Prototype

Prototype is an awful excuse for a hack-and-slash zombie hunting sandbox game. The really strange part that I couldn't figure out after hours of gameplay, was exactly what I was doing. This was because the idiot Mercer would give the zombie-mutants and the military equal opportunities on being consumed. It turned out to be Mercer's fault anything happened in the first place. Everything sucks, but its still a thrill to pick up anything and throw it anywhere. If only there were no story and mission to complete, and the game was a kind of digital "toy". Ah well..

Thats me, not being dead. Unfortunately. Actually, that's not even me, its an infection's interpretation of me. Yeah, you get to play as an infection...

... an infection that consumes people. The consumption bit is not too pretty. But once I eat anyone, I can not only be them, I absorb their memories and their expirience. If only this guy could be a man...

Yeah, Mercer has seen her before. And, that's a strange looking OS to boot... what kind of a desktop environment has no minimise or maximise icons I ask you? 

One of the many not-awesomely bad meanies in the game. He is modelled less carefully than some of the saurians in Wolfenstein. The DOS Wolfenstein. 

This guy looks like some monsters from Turok wen't out and mated with the zombie bitch from Bloodrayne. In other words, fugly. 

Meet one of the many women in my life, this is my girlfriend. Goth looking female ... is a pain to speak with. Still, have to keep running to her house to get missions. 
Hmm... the face seems familiar... who could this be?
...
...wait a min... Mom?

With a mother like that, all of this is just... just...

A hive full of infected thingies. 

That's me looking over the skyline. Look's like the skyline from Mirror's edge, only less pretty. 

Did I mention that you can run up walls, jump from incredible heights, and be the bastard cloned offspring of Spiderman and the Hulk? I didn't? I should have - it's pretty important. 
Then there are those soul orbs from POP. You pick them up for some reason, I was too busy nostaligcally remembering Elika to actually pay any attention to what it was. 
I gobbled up Daft Punk.  Ok. That one was a little stretched. 

Now I can become superman too. Yeahah. You get to fly somewhere in the middle of the game. One third actually, but you are no mathematician. 

Now I am the bastard offspring of Superman and Wolverine. Yeahah. 
I can attack flying copters in mid-air. Just swoop at them and give em a flying kick. 

Now I am military man destroying water-towers marked by a ring of flying crows. What brilliance. 


I just threw a car at another car , and it exploded. 

Look at me, holding that guy up in the air  - look closely at his expression of horror. 

Yeah well, got a tank and shit. Whatever. Bad game, give it a miss. 

However, be sure not to miss this.

One for the road

Oh Shi...

Singer going by the monicker "Dead" shoots himself with a shotgun remote cabin, and the bandmembers hike to a store, buy a camera, come back, shoots Dead, and uses it as the next album cover.

Lyrics here if you dare.

Bibo Hobo Bottle Slippers

Recession putting you on the streets? Shoes have a big hole in the middle of the sole? Are you on the road without sufficient footwear? Don't worry, I have the perfect solution, bottle-chappals. 

Note that these wont work with Bisleri or Aquafina bottles, as the plastic used for the labels are not strong enough to keep the flat bottle to your feet. However, the plastic labels of the Bibo bottles do this perfectly. Just flatten two Bibo bottles, put your feet through the plastic label, and walk around till they stop making weird squelching noises, and leaving small spurts of water. 

Two worlds collide

Story of the day 1: Opera launches a new service on its browser, which makes every computer act as a web server through the browser itself. You can host websites, get access to your files, and play multimedia from your "website" no matter where you are, and in fact, which browser you are using as long as your computer at home is running Opera and alive. You get urls like compname.username.operaunite.com or something. Look it up here.

Story of the day 2: It has happened before, many times over. Every once in a while, a web 2.0 site goes out and achieves something waaay beyond what it had been designed for. This time, it was twitter. Is there a full blown cyber war going on? Hardly so, but a movement has been alive and kicking for some time now, helped by the outside in many ways. Basically, information is getting out into the open from a place it has no business doing so, especially when one of the most robust armies in the world is trying to stop it. Errr.... where do I send you to track all of this? Read what's going on here, here, here, and here. 

Now the two worlds collide, here. 

