Rest

A holiday, well deserved, still bearing yesterdays fatigue. Nothing much - good games, good sleep, that's all 4 today.

Rhythm and Hues

Rhythm and Hues was scheduled today as i said...and we were supposed to be in the bus by 9 o'clock...mmm....well i woke up and saw my clock...and it was 9:05....Damn it!... I obviously panicked, realized quickly I didn't have too much time or what if everyone already left, crazy thoughts raced through my mind as i had a quick 20 second brushing. Me still in my night clothes, oh shit!, i take my shirt off and look around for another to wear. Flash our HoD philippe sir is in my room for me, wow i wear some shirt lying around, wear my slippers (no idea what i was thinking), and raced him to the bus. Aaaahhh finally so the bus didn't leave after all :) cool...and so begins my day. wasn't as exciting as i had expected it to be because of the insane traffic jams and it took 5 hours for us to reach - half the time to reach Pune and another half to get past the Mumbai traffic! Stoped at a petrol refill place which had CCD and some other stores. Packed a quick breakfast + lunch pack and got back on. And Rhythm and Hues was a cool place on the third floor of some building, don't remember the name. Umm had a nice presentation on the kind of work they do, about their company, the movies they worked on and had a tour of the work place too (which was like bamboo huts with central A.C, good ambiance). Anyway got back on the bus by 4:30, 5 i guess and headed back to the college. Everyone was damn hungry so we stopped by a food plaza. Had chaat and stuff, checked out the place, had some fun with some duck which came by, LoL. Had a bet of 20 rs for anyone who could go and touch them and 50 rs for anyone who can lift one up (no one won, kinda obvious cause the duck wasn't too friendly snapping at us and all...) back to the bus. Too much boredom = too many dirty jokes = lots of lame games = lot of meaning less laughter... oh well had some fun, back to college , don't remember the time, just happy to be back. And that's the it of that :)

nothing much

Nothing too good about today, just work on the game design document for our project. Got a big day tomorrow, going to rhythm and hues studio in Mumbai. Hmmm, must be fun :).

Art-O-War

After a quick meeting on the current game progress we started off with Adobe Audition. And the first half of the class was just that, sound design by our HoD Philippe Vachey. Next after lunch we had English, which as usual was a bit anarchic, with grammar practice, a story completion and ended with a very good debate on for or against wars.

Animage

It was supposed to be a programming class today by Alexi...but suprise suprise...we instead are divided into 2 teams of 5 each and are taking part in a game designing contest called animage organized by the Times of India group. So beginning from today we work for 2 days a week on this project. For the moment we all had to write game concepts by the end of the first half of the day. I wrote a game concept of car racing with a twist. Won't be writing down what my concept was though. The others made interesting concepts too. Like Pranav made a game concept with the idea of sneaking up on girls. Anyway, after lunch we all had our game concepts analyzed and we found that my game concept was way too complicated to make on flash, given the amount of time we had (27 days - only 2 days working per week). We found Sams game the simplest, so we began work on it which continued till the end of the day. Then some DoTA and more of working, completes today.

Its all Gud

Woke up at around lunch time. Attended my art history class. Had a very interesting discussion on how to improve my communication skills and over all attitude towards everything. Art history has always been free speech and free style kind of class, and most of the time it is short and fun too. then more DoTA, watched star wars episode 5:the empire strikes back and episode 6:the return of the Jedi.

I love Strategy games

We had video reportage today...and we did some group discussion on how the scene script, shoot script and storyboard will be. Tried our hand at using the new HD camcorder. Slept soon, don't know why woke up at 12 midnight and started playing civilization : beyond the sword and before I know it, its already 5 in the morning. Slept again at 5.

