Weekend Adventures 8

This weekend, I ran!

The Delhi marathon was fun, but hardly a marathon. It was less a race and more ’shuffling-through-a-large crowd.’ Behold:

It was also the site for some clever advertising tie-ins, like this one at the finish line:

Afterwards, I went to a concert:

and saw a Vigilante on the streets of Delhi:

 

Lists

Added a new page on top. Go take a look!

Nepal

I’m back from a holiday to Nepal, with cool stuff and leech bites! Behold my bitten foot:

Comics and pictures soon.

Chak De GTA?

The ‘latest’ videogame doing the rounds at Nehru Place.

Vampirical Observations (My ‘Summer of Videogames’ continues)

 

The best kind of games bleed temporarily into your real life. 

The original Thief, The Dark Project made me wary of streetlights, summoning an inexplicable urge to shoot off the bulbs with arrows.   

The much-maligned but oft-magnificient Mirror’s Edge converted what was previously a patchwork of urban rooftops into pathways, routes, and opportunities for multiple fractures. Often with an ambient soundtrack playing through your head.

The Phoenix Wright series, whose depiction of the justice system was about as accurate as Cricket 97’s idea of cricket, made me seek out every opportunity to shout Objection! and Hold It! (getting the exclamation marks in was the difficult part) in every conversation. Many friendships were lost in that brief, heady, uncertain time.

Vampire The Masquerade goes a step further. Whatever blood-fuelled frenzy channeled the mystic energies responsible for this title (it was undoubtedly blood-fuelled) had uncertain side effects i’m sure the creators were unaware of. What manner of alchemy, pray, makes one return to this game like a ghoul to her sire in the dead of night, promising yourself, rather uncertainly, that just one more quest would satiate the hunger till the next break of dawn. 

Infact, after a few days, dawn itself begins to lose its allure. Sunrise is too bright, too piercing. And when the real-world doorbell rings in the middle of your sneaky break-in into a kine apartment, you’re half-tempted to turn and hiss, like a kindred channeling her feeding frenzy. 

See what it did, there? Bloodlines bleeds slang into the real world: it bleeds its language, its unique visual grammar. The very rules that govern its twisted, dark characters and places. 

It’s the most effortlessly intelligent game I’ve played: with a script that oozes style and edge, and situations that make the quests in even Fallout 3 look positively childish.

But you can’t get over the sense of tragedy that underscores the title. It’s costly development led its creator, Troika games, to financial ruin. It’s an unfunished, often buggy game that was rushed through the door before the studio shut shop. It could have been the template for all future RPGs, but it wasn’t. 

We’d all have our own personal holodecks by now if that had happened. Instead, we have this:

 

The best kind of games bleed temporarily into your real life. 

The original Thief: The Dark Project made me wary of streetlights for nearly a month, summoning an inexplicable urge to shoot off the bulbs with arrows.   

The much-maligned but oft-magnificient Mirror’s Edge converted what was previously a patchwork of urban rooftops into pathways, routes, and opportunities for multiple fractures. Often with an ambient soundtrack playing through your head.

The Phoenix Wright series, whose depiction of the justice system was about as accurate as Cricket 97’s idea of cricket, made me seek out every opportunity to shout Objection! and Hold It! (getting the exclamation marks in was the difficult part) in every conversation. Many friendships were lost in that brief, heady, uncertain time.

Vampire: The Masquerade (Bloodlines) goes a step further.

Whatever blood-fuelled frenzy channeled the mystic energies responsible for this title (it was undoubtedly blood-fuelled), they had side effects I’m sure  even the creators were unaware of.

What manner of alchemy, pray, makes one return to this game like a ghoul to her sire in the dead of night, promising yourself, rather uncertainly, that just one more quest would satiate the hunger till the next break of dawn. 

Ooh. Pretty.

Ooh. Atmosphere.

Infact, after a few days, dawn itself begins to lose its allure. Sunrise is too bright, too piercing (The game itself is set in a perpetual night. Sunlight, after all, is anathema to the vampires (referred to as the ‘Kindred’, in game)) And when the real-world doorbell rings in the middle of your sneaky break-in into a kine apartment, you’re half-tempted to turn and hiss, like a kindred channeling her feeding frenzy. 

