PapareFAIL

Last Friday was failFriday. A series of unfortunate exclamations, if you must. Meet failboy, vileness and fallen at the Thummulla Barista. Fallen read some failpoetry to us which we completely ignore, preferring to discuss the baffling mysteries of why the outdoor seating things were made of wood. Baffled, we were. A ride from TMS later we were again at Eatmore restaurant. More fried rice was consumed as whacko had failpoetry spoken at him by fallen. Many heavy subjects were discussed, none of which were featured in the poem.

Later, we decided to go to the beach, since we were all broke and the beach was free. We also secretly planned to sell fallen to hairy old German tourists hanging around the beach but that didn’t quite go according to plan. And then this happened-

Scene: Last Friday, on a Moratuwa bus on the way to Mt. Lavinia.

Stfallen: Yeah Vin Diesel movies usually suck…

Whacko : Yeah there was that racing movie thing… what was it called? Ah Need for Speed!

After we convinced fallen not to tweet every single thing that happened, we got to Mount. Then whacko pointed out that there was a gaming cafe right there. We weighed our options. The beach. Free, sand and… well… nothing much else. Selling fallen would be difficult in this stretch. Games, well, that sounded much more fun. And we had just enough, counting all the ten rupee notes in our wallets, for an hour. We settled into playing when the greatest fail of the night happened.

Scene : At Venus gaming cafe at Mt. Lavinia. Fallen, whacko, failboy and myself are playing Call of Duty.

failboy : Dude I’m getting the hang of this!

whacko : *kills fallen*

fb : Dude! That was cool! This looks cool man…

me : *kills whacko*

fb : Dude I killed him! Haha!

me : Err… no, dude, I killed him.

fb : But it said “You killed Whacko” on my screen, and I’m getting pretty good at this now, I can kill you too you know!

whacko : *looks at fb’s screen* wtf? Dude, you’re spectating through Jerry’s player!

me : *look at scoreboard*

all : *Break out in laughter as we discover fb had been spectating all this time*

all : *point and laugh at failboy’s EPIC FAIL.

After that, failboy was too embarrassed to do anything so he just quit and created a Counter Strike server called “papareboy’s mom”. On which he again got killed repeatedly. Later was Need for Speed. Failboy fell back by a few thousand light years in the first lap itself so he decided to go the other way, intending to impede us by crashing into us. He didn’t. Not a single hit. Missed by miles, on roads only three meters wide. He learned the basic lesson that it is extremely hard to crash into someone head-on when your combined speeds are in the hundreds of miles per hour. Thankfully he didn’t try to go backwards in the Sprint tracks.

After we all thanked failboy for the entertainment, we all set off home. People, if any PC game thing comes up, just take papareboy. The opposing team will be too busy rolling on the floor laughing their limbs off to notice you killing them.

Four Types of Facebook Creeps

I’ve been on facebook a while now. I haven’t really done much on it other than accept the occasional friend request and comment on pictures of me, but I’ve noticed stuff. People. Decided to list a few types.

• The males that have a roundabout way of showing interest – I have a friend. She posted a few pictures recently. I went over to look at them, and while flipping through each picture I notice something strange. Along with the text like “2 comments” and  “In this picture:”, there is the ever present “x likes this picture, along with the thumbs up icon. On every. Single. Picture. I keep going and come across a few comments by the same person. “oh wow ur smile. it is so beautiful”. Way to go there casanova, freak her out by going on to click “Like” on every single one of her pictures and flooding her with notifications. Why don’t you just write “I love you” on her wall?
• The Drama Queen – Any gender can be this. The most recent example I came across was a male. A note is posted. With a bad joke. Snarky comments are made by me. Owner denies thinking up note(he didn’t). More snarkyness. And bam! I’m barred from seeing the note. Not even a “plez how do I make snarky comments lyk that to peepal” message. I’m offended. All I get is a reply to not comment or read if I don’t like it. I mean, I was in a state to write “I h8 uu!!!11″ on his wall! Hmph.
• Stalkers – Usually male. These teenagers, sometimes even grown men, will browse through facebook looking for people to add to their friends lists. No surprise that they’re usually female. They see some girl, say to each other “Isn’t she the sister of that girl who talks to the girl who sits at the back of the class in the class next to ours while she waits to be picked up after class?” and agree unanimously. Otherwise it’s “Isn’t that that dude’s girlfriend’s sister’s friend’s sister?”. Eventually half the population is on their friend lists.
• Me – I have a peculiar predicament. I used to get on only to confirms friend requests from people I knew. Which created a general impression of me not really being around fb much, the only activity generated being from my blog posts being sent as notes. Now I have a problem. I have this feeling that I should keep this image of me not being on it much intact, but it leaves me helpless when I actually want to add people to my friends list. If I send request around willy-nilly my image of being ‘too cool for facebook’, or ‘too uncool for more than 100 friends’ rather, is shattered. So I wait patiently till they eventually add me.