Lose Yourself

I remember waking up, gym, eating breakfast and then losing myself for 3 hours... Philippe showed us a 3 hour long video. Queer to the core, cut up, edited and modified in order to achieve this effect. It was one of the most bizarre videos i have ever seen. It made me write a small note after watching it, which is..."trance.... trance ?.... transcending.... transformation.... translating =?... trance... trick ?.... truth... treat ?..." the speakers in the video were very experienced people... who had well pretty well defined personal ideas of what sound and music are. There were people talking about many different aspects of it. One of them was talking of sound in the form of education... like when you teach a kid, his language at about the age of 6, you teach him alphabets first, then words and then sentences. And similarly unless you are "sound conscious" or are basically capable of appreciating it, you should not be exposed to it... One old man quoted a German philosopher's saying that the only two words that do not need reason to cause pleasure were....music....and....laughter....and he bursted out laughing. Well the video was indeed very strange. Many of them talked of Beethoven and Mozart and used big words like time, space and compared it to music...some thing like..."no beginning and no end"... it was a dreamy experience.. magical and sleepy at places too. Well the reason behind this was... for all i could understand, i found it mind boggling... and for all i couldn't understand, i found it extremely boring... well after that we had the English class, where i wrote down the stuff which happened in the previous class, the stuff maam dictated in that class and started doing time pass after that. One of the examples is below...first one by me and the other by noob Aman.

Introduction to Sound Design

One really interesting day today... today we had sound design by Philippe Vachey...the HoD for gaming. Also today was the very first class by him. We were asked to get any kind of materials which make sound. I brought two empty bottles of coke to try and imitate drumming. We had a very powerful sound recorder and all of us began using their instruments to make sounds. Nikhil got the scissors and tried making sounds of the barber cutting hair. Aman got a book which had a plastic cover with very fine lines on it and when you run your nail over this cover, it makes really cool high pitched sounds. Well he used this to imitate mice fighting and running around. Sam tried doing some weird sounds with the harmonium. Pranav got a plastic bag and crushed it to give very interesting sounds. Philippe also showed us to use the plastic bag to show if some one is being chased and how to increase and decrease the speed to give realistic chasing effects. It also seemed very similar to walking on dry leaves. Pranav also used the guitar to make some musical effects. Julien used a toothbrush, spoon fork and his glass mug. He made rubbing sounds with his finger moving rapidly on the toothbrush, he even imitated brushing his teeth to get his desired effect. He hit the glass mug with the spoon and fork at multiple locations to form different sounds. Amol used a thermocol glass and a piece of Jenga wood block (the ones we used to carve out our dice) to make table like sounds, hitting the cup with his fingers for a variation in sound sometimes. Siddesh made a very repetitive two strikes hitting with his spoon and glass which he stole from the mess :P. Karl used a small tube like container with a lid to make poping sounds. He basically pulled out the cap to make a pop sound and quickly put the lid back. Harshal used a one rupee coin to make some interesting sounds. He threw it from a certain height to get a metallic dropping sound. Then he spun the coin very fast and recorded the sound of it slowly stopping and vibrating on the ground. And well about me... well i tried to fill the bottle up and make some whistle like sounds which Nikhil suggested but I failed miserbly. Then i tried to bang the two coke bottles against each other to make some drumming sounds, didnt really succeed in that but well... after a few more tries with it , I was done. In fact it was really funny because Aman and Sam started taking pictures of me playing (i think i looked really retarded here) and philippe was calling everyone maestro. Well good day overall, had a lot of fun... it was to make us aware of something called sound consiousness and that we dont need the real objects to imitate that particular kind of sound with a little funny reference to the Pavlov's experiment... and to keep our mind open to the world of sound, as philippw said ears have no eye lashes...

Mixed Design

We were supposed to finish the mixed design Photoshop assignment and I was supposed to wake up at 4 in the morning. Well i dint wake up at 3 to finish it (which is very usual of me) , didn't wake up at 6 for gym (lazy bum) , finally woke up at 8:30 only for breakfast. Well did some very bad quality work on Photoshop and submitted it off (so sure i m gonna flunk in this one!!!) , spent the rest of the day doing time pass. You guys can laugh your asses off at the image i made.

