Desultory

Nice people are REALLY pissed when they are pissed. Maybe it's because they think they are getting a raw deal. Maybe it's because they are human. Maybe it is because they get hurt more than normal, used-to hating-and-hurting-everyone-and feeling-cool-about-it, pessimistic people. I don't know.

The teenage-emo-love-relationship-going out-break ups and "getting over someone"-depression and having too many cigarettes and booze because "nobody understands what you're feeling right now" industry is one of the most fraudulent, hyped up and bullshit things on God's green earth. Don't get me wrong, being in love(whatever your definition) and going for dates with someone who makes you feel like you have some worth in the world is awesome, but for the love of God, don't act like it is the best fucking thing to ever happen to you and the universe, better than sliced bread, Waqar Zaka, MTV's Gtalk, this youtube video and this video game put together. And if you are mature enough to be in a "relationship" then be mature enough not to get emo on every one's asses after that, acting as if you're the only one in the world with any tangible problems.

Most exams are fraudulent. Period. Read this. That TA exam was the biggest farce I've seen in a while. Why did the son of a bitch give all those slides and tell us to study them if he was not going to ask questions from all sections equally? The paper had a fucking 3 mark numerical which had NOTHING to do with the course, just a simple v=square root(2gh) formula from physics which confused people. And he had ONE MARK fill in the blanks like this:

X is different from Y because……

where X and Y are FUCKING OPPOSITE FACETS OF SOME PROPERTY like for example

beauty is different from ugliness because……

or

being straight is different from being gay because……

or

tensile stress test is different from compressive strain test because……

The answer could have been ANYTHING, a whole FUCKING PARAGRAPH and then he announces that you are supposed to write only a COUPLE OF WORDS, so children take up your bow and arrows, put on your blindfolds and make sure the concept you choose from the TEN-FIFTEEN CLEARLY DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS is the one he is looking for. You can't write all as there is no time. Disgusting. Though you should still study for exams, otherwise you're necessarily fucked.

You can justify bad things that have happened to you or times you've wasted being in a foul mood by saying that it makes the happy times happier and makes you appreciate the good times more. And weirdly, it feels true as well.

People act nice. It's true. Not everyone is as nice as they seem. By acting nice, you get others to act nice and care for you, thereby making you feel cheerful in a fake being-happy-because-someone-cares-for-me-and-I-have-so-many-friends kind of way. The chameleon behaviour thrives on itself. Acting begets more acting, all to feel some fake happiness. But happiness is a state of mind after all, so is it really that fake? Bottom line, act nice with people, no matter how much you get taken advantage of in the process.

Speaking of too-many-friends(TMFs), it's always good to be one with TMFs. Some people say that you should have some good close friends but you should actually have TMFs, then you automatically have the former. Having TMFs nicely massages your ego, ensures lots of birthday and other treats and makes you feel better for some reason, even when no one is actually talking to you.

Music sounds more awesome if you're high, confused in a good way or not thinking right but in a good way.

Human beings are awesome creatures. Meeting a new person is a very unique and wonderful experience indeed. How they think, what they like, their stories and perspectives. Though only if you're in a decent mood. Here decent doesn't always mean good, sometimes you feel like connecting to someone new if you're in a foul mood because as mentioned before, having TMFs massages your ego. Friends are in this sense a weird kind of currency, ego comfort chips or something. Thought I don't mean this derogatorily.

2 other things that massage your ego: people commenting on your blogs, people taking comfort from your cliched advice(which is actually correct in the situation as people get in a bad mood over cliched situations like the aforementioned "break ups").

Ahhh, feels good to write after all this time. Time for a coffee and some episodes of Death Note, Scrubs, Coupling and Family Guy.

Astrology is Fraud

Astrology is right up there with egotistic snobs, low Internet speeds, folks acting like exasperating idiots around infants, going "O, what a sweeeeeeet little baby! You're just so unbelievably cuuuuuuute!" and people using the phrase "last but not least" and the word "myself" as "Myself, Harry" or "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. Myself Roy, your host for the night" on the list of things that make me want to kill a dozen dainty puppies with a sweetass 12 gauge double barrel shotgun. How the hell can millions of people go through the exact same things on the same day? Or if it is an "inexact craft", then how do you interpret it?

The fact that people base important decisions, even financial, based on it really boggles the mind. If that was not bad enough, people also use it as an easy way out. That's right, why blame yourself for your under-par performances or bad decisions when you can pin it on celestial objects millions of miles away? Because of the rampant belief in astrology, idiots like this guy are also allowed to go scot-free instead of being jailed for fraud and wastage of television airtime. And no, he doesn't die, not even due to shame. All this after the basis of astrology has been debunked by scientists. No, really, it has. Go here.

