allVishal.com

Comic Konga 2 #2: A Dilemma

2008-07-08T02:38:51-07:00

Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

Comic Konga 2 #1: Jewels

2008-07-07T02:12:59-07:00

So begins the second Comic Konga! I think I'm starting to like doing the first one as a single panel gag; it's a format I never otherwise use, and it's a challenge to distill something down to one panel and one line only. Like most writers I have a tendency to ramble, and something like this could easily have been a three or six panel piece.

The anatomy and line-work is all over the place, and I did try to colour it but decided just to keep it to black and white (perhaps that can be a theme for this time's CK). Hope your own comic endeavours are fruitful. Can't wait to see what you lot have come up with.

Lots of Stuff Added to the Work Page!

2008-06-27T17:47:16-07:00

The last time I updated the Work page was probably sometime in 2005. This was back when the site was still on free hosting and looked all grey and lime green.

Yeah, it's been a long time. Quite a bit has happened since then, not least of which is this redesign. I've always wanted to redo the work page, make it richer and more than just a bunch of images, but then I realised that while I was putting that off for the right time (it would be a good deal of work), two years had gone by.

So, I bit the bullet, sorted through my work and came up with a bunch of stuff -- some of which has been posted on the journal before -- but much of which is new. So surf on over to the work page and have a look around. There's about 30 new things in the Design and Illustration sections. I haven't added anything to photos yet, and might do so in the coming weeks.

Get Ready for Comic Konga 2!

2008-06-24T14:44:38-07:00

It's been far too long since I've posted here, and even longer since our first Comic Konga! Half a year has gone by in the blink of an eye, and so I thought it would be best to get back into blogging by jumping in at the deep end with another CK.

CK2 will begin July 7th (that's Monday after next) and run until the 11th (that Friday). The rules are the same as last time: five days, five comics (in whatever way you define a 'comic') posted to your blog or online space of choice. A free-form festival of graphic delights, hosted by your truly.

You have about twelve days so that should be plenty of time to come up with ideas, doodle, and even prepare your finished comics. If you're participating do drop me an emial or a comment here (don't forget a link to where you'll be putting the work up!).

See you then!

Earth Vs The Legion of Lightbulbs

2008-03-30T13:15:16-07:00

Yesterday was Earth Hour in several places around the world, including here in Dubai. Not much happened, though a few buildings did turn their external lights off. One lovely radio jockey suggested that the best way to spend the hour was to turn off all the lights, fire up some candles, snuggle up with your significant other on the sofa... and watch a romantic movie on DVD (preferably on your big screen HDTV).

Take that, energy conservation!

Elsewhere people in India were complaining that cities like Mumbai were not on the bandwagon, and shame on them for not participating in this noble effort. Um, yeah, except that cities in India go through almost daily scheduled power cuts, most of which last for longer than an hour. There is a prevailing view from what I can gather, that by shutting off our light bulbs for an hour every year, we will all be directly saving the earth.

This, as far as I know, is not strictly true. Most power stations around the world run on fossil fuels; in them power is generated and thrown out onto the grid. If we aren't using it, they do not actually store any unused energy in large batteries somewhere. If the power companies got together and said, "okay, in order to save the earth we're going to shut down our power supply for a few hours," everybody would be up in arms. But that's really the only way the current electricity supply model is going to help.

Then there's all the energy that went into publicising the Earth Hour event itself; multi-storey billboards, the energy to light them for days leading up to yesterday, t-shirts and caps, concerts and karaoke and whatnot. The Earth Hour site itself declares it a 'carbon-neutral' event in its faq (and also addresses the power issue with what amounts to an "Um, yeah, we know.") but doesn't say much else about it. Are they policing every floodlit billboard around the world?

I applaud the idea as a PR exercise, certainly, but I do feel that the execution is little more than a token gesture, and everyone around the world has just jumped on because it's a lazy, easy way to think we're making a difference. It's like every Indian I've met who expects the government to solve all their problems personally, in the same way a 5 star hotel might, because, "they voted. (harrumph!)"

