I finished playing Max Payne 2 in TWO DAYS! Whoopee doo yay!

I played the first Max Payne 5 years and a couple of months ago. Started playing the game on a junior's new computer. One that I helped buy, convincing the boy to spend some money on a 4.1 Creative Speaker set and an extra graphics card, and later set up in his room, installing the drivers, benchmarking out the PC by playing a game I had bought on the strength of its previews. And this was right after I was done with my 2-day 5-interview session with a company based out of Hyderabad.

I stopped playing the game the next evening, at the last level. I was supposed to shoot at some wires and topple a tower onto a helicopter, and I had no ammo left or something like that, I don't remember too clearly. I stopped playing and went out to the local PCO ( this was a time when cellphones were around, but calls to Hyderabad would cost about 6 Rs per minute) to call the company. The nice HR lady told me I could come join in two days. I walked back to the hostel, finished the game and went back to my room to pick up my train tickets to Guwahati. It was eight by the time I got back from the railway station, having cancelled the train tickets and booked bus tickets to Hyderabad.

I am still employed with the same company, and apparently I can still finish a game in 2 days if I put my mind to it.

So, what are your dislikes?



( Read more... )

Junji Ito is messing with my head.

Junji Ito who? A horror creator from Japan. Known primarily for a series called Uzumaki (Spiral in English, also made into a not-so-good movie) and for Tomie. Tomie. I read scans of this series a couple of years back. Fairly gruesome story about a drop-dead beautiful girl (heh heh heh) named Tomie, who has the power to make people obsess over her, and ultimately, kill her.

Except, Tomie does not stay dead easily. She regenerates, inspite of having been hacked and slashed and dismembered and, in one mega-sicko sequence, being ground to a paste and mixed with Sake. She regenerates, and sometimes, most of the time, actually, she comes back in ways that are extremely distressing to an unsuspecting manga fan who is having his dinner. Take my word for it.

The scans I had read before were from this defunct company called Comicsone, and the translations weren't too good. Dark Horse comics has taken to reprinting all of Junji Ito's works in a series called Museum of Horror, and I recently bought volume 2. Excellent stuff, more so because in this volume Ito's art seems much more polished than the early Tomie stories. Now to find volumes 1 and 3.

You can read a complete Junji Ito horror story right here.

* * *

Gaurav got a bunch of my stuff back from the States. A Sergio Aragones Groo pin-up, a Harry Roland Vampirella painting, a Tony Harris Starman page, and a 2-page Kevin Maguire splash page from Gen-13/Fantastic Four( my first double-page splash! Woo Hoo!). The splash page had some of the most detailed inking I have ever seen, I spent a good half an hour just looking at the intricacies. Apart from the artwork, he got back the complete Hellboy collection, the first three volumes of Lady Snowblood, quite a bit of Ellis - all of which were part of Brady's collection that I had purchased this year, most of which is still at 2fargon's place in the States. I finished the Hellboy volumes sometimes yesterday - started them in the airport the day before. Yes, I was travelling.

* * *

How was the last year for me? Very trippy. Right from Jan 1st, 2006, half of which I spent in Bangalore airport, I seem to have been travelling like mad. I cannot remember more than one or two weekends in the first three months of this year when I was in Hyderabad. None of these trips were too restful, except for a Mumbai trip in April, where I spent three and a half days in invigorating company, and the last week of the year, which was my Back To Basics trip. I nearly ended up spending half of 31st December in an airport too, but I didn't mind it one bit, nosirreebob.

In case you haven't been following the LJ too obviously, last year was also the year of Original Art. ( 2004 was the year of The Comic Book, 2005 the year of The DVD ) Technically, I bought my first pieces on 25th December 2005, but in 2006, the acquisition of my first Quitely page broke the 200$-eBay-barrier. I slacked off sometime in the middle of the year, but then I had this life-altering conversation with a friend, sometime in September, about why he is going to collect original comicbook art, and only original art, after he graduates. There was a flash of light, in which I realised how right he was. And from then, there was no looking back.

