Sucker Punch – movie review

Baby Doll in a sword fight - Sucker Punch

His last film, Watchmen, had me cringing at some of its gory indulgences, so when the posters and trailers of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch were released, I feared it would descend into the same. However, Watchmen was in sections very faithful to the original, near-impossible to adapt comic, which showed great talent. I gave Sucker Punch a try precisely for what was on display in the previews: women in strange combat costumes, guns & swords, and fantasy mayhem. I hoped for an entertaining action-fest, but to my surprise it was all that and a complex fantasy film with human core.
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Ink Pen Drawings of Human Figures

Pen Drawings - Portrait of a man in a business suit

My last bout of drawing with a pen resulted in a chance encounter with an old fountain pen from my school days. That led to a whole new fluidity of sketching as I tried my hand at a more hatching-heavy technique of drawing. After January was done and the new year began to sink in, I once again felt that urge to draw, that urge to think while not thinking, and so I took up the fountain pen again.

I did a quick fountain pen sketch to loosen up, the one of the man seen above, and mentioned my upcoming sketch exercises on Twitter. While receiving very enthusiastic responses to the idea, I also got some suggestions and favourites as to what I should draw. The common theme of all the suggestions was the human figure, so I decided to concentrate on that. Having done this one sketch in a style similar to previous attempts, I also set out to make the subsequent drawings more elaborate and detailed.

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See Also …

Notebook page with writing and a pen - See also

Writing is an important activity in the human pantheon of activities. We often ascribe this importance to the fact that human society works on the sharing and passing on of ideas to those who will come after us, or in the case of today’s magnificently connected world, those who are our peers in distant and close-by places. Where writing doesn’t get its due is as a record of thoughts explored and solutions found, for yourself.

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Best Laid Plans of Writing

The burden of best laid plans is that we must fulfil them,
Decisions were made and now action must follow,
Meanwhile, we imagine these plans and build them,
Until they’re a mountain impossible to swallow.

We decorate and gild, and wrap them in fine leather,
We worry and fret, and wonder if they’ll ever be,
We protect them with armour against every possible weather,
We even provide flippers, for when they’re stranded at sea.
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The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin – book review

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

Though her reputation preceded her, I had never read a book by Ursula K. Leguin before this one. I’ve always been a fan of the old-guard of science fiction and fantasy writers, of whom she is a much revered member, so when I spotted this book for a bargain and the synopsis seemed thoughtful and intriguing, I jumped at it.

It was only when I got home with my new acquisition that I actually opened the book and decided to dip in, as I often do. The book started thus:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world as important as that wall.


Ten pages later, I managed to stop reading. It was clear I had to read this book as soon as I could, so I dropped the other novel I had been suffering through in slow agony and took up this one instead.

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Life Isn’t Obliged To Be Easy

Unrealistic expectations

How do you see life? Is it easy or difficult?

That is the all-encompassing question I was posed by my friend Sinduja during a recent chat. The question wasn’t completely out of the blue, because I had just posted this little nugget on Twitter:

One basic choice from which all differences in opinion branch out into their varied flavours, is whether or not we assume life must be easy.


She and I have these occasional discussions of thought and belief, and very often we agree to disagree on things. She was wondering if our disagreements could also be traced back to that basic assumption I had spoken of. So, I attempted to clarify my thoughts on it.

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TRON: Legacy – movie review

Light cycle - TRON: Legacy

I saw the original TRON a few times when I was in school. The fact that it was on mildly-scratchy rented video tape, made it no less revelatory about the possibilities of augmenting film with animation, and also about the vast potential of the then burgeoning technology of computers. While I haven’t watched that film in over a decade, I was very enthusiastic to see what they would do with a sequel, a quarter of a century later. TRON: Legacy exceeded my expectations on every level. I was expecting a glittery blockbuster, but what I was given was a excellent film of nuanced beauty.

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