The post How Facebook Has Ruined Your Life appeared first on dfuse.in.

It was 2007. Everyone was talking about a new social networking site, something with a book and face in it. I was trying to build my own social networking site back then (yes people in school do stupid things) but when I saw what this looked like, I gave up and I signed up on Facebook. Cut to 2014- it has been 7 years. That’s longer than the time I spent in college. In these 7 years facebook has had more facial surgeries than all the Bollywood starlets combined.

At least, she can role play as Daisy Duck. Your move Facebook

And then there is the whole privacy thing.

Those fake accounts (even I have one) and people stealing your info is just the cream of the issue. Dive down and you’ll realise that you have willingly agreed to a lot of stuff that you really shouldn’t when you register. For all you know, you may have sold your first born to a slave camp in Siberia to be trained by facebook as a programmer.

The biggest problem is how facebook tricks you into believing everything is alright and that unicorns exist. And that Mark Zuckerberg is not Big Brother.

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”.
Explains the facebook interface glitches.

And it is totally cool that facebook has probably more data about us than the NSA. I mean who cares they acquired Instagram and WhatsApp among numerous other smaller companies that have your data.

Then comes that ever green “What’s on your mind?” conundrum. Every single time I have answered this earnestly, it hasn’t ended well. The last time I spoke my mind, I was called a rebel without a cause- someone who sits around and does nothing but rant. All of this for a sarcastic observation about a TV show involving Aamir Khan doing an Oprah with a conscience.
(FULL DISCLOSURE I LOVE THE SHOW)

But why does it matter? When did people start taking facebook so seriously? Who puts elaichi in Biriyani? Why do people mix Red Bull and Vodka- when they are supposed to do exactly the opposite things? Those are the questions I have in retrospect.

When Russian stuff and Thai stuff meet via Austria, you know you have a problem.

Numerous friendships have been ruined by relationship updates, facebook location check- ins and photo updates. But none of that can beat the power of stupidity. Especially when it’s spewing in endless abundance.

“Pani puri khaoge Darth Vader ji?” (Will you eat pani pauri, Darth Vader sir?)

“Luke, I am your father, she is your sister and Yoda is gay”

Such seemingly connected but actually non-sequitur sentences can best describe what happens on an average Facebook flame post.  And that by the way is still better than whatever Disney will do to Star Wars.

And then there is 69% chance that even something like that would turn into a three-way cage fight between supporters of the right wing party, the secularist party and the common man’s anarchy party. And many of these folks aren’t even your friends.

But then that’s true with even some of those listed as your friends. Apart from the people you actually know the others can range from met once at a bus stop to who the fuck is this guy?

Slightly more awkward when compared to Michael Cera.

And such a diverse bunch of people can only spew and overshare a whole bunch of stuff you can actually live without. Like your cocaine Candy Crush Saga addiction. I am guilty as charged. I too happen to overshare more often than not, but half of it is to pimp articles on this very site and at the same time clog some of the shit you might otherwise get to see.

What’s the worse that facebook has done to us?

It has made us horrible people, it has ruined our real world social interactions. We have begun judging a person by his or her facebook timeline. We have stopped breaking up and moving on, the practice has shifted to breaking up and then going-

(a) Batshit crazy on facebook
(b) Stalking your ex
(c) Both (a) and (b)

Relationships have been affected, spouses get wary of each other over facebook activity. Lines are drawn and friends turn into foes who in-turn turn into Baba Ramdev.

That’s enough drama to force the creators of Gossip girl to create a spin-off.

And finally there is the poke button. I will never understand why this was made and what it represents. It is as useful as it’s as if facebook is laughing at us while flinging a finger. Literally.

[[midfing]] Try it!

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The post The Once In a While Playlist #8 ft.Nucleya/Donn Bhat/Ankur Tewari and others appeared first on dfuse.in.

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The post Ganesh Talkies- Dancing! Dancing! (official video) appeared first on dfuse.in.

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The post Review: Sony Neotank GTK-N1BT Personal Audio Device appeared first on dfuse.in.

This wasn’t intended to be done as a video review but then I realized a video review could be a place to have some fun and that’s exactly what I did.

In all honesty, I did actually use the device for more than a week- every night for about 9 hours straight. I hooked it up to my iPod Classic 160 GB and that was that.  And as I experience withdrawal symptoms while writing this I have to admit- I wouldn’t have actually considered buying this device earlier but the sheer sound that this delivers is just perfect for my small little world (i.e. my room). What kept me from buying it? The cost obviously. I just didn’t have the dough for this rather hefty beast.