It was also, in a slighter degree, the year of a near-complete comicbook collection. I bought out a collection from someone in the US, and effectively that has put an end to fervent searches and snipes on eBay. I am contented. For now.

A depressing year, as far as new music goes. Apart from the fact that my sister gifted me an iPod shuffle, there has not been any hallelujah-worthy moment in music for me, this year. (Yes, that's right, I have become a jaded old fucker. Rape me, my friends. Which reminds me that I waded through Nirvana's discography sometime back. Excellent rush of happy memories that was. ) No, hold on, let me remember some music-worthy moments from last year...

- The live Zero-7 video that Vasu showed me, that made me go and listen to all of Zero-7 for a couple of days.
- Listening to this band from Nepal called Nepathya, who do rock versions of traditional songs from around the Himalayas. Infectious!
- Rediscovering DJ Krush, who I had heard a little bit of in 2005.
- Siddharth singing 'Appudo Ippudo' from Bommarilu, Shreya Ghoshal on the songs of Anukakonda Oka Roju, and, most important of all, 'Dole Dole' from Pokiri.
- All the adgy mixes.
- Kailash Kher's Kailasa, the live DVD as well as the CD.

Hmm, seems like there might be a mixtape in the offing after all...

The first half of the year, I took this rather drastic measure of choosing to ignore ALL blockbuster movies that are released. It was meant to be a one-year abstinence from all things corporate-Hollywood-and-Bollywood-ish, but the idea got chucked somewhere along the way. I did not watch too many movies either ways - probably the fact that Sympathy For Lady Vengeance did not impress me as much early this year has something to do with it. The ones I saw were reruns of the ones I saw before. Repeat viewings rock, don't they?

About the rest of what went on in my life, well, all of you who know me already know about what's going on, so do I really need to write it all down? The rest of you will have to make do, I guess.

* * *

Right now, I have in front of me the following - Pride of Baghdad and Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, both hardcover. Genshiken volume 3 - I had bought volumes 4 and 5 yesterday on the last day of the Odyssey sale. DVDs of Pitamaghan, Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu, Anjali, and Jillanu Oru Kaadhal. A neat Hitman page, drawn by John McCrea and inked by Gary Leach, featuring the last appearance of Sixpack, that I picked up from the post office today morning. Ramesh Menon's Mahabharata is occupying my nightly hours.

Ain't life grand?

My friend Vasu was in the States last year, and I ordered some comics off a site - crazyeli.com, in case you are wondering - pretty decent collection with prices low enough so that one can order fill-in issues without too much of a strain in one's pocket. I got a pretty bunch, but unfortunately, the comics reached Vasu a little late. And the seller had to resend them to an alternate address. Where the bunch remained, alone and friendless, for about eleven months. They landed in my lap yesterday, after much fed-exing and address-coordination between friends of friends of friends.

The loot?

• Watchmen 2-12 ( I already had issue 1, which was bought in a shady bookstore in Assam sometime in 2001),


• Four issues of V For Vendetta that I didn't have,


• Elektra Assassin 5-8 ( I had gotten 1-4 in Magazines, Bangalore),


• Frank Miller and Dave Gibbon's Martha Washington Saves the World - one of my favourite Miller works.


• 300 issues 1-4 - issue 5 got out of stock just before I could buy it.


• What If 35, by Frank Miller - the storyline being What if Elektra had lived, a nice little story from 1982 which was one of the first Miller works I ever read in my life. I believe there is a dilapidated copy of that issue still somewhere among my books in Guwahati - the darn thing nearly fell apart with all the multiple rereadings I subjected it to.


• Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner's The Pro, a throwaway yet hilarious story about a prostitute who gets superpowers.


• Punisher: The End, the only Ennis Punisher book I didn't have.

And, the most important of the lot - Miracleman 1-3, 5 by Alan Moore, and 17, by Neil Gaiman. My Miracleman collection gets nearer to completion. This is one of the rarest series available, and I think the day I get a copy of Miracleman 15 and 16 at decent prices will be a Seriously Important Day in my life. How decent is decent? Copies of Miracleman 15 sell on eBay for anything between 90-250$, depending on the condition. So far, I have 1-3,5,10,17, 20-24 and the trade paperback of volume 4 and Miracleman: Apocrypha.

