Chp 205. Online Tribal Warfare!

Online games are fun. Extremely fun. The only downside to playing online games is that sometimes it’s difficult to turn off your online avatar and mistakenly talk in online gaming lingo in the office!

“Congrats on the promotion! w00t w00t!”
“huh???”
“errr… congrats!”

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“You don’t know how to copy the text from a PDF file? Gosh, you’re such a n00b!”
*smacks* “And you’re such a perv!”

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“Our pitch is so good that the client’s account is definitely going to be pwned by us!”
“Why the hell would we want to pawn away a client?”

-------------------------

“Hey Kima we’ve just nailed the FMCG account! We’re doing their entire micro-site!”
“woooohooo!! All your account are belong to us!”
“sheeeshhh! So many grammatical mistakes and you call yourself a copywriter?”

Coming back to the topic of this post, can you spot the odd one out?



urrrrrmmm…. See it?

These are the members of our "Tribe" at a popular MMORPG game that I play called "TribalWars". In the past few months we have all gotten to know each other very well and many a times I have sacrificed my expensive HC (heavy cavalry) just to rescue a fellow tribesman from an enemy raid.



Good fun we all have, but then, you must be itching to ask me, what the hell is a 28 years old fart like me doing with a bunch of 14-15 years old???

People who don’t know me would probably assume I haven’t matured mentally, or that I’m a disgusting creepy paedophile!!!

I sincerely hope I am not under the radar of any Interpol agencies, and that my profile is not there in ICAID (Interpol Child Abuse Image Database).

I also hope Interpol doesn’t go through my "TribalWars" inbox, and even if they do, I hope they understand that when I threaten a 14yrs old that I’d love to RAM her with full force, it means just that - Attack her village with my large army of RAMs (battering rams), and nothing else beyond the imagination.

And some people who DO know me very well (my dear ex-girlfriend included) would probably exclaim, ah he still hasn’t grown up!

See, in my defense, "TribalWars" is a very exciting game! Here are the reasons why I loveeee this game.

1. It’s a browser game and it involves resource collection and research/upgrades and army build-up just like AOE, WarCraft etc. But being a browser game, it does not require any sophisticated installations. All you require is a browser (duh!) and a net connection.
   
   
2. The style of the game involves slow resource collection and slow movements. Hence you don’t need to sit in front of the game the whole time, which works out perfectly for me here in office as I just need to click on a few commands once every 3-4 hours. No precious office time is wasted.
   
   
3. It is a MMORPG ("Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" for the uninitiated) which means players I am interacting with are real-time. Remember how excited you were when you played your first multi-player AOE death-match with a friend through an amateurish self-assembled LAN connection? It’s the same here, except I am playing with millions of people all over the world.
   
   
4. Once again I stress – it’s a lot of excitement that requires minimum attention, hence not distracting you from work in any way.
   
   
5. Being a strategy game, it also means you are slowly being trained in micro/macro management, hence it is like a crash course in MBA because you have to manage your economy shrewdly (no cheat codes), display marketing skills by enticing other big players to join your tribe, display HR skills by ensuring that there is good harmony among your tribesmen, and last but not the least, sharpen your "business strategy" by wisely forming alliances or taking over hostile tribes or having a good defensive back-up while attacking offensively.
   
   So I guess it is safe to say I am playing this game purely for its educational value
   

At first your village will look something like this:
[My village "Saiha" in World 25]



This is how my current village "Aizawl" in World 23 is:



And of course this is the dream village most of us are vying for!



And about the interaction with other players part, this is how your map would look like:





The dark blue villages are members of the Tribe I belong to.

Light blue villages are members of other tribes who are our allies [A very important part of the game].

Purple dots denote members of other tribes who are not our allies but with whom we have a "Non-Aggression Pact" [NAP] with.

Red villages are those villages and tribes who are neither our allies nor NAPs, but need not necessarily be enemies too.

Bright red villages are those who are officially declared as enemies. Right now our tribe the “Undead Knights” is currently at war with the "Knights of Fire", which is like 10 times stronger than us! We did nothing to provoke any of their tribe members but being a large Tribe I guess they just simply want to bully others. They may be strong, very strong, but together with our allies we intend to put up a good fight.

	Versus
[Undead Knights]		[Knights of Fire]

And this is what I love the most about this game. The moment war is declared in our Tribal forum, we all change our game style immediately from resource collection and building research to complete troops manufacturing.

At first your army may look like this:


[Taitesena is the name of my Paladin at village "Saiha", world-25]

And very soon this is how your armed force can look like:


[Khuangchera is the name of my Paladin at village "Aizawl", world-23]

I have proudly taken the names of Taitesena and Khuangchera, two of our bravest Mizo warriors from our tribal past, as my two special Paladins (we can have just one Paladin per world). I swear to live up to their names and bring out our glorious past and relive the gallant days of Mizo head-hunters! w00t! w00t!

