Like every other blog thats started on a whim, my blog suffers from extended ignorance from time to time. Some parts work, some parts catching up on reading and for the most part plain laziness are to blame. Writing is hard business and it requires me to sit down and well write. Can’t escape that, can I?
It started out as a fun exercise to see what I can come up, and now its my avenue to scratch that creative itch. I don’t have my niche yet, I doubt if I ever will. I don’t have the patience to write an extended piece. Nor do I have the chops to write something cool yet. Lets see.
So whats been happening in my life? Work mostly, followed by copious amounts of shut eye. Alternating between these two phases mostly, punctuated by some necessary, routine, mundane maintenance required to run the wheels of life smoothly. Right now I’m stuck in a rut, the same groove, the same note being played all over again. So for a change I decided to plonk down my behind in front of a keyboard and get myself to write, do some accounting of my life and see what I get.
Have been mostly playing video games, and my very first grouse is that a lot of good video games are windows only or console only! No fair! As an apple fan boy, who has willingly entered that walled garden and finds it to be exquisite, despite it being a walled garden I want some of the game makers to make their games multi-platform. Like Shank, pixel-junk,hard-boiled chicken or the other games on my wish list that I’m waiting for a mac release. You see, I have enough gadgets already and I spend way too much on apps and games for me to get a new console or another laptop just to play console-only or windows-only games! And neither is my mid-2010 MacBook powerful enough to handle an emulation layer.
That aside I’m really enjoying iOS5, especially the Newsstand feature. Access to all the magazines at a beautiful price! Earlier I had to spend a fortune (given the exchange rate, subscribing to magazines in India does cost a fortune), now I get everything at a sweet price! Thank you Steve Jobs and Apple. A whole years worth of subscriptions for nearly half a dozen magazines for about $50! Now I’m never short of reading material, I just wish my internet speed would catch up! More on that later.
I also seem to have a huge backlog of reading material, and given my recent discovery that some digital editions of certain books cost much less than the print edition, I have been on a buying spree! Yes, that sounds very nerdy, but the only things that I’m ever tempted to spend on is books, apps and video games. I curbed my spending on apps to some extend after I audited my spending on them after looking at the credit bill and the only charge on it seemed to be iTunes, followed by flipkart.
And now my ISP is forever upgrading my bandwidth but at the same time downgrading my download limit! And since we plan to move houses in a little while, I cant even change my ISP, and I cant think of another way to get better internet for the time being. Like everyone else I have bought the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and will post a review when reading.
And now my mundane routine life demands my attention like a attention seeking infant. I wish I could automate life like computer tasks. Write a batch file or shell script and be done with some of the banalities of life. A better thing would be if I could build life like LEGO block, putting my schedule together out of pre-defined chunks. Well, who am I kidding? This is life and it has to be dealt with, one way or another. Lets see. Thats all for now, see ya later 
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The blog is finally back to its original address, where it all began. After flitting about with one too many blogs, hosts both free and paid, I decided to keep things simple and host it with GoDaddy. For those thinking about buying their hosting I suggest researching a bit more thoroughly before signing up to avoid a mess like mine. Blog being down for a long time is bad for business! Perhaps I will someday post about what went into choosing GoDaddy, but I can sum it up in one word: lazy. Who can beat one click installation of WordPress and other apps? Well, its cheap Linux hosting, I just intend to run a blog and a portfolio website, basically a grand address for putting up a resume, you get the drift? Besides having an email address like mail(at)winnybhushan(dot)com trumps winnybhushan(at)gmail(dot)com day. One of the perks of owning a domain, and I suggest everyone get their own. Its cheap, when bought after proper research, you have plenty of options to choose from and it sounds kinda cool too, having your blog on your own domain. Will sound like you put in a lot of hard work into it, when in reality it was just series of simple clicks 
But I digress, like always wandering about. My blog has been in a state of neglect for a variety of reasons spanning from trivial to serious. Perhaps, it mirrors my moods and my state of affairs in much too accurate a way. The first is still fresh in my mind, like it was yesterday, but nomadic me cannot get down to plonk my butt in front of the screen and write. The world has changed. Apple dropped the MacBook, launched OS X Lion, the US hit its debt ceiling, Halo 4 was announced, i finally got a job, Google+ is previewed and much more. Perhaps its time i took this space of mine in the digital realm a little more seriously, nay?