OK, as you can see, I was really bored and jobless when I wrote this. After writing all this, I was still bored, so I typed "horoscope today cancer" in google and went to the first few sites that came up.

From calastrology:

Your personal charm and attractiveness has a positive effect on you at this time. People see you as a loving and lovable person, and as someone who is aware of their needs and feelings, which can benefit you at this time. Others are willing to help and cooperate with your goals and ambitions. Love: 19% Emotions: 40% Intuition: 79% Creativity: 70% Work: 10% Money: 30% Power Numbers: 27, 14, 7, 4, 22, 9 Born Today: Nostradamus, Spike Jones, Shirley Jackson, Lee Remick, Sophie Monk

First of all, what's with the "power" numbers? Do I buy a lottery with them? But what combination? Do I take an average(16.6)? Or a root mean square value(16.09865)? And what the hell do the percentages mean? 19% love? Does that mean 2 out of 10 chicks will say yes if I ask them out? But aren't girls always looking for someone who is "a lovable person", who is "aware of their needs and feelings" and all that tripe? Looks like my personal charm and attractiveness will have a negative effect on them at that time. And don't even get me started on the "born today" list. Last time I checked, this isn't facebook, and I don't know these people well enough to wish them.

From gotohoroscope:

Silence is a very valuable thing today. Try to still your rebelliousness. It is important to prepare yourself carefully for life’s challenges and rein in your impulsiveness.

Oh shit! Remain silent? Then how the hell do I use my personal charm and attractiveness??? No wait, that was another horoscope. Notice how 38.5% of this horoscope(It is important to prepare yourself carefully for life’s challenges) is pretty much general life advice, general enough to be true on any day.

From horoscopes.astrology:

You feel as if you've got massive back-up today, even if you're all alone. It's a great time to speak up for yourself, as others should have a hard time arguing or even disagreeing with you.

*triiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnng* Houston, we have a contradiction! Unless by "speak up for yourself", the thing means "argue with others about the pricelessness of silence", I don't see how I can satisfy both.

From eastrolog:

Today you might have a tendency to criticize everybody at work. You are determined to solve a difficult issue and will resent your workmates' lack of involvement.

You will recover your good mood in the afternoon. Chances are you will have a great time with your friends. Remember: all work and no play is not the way to go!

I am a student, I don't have any occupation, and in any case my vacations are going on.

I woke up at 2 in the afternoon today in a very good mood from all the awesome sleep. After that, I had a long hot bath and some delicious food, and went to sleep again. When I woke up, it was 7.

I've not even come close to being in a bad mood, and the only "difficult issue" I had was deciding which pants to wear.

It is now night, and I have not yet met any of my friends, not even online or on the phone.

Therefore, I win.

From cainer:

'It isn't the winning that counts, it's the taking part.' This is more than just a pleasant platitude, by which life's runner-ups are consoled. It is actually a statement that acknowledges an essential fact. Victory is temporal and hollow. It is merely the other side of the coin labelled 'loss'. Go down far enough and you can only come up again. And vice versa. What's truly required, as we approach the holiday season proper, is not 'success' but stability and wisdom. The ability to be ambivalent but not apathetic. To not really mind if something happens, yet to feel inspired to try. Make your best effort. Remain objective and you will rapidly overcome this week's small astrological hurdle to happiness.

Holy shit! Thesaurus alert! Reminded me of The Architect from The Matrix, though here the ideas are ambiguous more than the words. But still, reconnoitering that agglomeration of equivocation is going to be thoroughly operose and will necessitate a lot of sedulousness.

From tarot:

Wednesday, Dec 3rd, 2008 -- You may have big ideas about a project at work today, but self-doubt could prevent you from telling anyone what you are thinking. Perhaps you remember some other time when you bit off more than you could chew. Nevertheless, your production anxiety is likely unfounded. Sharing your thoughts will be easier if you are honest about your strengths and limitations. It's better to ask for help up front than to promise more than you can deliver.

OMFG! It's all true! Don't you see? I had a "big idea" to make a "project"(blog) on astrology at "work"(on working the brain, isn't it obvious silly??? I mean, work can have so many possible connotations, and I will obviously choose the one that fits me, never mind that doing this could lead to the horoscope reading completely differently for 2 different people, with them extrapolating the surface meaning to their context in a way that will make it true). I didn't tell anyone as I doubted if I would ever finish it. I remembered previous blog posts I started with enthusiasm and never consummated. The next sentence has the word "likely" and hence can never be absolutely wrong. The rest of the horoscope(39%) consists of general life advice, general enough to be true on any day. Therefore, it all FITS!!! It took six tries, but he's really hit it out of the park and into space this time. How the hell did he do that???!!!