I finished reading The Filth (by Grant Morrison, Chris Weston and Gary Erskine) recently. I thinking shooting myself in the head would have been slightly less masochistic an experience.

Planning to re-read the Morrison run on New X-Men. Mostly to get a feel of the Quitely-Kordey-Jiminez-Bachalo-Van Sciver-Silvestri artwork throughout the series.

JLU makes me want to set up a shrine to the Bruce Timm-Eric Radomsky-Glenn Murakami-Alan Burnett team. The ending ( and epilogue ) to the fourth season made life seem more worthwhile. What a show!

There was a sale going on at Odyssey. Buy three books and get the cheapest of them for free. Picked up Ramesh Menon's recent translation of The Mahabharata. The opening chapters are really inviting, just the right amount of risqueness required to hook a reader onto the volumes. But the packaging is really unmanageable - it took a great deal of struggling for me to pull out one of the volumes, and the slipcase is slightly damaged now. Bah!

This year, I shook myself off eBay a bit. Just a teeny-weeny bit, mind you. Part of it was because of dumb luck - I am a member of this community called comicbooklovers, and some LJ user put up a post sometime in the middle of the year that a friend of his was selling off a couple of comics. Out of curiousity, more than anything else, I clicked on the link to his LJ, where he had listed the comics and the prices down, and discovered that the guy was selling the complete Liberty Meadows for 15$. Bargain time! I shot off an email, and got a reply pretty soon, with a price breakdown. But goddarnit, someone beat me to Liberty Meadows. But Brady, the seller managed to coerce me with a fresh list of comics. Nice combination of trade paperbacks and single issues for enticing prices. And he even promised discounts.

So I got cracking. Tried ordering a small bunch at first, and got them very soon through some colleagues in the States. And then me and Brady began to break down the payments into time-based amounts. At the end of it, I was about 800 dollars lighter, and a back-breakingly heavy bunch of comics wound their way to 2fargon's place. Including complete runs of Hellboy, Cerebus, Tom Strong, Conan ( The Dark Horse series), a near-complete Warren Ellis bibliography.

A month or so later, Brady came back with a new list. He was liquidating his entire comicbook collection - with the exception of two series, Starman and Usagi Yojimbo, both of which I was looking for desperately, and was giving me first crack at it. The stuff that he was selling included quite a bit of Warren Ellis again, all his indie work, complete runs of Ex Machina, Essential Spiderman, Bendis's Daredevil run, quite a bit of which I already had, Hellblazer - and loads of other great swag.

I bought out his entire collection.

The explanation I offered myself was that I could very easily sell off my existing duplicate copies. Also, with a complete haul, it makes it easier for us to come up with a consolidated amount. Plus, he was offering free international shipping. After the first two months of the payment, he sent off the first package. The package was supposed to take two months to arrive, and I eagerly waited for those two months to pass. By the time it was October 19th, I was practically salivating with glee. I made it a point to cheerily greet the postman every morning when he landed at the office. All the office guards knew I was expecting a package, and the moment it arrived, they were to call me, regardless of how busy I was.

It didn't arrive. No problem, my stoic self told my foaming-at-the-mouth-and-at-the-brink-of-tears persona, give it three months, and then we'll see. After all, trackable packages don't get lost, they do get misplaced sometimes.

By the time November 19th came around, I was on my way to completely losing it. More so because November 19th was a Sunday, so I had to wait until Monday before I knew whether the parcel was here or not. Nope. No go. Went to the Post office on Tuesday , to verify if the package was there. Nope. No go. Went to the customs office on Wednesday, with The Flatmate, and then the post office at the airport to ask around. Extremely polite bunch of people, but they had no clue of how to track a USPS number. Came back and wrote off a mail to Brady to start tracking the package at his end. It would take 60 days to find out its whereabouts.

And today, it arrived. Flatmate is away in Bangalore, so had a gala time hauling 25-odd kilos up three flights of stairs. Spent a happy half an hour ogling at the contents.

