Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

January 10, 2023

Thoughts on Digital payments, UPI and the changing face of Indian Payment options

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:07 PM

Before demonetization happened back in 2016 in India where all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes of the Mahatma Gandhi Series were discontinued overnight, digital payment systems like PayTm etc were there in the market but not super popular but immediately after the demonetization, online payment systems really took off especially UPI (Unified Payments Interface).

Currently India leads the world in digital payments and in ways to transfer money from one account to another. We started off with National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT) that allows a user to transfer money online to any bank that supports it and the transfer would complete within 24 hours. Shortly afterwards IMPS was introduced that allows a user to transfer money to another account instantaneously and whenever I have used it the money has been credited to the other account within a few seconds. Then we have UPI (Unified Payments Interface) which was launched on 11th April 2016 with the goal of making user to user payments easy & painless and supports person-to-merchant (P2M) and person-to-person (P2P) payments. In Dec 2022, 7828.9 Mn transactions were made with UPI for a value of 1,281,970.86 Cr (Rs. 1,281,970,86,00,000) and the total transactions using UPI were at 74,195.02 Millon which is more than the VISA + Mastercard transactions combined. More stats on UPI are available on the NCPI Website

People outside India have no idea how far UPI has changed the face of payments in India. You can go to a roadside shop in the smallest town in India and they are ready to accept payments using UPI. Last week we were in Yelagiri and one of our friends wanted to get a Tarot reading done by this lady sitting outside a temple we were visiting. She wasn’t carrying her wallet and asked if she could do an online payment and the lady immediately whipped out a QR code for her to scan and make a payment. Keep in mind that this is someone who charges Rs 50 for a reading and she loves online payments because it all goes to her account directly and she doesn’t have to worry about securing cash. Recently I went shopping in Bangalore and bought Rs 11 worth of stuff from a pharmacist and tried to pay with a Rs 20 note. I was told that they didn’t have change and was asked to pay online using UPI. So I asked them about online payments and the guy told me that only about 5-10% of people pay cash anymore and most prefer paying via UPI as it is more convenient. A similar story was shared by our neighborhood grocery shop as well. Cash is still in use but more and more people are moving to online payments just for the ease of use. Transactions from 5 Rs to multiple lakhs are done daily using UPI. (The only condition is that there should be a network/data connection available which is the case for most parts of India). If I run out of cash when traveling I just need my phone and can survive without having any cash on hand and it makes sharing/settling bills a breeze as everyone just transfers the money to one another instantly.

However, the west doesn’t want to acknowledge this and still thinks that people in India are living in the stoneage. If I was in the US I would need to use a third party system like Vinemo, PayPal etc to transfer money and they charge a transaction fees for each transaction. UPI on the other hand is free and is supported directly by the Bank/Credit card company. I can transfer money by scanning a QR code, or to a phone number that is connected to my UPI ID which in turn instantly credits the money to my bank account.

There is a privacy implication to this in that there is an electronic trail for every payment sent/received so if needed authorities can pull up all the data for a given user with a warrant. This also reduces the black money (money on which no tax is paid) to a minimum which allows the govt to tax the people correctly.

We Indians need to talk more about our accomplishments and especially success stories like UPI and similar stories as we are leading the world in this space and we should be proud of it.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

January 6, 2023

Good developers need to be able to communicate and collaborate and those are not euphemisms for politics and org building

Filed under: Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:25 PM

Saw this gem in my Twitter feed a little while ago and had to save it so that I could comment on it.

Twitter screenshot stating: Because to some people, in order to be a senior software engineer it's about politics and org building (perhaps you'll hear euphemisms communication and collaboration)
Because to some people, in order to be a senior software engineer it’s about politics and org building (perhaps you’ll hear euphemisms communication and collaboration)

There is a constant theme in Programming that the good developers are anti-social, can’t be bothered to collaborate and should be left alone so that they can create a perfect product. The so called 10x developer. This is emphasized by movie stories about the genius developer creating something awesome sitting in their basement. Unfortunately that is not how real life works as this 10x developer is a myth. In real life you need to be able to communicate, collaborate and work in a team in order to be successful as a programmer. No single person can create an enterprise level software alone and even if you could it needs to be something that people want/need, so guess what you will have to talk to your users to understand what problems they are facing and then work on software that will fix them or make their lives easier.