Chp 204. Bicentennial resolution

I made a new blog resolution. Having crossed my 200th post recently, I am going to call it my Bicentennial resolution.

To read at least one fiction novel a month, written by somebody who does not belong to the mainstream group of fiction-thriller I usually read like Jeffrey Archer, Robin Cook (L), Robert Ludlum (L), Louis L’Amour (L), Tom Clancy, Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth, Mario Puzo and Ian Fleming.

Like how my good friend P would always criticize me: "sheesh, you guys are all so predictable! You’re all a bunch of typical stereotyped males with no appreciation for real literature".

And then we would get into a never ending argument about how my Ludlum main character could kick the ass of her Nora Roberts main character.

Anyway, jokes aside, such type of books, the number I have read, on my fingers, I could count, meekly.

Made a resolution to read such a book every month, and I’m telling you, the experience and journey were amazing right up to the very last punctuation.

The book I am talking about is "Half of a yellow sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I highly recommend that you read it too.



Also available in other covers:



For those of you who were moved by movies like Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April and could watch them over and over again, this novel is a must read.

Even till now, I go teary-eyed at that part in "Hotel Rwanda" when all the foreigners were just about to leave in the bus amidst the rain and then suddenly a voice cries "No waitttt!" and then we see an exodus of people hoping to be transported along with the white people while the song of Wyclef Jean’s million voice** in Kinyarwanda dialect is played in the background.

Ni ryari izuba rizagaruka hejuru yacu? Ni nde uzaricyeza?

When will the sun return above us? Who will reveal it to us once again?

** nominated as best film song for the Golden Globe in 2005 and the Grammy Award in 2006.

Like I said before, this book was a totally new experience for me. It’s about the civil war in Nigeria during the Biafra separatist movement in 1967. Even though the war was coming from a woman’s perspective and had none of the usual Ludlum-Clancy style of counter-espionage and lethal upper-cuts that I’ve grown accustomed to, it was nevertheless an amazing piece of work, a masterpiece if I may say so, wherein I was transported all across the war ravaged country with each chapter engaged.


[ source ]

It’s like a drama, with lots of bloodshed, rape, sex, emotions, and innocence.

Having Rwandan best-friends for 4 years back in college, this novel definitely opened a sluice-gate for me. That, and also the fact that this bloodshed took place due to the same mistake the British made here in India – Conquering a particular region and then making a country out of it without considering any religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences that have existed there for ages before they arrived. It’s like a déjà vu of what took place here in India.

Once again, I do hope you get to read this wonderful novel and I really must admit, the powerful and honest narration by the author is bitter-sweetly poetic.


[ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – source ]


--------------------------------


My favorite War quotes:

	War does not determine who is right - only who is left. -- Bertrand Russell
	When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
	I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography. -- Paul Rodriguez
	It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -- Voltaire, "War".
	Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them. -- John Fowles (The Magus, 1965)
	We have women in the military, but they don't put us in the front lines. They don't know if we can fight or if we can kill. I think we can. All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, "You see the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms." -- Elayne Boosler

------------------------------

Interesting reads:

	The Nigerian Civil War - Causes, Strategies and Lessons learnt
	Quick Kill In Slow Motion: The Nigerian Civil War
	Reviews on "Half of a yellow sun"

Chp 203. Sweet Gothic Love

I came across these two “Gothic” music videos recently, and I love it. Being a Goth fan, I must say these people did an amazing job, and I really hope this small promotion here will give them a little bit more exposure to the rest of India and hopefully some of our fellow countrymen will realize how advanced the music scene is in the Northeast, contrary to popular belief that the only thing that exists in the Northeast is terrorism.

Click on “PLAY” of both the videos and then pause them and continue reading the rest of this post while you wait for the videos to load.

The Scavenger Project – Signs





Myth of Fate - Paradise




I am not getting into the whole debate on what exactly is Goth. It is too wide a genre to define in one sentence. The kind I am crazy about would be Gothic Metal, which as wiki aptly describes it, is “a combination of the aggression of heavy metal with the dark melancholy aesthetics of gothic rock.”

You have the Goth subculture, such as this picture below:



Nah, that’s not the kind of Goth I am into. The pictures below are the Goth I love, which showcase some of my favorite bands.












And that is why I stress once again that being Goth is too wide a term to use. In fact, if you look at the first picture above of the Marilyn Manson look-alike dude, many of you old timers like me would remember that popular rock band called KISS (Beth, I was made for loving you, Detroit rock city, Rock and roll all nite etc). Well, one thing is for sure, their music was nowhere near Goth and yet you can see the similarity in their looks.