The thing is I never really like what I write most of the time. It sounds trite and hackneyed with the style bordering on juvenile and semi-literate. I write mostly the way I talk, which isn’t post worthy. In all honesty if not for TextExpander and spell check in OS X Lion, it wouldn’t be readable at all. Somehow my spelling deteriorates while i type. I have been on a digital diet recently, shunning internet, my MacBook and the iPad for a full week only checking my mails twice a day 15 minutes each time. The original goal was to do without all the digital and computing conveniences for a week and then slowly wean myself off and get back to books, going out into the real world and doing things the old school way, like writing with pen and paper. It laster for a grand total of four days, during which I realized I did not do much productive useful work while hooked to the MacBook. There was a dramatic increase in my productivity those four days, and a precipitous drop later. Though I realize I started doubting my spelling while writing without auto-correct, spell check and text expansion macros. Duh!
But writing has become a habit for me now, though I still can’t figure out why I write. It isn’t my profession, though I wonder now what is. It doesn’t pay my bills, I don’t have the patience, or perhaps I lack the imagination, or both to write good fiction. Short pieces like these make me restless enough to want something to calm me down. But nevertheless write I will, if not to just fill this space that I own. To populate this piece of digital real estate that I own with beings made out of the alphabet, brought to life on insomniac nights. I don’t promise sane writings. I don’t promise anything in fact. I will just write, perhaps to kill time on sleepless nights, to fulfill my creative itch, to rid myself of delusions, to anchor my thoughts in the sea of my mind, to see what it feels like to construct complex sentences and feel god at obfuscating what I want to say, burying meaning in verbiage and high falutin language. Oh what the heck! I’ll do it for no reason it at all! Introduce a little anarchy!
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Hooray! The humble Indie Bundle 3 is here, it was actually out on the 26th of july. Get 5 awesome Indie games for a pay-what-you-what-you-want price. And get Steel Storm Retribution as a bonus. You don’t want to miss this awesome bundle of some of the best Indie games out there. Oh, and you can also play mine craft for free till August 14th. And if you pay more than the average price, you get the Humble Indie Bundle #2 for free! Head here.
I eagerly await every iteration of the humble bundle. My first purchase was the Humble Indie Bundle #2, and so far I have bought 3 out of four iterations and got one for free as a bonus. And whenever they are out I promptly buy them for $5 and split the money evenly to all the developers, for its their sweat that makes these games you see. I wish I could someday pay more than $5, perhaps someday pay the cover price for all of them and maybe a little more. But until then I hope to pay as much as I can and hope that whatever few people who read my blog go buy them too. Do yourself a favor and instead of playing pirated versions of big name blockbuster games, pay some and play some really smart and cool Indie games. Support the Indie game scene, my dear hardcore gamers.
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Why must fireflies die so young?
-Setsuko, Grave of the Fireflies
There are movies that are tear jerkers, over flowing with moments of saccharine sweetness. Then there are ones that are touching, moving and affect you profoundly. Grave of the Fireflies does none of the above. What it does however is cause you profound grief. The kind of grief when someone you love and value passes away. And goes further and leaves you with a vile bitter feeling about war.
Quite a heavy opening for a movie review, but a movie such as Grave of the Fireflies, begets nothing less. Released in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies or Hotaru no Haka (insert kanji name here) in japanese, was written and directed by the famed Hayao MIyazaki of Isao Takahata, one of the greatest anime directors of all time, who gave hits such as Kiki’s Delivery service and My neighbors the Yamadas.The plot is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Aiyuki Nosaka. Its considered one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Anime historian, Ernest Rister, compared the movie to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List ( and thus the title of this review) and called it “The most profoundly human animated movie ever made”.
Grave of the fireflies is the story of two siblings orphaned by war, Seita and his younger sister Setsuko. The movie begins with Seita dying in a train station and a janitor throws away a candy tin. The movie is narrated as an extended flashback narrated by Seita. The two siblings are fleeing a fire bombing by the americans and are trying to flee to the nearest air raid shelter.
It is here that you begin to see the other side of war that we all dread. Chaos, confusion, dying and the lands ravaged by large scale bombing. “Dad will make them pay for this”, says Seita when he sees his whole neighborhood wiped out in the bombing. Their mother is injured in the bombing and dies later. When Setsuko demands to see their mother, it makes for the first of several heart rending scenes when Seita tries to distract her.