In one of my previous company, my role was to look at new software/systems and bring them into the company. So we went to expos, talked to startups and explored the market and found a really cool software that we thought would be extremely useful for the business so we went back and pitched it to the business. To our shock no one was interested in adopting the software because it didn’t address any of the pain points that the business was facing. We thought it would be useful for them because we were looking at it from the outside and hadn’t bothered talking to them about what their pain points were. Then we sat down with the business and their development teams to understand the setup and find out what are the most urgent/painful problems that we should fix. After multiple discussions we went out and found a software that addressed a significant pain point for the business and as soon as we demo’d it, we were asked to expedite getting it validated/approved for installed in their org.

Similarly, one of the startups I was working with during the same time were creating tech to help blind people and I happened to mention that to the founder of a NGO (Non-Government Organization) that works with blind people and his response was that what they are creating is cool but I wish they would actually talk to some blind people before they start working on tech to help them, as the blind people don’t want systems that will give them sight but rather assist them in doing things without trying to recreate sight.

Coming back to the original point about Senior Software Engineer, it is not their job to work on every part of the project themselves. Their job is to look at the high level goal, design the architecture and work with other developers in their team to create the software. Another major task of the senior Software Engineer is to mentor their juniors, teach them the tricks of the trade and help them grow in their skills and role. I personally believe that I should always be training the people under me so that they can one day replace me so that I can move on to more interesting projects. If you make yourselves indispensable in your current role and no one can replace you then you will always be doing the same thing and can never move on. Yes, there is a risk that you might be replaced with a junior and get fired but that can even happen to the 10x developer as well. Personally, I would rather have 10 regular developers than a single 10x developer as they are a pain to work with. They will insist on having full control of the entire dev process will refuse to share information that other developers/database/network folks need and basically become a bottle-neck for the entire project.

The way I look at being a senior engineer/architect is that I get to work on the really interesting problems, write code for PoC’s (Proof of Concept) that fix the problem. Then I can handoff the code to others who can productionalize it with me providing guidance and support. Its not to say that I wouldn’t get my hands dirty productionalizing the system but I rather solve interesting problems.

Another myth is that the only person who knows the system will never get fired. I have taken over multiple systems over the years (at least 4 that I can recall for sure) where they were originally managed by a single person who refused to collaborate/communicate with the rest of the team. In some cases they were fired and I was asked to take over, in others they were moved to other non-critical projects so they stopped being a road block. It each case took us a lot of time to reverse engineer/understand the system but it was worth the effort to do that so that we could make future changes without fighting with someone for every change or having to call the person for information everytime the system gave problems.

Long story short: communications doesn’t equate politics and collaboration doesn’t equate org building. If you think that they do then you will be miserable in any mid to large size company. You might get away with it in a startup initially but not for long as the team grows you will be expected to work together with other developers/admins (collaborate) to create systems that others want and for that you will need to communicate with others to ensure what you are making is actually useful.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

December 21, 2022

“Linux is a meme and only autistic people use it” brainstorm from an anonymous coward

Filed under: Humor,Linux/Unix Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:28 PM

It is funny how people will make up stuff to explain why Linux (or any other OS) is difficult and why the person making the pronouncements can’t get it to do what they want it to do. Recently, the screenshot below came up in my feed and it made me laugh. As per the author only autistic people use Linux and everyone else “has just fallen for the meme”.


Linux is only for Autistic People

I have been using Linux almost full time since 2001 and am definitely not autistic. I can’t identify trains by their sounds and instead of not being able to talk to girls, according to some I sometimes talk too much. I have no interest in learning the names of the cast for any TV show and as far as I can tell I am leading a pretty normal life.

