Behind The Mac, Once Again!

September 18, 2018 General Happenings

Of all the places in this vastness of Toronto city, I spot a massive poster hung atop a building featuring none other than the musical maestro AR Rahman, I’m still wondering how that location somewhere on Bloor Street West was chosen for this grand display! One is used to seeing a diverse mix of models complementing anything from creams to cuisine, so the excitement of watching an Indian celebrity endorsing a premium brand in a foreign land was palpable. This is Apple’s attempt at projecting it’s Mac lineup of computers as brilliance personified.

This ad was also unique for a reason because this month I chose to move on from my ‘old-but-gold’ MacBook Pro and opted for the new 2018 line-up. Here’s a little background to my old Mac which is still my favourite – the second-generation unibody Macs were first announced by Steve Jobs in October 2008 and the timing couldn’t have been more appropriate for me to order one in Canada back in 2009. It was a tedious buying episode, to say the least, however, this time the shopping experience was definitely surreal & seamless (thanks to my location in Toronto) right from placing the order on my app to receiving it within a few hours at the nearest Apple Store. The new 15-inch configurations are loaded with Intel Core i9 (up to 6 core) and upgradeable to up to 32 gigs of RAM which definitely makes it sheer desktop-class. Besides having been on Mac for several years now the need to experiment or work on a Windows (eco)system is fairly diminishing.

Which brings me to a question. In a previous post about my first Mac I had pondered if this indeed is the end of my association with the Windows family and the answer is probably “nah”. Because as someone in the creative arts field I need to constantly push the boundaries of my artistic and innovative desires and not let my limitations or beliefs stifle the positive outcomes. I guess Rahman would have definitely smiled on that note.

Lara Croft & The Mayan Jungle Adventure!

September 15, 2018 Design General

I was pretty excited to grab my copy of the ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’ (SOTR) this week, and a good 2 days before the official launch since I preordered. It also happens to be my first PS4 steelbook case title. The ‘Croft Steelbook Edition’ is a limited edition title that includes a Season Pass, 3 additional weapons & outfits, original game soundtrack, and 3 Art Cards which are basically artworks of Lara Croft in action. Besides everything, I was drawn towards the ‘Season Pass’ which was a deal breaker for me in the sense it gave me more side missions to play apart from the main story; I’m told, there are 7 Challenge Tombs, each with new narrative side missions, as well as 7 Weapons, 7 Outfits, and 7 Skills available with the DLC ‘Season Pass’. Let me also say this, that it’s a gorgeous design of the steelbook case inside and it feels like I’m holding an ancient document.

I am looking forward to diving into SOTR after experiencing the storyline in the cult prequels of the ‘Tomb Raider – Definitive Edition’ and the ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider – 20 Year Celebration’ both with out-of-world gaming and storytelling. Effectively I’m completing a trilogy, and until I play the entire SOTR I’m not sure if this would be the final episode with Lara Croft and her tryst with destiny — it’d be really tragic after Naughty Dog wiped clean Nathan Drake’s existence from the ‘Uncharted’ series (another of my favourite franchises), but keeping fingers crossed for Lara’s upcoming adventures.

For the time being though, I will bask in the glory of discovering & collecting numerous ancient relics & documents (called ‘collectibles’) and completing the challenges, then beat the extraordinary tomb puzzles and fight the battle-hardened forces of the evil Trinity forces but this time in the deep jungles of South & Central America laced with awesome environments and screenplay. I may detest the end of Lara Croft’s exhilarating adventures just as I did with Nathan Drake, but not so soon.

Mersal, The Masala Entertainer

August 29, 2018 Movies
Mersal

To begin with, I feel glad in confessing that my choice of movies is not governed by any lofty standards, nor by Rotten Tomatoes or by critical appreciation (or ingratitude) since there are examples of abstract works in Hollywood and India which have been positively received by audiences. Amid this wrangle between the pundits on the quality of cinematic expression comes a genre called the ‘Masala’ movies that were defined in the 70s & the 80s by the awesome Manmohan Desai (aka Manji) with a string of jubilee hits such as Amar Akbar Anthony, Suhaag, Naseeb, Coolie, Toofan, each an entertaining blockbuster that was devoid of logic and sensibilities, and which catapulted Amitabh Bachchan to the echelons of legendary status. Much as Manji believed in the art of making wholesome entertaining cinema, I too believe that the primary role of movies is to entertain the audiences and then perhaps branching off to other segments of realism or social messaging, and so on. If I had held a critical approach towards all movies, I would have missed the emotional magic weaved so very often by indie producers (Yes, I’m referring to the likes of Tu Hai Mera Sunday and Rowdy Rathore) those which primarily cater to entertain film lovers. So recently when I stumbled upon the beautifully shot songs of ‘Mersal‘; composed by none other than the versatile AR Rahman, I knew I had to watch the movie.

