Archives for the month of: January, 2009

Here’s some motivation for you to move your ass.

January 31, 09 //

arnie

Sometimes hitting the gym is near impossible. For some reason this is so true in India, you JUST don’t want to go hit the iron. Whatever the reason may be, but I’m here in Kuwait and it’s totally awesome going to the gym. I know I have only been to the place for a week, but I’m working on it and spending an hour at it. So often you want to slack especially after the first day where after you do the squats, every fibre of your being aches in agony and the only thing you want to do is die. But you live. That’s what successful people do, they push that extra mile to get the task, no matter what it takes. And you got to do that. Because Fitness and Body building are about 2 things.

Mental strength and Physical Strength.

Mental Strength means having the toughness to push every nerve and sinew that extra rep till the body wants to die, and then you push one more. Whatever workout you do , the first few reps are the warmup those don’t hurt because the body is used to doing that much work, it is safe, at home. Well you got to kick it out, throw it out in the harsh wild where you step it up, but it’s not masochistic torture that I urge you on to. I ask you to just take it one step higher like I am trying to do. If you do 12 pushups easily, then aim for 15, when you reach the 15th one, push one more for 16 today. Try 17 tomorrow and slowly get it up to the number you desire by setting a goal. The euphoria in achieving that extra pushup is something everyone has to experience for himself (read Fantastic).

Physical strength means your body is “Strong”. Not “Showy” but strong. You don’t need 100 veins popping out and be a stiff hulk if you can’t even run fast or bend down and touch your toes or lift your leg high up. The key word is Flexibility, you have to maintain that. That’s one of the reasons I have Arnold as my mentors, he’s a guy who not only used mental toughness to carve his body but also had a very “strong” composition often winning the worlds strongest man competitions in Austria. His counterpart however had the bulging muscles but couldnt touch his feet nor move fast enough. That’s crap, in the real world you got to be able to move fast, think fast and be quick on your feet.

So anyway this post is inspired by something my friend Saran pointed me out to. Read through it and be inspired and here’s to your good health for 2009.

I asked one question: “What do people who make successful physical transformations all have in common?”Here’s what they told me.

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Manga looks.

January 26, 09 //

So I have been fooling around the website Face Your Manga. Head on here and get your own avatar. Here’s what mine and my brother’s look’s like. Heh don’t we look similar? I think we do.

kagemanga kaushmanga1

This gives a lot of fun things to do.

Life is tough get used to it

January 26, 09 //

Here’s some good stuff for motivation in a new program I am going to test out for fitness. 2009 is the year.

“Somewhere along the line people have been fooled into believing that life is supposed to be easy. I often work 12+ hour days, and there are weeks when I work 7 days. I perform my own workout at the crack of dawn. Do I enjoy waking up at 4AM? Not really, but I get it done. I have a wife and son, with another on the way next month. I also have dogs, house work, work in the yard, etc. I’m beyond busy. Oh well, that’s life. I won’t cry about it and feel bad for myself. I won’t rush to the local fast food restaurant. I cook much of my food ahead of time. I make time. I find a way. Most people aren’t trying to make time. They aren’t making an effort. We need to stop making excuses for others. People need to stop feeling bad for themselves. Life is tough. That’s a fact. There are good times and bad times. There are action takers and action fakers. There are ultra busy professionals who make time for fitness, while others don’t. We all have options, and we all make our own decisions. If someone has made poor decisions, I won’t sugarcoat it and console them with more excuses.”

Company of Heroes is an awesome game.

January 25, 09 //

I met a couple of dudes over the weekend and we gamed at this place in Kuwait called Arena Lan Gaming center. That’s on the secondfloor of the Wataniya mall in the road as Fanar Cinema etc. And the cost of playing there is 1 kd for 3 hours. Pretty decent deal I think ..

Anyway, it was playing the game that really got me super hooked to strategy and rekindled the forgotten love of learning strategy and warfare. The game was Company of Heros and in it I realised what a shitty game Warcraft 3 is in strategy as opposed to this game. This was pure warfare as was fought in the second world war.

