The Story of Rexy

Rexy is a T. Rex from Jurassic Park, actually the one and only T. Rex from Jurassic Park. Rexy is a female, who was to be the main attraction in Isla Nublar. In the demo ride, they try to bait Rexy with a goat, but Rexy likes to hunt, not be fed. We see her appear first when things start going to shit. She dispatches impact tremors as her hair-raising herald. Then she chases Ellie, Malcolm and Muldoon in an epic car chase sequence. 

At the climax, Ellie, Grant and the kids are cornered by the three raptors who really are on the verge of building a spaceship and going to the Moon. This is when Rexy steps in, and literally becomes the hero of JP. 

Now Rexy does not show up in the two JP sequels, although both movies do feature T. rexes. The family of T. rexes in JP2 is from Isla Sorna. The lone adult male T. rex in JP3 is unrelated to the family from JP2. Rexy then appears in three Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, and Dominion. Rexy appears during the climax of Jurassic World. Battles and takes down the Indominus Rex, and pushes it into the jaws of the Mosasaurus. 

Then Rexy shows up right at the start of Fallen Kingdom. Here again, something similar happens. She attacks one of the mercs, they escape, but then the Mosasaurus gets him. Rexy is moving fast with strobe lighting, so had to play back at 50 per cent speed to capture this. 

Then in the climax, Rexy ends up killing and eating Eli Mills, the villain of the movie, then escapes into the wild. 

Rexy also shows up in Dominion, in the climax. This means that Biosyn tracked her down, caught her, and then moved her to BioSyn Valley in Italy. Here is Rexy in Dominion, recreating the iconic logo from JP, that kickstarted the whole franchise. 

Then there was this epic scene where the Therizinosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Rexy. Rexy and the Therizinosaurus tag team and take out the apex predator, Giganotosaurus. No Mosasaurus comes to the rescue this time. 

At the end of Dominion, Rexy is presumably the apex predator of Biosyn Valley. 

So Dead

It is early in the morning, the Sun is yet to rise, the sky is gradually growing increasingly brighter, the warm yellow LED in my kitchen is still glowing like a trapped sun or an ancient bonfire, casting long, deep shadows across my modest hall. The early pre-monsoon rain is pitter-pattering on the flimsy fibreglass covering held down by stray bricks over the skylight in my 'compartment apartment'. This is also known as a barsatiya, it is an extra, shoddily constructed floor, that are leaky. This is fun, because the water seeps through the walls, creating patches of fuzzy fungal growth. Then the actual locations of the roof leaks shifts throughout the monsoons, requiring moving the buckets over time. First the paint, and then the plastering continuously falls of the ceiling, creating an internal rain of debris. The beds and other things have to be shifted around as well, away from the leaks. I have a poor lamp that seems to somehow attract water, because the roof starts to leak wherever I place it... it has shrunk considerably.

I am actually enjoying the experience, understanding the difficulties. This is exactly why I came to Delhi! The buckets of water are great! Rainwater harvesting. Also I like buckets, they come in so many shapes, sizes and colours. Getting buckets without handles is a fatal mistake. I like the round flat tubs, these are good for catching leaks from a wider area. Then I use a big, deep ones for the fast leaking places. Need a bunch of small ones for the newly leaking places. In a barsatiya, you understand the use cases for the various types of buckets! I think the whole bucket parameter space exists because of barsatiyas only. 

I am typing all this after just smoking some herb out in the balcony. Got a bit wet, but not drenched. Also shivering a bit. I have recently been diagnosed with bronchitis. This great doctor has given me some kickass, strong meds, that is making me feel fit and fine. My condition was very bad just a couple of days ago. Now I am feeling alert, energetic and so alive! I am just super relaxed, super comfortable over an electric blanket, under a rajai, totally enjoying the buzz, along with the soundscape. The metronomic plops filling up the big bucket, and the hum of the electric pump, some birds waking up, and the distant chug of a train piercing through the city. I have an abundance of free time and freedom, and have no commitments. I am on sick leave, and this is the best I have felt ever lol, or at least since college. 

About two days ago I really was struggling a lot. I had not eating properly since Sunday, when I puked after eating a bit of that stale curd rice from Bheemeshwara. On Monday, I could not go to work, and went into some kind of fever-dream state, had chaas and curd rice from Dosa Coffee... no bells and whistles (in the curd rice world this means sun-dried fried chilis and pomegranate arils), no sweet curd... just plain, simple and good old curd rice. On Tuesday, I went to work unwisely, and I ate maybe five to six spoonfulls of mixed dal rice. I should have eaten just the dal I feel now. At work my shoulder and back were paining. I ignored it through the day, and came home. On the way back I picked up a charger for a colleague from Nehru Place, that is still there with me. 

Anyway... that night, I could not sleep or eat. The right side of my chest started paining too much. There was no position I could assume that allowed me to sleep. Somehow I got two partial cycles in. Was struggling a lot, tried the massager in two bursts, which gave me comfort. There was no way I was going to work tomorrow. The next day I fired up google maps and looked for a doctor. There was no clinic on one location. The next one, I went in there some weird woman asked me if I wanted a physiotherapist, I said no I wanted a doctor. She said there was no doctor at a community health centre, and I finally started winding through congested gullies towards this doc that allegedly exists, and stumbled across it by accident on a location not where it was indicated on Google Maps. 

I have experienced this with ATMs and known coffee shops also (Blue Tokai lol), the locations are not exactly where the place is on Google Maps. Case in point, if you are sick and hurting, Google Maps is of no use. 

Anyway, I finally found the doctor. I this point I can feel as if the right side of my lung has twisted up. Every time I take a deep breath, laugh, cough, or even move wrong, it pains like hell. There is some other drama ongoing there, a story worthy of a national award winning movie. The doctor is a Muslim, but no beard and topi. The only way I could tell was some Islamic collage with text overlaid that was framed at the apex position on his wall, over all the other certifications and posters. His patient is a woman who appears to be Hindu. Her husband is clearly a Muslim, with a kurta, beard, topi... all the signs. The doc and the husband are trying to convince the wife (who has a small baby in her arm, I just noticed), to break the fast, eat meals, and take her medicines. She negotiates, saying I will take the medicines but not break the roza fast. They both try to convince her in different ways, but she remains stubborn and steadfast about not breaking the fast. 

The doc interrupts the consultation to address me. But all my pains are gone looking at the unfolding drama. At this point, I have to act and wince and gesture and say I have sever chest and shoulder pain on my right side, difficulty in breathing. He asks me to take a seat, while he sorts out the woman. 

I am wondering if she is converted or just following her husband, like I cannot just assume. Even a traditional Hindu wife will not eat till her husband has eaten. The doctor tells her what to do, and hands over medications for both her and the babby. The husband understands that there is no point in arguing, he is both proud and amused. The woman tells the doctor what she will do. No one has really budged from their positions. Everyone walks away without compromising. This is sufficient material at least for an artsy short film shot in the style of Kiarostami.

Anyway, it is my turn. The doc makes me lift up my shirt, and my thermal undershirt prods around with the stethoscope, and asks me to go get an X-ray. There is this place called Noble Diagnostic Centre. It really lives up to its name. It feels like a posh place, everything is modern. There is this really cool Ganesha idol, who is wearing nice earrings, and has two long golden tusks. Most of the idols show one tusk half broken, typically close to the base. This one has a long tusk with just the tip broken, which is well historically accurate. Looking at this murti, one can imagine the tusk as being a fine tip used to write the Mahabharat, cut off in anger by Parshuram who wanted to meet Shiva, but stopped by Ganesha, who Shiva had asked to ensure he was not disturbed while sleeping. I feel bad for Ganesha, who gets into trouble every time his parents ask him to guard them. The really cool thing about this Ganesha is he is writing out on a book, an Om and a Swastika, and holding a battle axe in the other hand. Looking at the murti you feel like the Genesha has four hands, but it is only two. This is confusing for a second till you realise that Ganesha is using his trunk to hold up the book. It is a nice, unique, thoughtful and detailed murti. 

Anyway, these Noble Diagnostic Centre folks are attentive, kind professionals who know what they are doing. They provide the best service, top-class. They serve the lowest socio-economic class though. Their rates are super affordable, and the staff is committed to providing the necessary service, and understand that they are doing something beneficial to society. The clinic is itself located on the outskirts of what in Mumbai would be called a slum. It is a low-income area. They are truly Noble, and they are doing great work, countering all the bad juju of the shitty ISKON temple. They have everything, ultrasound, x-ray, blood tests... I should have checked all the boxes, but initially just did the x-ray. 

This required waiting for about an hour. I sat and waited. When my turn came I had to tie the hair on my head, press my chest against a plate, and position my arms behind my back, breathe in and hold. The guy took one look at the X-ray and asked me if I had TB before. He would go on to ask me two more times during the discussion. I said no each time. He said something was very off, and that he would not hand me the X-ray, and that I would have to wait for the full report, which would be available at 18:30 hours IST. This was still about 11:00 hours. I limped back home dejected, and spent a horrible few hours, with sporadic bursts of sleep out of pure exhaustion. Could not eat or drink anything. I kept drinking and throwing up water. 

Finally, went back to the clinic, got the X-rays, it was bronchitis, inflammation in right lung, infection of some kind, and some buildup of water. I had not clocked the fact that the left lung extends for longer than the right because of the stomach and the diaphragm, and had thought that literally a part of my right lung had collapsed or shrunk lol. Basically, had been too scared. Got it back to the doctor, who said TB had to be ruled out, so had to do ultrasound and blood test next. He recommended that I get these tests done at a govt TB hospital nearby. He gave me some anti-biotics and painkillers for immediate relief, along with some third tab.

This was the medicine I needed. Instant relief. Everything feels fine. Im at the top of my game. I don't need the rest of the treatment and tests I feel. But I have to go through all of this. Im just glad I can sit and sleep and function normally. Previously, just lying down on the bed and pulling on the blanket, felt like quite a task. To get up, I would be lifting my thigh, catching it with both of my arms, and then, lowering the leg, using my tailbone as a fulcrum to lift my body up. Now, I could lie down easily! I felt great! I played games, watched One Piece on Netflix, ordered curd rice from another nice place called Sambarpot, that gives the masala from masala dosa as an extra, which goes great with the curd rice. Could sleep and eat properly for the first time in three days. I was feeling despondent and like I was on the verge of a heart attack. If only the Noble guy had given me the X-ray earlier I felt, but now I know that I should have just gone back to the doc, explained that the report was coming in the evening, and to give me something for relief at the moment. 

The next day, that is yesterday, 19 March, I got up early in the morning and went to the Nehru Nagar TB Hospital, next to the Vinoba Puri Metro Station. A kind rickshaw driver dropped me there, because he knew I was suffering, even though I asked him to just leave me at the previous signal. The place looks like it is frozen in time in the 1920s or something. It looks like a colonial building, but was only started in 2014 lol. The registration was not working, a queue was building up, and the place just had bad juju. Despite all my education, wisdom and knowledge, I did not go there with a mask. Everyone else there had a mask. So I got the fuck out of there. 

I walked over to Noble. On the way, I got a bit confused in the Subway, that connects to the Vinoba Puri metro in the middle lol, and crossed an old abandoned building that I always wanted to explore but never saw from up close. Also this place had one of those Chandrayaan 3 street arts that showed off the might and glory of India's operations in out space with the pictorial reference of a Space Shuttle. This has mostly worn out now, which is a loss to no one. 

So the Noble people say they will do the ultrasound, and the tests are delivered 'hand-to-hand' which means then-and-there, but there is a wait time of about nine patients. I asked if I can go home and come back later, they said sure, give us your number, we will call you. I went back home, drank a big glass of mosambi juice, then ordered three hot cups of coffee, came back home and discovered that both my coffee cups gifted to be my my elder sister from Dilli Haath were cracked. I fished around in my box of event goodies and found an Asus ROG coffee mug with a retarded temperature sensor (it just takes a bit of extra time to reach the accurate temperature). Well, debut of the mug, all good, just one J down and an hour later, I get the call. 

Again, I take a cycle rickshaw, go to the clinic, wait for an hour, play some games, admire that beautiful Ganesha murti, and get my ultrasound done. When I say it pains, the doc jabs it in there right then. The whole procedure was smooth and AI assisted. The guy pointed out infection and some little water buildup in the lungs. He suggested a blood test as well. I get pricked, the blood is drawn, there is a vacuum before the blood starts building up. I then go home... take my second dose, sleep, game, rest through the day. In the evening, I go to the Raju Vaishnav Dhabha, treat myself with Medhu Vada, which is actually Uddin Vada in Karnataka, and here is called just Sambhar Vada, which I don't understand, how u can make a Vada out of Sambhar dude. Anyway, Raju Vaishnav Dhabha was playing devotional music in praise of Lord Ram, has a big banner saying Jai Shri Nath Ji, and is situated bang opposite the Iskon temple. I mean what a colossal fraud, that Prabhupada asshole chutiya said all Nobel Prize winners are donkeys. He himself looks like the bloated scrotum of a langur, and idk what cheap kicks he did before writing his version of the Gita, with hallucinatory commentary that has nothing to do with the source material. Anyone who wants to read a reconciliation of the various traditions made suitable for modern lives are better off reading Aurobindo's version, rather than the toilet paper that is Prabhupada's version. As a thread wearing Brahmin, I curse each and every ISKON binbhosadika adherent around the world, including the ones that ever lived, to be reborn enough times as an insect, for their exoskeletons to fill three bullock carts. No takebacksies. So that is at least three million bullock carts full of insect exoskeletons of fraudulent sanatanis delivered to Yama from my side. 

I hope the people who spend their lives jacking off to religion and nationality are in some way exposed to the exquisite beauty of neutron stars, the cores of dead stars so dense that mountains are 2 cm high, that can suddenly speed up and glitch, and forged all the gold that they love so much. 

(I took a two hour nap at this point lol). 

After the hearty meal, which is over at 18:40 hours IST, I catch another e-rickshaw to the T-point, and walk to Noble clinic to say hi to the studios Ganeshaji for the third time that day. I pick up by blood tests, my RBCs are enlarged lol. My liver is also slightly enlarged. This is not very extreme, but both are signs of consistent and sustained alcohol use lol. I really have to start drinking less than two times a month, even just the weekends is not good enough. Actually, I feel like it is time to ditch alcohol for good. This frees up a large portion of my rest of life budget, and I have had hard alcohol only once over the last year, mostly because of a lack of availability of original Bacardi White here, following the Delhi liquour scam, and the tourism board operating all the wineshops. 

Anyway... finally, I get all the reports come back to the doc, and now it is the time to get treated. I get a whole week-long course of antibiotic injections and tablets, that include a proton pump inhibitor, one for killing pain and fighting inflammation, a probiotic and an antibiotic. I imagine some kind of battle between pro and anti biotics... anyway, I take them all come back home. Order in Pizza and Fries.... feels good man, everything is sorted, I actually feel on the top of my game.

All is well. Life is good. Just Enjoying the ride. 

Going to catch some One Piece Bonus content now, the Podcasts are really good. Also, new albums by both Morcheeba and Nightmares on Wax are about to drop, so looking forward to those. Have two more days of holidays to relax, before I get to work on Sunday. 

Fever Dreams

I ate stale or spoiled curd rice from Bheemeshwara on Sunday, which made me puke, so I threw it off. This was followed by suffering for two days, with symptoms similar to food poisoning. I could not eat or even drink anything without puking... got fucked basically, but had some glorious, persistent vivid dreams. 

One was on how AI agents are going to make all knowledge workers obsolete. I was continuously dreaming over four-five sleep cycles of Agentic AI creating a physical temperature monitoring and regulation device, because I was constantly feeling too hot or too cold. This was the result of watching a podcast on the subject by David Kipping (Spotify link for those who hate the ads on YouTube). Another few cycles were on increasing competition between states in the space domain, and I imagined in vivid detail an MoU signed between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka on competing in space, and whoever launches more rockets getting more share of the Kaveri waters to support their activities! 

Scientists are starting to write on their own substacks

The Conversation is one of my favourite sites of all time, and invites scientists to explain their discoveries for themselves. The content can be syndicated for free by anyone. Such direct communication by scientists is great for reducing the growing mistrust that the general public has on the scientific community. Now, I am happy to see that many of my favorite scientists are getting on substack too. 

Janna Levin, the global expert on black holes, has a substack called Higher Dimensions. 

If you follow solar activity, then you should subscribe to the brand new Sunny Sci'd Up by Ryan French. I really like the name too. 

Ethan Siegel's Starts With a Bang is a fun way to keep up with the latest advancements in astrophysics. 

Corey S Powell's Invisible Universe does a lot of myth debunking and questioning. 

SEO is absolutely useless for a news site

If you are a news site doing SEO, they you are pretty much axing your own leg. Here is why:

If you are optimising your content for what people are searching for, then it means that you continuously deliver your news late, do not have anything original to say, have little or no editorial direction, add nothing of value, and are essentially hitching a ride on other people's work. 

Avi Loeb has some outrageous ideas, is one of the many scientists on substack, but what is great about his content is that whatever he bashes out makes global headlines. He does not need to do SEO, because when he writes, he creates the content that people look for. He actually specialises in black holes, cosmology and the early universe, and his ramblings on aliens are considered pseudoscience, that most serious scientists, including astrobiologists, do not engage with. Still, his content is SEO gold. If you are a news site, you should be writing your own gold. 

So, SEO means you are late and unoriginal. It is not a good approach to growing an audience. If you are catering to readers who want to read about increasing federalism in India's space sector on the same site as curd rice recipes, either the people who read about space or about curd rice are going to go away. (Not me, Im right in the chut of this venn diagram). It is dangerous, even suicidal for a news organisation to sacrifice quality and editorial oversight to favour high volume of SEO articles. 

Now, if your entire editorial policy is dependent on SEO, then you are basically publishing the same shit as everyone else, removing entirely the scope for discovery and providing unique content for your readers. There are some things that people just will not search for, such as the growing need for a second kitchen, at least a larder with automatic deliveries and inventory tracking, or the amazing story of science catching up and proving the mother right, who believed for decades that her unresponsive son with severe brain damage was still hanging in there, or the amazing efforts by a team of scientists who used microgliders to teach the endangered Northern Bald Ibis to migrate. In-print, the New Yorker aptly titled this story as 'Helicopter Parents'. Your publication will never write stories such as these if it relies on SEO, and you are wasting away the careers of all the journalists who work for you by depending on SEO. Searching for 'LPG' on Google and tabbing to News will not show you how the LPG cylinder shortage is causing crematoriums in Keralam to shut down. 

There are also concepts and ideas that are too complex for anyone to look up. Even if you look up Laplace’s principle of ‘the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness’, Google and other search engines are unlikely to surface current, relevant pieces wrangling with the subject such as 'Why Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?' by Corey S Powell, or my own exploration and explanation of the subject that I published a few months before that one. These concepts are too complex for anyone to search on Google. If you are serious about News, you cannot be serious about SEO. 

The algorithms that drive engagement on social media heavily favour clickbait, sensationalism, and low-quality content. You cannot allow dumbfucks in senior positions to drag the quality of journalism down some hell-hole, then keep digging. Most Indian news sites shy away from using the accurate terms and technical jargon, and do not even end up communicating what happened. The trans-lunar injection manoeuvre of Chandrayaan 3 and the trans-Lagrangian-point-1-injection manoeuvre of Aditya L1 were just covered as 'important' or 'crucial' manoeuvres, with the body text often omitting what the spacecraft even did. You are so focused on SEO, that you do not even convey the news! 

Now even the best experts in SEO, have little to no understanding of the value of editorial content. Entire websites are tuned towards in-bound links from Google searches, with the interfaces burying older stories with no way to access them from the home pages. This devalues years of work by journalists, with many platforms opting to purge previous stories when new SEO policies are formulated. Such news sites do not care about the talent, or the previous work put in. They are ruthless, careless and damaging to the industry. Any journalist who has worked for more than 10 years in India knows that a portion of their work... in fact years of work, has been destroyed. This is why you are better off working in print media. 

If a news desk starts with Google trends and specialised keyword tools instead of authentic sources and original reporting, you are basically killing the entire industry by crowding out real journalism with copy-pasted, paraphrased, and AI-generated crap. If your news organisation relies on SEO for traffic, then it is setting up the property for failure, and committing a crime against the company they work for. 

Remember, Google is not your friend, it has killed your entire industry, and is your biggest enemy! The AI generated overviews keeps people on Google. If you set up processes and systems to optimise SEO, Google will change the rules, and fuck you in the ass. You cannot win, even if you play by the rules, that keep changing, are arcane, and necessarily opaque to prevent exploitation. 