Having nowhere else to go, they move in with a distant aunt. Although she takes them in at first and feeds them, she becomes increasingly cold and mean as the war progresses and the run out of rice and supplies. She first persuades Seita to trade his mother’s kimonos for rice, which a tearful Setsuko refuses to let go. The ghost of Seita, watching, turns away and closes his ears unable to bear. And I admit, so did I. A recurring theme throughout the movie is a can of fruit drops that Setsuko retrieves from the rations that they buried before the bombing.
A cold and resentful aunt belittles Setsuko by remarking that he does nothing to earn their food. Unable to take their resentful aunt anymore, Seita and Setsuko move into an abandoned bomb shelter. At first life is all good in the bomb shelter, and they live as they please. They catch and fill their shelter with fireflies but the next day when they all die Setsuko is distraught and she makes a grave for them. “Making a grave. Mama’s in a grave too” she says, when Setsuko asks her what she’s upto. And with tear filled eyes, she asks “Why must fireflies die so soon?”.
When they run out of rice, Seita starts stealing crops from the local farmers and realizes his desperation when he’s severely beaten for stealing sugar beets. He takes Setsuko to a doctor who tells him that all she needs is food. A panicky Seita withdraw all the money from the bank, where he learns of Japan’s surrender. He returns to a dying Setsuko with food only to find her hallucinating and chewing on marbles. She offers Seita rice balls that she made, which are made from mud.
After Setsuko dies, he cremates her with supplies donated by a farmer. After the funeral Seita passes too and he joins Setsuko and they look at a modern day Japan together. This is a movie released in 1988 and compared with the animation standards of today, Grave of the fireflies is very basic. Today’s animation is very real and highly advanced, but they all seem to be forgetting something in this quest for ever increasing standards of realism.
That a story, to change or affect you, doesn’t have to look real. Grave of the Fireflies captures a gamut of emotions in a way no animated movie of today can stand up to. Beautifully told and directed, makes you rethink animation as a story telling medium. In fact, even a live movie can never do justice to the master piece that is Grave of the Fireflies. I am yet to write a review that will do full justice to it. I guess I’ll watch it endlessly till every frame is etched onto my mind and yet never tire of it.
A must watch for every watch for every anime and Studio Ghibli fan. But be warned tho. This is an intense movie that will change the way you view animation forever. A timeless classic.
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I’m a huge fan of Indie video games. What I’m not a fan of, is there being no Mac versions of a lot of Indie video games. I have a modest list of Indie games that I so badly want and they don’t have Mac versions >_<.
The steam Indie store page sometimes makes me wanna chuck my MacBook! But hell no, I’d rather not play any more video games than give up on Macs. All the goodness of Unix with a decent, nay delicious UI. What? Me mad? Nope! Yes I’m a big fan of Indie games indie game studios, and I either want to either start my own Indie Studio or a fund that invests in Indie Games ( neat right? Tho I think there already is one.) But its so unfair of them Indie game studios to forget the Indie fan like me ( Yes ,yours truly is an ardent supporter of the Indie game scene. In fact I paid a princely sum, at least for me, of $5 for the Humble Indie Pack2) who own a Mac. Come on! Look at my Steam Wishlist
-Time, Gentlemen Please!
-Blueberry Garden
-The Misadventures of P.B WInterbottom
-Super Meat Boy
-Bit.Trip Beat
None of them, except for Bit.Trip BEAT have a mac version!!! WAAAAH!!!! So damn unfair!!! Indie game studios! Take note! The legion of loyal Mac users, aka The cult of the Mac, is a burgeoning community, swelling in numbers at an alarming rate. Please! Oh PLease! Port your windows only games to the Mac. Either through steam or the Mac AppStore. Every time I look at an Indie game that I want to own and that windows only or PC only banner stares at me, remember dear Indie Studios, you’re losing an audience.
Winny out.
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On 23rd March, 2008, Madeline Kara Neumann, who often went by the name Kara died of undiagnosed Diabetic Ketoacidosis. She was eleven years old. What is shocking about the way she died is not that diabetes at such a young age isn’t rare and not difficult to diagnose. What is shocking is that her deeply religious parents believed that prayer would heal her, and did not seek medical help on her behalf.
Her parents refused to seek medical help, in the belief that faith would heal her, and instead knelt down in prayer beside the dying child and only called an ambulance when she stopped breathing. Appalling? Horrifying? I’m stunned for words.
