Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Avishek Sen Gupta's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, August 27th, 2006
9:51 pm	Going mad...book-mad. I'm just writing down the stuff I bought in the last month. There are a few left to finish, but yeah this is it. * The Medieval Machine * Medieval Technology and Social Change * Daily Living in the 12th Century * The Cathedral Builders * The Basic Works of Aristotle * The Confusion * The Last Knight * The Physics of Immortality * Metamath: The Quest for Omega * God's Clockmaker * The Friar and the Cipher * On Writing There are a few more; I can't find them right now. Madness. Current Mood: anxious Current Music: Des Milliers de Baisers (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
12:32 am	To join a class or not... Been thinking for a while whether I should join an arts course or something. I seemed to hit a plateau for a month or two. Was actively considering this option, when I drew this today... Maybe postpone the decision till later :-) Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Discoteca (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 30th, 2006
8:37 pm	The difference... For fun, I decided to redraw one of my very old black-and-white pics. I was pleasantly surprised. Before After Some improvement, yes? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006
8:13 am	The diversions of a bored dude Couldn't find a more imaginative title: hell, why'd even try to imagine one, this is LJ, for crying out loud. Anyway, I have woken up from a deep slumber after all these months in Vancouver; nothing new really, even my muscles sympathised. And I realised that I *was* bored. So, what to do? * Swordfighting: They have classes on Richards Street, and I'm currently learning duelling using the rapier. They teach longswords, staves and wrestling too, and after the first day, I couldn't feel my arms and legs. It's gotten easier, more fun, and it gives me an excuse to practise at home with my lightsaber :-D * Rollerblading: Classes under the SkyTrain tracks, on the cool morning grass near Sceience World. I wobbled horribly, but it's steadier now, and all I need is practice. And of course, practice is *everything* :-) *Indoor wall climbing: Have the first class scheduled this coming Tuesday and it should rule. Yay, Spiderman, Spiderman... Other than that, work goes on pretty well, I'm thinking of taking Kendo classes, but the chief consideration is fitting them in this suddenly busy schedule I've created for myself. Good. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: 24 - Jem (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
2:46 am	My head...ooof! I've never really drawn buildings - which is to say that I never paid any attention to them in my drawings. It was, at best, a placeholder. I lavished more attention on faces and characters. I decided to draw the interior of the Chartres Cathedral tonight. Googled for the elevation plan of the cathedral nave and used the engineering drawing as a guide. And now, my head *hurts*. Aaargh. My jaw hurts, I don't know why. It requires tons of patience than drawing a face like this from imagination. But maybe that's because I practise faces more. Anyway, here's the result. It's not very good, and I wasn't even aiming to be accurate, but I think I'll practise buildings a bit more. The results seem rewarding. Now, about that headache... Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Adagio on Strings - Samuel Barber (Comment on this)
Monday, March 27th, 2006
11:06 pm	Oblivion...uhhh...hmmm...ROCKS! Yes, that's the word! Flashback to...ummm...1998? I'm trying to install this weird-sounding RPG on my...oh...486 machine. It's called Elder Scrolls: Arena, and as I start playing it, I realise it's different. For one, it's open-ended. And not pseudo-open-ended (where they just stuck in a bunch of rooms unrelated to the main story). And it was amazing. The graphics were amazing too (anything over the 256x192 of my ZX Spectrum was an improvement back then), and I only stopped playing it when I lost the CD for some reason. The game I was playing was a demo, but I kept hoping that I'd play that again someday. A few days back, I found that Bethesda (the makers) were giving away the 1998 version free. I couldn't run it natively, so I fired up DosBox, and ran it. And I died. After playing HL2, this, *this* was horrible. I did try very hard to think that this was the game that I'd played so much back then, but i could not bring myself to play it. *Sob*. Then... "Among the best products shown at last year's E3 Expo, the gaming industry's annual mega-event, was the medieval fantasy PC game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. " - Review in The Houston Chronicle Elder Scrolls Four? All the others had just passed me by somehow! So right now, I am playing Oblivion. And it's all I hoped it would be. Screw the FPS. Long live the RPG. Does anyone release text adventures these days? I'm in the mood for some. Current Mood: mellow Current Music: Retiens moi (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