The genius who penned this (and I am of half a mind that this is just someone trolling Linux users) doesn’t seem to know that it is used to power 96.3% of the world’s top web servers and Android is based on Linux as well. It is the world’s 3rd most popular OS (after Windows and Mac) and while it has its own quirks it def doesn’t need you to know the in’s and out of the computer in order to use it. In fact in my experience, it is easier to install Linux and have a functional setup than it is to install Windows as Windows requires a lot of extra stuff to be installed in order to be productive while in Linux most of that is already pre-installed or built-in.

This was good for a laugh so I wanted to share it here.

– Suramya

December 19, 2022

IndiGo Airlines classifies powerbanks as Dangerous goods & threatens potential prosecution for carrying them on Flight

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:19 AM

A couple of days ago while I was checking in for my IndiGo flight, I noticed that the airline has a page for “Dangerous Goods and Restricted Articles” just like most other airlines have when doing the online check in. What was interesting over here, was the fact that the page lists “Power Banks” under this category and states that “Carrying these objects may be an offense and may result in prosecution”.


Screenshot from Indigo website taken 10th Dec 2022

This makes absolutely no sense as powerbanks are now carried by pretty much everyone and yes while they are not allowed in checked-in luggage anymore, they are still allowed in carry-on luggage. Classifying then alongside weapons and flammable liquid etc doesn’t make any sense and just gives the airline the option to potentially abuse this classification if required.

I did try reaching out to Indigo over social media about this but didn’t get any response.

– Suramya

December 1, 2022

Analysis of the claim that China/Huawei is remotely deleting videos of recent Chinese protests from Huawei phones

Filed under: Computer Hardware,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:23 AM

There is an interesting piece of news that is slowly spreading over the internet in the past few hours where Melissa Chen is claiming over at Twitter that Huawei phones are automatically deleting videos of the protests that took place in China, without notifying their owners. Interestingly I was not able to find any other source reporting this issue. All references/reports of this issue are linking back to this tweet and based on this single tweet that is not supported by external validation. Plus the tweet does not even provide enough information to validate that this is happening other than a single video shared as part of the original tweet.


Melissa Chen claiming on Twitter that videos of protests are being automatically deleted by Huawei without notification

However, it is an interesting exercise to think how this could have been accomplished, what the technical requirements for this to work would look like and if this is something that would happen. So lets go ahead and dig in. In order to delete a video remotely, we would need the following:

  • The capability to identify the videos that need to be deleted without impacting other videos/photos on the device
  • The capability to issue commands to the device remotely that all sensitive videos from xyz location taken at abc time need to be nuked and Monitor the success/failure of the commands
  • Identify the devices that need to have the data on the looked at. Keeping in mind that the device could have been in airplane mode during the filming

Now, lets look at how each of these could be accomplished one at a time.

The capability to identify the videos that need to be deleted without impacting other videos/photos on the device

There are a few ways that we can identify the videos/photos to be deleted. If it was a video from a single source then we could have used a HASH value of the video to identify it and then delete. Unfortunately in this case the video in question is recorded by the device so each video file will have a separate hash value so this is not how we could do this.

The second option is to use the Metadata in the file, to identify the date & time along with the physical location of the video to be deleted. If videos were recorded within a geo-fence area in a specific timeframe then we potentially have the information required to identify the videos in question. The main problem would be that the user could have disabled geo-tagging of photos/videos taken by the phone or the date/time stamp might be incorrect.

One way to bypass this attempt to save the video would be to have the app/phone create a separate geo-location record of every photo/video taken by the device even when GPS is disabled or Geo tagging is disabled. This would require a lot of changes in the OS/App file and since a lot of people have been looking at the code in Huawei phones for issues ever since there was an accusation that they are being used by China to spy on western world, it is hard to imagine this would have escaped from scrutiny.

If the app was saving the data in the video/photo itself rather than a separate location then it should be easy enough to validate by examining the image/video data of photos/videos taken by any Huawei phone. But I don’t see any claims/reports that prove that this is happening.

The capability to issue commands to the device remotely that all sensitive videos from xyz location taken at abc time need to be nuked and Monitor the success/failure of the commands

Coming to the second requirement, Huawei or the government would need the capability to remotely activate the functionality to delete the videos. In order to do this the phone would need to be connecting to a Command & Control (C&C) channel frequently to check for commands. Or the phone would have something listening to remote commands from a central server.