Conservation and reduction of our energy usage is a vital thing, but we can't pat ourselves on the back and get back to our wasteful lives just because we shut off the garden light for an hour.

Book Excerpt Tag Meme

2008-03-30T07:06:54-07:00

I was preparing the photos for this week's Ten Rupee Book Club post when I remembered that Dan was tagged with this meme, and I hadn't done it yet. The Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment here once you post it to your blog so I can come see!

Now, having not just one but seven at hand posed something of a problem. They were all technically 'nearest' to me, and all but one of them had enough pages to satisfy criterion no. 2. None of the books had the same problem Maija encountered with Good Omens either, so I was stuck. Having to look through them for the book post anyway, I figured I'd do quotes from all seven books, subsituting a quote from page 12 rather than 123 from the one that was slim. Consider this a teaser for the whole post (which should be done by tomorrow). Here goes:

1. Our Friend the Atom

"Before Biologists had tracer-atoms it was difficult for them to study living organisms. To do this they had to kill their test animals, and test plants had to be cut up. With tracer-atoms they can now study the living body in action."

(On tracer atoms and their uses in food science)

2. Paracelsus: Magic into Science

"One was the most balanced mind of his time, scrupulously weighing each word, the other a mystic, rash of judgement and fond of speculation. The one lived with books, the other considered life the only book of value. Necessarily their relations were cool."

(On the differing characters of Erasmus and Paracelsus)

3. Penguin Science Survey 1965

(Unfortunately this is a table regarding a Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, but I'll see what I can do)

"Stabilization and Attitude control

Weight (lb.): 138

Main body orientated towards earth and space.
Solar paddles point towards sun.
Inertial wheels, gas jets, horizon scanners and sun sensors.

4. Science: The Soviet Union, Today and Tomorrow

"Antitritium and Antihelium are substances of the anti-world, which existed only in science fiction until they were obtained with the help of the Serpukhov accelerator near Moscow. Georgi Flyorov's laboratory is the birth place of elements 104, 105, 106 and 107 of the Mendeleyev Periodic Table, chemical elements unknown in nature. The list of such major scientific advances in the Soviet Union is a fairly long one."

(This is from page 12 of the slim, mostly-pictures book)

5. Giants of Science

"Water is a compound of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen. This was too much to accept for the scientists of the day, one of whom said, "This arch magician so imposed on our credulity as to persuade us that water, the most powerful natural antiphlogistic we possess, is a compound of two gases, one of which surpasses all other substances in inflammability!"

(From the chapter on Antoine Laurent Lavoisier)

6. A New School Biology

"The achenes fall apart, and are dispersed by the action of the wind upon the awns. The fruit of many Compositae (a cypsela) bear an apical ring of fine hairs (the pappus) which enables them to be wind-dispersed. In the Dandelion a long pappus stalk develops as the fruit ripens, and this lifts the pappus above the top of the fruit."

(From the Chapter, 'Dispersal of Fruit and Seeds')

7. The Experiment

"He imagined her lovely head dutifully bowed, as though praying, over a microscope, a long yellow lock of hair prettily swinging down beside the brass eyepiece, her impatient fingers combing the hair back, out of the way. He envisioned her as a shining Joan of Arc of science, unselfishly dedicated to a cause, tired to the bone but unflagging -- stubbornly brave. He remembered the fair silken down on the slender nape of her neck and felt a sweet pang of lust mingled with pity."

Come back soon for the next Ten Rupee Book Club post!

Race - Movie Review

2008-03-29T07:42:50-07:00

Director Duo Abbas-Mustan (not otherwise known as 'The Brothers Burmawalla') have been steadily putting out pulp thrillers since their early 90s hit, Khiladi. The brothers' latest offering, Race, hit theatres a couple of weeks ago, and since then has gone on to do unexpectedly good business. Some of this success can be attributed to the fact that it's the first truly 'Bollywood' movie to come out for months; whether we admit to it or not, posh city folk like nothing better than an indulgent entertainer now and then. The last one that fit the bill -- Om Shanti Om -- was released last October. If only someone would tell our filmmakers, who are increasingly shifting their attention towards an output of macho noir violence-fests, epic historical snore-a-thons, Oscar bait (and always failing that, Filmfare Critics award bait) and trendy urban train wrecks distinguished by their characters calling each other 'Guys' a lot and knowing what ribbed condoms are.

