Look at this image —

My laptop runs Windows Vista, but here are two screenshots of the desktop, with Linux wallpapers on them.  On top is the blue "Waves" wallpaper from Fedora 9 Sulphur, and in the bottom picture, there's the wallpaper from Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.  Currently also, the Ibex wallpaper is the one I have on my desktop.  How this was done is very simple — I ran the LiveCD versions of both distros and copied these wallpapers onto the Windows partition.

Would this be considered blasphemy?

I watched Quantum of Solace in the theatre yesterday (it was released in India on 7-Nov-08, and at Prasad's Multiplex, they are showing this movie on the IMAX screen).  As I had read that the movie picks up immediately after the events of Casino Royale, I watched that movie again before seeing this one.

I was disappointed by Quantum of Solace.  Maybe I need to see it again — after all, I liked Casino Royale more on watching the second time than I did initially — but still, I thought the first movie was more engaging and entertaining overall.

This post contains SPOILERS so you may not want to read further unless you have seen these movies —

To recap the events of the first film — international criminal Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) is the "banker" for the world's terrorist organisations, and he invests their money in various stocks.  James Bond (Daniel Craig) intervenes and foils a plan of his — thereby causing Le Chiffre to lose more than a hundred million dollars, which he desperately wants to recover.  Hence, he sets up a high-stakes poker game at Casino Royale in Montenegro, and Bond is entered in by MI6 as one of the players.  The plan is to make Le Chiffre lose, and turn him over to the intelligence agency so that he can give away secrets about the terrorists.  Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is brought in as the accountant/banker for Bond.  Bond falls in love with Vesper by the end of the movie, but in a twist, Vesper betrays him — which is revealed to be because a mysterious organisation was holding her boyfriend captive, and they wanted the winnings from the game.  In a cliffhanger ending, Bond apprehends Mr White, one of the people thought to be behind the kidnapping of Vesper's boyfriend.

Quantum of Solace picks up pretty much immediately from here, where the organisation is shown to have people everywhere — even within MI6.  Bond is led to an environmentalist, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric), who seems to have ties with this organisation, called Quantum.  It is revealed that Greene is in deals with various military generals in South America, because he wants to control the water supply in Bolivia, in exchange for political power.  Camille (Olga Kurylenko) is working with Greene — but only so that he will lead her to a General who was responsible for her mother's death.  With the help of Camille, Mathis (played by Giancarlo Giannini, an ally from the previous film) and Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), Bond seeks to find out and stop Greene's master plan, also hoping that it will lead him to the people who killed Vesper.

I thought Quantum of Solace was underwhelming.  Yes, there is a plot, but I didn't think it was gripping enough to sustain interest.  The villain here also, didn't make as much an impact as Le Chiffre from the previous film.  The action scenes are efficiently done, and the movie is worth watching for that, though.  Overall, I'd rate it a 6/10.

Nevertheless, I started doing a drawing with characters from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.  An in-progress version can be seen above, and clicking on the image takes you to a YouTube video that I recorded.  Left to right, pictured are Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre and Olga Kurylenko as Camille.  I have to add Daniel Craig as Bond to the picture, and some other characters too.

I completed a drawing called Four Letter Words today.  This is the one I started doing a couple of weeks back — a mashup drawing with "Profanity in Movies" as the theme!

There are eleven — count them — eleven instances of swearing on film depicted in the drawing!  I will be adding the completed drawing to the Art Gallery sometime later.  For now, though, you can watch the "official" video for the drawing — written, edited and directed by me!  The video is a compilation of clips that I had recorded while doing the drawing, and it's uploaded on YouTube.  Click here or on the above image, to watch the video (6 mins long).  By the way, though the subject matter could be considered adult-oriented, the actual video is not.  It only contains some mildly objectionable content.

I did this drawing about a month ago —

I've now added it to the Art Gallery.  Click on the above image to view the picture and the write-up I've done on it.  Perhaps I will do a more extensive treatment for The Evil Dead trilogy later!

