Manish Vij

Vision Pro

Vision Pro: what was I made for?

Vision Pro: You can’t multitask with eyes and both hands, have to look at each control serially and tap with one hand. More like a telegraph than a keyboard. Eye tracking works better for fighter pilots because they also have physical controls like weapons buttons, eyes are just used

Monkey Man

‘Monkey Man’

Monkey Man: Dev Patel doing John Wick in Bombay… … crossed with the Delhi Kaala Bandar / black monkey hysteria, with a glancing nod to Mexican lucha libre Contrasts Hanuman as “the white monkey” with Kaala Bandar Hanuman burning Lanka The “Rang De” mujra song × Kathakali-ish demon masks Malignant godman is

Late Bloomer

‘Late Bloomer’

Late Bloomer: The very funny Jusreign (Jasmeet Raina) pens a dramedy series based on his life, going from struggling You Tube comedian to viral hit. It’s extremely specific Sikh and YouTuber humor, like “Man Like Mobeen,” “Ramy,” “Mo” ❤️️ His Punjabi mom’s just like mine First 2 eps surprisingly

Vision Pro

Neargoggling

Before trying it— Vision Pro seems much improved over earlier VR like Vive, but feels like niche use cases rather than daily productivity. Focused on productivity over gaming, with iOS apps available. I don’t buy this yet. For comparison, AirPods Max are enough friction to don / doff that I

Ink & Sigil

Shamanic Pixie Desi Girl

Ink & Sigil urban fantasy series by Kevin Hearne, in the Iron Druid universe, has a Goth, Mohawked, lesbian British Asian sidekick with supernatural powers—a Shamanic Pixie Desi Girl :) As love child of an Indian god, “Nadia Padmanabhan,” battle seer, can see and avoid bad events right before they

Cat Person

The Brown Bechdel Test

Geraldine Viswanathan, Liza Koshy as roomies in “Cat Person,” based on a viral “New Yorker” story about a white woman’s bad date (Emilia Jones). The ultra-rare Hollyflick which passes the Brown Bechdel Test: more than one desi in a scene that’s not about desis.

movies

Holistic romance

“10 Things I Hate About You” (Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Seattle, ’99): the Holi shot :) (paintball) Holi romance Based on “The Taming of the Shrew.” Title and climax based on Sonnet 141: Baby Joseph Gordon-Levitt The Fremont bridge troll Allison Janney hilarious as always. Nothing dates a movie faster

The cult of the constitution

Like all cults, the cult of the constitution turns into dead ritual because it’s easier than using your brain to solve novel problems. “Swear bayaat to the constitution.” Well, which one? There’s the one for white male landowners, with special rights for slavers. The one which included poor

Hounded

Druish-American princess

“Hounded,” Iron Druid book 1 by Kevin Hearne: Fun urban-gods pulp fantasy based on Irish myths. Goes down easy. The modern setting deflates the pompousness of the genre, turning each old god into a fish out of water. Each one’s an immigrant comedy on legs. Key ally in

steer-by-wire

Steer-by-wire

Steer-by-wire gives you variable ratio turns, which eliminates hand-over-hand wasted motion. It also lets you control multiple parts (front and rear-wheel steering, plane aero surfaces) without complex mechanicals. Used on Cybertruck. Accelerate- and brake-by-wire are already common. EVs smoothly blend physical and regen

Christmas As Usual

My Big Fat Norwegian Wedding

“Christmas As Usual”: fun Nflx fish-out-of-water rom-com with comedian Kanan Gill 🇮🇳, actress Ida Ursin-Holm 🇳🇴. “My Big Fat Norwegian Wedding,” basically, with built-in sequel in India. via RS It’s like Chhoti [Small] Diwali, yaar Flips a desi-Am trope: the white gal’s the

Vegas

Vegas burbs

Vegas burbs: plentiful land converted from desert. The new development I stayed in was semi-rural with pickups, paddocks and horse trailers. Many parcels had a compound wall and gate. Felt jogger-hostile: no one walking, big trucks speeding, 8-lane roads, hard to cross. Finally saw a couple of

Cybertruck

Are we the baddies?