Both of these are hard to disguise and hide. Yes, there are ways to hide data in DNS queries and other such methods to cover the tracks but thanks to Botnets, malware and Ransomware campaigns the ability to identify hidden C&C channels is highly developed and it is hard to hide from everyone looking at this. If the phone has something listening to commands then a scan of the device for open ports/apps listening to connections would be an easy thing to check and even if the app listening is disguised it should be possible to identify that something is listening.

You might say that the commands to activate might be hidden in the normal traffic going to & from the device to the Huawei servers and while that is possible we can check for it by installing a root certificate and passing all the traffic to/from the device via a proxy to be analyzed. Not impossible to do but hard to achieve without leaving signs, and considering the scrutiny these phones are going through hard to accept that this is something that is happening without anyone finding out about it.

Identify the devices that need to have the data on the looked at. (Keeping in mind that the device could have been in airplane mode during the filming)

Next, we have the question on how would Huawei identify the devices that need to run the check for videos. One option would be to issue the command to all their phones anywhere in the world. This would potentially be noisy and there is a possibility that a sharp eyed user catches the command in action. So far more likely option would be for them to issue it against a subset of their phones. This subset could be all phones in China, all phones that visited the location in question around the time the protest happened or all phones that are there in or around the location at present.

In order for the system to be able to identify users in an area, they have a few options. One would be to use GPS location tracking which would require the device to constantly track its location and share with a central location. Most phones already do this. One potential problem would be when users disable GPS on the device but other than that this would be an easy request to fulfill. Another option is to use cell tower triangulation to locate/identify the phones in the area at a given time. This is something that is easily done at the provider side and from what I read quite common in China. Naomi Wu AKA RealSexyCyborg had a really interesting thread on this a little while ago that you should check out.

This doesn’t even account for the fact that China has CCTV coverage across most of its jurisdiction and claim to have the ability to run Facial recognition across this massive amount of video collected. So, it is quite easy for the government to identify the phones that need to be checked for sensitive photos/videos with existing & known technology and ability.

Conclusion/Final thoughts

Now also remember that if Huawei had the ability to issue commands to its phones remotely then they also have the ability to extract data from the phones, or plant information on the phone. Which would be a espionage gold mine as people use their phones for everything and have then with them always. Loosing the ability to do this just to delete videos is not something that I feel China/Huawei would do as harm caused by the loss of intelligence data would far outweigh the benefits of deleting the videos. Do you really think that every security agency, Hacker Collective, bored programmers, Antivirus/cybersec firms would not immediately start digging into the firmware/apps on any Huawei phone once it was known and confirmed that they are actively deleting stuff remotely.

So, while it is possible that Huawei/China has the ability to scan and delete files remotely I doubt that this is the case right now. Considering that there is almost no reports of this happening anywhere and no independent verification of the same plus it doesn’t make sense for China to nuke this capability for such a minor return.

Keeping that in mind this post seems more like a joke or fake news to me. That being said, I might be completely mistaken about all this so if you have additional data or counter points to my reasoning above I would love for you to reach out and discuss this is more detail.

– Suramya

November 29, 2022

Twitter: How the user experience has been changing over the last month

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:46 PM

Its been about a month since Twitter has been under the new management and it is an understatement to say that things have been chaotic over there with Musk in control. There have been plenty of articles written about what is going on at Twitter so I am not going to go into that, instead since it has been a month I wanted to share my experience on how the user experience at Twitter has changed, thoughts about its future and general musings.

Personally, I don’t see much of a difference when I use the chronological view using Tweetcaster (which is the Twitter client I prefer). It just shows me all the posts by the people I follow in chronological order which is the same as how things have been so far. However, Most of the infosec folks, and a lot of the experts have reduced their posts on Twitter and instead are posting on Mastodon now. Some post in both locations others have moved completely. Looking at the accounts, it looks like most of the non-white, non-male accounts have moved to Mastodon since the reduction in moderation means they are facing increasing amount of harassment from idiots. I have also been reading about how some of the functionality on the site is flaky and recently the block function was not working intermittently.