( The Loot, with annotations )

Best Book Stall has another sale going on right now, at YMCA Secunderabad, and I happened to drop in about 5 days into the sale. Much astounded at the clearance sale section which occupied one side of the huge hall - you could select any 5 books for hundred rupees, ten books for one hundred and fifty. A cursory search yielded gems like hardcover editions of Robert Silverberg's Valentine Pontifex AND Lord Valentine's Castle. Volume 3 of Brian Lumley's Necroscope, assorted parts of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, two Patricia Highsmith novels, Tim Dorsey's Cadillac Beach, which I am looking forward to reading - I hugely enjoyed Hammerhead Ranch Motel. El Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, Gregory McDonald's Son Of Fletch, and I hate to say that I haven't gotten around to reading any of the Fletch novels yet. John Berendt's Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil which, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't have picked up had it not been for the price. And interestingly, found this out-of-print book called Mrs Coverlet's Magicians by Mary Nash. I don't really remember where I had heard of this book - probably while amazon-surfing some day....

The rest of the sale yielded some great finds too. Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, which I read immediately, and which, like I expected, has very little in common with Tim Burton's movie except for the broad theme in general, and the ending. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which I also finished immediately. An illustrated 1946 hardcover of Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, (John Tenniel's drawings, of course!) I had resisted buying this for quite a long time. An illustrated unabridged version of The Three Musketeers, and the only children's book William Faulkner ever wrote, called The Wishing Tree. The Encyclopaedia of the Occult, which seemed much comprehensive when I browsed it on the spot, and a book on the early Warner Brothers' directors. Yukio Mishima's Sound of Waves, a love story set in Japan, which I had been hearing good things about ( seems it has been adapted to film some five times). Two Shel Silverstein hardcovers - When The Sidewalk Ends and A Light In The Attic. An interesting children's book called The Philadelphia Chickens - this came with a free CD that had songs sung by folks like Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep and Laura Linney.

Also picked up quite a few random books on music criticism. Had to go there again later, because I ran out of cash.

Spent the long weekend peacefully completing four volumes of Buddha. Can't wait to get my paws on the remaining four - and I now understand that the term "Godfather of Manga" is one not easily bestowed on a person. Do yourselves a favour and try reading Buddha if you can. Scans are not available online, as far as I know. The storytelling alternates between cartoony goofiness and gut-wrenching realism between pages, and goddamnit, why is so less Tezuka available on eBay?

Which reminds me, I won a lot of 18 comics that included a signed first edition of Craig Thompson's Goodbye Chunky Rice, a signed copy of Slow News Day by Andi Watson, and Matt Madden's One Faraway Beach, also signed. Loads of other stuff too, and all for 22.5$, woo hoo!

And there was also the package I received from mikester, containing multiple copies of Solo, each signed by Sergio Aragones, and a trade paperback of Fanboy, that has a sketch by Aragones inside. Why multiple copies of Solo? Because there are rabid Aragones fans in Delhi, Bombay and Kolkata, and it just didn't seem fair for me to have a copy and them not having it. Now, now, is my halo showing?

What is Solo, you ask? Oh, well, you don't, but let me tell you anyways. It's a series published bimonthly by DC comics, with 48 pages and no adds, and correspondingly has a higher price point of 4.99$ per issue. What really sets Solo apart is that every issue is done by one artist, who is given free reign to do whatsoever s/he wants with DC characters. I believe the series has been cancelled after twelve issues, but each of the artists who have contributed so far are legends in their own right - Paul Pope, Tim Sale, Howard Chaykin, Mike Allred, Ted Kristiansen, Richard Corben, and on issue 11, Sergio Aragones. Coincidence department: I bought the first 10 issues issues of Solo from a comicbook fan at a dollar each just two days before Mike mentioned that Mr Aragones was signing at his bookshop.

I had to play a game this weekend - one of these insane urges to trounce virtual meat that crop up from time to time - so I began Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Excellent gameplay, which was kind of expected when I found out that the game was produced by Tigon games, a company founded by Vin Diesel himself ( I remember asking a question about this company in some quiz or the other when it was launched). Currently midway through the game, and enthused enough about gaming to install Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend, the latest TR game. Graphics are superb, but the camera angles are killing me. Is it time to pick up a controller?