The militaristic Cybertruck, used to pick up kids at school, marks it a truck for bed-wetters and guys anxious about their masculinity. It’s Joe Keery in Fargo. It’s open-carrying a rifle to a bagel shop: a cry for help. Elmo launched his Cybertruck Kickstarter on a

The Archies

‘The Archies’

The Archies is a Bollywood nepo baby vehicle which adapts the Archie comics, huge in India. Beautiful art direction, costumes, cinematography and dance, on a quick skim. It transplants the gang into Anglo-Indians at boarding school in the hill station of Ooty. The refs are more British than American:

Cybertruck

Tesla’s Lisa

Cybertruck is Tesla’s Apple Lisa: new tech in a model with poor price / performance will be reused in more successful models. Also like NeXT: design curator gets high on his own farts, demands shell of pointlessly posh material which makes product a bad deal. Core tech reused elsewhere.
 Next-

Cybertruck

Knife missile

On regular cars, panels curve over corners and meet on flat planes, protecting people from sharp edges while shielding internals from rain and snow. Each panel has rounded edges covered in several layers of paint. On Cybertruck, flat steel panels have gaps at sharp origami corners. This exposes the internals

AGI

AGI hype

Altman’s “brink of AGI” hype is lulz, what we have is as far from general intelligence as a nail is from an elephant. Because it’s so dumb, it wastes mongo bucks to run, driving a need for more funding: a self-sustaining hype loop. Altman learned hypebeast fundraising

Lazarus Project

Lazarus should stay down

“Lazarus Project” 🇬🇧: 007 × “Groundhog Day.” Wild seeing a show with desi second and third leads, neither are techies, aren’t dating each other and both get to whup ass. Hollywood took romantic lead Alia Bhatt and jammed her into the IT stock role 🤦🏽‍♂️ Bechdel test → Bhatt test. Hermione type Anjli

The Marvels

Bollywood planet

“The Marvels”: Help me, Obi-Khan, you’re my only hope Sleepover in space Hatecopy’s pop art Dad giving financial advice in space, such a dad joke Mom: Beta what a lovely house in which to get married Son: The shahada (?) surrounded by alien housecat eggs r/movies: Captain

Ghostbusters

Bodyswapping

“Ghostbusters” is my Proust’s madeleine. Distinctly remember feeling alienated while nerd friends got hyped to to see a sequel. I wanted to see it, but movies were frivolous, said parents, your job is to study. Brown folks in Hollywood then weren’t brown—Peter Sellers, Fisher Stevens. We got

Mean Girls

The mean girl power shot

Two desi actresses in the high-school movie power shot. This is the “walk away from an explosion” shot for mean-girl social rank :D
 The female version of Swole Kumail, superhero. Mathlete rapper “Kevin Gnapoor” (Rajiv Surendra) was a dorky ethnic cliché with a gibberish surname in “Mean Girls,

ML

Machine lucre

As generative AI moves from research to product, co’s should pay for training inputs: either buy the book / art or use public domain. Paying creators for random, one-off output is silly. Neural nets regurging a lightly modified version of what they’ve seen before is called “an intern.

Humane

Screens vs. sensors

Phones and watches face in, the Humane chest pin faces out. Mainly screens vs. mainly sensors. A body pin is more convenient for analyzing the real world. Convenience wins for frequent use. E.g. wristwatch > phone for checking time. Is analyzing the world frequent and useful enough yet that

Humane

Humane AI Pin

Humane = Trek communicator with body cam, laser projector, simple gesture recognition, ChatGPT voice interface. Resembles iPhone 6 with its chrome sides. The side view explains their logo 🌙, and is coincidentally resembles Imran Chaudhri’s presumed birth religion :) Voice is low bandwidth for computing tasks, but a usability win for non-

The Marvels

‘The Marvels’

The Marvels uses the Peter Parker template for Kamala Khan. The Punjabi-coded family is the relatable audience bridge, Kamala’s the wide-eyed teen supe. Funny action scene where Ma, Pa and brother Khan fight off aliens with a wet mop, under a rap track with a bhangra sample.