I stumbled on this quite by accident.( Serendipity, she never fails to surprise me.) After a marathon browsing through my Wikipedia watch list, I landed on the Kara Neumann Case Page, courtesy of the random page link on wikipedia. Shock and awe subsequently chased boredom away. It took me a while to digest what I was reading. My neck was sore after shaking my head in disbelief for so long. Parents do not seek medical help for a dying child because they believed that prayer will heal their child?
I agree faith, religious or otherwise, has a way of healing us but relying on faith alone, is like, I really don’t know. No metaphor springs to my mind to describe this. Its well documented that people with terminal illnesses have sometimes had spontaneous remissions and the underlying cause for such phenomena have been obscure, and people seize upon this to call them miracles. Books have been written about the power of faith, and faith has been bandied about as a crutch to get through tough times and trying circumstances, but hey! God helps those who help themselves.( As a staunch atheist I am inclined to add, if there is a God and if he/she can reach out from wherever he/she resides and help )
Me being an atheist aside, this particular instance has profoundly shocked me. I am a fairly tolerant person and do not have an issue with another person’s faith, preferring a moderate rather than a militant approach to faith and religion. True, a lot of problems today arise from proselytizing from religious nuts, but there are strong underlying causes that push people to religious nuts in the first place. But this? Refusal to seek medical assistance because God and only God will heal the sick?
Kara Neumann’s parents have strong ties to the Church of Unleavened Bread, a little known church that does not believe in medical intervention but rather shuns people going to the doctor. The banner on their website proclaims the “Warning: These are America’s Last Days”. A very fatalist view if you ask me. I try not to judge but I cannot ignore the loud flags in my head going ding! ding! reading the banner and some testimonies written by member’s of the church.
A few years ago I almost died when I got bitten by a snake ( in fact, I was clinically dead for a minute or two). I was saved by the timely intervention of an excellent team of doctors. Now for a moment imagine if my father, instead of rushing me to a hospital, in a manner that would have broken several speed records, or calling an ambulance, rushed me to the nearest temple and lay prostrate in front of the deity, praying fervently for my recovery. Well, this post would be from beyond the grave and this blog would be an interesting account of the happenings of the after life and not of this sometimes mundane life. And would have made fodder for some prime time TV.
Help yourself first. A lot of people prayed for me. Family and friends. They even had a prayer session on my behalf in school. All this after I was in the ICU. Not while I lay on the death bed. Yes, the prayers must have helped. When so many people pray with such sincerity, something must have happened. I do not know. My stand on religion has been pretty extreme, but I kind of believe in the power of prayer. Well, I saw it first hand. But not in the power of prayer alone!
Our body is a strange and wonderful thing. Complex and runs well. But still not fully understood. There have been well documented cases where mass hysteria has produced symptoms of diseases that patients believed they had and where placebos have cured terminally ill patients.
Now, if you taught that Kara Neumann’s case was shocking and appalling, wait. Its not over yet. Here is the real interesting and outrageous part. Wisconsin law, under whose purview the Neumann’s fall under, actually has an exemption for child abuse and neglect, which parents can use as a defense in court. Wait a minute. An exemption for religious and faith based cases of child abuse and neglect? Did I hear this right? Dale and Leilani Neumann, the parents of Kara were originally sentenced to 25 years in prison for reckless second degree homicide. Basically, unintentional murder, but murder nevertheless. But after an appeal by their attorneys, it was reduced to ten years imprisonment with probation with only a month in jail each year to help take care of the remaining kids. The law is supposed to provide a uniform code of protection and penalization but there is an exemption on the grounds of religious and faith cause? Interesting! The law actually abets them in this regard. Not surprising really, since the law is written by the very people who preach. This clause was pushed in with insistence from the Church of Christ, Scientist or simply the Christian Science Church.
This case is certainly a hard hitter and will be a test of the law and of faith and religious belief. We actually live in a world that allows groups like the Unleavened Bread Ministries, the Church of Christ, Scientist, people like Chandraswami live, flourish and herd more people into the flock. Humans, I believed, are rational beings with strong instincts for self-preservation. We are naked and defenseless and yet we thrive ( and of course destroy) in a world that it is violent, capricious and not tailored for our survival or prosperity. But, at the risk of sounding like a fatalist, seems like our days are literally numbered.