12:34 am	Craving like a train... Shortly after landing up in Vancouver, I was introduced to sushi. Now, I really wasn't particularly keen on it, since I could not imagine rice eaten like that, nor the near-raw food, though Owen assured me that it was perfectly safe. Seeing my lukewarm reception to this, I was told that it was an "acquired taste". And there rested the matter. Till today. I was in office today, and it was nearing lunchtime and i was pairing with someone, when a sudden craving for sushi hit me...not a "I like sushi" feeling. More like "SUSHI. NOW!! NOW!!" I could barely tear myself away for lunch, so that I could run to the nearest sushi bar (the one with the rotating food bowls), and gobble boatloads of it. I wish I knew why. Current Mood: shocked Current Music: Nycteris - Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
1:00 am	Put the whole thing up I was running through my list of digital drawings and was surprised at how many of them were just gathering...bits? Anyway, rather then sort out the chaff from the grain, I put up the whole thing on the Art Section. For your viewing (dis?)pleasure ;-) Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: All In The Serve - Michael W Smith (Comment on this)
Monday, February 13th, 2006
9:15 am	I am a Splinter Cell... Finished playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory last night. Though i think it's this morning. It was 3:00 a.m. so you've to judge for yourself. Anyway, the game is amazing. When I bought it, I'd been expecting another FPS without any variety. Couldn't be more wrong. The character is very well detailed, and has this array of amazing visual equipment and sneaky moves at his disposal. The best part of course is that for most of the game, you need to play using your night vision on , and that rules! Seeing the workd in shades of washed out shades of green and being almost blinded by the merest candle is something pretty cool. Then there are moments when your ears are burning because you have to defuse 3 bombs and you don't know where they are and there are guys chasing you with Shock Sticks, and there's this techno soundtrack - it feels so amazing that half of the times I forgot to defuse the bombs and just *felt* as if I was in a movie. No. Really. The end is satisfying too. The story is a bit loose though, and the save system has some limit after which it screws up. Other than that, Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory ranks right up there with Halo, Halo 2 and Half Life 2. I've tried the CoOp a few times and you have to play it to see it, believe me. Try Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory. You might like it. That concludes what I did this weekend. lol! Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Splinter Cell soundtrack (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2006
4:00 pm	Moving to a new place is disgusting... Not the place itself, mind you, but the process. Not even the packing part of it; it's the buying stuff for the place. I'm moving out of the corporate apartment tomorrow into a new one. It is nice, albeit bare, in that there is no furniture. So hey presto, bus to Ikea in Richmond to do some shopping for furniture. The whole thing sucks. I don't mean Ikea. There are so many different pieces of things to select. Then inevitable disagreements with my roommate about what to buy and what not to. Finally, when we have a trolley-load of stuff, we go to checkout. We'd initially planned to get it all delivered to our new place, but they only deliver the things which are in the boxes. And not even all of them! I mean, we had to buy cutlery and plates too: the last thing in the world I'd want to do: buy cutlery. Yuck! So finally we did manage to put most of the stuff through delivery, but there were quite a few other things which they refused to deliver. So, hey presto, call Yellow Cab, dump stuff and come back to our (current) place. We'll have to go through this same taxi charade again tomorrow, because we are only going to get the keys to the new place tomorrow. Which of course means I get to miss office, which sucks too. And we'll have to wait for an Internet connection for a few days. And call the Hydro guys to switch on heating and electricity so that we don't die in our sleep. This is something I'd hate to do. Ever. Again. Me, I'd rather pay for a furnished place than go through this crap. Maybe choosing an unfurnished apartment was a wrong choice. Time will tell. Current Mood: cranky Current Music: Some Ikea ad jingle that's brainwashed me. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