In this age where the term 'Pulp Fiction' is more synonymous with an overrated art movie than the vibrant genre that supposedly inspired it, it's nice to see that someone, somewhere at least isn't trying to reinvent the wheel or make a genre of pure entertainment 'relevant to this post 9/11 world.' Wielding the twin cannons of amoral pulp and bollywood exuberance (with both genres' devil-may-care attitude to realism as their car's engine) the brothers have came out with a winner.

To summarise the plot of Race would be foolhardy. It's ostensibly about two rich step-brothers who stand to inherit tons of cash in insurance payouts should either of them die in an accident. Obviously, this being pulp, one of the brothers is rotten and wants to bump the other off, and the story goes from there. How it does so is nothing short of marvellous: over the course of its two and a half-hour running time, Race manages to squeeze in more plot twists and sudden reversals than a whole DVD box set of thrillers. The twists themselves are all the old ones, but the makers are obviously aware that the viewers will be actively trying to guess which one comes next, and almost always the twist that they do deploy is not quite the one you were expecting. Is there one twist too many? That's an irrelevant question in this case. It's a tightrope walk, for sure, but it manages to be consistently entertaining.

The characters are sketched very broadly. You have the work-hard-play-hard businessman, his alcoholic schemer of a brother, the dame with a dark past, the pining secretary, the corrupt cop and his bimbo assistant, all of which is laid out within ten seconds of their onsceen appearance. It's more archetype than character, and in any other movie this would not be enough, but Race is a film where your focus is always on the increasingly knotty plot; any attempts at making whole characters out of this bunch would distract from it.

Also, if you made these people more realistic they would throw the ludicrousness of the world they inhabit into sharp relief. Here people are blown up in broad daylight, men survive treacherous falls and deadly car accidents, and insurance companies have no problem parting with 50 million in cash once a little paperwork is done. Race is unrealistic to the core, and it knows it; it's a sexy pre-code comic book where there are no good guys, but everybody isn't a dour Frank Miller creation either.

To their credit, the actors do a fine job with what little they have. Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna are wonderful when they're playing bad guys, and it only dawned on me a few days later that they were both in Dil Chahta Hai together (playing very different characters). Anil Kapoor's fruit-munching cop is loud, over-the-top and has more bad jokes in him than there are pips in his orange, but even this manages to fit snugly into the proceedings. The women have less to do and don't quite distinguish themselves beyond eye candy and comic relief.

What really impressed me about Race to begin with is the great pacing. Usually in films there's an energetic first fifteen minutes, and then the filmmakers decide they've had enough quick stuff, and according to that 'How to Make a Movie' book they read, it's about time to slow down and add in some character and texture to it. Not so in Race, whose first half maintains its breakneck speed from start to finish. Even post-interval they keep it up, and it only ever really slackens for a few minutes here and there. To anybody who says it can't be done, this should be Exhibit A.

If anything lets Race down, it is often its technical side. There's terrible sound mixing in the songs; Bollywood movies are loud and hissy anyway, but the songs here are really pushing it (and I saw it in a good theatre with excellent sound). The soundtrack itself is the by-now standard action movie staple of Pritam-composed songs and a revolting Salim-Sulaiman background score (they should stick to film songs; they're much better at it). Lots of jarring hip-hop and crashing guitars. Some of it is hummable but most is not, and one wonders how much better the film would be if the score wasn't trying to hit you over the head every two seconds. Oh, and the songs literally come out of nowhere (incuding one which happens just after a major twist in the second half), but like every excess in this film, I went with it.