Why don’t females suddenly flood my inbox with “i really lyk your hair, can i touch it”? Why don’t females start writing poetry to random males? Why do people put LOL at the end of every damn comment, even when it’s not remotely funny? Why must my brain die a little each time I go on there and see what people say? Why are the comments sections turning into youtube comment sections?

I don’t know. I’m off to go change my profile pic and look at pictures of strange exotic girls.

I hear they want to “friend me”.

Backwards Weekend

TEDx

Yesterday. I showed up around nine to a roomful of people I didn’t recognize. Then Sinidu showed up and gave me my free ticket. So I found myself an uncomfortable metal chair and sat. Turned out Celestial Dream was sitting n front of me. According to St. Fallen who came in later she was wearing an interesting top. But anyway,

Most of the speakers were interesting, whereas some were dead boring.They also showed some TED videos from the site. Interesting bits were meeting the pavementleaf and some woman I thought was T.

There was some woman there, with sunglasses perched atop her head. Fallen, for some reason, thought that was a clear sign that it was T. Apparently T is a beach person. Apparently beach people wear sunglasses everywhere. Gehan wears sunglasses. He’s in kandy. Didn’t realize Sri Lanka was half submerged in the sea.

So I dramatically turn, point at her and go “AHA!”. She stares, looks away. I look back at Fallen. He laughs. I look back at the woman, mumble something like “You’re not tea are you? I’msorrymistakethisguy…..”, and then elbow Fallen. In the stomach. Cow.

Being stared at as if you were a druggie on the street is not fun. Hitting fallen is.

Met Rannelee there too. She waved at me frantically while I was on the phone, leaving me wondering who the hell it was. She gets a link because she bought us juice after the thing from roots. Everyone is advised to ask her for things when first meeting.

–

Sabby’s Place

Went over to wreak havoc. Wreaked very little. Just threw a few pillows around, splattered wine on a wall and ambled out in the evening. Also managed to get @hijinx to log into TweetDeck and throw a few tweets around. @sabbyaz deleted all the tweets I made on her account. Hag. On the bright side she’s started a new blog.

–

Friday

Wanted a repeat of last Friday. Didn’t get it. Went to food court, waited, got donuts, off to burger king for dinner. Notably, papareboy pulled on whacko’s collar to see inside. I’m not kidding. He then goes “Oh I’m sorry, was just checking whether your chest was hairy”. Oh, that was all? All’s right then. WTF? That’s like going “Oh I was wondering if it would fit” after sticking your head up an elephant’s ass. After a satisfying dinner we were off home. No beach or anything :/

–

Went to rock.lk for the first time. Bad photoshops. The cons of pirated software. Why don’t all those bands just hire me to do all their album covers instead of that dude who’s called a graphic designer because he can take a face and slap in on a Llama?

–

Single again.

My Country

Note that in the title, the emphasis is on ‘my’. I don’t want none of you fools thinking I’ve gone all 4th grade essay. I have not gone street grammar either, that ‘none’ up there was just for effect.

On my way to work I have to take three buses. It’s not a very winding route or anything, just a perfectly straight path. Along the Kandy road, then up along the Baseline road. I get a 138 from near home, get off about two minutes later, go to the main bus stop thing for a 154. I get into a waiting bus and pick a seat, usually at the rear. Today I chose the back seat. There was already a woman sitting in the corner away from the door so I sat in the middle. The opposite corner, I knew, would expose me to the rising morning sun. I had quite enough vitamin D as it is. What with crazed parents and siblings telling me it’s good for the skin, most of my formative school years were spent in the sun, turning a deep… whatever it is my skin colour is. But I did move slightly towards the offending corner, just to make sure the female opposite wouldn’t feel crowded or anything.

You see, an unspoken rule of the bus is that you position yourself according to the space available on the bus. If it is completely empty save for a single person, you would do well to stay at the opposite end. Especially if it is a woman. If it is a woman, you would do well not to get into the bus. Instead, you must follow it in a different bus and make sure that the conductor acts decently towards her.