Teh Seince uff SleePin

A lazy Sunday. Woke up only for lunch and went back to sleep as soon as i finished eating. Woke up again at 6 in the evening...its like a day dedicated to sleeping. Didn't do much later either...played a bit and worked on Photoshop mixed design assignment.

suprise suprise

Oh today was a really fun day. We went to the GA (gamers anonymous) torney for DoTA to Pune and guess what, found that JNP (clan from Hyderabad) was coming, and our first match was against them. Well we obviously didn't stand a chance against them given the level our clan was in at that moment but we had a good wake up call and we learn from every deafeat so... anyway we ate at Subway, practiced a lot after coming back to college that day and won almost every public match played on Garena. Slept late at night cause its Saturday night and didn't care about gym on Sunday either.

Strategizing

All through today we were practicing and planning strategy for tomorrow cause its a DoTA tournament in Pune.... took permission from all the required teachers for it and here goes nothing... the first time we play as a clan...

My funnly lil presentation

Yipeee its all over!!...its finally all over!!...Well the last post was written just before going to give the presentation. We all were very tired already and given such circumstances we had to give a a presentation, so obviously the quality of presentation from everyone was pretty bad in general. Mine was worse though and as usual the most funny presentation too...in fact as i clicked the next slide my audience (my classmates) started laughing, even before I say anything lol... But anyhow i managed to give a 13.5 minute presentation out of the alloted 20 minutes. After the presentation immediately we had lunch. But i was too tired (missed one whole night of sleep) to have any lunch so i went straight to my room to bed. As soon as lunch was over and it was time to go back to class my room mate Anshuman woke me up. Then i met up with Harshal who was waking everyone one. We went back to class only to find out that we had to play poker or any card game for the rest half of the day. I kept eating chips from Pranav and Sam as they played poker and rummy respectively. It was not soon before we were bored and started playing DoTA. I ate a lot of snacks as i dint eat anything for breakfast or lunch, have been working all night long and was really hungry. Soon after i saw the movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona which i found was an amazing movie. Had dinner and blackout for the rest of the day.

Burning the midnight oil

Today we had card games with Alexi but because of the internet not working, we started playing a game of texas poker , over the first half of the day before lunch. After the lunch , the internet was back so each of us were given different card games on which we had to research and give a 20 minute presentation on. We stop researching after we realize that we have a lot of work remaining on the game board and start working on it. We worked...we worked...and worked even more....i mean...we just went on working. Well a lot of things did happen whiled we were working and we did receive a battalion of helping hands from the industrial design and animation schools (part of our college). I think we finally finished our board game by 5:30 this morning. We pack it perfectly (as perfectly as we could manage), then all set and done we realize that we haven't put in the rule book. We reopen the packaging, put it in and repack it. Again we realize we haven't put the dice in it, we found the dice lying around on the table, so we open it again and put it back it. Well that's the good part about the packaging (which was done by Inder from ISD), its so easily opened and re shut too, so well that came handy. After that we started working on the presentation we had to give on the card game on the next morning that is err now.... Its already 9:40 and i still have no idea what i am going to give a presentation on....hmmm...lets see how this turns out...writing this just before the class starts....

Lodi/Boghi/Bon fire night

Quite an interesting day today...well lets see, the day begins with my lunch followed by 4 hrs of rigorous work on the game board...then we had a meeting with one of the directors of our institution on the problems we are facing on campus which was quite long and frustrating...had a racial discrimination incident at the same time which we got to light. It ended after about 3 and a half hours at about 9 in the night. Then we lit up a bon fire, Urvashi got the Dhol guys to drum for us and started dancing around the bon fire. Had a little of coke which was spiked with whiskey, played few DoTA matches. Got Asadul to paint the game board for us. I asked him what he wanted in return for all this and he jokingly said he wanted me to take off my clothes and run along the whole corridor. Well i didn't exactly take off my clothes, i only took off my shirt and ran. Aman came exactly at the wrong time and video recorded the whole incident. Well anyway that's the end of it.

boring...