So, to summarize the advice given by all the horoscopes above, basically today all I have to do is pursue my goals and ambitions, prepare myself for upcoming tasks, speak up for myself, solve any difficult issues I come across, set aside some time for recreation, try my hand at everything with the best efforts, be well-versed with the philosophy of victory and defeat, remain objective, try to be happy and have a big, difficult idea about something and take other people's help and pull it off.

Whew! Now I see why all the celebs who take horoscopes seriously do so well in life. Too bad most of the day went in deducing all this. One can't follow the same protocol the next day, as it keeps changing. That's why they call it the daily horoscope. Damn you Venus!

Oh, and I've just realised that you can't verify the veracity of the content I've posted from the sites, as by the time you read this, it won't be the 14th of December, 2008 anymore. In that case you can do 2 things:

1. If you believe in astrology, blame it on the wrong alignment of the planets when you came here.

2. If you don't believe in astrology, eat me. Now, where's my 12 gauge?

Rant

Taken from Sid's blog:

This is a collab thingy me and Ashish wrote one night at the cc in our second sem. Right after the endsems, so it was something like 30th April or something. We left it incomplete and thought we'd finish it together sometime else. We never got around to doing it. Maybe we'll add some more courses to the roster if we get frust enough to think of completing this in the future. Happy reading!

A word of caution: For you own sakes('cause neither me nor Ashish care about what you think of us), do not judge the authors by the post. We were a bit too sick of acads and wrote a couple of things we shouldn't have(like abusing Lord Rayleigh, who, by the way, was never knighted). The article remained saved in my blog and hasn't been edited one bit. Just think of it as what went through two lost souls when they finished their end-sem exams(which, I hardly need say, were disastrous).

What we learn here:

PHY103

Why is the sky blue?

Interesting, no? Well get this, it is blue due to the oscillation of %@^!ing dipoles. That's right, ladies and gents, high up in the sky, you have electrons and protons forming nice little symmetrical pairs and oscillating in perfect harmonic motion. Now this is where things really get interesting. A formula pops up, literally from thin air(just like our little subatomic particles) I=aw^4sin^2theta made by some jobless b@s+@rd called Rayleigh(and that Queen b!+{h actually knighted him for it). So now I is proportional to the fourth power of w and since w is highest for violet the sky is violet...no wait things are never THAT simple, even if you are working with pop-out-of-nowhere formulae. So, violet, indigo, blue and all the other high w colours 'superimpose'(that's like intercourse in physics: two things combining to give a new thing that has the properties of both, happens all the time in physics, horny subject, no?) and you see blue.

So basically, guys who've come here to become engineers and who'll never use this formula in their entire life are made to mug it up without knowing where it came from. SAD.

MTH101

Ah...the big one.The biggest reason for sleepless nights after hall days. I'm pretty sure that even if I ever came within an epsilon distance of really understanding what's going on, I would never fall within the delta range of passing. Didn't get it? Neither did I! (managed to pass though, but that was because of the continuity of my friends' answer scripts into mine). This is what the course is: a sequence of mindless discontinuous topics put into a series of lectures. The subject really tests the limits of your patience. Convergence of your mind on the topic at hand is integral as theorems like Green's, Pappus', Stokes' will make your hair curl and you will not be able to differentiate between the various elements of the text.

CHM101

Held at 10am(why, oh why???), it ends the snooze cycle of your alarm clock. That's right, no more "Oh, I'll get up in ten minutes before the next snooze." Wake up by 9:55, hunt for lab goggles and a lab coat, make sure you've worn shoes and drag your sorry lazy butt to the chem lab, still groggy eyed and disheveled.

How chem lab basically works is:

1. Mix A and B.

2. Put some reagent/indicator/catalyst/whatever to the mixture.

3. Put some sort of measuring device in it and measure whatever the device is supposed to measure.

4. Repeat the whole thing to make your reading more 'consistent' .

5. Write a lab report showing how much you've learnt in 3 hours.

Of course, you could just skip the whole thing and copy the final results from your neighbour or any other student in the lab for that matter. But now, why would you want to do that when the alternative is so much fun and interesting and educating? Silly to even think of it, isn't it?