Category: Chess

This is a pretty old song that I dug up recently from karaoke, hope you enjoy 🙂

Onto the actual post….

Have you ever felt that most of the time, when you talk to strangers, it’s almost the same few lines being used?

Like in chess, we almost always start off with the book moves (king or queen pawn up), and the response is almost always the same for many players. Similar to a simple interaction, we always start off with ‘how are you’ or ‘hey what’s up?’ and receive similar responses like ‘im good’ or ‘im fine’. Without these book moves, people would just feel out of place. The best thing about them is that they work on ALMOST everybody. It’s just a polite way to start.

Thing is, how far can you take these book moves?

There’s always the old ‘pat on the back’ trick to make the other person feel closer to you. If not that, there’s the ‘listening for similarities’ and high fiving the other person whenever he mentions something you both have in common to penetrate through their barriers. We all make such book moves in hopes that it can further develop some sort of bond. A new and not fully recognized book move is to simply identify the small subconscious gestures of who you’re talking to, and to imitate them naturally.

The point of these book moves is to create likability for yourself, and to instantly gain the other person’s trust. But how well do they work? We could probably high five the other person EVERY SINGLE TIME he says something similar that we do, and follow it up with something like ‘we’re so similar! why didn’t I meet you earlier?’

To be honest, they do indeed work pretty well, or else they wouldn’t be recognized as book moves in the first place. I have to say that some people have won me over with the exact same book moves just because they were executed so well and done in such a subtle and natural manner.

However, the problem with book moves is that the same closeness just isn’t there. When I first met my high school friends, we didn’t have any book moves. It was that spontaneous interaction which grabbed me and rendered me loyal to them up to this point and beyond. In the longer scale of things, book moves appear to work in the short run because it stimulates our endorphins, but it doesn’t appear to create the same attachment you might feel when you encounter a person who you met without these moves.

Honestly this movie is total shit.

I hate to not share common opinion with others who love it (afterall, I did spend $14 CND just to watch this crap), but honestly it is not as good as everyone says it is.

Fair enough, there were some nice concepts and pretty awesome graphics, but there were too many loopholes in the movie for it to be anywhere near ‘exciting’. Also fair enough is that I might be being ignorant, and that this movie actually had everything covered which is beautifully laid out if I took time to explore deep enough, but until someone can explain the entire thing to me I’ll stick to my belief that the ticket was money down the drain.

Anyways, what are these ‘loopholes’?

First of all, the ending is NOT interpretable. The totem is stopping, which wouldn’t happen if this were a dream anyways.  Yes yes it seems to perfect to be true, his kids seem exactly same age, everything seems like a dream. But then again, we’re talking about a movie, and when have movies with happy endings ever had anything relating to the harshness of reality? It reminds me of shutter island where everyone keeps saying there are two different endings, but there really isn’t because the end clip showed a lifehouse and that suggests that lobotomy DID in fact take place in the island. I feel that directors often leave a semi-ambiguous ending and hypes all the fans up because they think they can see two sides of the coin, but really I bet the director is just laughing at them.

Second of all; whose dream were they when they had a dream of a dream of a dream? Honestly it got a bit retarded for me when they were saying how the subconscious is trained on some levels but not on other dream layers. The architect thing was even more retarded. To build a maze so that people’s subconscious doesn’t find you? And then to kill off the subconscious minions as to make an adventurous plot? Seriously?

Third, that Japanese guy was supposedly stuck in the realms of dreamality. Why didn’t he escape? How did he meet De Caprio? Did he shoot himself or De Caprio? Given the ending, how did they escape the dream world? I’m guessing most people say that they’re in dream world because of this part, but seriously the ending suggests that this is not the case.

Fourth, why the hell was the wife trying to kill Leonardo? So apparently she’s this memory living inside of him, and she has the power to come and fuck his dream adventures up whenever she pleases….

Okay maybe I am being a bit harsh. I guess the sound effects and graphics were great, but the plot made no sense. If a movie so complex is to be created, and the concepts are difficult to understand, I think the plot writers should focus more on making it more understandable at least…

But oh well, that doesn’t seem to matter, half the world thinks this is a great movie simply because they DON’T understand it. If someone does understand it and can explain to me in full I am willing to listen and remove this post.

I fell asleep 5 times in the cinema watching this.

This is pretty amateur, but still very nicely played out

A pretty interesting video, but sort of what the world is already seeing nowadays anyway