My experiments with MS Paint

Someone needs to take a gun and shoot me. As no one seems to be doing so, I guess I can get on with the erm... questionable things I do.

Today, I might have gone just a tad off my rocker. Yes, I accept that it's so before you take it upon yourself to kindly tell me so. (In fact, some of you have already expressed your ahem, opinions on the same, so never matter.)

My spending the whole day in lab, and my mucking around in noxious glacial acetic acid and hydrogen choride fumes just might have done the trick. Anyhou, I come back to the room after the ritualistic visit to Guru, our friendly neighbourhood 'Gurunath Patisserie', and do the routine search for the latest episodes of all those TV series I happen to follow. And it was good news! Lost, Boston Legal, Jericho, Scrubs, and HIMYM had all come out with new ones. *counts* Almost three hours worth of stuff. Bliss. My day is done.

Or so one would think. Suddenly, I find myself opening MS Paint. I can't quite recollect as to why I actually did that. Soon, I find myself doodling there, drawing a face, whilst things were downloading off the LAN. The face comes out OK, but the hair looks terrible. So the obvious choice? Cut off the poor bloke's head. And fill it with something weird. The result, quite ghastly, was my display pic for a brief while, when TheGreyPilgrim was kind enough to express his horror at the same. I think I'll do everyone a favour and not put up that pic here.

I am a very dedicated person. Of course, few realise that. You may see me idling most of my time, but that is only because most of the time, I'm just waiting for an inspiration noble enough to match this erm... spirit of endeavour of mine. Well, I found one today.

I see BigBet having one of his Anime/Manga pics on his Gtalk profile. It looks particularly elegant and simple. I'm intrigued. When asked, he gives me the image file, rather amused. Ever used the curved lines option on MS Paint? I draw all the outlines using that option. Not the most trivial thing one can do. And then I proceed to spend almost three hours on recreating that picture from scratch.


Three hours, when I could have watched a plethora of sitcoms and series, or when I should have worked on the A slot assignment.
The result, I'm proud to say, was quite good. All who called me a loon did agree with me on that much.

Poetry!

So I was thinking. Why don't I put up one of those Tolkien-poems I've written. Not the most original of ideas I've had, I'll admit.

And so I am putting it up. Written in the back of an Aerospace-101 class, the only piece of third-person poetry I have ever written. (Whoa. That makes it sound as if I've written a lot of poems. Surely people know better.)

Anyhou, here it goes. It's been more than two years, and I still haven't been able to come up with a title. Good, huh?

Mithrandir

In ships they came,
From yonder silver shores;
Soon after the shadows fell,
On woods of green and so much more.

In Moria, in Khazad-dûm,
A shadow's formed in the once clean dark;
Where Durin once had met his doom,
He may not come back again.

In Rhôvanion, in the Greenwood Great,
Where elves linger since age unknown;
A darkness fell over the land,
And fell things came under Oak and Beech.

In the east that was wild, bereft of lords,
The old that was feared had now come back;
Dread was great in these men of night,
For long had they under evil dwelt.


The blessed ones came in numbers five,
Pale and cloaked, hooded and staffed;
Thus they came to the Gulf of Lune,
Where Círdan hailed them from afar.

In front of all was one in White,
A light there was seen in his eyes,
And a might there was seen in his voice;
Leader he was of all the five.

And in his trail came a figure in Brown,
Following who were the twain in Blue;
Lost now they are to the western cause,
Bereft of purpose, roaming the wild.

The last seemed like an old man in Grey,
Seemed less in might than the other four.
But a fire nevertheless was in his eyes,
And a staff much gnarled was in his hands.


They were sent by the lords of the west,
As messengers to the lands in the east;
To form an order, great in might,
To check the growth of this Shadow from the past.

In this they failed, all but one:
The twain in Blue were lost in the east,
The one in Brown took off with Bird and Beast.
The leader in White, the west he betrayed.

Yet one remained, faithful till last.
Webs he wove, subtle their strands.
Prime was he, in cleansing the land,
In destroying the Shadow, Sauron returned.

Mithrandir, O Pilgrim Grey!
He assumed the Mantle of White.
The White he pitted, against the dark:
The White burned the hotter, down fell the Black.

-Pavan Srinath

Beginnings

Now that just about everyone in this dark and gloomy world has a blog of their own, I thought to myself - pah, why not? The question, meant to be rhetorical, got a whole bunch of answers.

Why not?
a. because just about everyone in this dark and gloomy (and boring!) world has a blog of their own.
b. I am sufficently accomplished at blowing more than enough time as it is, and this isn't gonna help.
c. Whatever am I going to write?

(There were more, but I forgot them somewhere along the way.)

It was point c that I could never really defeat by reason. (If you're thinking that this is yet another one of those 'first blog's in which people contemplate what all they could write about, then fear no longer - for this is not one of those.) Sure, I write. I write a fair bit more than your average Joe, at least, I'd like to think so. I've written a few poems, and I've been writing a fan-fic for over 2 years now (the end is far from sight, but that should be a post for another night. See, I'm a natural,) and... I fancy myself to be a decent writer.

Which is not the point. Who would I be writing for? Myself? I don't need something so elaborate and impersonal for that! I would much rather scribble in a notebook, one of those Navneet ones that I am quite fond of. So I would be writing for others, the public?

Erm... I'm not exactly a giving kind of a person (now there's something you didn't know!), so the idea of writing for the public doesn't really appeal to me. Hell, I don't think so highly of myself to believe that I would actually be contributing to the world by starting this blog. Nope, even I don't.

So why in the world am I writing a blog? I try not to do 'why not's. I guess the final deciding point is that I'm bored. And I have nothing better to do. Great incentive for you lot to read this, huh?

I dunno, I kinda like assuming that I am addressing some large populace... and I think I'll continue to do that. I'm escapist, you see. Love fantasies.

As to what I will be writing in this blog? I have no clue, none whatsoever.

Also, don't ask me why I named the blog so, again, I have no clue, none whatsoever. Whatever I could say now would be nothing but post-justification.