In addition to reading the chronological feed I also occasionally view the feed in the Recommended View or Home View as Twitter calls it and there is a drastic change in the content shown when I use this view. Earlier I would get about 80% of content from the people I follow and about 20% of other trending posts and recommendations. Now, it is the other way round. Last I checked, in the first 10 pages of scrolling only 3-4 tweets were from accounts I follow, rest all were recommendations and ‘popular’ tweets.

Specifically, it appears that tweets which talk positively about Musk are promoted more via the algorithm and out of 10 tweets shown at least 2-3 would be tweets praising Musk. Based on my likes and accounts I follow this should not be the case as a lot of them are fairly critical of how he is doing things. Worse case I would expect to see an even breakdown of tweets in favor and tweets against him as he is quite controversial right now. But, it looks like the algo has been tweaked to give higher priority to tweets that praise him. Please note that this is anecdotal evidence based on what I see and felt rather than a formal study as such of the algo.

In addition a lot more crypto scam accounts are showing up in my feeds as well. This is a scary thing because they look and sound quite reasonable but end of the day they are scams. The recommendation system that creates the feed for every user seems to be quite broken and a lot of the stuff being shown to me is stuff that I am not interested in. For example, today my feed was flooded with Bollywood movie news which is something I am not at all interested in.

If I stay with the chronological view then things appear to be normal. Most of the brands and services are still there on twitter and it is still a good way to reach out to companies for escalation or help. How much longer that will continue depends on how much more chaotic things are at Twitter offices. That being said I don’t see the service shutting down soon but there is a good chance that there will be a significant outage in the near future. If the trend of folks moving away continues then Twitter will end up being becoming less diverse than what it is today which is a shame.

I don’t see myself stopping from using it everyday yet (as long as I stick to the chronological view of my timeline). But a lot of the interesting posters from twitter have moved to Mastodon so I will probably be spending more time over there as time passes.

On a side note, I have been adding more features to my program to extract data from Twitter and the new version will be released in the next day or two.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

November 14, 2022

IBM Unveils the worlds largest Quantum Computer with 433 qubits

Filed under: My Thoughts,Quantum Computing — Suramya @ 2:01 AM

Scaling up Quantum computers has become a race between the various players in the market and IBM has raised the stakes by unveiling a 433 qubits Quantum computer that is more than a 3x increase from their previous setup of 127 qubits. Even with this massive gain they are still ways off from a making a 4000 qubit computer by 2025 which is their goal.

In this new setup IBM replaced the “quantum chandelier” used in the previous processors with flexible ribbon cables that are designed for cryogenic environments. These new cables allow a more efficient flow of microwave signals which in turn decreased the interference caused by the cables. This gave them a 77% increase in the number of connections to the chip, which in turn enabled them to scale up more easily. They also separated the wires and components for control and readout into their own layers, which further reduced the interference with the qubits.

The new setup also includes a state of the art cryo-CMOS prototype controller chip implemented using 14-nanometer FinFET technology that reduces the power requirement for the setup from about 100 watts per qubit to about 10 milliwatts per qubit. The new beta update for Qiskit Runtime allows the user to trade speed for reduced error count and a new option called Qiskit primitives called a “resilience level” lets users dial in the cost/accuracy trade that is suitable to the task being worked on. Both functionality is expected to be ready for production release by 2025.

Quantum computing makes my head hurt but there is no doubt that it is changing the computing world in a massive way.

Source:
* IEEE Spectrum: IBM Unveils 433-Qubit Osprey Chip
* New Scientist: IBM unveils world’s largest quantum computer at 433 qubits

– Suramya

November 9, 2022

FOSS: Asking folks to run their own servers/services is not the answer

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:06 AM

A few days ago a discussion was going on in a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) group that I am part of about Twitter and how it is imploding due to the recent changes. One of the members commented that “Both Twitter and Gmail are private services (not public utilities). Hence FOSS. Hence self-host your blog / email.” This is a very problematic view that is unfortunately quite common amongst techies. They (we) tend to believe that everyone has the time, knowledge, interest and resources to do things the way we do.