I understand Warcraft 3 is a fantasy world, but so is Starcraft and you realise the 2 things that make Warcraft 3 an inferior strategical game is the “teleport scroll” and the “massive hp units”. I mulled over the games I played and realised how quickly strategy and warfare are very essential in all RTS combat games. There are some basic components to the game that I realise cover ground in almost all Real Time Strategy games. Hautamaki, one of the greatest writers of the starcraft world, mentioned the Power and Mass equations. Now that is slightly too detailed to note down here but what I’ll do is distill information to give you the basic underlying skills/actions needed to play in RTS games.

a) Resource Generation (Macromanagement)
Simply put, if you don’t have resources you can’t make an army. You don’t make an army you die. So gathering resources are of primary importance but you know the more important thing in this? It is to decide whether you wish to mass in large numbers early and attack or you power (tech) your way up the ladder to get yourself higher/tougher weapons of destruction. The tradeoff being that you need more resources, have a smaller army that can defend/fight off an assault.

b) Tactics of Operations (Micro)
This includes everything from flanking, to diverting, conning the enemy, taunting him and hitting from higher ranges by using the terrain options. In company of heros you see that the tank has higher armour concentration in the front of the tank, therefore to hit the tank you would have to hit from the back, I took out a tank by drawing the enemy tank towards me while my riflemen with sticky bombs went from the back to hit them. That is the art of flanking. This way of battle is important because it keeps your units alive and more important renders the enemys ones useless. It’s also important to keep a mixed army so you don’t get run over by hard counters.

c) Recon (Scout)
This is of primary importance to know what the enemy is up to. If you see him powering his way to tanks, you can start capturing map area and resources, if you see him massing an army coming to assault you, you can either follow suit or power your way with defence structure massing. But generally there would be a hard counter to that, so the point is Recon is very important to both know where the enemy is, what his plans are and hit at the right time to ensure damage.

Anyway Im super excited about the game and hope to get a good enough computer to run it or head to Arena to play it.

How to write sexy titles and preambles that get you 10k readers.

January 20, 09 //

I learnt a very important lesson today. Whatever is the news and hottest comes first in your title and preamble. The attention span of readers is next to 5 seconds, if you don’t catch their eye (sight) you have lost a reader.

So I have spent a lot of time reading up on how to write good titles and how to write preambles and I have some tips that you should read if you are just getting into this. If you already have a good experience in this, then do let me know what your tips and I’ll update it here.

News rolls in this format

Hot + New > Hot>New>>>>>>>>>> Old
So if you have a news item that has hot news and “news” then roll with that in your title. If you have a title that’s Hot prefer that over the just new. If you have an item that’s old, then why are you reporting it? I’ll explain

BRITNEY GETS BACK WITH KEVIN FEDERLINE (Hot + New)
BRITNEY WANTS KEVIN FEDERLINE (Hot)
BRITNEY IS A MOM DESPERATE FOR LOVE AND HUBBY K-FED (Old)

Pick controversial things
This should probably be the number 1 secret. You HAVE to pick up controversial details or missing details and highlight them in your title because they catch the eye. Digg.com is an excellent resource, spend time on what people post up and makes front page and you can quickly see that some titles are eye catching. Example of today’s page.

Anti-Abortion Nurse Sued for Removing Birth Control Device

See how those words “Anti” “Abortion” “Removing” “Birth Control” device just screams controversy?

Promise some sex
Never reveal too much to the audience. Show them just enough to make them want to read more, promise the benefit and give it inside. You sometimes just HAVE to click on certain titles when you see it.

Example. The Secret 7: The Top Presidential Limousines of All Time

Always re write the headlines till you get something that makes you want to click it

I wrote a post today on SK-Gaming and I consulted Carmac on how to write it better. He gave me an important tip which I’ll share today. The tip is “New things first which means preamble a has the order z to a and not a to z”

What I had initially written -
Preamble:- The Head Admin of NGL One- bond, in this interview, gives us the prize money amount and why they changed the rules to accommodate an extra player to their list.

The problem is that Head Admin is old news, prize money sounds so drab, changed rules to accommodate sounds so drab.

Carmac replied with

the sk gaming managing director andreas bds thorstensson who runs the company with alexander t mueller has announced the details of the deal with element.

Notice something here? I definitely did, boring old repeated information.

This is my latest title:
$17,500 prize money and why the rules of the NGL were changed to accommodate an extra player, all revealed in this interview with NGL’s head admin- NGL-bond.

Guess who is the sexiest bugger this side of the world?

January 15, 09 //

All step it up for the truth yo. Finally someone has recognised this (and he made my day).

George Clooney looks like me.

Now time to start working it up to live up to my reputation.

They killed the Batman in Final Crisis

January 14, 09 //

knightfall Batman is dead. You heard it. I couldn’t believe it either. I have no idea WHY Grant Morrision (you dick) would ever want the Batman dead or removed from the face of the earth, especially when he’s the heart and soul of a failing DC comics (Marvel’s been kickin their ass in the movies and the only saving grace has been the Batman movie franchise) universe.