1:47 am	I want a gravity gun... So I finally finished Half-Life 2...and it's easily much better than Doom 3. Not in terms of graphics: I was equally wowed by both of them. However, Half Life 2 basically focusses a lot on a cinematic experience, kind of what I look for; there is shooting, sure, but there's other stuff to do too and the genocide becomes really cool once you get the gravity gun. Ohhh man...imagine pulling an Overwatch soldier towards and using him as a shield! Imagine running around with a whole car, tossing it at unwary soldiers! And the physics is amazing. And the faces...they are the most realistic I've seen in an FPS yet. Do yourself a favor. Play HL 2. Oh yeah, moving into a new apartment this weekend. It's in Collingwood Village, quite close to the Joyce-Collingwood SkyTrain station. About 18 minutes total by SkyTrain. Tons of stuff to do. Current Mood: mellow Current Music: Can't Turn Back The Years - Phil Collins (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 14th, 2006
5:52 pm	More pics... Settled down for an afternoon of doodling...drew two more pictures. They are up here now. More books bought yesterday: The Perfect Heresy A Distant Mirror Hmmm...not much more Current Mood: artistic Current Music: Tous Les Secrets (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 1st, 2006
12:52 am	Reading Update Just finished 'The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople'. Funny how boring I used to find all this stuff at school. I need time to reflect on the book; it was pretty good. Which means that the next book I read can't be about the Crusades. Something lighter? Yeah, I started 'A Short History of Everything' but it was while I was reading the Sack. Yup, maybe this one? Other news, two other books bought: 1) The Name of the Rose 2) Baudolino Plus, the pesky Jedi continue to destroy all the Sith holoboxes every time I play Battlefront II. Grrr... Oh, yeah...Happy New Year! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 29th, 2005
9:00 am	The list grows, and is beginning to make me panic... 1) Empires of the Word : A Language History of the world 2) Chaucer and his England 3) Scottish Border Country 4) Human Accomplishment 5) The Arts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 6) By Permission of Heaven : The True Story of the Great Fire of London 7) The Great Mortality : An Intimate history of the Black Death Especially interesting is "Chaucer and his England", reads almost like a travelogue. 'Human Accomplishment' is pretty amazing...I'm through with only the first few chapters and they were delicious. Upcoming chapters have intriguing names like "Is Accomplishment Declining?", "Excellence and Its Identification" and other such. Yet to start off with "Empires of the Word", but rearing to go...couldn't start immediately after reading "Peopleware: Successful Projects and Teams" (Owen lent it). Oh, and guess what? All the books in the above list excluding the first and last...cost me only around $34 CAD or so. Boxing Week sale and all... :p Current Mood: calm Current Music: Eptesicus (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 24th, 2005
9:08 am	The books! The BOOKS! So I was strolling down Richards and Seymour's the other day, on the way to Finches for lunch, when I stumbled upon McLeod's Books. It'a second-hand bookstore. The books aren't categorised or anything, only vaguely, like Scottish, or Environment, or Literature. Stumbled onto some books that I'm sure i wouldn't have gotten anywhere else...my, and so cheap! Ugh, I'm drowning in books. Owen lent me a 'A Short History of Progress' and 'A Short History of Everything.' List of books I've gotten already in my time here: 1) A Short history of Byzantium 2) 1421 3) Dynamic Figure Drawing 4) Soldires of the Faith 5) Everyday Life in the Middle Ages 6) The Little Ice Age 7) Europe in the High Middle Ages 8) By the Sword 9) The New Concise History of the Crusades 10) Characters and Viewpoint ...etcetera. In fact, I keep postponing getting an iPod just thinking, "Just one more book. *Just* one more..." Current Mood: calm Current Music: Steel - Charlotte Martin (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 20th, 2005
10:21 pm	Dance on the Sidewalk It was a sweltering +10 degrees in the city, or so the weather report said. And of course, one can't blame all the expectant flakes for dripping onto Vancouver as wet blobs, forming puddles glistening in the weak haze of the afternoon. And of course, the weather here affects people a lot (or so Owen says). Lowered heads, hooded faces, barely concealed glumness. I was no different, hurrying all amidst all the vertical rain and horizontal crowds, trying to get to office. Trying to drown out the drum-drum of the rain in MP3's. When 'Je Lui Durai' came on. Ever felt that the right song came on in the right time...but though the song might remain, the moment is forever gone. This was one. It was fast, slightly rustic...and French. Now I couldn't speak a word of French to save my life, but that didn't matter. I do remember though that I was almost dancing while walked, my fingers conducting an imaginary orchestra while my foot tapped the grey pebbles whenever I stopped at a crossing. Davies and Homer, Seymour and Granville, finally Seymour and Dunsmuir...they passed like a dream. I recall raising my face to the grey slate sky and walking unheeded in the gentle drizzle while others hurried for cover. Today I danced on a sidewalk... Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Je Lui Durai - Celine Dion (Comment on this)