One of the most mentally challenging days apart from programming. we didn't have any programing as we had expected, instead we had level design. Followed by DoTA, and work nothing interesting happened today.

hoggin n shoppin

I am gonna try to keep this post real small. I am kinda late and we have algorithm and programming class tomorrow (have been watching smallville and its already 2am. Hmm so lets see.... Woke up today at 1 pm all alone, went to the bathroom and when i am back out my room was full of friends. Apparently there wasn't any power, which is kinda usual during the Sunday and all of them wanted to go out to eat. So i got into the Innova which was provided to us by the college management directly without any freshing up. We went to SGS mall, McD , ate the french fries and coke routine , then to KFC (for Harika) , went around looking for markers for our board game ,went to Archies , Venus , some electrical shops, had fun going up down the escalator and finally after much looking around picked up some stuff which came closest to what we were looking for. Got some free hugs and took some pics outside SGS , Ansuhman fixed up the Innova which broke down (talk about having cool friends) , back to college , had Harikas tang , played some DoTA , had a lot of fun , and we had our first student body meeting which was really interesting, where we discussed the problems we are facing and not just complaining about them but also providing the institution the solutions as well. Then dinner , more smallville and that's it for the day.

Movies n Muching...

Well I woke up at my usual time (12:45 which some how magically is always the same when i open my eyes in the morning) , didn't have any class today so went about playing , chating and other stuff. Played some fun matches of DoTA , watched 2 movies - Star wars: episode 4 - a new hope and pineapple express, went on a cashew nut eating spree while watching pineapple express (which was kinda challenging cause we couldn't just pop in those nuts , we had to remove some hard ass covering to eat each of them, well anyways). Well wrapped up by 4 in the morning.

dumb awe n shiny disco lights

Well this day was really fun. I woke up at 12:45. Wasn't much choice on what i could do, just brushed my teeth and went down for lunch. Had art history class with Jerzy. saw some really vibrant, exotic as well as dark,nude and gory old paintings... didnt understand the real topic which was on impressionists and expressionists which are basically groups of people (European Art Revolutionists) and styles if i guessed that right, still liked that class a lot. Had loads of fun after that, we were working as well as listening to music, and had our hands pretty much full. As the night went longer we went over slowly to jokes which got dirtier by the minute. Increasing the volume might have had more influence on us than we could have expected, cause Harika got up and started doing some dance moves. Soon I followed and Urvashi joined us and we went on dancing for a while. Archesh came for a while and seeing that the audio output from our lab computers was not good enough we got his speakers from his room. Well fast forwarding.... Sameer came too, lights off, everyone on the dance floor (lab floor), 3 in the night, don't care about anything, found a pair of empty sprite bottles and started drumming out of tune songs, Harika started doing some gud ass shaking belle dancing moves, everyone just lost it and we had a great time. We did some Nepali dance also some Bollywood style dancing because Urvashi knows some good dance moves (she used to go to dancing classes at Shimak Devar's Institute). we went through the corridor dancing and all to Harikas room where we drank a little chocolate milk, ate a few bourbon biscuits and Urvashi's honey and all but didn't go back to sleep, went out again into the corridor, sat down comfortably , Aman left at this point and we were joined by Rachana. Archesh got out his guitar , started playing it, everyone started singing songs and all at 5 in the morning. We lied down on the corridor floor, Harika got a blanket and Urvashi a pillow. Archesh got this crazy idea about spraying deodorant on his guitar and playing it when it is on fire. It started okay and looked really cool but soon after the two strings (the thinnest ones) broke off. So put it inside and got out his sketch book and started drawing Harika who was sleeping on the corridor floor lol!! soon slowly all left and it was 6 30 in the morning now. Whoa what a night man...cool one though...:)...