For quite some time Marvel was handed their ass back to them in comic publications, Batman/Superman/Justice League were doing not only superbly well in the animated cartoons, but had an edge in the comics. Till the movies came about. Iron Man and Hulk, especially the former, overshot sales of any DC comic hero adaptation. Save for one guy in Gotham. The Dark Knight had the edge, and heck which superhero movie actually gets nominated for the Golden Globe in a non special-effects category?

So why would they want to kill the Batman? He’s growing old, he has been around forever and they want to probe and build Dick Grayson, who is a legend in his own right and while not the blood of Bruce Wayne, is a son in almost all other ways. That is fine, Damien (allegedly the son from Talia) is not really a notable successor.

But you know what gets to me? It’s the stupidest way to kill a character I practically worship. Grow him old break his bones (like they did in Knightfall) and remove him, but DO NOT EVER royally screw up the methods to die. My good friend Arvind tells me this is how they killed the Batman.

” Batman was supposed to have this fate worse than death. the author said it would be the most shocking revelation in 70 years. and that black glove, RIP etc was linked to darkseid instead no shock or suprise at all he just got shot by darkseid and dies. I feel like crying and laughing at same time at this dumb ending firstly, if Batman has to die, instead of darkseid, I would have preferred Joker to do it. Joker as the leader of the Black Glove and orchestrator of RIP, and some revelation that he has known batman as bruce from the very beginning and how his whole life is just a mere pawn by the black glove. I was expecting something like thatinstead RIP just ended abrubtly with batman escaping and black glove running away in fear. and then the author said RIP was linked to Final crisis, and darkseid was the mastermind. we find out that darkseid has nothing to do with RIP (making it a useless storyline with no relevance), and he kills batman in the dumbest way possible.”

Seriously. Wtf? Is this anyway for the world’s most loved detective to die? What were they thinking? And who wants to bet they are going to find some twisted way of bringing him back alive because fans hate it. I would love to see Dick Grayson take the role, but give Bruce Wayne the dignity to go with a legacy he deserves. Not get fucking shot by Omega Beams. WTF.

What a good death is.

If you have read a Death in the family. You’ll know what a death is. While people hated the fact that Jason Todd died and that Joker had blood on his hands, what was important was this step was monumental. It pushed the limits of the Joker from a taunting villian to one that now had blood on his hands. The thin line between sadism and violence were now marred. He was breaking the Batman. He raped Barbara Gordon in the Killing Joke (rendering her disabled) and now had laid his hands on Batman’s protege. This was monumental. This was a fantastic twist and nearly drove the final nail into Batman’s mental coffin. This was far far superior to what shit came about in Final Crisis.

What the Final Crisis death lacks.

They have insulted the mantle of the Bat. They have insulted the prowess of DarkSeid and most of all they have insulted 60 years of tradition that was so carefully built by Bob Kane. Fuck you Grant Morrison, I hope you regret this day for the rest of your life. They said he would face a fate worse than Death, that this would be monumental? What was monumental? The way Batman died or the fact he died? Cause the first one is as monumental as my right butt cheek. I can’t believe they stooped to this level. What are they trying to do? Sell out whores. DC, I will buy every comic till now and cherish the growth of the Batman. I hope you have some good explanation for this, if not, you should seriously be bought off /or get in writers who actually care and cherish the legacy.

What bunch of idiots reside in the DC marketing world? I hope they fire you.

Update – A great link here detailing the whole final crisis WITH ZOMG scans of the final comic. The confrontation, the firing, the death. And you have to see it to believe it. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh now. Fucking batman shoots a bullet of the Gods and then Superman flies through different realms to pick him up. What shit man.

I like the new Google favicon

January 10, 09 //

I wish they didn’t offset the “g”, but I really like the new fav icon that they have brought up, the colors add vibrancy to it. Did you guys notice it as well? Check out the post here. It is by a designer called Andre Resende from Brazil. He must be one happy South American now getting his stuff approved by Google and using it internationally.

I have been reading a couple of books now, read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, will post a review (short review: wasn’t that impressive). I am currently reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and the next in line is Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check (though I cheated and read some chapters that I couldn’t wait to read and found them to be filled with awesome advice).

Added to that, I am also currently looking for oppurtunities in the Entertainment, Gaming and PR fields. After years of ideating, I think that these industries would best compliment the skills I have and align with my interests. I have worked briefly with Social Media and Content Management as well so if you know someone who needs a consultant/advice then they can holler at karthickgopal at gmail dot com with an email.