[KISS]

Just like how Heavy Metal is too general as there are thrash metal, power metal, speed metal, death metal, glam metal, even nu-metal etc with different fan followings in each sub-genre, the kind of Gothic Metal I follow can come under “Symphonic Scandinavian Gothic”, since a majority of such bands come from Finland and other Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden and Iceland).

Of course I don’t like all Goth bands that have a female front (wo)man, like for example Cadaveria (former vocals of Opera IX) whose style is more extreme to the likes of death metal bands like Carpathian Forest, Satyricon, Deicide etc which are all way too dark for my taste.

[Cadaveria]


Likewise, I am not into Astarte, althought they are hot! After listening to a couple of their tracks, I had to sadly “shift+delete” the files.


[Astarte]

And there are many other Gothic bands I listen to, that do not have a female vocalist. It’s mainly about the similarity in style.

Some gothic black/death metal may be about Satanism, occultism, nihilism, necrophilism and all the other disturbing “isms” one can find in the dictionary, whereas the symphonic gothic metal that I love are usually about mysticism, nature (animism), medieval love songs, Norse mythology and even phantasmagoria.

However, there is no clear cult definition because of the continuous fusion of various styles and forms of music.

So rather than argue about what is the exact definition of Gothic, or the subtle differences between melodic black metal and symphonic black metal, or Gothic ambient and Gothic doom etc etc. let us all appreciate these two new Mizo bands and hope they continue to shine. In fact, "Scavenger Project" defines their music genre as ELECTROROCKGRESSIVE.

All the best to you guys! Show the world what you've got.

I’m just a little bit disappointed with some of the criticisms they get, mainly: “Why don’t you guys come up with your own style or originality? Why do you copy other styles?”

I find such people who talk like that to be quite ignorant about the music scene. I wonder what they mean by “original”. There has been so many many many different styles produced all over this tiny place that we call earth, that it would be extremely difficult to come up with a totally new style that has never been composed before.

If such people hear a “new” style and say “THAT is a new style”, then it is simply because they haven’t heard of it before, hence the reason they think it’s a new style. That is why I call them ignorant. Just because they’ve never heard of a particular style doesn’t mean it does not exist.

So keep rocking, Scavenger Project and Myth of Fate. Don’t listen to such unconstructive criticisms and may you take India by storm. Special wishes to the bassist of Scavenger Project - Jonah who’s the ex-bassist of IIIrd Sovereign and a good friend of mine.

Now, scroll up, watch the two videos that must have loaded by now, relax and admire their awesome talent. Cheers.

Chp 202. Cool viral – Kima 666

Before I joined the advertising world, the only viral I knew was the fever kind.

Never did I imagine it would be something my entire life would revolve around.

Viral:
"Any kind of digital advertising tool that can be forwarded to multiple users due to its engaging and entertaining content."

Or, according to my senior copywriter, a viral is something you work your ass on for months and finally does not get released. Lolz!

Here is a cool viral forwarded by my friend Jimbo the dimbo (ps. No, a dimbo is not a cross between a dumbo and a bimbo. And no I am not passing on subliminal messages to you. No, there aint no polar bears in Antarctica.)

Click here to go to the page.

It’s a promo of the recently released (in US) animation called Igor with the voices of John Cusack and Jay Leno!



There’s a small interesting game in the Igor microsite, so in true Advertising sense I was analyzing the specification, feasibility, implementation and execution of the promotion of that online standalone viral… or in layman’s term – I was simply wasting a few minutes of my office-hours.

And hey, I high scored!!!



Just a little bit funny though, that the exact score I got was 6:66! I knew it! There was always something wrong about me since I was a kid. The way I skinned the neighbor’s cat or pushed my nanny down the flights of stairs always seemed weird because the other friends I knew back then never used to do those kinda stuff.

They used to tell me their folks didn’t allow them to do that, but as for me, I just simply obeyed the strange voices in my head

And then when I was in 9th standard, those voices told me to buy the latest album of Backstreet Boys and that was when I stopped listening to those horrible voices, for good.



So there you have it. Me a 666.

In other online related news I came across today, my good friends from samaw.com mentioned that there was a google pagerank update recently and zawlbuk.net at PR 5 is currently the highest among all Zo-centric sites according to samaw.com.

dipr.mizoram.gov.in is also currently at PR 5, but I read somewhere that government (official) sites are given higher priority for SEO or something like that so I guess it does not count.

hmar.net and delhithurawn.net are currently down. Can anybody explain?
( Lal, I told you not to fiddle around with the codes while drinking )

My blog is currently a PR 4. Yay!!!

Here is a list of some of the Zo centric sites with latest PR:

PR 5 - zawlbuk.net
PR 4 – youthim.com
PR 4 - zotalk.com
PR 4 – lelte.net
PR 4 – vanglaini.org
PR 4 - lengzem.info
PR 3 – lawrkhawm.com
PR 3 – samaw.com
PR 3 – buannel.com
PR 3 – maraland.net
PR 3 – ralvengtu.com
PR 3 – kolasib.com

Check your blog PR here at PR Checker.