See what it did, there? Bloodlines bleeds its slang into the real world: it bleeds its language, its unique visual grammar. The very rules that govern its twisted, dark characters and places. 

Heather. Definitely among gaming's best-written characters. Of all time.

It’s the most effortlessly intelligent game I’ve played: with a script that oozes style and edge, and situations that make the quests in even Fallout 3 look positively childish. Forgetting the ‘game’ part of it, even taken as a work of fantasy: its worldbuilding is incredible.

In the game, some of the Kindred believe that the Biblical Caine was the original vampire.

It’s a game that populates its world with people who have personalities, and not  just quest dispensers, or plot advancers, or monologue-deliverers. Take Beckett, the vampire archaeologist, pictured above, with whom you can have a freewheeling discussion on the origins of vampirism for no apparent gameplay purpose. Or Prince LaCroix, self-proclaimed monarch of the kindred, whose political machinations hover over the plot just out of reach, his intents always just beyond understanding:

But nothing illustrates the attention to detail in this game more than playing as the Malkavians. The Malkavians are a slightly…unhinged clan of vampires. Choose to play as them, and EVERY dialogue option in the game changes into bizarre, semi-coherent psycho-babble:

'I Shall Undertake Your Dark Tutelage' may possibly be the best conversation line ever.

I can't help but say 'lulz'.

Then there’s the sense of tragedy that underscores the title. Its costly development led its creator, Troika Games, to financial ruin. It’s an unfunished, often buggy game that was rushed through the door before the studio shut shop.

The creepy Nagarajas

If Bloodlines had been the template for all future RPGs,  we’d all have our own personal holodecks by now.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, we have this:

Homecoming

Ah, home.

I’m back just in time to see a new front opening in the ongoing war between my father’s arsenal of chemical weaponry, and an increasingly mutant cockroach army.

Resilient to all known sprays and powders, and no doubt smug under the mistaken impression that they’ll be the rulers of the world once the inevitable nuclear war comes along, the super mutant cockroaches have begun brazenly overstepping ceasefire lines, carefully delineated with those ‘Lakshman Rekha‘ mystery sticks that are either pest control placebos or stolen alien technology. 

The aforementioned new front is, well, the actual house. Discontent with skulking along dark corners, and scuttling under kitchen counters, the cockroaches are taking advantage of my parents’ absence, and freely roaming the floors and passageways. 

I don’t condone chemical warfare (and its not like its having any use anyway), and random sweeps of the broom seem to do little.

The little alcove near the back door is already theirs, and large ant concentrations in the second bedroom suggest a tactical retreat, which means they’re massing near the kitchen corridor. Reconnaissance missions have so far revealed little, but atleast four Skulker divisions have been sighted (the needlessly expensive Binoculars finally put to good use), and Ant forager units have been disappearing on previously neutral ground.

A scout reports seeing little plumes of smoke from the back, and the distinct (to insects, atleast) corrosive odour of nuclear radiation. 

Power plants. War factories. Protoss Pylons. Siege Workshops. 

But war is not coming to Customs Colony.

Not while negotiation channels are still open.

En Route

So, yeah.

Anger is pretty rare for me, and even in the unlikely confluence of events that leads to its manifestation, my facial muscles tend to confuse ‘latent rage’ with ‘wave of nausea’. What they should be doing, cheeky little bastards, is putting on convincing public displays of affectation that agrees with the boiling fury inside: you know, clenched mouth, heavy breathing, fist thumping and the likes.

Instead, my dubiously  confident friends conjure a combination of facial twitches better suited for attempting to keep your lunch inside. People usually ask me if I’m feeling okay when they should be cowering in fear, or reaching for their defensive apparatii. This tends to confuse my anger a bit, and it usually retreats to under the metaphorical mental dining table, where all my other mental states (who are all mental haha) sit around eating ice cream and talking disjointedly about….i dunno, balloons or something.

So, why am I angry?