But we are straying from the story.

I sat down, and started bastardizing twitter with chat replying to tweets. After a grand total of 3 minutes the bus starts moving. I look around and all the seats are taken. There was a small space between me and the dude next to me. At the next stop, a skinny dude gets on, motions to the man next to me to move over a bit, squeezes himself into the gap and sits at the edge of the seat. He crosses his legs. I put on my headphones, go back to reading. The next stop, a dude with a rabaana gets on. Starts playing. I turn the volume up.

The next stop. Passes by. Some dude starts ringing the bell just after the bus passes it. Conductor yells at him. He yells at conductor. Something along the lines of -

Conductor : Stop ringing the bell, insolent rat.
Passenger : I’ll get off whenever I want to, bus stop nazi!
C : [Insult]
P : [Counter Insult]
C : [Reference to disrespecting public services]
P : [Pointing out that C is an asshole]
C : [Reference to P's mom's circumference]
P : [Jumps off bus while saying something about sticking things in strange places]

Then the conductor stares, flabbergasted, at us. Nobody says flabbergasted enough these days. Flabbergasted.

Conductor looks imploringly at us and asks “Kisi ugathkamak naha mee lamayta”. I won’t translate. We just nod stupidly. He keeps asking us things about the state of today’s youth, what colour his rice will be today and whether he looks good in a tux. We all agree wholeheartedly. The whole backseat is transformed into the conservative media.

Eventually I get off at Borella. Wait for a 103. Get in, sit down. Get off.

Work.

And that is a normal morning over here on this patch of earth. Awesome.

PS : Yet again, most is not to be taken seriously. If you needed to read this to get it, you’re an idiot.

I’ll listen to whatever the hell I want

Music. People quickly judging you by the music you listen to. People listening to certain types of music to look ‘cool’. Stupid.

A lot of people treat musical genres like it was embedded in their DNA. In the ‘coolness’ strand. They listen to what they perceive as ‘cool’ music, usually some obscure band with obscure sounding instruments. That’s alright, you can listen to whatever you want. But why in the world would you look down on someone listening to other types? I’m sure you’re all gangsta and that only rap can soothe your senses. Smack yo bitch up eh? MP5 be praised!

But it’s just music. Nobody gives a damn. It’s pointless parroting around your music tastes to anybody who will listen. You aren’t cool because you listen to music that’s not mainstream either. Most music doesn’t go mainstream because it’s so crappy nobody wants to listen. Then it’s peddled to all the schmucks looking for ‘underground’ music. Old music is not necessarily better than new music. Ohhhh music changed your life eh? Well guess what? Hannah Montana does that to 12 year olds too I bet.

If you listen to the words, then keep it to yourself for cryin’ out loud. It’s worse than those uppity armchair movie critics looking down their bent noses at people who don’t see the ‘true meaning’ in movie scenes. A beat is a beat. Music is music. Different people like different types.

Coolness is relative. In order, you get

1. Obscure Band
2. Major Band
3. Small-timers
4. Guitarists
5. People who listen to ‘cultured’ music
6. Inanimate objects
7. Miley Cyrus
8. Toothpicks
9. …

99. Pianists

That is, according to popular ‘coolness’ ratings canvassed from urban youth from different genres.

I’ll listen to whatever the hell I want.

So I was thinking(again)

I can’t really remember what the last ‘So I was thinking’ post was about. No, that isn’t what I’m thinking about either. I just created a wordpress blog and hell, WP is brilliant! It’s practically Google Analytics in the dashboard, with some added extras. So I will probably be switching to that permanently. I would also like to know if anybody has a way to export blogger posts to WP. I feel like I’ve discovered chocolate after eating cocoa powder for so long, believing it to be bounty from heaven.

Anyway,
Twitter is strange. It’s kind of addictive, yet we(the ‘locals’) use it not for its intended purpose but as a mini-chat like thing. It’s a great big orgy of instant messaging. Whenever you go to sleep or work, anything that takes you away from the internet, you feel this strange… feeling… of being disconnected. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night, to find yourself sleeping on the floor. You know things have happened, but you’re not quite sure what they are. For example, leave @stfallen and @papareboy alone in the wee hours of the morning, and you find all sorts of words like ‘Pani Bunis’ and ‘I don’t love you anymore!!!111′ floating around when you log on in the morning. Thoroughly disorienting when you expect things like “Going to work. Boring day” or at the least “Whackster looking for attention of the troll-ish persuation. Yawn”.

