Random Crap

I'm back and so is Spring! Does geography make more sense here or what? Back home, the year was generally made up of seasons such as Summer, Deadly Summer, Rainy Summer and Mild Summer. If you lived in an uber cool city like Bangalore, you'd have Freakishly Awesome Weather as a major season. Over here, you actually see so much variation in weather that the whole Summer/Winter collection showcased in fashion makes more sense now :P

As usual, I'm gonna deviate from the topic. My mind just wandered away to the day I landed over here and I just made this crappy whatever-you-call-it in the last 25 minutes.

Remember, Remember the Seventh of August
When Amrika opened its arms at dusk
To yours truly, a man in bitter disgust..
Almost thirty hours clocked in flight
Not a chick seated near me, oh my plight!


Chicago O'Hare, I was finally there
Just a bus trip to Madison left to bear
I was tired as hell, but all was well
Or so it seemed, I had to tell..
The weather was so chilling and I, shivering,


How terrible will the winter be, I thought..
Now that Spring is here, I ought to say
Hype it was, all the way
A bit cold at times, but what's to complain
When snow is so serene, white and plain..

Bah, enough! I can't mix any more words :x
Moving on, I've always believed anyone can become good at anything, provided they put in a good amount of effort. Yes, there are prodigies/savants, who just 'get' it, but then most of the world is full of normal people like me! Also, research suggests that 10,000 hours spent in learning something will make you a master at it! And its amazing how everything we do fits into 'patterns'. Be it recognizing patterns, creating patterns, or even doing things repeatedly (which in itself is a pattern). The guitar keeps reminding me of patterns and learning to recognize them. My current favorite chord is A-minor. It sounds so awesome =] Such a sick learning curve it has, I wonder when I'll get a hang of the normal tuning and shift to the 2 step down tuning Insomnium use..

Damn, I wonder how I never got into music as a kid. I still remember loving the tracks of a Hindi movie named Mohra as a kid. All sorts of bollywood and some tamil music till 4th, the pop music craze of BSB, Boyzone, Code Red, Westlife, N-Sync, 98 degrees, Britney, Enrique and all the other shitty stuff that MTV and [V] brainwashed me with lasted till 12th. That ruined everything :( I still remember the lyrics of a number of BSB songs and I just hope to erase that sector of my brain.. what a waste of memory :-/
Thank goodness I didn't choose Anna or NIT Trichy for my undergrad. No offence to either of these awesome colleges, but from a cultural perspective, I would have been exposed to a lot more local tamil stuff than the heavenly genre of rock/metal. When I joined BITS, I don't think I had even heard of Metallica, Iron Maiden, Nirvana, Pink Floyd etc.. I think the first"rock" song I heard was Linkin Park - In the End and was the end of all the crappy pop music I had heard before. The state of some of my best buddies was also the same; it was their first one too! Together, we embarked on a journey to explore the genre of rock music. Soon, Evanescence, Metallica, Maiden, SOAD and a ton of main stream metal bands followed. Marilyn Manson was also one of the pit stops we had a good laugh at. Damn, some of their tracks are so awesome, but the videos are sick as hell. And finally, in my last semester, I downloaded a song called Fate of Norns by Amon Amarth by mistake. That changed everything. And the rest, as they say, is history. The Melodeath post contains the continuation of this saga.
This point of the post has been randomly selected as the sudden death, keeping with the theme.
The End.

Gateway To Hell

The second month of the two thousand and fifth year anno domini witnessed the much awaited LAN facility to every hostel room at the BITS-Pilani Goa campus become a reality. To a reader outside India, this would seem like a joke. But sadly, most engineering colleges in India couldn't offer such luxury to their students back then, and many don't even now. BITSAA, the alumni association of BITS-Pilani, pooled in to create a state-of-the-art Internet and LAN facility in Pilani and if my memory serves me right, I think they were partly responsible for the facility at Goa as well.
Anyways (its baffling how often I start a new para with this word :x), the seven months before that, students of the very first batch of the Goa campus didn't have much to do within the campus premises. Normal time-pass activities were limited to chitchat, TT, carrom and exploring Goa's beaches. All this was about to be overhauled by 100 mega bits per second LAN!

Getting straight to the subject, gaming took over the life of a good number of the students, with the RTS marvels Age of Empires/Mythology and the FPS masterpiece Counter Strike becoming a common sight in every wing. The junior batch landed in soon enough and forming gaming clans became a necessity. A bunch of fanatics and good buddies from the 2004 batch formed a clan called Gateway to Hell aka G+H, the naming credits going to Maali aka Hulk. Many people think I exaggerate the lifestyle we had in undergrad. Clocking in at least 8 hours of gaming every damn day, with peaks of 16 to 18 hours, the virtual life seemed a million times better than reality. Actually, reality and virtuality (which apparently isn't a word.. :-/) merged in such an abstruse fashion that I couldn't differentiate them. The junior batch were equally good at Counter Strike, with BRAS and @$ featuring in some epic clashes with us. And there were other awesome clans from our batch like O2, FyF, bmp, etc (my memory is short-lived..), but unlike most of the clans which kept changing their squads, ours was a stable lineup throughout the three years we played this gem of a game.

Strangely, I'm not able to remember how it all came about. Ani (maverick), Chaitu (sc/bozo) and I (kissofdeath), being from CS (expand it as you wish..) used to play AoM and Warcraft prior to CS, and we used to hangout a lot together. VPk (gay) was no where near the terror of the player he came to be when we all started. I still remember him camping a lot in the initial stages which used to atract a lot of banter! Somehow the joom lens of a sniper changed everything. Meanwhile, Giri (thu) and Tinku also joined in the addictive fun, and we became good buddies and we had a clan!

This pic courtesy Mohan aka Orange brings back so many fond memories!
Each one of us had a different style of approaching the game.
Mave was an all-out aggressive player with insane reflexes with the colt and ak-47;
Sc used to play as though he was in a real war situation, with a lot of intelligence and caution.
I loved the nutcase style of playing which is die/kill and type wtfwtf/yoyoyo and found nades and flashes to be more fun than guns at times.  
VPk became the famed sniper who didn't need to zoom at all, with the reflexes and attention to sound of a poaching tiger.  
Giri was a class act, he could do it all, rush/defend/camp/snipe/psycho modes and a famous thu-mode as well!
Tinku had the most unbelievable strafe gameplay (and many-a-time was invincible) and the ability to flash his teammates at will.
Mojo being one of our best buddies, became the self-appointed team manager in charge of all the press interviews. What he ended up doing is another story, best left untold here.

The discussions after a night of gaming were so much fun as well. Everyone boasting about their awesofuckin' skills and having a laugh at some of the n00by moments. The walks outside BH2 towards the cafeteria/mess, oh how much I miss those days..
We had our highs and lows, eventually getting raped by ju's and subju's :D, but the best part was the fun that came out of it. Sure, losing wasn't nice and we did get pissed sometimes, but then it was just a game and more of a reason to stomp n00bs in the pub play after a bad defeat!

To all the wonderful and friendly gamers and clans in BITS, to the dedicated servers that brought all the fun, to being the elite breakfast tasters in the morning, to the thousands of de_dust2 and awp_india clashes, to being sniped as you ran towards B from the ct spawn zone in de_dust2, to the yoyooyo and wtf ckfkn mkl bc m2l2 moments, to using new nicknames and revealing them only after some pr0 play, to all the friendships that came out of it, to memories worth reliving over and over again, Counter Strike and Valve, take a bow!