In the early 2000’s I hosted my site & blog on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which I maintained on my own. It was a great experience because I got to learn Linux Sysadmin skills on a live environment and I did it for a few years. Then as my responsibilities and workload started increasing I had less time to devote to managing the server, plus I had issues with the costing so ended up moving hosting providers and to a shared hosting plan. Since I was moving to a different role, I just wanted to host my site and not worry about managing the server and this move allowed me to do that. I can move back to a VPS if I need to since I have the tech background and skills to manage it. Expecting everyone to do the same is nonsensical and impractical. I know the time it took me to walk my parents through how to access their email from various computers & phones. Just thinking about asking them to manage sendmail/postfix servers and secure them is enough to give me nightmares about hours on the phone trouble shooting.

FOSS is a great thing, it has made life easier and allowed us to retain control of the devices that we use to manage a large portion of our life. However, it is not practical to expect everyone to have the skills to host their own servers. Imagine if other services did the same thing, you would need to run your own sewage treatment plant to process your waste and have to manage your own power generation plant, or grow your own food. That sounds pretty nonsensical right? Which is how you sound when you tell folks to run their own servers for stuff that shouldn’t need it (like email or social media). Unless you want to only communicate with a microscopic portion of the population and feel superior to everyone.

Our goal is to encourage people to use FOSS whenever possible and that requires us to make the software usable, stable, have a shallow learning curve and smooth/easy onboarding. If you think that people will learn about server configs to access your product then you are dreaming. For example, GIMP is an awesome software but its UI sucks, which is why it has been unable to gain popularity and beat Photoshop. One of the great mods for GIMP which came out in 2006 called GIMPShop modified the UI to make it similar to Photoshop and people loved it. Other software / systems have the same problem as well. The most recent example is Mastodon which is a pretty cool software but onboarding process that explains how you would access it and setup accounts is something that I still am confused about. I had a client I worked with early in my carrier who would ask me to “Just make it work” when faced with complicated software setup. She was smart as hell but didn’t have the time to waste to setup/configure software as that took her time away from her core responsibilities.

The general user will go for ease of use, they will go for easy onboarding and accessibility. IRC was an amazing protocol but the clients sucked (I mean they worked but didn’t have mobile clients and were not user-friendly) as the years passed newer protocols and clients came into the picture and they had snazzy UI and clients (e.g. Slack) which enabled them to take over as the communication channel for a lot of communities. We can moan and complain that IRC was much better but from the end user perspective it wasn’t better because it didn’t allow them to do what they wanted using the devices they wanted to use. Like it or not mobile is hear to stay and not having a native mobile client made IRC a hard sell. (There are a few clients now, but the damage is done).

Usability is not a curseword. We need to start embracing making the software/systems we create more userfriendly. I am not saying remove the advanced / power functionality, I would be one of the first to leave if you did that. A good example on how to balance the two is the approach Firefox takes: they have the general UI for all users with sensible defaults and a configuration setup that allows power users to go in and modify pretty much every aspect of the system.

Coming back to Twitter, the fix for this current issue is not to run our own servers but to make the existing systems interoperable the same way Email systems are interoperable. Cory Doctorow has a fantastic post “How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends” where he talks about how this could work. It would require pressure (regulatory/government/user) on the companies to adopt this model but in the long run that would removed the walled gardens that have popped up everywhere and restore the old more distributed style of internet.

I still need to figure out if I want to join a Mastodon server and if so which one, I will probably look into this later this month once I have some free time.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

October 13, 2022

No you are not disliked because you are a nerd. You are disliked because you are obnoxious and love gatekeeping

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:57 PM

There is a ongoing thread on Twitter where someone is complaining that the girls who were ignoring this person in the 80’s because they liked comics and ‘geeky stuff’ now love guys who are into the same thing in 2022. (See the comic below). The idea being that girls are mean and only chase whatever is ‘cool’ at the time.


