Memes and Whatnot

 Having lived in Oakland for the majority of my life, I was born in India, I've never had the opportunity to live in a "big" city. I've only lived in the suburbs. When it came time for choosing colleges, I definitely didn't want to end up in another suburban city *cough* *cough* Ann Arbor *cough* *cough* and so I looked elsewhere.  I became quickly fixated with Carnegie Mellon. Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon is located, is an odd city. It's got a big city feel without actually being a big city. Rather than trying to describe Pittsburgh, here's a picture that I took when I went there (funny how I committed to a school I hadn't even visited :P) blogger compression is so bad :( Pittsburgh has a medium sized downtown with SKYSCRAPERS!!! I'm so excited to be going to a college in a city with SKYSCRAPERS! In any case, the rest of Pittsburgh, outside of the main college town, is just run of the mill suburbs which is a nice taste of home. Having been to...

Well the prompt for this blog post couldn't have came at a better time. Back when we went to school and had actual club activities, I can't help but reminisce about my time on Troy's Robotics team. I had made lots of good friends on the team, but more so, I had made a lot of good friends on other teams. We'd occasionally chat about how progress on each of our robots were coming along or rant about the stupid bureaucracy that comes with doing robotics. In any case, with not having competitions this year nor the year before because of the coronavirus (side not I cannot stand hearing COVID or coronavirus or the other names that've been given to it, it's like listening to a broken record at this point) its been a long time since we've seen each other in person.  As luck would have it a few nights ago I was playing in a League of Legends (don't come at me) tournament with a friend; both of us invited some of our friends who are going to Duke and Carnegie Mell...

I saw a yellow butterfly flying in my opinion the wrong way, flying across the sound to Connecticut I saw a cormorant oily-looking flying close to the sea’s surface precisely as I floated on it on my back in the attitude of the crucifixion minerals in my body in conversation with the minerals of the sea about the sun how can I possibly add to what’s already been said so well by the ancients and said with an austerity I’ll never know it is an honor to take a backseat to the ancients who knew how I was a fat white fish dissolving under the sold-out stadium sun like a god but like a god I could live through anything. I refuse to do annotations on this poem. It's too soon. Let me procrastinate till the due date for the Mentor Poet Project. In any case, here's a picture of Timothy Donnelly:  This man and his beard exude so much swag; I'm truly jealous. While this reasoning may seem a bit superficial, albeit it is, the reason that I picked him was just because he caught my attent...

As I've written more and more of these blog posts, I've realized just how far I've strayed from my given title of a "Confused Political Compass." Maybe it's because these prompts don't cater themselves too well to politics; what can you do? On the topic of prompts, I'm super confused by what it means to put the pieces back together. Gut instinct was to write about playing with Legos as a kid, but something tells me that wasn't in the spirit of the prompt. I guess we'll have to settle with some discussion over my BBC book. My topic of interest is Emil Sinclair, the protagonist from Demian . Demian chronicles the intellectual and emotional development of Emil Sinclair, the protagonist and narrator of the story. Sinclair begins the novel as a mentally precocious ten-year-old boy. He has a sense that there is more to the world than what he learns in school and from his parents. At such a young age, he is in no way prepared to move into the world of...

I absolutely love the word eloquence. The way it rolls off of one's tongue is very beautiful. Any word that has the "qu" sound found in the word eloquence feels expensive and important. Take for example the word quail. Quail meat and quail eggs are considered a delicacy: both expensive and highly sought out for. Another characteristic of the world eloquence comes down to its lack of hard sounding consonants. The main consonant sounds of "l", "kw", and "s" all are very soft sounding; this contrasts with other consonants like "d", "t", or a hard "g". Words that contain those aforementioned sounds sound quite ugly, and often have ugly meanings associated with them. Words such as spite and bitter and come to mind.  Though the formal definition of eloquence relates to oral speech and written speech, by virtue of the sound of eloquence, it can be used in various contexts outside of that. Often the mannerisms in which o...

To be honest I didn't have much to write about Demian  so far. I'm lucky to have the creative liberty to write about whatever has been on my mind this week. Luckily, I do have something for that: the stock market.  I've been a long time follower of Reddit's Wall Street Bets. When I heard about the plan to try screw-over Melvin Capital and other hedge funds who shorted GameStop, I figured it was time to get my feet wet into the stock market. When GameStop's stock (GME) was at $45 per share, I put a decent chunk of change into it. Last week when its value soared to over $350 per share, I sold it; this ending up giving me 600% ROI and I made quite a bit.  There's a far more interesting conversation to be had other than me making some money on the side. It's the politics and economics that's behind it all. The entire reason that it was possible to short squeeze GME was that hedge funds had shorted it over 140%. Simple explained, when a stock is shorted over ...

 Honestly, this has been a very good English class so far. I enjoyed the variety of books, plays and short stories that we read together as class. Likewise it was to fun pickup books that I had a personal interest in reading. There's no doubt that the literature that we read together and discussed had a larger impact than that of what I read on my own; knowing that I'll have to actively engage in discussion upon completing a text meant that I put more effort and care into what I was reading. That quality was often lacking in my personal reading books as it was more for enjoyment and less of analysis. My prefered type of reading isn't novels or plays or anything like that. I find articles and research papers that are tailored to my interests in politics and engineering to be far more interesting. These texts provide information in a easily digestible manner — unlike the convoluted English found in the texts we read — and I enjoy that.  I thought that the work for this class ...