Invictus and the Rime

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus by William Ernest Henley.

I listened to the The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Samuel Taylor Coleridge before I started scribbling this post up. Then couldn’t help myself from listening to Invictus as well. Come to think of it, I think the ‘why’ in the first poem really doesn’t matter. The question of “Why did the ancient mariner killed the albatross?”, I think maybe the motive really didn’t matter that much but rather the consequences of it. Say, we are extra terrestrial species looking over the Earth from afar, and talking to our best alien friend, “Pity, pity, pity, why are these humans of the Homo Sapiens filthing their own planet?” My point being “why” here won’t lead us much but rather a solutionistic approach, what can we do now? More like, let the why remain in the past but let’s take action for the present. As in part 5 of the poem, the inside voices of the ancient mariner, the accusatory and repentful one and the other, a little more hopeful,  and absolution through the path of penance.

I was waiting for inspiration to hit me, and it didn’t, I just took the hammer and hit the inspiration back. Because well, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. May I be struck down by inspiration and May I be bold enough for me to hold it.

I started playing GeoGuessr, my friend recommended and got me instantly hooked. Looks just the right thing after I bought a World Map for my place. Also saw a video where two folks were playing, one of them was a GeoGuessr Goat and the other one was able to tell just by looking at the grass(?) whether that country is in Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere. The GeoGuesser God person is now famous for helping people out with telling people where that old pic of their parents was taken. I still haven’t cracked the code of differentiating between the Southern and Northern Hemisphere.

Tips for future me, trying to play GeoGuessr again in the future when I would be unhooked and re-hooked 🙂

• If it looks like India but it isn’t, it can be Indonesia.
• If it looks like India but the people don’t look like Indians but infrastructure is similar, two wheelers and cars, it is Africa.
• If it’s green and lushlicious, it can be Australia or one of the islands.
• If the sand is lighter shade go more northern.
• If it’s meadows, remember the animes, it could be other East asian countries, Japan.
• And from my friend. if the roads are narrower and there are lot of cars but the view is scenic, it is one of the European countries.
• If the view is scenic but roads are wider, it’s in the North American continent or Scandinavian/Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and others)
• If the language is includes alpha, beta, delta, gamma, it is Greece, don’t forget your Pythagoras theorem!
• The terrains of Mongolia are a bit deserted, so are the north regions of Chile.

All the best! And of course they are clues all over the place, the road signs, the road stripes, on which side of the lane the car is being driven and all (no, I am not good at these things yet, I go by the language of the ads and domain names of the websites and clothing style).

Adventures:

I went on small forest trail trek trip to Avalahalli Forest with people from my previous company. It was swift like a dream, maybe they are all like that, and just a tad bit bumpy coz I did fall. (Note for me: Importance of gear preparedness, buy the trek shoes for next time). Many a movies exist, where the protagonist wakes up from her* adventurous dream. For me t’was waking up from it, t’was rather waking up after it has actually happened.

Books:

It took an year to finish this book! The first book of Narnia, the Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, is finally done, after almost a year has passed, seems like a long time. I read it in German in a study group. The next chosen book is – The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, let’s hope we finish this one sooner. On that note, I did watch the first two parts of the trilogy movie.

Tech:

I learnt a bit about Unicode characters of how, the bits free space above 128 was used differently by each country and region, so they all used it to accommodate for their own special characters, extra letters, accents and others. So if you were to send a e-mail from Europe to Russia, it would totally be gibberish coz of the messed up encoding standards.

Rants:

Super hard to find “women’s” table tennis shoes, although I kept giving it in the search query, there were hard to find, I did buy from men’s category and got a shoe bite, so I was bit skeptical and specifically wanted to buy from women’s category, although maybe it’s not related.

Thanks for reading!

*I decided to use reverse genders in the stereotyped world to break my own biases. So going forth, I will intentionally make a sailor a she, and the nurse a he. Not that, there’s anything wrong with it in their original places, just want to allow for more flexibility.