Girls didn’t like me because I was a Geek

This is of course absolute nonsense and multiple girls responded stating the same. One memorable response by dan-hell badford stated:

I have seen this behavior first hand in multiple communities. As soon as a girl (or anyone who is not a white male) tells that they are a fan of a particular comic/art/tv show etc almost immediately the response is “Prove it”. Once we had gone to Comic Con and a friend of mine was wearing a T-Shirt with an image & quote on it from one of the famous series and this random guy came up to us and started a conversation with a statement that went something like (it was a few years ago) “you are wearing this t-shirt but I can bet you know nothing about the series. If that is not the case then you should prove it by answering this question”. My friend basically told them to get lost. They were a fan and they didn’t need anyone’s approval or permission to be one. Others have comeback with similar idiotic takes. There is one post on twitter where this person basically states that only non-pretty/non-handsome people became geeks because they were outcasts and pretty people became popular. (I wish I had taken a screenshot but I didn’t and now can’t find it).

This is basic gatekeeping and part of the reason why I am not part of any Fandom. I am nerdy, I love comics, books, tech and techy topics and if you give me the chance and show interest I will talk your ear off talking about the latest tech-advances or a new TV show I have been watching. The more I like something the more I would want to introduce others to it. Unfortunately, these gatekeepers seem to think that the only way to be ‘a true fan’ is to adhere to their definition of a true fan, which is basically be a carbon copy of their thought process. To give you an idea of how these nincompoops think, check out this post that claims that all sub-cultures are dead because “that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them.

This guy, seems to think that all cool things follow the following life flow:

  • Something is invented/created by the scene
  • Fanatics become aware of it and they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.
  • Members of Public (MOPs) become aware of it and make it popular
  • Someone (‘Sociopaths’) work out how to monetize mops and fanatics get pushed out
  • Due to this the ‘cool’ dies.

Apparently you are only allowed to like something if you willing to be obsessed by it. Meaning that you need to spend all your waking time talking about just one thing. Thanks but no thanks. I love a lot of things in life and have better things to do than to obsess over one single topic for the rest of my life. Read the entire post if you want to be infuriated. My favorite part was: Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers. . Treating people with courtesy and talking about other things in the world doesn’t make you repellent, it makes you a normal human being.

These fans define their whole identity by their obsession with a particular show/comic/game/movie etc so any change or disinterest by others is taken as a personal attack. Another aspect is that they are not willing to understand that people dislike them not because they like xyz but because they are actively obnoxious. I remember one instance from college where there was this one guy in our class who was obnoxious in the extreme, would be rude to others and refuse to engage in common courtesies etc so I (along with most of the people) would actively avoid them as much as possible. One day I was cornered by them and they commented that “You don’t like me and don’t want to be my friend because I am Muslim”. So I responded that “I don’t avoid you because you are Muslim, I avoid you because you are an obnoxious ass”. They were shocked because they had created this mental image that ignored their behavior and blamed others for not liking them because they were Muslim (this was a few years after 9/11). These ‘nerds/fans’ are the same way. They can’t process the fact that people don’t like them because of their behavior so they create this fantasy that they are an outcast and not liked because they are Geeky/Nerdy.

This happens not just in Tech, Comics or Gaming but in every single art form or hobby. A little while ago a song by Metallica was featured in Stranger Things, this introduced a whole new generation of people to the band and their popularity/downloads spiked. Then some idiot posted a message stating “I’m Sorry Metallica for all the fake stranger things fans love ya”. The group immediately hit back stating “Don’t be sorry. Everyone is welcome in the Metallica Family. If they like Puppets, chances are they’ll find plenty of other songs to get into.”

It is worse for girls as they are constantly being asked to prove they are ‘worthy’ of being a fan. If you look at the comments to the first Tweet I linked to, the responses show how badly they were treated when they just wanted to be part of the fandom. I sometimes wonder what we could have achieved if all the stupid gatekeepers were no longer there and more people could be an active part of the fandom.

As John Scalzy put it Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be. There are so many interesting things out there, we should share them with others so that they can take joy in it as well. I wouldn’t have known about Babylon 5 if a random person in a book store hadn’t sat with me and told me about it because they saw that I liked Star Trek and recommended it to me. Similarly others have recommended stuff to me that I loved and some stuff that I hated but that doesn’t make it bad, it makes it different. Keep in mind that no one was born being an expert on something; every single person started off as a newbie at some point in time.