What I have slated for the next few weeks are

– Brushing up my German
– Learning Arabic
– Learning Wordpress and WedDesign the right way

I’ll let you know how that goes. I also got a new design up on iGamemag which I think looks much snazzier, the page went from Page Rank 0 to 1. Weeee. I have a thought about writing killer titles, will post more on that next.

Will Smith’s lessons on hustling, life, being outworked and achieving what you want.

January 5, 09 //

I’m a huge fan of Will Smith. I don’t care what the movie is about, I’ll go see it. Hancock was trash, I went and saw it, I didn’t openly critcise it, but I love Will Smith. That being said, I read at Mario’s blog some stuff about Smith and another awesome idol -- Obama quotes on inspiration and working 2009 to be a great successful year. So I bring to thee this particular video that you have to watch about Will Smith. I have added the main quotes below.

The quotes.

Philosophy

Make a choice, you just decide. What it’s goin to be, who you’re goin to be and how you are goin to do it. Then the universe just steps out of your way.I can create whatever I want to create. If I can put my head on it right, study it, learn the patterns. Ifeel very strongly that we are who we choose to be.

On Hardwork

I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked. I will run.Period.You may have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier and all those things, but if we get on the treadmill, then you are goin to get off first or I am goin to die. It’s that simple. The guy who is willing to hustle the most is the one that get’s all those loose balls. The commodity that I see in most people that aren’t getting to the places they want or aren’t achieving the things they want is strictly based on hustle, strictly based on being outworked, strictly based on missing the right oppurtunities. I always say if you are stay ready, you ain’t going to have to get ready.

Another hustler I admire is Gary Vaynerchuck. Watch him too. But first watch Will Smith.

5 Top Blogging celebrities you should be reading for 2009.

January 5, 09 //

I have spent time observing these people and here are the reasons why they rock and why you should follow them or their blog. There are some that you needn’t follow but that’s for another post.

Guy Kawasaki
He’s funny. He’s informative. He’s fucking famous but not condescending. He knows how to work the tools (read his superb post on Twitter). He’s a guy whose loveable because he’s down to earth. It doesn’t matter if you started your blog yesterday or you are Michael Arrington, you get the same treatment (well almost.. he’s nicer to you). He writes pure gold. He talks pure gold as well. He is a family man and family men are nice because they have kids who teach him patience. He’s a smart entreprenuer. He is a guy who gives you a pedestal to aim for.Why do I like him? Because he is in the Ideal position I want to be 5 years from now. Consulting and writing my own books and signing autographs to fans from India.

Seth Godin
He replies to all emails. It doesn’t matter he is the foremost expert on Marketing in the new age with a plethora of books, he takes the time to send an email. It might be just 2 words but that single action alone is enough for you to want to respect him. Why do I like him? His blog is pure genius. EVERY post of his is worth reading over and over again, I have filled a notebook just jotting down his advice and insights. Subscribe to this blog today and you won’t regret reading his material. You might not understand all of it at times, but it’s highly informative and well thought of.

Chris Brogan
I had my initial doubts when I wrote to him considering he’s new age celebrity. But what a nice guy! His personal assistant replied to me and he took the questions personally. Of late though the reason you should read him is because of his gold posts. The last few months Chris writes timeless pieces on Social Media, Brand Building and Communication. As a person interested in communication, I often refer to his posts. Another one of those guys I write down ideas from. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Tim Ferris
Some guys are just superstars. You know when you read their stuff that they are awesome. Tim Ferris is famous for his book (of which I have 2 copies) Four Hour Work week. Excellent suggestions in it from speed reading to outsourcing your life style. Something that I wish to actually implement. Why do I like Tim? His blog posts are very well crafted, entertaining and most importantly educative. He doesn’t bullshit around, doesn’t shit talk and always has something interesting to say, from losing 20 kgs a month, to sleeping like a pro, to being the Incredible Hulk. A guy living his life. A guy you should read about.

Brian Clark (Copy Blogger)
Not one but 3 books have been filled with his advice. IT doesn’t matter how many times you read it, you never get bored. Brian Clark, doesn’t write that much nowadays, but he is what I would call the Guru of online copywriting. His posts from magnetic headlines to writing well are timeless classics and form the last of the 5 must reads I have tagged in Google Reader. His copyblogger theme is famous, his pots are magical. Make sure you read it !

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