The 22nd James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace will be released in theatres in the US on the 14th of this month.  Apparently, it is already released in the UK.  From the trailer, it looks like it will be a great movie, comparable to its predecessor, Casino Royale.  A few days back though, I spotted an auto-rickshaw near Madhapur, with this written on the back —

Yes, that is Jems Bond.  You can click the above image to see the full photo.  I remember that many years ago, we used to have a mascot called "Gems Bond" for Cadbury Gems, which used to be shown in TV advertisements.  But this is the first time I am seeing this particular usage.

By the way, if you want to see a slightly differently-processed version, here it is —

The first picture was edited with Picasa which I was experimenting with today.  The second one was made a few days back.

As promised, I have added the "8 Movies I Want to See in 2008-09" drawing of mine to the Gallery.

Click on the above image to view the respective page on the gallery.  There is a detailed description of the drawing, and information about the movies represented there.  I recorded a short video description of the drawing too — I've added a link to that as well.  Finally, as an "extra", there is the uncoloured version of the drawing available too.

Next thing I will be adding to the gallery is a similar entry on my "Classic Movies" drawing.

Here is a drawing that I had done in early September —

This is the “Iron Monger” from the 2008 movie Iron Man, and you could say he is the villain in the movie — and is the product of a superpowered suit being built based on Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr) Mark I design.  The character is not known by that name explicitly in the movie, but there is one reference to it in the dialogue, where Obadaiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) says to Stark, “We’re Iron Mongers”.

I did this drawing in pencil and there was minimal touchup done in Photoshop.  Only the addition of the blue tint was done, and the addition of the text.  The text is the lyrics to the song “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath.  This song appears in the end credits of the movie as well.  Of course, the song is about a supervillain rather than a superhero — so while it doesn’t suit Iron Man, I think it is more apt for the Iron Monger!

I spent the last couple of weekends working on a redesign for this site.  After quite a few hours of work, it is now done, and the new design is live!  You should be looking at it now, and as a reminder, here's what the old design looked like —

When the time came for me to re-upload the website after switching to a new host, I was actually thinking of shifting the blog to Wordpress, which the host allows me to set up automatically.  But then, there was no easy way to migrate all my old posts (more than 400) and comments (nearly 300) to Wordpress, and hence I decided to continue using my own custom-coded system.  Still, this was an opportunity to do a redesign, and I decided to reorganise the content a little too.  Comparing the old design and the current one, you'll see that the focus has shifted to the blog, and I've got rid of some infrequently accessed items off the main page.  The current design is actually based on Derek Punsalan's Grid Focus Wordpress theme.  I'm not actually using that theme (because obviously, that is designed for a Wordpress blog), my design is built from scratch, but I followed the Grid Focus theme quite closely.  Dimensionally, I was inspired by the 960 Grid System.

As for the reorganisation of content, I haven't actually deleted anything — if there's anything you're looking for and it's not on the main page, it has been moved to the Archives page.  So what do you think of the new look?

Have a look at this picture that I took a few days back —

Well, it appears that the Dark Knight is standing in daytime, watching over Madhapur, Hyderabad!  You see, I have this small Batman toy that I keep on top of my computer monitor at work.  A few days back, I put it near the window and took a photo.  A bit of cropping resulted in this image which you see above.  You can click that for a slightly larger version.

Well, it took a while, but this website is back online in the form that you are used to seeing!

I shifted hosts recently (from Net4 to Answerable), so it took sometime for the domain and the hosting to be transferred.  Now that the transfer is completed, the site is back.  I am actually planning to do a little redesigning as well (moving out some of the sections that aren't updated etc), and intend to make the site more focused on the blog.

But, here are a couple of videos that I made in the recent past (all of them feature drawings that I have done) —

• Nine Inch Nails: Every Day is Exactly the Same Music Video
• 8 Movies that I want to see in 2008-09
• Classic Movies Drawing

Varun is here in Hyderabad for a few days.  We're going to watch Kung Fu Panda on an IMAX screen tonight.