Also, the film could have used a few more weeks of post-production, especially digital grading. There's some wonderful physical camerawork to see, but since a lot of the film is shot during stark daylight it doesn't quite have the same impact. Towards the interval there's a fantastic day-for-night sequence on a high-rise terrace; it's coloured to look surreal and weird, and I wish the rest of the film's sequences could have had that much attention paid to them (but they probably ran out of time/money).

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here with dreams of logic and social relevance. This is the land of surreal entertainment that Bollywood should never really forget, and as long as Abbas-Mustan in their matching white clothes are around, it never will. Race is pulp without parody, Bollywood madness without apology. It's loud and loopy and I loved it.

The Ten Rupee Book Club 001

2008-03-21T04:01:42-07:00

Over the past five years I've been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren't expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird -- and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). "That's it," I said to myself, "enough dawdling!" I looked through a small box of them and chose seven -- none of which I have read -- but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

A Bit of Background

India has a huge English-speaking population, especially in the cities. In a culture that values education and knowledge as much as we do, it stands to reason that books and reading are still a significant part of life (at least among the urban middle class). So nothing is thrown away, old books move from private collections into small neighbourhood libraries where they get read by thousands of people over dozens of years, and eventually when they're tattered and worn, or riddled with worm holes, they end up in raddi.

'Raddi' literally means 'scrap' and raddi merchants deal in paper and other valuable things like copper and metals. They buy in bulk by weight, and pick and sort things by hand into various piles in their usually hole-in-the-wall shops. The loose paper ends up in things like newsprint, and single-side printed matter is cut and bound into cheap notepads, while some of it even ends up as sandwich wrapping from roadside vendors. It's a fun game to read the scrap on which you get your sandwich; usually it's some kind of internal documents from companies -- memos and letters and photocopied invoices -- and sometimes it's even old school textbooks (which are crap anyway, so no big loss).

The books, however, are kept aside and resold. In raddi shops the price is not fixed and is negotiable; you choose a book, ask the vendor how much he wants for it; he inspects it and quotes something ridiculous (5-10 times what it's worth) and then you haggle. In South Bombay where time is money and people just want to get from their office to the train station and vice-versa, things are a little more advanced, and in addition to the stack of negotiable old tomes, there will usually be a display of fixed price 10 Rupee books.

Remember, these people buy by weight, not title (and most of the hawkers don't know English, but can read the words), so it's quite common to find something you might pay a hundred rupees for just sitting in that pile because it's too worn or the cover/author's name is uninteresting. Many bargains are to be found. And below are just seven:

(Oh, and you can click on the front covers for larger versions)

1. Envoy to New Worlds/Flight From Yesterday

Our first book is even greater value for money than the others, because it's actually two books. Published by Ace Books' 'Ace Double' imprint, this is two novels for the price of one. When you get to the end of one, just flip it over and continue reading! It's a gorgeous format from a design point of view alone, and there were hundreds of these, including this which was published in 1963.

Of the two tales, Keith Laumer's Envoy to New Worlds is significant because it marks the first appearance (in a novel) of Jame Retief, 'The Machiavelli of Cosmic Diplomacy' as it states on the cover. He's apparently an intergalactic diplomat, a role modeled somewhat after the experiences of his author in the United States Foreign Service. Retief would go on to star in upwards of sixteen books. The absence of a back cover summary prevents me from making any guesses as to the plot of this first adventure (I'm guessing there will be diplomacy), but any cover that depicts a man who has descended from a ladder with a cape, a gun, and a cummerbund, has piqued my interest.

On the flip side (haw haw), the slightly less well-known Robert Moore Williams (his name is so plain he couldn't have made it up) gives us Flight From Yesterday. 'Yesterday in America, tomorrow in Atlantis' the cover blurb reads. Surely, hey must be talking about lost airport luggage. No? Oh well. Keith Ard ('es well 'ard, I hope) is an unemployed test pilot who answers a mysterious classified ad and apparently meets up with vanishing men in togas (or is it vanishing togas?) and girls with literally flaming hair. If this is any kind of good SF, the man with the vanishing toga teaches him stuff, and he gets off with the truly hot hottie. If this is progressive SF, then the roles of the man and the girl are switched. Either way, Keith Ard!

