Tag: geoguessr

The monks are the monks

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More from Geoguessr, in which I found myself dropped in Thailand somewhere near the Myanmar border, and close to a UNESCO World Heritage Site (there was a sign with the logo on).
Not too great on the guess, sadly – 131km away – but my curiosity was piqued and I ended I revisiting the place after the game to have a look at another sign which was nearby:

Turns out that I couldn’t find out much about it, because blue signs with white writing on are very popular in Thailand. (Aside from being able to recognise the Thai language, it’s actually a good way of working out that you’re in Thailand.)

Still, maybe using Google Translate would assist me in trying to learn a bit more about the place:

Well, this suddenly made things a lot clearer.

I don’t think that I’m assuming too much when I say that we all know that the monks are the monks, but equally, we often have doubts as to whether that goes deep enough in ascertaining what the monks actually are. Therefore, logically, any clarification of their actual full status is always going to be helpful.
And what I – and many others, I would guess – would have never imagined, is that the monks are the monks – and the the monks are the monks.

It’s that sort of attention to detail that Thailand is known for, and I’m very glad that I took that time to go back and have another look at this. Otherwise, I would only have got as far as thinking that the monks are the monks, whereas quite obviously (now, at least, lol!) the monks are the monks and the monks are the monks.

I think we’ve all learned something here today.

Tent camping in Australia

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If Geoguessr was an Olympic sport, I’d be all over it. I already enjoy watching the regional qualifying for the upcoming World Cup. If you have a few minutes, take a look at some of these games. The skill level is right up there with anything it would take to be an Olympian. Incredible stuff.

But Geoguessr isn’t an Olympic sport. So I’m watching handball instead.
France 22-27 Norway. Thanks for asking.

But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been playing Geoguessr.
And today, I got dropped here:

Easy for you to say.

Actually, easier for everyone to say when you realise that Google Maps has maybe added an extra syllable again. But why hasn’t it added anything to the second line.

I’m confused.

Anyway, it’s up in the Northern Territory of Australia, in case you were wondering. I came pretty close from the name (whatever that is), and the vegetation: just 22km away.

The two main things to do there, according to their website, are “birdwatching and croc spotting”.
And not swimming, presumably.

Crazy name. Crazy place.

Legless

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A busy one ahead today – look out for IG updates during the day – but at least I got my blog post and daily Geoguessr challenge done.

Normal Geoguessr: can you find the location?

Today’s Geoguessr: can you find this lady’s legs?

Poor timing to turn up at this Chinese tourist spot this day.

Which ruined it more: the weather or the building work, I wonder?

Hopeless

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It’s been a weekend filled with local violence, the occasional threat against Cape Town schoolchildren, more of the usual disinformation and misinformation and more of the usual hyperbole and histrionics.

Unsurprisingly, social media has been a particularly unpleasant place to be, with a complete lack of tolerance throughout, and no willingness or effort to listen to anything that anyone on “the other side” has to say.
Ebola has nothing on the replies and threads that follow just about any article of comment on the situation in Israel and Gaza.

If there were such a thing as Biohazard Level 5, this would be it.

Reasonably, I wanted away from real life for a few minutes. I thought that I would find solace in the Daily Challenge on Geoguessr. And indeed, I seemed to have found it when I was unceremoniously – but happily – dumped in some semi-rural backwater in Pennsylvania. Peace. Tranquility. Half a world away from all those problems.

And then I turned myself around and found a glorious metaphor for the world at the moment:

Could it have been put any better? Sadly not.

Anyway, once we were done with that, I was popped into a forest in South East Latvia, which was much less telling about the general worldwide state of things.

And thus, much nicer.

Not a nerd. Well, not that much of a nerd.

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Yeah. Halfway through the title, I realised that my opening line was going to be “Yes, I play Geoguessr…”, and that is quite a nerdy thing to do. So I had to add the second bit.
To be fair, I was going to follow it up with a “but”, but actually, it’s still quite a nerdy thing to do.

Not that I have a problem with that.

Nor do I have a problem with what follows, but it does rather put my nerdiness in perspective.

You see, I might be nerdy, but there are levels to nerdiness. In this case, there’s playing the game, there’s knowing some of the vagaries and giveaways for identifying which country you are in, there’s being aware that the roadside bollards might be one of those vagaries (you’ll find me here); then there’s identifying each design of each roadside bollard and assigning them a country, and finally(?) there’s knocking up vector images of each of the most common bollards for each country, making a 14-page long document and sharing it on Reddit.

No matter how much I play, and no matter how much I want to learn and win, I think it’s unlikely that I will ever take it to that level.

Although you never say never.