This gatekeeping is ridiculous as I want more people to like the stuff I like and its ok even if they like it and like something else. Because remember, variety is the spice of life. I don’t want to be reading/watching endless remakes/rewatches of the same trope/show, there are enough new stories to read and topics to learn about.

Or to put it another way, get a life. I/we don’t need your approval to be a fan of something.

– Suramya

October 8, 2022

Thoughts about some of the new TV shows

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 6:19 AM

Over the past few months there have been constant whining by a certain group of people who think they get to decide what should be shown on TV and anything that keeping with their view of what is right is ‘Woke’ and should be removed from TV and never shown to anyone. Never mind that they are a minority and almost everyone else likes the changes. These folks have been trying to stream roll Lord of the Rings: The rings of Power, Sandman (The Netflix show), She-Hulk and a bunch of other shows that dared to show non-white/non-male people in major roles.

This is the same nonsense they pulled with Star Wars, Ghostbusters amongst others, unfortunately it did work for the most part for in those instances as the studio rolled back some of the major changed. Thankfully, this time people have wised up to this tactic and with show runners like Neil Gaiman there is a snow-balls chance in hell that they will be listened to. In any case, in this post I just wanted to talk about some of the shows I have been watching and thoughts on them (Used to do this quite often in the early years of the blog but haven’t in a while):

Lord of the Rings: The rings of Power

I am not a fan of the LOTR, the movies were ok but nothing that I would go back and watch again and the books were painfully verbose. I don’t enjoy reading a multi-page description of a walk from one place to another along with a description of what they ate on the way and I still haven’t finished the 3rd book (don’t plan to either). But, the Rings of Power is a fantastic show and the cinematography is awesome. The show is enjoyable and has a consistent storyline that makes sense even to someone who doesn’t know the details of how the story ends in the future. There has been a lot of grumbling/whining about black people having a prominent role but they can suck it up. The characters are likable, believable and most of the time the decisions they make make sense. Which is not always the case in such stories as sometimes the decisions are made to further the story and that gets annoying. Looking forward to the season finale and the next 4 seasons of the show.

Sandman

I have not read the comics and will rectify that as soon as I finish watching the show (currently at episode 7 of 10). What a fantastic world and I love how it has been brought to life. The Lucifer TV show was a spin off from the Sandman comics so I was aware of them but never got around to reading the comics. One complaint a lot of people had was that they should have asked Tom Ellis and Lesley-Ann Brandt reprise their roles as Lucifer and Mazikeen in the show. I felt the same way initially but after I watched the episode I have changed my mind. Tom Ellis is a fantastic actor and his take on Lucifer is awesome but it wouldn’t have worked in Sandman as the tone mismatch between his take and the rest of the show would have been painful. Gwendoline Christie’s take was sublime and I loved it.

Can’t wait to see how the season ends so no spoilers please.

She-Hulk

Lots of crybabies have been complaining about the show and while it is not super brainy and serious it is a fun watch. You just need relax and enjoy the casual fun. They do tackle some serious themes that might not be obvious immediately such as the toxic comments and fandom. They have taken actual comments posted by folks and incorporated them into the show which in turn really pissed of the ‘fans’ making the comments in the first place. They talk about toxicity, the glass ceiling and a lot of serious topics in a fun and engaging way.

Not the most intellectual shows but is a lot of fun and you should check it out if you haven’t.

Vampire Academy

Its an interesting show based on a book series with a significant fan following. I haven’t read it yet and will prob do that once the show is over. I like the concept, the characters are interesting and believable and the storyline is engrossing. Not very gory like True Blood and very little nudity and sex. (Fans of Game of Thrones/True Blood will be disappointed)

Check it out if you like Vampire shows.

House of the Dragon

I did not like this spin-off just as I didn’t enjoy GoT. I barely got through half the first episode and stopped watching. The show is not my cup of tea even though it has a fantastic cast.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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