The cover reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth movie, which is one of the reasons this book caught my eye. Sadly, no artists are credited on either of the covers. The books themselves are slim (Flight From Yesterday is 120 small pages, 11 pages longer than its 'book-mate') and both have a certain charming brevity to the narrative. For instance:

"How'd you get this, Keith?" he asked.
"I was struck in the back by something that felt like a hot wind made in part of living electricity," Keith said.
Dr. Riker made no comment.

I love old SF.

2. Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles

To say that author Lucy Kavaler's work is eclectic would be an understatement. Anybody who writes books called The Private World of High Society, The Artificial World Around Us and The Wonders of Algae deserves to be taken seriously, and by all accounts, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles is a very well received and regarded book. It covers everything from fungi as miracle foods and medicines to yes, even hallucinogens and extra terrestrial speculations. The writing style is a perfect mix of conversational and academic; not shying away from big words when it needs to, but eschewing them when something simpler will suffice.

If it still aren't convinced, here's the first section of the back cover copy:

Martinis and the secret of heredity, Penicillin and The Angel of Death, Truffles and L.S.D., the Irish Potato Famine and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Astronauts, Gourmets, Scientists, and Indian Medicine Men...
What does this wildly assorted list have in common? The answer is Fungi.

How could I not pick this book up?

3. A Dictionary of Geography

All this talk of mushrooms should get you in the mood for the great outdoors, yearning to fulfill that romantic ideal of going out into the nearest wood and poking around under a rotting tree bark. It might help, therefore, to have a handy guide to tell you the difference between a gryke and a gulch; to be able to properly interpret the hachures on your map and to watch out for precarious talus.

All these and more things can be found in the Revised an Enlarged edition of Penguin's A Dictionary of Geography by W.H. Moore. This surprisingly weighty paperback does exactly what it says on the cover, and even has a bunch of pretty black and white pictures in the middle. It's fun enough if you are a closet geography nerd like me, but is also useful as an idea mine (there are several terms I'm going to steal for story titles already). We've all been at a dinner party where we've needed to know the difference between a Mercator's Projection and a Sanson-Flamsteed Sinusoidal one, haven't we? Well now we can be ignorant no longer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the top of that there drumlin to see if I can spot that dingle I've been trying to find all day.

4. Our Language

Big words scare people. It's the truth. But big words needn't scare you any more after you've read (Prof.) Simeon Potter's Our Language. The beautiful Romek Marber cover was enough to convince me to buy this book long before I opened it. Its ambition of telling the history, structure, dialectic branches, trends and future of the English Language (also known as 'Merican'), and that too in only 200 pages, sealed the deal.

This is the kind of book that publishers seemed to just pop out on a lark back in the 1950s and 60s, and is now unjustly forgotten. They do not make them like this anymore. Here's something that doesn't claim to have the answer to everything, is not a trendy pop-culture phenomenon, the latest gee-whiz-ain't-it-spiffy nonfiction breeze that gets blogged to death and launches a thousand speaking tours (even though I greatly respect and love things like Tipping Point and Freakonomics). It's just a simple, well-researched, intelligent account of a subject, and we're all busy reading about Britney's navel grit.

Shame on you, human race.

5. Teen-Age Vice/Designs in Scarlet

Speaking of the human race...

Oh, where do I begin? This 1939 (but 1957 edition) book is so deliciously cheesy. Told in a Bob-Woodward-channeling-Raymond-Chandler style, only bad, it apparently took Cooper eighteen months of "relentless, coast-to-coast personal investigation to ferret out the facts. If you are shocked by what he found, remember -- he meant you to be."(!) -- this from the inside flap.