( Pictures! )

So, like 'em?

I used to draw and paint, once upon a time. Even went to art school when I was a kid, and found out that watercolours was the only medium I had some amount of control on. Until of course, I discovered the joys of pen and ink and trying to imitate John Totleben's artwork.

After buying a scanner ( along with the computer I bought my parents the other day ), I spent some time scanning whatever of my samples I could find.

( Scans )

I will respond to not-so-important mails, and all LJ comments after I get back to Hyderabad. Sorry about the quiz powerpoints not working, I was more than a little sleepy when uploading the files, and something must have gone kaboom.

The year ends on a high. The DVD rip of Sympathy For Lady Vengeance Chan-Wooked its way into the torrentsphere and is now Parked in my harddisk. Ditto the complete scans of Mai The Psychic Girl, the first manga I read in my life.

Purrr.

Someone seems to have anonymously gifted me a paid LJ account for two months.

I know I should be really happy about getting a free gift ( What? Oh yeah, also moaning and being outraged about the violation of my rights to Free LJing), but what really scares me is the thought of what exactly I am going to do with a paid account. Frankly speaking, I have never even considered getting myself one. Partly because I am a lazy something of a some-other-thing LJ-er who would rather click refresh on his friends' page the whole day instead of musing about life or venting my ire at things that annoy me. ( No, Kisna doesn't count, O Unkind Dissenters to the previous statement of mine.) In fact, I have realised that I am quite happy not musing about life and indulging in fanciful consumerist rampages every other day. Most people I know, including myself, treat these rampages as impending signs of my landing up someplace where the jackets are strait and people carry electric prods in their back-pocket, or ending up bankrupt, or both. Writing about my acquisitions are thereupatic. I write about, say, one of every ten things I buy, and when I look at my LJ later and read about how less I seem to have bought the past couple of months, the juices begin flowing, and eBay beckons yet harder.

Sorry, got sidetracked there for a moment.

So, a paid account. Lots of iconspace, which means I will have to spend some time searching for those tiny pics that make me laugh. The only ones I like seem to be taken by other people, and I dunno, it seems like a very personal thing to do, stealing using someone else's icon. Not that I would use them anyway. Somehow I seem to forget all about the "change userpic" option everytime I leave a comment on someone's post, and end up using the default userpic. It's not funny, I know, seeing Gollum's leery face accompanying a rather serious comment from yours truly ( *giggle* "serious" comment), but I convince myself that the expression on my default userpic can be interpreted in multiple ways. Try looking at him real hard, can you detect that vein of emotion in his evocative eyes? Can you? Bah, you weren't looking hard enough.

There are also these neat customizable options I can now apply to my Livejournal and make it really spiffy, but I went to the "manage" page and got a headache. Tried reading the FAQ, and then figured that reading my friends' page and clicking "refresh" was a more entertaining option. Besides, I always thought the minimalist, black-and-white approach to my main page really kicks ass.

Voice posts - you crazy? I already have people looking at me strangely everytime I am reading through vrikodhara's old posts, and now I am supposed to talk to myself in my cubicle and have all my colleagues, on top of gazillions of unknown people ( well, that was just a random number I thought up, to be honest) listen to what I have been doing? No way, Jose!

Erm, in case you are reading this, O anonymous gifter, and wondering at the ingratitude I seem to be displaying at your gesture of goodwill, allow me to assure you that ingratitude is the last thing on my mind. I was really, really zapped when I saw the mail in the morning and, with emotions ranging from euphoria to unbridled curiousity, I called up a couple of friends I know to figure out if they were responsible for this. It turned out to be none of them, and I was even more enthused. My, my, Houston, we have a secret paid-account-bestower, and probably I will never know the reason why I have been gifted one.