Trek to Sindola

A friend of Mine, Mangesh, and the leader of Green Carpet, a trekking group has a penchant for finding out the more obscure trekking locations. Sindola is located bang on Khubi Phata, the same spot, where people get off to head out to Harishchandragad. Naturally, the majestic cliffs of Kokankada, and the view from Taramati, along with the ancient caves overshadow the allure of Sindola. I am so glad he took us there, because a combination of terrain, weather and my own stupidity gave me one of the more memorable trekking experiences in my life.
It started out well enough, the usual get up early in the morning and catch an early train to a godforsaken station routine. Ended up at Kalyan at six in the morning, waiting for a large crowd of forty to show up. Said hello to a few people I keep trekking with regularly. This time, had taken with me two friends from College, Bulbul and Simi.
The walk up was simple enough, with a rock patch showing up around an hour into the trek. The rock patch was a little strange, in the sense that there were an endless combination of paths you could take to the top. Sindola is also strange in the sense that there are no direction arrows pointing to the top, which is the case for every other trek in Maharashtra I have gone to so far. The Himalayan foothills don't have arrows, but the paths are very clear, and at least three times as wide as most paths in the Sahiyadris. There was another rocky patch I should say, instead of sheer rock, this was a steep incline of mud and stone. That too was easy enough, and a few of us were well ahead of the group. We kept going, wondering which way the trail was. Then it round around a contour of the hill, getting very narrow when it did so. There was place to barely keep two feet side by side, so we had to walk carefully and swiftly. There was a wall of rock on one side, and the valley on the other. We followed this narrow trail for a while, and then hit something strange. There was a rock patch to the right, and a very narrow trail on the left. The trail on the left was clear, but had space for only single footholds. Two of us took a bad decision, well ahead of the group, and chose the path on the left.
The path quickly became very steep, and offered hardly any hold. It amounted to climbing, which was something I hadn't done before. Got shit scared for a moment, when I was holding on with three limbs, and two of them slipped. Attached myself to the incline, and found little way of moving. The guy who had gone ahead of me was far ahead. Looked around, then started climbing again. Reached the top, got out, and carried on. Looked down, and everyone else was far below us.
We roamed around the top. There were three old tanks, which didn't have any water in them. Apart from that, nothing. Eventually the rest came up, a few had their own mishaps, and the leader took us all to a windy little spot for food. As usual everyone shared everything they had, and unfortunately, there were too many theplas. A photo session followed, then something scary happened.
The rains came on us with full force. Within minutes, we were drenched to the bone. Add to that a powerful wind, and everyone was shivering like crazy. Some of us enjoyed it thoroughly, there was simply nothing we could do. The cloud swallowed us whole, and a few times the thunder sounded below us. A few people on the top actually saw the rain headed our way. I took what little shelter a tree afforded, and lit up a cigarette. I was shaking like a bitch (sorry), and it was fun.
Eventually, we joined the group, and they were all shivering, some of them were shit scared for too long, and generally moving slowly. The rain had actually made the loose gravel wet, and that offered a better grip than it did on the way up. We took a good hour and a half to navigate a stretch which would have normally taken twenty minutes, had it not rained. Eventually, we all reached down. Some of us walked a further two kilometers to get the bus, because we came down directly to the road, instead of walking back the way we came.
Photos below:

Trek to Mahuli

Mahuli is the highest fort in Thane district. Not to be confused with the highest peak in Maharashtra, which is Kalsubai (Btw, headed to Kalsubai tonight). Went there two weekends ago, didn't find the time to blog about it.
Took a friend along with me on this trek. His name was Bala, and he was an old college friend. Showed up from Pune, and we left at two PM from Thane. Caught a train to Asangaon. The base village, Mahuli is about an hour's walk away from Asangaon. We started walking, but ran into an ST in about ten minutes, so we got in.
The base village is large, and spread about. Near the temple at the foot of the hills, there are two households. One of them sells biscuits, water, cold drinks, sweets and cigarettes till ten in the night. That became our hangout for the rest of the evening.
The temple at the base is a great place to stay. There are two temples close together, but one of them has no illumination, so it is pretty dark and scary. This is for the adventurous types. The night had a great campfire, and a usual session of song and a little dance.



Bala and I had a chat after that, and a bunch of people strayed outside, walking around a bit, looking at the stars. Shooting star count: 4. Divided by zero again. Bala showed me how to recognise a few constellations. I knew the sickle/great bear, but that was about it. Bala showed me Taurus, Leo, Pisces, Gemini, Orion and Draco. Pisces is a bitch, looking nothing like a fish. The others have a very good resemblence, more than just random dots connected together, they look like they are a group. Draco is this huge thing stretching across a quarter of the sky.
We took out our carrymats, and went to sleep. We were warm, because we were smart enough to come prepared. The others however, were a little uncomfortable, so they went about the place creating havoc and running across people in the night. This broke my sleap, and I got a splitting headache which lasted till I came home. As an effect, I was very grumpy with everyone, and slept off every chance I got.



This is Chanderi from the base villiage. There was a well and a handpump nearby, which gave us water. The water from the well tasted better than the water from the handpump. A bullock cart came over, the bullocks were given water, and he drove away at an amazing speed.



I have close-ups of the bulls, but I am saving them up for another epic bovine close-up post. The trek itself was a little distracting and hazy, courtesy the headache. It was steep, and laborious, which I didn't notice too much. This is Bala half-way to the top, drinking all our water supplies.



We played many games to the top, including 20 questions, cofeepot, and a few games of our own invention. Actually, a single game but with variations. The game was, that we had to come up with a list of names, around a topic. For example, we had to come up with fantastic or mythological animals such as the unicorn, phoenix, manticore, mermaids, werewolves etc. We went down the were-(insert animal name here) road, but only briefly. I won that one. The other topic was sword names. My list went something like katana, gupti, broadswoard, longsword, cutlass, sabre etc... He came up with obscure ass shit like epee, rapier, flamberge, claymore, falchion... I forgot the rest. Then I remembered that he had an unfair advantage because he had actually learnt swordfighting. Lost that one.



The way was pretty steep, and there were some crazy spots. A few places, we found some shade, I promptly slept off. Took at least two hours of rest on the way up, and still the group was slow. Eventually, we made it to the cool place on top. Cool as in full of shade cool, not oh look that's awesome cool. Kalyan Darwaja was there, a few caves (where I slept off again). There was also a small Shivling, which marked Mahuli.



Eventually, we started back down. The walk was much longer than I remembered coming up. Came home terribly late. Nice place to go, loads of birds and butterflies, will go again and explore more. We didn't roam about the top too much.