But getting to the specifics, since this is technically a review:

Pros

Multiple Connectivity Options (Line In audio input jack, USB, Blue Tooth)

Incredible Sound – Especially the bass (DubStep glitches and drops sound amazing- I almost don’t hate the genre now)

Bluetooth Connectivity (It took my 15 year old sister to figure how to work it- she read the manual) 

Remote Control (Very unlikely for a device that is sold for it’s wireless bluetooth capabilities- but makes sense for people like me who are going to hook stuff using the USB port- like I did with my iPod Classic)

Cons

Cost 

No Battery

Heavy

The Shitty LED lights (These look very tacky- like those cheap unbranded Chinese Toys)

Also I must add that the device does have only a few equalizer presets, it doesn’t have a custom equalizer but I wasn’t really expecting one.

It officially costs Rs.16,999 but you can get it for a bit lesser on sites like SnapDeal.

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The post How Harry Potter should have ended… appeared first on dfuse.in.

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The post How WhatsApp Has Ruined Your Life appeared first on dfuse.in.

For people interested, we just made that up. But we can sell it for 19,000 rupees

And then came WhatsApp – an unassuming contender started by two ex-Yahoo employees, one of whom was rejected by both, Facebook and Twitter.

It changed instant messaging forever- for the better.

Or maybe not! I know several people who’ve had heated arguments that have lasted days, thanks to that bothersome ‘last seen today at’ thing. The dreaded double ticks have pierced through the last shred of privacy you can ever have.

And this is how Aniket talks to Rajdip. So concise.

Honestly, I really don’t care how you wet your chaddis when Sachin played his final match. But no! Thanks to WhatsApp, if I ignore your message I’d have to hear about it till rapture.

Hopefully rapture is this visually appealing. And funny.

Thank god WhatsApp doesn’t give away the location of where you are at as of now – I know of many friendships and relationships that would end on that geo-location feature.

Oh! Are you worried about your parents causing a scene when you are not back home in time? Well, now thanks to whatsapp you can have that very argument with your parents – virtually – after 3 Old Monks, well past the adorable tipsy annoyance stage and almost close to Paris Hilton on bath salts internalising Miley Cyrus stage.

And then there are ‘groups’ … And you thought they died with MySpace?

Then again. MySpace isn’t dead.

Whatsapp groups are like high school relationships in dog years. And, in case you’ve never had a canine companion, since you are probably heartless or allergic to dogs (both being the same damn thing) dogs age ridiculously fast.

1 dog year is equal to A LOT of human years.

That group Aniket pretends to have to show that he is “in-charge”

WhatsApp groups have different stages of a relationship – such as the initial romance, where everyone is SO INVESTED in the group, you would spend so much time answering the 500+ messages that you would turn into a sleep deprived zombie starring in Go Goa Gone.

Then resentment creeps in, as the dominant chatters are set. Enemy lines are drawn, the frequency of pings increases and you slowly realise that the honeymoon phase has now passed.

Cut to the third stage, where all you want to do is get away, leave and never come back (said Scar to Simba in the Lion King).

Maybe I’m being a cynical nincompoop and am for sure over-exaggerating the horrors of WhatsApp. WhatsApp has done plenty of good too –avoiding creepy strangers has never been easier. It has helped bring people closer without the need for physical contact, thereby reducing the number of fatalities such conversations could cause if they took place face to face, in the real world.

And where else could you quote Kafka, Nietzsche, KRK and have other pretentious status updates? BBM? Puh-Lease, this is not 1776 and remember, Smoke Signals > BBM.

Where the smoke came from. And why it’s better than BBM!

The more I write, the more I realise now that Facebook has bought Whatsapp, they can actually rescind the awesome whatsappability on my phone (though they promise not to).

Please, Big Brother Zuckerberg – don’t take away my WhatsApp.

“By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”

Oh also, I’d kill to work with you. Until Larry Page or Sergei Brinn hire me to take over the world, then I’ll dump your ass for the Google.

Cause Google is awesome.

Until then, keep WhatsApp the way it is and even WhatsApp me maybe?

Because Facebook Messenger sucks. But you know that.

Even our phone refused to screenshot it…

We followed this up with how Facebook has ruined your life…

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The post The Nokia Android phone is a reality, but is it worth it? appeared first on dfuse.in.

The three dual sim phones that have been announced are X, X+ and XL. Apart from the rather lazy nomenclature, these phones have very little difference. The Nokia X comes with a 4-inch IPS LCD screen, 512MB RAM and a 3-megapixel rear camera. The Nokia X+ adds 768MB RAM to the host of features on the X. The XL comes with a 5-inch display and 5-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front-facing cameras and has 768 MB RAM.

The Nokia X bears a striking resemblance to the Lumia 520 and the only external difference is the lack of the three capacitive buttons present on the 520. These phones just have a single capacitive button. So Nokia essentially tied the Windows like tiled UI with an old version of the Android OS- an October 2012 Jelly Bean release to be precise. This could slow down the phone considerably since Android KitKat uses about 16% less memory compared to Jelly Bean. In early previews the X has been reviewed to be laggy and quiet slow when compared to similarly priced offerings in the smart phone market.