At least now we know to stay away from people like @pseud0random who tweet saying “My favourite past time is to push little girls off their bikes and steal them”. The bikes, not the little girls. Oh, now we know where LLD gets all that insider info on bloggers. Sneaky.

Sabby has yet again abandoned my blog I see. I have proof! Google reader tells me that there are only a few dozen hits from the middle east, and most of them come from Google keywords of the anti-flying machine variety. Flight simulator, bomb, hijack, U-235 decay rates, AK-47 suppliers and ‘Airline Food Menus From Around The World’ feature quite high on the list.

Speaking of menus, this small cafe thing just opened up across the road from where I work. T’was quite an adventure going into it. The lone table inside was surrounded by about five people. As soon as they saw me, they sprung up and dispersed, giving me a “you just HAD to come in here, didn’t you? If you don’t order for at least two, we’ll take you to the Zionist thing back there and do Zionist things to you.” Zionist sounds like something Dr. Evil would make up. Whatever it is… *looks up in wikipedia. Ohhhh…. But then why is it practically right next to some Islamic girls’ school? That’s just asking for it. Females already dressed for some ninja action just a wall away.

Anyway, I walk up to the counter and this dude who looks like he has a subscription to “Linux Illustrated” stares back at me, beard and all. I meekly as for two little burger things and a cup of black currant juice. Get a feeling of various eyes boring into me. Look around to see the previous knights of the round plastic table draping themselves on various fixtures around the room. A doorway would bring me a curious look, the far end of the counter suddenly looks away, pretending to stare at the items on display.

I take my eatables to the table and eat. Quickly. Stuff it all in my mouth and get up. Hurry outside.

I don’t look back and hightail it back to work. I don’t think I’m going in there alone again.

Lies 5.0 – Web of Lies

You might have heard that we went to the beach again. This time, the directions were even worse than at the bachelor’s thing. It’s only saving grace was that it was in the daytime. Another difference was that MoM was around too so I had to stay clear of buying any refreshment for fear of the shopkeeper carefully considering the Mario-Brothers like look on the mess-aiya’s face and having a sudden negative discount sale.

After being intercepted by St. Fallen, being told that we suck because we didn’t find the place five minutes earlier(they just don’t make saints like they used to) and finally reaching the place, we sat. Coke. Drink. Stuff.

—

Eventually, we go sit out on the beach, whacko arrives, we find it hilarious that papareboy goes off looking for his phone when we all saw it had fallen out of his pocket when he sat down. We hid it. Then MoM, being the tattletale that all females are, went and dragged papareboy, who was by now asking the waiters whether they had seen anyone steal it, back to the beach and gave him his phone. Spoilsport. She has now gone down a few notches in reputation points for all males, except for papareboy, but nobody cares what he says anyway.

We get kicked off the beach because it was being used as a landing site for invading barbarian hordes or something. I have a sneaking suspicion the waiter just made it all up.

Get to a more civilized location via the whackmobile, which had managed to traverse the dense jungle to get to this god forsaken patch of beach. Get to majestic city, do a circuit of the upper floors(I might note that papareboy looked as if he’d been doing it all his life, and made comments along the lines of “Oh gawd, we’re ‘MC dudes’ aren’t we? Oh man this sucks, I mean like, wh would ever be an MC dude? Jeez, not me, definitely not me….”), head to the food court and get ice cream.

It was fun eating things in front of papareboy, who seemed to have eaten something dirty and gotten his stomach in a twist for two months and hence couldn’t eat a thing. We all commented on how yummy everything was.

Should go again sometime.

Open Mic

Went for last Thursday’s Open Mic. After a lot of hullabaloo about the war, celebrations for ending of said war and some other stuff about st. fallen’s suicidal tendencies being brought out through a ‘poem’ about glasses full and half full of poison, I recieved a text.

A strange text. From a strange number.

A text with a single word in it.

A word that made me jump. A word that took me by the scruf of the neck, pushed me against the wall and said, ‘I’m female’.

‘Berry!’

I look around the room. A sea of faces in an ocean of… attentiveness? I’m not too sure. What with getting linked on the great RD’s blog, I feel like I’m expected to come up with ’sophisticated’ one liners and put downs every other line. It’s quite taxing. Almost drains you of anything funny you had to start with.