1:35 am	So much for procrastination... Three weeks back, I'd have been chattering my teeth off. Now, I find the cold quite refreshing, though not so much as to discard the overcoat...yet. Vancouver. I've been wanting to blog about all the wide-eyed-making-things I've seen...fortunately, tens of descriptions cannot supplant the personal one. Unfortunately, tons of pressing issues have kept me from writing anything. Here goes... 1) Cars stop for you when you're crossing the road...even when they are a mile away. Now is that power or what? Compared to here, Bangalore traffic is more like a Matrix movie with you dodging cars instead of bullets. LOL. 2) Roads are straight, almost irritatingly so...and you never know what's coming up over the rise. 3) It's no use trying to remember places by landmarks...as I found out lamentably after choosing Starbucks as one.. :-)) 4) Snow is good. Snow and sleet together is bad. 5) It gets dark by 4:30 p.m., confuses my body clock no end. 6) It's no use converting prices from Canadian Dollars to Indian Rupees, unless you want a premature heart attack. 7) After Calgary's -17 degrees Celsius, Vancouver seems a relatively cool -1 degrees :-) 8) It hasn't started snowing yet; that's a good thing. 9) My book collection here is starting to resemble the one in Bangalore - unmanageable. 10) Google Maps is all (mostly) you need to know how to get somewhere :-) 11) After someone tells you how to lower window blinds, you begin wondering how come you're so stupid. 12) The Banff rules! Gotta go back some day soon. 13) Haven't seen a traffic snarl yet. Might have to expand on some of these later...after some sleep. Seez ye. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: On Ne Change Pas (Comment on this)
Friday, November 18th, 2005
3:51 pm	Perfect for Writing... I recently got hold of the soundtrack for "Batman Begins". And it rocks. Not in the sense of you keep on listening to it all the time, or it's catchy. It's perfect for my writing. See, there is no overpowering theme music throughout the tracks; rather it's just a sense of atmosphere, almost background music, something that doesn't force me to stop writing and listen. I think I even write to the beats of these pieces on a good day :-) My favorites: 1) Nycteris : Starts off with a nice brooding beat, noir-ish, fades into a dark string score against a thrumming pulsing background music. *That* fades into a short but nice piano ending. 2) Corynorhinus : Slow, trembling strings rising and falling, evoking a sense of loss (with a haunting lonely viola). This continues for almost four-fifths of the piece, after which it fades. A thrumming background pulse rises - reminiscent of the one in Nycteris - but different. And a low baritone rising in crescendo till the background takes over and ends the piece in a dramatic crash. 3) Macrotus : Starts off like Corynorhinus, has almost the same beginning melody, which repeats twice, then takes a different turn of pitch, and fades away. Then there is nothing except a very low music, almost an echo, with some sharp, irregular beats, fade into an almost crystal like dream which resonates slowly, rising higher almost in steps, pulsing, then bursts into an almost Gothic swell of music. Layers of instruments wax and wane, almost signalling the inevitable. Ends abruptly to start off with a faint choir-ish voice, soft keyboards. The insistent current of string remains fades to the end. 4) Eptesicus : Starts off with a comfortable string-keyboard piece...with a hint of the Corynorhinus melody which ends as soon as it starts...fades to black. Rise the thrumming pulse, like Corynorhinus, the tune is larger, heavier, more overt. Continues with nice variations till the end. The good thing is that whereas a lot of music just plain distracts me from writing; this doesn't. I can work comfortably, it even colors what I'm writing at that moment...I hope. Anyway, good job. Of course with Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, what's new ? Highly recommended. P.S. : If you are wondering what those names mean, they are names of different bat species. Cool. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Nycteris - Batman Begins (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
7:18 pm	What to do in anger... When in anger, like right now probably (which is pretty rare), it is impossible to be objective. However, there's a neat trick I've learned. I read somewhere that when you are angry, your mind is a slave to the person whom you are angry with, since he occupies your whole concentration. That's demeaning. With that knowledge, what you do with it will differ with who you are. In my case? It has taken time, but I have learned to shrug it off and the person with it. He is not important enough for me to be angry with him, so why bother? Not defeatedly-like, but file away the point of dispute to discuss later probably. For now, as far as you're concerned, he's the insect that alights on your room's tubelight. Gone... :-) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
11:20 am	Hello world ! Finally, avishek.net is now online. Hello world ! (1 Comment |Comment on this)