The Entertainment Begins!

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”” class=”” cite=”” link=”” color=””]”Man has faith in 2 entities blindly. One is God, the other is a doctor. We tonsure our heads as a vow to God, but we trust a doctor with our life. That doctor should not go astray… A criminal should not be a doctor. Misdeeds happen everywhere, but in the medical field, it isn’t a mere misdeed. It is treachery. There is no forgiveness for that betrayal!”
– Vetri, from a scene in ‘Mersal’.[/perfectpullquote]

An oft-repeated narrative on the rampant corruption, especially prevalent in the medical fraternity of India in which ‘Mersal‘ (translated as ‘zapped’) delivers a strong signal at not just curbing the menace of the doctor-hospital-middlemen nexus but also drawing attention to the government’s apathy on clamping down on this vicious circle of evil. Caught in this inhuman vortex of moneymaking design are the hardworking, poor natives of Chennai and led with wretched indifference by a fellow doctor named Daniel Arockiyaraj (essayed by SJ Surya). In all the murk and malevolence, I’m introduced to a genteel Maaran (Vijay’s most engrossing portrayal in recent times) or the ‘Rs.5 Doctor’ as he’s lovingly called by locals for his humble dedication to the cause of healthcare for the downtrodden, no matter what the complication he’s content with his paltry sum of fees. But wait. No sooner has the audience settled with ‘Doc Maaran’ I also gather that he’s quite adept at magic? The deep anguish in the present-day Maaran has its roots set firmly in the 70s with ‘thalapathy‘ Vetrimaaran and his wife Aishwarya (Nithya Menen)  in a small village in South India.

If there was indeed a definition for ‘Masala’ cinema – one that effortlessly combines good music, delivers social messaging and laced with awe-inspiring action, then Mersal would easily fit in that list. There’s hardly a dull moment, the story moves rapidly without the usual cacophony in the emotional strife between the characters which we’re so accustomed to seeing, and oh the music by Rahman (my personal favourite would be ‘Aalaporaan Thamizhan’). Good heavens, this is one entertaining flick that left me ‘zapped’, and need I say that its director Atlee would have surely made Manji smile!

Gutenberg & The Era of Modern Editing

August 6, 2018 Happenings Technology
Gutenberg - WordPress

WordPress launched a sleek visual editor and named it after the German publisher Johannes Gutenberg who introduced the printing press in Europe in the 15th century, I thought that naming by WordPress is quite an oxymoron! This would only be my second post in Gutenberg, and ever since I have embraced WordPress blogging as a regular activity I’ve considered it as an art form of composing thoughts that are interspersed with emotions and delivered through phrases. Others might simply label this creative outfall as ‘content’. That it requires the blogger to reconcile with the technology & design first is only a part of a challenging journey in publishing a blog post. But it cannot, rather, technology should not make it any more complicated in putting at risk a writer’s heartfelt endeavour. What about the non-techies then? Bottomline, blogging platforms should aim to minimize any barriers, minimize fuss, and allow writers in publishing their views creatively & constructively.

It’s time to hail WordPress for achieving this goal and for introducing Gutenberg’ which I was amazed to ‘test-drive’ in their latest update. It’s also available as a plugin although Gutenberg would be a standard feature with the future release of WordPress 5.0. Least to say, when I thought about how the Classic editor could be further enhanced WordPress has just provided a modern & sleek replacement. Firstly, I’ve taken a fancy to the metaphor of ‘blocks’ as a WYSIWYG feature, these are movable containers carrying media such as images, audio, gallery, paragraphs, etc., (ah! similar to Gutenberg’s ‘movable type’ printing press) and each block which can be individually customized. In contrast, the Classic editor treated the entire post as a single structure and all media had to be inserted & refined from the toolbar. The other attribute which stood out for me was the often used ‘link’ feature which has now become more focused and it’s easier to choose whether or not a link should open in a new window. I’m pretty certain in the coming days these collective features would provide a new visual language to the blog posts here. I’m certainly open to experimenting in the coming days.

