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I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shatter
by monero-xmr 4y ago
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- xwowsersx 4y agoOne of my favorite poems. In my language arts class in high school we could memorize poems and recite them to our teacher for up to 0.3 added to our GPA. This was one of them.
- typon 4y agoThis should be framed in the the office or every CEO. Although the point of the poem is the inevitability - maybe a good reminder nonetheless.
- yamtaddle 4y agoMemento mori but for businesses.
- dweekly 4y agoI like that for years (and maybe it's still there) the back of the Facebook logo sign out front was a molding and decrepit Sun Microsystems logo. It was there on purpose as a reminder that regardless of how many brilliant engineers you hire, death awaits you when complacency arrives. And if you paid attention you could find little Sun logos still lingering around the MPK campus...
- dreamcompiler 4y agoThe poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
- dxbydt 4y agoFirst time I watched Emperor's Club, I was like hey isn't this just Ozymandias ? It turned out that's a very common confusion, mined by English highschool teachers https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=102282&ViewID=e180f8c2-82f8-444d-a6f1-6f1739eda3f2&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=159733&PageID=64887 https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&... Anyway, I just chimed in to say if you really want to understand that poem, Emperor's Club is a must-watch. I still can't believe they made a whole 2 hour commercial Hollywood feature film centered around that poem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_Club
- shagie 4y agoElsethread I was reminded of one of my favorite collection of essays on software development. The last post in its collection is titled "Ozymandias" http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234 I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: a stack of printouts, tall as any man, that in decaying boxes had been stowed. Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. Abandoned in the blackness to erode, what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. The language is unused in this late year. The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, a line of code and then these words appear: # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE The code beside persisting to the last— as permanent as aught upon this sphere— while overhead, a vacant moon flies past. https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.agc#L179 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...