Nokia didn’t even bother changing the thumbnail for the X+

The phone will have the Nokia Store instead of Google’s Play store and instead of Google’s Maps and Mail, we’ll see similar products from Nokia and Microsoft. Having said that, quite a few apps have already been ported to the new hybrid platform – Facebook, BBM, Line, etc. It can also use the Yandex store and install most Android apps from there.

X is supposed to be the first of many devices that will tie the underlying Android OS to the tiled interface and services from Microsoft. This is an interesting move since this would essentially be selling Microsoft’s services on a non-Windows platform. This could be a game changer in terms of App development from the Microsoft stable.

So what is the big problem? Well, the phone doesn’t make sense beyond the geeky fantasy of seeing Android run on a Lumia 520. Microsoft, which is in the process of taking over Nokia, wouldn’t want to run an entry level phone on a competitor’s platform. They’d be better off designing something fresh for the entry level markets. In fact they just announced hardware improvements with the Windows Phone 8.1 update.

Also, Nokia isn’t the first to create a forked version of Android, Amazon did the same. And the fact that the apps on those Amazon devices are seldom updated as compared to the mainstream Android apps does pose an important question.

With Microsoft takeover happening, only time will tell whether this experiment with Nokia actually works or will it end up being another travesty like the N9.

Even if it succeeds- I wouldn’t look beyond the Moto G for now.

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The post Lightbeam – Tracking who Tracks you! appeared first on dfuse.in.

Lightbeam offers several visual representations of how different websites and applications are following your online activity. You can see who’s tracking you at any moment with a graphic. It re-imagines the Internet as swarm of apps chasing the user. You also get a Clock view displaying  daily highlights and a detailed List view.

When you activate Lightbeam and visit a website, the add-on creates a real time visualization of all the third parties that are active on that page. The default visualization is called the Graph view. As you then browse to a second site, the add-on highlights the third parties that are also active there and shows which third parties have seen you at both sites. The visualization grows with every site you visit and every request made from your browser. In addition to the Graph view, you can also see your data in a Clock view to examine connections over a 24-hour period or in a List view to drill down into individual sites.

The new add-on is a successor to Collusion, which Mozilla introduced in 2011 and sat in an open browser window. It used to track the cookies that track us across the Internet and showed users when they were being targeted. With Lightbeam, Mozilla, hopes to offer a more powerful and dynamic way to shine a light on a facet of life on the Web.

“It’s not necessarily good or bad,” says Fowler. “I think the bad that we’re focusing on is the lack of awareness, the lack of understanding.”

To start using Lightbeam, just download and install the plugin here and starting browsing. You’ll also have the option to share what you learn with a central database that hopes to map out a larger image of how the internet is connected.

For more details, Watch the informative https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/

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The post 10 High School Movies You Must Watch appeared first on dfuse.in.

 1. Dazed and Confused

This film has featured on my previous list  and will feature on any ‘Best of…’ list I’ll make. Made in 1992, it is sort of a throwback to the genre which deals with a day in the life of high school students in 1976 where the biggest worry for the summer is acquiring Aerosmith tickets and where the next party is at. It’s a nostalgia trip.

2. Heathers

This one is quite unlike any other high school films you might come across. It was touted as the ‘Anti-John Hughes high school movie.’ What makes it so good is because it is a perversion of a genre you know too well. It deals with strong topics like ‘teenage suicides’, ‘homosexuality’, ‘alienation’ and ‘cult of personality’ in a uniquely bleak manner. Simply put “What if the good half of Full Metal Jacket was set in a regular high school?” Oh, and did I mention it stars Winona Ryder and Christian Slater?

 3. Risky Business

Rarely do you find a film in which the protagonist’s problems have so little to do with the world, and yet the film is so engaging and entertaining.  Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise) is a suburban teenager who, as his name suggests, is a good boy. He has the house to himself for the weekend and on this friend’s advice, calls a hooker and everything after that is fun and games – when his house literally turns into a house of adventures and in the mix of it all, he has to give an interview to get into his dream college. As Janet Maslin of the New York Times put it, it is “part satire, part would-be suburban poetry and part shameless showing off.”

4. Can’t Hardly Wait

Don’t go by the reviews. Watch it for what it is. The writers wrote it on the premise that ‘the best scenes in high school movies are party scenes, so why not have the entire film be one long party.’ The film takes place in almost real-time at the graduation day party where everyone’s wishes come true in a twisted manner. It is packed with interesting characters, funny dialogues, and a foreign exchange student whose English vocabulary is limited to “You want to touch my penis?” and “I am a sex machine.”

5. Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Written by the guy who would later bring you films like Almost Famous and Jerry McGuire, this is one of those genre defining films, which made the high school genre what it is today. It explores teenage sexuality, frustrations of part-time jobs, and friendships, in a unique manner which has become the norm now. And Sean Penn plays a surfer dude, DUDE!!!

