing the missile vector. Every time I watch one of the bielek gunships fly, I'm struck by how silent - and how beautiful, how streamlimed, they look. The sun breaks through the cloud cover for a moment, and we're suddenly bathed in dazzling, after the rain-shadowed gloom of the day, sunset light.

There's a prickle on my neck, and memory floods, violently, painfully.
On pure adrenaline reflex, in one movement, I twist the radar sheet behind me into an angle; a patch of sunlight flashes across the river, and illuminates a single bielek on this side of the bank, chaingun in its hands, eyes screwed shut against the dazzle of the sun's reflection, wings already swinging up into takeoff; then he's torn to pieces in the small-arms fire.

I know it's nearly over now, and the last of the lethargy vanishes. The first part of the mission is almost over; I remember that, too.

Their bird climbs higher and higher, nearly vertically but tracing out long, elongated curves trying to shake off the missile; but this isn't dumb machinery, it's one of my own people's minds in there, and he's not letting go. The air is surprisingly clear; we can watch the chase for a while, getting smaller and smaller, but the actual kill is just a muted flash of orange in the clouds.

We've already docked and in the camp before the little pieces of metal patter down, just ahead of the quiet rain that starts as the sun disappears.

Social networks and you

Social networks touched my life several times today, unrelatedly - A news article about teenagers forsaking Myspace for Lent; a series of responses to a request for advice on orkut; a new widget on this blog (see the sidebar) that lets readers add scraps on my orkut; and a daily horoscope that advised me to reflect on past relationships and what I've learned.
It suddenly hit me that the people I ask for advice, for example - or any time when I need to get in touch with people that I'm not interacting with daily - I turn to my online networks first of all. Which means people who are not on them - or are infrequently on them - are virtually non-existent in my life.
It's... insidious. Because there are so many people there anyway, immediate purposes get served... until one day you realize that there were once people who played a very important role in your life, years ago, that for no discernible reason you fell completely out of touch with.
It's a new caste system, the haves... and the have-nots.

the rush continues

Slightly scary. My game obsession is back. The last time I looked at the clock, it was 4 AM and I'd just shot down two entire squadrons of B-17s. Yup, they're the ones with tailgunners, waisgunners, and even a friggin' nacelle gunner. and I shot down twenty. And as of this morning I acquired NFS:Underground, Hitman, RA2:Yuri's Revenge and Caesar III to add onto the ever-growing pile of games to be tested sitting on my PC, where HL2: Ep1 is beginning to practically vibrate in anticipation. Damn I need to clear out a couple of dozen GB. Talking of which - I took stock and realized over the last 60 days I've aquired 149 divx movies. If I'd legitimately bought them, I'd have spent close to 50 grand.
Oh Lord, won't you buy me, an external HDD?

charging up

I guess this is why people get into fights... it's a rush.
Got into an argument with a autowalla last evening - he didn't want to go where I wanted - which, after phases of sitting there and refusing to move, to ordering him to the nearest police thana, to yelling in his face, and ending with him throwing back the fare at me in a display of le grande attitude, I went back home highly shaken & stirred but also extremely proud of myself. I hate confrontations like this normally but somehow went a little nuts last evening... after which I managed to shoot down not one, but two, A-20C Boston fighterbombers within fifteen minutes. My first kills, after nearly 3 days of playing IL2: Sturmovik.
Just as well. I was beginning to wonder why I ever bought that joystick.

I wonder what this would do to my FPS game performance?

And Lilah, I so completely know what you feel now...

social networks

greater than the sum of its parts

that's what I look like on the other side of the 17" window to the world, the monitor screen that's become so much a part of life it's beginning to feel like an extension of my own eyes now
but I still feel sometimes that never mind the sum, each of the parts is becoming greater than the source
Yahoo avatars, Gtalk and Gmail that knows who you are and who you talk to all the time, anywhere you go, and won't let you hide; MSN, meebo, Y!M will ding away incessantly in the background over your work, your games, your movie, and your music; outlook reminders pop up like with a sound like smug cherubs; gunshot-ricochets of Y!M's telling you you have new mail.
Then it's the apps you use - updates, expirations, registrations, ads, newsletters, feature disablement, cracks, hacks, patches, bugs and bug fixes, UGs... somewhere in the world are a bunch of servers that know you, what you do, who you are, what you like, and will not hesitate to use that info any way they can to complete their mission objectives; to make you spend.
And the human interfaces. Strangers trolling through orkut, friendster, ryze, linkedin. Your blog that suddenly starts collecting escort-service ads in comments. scraps that are text pictures of extraordinarily cheesy Archies cards sentiments.
Targeted ads in your mailbox
Spam SMSs
mailers
in-game ads custom made for you
bank alerts
payment reminders
calls, calls, calls
skype dings

My IP probably has a greater presence in the world than I do now

duh. Tell me something I don't know.

