There’s something very fishy about this business of so-called immor­tals that I see in movies and books. I mean, they don’t seem very smart, given that they’ve stuck around for hundreds or thousands of years.

There isn’t really a happy ending to these stories. If he happens to be a bad guy, he’ll invari­ably get himself killed in some rather stupid way, like allowing someone to put a stake through his heart. If he’s a good guy, he’ll live a long lonely brooding life — that is the essen­tial romance of the plot – until he kills the bad guy in some stupid way, like putting a stake through his heart. After that he’ll happily continue to live a long lonely brooding life.

On a side note, I don’t recall having seen many good gals – woman as the protag­o­nist — in these kinds of stories. I guess they just aren’t suited for such depressing roles, or maybe that stuff just isn’t marketable. I’m not sure how many actresses other than Kate Beckin­sale can pull off the “depressed-yet-cool” act.

So now that we’re on the topic, how smart are the immor­tals anyway? The last time somebody asked, I couldn’t remember what I had for dinner the previous week, but these guys – the immor­tals – always have flash­backs of ancient memories popping into their heads at some crucial times and lending the audience the much-desired “aw..” moments. I mean seriously, just because these guys live forever doesn’t mean they remember every­thing, do they? Even R. Daneel Olivaw had to have his memory-banks archived to tape (in a manner of speaking) on a semi-regular basis.

And then of course, there’s the mechanics of it all that’s inter­esting, to say the least. Take ghosts, for instance. I think it’s fairly well-established that ghosts retain their souls but not their brains. On the other hand, even religious people will agree that the brain does the thinking, even if the higher aspects of humanity – free will, conscious­ness etc – may be controlled by the soul. So what’s doing the thinking and the remem­bering for ghosts?

Or maybe — is that why the don’t-do-anything-stupid switch is turned off?

So I took a spoon to the dough, and it ended up growing a face. But is it art? I’ll let the audience decide.

You wouldn’t believe how many chess games I’ve begun but not played to comple­tion. Part of the problem stems from the fact that I only play (or rather, start playing) human-versus-computer games. Humans playing chess (not world champions, of course) add some kind of ‘flavor’ or person­ality to their game, and not all moves are completely logical. Computer chess players, on the other hand, tend to…win, with cold preci­sion. Now I could tweak the diffi­culty level of the game, effec­tively asking the computer to make occasional mistakes, but how could someone play an honor­able game, knowing that the opponent was not giving a hundred percent?

Now that my 25^th-week resolu­tion is to play chess more seriously, I guess I should hunt for humans to joust with me. Any takers?

I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop client to post to my blog. (Somehow, Google never managed to sell me on the browser-as-an-OS idea.)

Now that I have a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I’ve decided to give Windows Live Writer a test-drive. Here goes nothing.

I guess I have a thing for movies with plots based on fantasy or magic. It never hurts to add some action scenes and a princess or two, either.

That’s a round-about way of saying I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater today.

Movies based on video games gener­ally tend to miss expec­ta­tions, but happily, I have never played the video game that this movie is based on. If you haven’t either, then here’s the gist: a magic dagger turns back time and uses some magic sand to fuel its time-circuits (okay, I was just kidding about the time-circuits). You can figure out the rest.

Here’s the impor­tant thing to note about movies that involve time-travel: no matter what happens, you can’t take it at face value because sooner or later some bloke will come along and undo all of it. And when the only thing stopping you is some lame threat involving sand-storms across the world, no one really gives a second thought to changing time as they please. Now if someone had said the entire space-time fabric would come unrav­elled causing the Universe to implode, that would have made them sit up and pay attention…

In case you were wondering, the hero’s uncle — the King’s brother — is the bad guy. And in case you don’t want to read the spoilers, skip the previous sentence. With that out of the way, here are the top four reasons why he’s the bad guy:

1. He is the prince’s uncle. Uncles seldom end up on the good side.
2. The prince claims that he is the only one he can trust. Er…yeah, right.
3. He has a pointy beard.
4. He has a name like “Nizam”.

Moving on, there’s the question of how long the movie really lasted, after all of the time-travel, I mean. Here’s what happens: the Persian army camps outside the city, attacks at dawn, after which the prince accuses the uncle of treachery. In a bizarre reaction, the uncle gives himself away by attacking the prince (why?) and gets himself killed in the resulting scuffle. The prince gets the girl. The end.

Finally, the action sequences seemed a little far-fetched, but enter­taining. Now if you weren’t satis­fied with this movie, there’s always the sequel. Any movie that has a colon in it and sounds like “X: blah blah” has a sequel coming in the near future.

Pick up ten random blogs on the Internet and at least one of them is sure to have an apolo­getic note from the author explaining why there have been fewer than usual updates recently.

Gather some statis­tics and add a punch­line, and I’m sure this will be a great xkcd strip.…

Argh! The last post on my blog was ages ago.

I guess the hardest part is writing something — there’s a certain inertia associ­ated with it, like starting a conver­sa­tion. It gets easier after that, but if you stay silent for too long, breaking the ice becomes that much more awkward.

But don’t worry, I’m still here.