presentation day

The internet which went off yesterday along with the power cut didn't come back until next morning. So the presentation which was already postponed to today morning was again postponed till 2 pm. We were give the morning to prepare for it to compensate for missing out yesterday. Soon before we knew it, it was time for the presentation. Well, i wasn't as nervous as usual, i think i got a hold of it, even though I didn't know my subject perfectly. It started with Sam next was Aman and then me. I think i started off pretty well, but mid presentation, i got all jerky, thanks to Lionel, who gave interesting bits information on the current version of the game i was talking about. it helped a lot to get me back to the real world. Thinking back it wasn't all that bad. It ended smoothly, then we got some feedback on what we need to improve on etc from both Alexi and Lionel together. And as usual spent the rest of the time playing Dota and CS. Had a small water and toilet paper fight with me, Aman, Urvashi, Rachna and Siddesh. Cleaned up the mess a little bit after that, the room was really stinking. Watched Russel Peter videos on Youtube after that till 3 in the morning. Did more time pass and finally slept at around 4 in the morning :D.

CS day in

The first day i actually had breakfast in a long time. Usually, i wake up either a few minutes before class or exactly at the beginning of the class. Interestingly waking up a bit earlier than the routine, just by chance enabled me to have some yummy dosas. the class for today was case study and we were told that we would have to give a 20 minute presentation by 3 pm. we were asked to chose numbers by Lionel and based on that we got our topics. I got flight simulator games, which i had no idea about. It was crazy Wikipedia reading till 2:30 or so until suddenly the internet stops working. Then a guy walks in to tell us that some xyz happened and the electricity would be gone for half an hour. it was supposed to come back at 3 i.e. But it came back only at 5. rest of the guys were doing their own things, some playing volleyball, i slept off, told my room mate to wake me up if the electricity is back.By the time i wake up its already end of class and Karan, Anushuman and Saket are going out to get some snacks. Its Sakets treat and i join in as soon as i wake up. we travel to a place called Hadapsar in a sharing auto. had some wada-pavs (pretty famous in Maharashtra) and some really tasty sweet paan with a cherry. by the time we got back it was about 6 in the evening and the internet was still not back and everyone was gearing up for some counterstrike action. As the internet was still not back (which was just a reason not to work) i joined in to play. And wow it began at 6 and we were playing non-stop till 9. got up only for dinner after which we started playing again. awesome fun, we played till about 12:30 and had some fried fish and prawns (midnight snacks :D) which Urvashi got for us from Hadapsar. hmm well that's the end of the day slept really early at 1 am and dint watch Smallville at all (which still surprises me).

the accidental holiday

Lets see... hmm... Woke up at 9:30 (class begins at 9:30), brushed my teeth quickly, if you could call that brushing?, and well rushed to class only to find that I am the first one to come in... Soon we found out that our teacher Alexi was feeling sick and couldn't teach today, so we had personal work instead of programing (yipeee). Played Caesar 4, after that for quite some time. Then took a bath and put my clothes for washing and other stuff, lunch after that followed by a few games of dota. then Sam and Nickhil started a cardboard fight which soon followed into a Maaza bottle (read light sabre) fight. I joined in only to get my ass kicked. then Harshal took the an old dsk t-shirt and started using it as a whip. Crazy time as usual for gamers. Worked on the game board a little followed with some good games of counter strike (got my ass pawned again). Watched smallville as usual and end of the day. Thinking of the whole day back, for my blog, i guess that was pretty much the ideal holiday for a gamer though accidentally ;)) hehe.

lol i told u gud nite...hehehe....didnt go back to my bed though. aaahhh juz watched another episode of smalville with Aman (about 45 mins) . Its almost 3 am now. I have to stop saying gud nite and not going to sleep. OK! gud nite now. Time to sleep. Nothing else.