Your Personality is Very Rare (INTJ)

Your personality type is logical, uncompromising, independent, and nonconformist. Only about 3% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 4% of all men. You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging.

How Rare Is Your Personality?

random

Two travelling Honda salesmen. Abhijeet jumps off the train in the early morning light, running along the platform, laughing, happy. It's monsoon, and the day is dewfresh, misty, cool, green.
Heavy rain, later. S&A are in my office, working. I see a small plant on my desk. I water it.
Night. Stealing jet fuel from the camp's storage trucks. The place is flooding. Silver Hornets disappearing under the rising water, shimmering in the orange light.

Some months later
Hot, dusty sepia evening. The car's empty now, except for Inanna, uncoscious in the back seat. I'm sitting on the bumper, watching the evening fall. A small child runs up to me, waving something. It's a bunch of peacock feathers. I buy one off him - I don't really know why, right now, but it seems important.
The other children are playing by the road, but their faces... tired. Afraid. Their movements are jerky, fearful. They're always watching. Above the street, on a balcony, a young teenage prostitute stands, screaming in anger at someone inside. The clothes strung up on the lines between the houses - as dusty as the road, don't really see the point of washing them - are hanging still. Not a breath of air, just the dry heat of dusk.

I'm in water. Cold. Deep blue-black, motes of sunlight dancing off the surface, streaming down in geometric perfection until it glitters off the fishes in dancing, random chaos. The fish are brilliant - flickering about, too fast to identify, apart from the silver movement, swimming with us.

house hunt: a fitting end

Finally, it is over.

After going through n number of assorted houses, flats, apartments, 1-BHKs, 2-BHKs, societies, brokers, colonies... we finally found the perfect house.

It's cheap.
It has internet.
It has a non-interfering landlord.
It's walking distance from Andheri station.
It doesn't flood more than 3 feet.
It's quiet.
It will give us a room each.
It's big.
It's well-lit and airy.
It receives equally good, equally cheap dabba.
It has balcony.
It has nearby stores.
It's the same one we're in right now.

So we're continuing.

I feel like Veronica Lodge in a shoe shop, surrounded by mountainous piles of shoes and exhausted, broken salesmen, finally finding the Perfect Pair. The ones I came in.

House hunt: The story continues

The story so far:
After roomie recovered from spiritual anguish, and we finalized the Embassy society to move. Papers were signed, advances paid, NOC's done, cops bribed, photos clicked and submitted, biodatas given and signatures signed.
Then the Embassy society called an emergency meeting to ban bachelors from entering the premises. Our shadows can no longer darken their doors again.

So, the search continues...

Perizaad (The Fairy) building has excellent views of both the Andheri Sports Complex ground, the under-construction building in front, and the excavated canal filled with a black sludge that looks like Ardros from the ST:TNG - Skin of Evil episode, a psychotic, malicious, unkillable black tar-creature who murders the security office for fun.
Guru Dhrishti (The Sight of the Guru) building can be reached only by land rovers or tanks. We watched a girl in an Accent nose-dive into a camouflaged ditch and bleat pitifully for help from within her trapped vehicle for half an hour.
Amiya (Sanskrit - "nectar, delightful" or "boundless") building is precisely behind the DN Nagar Towed vehicles holding area, so recovering my bike from it's frequent stays at police hospitality is going to be a lot easier. It also has horrific scribbles done by an apparently mentally disturbed child in crayon on every wall.

...and so the hunt continues...

house hunt: rejections and rabies

this keeps getting better and better.

3 days left, and we've finally selected the house we're going to shift into. Lease on the verge of expiring. 90% of all stuff packed, which means I'm living out of a suitcase and eating out of the single plate which I need to wash when I finish... and the Embassy society calls an emergency meeting to ban Bachelors from living in it.

I'm beginning to get a feel of how a discriminated minority feels.

So now we need to vacate by Wednesday, and there's no alternative in sight. I need to think of some options, fast. Managed to recover the token money, at least; was worried about that, since this Arora broker is so cheap he only makes missed calls until you call him back.

We can either now

1. search, finalize, and sign up for another option - probably as a compromise solution, settling for what we can get because there's no time;

2. Extend the lease and search for another place properly;

3. Renew. Which means dropping S.

After we got this call in the morning, unwashed and unbreakfasted, we were practically biking from broker to broker to more house options, subsisting on tea and cigarettes. And finally when I come back home in the evening, the pups living in the compound greeted me so enthusiastically that I realized they'd drawn blood when I went to wash up.

Which means rabies shots tomorrow.

Drat.

And there's a dubious plan being implemented in office which promises to triple my workload over the coming 3 months.

Life is Beautiful.