The entire book is like this. I should probably point out here that the author started his career as a clown, and at the time of his suicide in 1940 was the chief publicist for a circus. Of course, nothing I could say about this book could match the back cover copy, so I'll just let it do the talking:

What makes them do it?
Who is to blame?
They hold orgies in cellar clubs, go on juke-joint "honeymoons." They get hopped up on liquor and dope, then rob and rape and murder. They are the young people under 21 who commit more than half the major crimes in the U.S.A.

Inspired by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Courtney Ryley Cooper gives you the grim and tragic answers in this brilliant and blistering exposé of TEEN-AGE VICE.

...To paraphrase Renée Zellwegger, "You had me at 'Hoover.'"

6. Cool Kids with Hot Ideas

Likewise, this book had me the second I saw its cover. No, I'm not just talking about the naked girl on the bike (although it is a well-posed photo, and she isn't bad either). The cover design is remarkable, though entirely uncredited (and in a rare instance, they paid attention to the back too. Cover, that is). I routinely pick up books I have no interest in if the cover is particularly good. Being a graphic designer (with the emphasis on graphic), strong stark covers like these have always appealed to me over today's wispy, layered and overworked Photoshop monstrosities.

The text itself is a lot less sensationalist than the cover would have you believe; certainly, it's not as SHOCKING(!) as Teen-Age Vice. A compilation of articles, Cool Girls... may have lost its edge when viewed from our media-saturated times. Perhaps, in 1968, this boook chronicled the kind of shocking behaviour people associated with fringe sorts like hippies and beatniks, not ordinary teenage daughters. Most stories deal with unplanned pregnancies, unwed mothers, and illegal abortions (remember, Roe Vs Wade only happened in 1973). The others deal with drugs and teenage prostitution, and none of them are made to look sexy.

It's interesting that a book with such an unabashedly titillating cover disguises what is fairly straightforward, even depressing, content. I could go on and on about how news has always been latently pornographic, but that's another story. This book is the perfect example of 'Don't Judge a Book by its Cover.'

But what a cover.

7. How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home

"Enough!" I hear you say, "all this teenage vice is too much for anyone to take. Can't we talk about those nice mushrooms or sexy dingles again?"

Well, sure, I'd love to, and if you do want to chuck it all and move to the farthest wood, it would be a good idea to have some place to live when you go there. The first thing that strikes you about this Popular Science Skill Book (other than the splendid Bauhaus cover by Frederick Charles) is the little note on the inside that says it's printed on 100% recycled paper. Somehow I never imagined that people highlighted that fact before the 1980s.

This is an honest to goodness 160 page attempt to teach you how to build a cabin. It's pretty successful too, and I have little doubt that a person of average intelligence might actually end up with a functioning home in the woods if he used it as a rough guide. The genius of the book lays in the fact that it doesn't just show you 'four methods of supporting rafters on top plates in gable-roof construction', but also covers things like 'how to develop a spring' (as a reliable water source), how to choose a site for your home in the hills, and an overview of the tools you might use (of chainsaws it says: "Gas-powered chainsaw speeds log-cabin building. It is strictly for outdoor use.").

My favourite part has to be an early chapter showcasing classic and avant-garde cabin designs to inspire you. I have half a mind to buy a plot of land and try one out, but I think I'll start in miniature with ice-cream sticks. The fun doesn't stop there, though; the back cover gives the names of several related titles, including How to Work with Concrete and Masonry (for my closet brutalist, of course) and How to Build Your Own Furniture (I'm also vaguely intrigued by How to Do Your Own Wood Finishing by Jackson Hand, but only so that I can giggle like a schoolboy).

How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home is strange; it's set up almost exactly like every book on drawing I have ever seen or purchased, only at the end of it you get a house. How cool is that?

In Conclusion

I hope you've enjoyed this short trip through a little corner of my book collection. Even though I didn't look through the majority of them, there were enough good ones that I was spoilt for choice, and could even group them by theme. This first one was a pick-and-mix of strangeness to whet the appetite, an amuse-bouche for your bibiomaniacal palette.