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

Our site misual.com is currently at PR 2, so we will try to figure out where we went wrong in a jiffy. I hope we didn’t get penalized for something we were not supposed to do

Until then, keep blogging and viraling.

Updated today - October 2nd, 2008:

ok this is really freaking creepy now. Today I came to office and checked my status at this browser game I am hooked to, and I have currently accumulated 666 points!!!! (I have censored some of my important resource amount and army strength because you never know if my enemy tribes are spying here... lolz. )

Chp 201. Lighter not in pocket

 
I feel my breath grow heavier,
and the constriction within my eye socket.
It is time to light up another,
but alas, my lighter isn’t there in my pocket!


Where could my lighter be?
I ain't afraid of the supernatural or ghosts;
But since I came to webchutney,
more than a hundred lighters I have lost.


I wonder where my lighter is,
probably lying next to some guy’s "gear".
I feel so sorry for that lighter
when I think of all the smell it must endure.


Have you ever thought about it-
the number of pockets my lighter must have been in?
From Sanket to Sidhwa to Amit.
Maybe that’s the real reason why it is now in hiding.


Sometimes I just close my eyes
and try to imagine where my lighter can be.
Entering pockets of different sizes
I really hope my CEO didn’t take it back to Delhi.


Even among the girls it could land,
lying somewhere unnoticed at Manisha’s table;
moving from there into Meg’s hand
& finally settling next to Tarana’s unmentionable.


In the end it doesn’t matter
whether my lighter ends up next to where it itch.
I’ll find out, sooner or later.
Hell, I even suspect the peeps from Bombay Bitch.
 
 

Chp 200. Post number 200

Ok, actually it’s not my 200^th post. It’s my 200^th Chapter! Because a couple of years ago, I used to occasionally post “Chapter Interludes” in-between Chapters. “Chapter Interludes” were short posts, maybe just a sentence or two, very much like the twitter of today.

5 years I’ve been blogging now. And it has definitely shaped and moulded me into what I am today. I was never the writer kind of guy back in school and engineering college. But that one incident at IIMB changed everything.

For 5 years I’ve been maintaining my forte – article based long copy, usually covering one entire issue completely and with an introduction and conclusion, while maintaining a flow throughout the article.

I can say at least 95% of my posts have more than 1500 words each, and to have more than two lakh visitors even with that length is something I am truly grateful to you all for.

I know, I feel bad that I do not blog about all those wonderful tags and memes I get from all my amazing friends around the blogosphere. It sounds so… prudish and egoistic of me to ignore the tags. But much as I would like to return all those favors, I also have to maintain the so called “brand image” of my blog – strictly article based posts [ General | Humor | Mizo-centric ] or short stories and poetries.

And I am glad many of you understand me for doing that.

For people who think blogging is a waste of time, let me fill you in on some of my experiences as a regular blogger.

1. Vast improvement when it comes to language usage and article framing. It also gives courage to people who have always been afraid to speak out.
   
2. Knowledge increment. With today’s easy access to the internet, any info you require on anything is available on the net. By reading other people’s blog, I learnt a great big deal about stuff I never knew. Sometimes I do my own researches too.
   
3. Social network! I have found a lot of new friends from blogging and my bond with such people is extremely strong because we all share the same wavelength.
   
4. Exposure to the unknown world. It is always exciting to wander into new domains we’ve never explored before. Blogging provides different platforms for that.
   
5. Recognition. This is also something that comes automatically once you cross a certain milestone. You are recognized not just socially but also professionally and your entire blog itself becomes one huge résumé, which to me is the biggest gain I got from blogging.
   
6. And of course, apart from your normal salary, there is always the extra side income you get from Google Adsense revenue. Lolz.

I can go on and on, but let’s leave it at that for now.

If I ever reach a position where I can give advice to other new bloggers, then my two advices would be:

1. ALWAYS accept criticisms. Sometimes you can even ASK for criticisms. Correct yourself from those criticisms. If you are not getting any criticisms
   • Nobody’s reading your blog.
     
   • Your so called buddies are not real friends, because true friends criticize each other honestly.
     
   • Or you’re the kind who can’t take criticisms so your friends are afraid to criticize you.
2. Learn how to differentiate between constructive criticisms and people criticizing you just for the sake of criticizing.

200 chapters and many more to come. I am eagerly looking forward to the bright future with fingers poised and ready on the ctrl+S keys

I will be moving into a slightly more flash hybrid blog with better GUI and UIDs, while maintaining the same content-driven USP.

And I’ve just joined twitter, finally. Catch me at twitter.com/Mizohican for lots of lovely twits. Errrr…

Cheers to you on my Bicentenary!