OMG i dont know what the fuck happend in the last 1 hour or more but both me and Aman decided to do at least a little bit of work for today on our game board. And LOL ! work was it? hahaha we were laughing hysterically at everything, it felt as if we were suddenly high or something (like we breathed in some laughing gas??) and we went nuts over everything. We were listing the animals which have to be printed and I don't really understand how it all started but, slowly (probably cause of my laziness/insanity aura combo) we started acting like drunken drugged people. While we were searching, we found an image of two kangaroos lying on their back in the open, and we started thinking of ourselfs in their place, Aman even said something like "now i am gonna show you how to use photoshop and edited that image replacing thekangaroos face with mine!!( i will upload the image the original not the edited one!) I absolutely had to write this down, though i juz posted an hour ago. oh boy its 2 am in the morning now (just realised i had to set the time in my blog), gotta go sleep now....enough laughing for a day, and O shit, tomoro is algoritms and programing shit (i hate programing, even though i am fascinated by the taughts of being able to code and decode your own programs). K Time To Sleep Now. Good Night :)

The Beginning....

I begin my post feeling lazier than usual, as i haven't posted anything in my blog for the last two days, I begin to wonder what to fill in today.
And as several attempts to recollect how the last 2 days have passed haven't yielded any result, i simply conclude that they must have passed by with me greeting everyone back to college with a "Hey!!! Happy New Year", "How are you?" and "What did you do for New Year Eve??".
All i remember about yesterday is that I went along with my friends Sameer and Harika to a place called Kamat (which is a restaurant) for breakfast at 12 noon. Well... we didn't exactly decide to go to this place though, we just started walking along the highway, stopping by and looking at every small cafe that comes along our way, in the hot mid day sun, bearing with all the guys on motorbikes spamming their horn at Harika, which she surprisingly was ignorant of. Filnally after about 1.5 kms of walking we reach this place called Kamat which was decent enough, we sat, ordered and went on talking on the usual stuff collegers talk about. We got our dosas and Harika got her Pa Bajji (umm details arnt really necessary but well... when i will look back years later, i may find it funny?). Umm Harika paid my bill too (best part), we got into a sharing auto rickshaw and got back to college.
That was the first part of what i remembered and the second part is watching Smallville in the lab till late night. Well smallville is "Smallville is an American Television series developed by writers/producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, based on the DC Comics character Superman character Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Smallville premiered on October 16, 2001, and completed its seventh season on May 15, 2008" word to word, copy pasted from wikipedia (i love wiki). Well its basically Superman's story when he was younger and i've taken a liking to it (fantasy freak).
Ummm and about my first day of second semister, well it was ok i guess, photoshop isnt my forte but i tried to mix 2 pictures - jet plane and cycle into one. It looked like an object stuck together with glue, oh well have to work on it and finish it by the next class which is 2 weeks later (xD). Spent the rest of the afternoon playing civilization 4 very seriously, i like the game and evidently it showed on clock. It was 8:30 when i quit playing, went down for dinner and continued playing, after that watched more of smallville with Aman (the guy who got me hooked on to this), yeah and that it for today...opps its already 6 Jan AWWW i wanted to finish on 5th itself....oh well i dont have the best track record when it comes to sticking to schedules .... err which reminds me its been 2 weeks and i havent worked at all, hmmm why dosent that suprise me anymore?...dono... maybe cause i've always been like this but like Shah Rukh ( i m NOT a fan) says in OSO it all falls in place in the end...gud night n c ya fans ..um i meant myself (??? no ones reading my blog yet ??? grrrr) :P

My First Post!

Aaaahh finally I created my own blog!... wanted to create one since 2 years... lazy me...
Oh well... so this blog starts during my second semester in college, no yet to start cause i am back at my college hostel 2 days before it starts. So lets see... about me well... i was an above average kid back at school though i flunked both my 11 and 12, i still managed to get into collage cause i passed their entrance exam and impressed (now that's a big word so got them interested?.. maybe) my interviewers and so here I am.