Then, of course, familiar beatzoian paranoia won through, and I waited for sometime for a mail from LJ that said - "We are sorry, there has been a mistake and this paid account was meant for someone else." Or one from some other LJ guy named "beatz" or "beatxo" that said "eh, I misspelled my name while filling in the paid account form, give me my money back." Even did a quick check around other users to figure out if this was LJ's idea of a Christmas gift. All the time remembering to click efresh on the friends' page every now and then, yes.

None of this happened, and by the end of the day, I became pretty sure that I had indeed received a gift. MINE, ALL MINE!!! Which is when it hit me, the question of what exactly I would do with a paid LJ account.

So I thought and thought, and came to a conclusion. ( Part of me itches to say "And the conclusion is - I am shutting down my LJ. Bwahahahaha!" We be thinking nassty thoughtss, precious) The conclusion being, yeah, I will pay better attention to my Livejournal. I will not neglect it the way I have this year. Not that I will blather meaninglessly, but expect the frequency of posts to increase. In other words, this will be a live Livejournal, instead of the intermittently-zombified Journal that it is right now.

Whoever you are, thank you for your gift.

One good act of vengeance deserves another.

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

Don't write anything on your LJ for a month. And then, make a post creating a new meme.

I tag ALL OF YOU! Muhuhahahahaha.

Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.

I finished Anansi Boys last night, in two sessions. Now I am in that unhappy state of mind that is brought about upon the realisation that I would probably have to wait fo a long, long while before a new Neil Gaiman novel comes out.

Gaiman had already pointed out that the book was more humour than fantasy, and rightly so. There was the friendly Douglas Adamsy-PG Wodehousey narrator's voice throughout the writing, and the observational gems that Gaiman indulges, the kind of opinions about everyday things that make you go - "Damn, now why didn't I think of that?" I have been thinking of a way to write about the book without giving away any spoilers. Probably the best way to make you go and read it is to repeat the tagline - "God is dead. Meet the kids." and to say that in the book, much like all other Gaiman books, Things are Not What They Seem, and Events Happen in Different Layers of Reality. I think it would also help if you read up on Kwaku Anansi, the trickster-spider-god character of African myth. I had bought a collection of Anansi stories off a sale sometime back, and could not but help smiling at the entertaining Gaiman spins on the myths.

It's self-referentially humorous. I mean, just look at these lines:
Daisy made a noise. It was not a yes-noise and it was not a no-noise. It was a I-know-somebody-just-said-something-to-me-and-if-I-make-a-noise-maybe-they-will-go-away sort of noise.
Carol had heard that noise before.
"oy", she said. "Big bum. Are you going to be much longer. I want to do my blog."
Daisy processed the words. Two of them sank in. "Are you saying I've got a big bum?"
"No,", said Carol. "I'm saying that it's getting late, and I want to do me blog. I'm going to have him shagging a supermodel in the loo of an unidentified London nightspot."


I must have spent three minutes, probably more, just laying back on the bed and laughing hard after reading these lines.

The version of the book I bought, the British trade paperback, has a deleted scene, a scanned excerpt from Gaiman's diary ( which contains such entertaining information as an idea to begin every chapter in the book with a punchline of a popular joke, which was vetoed later) and an interview with the writer. On an aside: How much did I pay for it? Nothing at all. Bought it with the book coupons collected from KQA quizzes. Muhuhahahahaha.

Also picked up an Iomega 160 GB External Hard Drive yesterday. Looks really cool, but has an American 3-pin plug, so I need a converter for that, even though my spike-buster does have a socket that works with it. I need to work everywhere, that's why.

You get all kinds of DVDs at National Market. Especially blockbusters, the kind of big-budget movies that go on to make a lot of money and win awards and all that. All three of the Lord Of The Rings movies have been available at National Market, and in different formats too. You can get the fullscreen versions, the widescreen versions, all three movies in one disc, all three movies PLUS Spiderman 1 and 2 on the same disc, or if you are really feeling adventurous, all three LotR movies and the three Harry Potter movies in the same disc.

Me? I was feeling a bit more adventurous.