Well. I’ve been working this job, you see, for the last few months, and I’ve been really enjoying the work in itself….it’s exposed me to a fascinating set of viewpoints and opinions that have not so much affected my wordview as firebombed it. repeatedly. (Why I’m making this sound like radiation, i will never know).

But shit has happened, as it always does, and things are a bit difficult right now. I know the blog has suffered for it, I’ve hardly had time (and place) to draw, or think, or play. I promise a larger, and more straightforward update soon: but let me sum it up in one sentence. I’m broke, unemployed, homeless and shifting cities.

Right then. Enough of that. Have some comics, internet peoples!

AWOL

Sorry I haven’t updated recently…been really busy with work (14 straight days without a holiday, and counting), and Internet access at home has been patchy.

More comics, however, are being pencilled in dutifully, and I should probably have them up here as soon as I get some breathing space from the relentless assault of mind-numbing edit runs. Watch out for the man with a shoulder fetish.

Laters.

Embarrassments

I get this strange feeling of uneasiness whenever I see my boss working. It starts somewhere around my neck, which automatically tightens, before moving down into my left arm, which begins to scratch aforementioned neck. Another strand moves upwards to my eyebrows, arcing them upwards, which triggers a complex series of facial muscle reflexes that stretches my mouth into the vague contours of a grin. 

All of which results in a wonderful display of buffoonery that my boss is undoubtedly hard-pressed to explain. His response to my semi-permanent state of grinning embarrassment is usually denial, or the imposition of more errands to perform. Preferably away from the office. 

The reason for this uneasiness, I think, is the remarkable amount of self-assuredness he seems to have in everything he does. It scares me.

It’s like he’s permanently in the Zone: shifting between explaining the behaviour of Buffaloes in heat and the vagaries of the Directorate of Foreign Trade with inexplicable ease (I kid you not). Every word he reads seems to be imbued with a sense of purpose and meaning, like somehow everything everything around you fits into place perfectly, and even the most random puzzle pieces you pick up go exactly where you want them to. 

I, on the other hand, am content with the rare display of articulation, or the summoning of (rarer) creativity from increasingly dry reserves. It seems to take very little to get me out of my standard-state malaise, but very little to plunge me back into it too.  I seem to be able to think clearly only in twitter-length messages, with larger pictures either completely incomprehensible or scarily ominous.

There’s somehow the comfort of the often bizarre memories I’ve retained from the last few months:

like roaming around Delhi with a bunch of Gond artists, helping them buy T-shirts.
Or discussing the ‘Republic of ManUcia’ and its inevitable demise.
Or singing Himesh Reshammiya in karaoke, and getting an A rating on the effort.
Or wondering if your designation at work is ‘All-purpose Errand Boy’ or ‘Apprentice Pedant.’

Or finding out that one of the subjects of the documentary you’re helping shoot runs an international child adoption racket.
Or listening to a song called ‘If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart.’ And liking it. 
Or finding yourself in a financial quandary so dire you had to choose between Toothpaste and lunch.

(All of this is true)

 I’ve also been a bit of a social embarrassment recently. I may have tried a tad too hard to make something work, which didn’t, and its a little difficult having to realize (and admit) that its sort-of hit you square in the heart of a rather troubling flaw in your character – the stupid tendency to assign alarming portions of your emotional normalcy to trivialities. 

Anyways.

Wins have also happened. I think I’m close to finally reaching some level of comfort with my finances, and I’m surrounded by plenty of great books to read in the coming month. The Nintendo DS is seeing its best release period yet, I get to dig up some awesome old manuscripts as part of work, and the Battlestar Galactica finale is tomorrow!

So, yeah. A social, grinning, and partly-successful embarrassment. 

I think I can live with that.

Weekend Adventures 4.5

This week, I found:

A Half Life reference in a speech delivered by the venerable Dr Ambedkar in 1945:

Full sentence reads: 'The distribution of seats should be so made that a combination of the major minorities should not give the combine such a majority as to make them impervious to the interests of the minorities'

Evidence of time dilation in the Delhi Metro (see, KK? Witness how a minute becomes two, how the time dilation field bends seconds into denser units of time, throwing even electronic equipment out of whack):

Oh, and MTNL Fail: