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. 

Horrible Experience with Uber, Swiggy

 Just a day after posting about the strange habits of Uber Drivers, I was hit with a really bad experience. I first booked the ride at 11:40, but the guy cancelled after making me wait for 10 mins. Then another guy dropped someone off, and got stuck in traffic close to the pickup point. He only made it by 12:05. Then there was traffic at Kalindi Kunj, and when he saw a petrol pump, he wanted to fill up gas. The problem is that there are many tempting petrol pumps on the way to office, and these guys suddenly just go in saying five minutes, which is never less than twenty. I finally reached the office only at 13:05, normally the route takes only about half an hour. 

Then the Swiggy delivery people reach beneath the house and say "I am here". They do not have the balls to say come down and take the order lol. I am done fighting to them at this point, but at least be up front of what you want. Then that bitch had the audacity to tell me that I am telling him 'ulta seedha' baat. Motherfucker, you talk straight first and tell me what you want. If you do not want to deliver at home, then maybe do not work as a home delivery professional lol. 

Weird habits of Uber drivers

 Today my Uber driver was scrolling reels uncontrollably, as if he was addicted, for most of the trip. He was not using headphones, and had not put the phone on mute, so I was constantly exposed to a cacaphony of continuously changing audio. He had one phone for the GPS, and another phone presumably just to scroll reels. You do not need to be a scientist to figure that scrolling short videos negatively impacts attention and cognition.

My brain was rotting along with this dude. I also don't know why people do not use headphones in India, and constantly live in a environment saturated with noise pollution. Now another bad habit is chewing pan. Especially if you are in a closed car, with the ac on, and someone is chewing pan, the environment becomes a biohazard. I cannot breathe, and cannot open the car, and feel like puking. Fucking clueless people live like heathens and cannot understand how their shitty habits affects others. Chewing pan is a disgusting, unhygienic habit. 

Then there are the people who play music. I am so tired hearing both Punjabi and Bihari songs. Like fuck you that is not music, and it hurts by brains. If some cab driver plays Bollywood music, then I am actually relieved, even though I prefer no music at all. 

Then finally there are the cabbies who are on calls throughout the ride. I got tmi. 

Worst of all are the cab drivers who suddenly ask you where to go from. Idiot, you are driving, you have the map, you figure it out, don't ask me suddenly when you are unsure, I haven't gone to every single place I book a ride to fucktard. 

Uber really needs to give some basic training to its cabbies. What a bunch of dehati people lol.