( And a good thing I was, too. )

Other things I bought last week: The DVD of Dil Chahta Hai (2-disc Edition) The double disc edition brought out by Sony is fast going out of print, the only one I can see at the Planet M/Music World outlets now are a very pirated-looking single disc version that sells for 400 Rs. The 2-disc set cost me 500 Rs. The extra disc has got a couple of unmastered deleted scenes, a "making of" where everybody kisses everyone else's asses, and a couple of theatrical/TV trailers. Why did I buy it? Because I needed a version of DCH that has all the songs mastered properly. One with a proper image transfer ( T-series had brought out an atrocious VCD that totally sucked. I had a pirated VCD sometime back which was of better quality than this legit version, honest injun! )

And of course, I bought it because it's one of my favouritest movies, ever.

Also picked up a 256 MB GeForce card for the PC, and now I am playing the Punisher like crazy. One thing I loved about this game is the way they have brought in Ennis's scripts and characters, and in some cases, even the dialogue. Next Up: Half Life 2, and GTA: San Andreas.

( Who wins? )

Thank you, people!

Battle Royale lovers be warned - Battle Royale 2: Requiem is to the first movie what Kisna is to Lagaan. Overblown acting, choppy cinematography, less-than-a-quarter-baked character developement, and a storyline that makes you want to gouge your eyes out and promise never to overestimate a movie sequel, even though it's Japanese and claims to be "Asian Extreme Cinema". To think I almost ordered this movie from cd-WOW a couple of months ago, and stopped myself because of this vague hope of finding it in National Market sometime. I did,on Monday night. Watched it. Yeaagh!



And come to think of it, I have been watching too many movies lately. 26 movies in January, and 9 so far this month. Part of this is because of the DVDs I've been finding at National Market.



England, London in particular, as visualized by Ms Susannah Clarke in the exquisite Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell haunted me for a week in January. It took me that much time to read the 800-odd page book. This hasn't really happened before, my reading a paragraph and then rereading it. Generally, it is the story that takes me forward, rather than the prose. Susannah Clarke, however, made me pause and savour the rain-soaked, fog-swept streets and alleys of nineteenth century London, a world which has some shades of our world, and some of its own; the characters - quaint, unfantasylike names ( I absolutely hate fantasy stories have an overdose of z's and x's and q's in the names of the characters) and demeanour. It's not an action-packed magicfest, nope. Reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is more like a brisk walk on a misty winter morning - you know the chill isn't going to last, and you know beautiful sights lie in store for you once the sun comes up. You shiver once in a while, wishing you were safely under your blanket in bed, but at the end, there's nothing really like walking alone on a wintry morning. Call it English Magic, if you will.

Just when I was done with the book, I had the one-volume Bone, by Jeff Smith, delivered to me. Now I have read parts of Bone, mind you. Scattered issues towards the beginning, and a couple of story-arcs in the middle. But the joy of reading the complete story, end to end, is something that really cannot be expressed in words. Bone is funny one moment, touching the next, and the more I progress, the more of an epic heroic fantasy it's trying to become. How can anyone not fall in love with the Moby-Dick loving Fone Bone, the guy whose hat bursts into flame the first time he sees Thorn bathing in the river? How can you not root for Gran'ma Rose as she races her cows? Yes, you heard that right, she races cows. She runs. I would kill to have a grandmother that can run neck-to-neck with a cow and occasionally pound those stupid, stupid rat creatures to a pulpy quiche.

And now that I am about to finish the Bone volume, I just got five volumes of the Cerebus trade paperbacks delivered to me yesterday. Three of them autographed by Dave Sim and Gerhard. Muhuhahahahaha.

Life is pretty much fun. I reserve the mornings for reading and the nights for movies, and I slog my ass off in the daytime. Suits me fine, I say.

....watching Shogun Assassin and Battle Royale back to back.

Giggliness, on the other hand, is the download status bar on Battle Royale:The Manga and Lone Wolf and Cub: Volume 4 proceeding at a brisk pace.

Note to self: Damn, I need to complete my Lone Wolf collection ( 28 manga volumes, 6 DVDs), and fast.

Ladies and gentlemen, a Big Hand for the Man of the Week, Vasu, who has very ably demonstrated that the best way to watch a movie is to indulge in semi-Industrial espionage to get at it. You rock, my man.