So if you are a news site and the management is more focused on SEO than editorial, then get the fuck out! In India, the news sites that prioritise editorial over SEO, and publish original, authentic stories without stuffing their site with crap are The Print, The Wire, Scroll, The Caravan, Newslaundry, News Minute, and The Ken. The tier-2 ones that still maintain some editorial while following the rules of SEO are The Hindu and Indian Express. 

My multiplayer gaming experiences

 I have been writing to pen all of this down for a long time, finally got some time today. In school and college, I played Ragnarok and A3, which was India's first MMORPG. The game is still running, but both were so grindy that I did not go much into it. My first real exposure to the world of MMORPGS was this game that released in August 2011, called Star Legends. The game originally started off as a console/PC title called The Blackstar Chronicles, but the team pivoted to mobile platforms following the release of the iPhone and the App Store. The developers, based in Texas, called SpaceTime Studios had earlier tested out the approach successfully with Pocket Legends, and then went on to develop Dark Legends, with more adult content and Arcane Legends as well. Then the development died out and the games are just hanging on. I made a community of many friends, joining guilds such as Cosmic Consciousness with EgoFury, and Neon Genesis, and Sparkling Pwnies, whose leader was Artstar, and Morphic, who was one of the first pwnies that I got exposed to. I am still in two of these clans and hop on from time to time. There was a brief resurgence among old players during the pandemic, but the games are all more or less dead now. One of the biggest pursuits all of us had was to get the legendary sets, but I lost track of one planned stage, and the items were available from loot boxes later... so they are not so rare or valuable or precious any more. 

This game exposed me to a crowd of people who jump from beta version to beta version, playing the latest games. Around 2014s Digit community organised play dates, where we tried out different games every week. This community is still active. Played Path of Exile for a while and League of Legends too, but this was only for a couple of years on this platform called Garena. After that I moved primarily to Steam. One of the games that we tried out in these play dates was Warframe, and that changed my life. 

I have over 9000 hours of gameplay on Warframe. On a couple of years, I spent more money on Warframe cosmetics than clothes in real life. This gave me access to a glorious community called Clan TriForce. We were all initially on TeamSpeak, but many moved to Discord. The game is being actively developed, but most people have disappeared. I am now the Clan Warlord, and hold the game together, including the very special reactor from the Beta version on the ground floor of our Dojo. 

After that I played a bit of MilSim with StarShip Troopers: Exterminate.... but that game died out rapidly too. Then the third big game in my life after Star Legends and Warframe has to be Wolvesville. This is a wolf simulation game that I have been playing for over five years, with activity peaking during the pandemic. I just could not stop playing ranked, spending most of the day on the game, and reaching the highest tiers. Now I just play sandbox and watch the game slowly deteriorate. The popularity has also fallen considerably since the pandemic. Here I met the Beta Wolfpack clan, with BetaMom, who is a kind and generous person. 

I met so many people along the way, had so much fun, now have forgotten many of them. Let me see... ViolentViolette, EgoFury, StarJedi, ArtStar, Morfic, Ghost... DrOrrock, BetaMom, Yuna, Tanner, MajesticUnicorn.... yeah I can only remember a fraction of my friends unfortunately. 

Feelsbadman.jpg. 

About Today

 Came in a bit late to work today. When I woke up in the morning, there was thunder and lightning. Experienced a mild version of sleep paralysis, the first with such weather. I imagined some kind of storm raging outside, which probably was, but my imagination made it more acute. Had also consumed nearly the entire second season of One Piece on Netflix, so I was imagining over the top weather. 

Having trouble eating anything. Sarvana Bhavan had no curd rice and the sad, sweet one from Bheemeshwara that just looks good on the surface, with no action on the inside, literally made me puke not just the curd rice but also the pulpy orange I had consumed before. While moving in closer to a tree, I got a gash across my forehead because of a dried coconut rachis hidden amongst the leaves. Unfortunately, it is not lightning shaped. I just dumped the sad curd rice and decided to fast for the rest of the day. 

I finished my work well ahead of my allocated time, so I had a lot of time to waste. I took at least three short naps, listened to a podcast, played a couple of games, took two walks just to get some tea... and still have about 40 minutes to kill. SMH, this policy of having to log in nine hours daily at office is killing me, and more importantly, wasting a lot of my time. I need a viable strategy to use this time in a productive way.