There are several cases such as Kara Neumann’s, both contemporary and past, that haven’t been brought to light. Kara Neumann’s case would not have come to light if her parents had not called 911 after she died and had not her aunt called the Sheriff’s office several times to complain about negligence and to report that Kara might be in a comatose state.
This is the 21st century, not 6 B.C. We now know and understand ourselves and the world around us much better, albeit still having much more to know and understand. We love in times where we do not have to believe lighting, thunder and earthquakes are God’s wrath and that God sends us disease and pestilence to test our resolve in his faith.
But still, things like these make we wonder, whether we have really marched on or has time played tricks on us?
Notes & references:
^ I might sound biased towards christianity here, in spite of my pseudo christian name, but hinduism is no less. Hinduism has its fair share of scandals, but the case in point has to do,mainly, with christian beliefs. I’m impartially acerbic to all you see.
^Kara Neumann Case, Wikipedia.
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O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bulge trills;
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel y arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
- Walt Whitman
For all fans of Dead Poets Society, the complete verse of O captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman. And yes, you can call me O Captain! My Captain! for posting this. ^_^
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-Buying indie games on sale and wondering if I payed enough so they can make more games (case in point Humble Indie Bundle1 & Humble Indie Bundle2 )
Coffee. anytime of the day
grep + dict.txt research by day to win at scrabble at night. (The power of the CLI!) deluxe Scrabble board (Black tiles!!!)
Perl poems (tho I am yet to pen one myself)
Driving at 80kmph on the activa
Diet Coke, french fries and fish with tartar sauce
Reading endless blog posts about why Java sucks and vi vs. Emacs. ( I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I’m leaning towards the vi camp)
no caps at the start of sentences. on purpose ^_^
keyboard shortcuts
Lewis Carroll
Marathon anime sessions
App buying ( Hate you app store!!!)
8-bit music and 16-bit graphics. Hell yeah!! Retro videos games Rock!!!
Mario on NES
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Yup a true story.Read here
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From being a research toy to a business fad to a luxury to an absolute necessity, internet has come a long way. I don’t quite get the difference between the internet and the WWW. pah! thats just being pedantic…
As for my road to the information superhighway, the less said the better. Sometimes, I just wanna chuck that little black infernal modem down the toilet and make it fodder for a flame thrower…
Aaaarrrgggghhhhhh!!!!! Somebody get me an axe man!!1 If a Reliance sales exec were to cross my path, he’d wish he were never born. Gmail doesn’t load properly even when I use just HTML. Google takes ages and ages and ages to load… By the time I can brew a cup of coffee, drink it brew another, drink that as well, ext a couple of people ( hey! whatcha doing?… oh online? ok.. and smash goes my phone in frustration) dearest authority up above, why are some broadband connections more equal than the others?
I strongly suspect Reliance bought the very first network way back in the ’60′s and sells them to us in a shiny package, or maybe their servers are situated on mars, no Pluto. It takes 2 hours for light to reach Pluto.
And I pay a princely price to watch google.com load pixel by pixel on my screen. Ah! What entertainment! Mum, more popcorn please the ‘G’ just finished loading!!!!
Aye, I pay some 3 grand to watch all this, while the kid downstairs, who’s just outta college, pays Rs. 799/- only, per month and surfs away to glory. I know the smirk on your face dude! It says it all…
Grrrrrrr…. my usual civil demeanour disintegrates into utter barbarianism when I see my download speed as .04kbps/. And my download time as infinity!! I might as walk to their servers in Cambodia, buy a pen drive, copy paste the file onto it, eat some deep fried grasshoppers with Hershey’s chocolate sauce and walk back for those speeds!!!
Oh please!! The God/Goddess of Broadband!! I beseech thee! Won’t ye listen to my plea? Cant thine have an iota of kindness upon thee and upgrade my speed? I’d be content with 20 kbps/ for a while. Or better yet grant me a broadband?
I shall dutifully shun KFC and McDonald’s and only chomp on bits and bytes and disks and platters.
Please??
In case you are a Reliance sales exec or the bloke who designed this infernal modem, I hope you go can only do things from now on in Slo-Mo!! It might seem like a cool prospect but imagine you had to pee like super urgent and you can only undo your zipper in slo-mo!! ha-ha!! Gotcha you bugger!!!
(This is a post from a short lived blog of mine. Back then I had this super slow, super expensive Reliance mobile internet)
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