That being said, although there are some glitches and I’m still learning the ropes, I am particularly eager to see how the other taskbar functions through third-party plugins would be integrated within Gutenberg (or not!!). With that, I’d like to say that WordPress has become a robust, most widely-used blogging platform which is why it should now aim to integrate popular blogging features into its core program, such as SEO or web analytics which are currently being delivered through third-party plugins. This would not only provide efficiency to the non-techie bloggers, it’d drastically minimize security concerns, make the platform faster, and enable WordPress to become a clear alternative to the competition.

Civilization - The Last of Us

Our Civilization & How Everything Could End

August 5, 2018 Design General

A nuanced study of our civilization has always appealed to my faculty, by connecting with multiple cultural conventions of diverse user groups through the prism of technology & design I can synthesize & draw conclusions from their unique behavioral & cultural patterns, so I was thrilled listening to an episode from the Software Engineering Daily (SED) podcast which reinforced my beliefs in that direction. It was in July that I stumbled upon Tim O’Reilly’s book What’s The Future (what a clever wordplay of WTF) and found a piece of ominous foresight by the author from the insightful podcast. He was responding to the question, How do you contrast the role of human agency versus the positioning of these technologies as being inevitabilities? And Tim responded with a sense of grim:

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]

You know, I think some ways this goes back to this disagreement I had many years ago with Ray Kurzweil. Where he would draw these graphs and say, “Well look, progress goes up into the right,” and I said, “Well, yeah, from a distance,” sure but you know, if you look for example at architecture, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was for a thousand years, the largest building in the world.

Because we lost the knowledge of how to build something like that. You could have on human time scales, an immense slowing down or reversal of progress. I think part of what we need to understand is that first of all, nothing is inevitable. I think that we face enormous discontinuities and anyone who looks at history will see those even in human timeframes where there were great empires that fell. Where there were civilizations that collapse and I don’t see any reason why ours might not be among them. In fact, I think it’s more likely than not that ours will be among them and so the notion of progress is also something that I think is profoundly suspect.

You know, are we really more advanced? If you think about adaptation to the environment, maybe humans are not so very advanced after all, we are kind of destroying our environment in 10,000 years of our rise and will we effectively foul our nest sufficiently that we won’t be able to continue to prosper?

[/perfectpullquote]

But then he describes, what I term as, his vision of an environmental catastrophe which could materialize as a result of a ‘climate change’ phenomena — a change in global or regional weather patterns attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels, which is demonstrating its ruthless power in real-time with the extended periods of hot summers or excessive rainfall to droughts in most parts of the world.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]

I think I like to focus, yes, there are long-term trends that have momentum that have a powerful vector behind them but that doesn’t mean that they’re inevitable because first of all, there are other intersecting vectors. It’s so interesting, one of the said people I’ve invited to our science
bootcamp event or a couple of scholars who have been researching the interaction between climate change and the fall of civilizations.

Both of them – there’s a group at Harvard that has basically done ice cores in Greenland then it’s just basically correlated historical events through roman and early medieval civilization with climate change events. We have also one of the other people while study is the fall of ancient again civilizations and again, looking at the combination of climate change, you know, triggering a disease and then triggering migration, triggering warfare and that kind of being this toxic stew that brings civilizations to an end.

[/perfectpullquote]

That last bit of prudence in “triggering a disease” also brought flashes from the critically acclaimed action-adventure horror game ‘The Last Of Us’ the plot of which deals with a mysterious virus called Cordyceps ravaging the United States leaving not just an infected civilization but eventually destroying it; the premise of which is the effect of ‘climate change’. The game beautifully captures the mass migration of the survivors from coast to coast and puts the gamer in the midst of a warfare with rival gangs who are fighting for the control of rare resources in their neighbourhoods, not to mention combating the scary ghoulish creatures who prey upon their unsuspecting victims. It’s a captivating glimpse of a combination of catastrophic outcomes that O’Reilly has insightfully referred to in his prediction of how our civilization could end realistically.

The entire episode is worth listening and you can enjoy it in a new tab/window.