6. The Breakfast Club

Widely believed to be the greatest high school movie ever made – it stands true it that. What could be worse than having detention on Saturday? Being locked in for 8 hours with people you wouldn’t even make eye-contact with if you passed them in the hallways. All the high school cliques are represented by Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald (Queen of the 80’s High School films), and Ally Sheedy. Where, through forced interaction, they discover they have more in common than they think. But will they still be friends come Monday?

7. Brick

Another one of those films that turns the genre on its head, or should I say it creates its own genre, High School Noir. Taking troupes from the Film Noir Detective genre and placing it in a high school scenario and being helmed by a talented cast headed by Joseph Gordan-Levitt, it’s an immersive experience where no one is who they seem. Though I must admit this one requires multiple viewings to imbibe all its intricacies.

8. American Pie

Come on, you know how old you were when you watched this one secretly when you weren’t supposed to, and then followed up by watching all the sequels (even the shitty Direct-to-Video ones.) This is the film that gave us Stiffler, Nadia and the MILF, and childhood would be less fun without this. All of you who have now gone to America for ‘further studies’ hoped life there would be like this film.

9. Superbad

Losing your virginity is important in all high school films, but doubly so if you are Evan and Seth, and only way that’s going happen is if they manage to bring the booze to a party where they normally wouldn’t be invited to, and their only hope is their weird friend whose fake ID says his name is McLovin’ (sic). What ensues is a series of adventures that involve setting cop cars on fire, getting perioded on the pants, rifts in friendship while dealing with having way too much alcohol. …And, it is written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

10. Die Welle (The Wave)

How far can you let an experiment go to prove a point? Most high school films have characters whose problems have little or nothing to do with the world; or in other cases, you have the white upper class teacher going to poor schools and uplifting students from their circumstances, which again are very culture specific. Based on real events that took place in a Palo Alto school in 1967, an anarchist teacher forced to teach a week long project on ‘autocracy’ decides to take a practical approach on teaching by setting up circumstances for a dictatorship in the class room based on points put forward by the students and things get out of hand. The class is a great microcosmic representation of society as a whole, as you see many parallels between what happens in the school with actual events happening in India as we speak.

Special Mention: Freak and Geeks

This one isn’t a high school film, it is a TV show. However, it fits into the same vein as Dazed and Confused and Fast Times… A must watch.

This is in no way a comprehensive list, because I haven’t gotten into some of the other films that I love or the ones which have moved me; and some others which are critically acclaimed films in the genre. So, also check out the films below:

Ferris Bulller’s Day Off, Scent of a Woman, Dead Poets Society, 10 Things I Hate About You, Easy A, Rebel Without A Cause, Back to the Future, Pleasentville, Donnie Darko, Remember the Titans.

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The post Recommendation: Om Dar-B-Dar appeared first on dfuse.in.

The film follows the dadaist adventure of Om and his rather strange family. I could go on and list out the whole story and plot but I’d rather link you to it.   I am doing this because the story doesn’t play out linearly on screen and the piecing it out in the end is pretty rewarding. And no, it’s impossible to get all of it at once. It’s like a psychedelic trip when you can’t understand all of what’s happening but you wish you did.   And there is a reason for the forced non-sense in the film. Over the years, surrealism has gone mainstream and just about any shit passes off as “surreal and brilliant”. This led to a movement called the Panic Movement in the 1960s and one of the people behind it was filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. His full length feature films were my induction into this world of madness. And here I am taking the liberty to state that Kamal Swaroop’s film is just that- it’s anti-film- mainstream, parallel, Shyam Benegal, Middle Cinema- whatever it may be. The film breaks and twists each and every rule that there maybe.

The dialogues for example are idiosyncratic and  may seem stupid; but then you realise that’s exactly why they were written that way – to be stupid. The flow of narrative is  non sequitur par excellence. It takes a dig at the sociopolitical and cultural conditions of the late eighties; one of the characters refer to the Prime Minister as Raju! This film would have been Sigmund Freud’s wet dream (yes it does have a Freud- Fraud joke too). The film is immensely layered- I watched it for the 3rd time today and I was smiling when I discovered the beauty of the otherwise humorous sexual encounter between the characters of Gayatri and Jagdish- the father screaming her name cycling around represents the superego. Or maybe I am watching too much of Slavoj Žižek.

And that’s the thing with this movie, every viewing of this film leads to a new discovery. I could go and on about the film but I had already made up my mind on not reviewing it. I am not good enough to do so.

But to see 6 people in the auditorium hurt the film lover in me, this is a film that every film fanatic needs to watch and on the big screen. So go watch it.

I am waiting for the DVD- because I more than love this film. This makes me proud of us as a movie making nation though it is against everything our films stand for.

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