Since Delilah seems to be the most frequent offender for usage of that word, I wonder if she’s around. Log onto twitter. See if anybody is on who’s been mobile tweeting. Nothing of interest. Strange. Nothing much of interest after that till-

After it was over, Mr Whackster beckons to someone in a manner saying ‘Come aney, he’s not going to bite you’. Somebody comes. Somebody is introduced as Delilah. I go D: . Then somebody else grins, not Delilah. DeeCee! And er… I’m sorry, I can’t live up to your ‘Be all sarcastic and make me look all…’. I just can’t. There’s nothing to write. A few seconds of exposure just doesn’t give me enough to go on, especially when you’re about as interactive as a wall, and not a revolving, hidden door-sy wall. Suffice to say, she was… different.

After that and after a brief ride in the whackmobile, I was off home. All in all it was pretty good. Fallen says it was the best we ever had. I’ll take his word for it.

Speaking of ‘Best I ever Had’, I finally heard Gehan singing. Yes, just yesterday. And… he was pretty good.

There. A coompliment. A real compliment.

See? Miracles _do_ happen

And then the sun shone through…

…

I’m sorry, that’s about all the dramatic-ity I can muster. The rest of my meager reserve was spent on walking up to an abandoned street stall in Borella and asking the old man there(See? Old man. Old. That has to be at least a little dramatic, right?) for a flag. Ever opportunistic, they still overcharged for it. Either way, there’s none left to expend on my already shaky writing.

It’s like living in a weird-everydays-christmas like place right now. At the moment I’m getting more or less the entirety of the president’s speech texted to me by the Daily Mirror news service. Firecrackers going off sporadically. People on the streets. I have to stay cooped up in here. I wanna go wave a few flags, dammit! I have the right to wrestle with some old lady for a prime spot by the pavement to grin at passing vehicles!

I will arm myself with a keyboard instead.

*wave
*shove

It just. Doesn’t. Feel. The. Same.

The fighting’s all over. People keep asking what we’re going to talk about now. As if there isn’t enough to talk about now that people have stopped getting their legs whipped out from under them by a mean man named claymore. What do you think people in other countries talk about? India didn’t get that highly populated without a few solid conversation starters. And I doubt men in China went about with a Tiananmen square pickup line.

Go back to the default topics. These are for males. Slightly alter and you get females.

• Small children – Toys/starring in America’s Funniest Home Videos
• Teenagers – Females
• Young men – Work/Females
• Middle age – Family/Work/Starring in America’s Funniest Home Videos
• Seniors – Females

For women, just replace “females” with “shoes”.

I mean, I can’t remember the last time I talked about the war. Save for the getting flag bit, it never came up in conversation for at least a few weeks.

WOOO!!!! Tomorrow is a national holiday!

I have to go rejoice! Will finish this post later. I hope.

Getting Attention

I’ve been feeling pretty neglected on the blogosphere lately, what with most trolls ignoring me and even that other douche seeming to pick Gehan over me. Highly distressing when you thrive on hits.

So to rack up some pageviews and generate some troll-fodder, I present to you my latest post on what people are saying.

Let’s see.

Drag up Gehan’s blog for a blogroll. His own blog has some sob story about him crying or something. Speaking of, I still haven’t heard him sing :/

Moving on to the blogs, DC has something about a Japanese fetish. And something to do with rats. A rat, rather.

Charm Bracelet is closing up. Oh well, more hits for me. But I still think it’s pretty pointless leaving.

Pseudorandom is having a Bad Day. She’s listening to ‘Let Her Cry’ by Hootie and the Blowfish. Maybe that’s why. And the title is clearly a Daniel Powter song, and not, say for example, Fuel. It’s so “E-FM… All the time”.

D has posted again, but only to tell us she shouldn’t be posting. She makes a few solid points such as me having to be more careful with messages and girls being fun to look at. But then she goes a bit off and says she misses Sabby. I mean, who misses HER? Certainly not any of us.

Scrump has a post on the significance of ‘x’. Must be some secret code by women to taunt us. See, signals like that don’t work unless the dude you’re sending them to knows what it means. Apparently all women know this. Except for scrump. Signs of a hairy 40-year old hiding behind a keyboard pretending to be a 20-something 30-something female?

Next up is RD. Something about writing. Long post, and I’m not in the mood to read it all. Pic of a written page. So I skim through it. I see something about Pubs, then a claim of “I’m gay and I hate all you English bastards.”. I can’t really say I knew that, but the moisturizer did throw some doubts that way.

Then there’s T. Click and it’s all black and gray. This taking quotes out of context thing is fun. Like “Clearly I have a problem selling myself.”.

And then I got bored. That’s it for now till I get round to writing a proper post.