Barring Graphic Rampage, I have still been on hiatus from quizzing, except on two instances. One was when I did four quizzes at IIT Kharagpur this January. I almost did not enjoy the proceedings, partly because of the steady downpour that nearly drowned out the organisers’ hard work, and partly because of the disorder that persisted on stage in all but one of the quizzes. I guess I was to blame as well – I am not too much of a crowd control person, but it really gets my goat when teams bicker with other teams while onstage, or draw attention to themselves by being extra-loud, or just do not listen<\/i> to the other teams’ answers. Come on, people, you can save yourself lots of bad guesses or get a hint at the right answer just by listening to the wrong ones. And does it really kill you to shut up and LISTEN when the quizmaster is explaining a round? Feh.<\/p>\n
Or maybe I am just getting crankier in my old age… <\/p>\n
I did a quiz at IIT Kanpur a week ago, and enjoyed myself quite a lot. Kanpur tends to do that to me, I love the campus and the people there. Some of them I know personally, and because I did not make it to Antaragni last year, I could not meet a couple of them who have passed out by now. Some of them are in their final semester. One of those unknown people I love with all my heart is the guy who shares kickass anime series on the Kanpur LAN using the monicker ‘Vash_the_stampede’ – dude, if only I could tell you how much I dig your taste. One of the weird reasons I love quizzing in Kanpur is because the travel involves slightly more time – mostly wait-time for trains or flights. Nothing, I tell you, NOTHING beats reading a book while travelling. I did a Terry Pratchett retrospective this time around, managing to reread The Colour of Magic<\/i>, The Light Fantastic<\/i>, Mort<\/i>, Faust<\/strike> Eric<\/i> and Moving Pictures<\/i> over a span of two days. <\/p>\n
I just downloaded a blu-ray rip of Tekkon Kinkreet<\/i> which apparently refuses to play on both my three-year-old P4 and the laptop. The resolution of the rip is 1920*816 or thereabouts, and both the computers’ monitors just can’t take that kind of load. Just my luck. Reminds me of six years ago, when I nearly harakiri-ed myself when a hard-to-find divx rip of Night of the Living Dead<\/i> could not be rendered by my 366 MHz, 32 MB RAM Celeron machine. Deja vu! Upgrades are just what the doctor ordered. <\/p>\n
And I got a Nintendo DS as a Very Belated Birthday Gift. Woo hoo! And thanks to The Serious One, a bunch of DS games wended their way into my ken. Now if only I had the time to sit and play games. *sigh* And it’s slightly depressing to think of buying games at 1200 Rs apiece when Madman Gargantua<\/i> still eludes my grasp, as does The Complete Little Nemo<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The animated version of Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier<\/i> is beautiful<\/i>. Take my word for it. If you’ve read the comic and liked the idiosyncratic style, you will completely trip over this movie. It uses Cooke’s designs straight from the book, and the editting is superb – the animators knew which bits would work in the narrative, and they chop some characters completely – and still manage to pack in almost 90 percent of the book into one and a half hours of glorious movietime. If only Superman\/Doomsday were half as good as this! If only The Judas Contract<\/i> is still greenlighted!<\/p>\n
Oh, and I am doing the graphic novel column for Rolling Stone India<\/i>. The first issue’s already out, though only in Bombay. I reviewed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier<\/i>, Essential X-Men Vol 1<\/i> and the first Lucky Luke volume Jesse James<\/i> this time around. And I also did this review of Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari<\/i> for Tehelka. I liked that book much much<\/i> better than Sarnath Bannerjee’s sad offerings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barring Graphic Rampage, I have still been on hiatus from quizzing, except on two instances. One was when I did four quizzes at IIT Kharagpur this January. I almost did not enjoy the proceedings, partly because of the steady downpour that nearly drowned out the organisers’ hard work, and partly because of the disorder that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}