Next week: Seven Science Books!! I hope you'll be back.

Vishal

The Perils of Overzealous Spam Combat

2008-03-20T12:00:14-07:00

In case you never noticed, there's a 'Recent Comments' column in the sidebar, and the more astute among you will realise that my comment has been sitting at the top of the pile for quite a while now. At first I thought it was just my readers being polite and staying silent while I ranted and raved about hot army women, haunted dream homes, and the unsexiness of the modern caveperson. But, pretty-much every reader of this blog is a blogger themselves, and we're a chatty lot. It was unusual to have no comments for weeks.

I decided to test the system out, and lo and behold, ran across a host of problems, all of which had to do with a malfunctioning captcha system (a 'captcha' is a test to find out if you're a human and not a malicious spam program, by asking you to answer a question only a human could) . Hmm, malfunctioning is not entirely right, because it seems to have been behaving a little too well.

In order to combat comment spam, I have been using a drupal plugin that generates a random type of captcha test (maths, odd word out, etc.) and this part of the plugin seemed to be causing some problems. It would not accept answers even if they were right, and even after repeated attempts the submitted comments were automatically being marked as suspected spam.

The conundrum here is that if I turn it off entirely, the blog will -- within hours -- be inundated with comment spam. This is one of the main reasons I've reluctantly had to turn off trackbacks entirely, as several thousand were coming in daily, being marked as spam, and then just sitting there (unpublished, but still, quite annoying). I could have turned on moderation of all comments, but I don't log into the site several times a day, and that would interrupt the flow of proceedings. Part of the fun of having a blog is seeing conversations develop while you aren't around.

I have therefore reduced the captcha test to one type, and this seems to have solved the problem. It does mean that the site might a bit more prone to comment spambots that learn or just brute-force their way through, but I'd rather have to clean up a few unwanted comments a day rather than have my puny human meat-things be impeded in expressing their views.

Of course, there are always niggles, so do leave a comment and test the system out (remember to solve the captcha before pressing 'post comment'!) and let me know if there are any problems (via email, at allvishal [at] gmail [dot] com).

Take that, evil machine overlords.

Dance Dance Meri Jaan!

2008-03-16T14:59:58-07:00

[This started out as a comment on this post on Aishwarya's blog which references this 'blessay' by the inimitable Stephen Fry, but it ran a bit too long so I figure I should post it here]

Apparently when I was younger I had a good sense of timing (in the back row of a filmi group dance performance), but this comment came from my mother, so I can't believe it entirely despite her generally pragmatic view on things.

These comments, my own hyperactive nature and my shyness led to many an afternoon spent bouncing around our cavernous Muscat house to an imaginary soundtrack and my own improvised moves. Is it any wonder that Fame is one of my favourite movies?

Then I turned 12 and dancing became that thing you did with girls you had the hots for. But this being the early 90s the jeans were tight and the sleeves pouffy, so we looked like two penguins saying goodnight (Also, Glen FRIGGIN Medeiros: argh!).

Since then Hip Hop happened (we still called it rap and R&B back in my day, younguns) and the term booty entered our vocabulary. It seemed like far too much exercise, and besides, this is the kind of stuff we in the civilised East had rightly left behind a decade ago. I was back from my short preteen sojourn into 'normal' society so I thankfully missed all of this. I do not think I would stand before you today as the crazed lunatic I am if I spent my sixteenth year bopping to Jeniffer (pre-J.Lo) Lopez's Waiting For Tonight.

Still, Hip Hop isn't all bad, really*.

*(okay, so my definition of hiphop is not very traditional)

I don't dance anymore. I haven't had the opportunity, and ten years of being generally inactive means I wouldn't want to attempt it without getting into better shape, or I'll risk major (or at least irritatingly long-lasting) injuries. The urge is still there, and I suppose if I were to reclaim my body-as-temple and pursue a sport, it would be some kind of mad and wonderful mix between parkour and, um, this.

I would be so legend.