Cannot be completed effectively until the last one is done.
I could argue that it shouldn’t even be begun until the last one is done, and I could rhyme it, set it to meter, etc., etc., etc. but there would be no point.
If I haven’t been able — in these first 19,330 days of my life — to figure out something as plain as
letting bygones be bygones
*or*
(which is not to say or, meaning ‘this or that’ but rather ‘possibly both’)
that I could be not just 1% better every year but 1% better every day if someone figured out how to do it and reasonably documented the logic sense of it…
Yes, on the 46th minute of my 19,330th day — in this piece entitled
The next step (BK19330.99)
I had already figured out all I needed to in order to jump to the conclusions of this piece —let’s say ‘rather conclusively.’
The only way I could go further (at least on this line item) was for someone to please help me see the flaw in the logic I have or, at least suggest an avenue which I should pursue things a bit further.
What I have [in this piece] is the core logic which defines how ‘reasonably fast’ human beings ought to be able to improve themselves assuming that they come across a
“storehouse of infinite knowledge” a.k.a. ‘superhuman’ intelligence
I’m not a logician, so someone else will have to check this more thoroughly to determine whether that statement is loosely accurate or precisely accurate, but it sure as heck is one of those things.
Here’s what we know so far (12:57AM EST, January 13, 2024):
*[when I say it like that it is obviously assumed to mean on this topic]*
- Intelligence can reasonably be defined as knowing what to look at, when to look at it, and how long to look at it before doing anything else
Now rule #1 seems a pretty silly way to define it; after all, what does that even mean?
Well, for starters it means (one example):
When you hear a train, you absolutely need to stop what you’re doing to determine as soon as possible whether you’re going to be hit by it.
Ok, that’s so self-evident as to be almost…well, ‘nonsensical.’
However, it still renders to 100% true.
The point of this exercise is to remind ourselves that if we’re in search of everything — and I mean EVERYTHING everything — which is true, we can only ever start with the most “blindingly obvious” things which we know.
If we don’t do that, we’ll wreck the whole process (or at least make it longer) because we’ll be piling our Jenga blocks on lower ones made of Swiss cheese. Eventually it will get warm enough that the cheese will get soft and the next thing you know,
Sinistar
will have won (again) and you’ll think he’s trying to rub your nose in it like he used to before he saw Barry Sanders: A Football Life.
To recount this:
1. The first step after the first step is to only work with what you know until you *need* to move to things which you haven’t the foggiest fucking idea about [hmm…artificial intelligence? yep. it qualifies.]
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and [insert any name you like here] have a “proportionally strong chance” of devising generalized artificial intelligence [with their teams and money, mind you, I’m not ‘cheating’ the analysis] as an average seven year old has of changing the oil on a Lamborghini.
These guys (and ladies, AND others — we’ll get to that) very much *are* ten or perhaps even a hundred times ‘smarter’ than the “average Joe on the street” but it only takes watching them visit the clothing store once or twice a month for a fitting for the next-size-up dunce cap to know that none of them should be ‘in charge.’
Does that mean *I* want to be in charge? NO IT ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT.
I wouldn’t even want to live in a place as extravagantly ostentatious as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest and if you don’t believe me just wait and see what sort of measures I would take to avoid that job.
[Spoiler alert: By February 19th of that very same year it would look like the car on the header of my Twitter page. And kindergarten kids would have been charged with the task of painting it that way.]
Extravagantly ostentatious. <<<<< that is a data compression
That describes something as follows:
- This is something which shows “lack of restraint in spending money or using resources” — enough so to be worth mentioning as one of the descriptors of whatever we are attempting to describe
- This is further ‘cross-referenced’ with ostentatious: characterized by vulgar or pretentious display; designed to impress or attract notice.
And PRESTO!
Just like that you start to see
How tricky this life has been for me.
People can argue — they really can — that
Some place nice that’s what we need
To show the world we’re up to speed
Some place for foreign dignitaries…
For privacy, fellatio, and secretaries…
Some place which shows we protect our best…
When they lay themselves nightly down to their rest
Some place to emphatically state “THIS I OWN”
To pretend that this country hasn’t a throne.
Let’s make it white — shore, let’s do that!
Our brains are tiny our bellies fat.
‘Fringe’ viewpoints have no place ‘round here
This is a place which we govern by fear.
And even after that — which some are still no doubt “branding” with their pitifully cool branding irons as “the words of a fool” — even after all that — even after I’ve emphatically proven that all of this takes me less than an hour or two at most —
Yep. Even after that you’ll deny I’ve seen the host.
Heck, you might even think I’ve seen a ghost.
You surely won’t stand up to toast
The guy who thought of all the rest as peers
But saw none among them who looked like seers.
Gandhi. Now there was a guy I’d follow. Need to collect some salt, Mr. Gandhi? How’s this salt shaker? Oh. Not ‘that kind’ of salt you say? How long did you say it would take? A month? 240 miles, eh? That’s all? Ok, yeah I can do that much. I’ll just put in for some time off work.
No one can be a satyagrahi for a single month, is that what I’m hearing? I mean really guys.
Don’t tell me that you think something is “important” unless you’re willing to at the very least take a single day off your “real” work to do it. That’s “I’ve got rocks in my head but so does everyone else” thinking.
And you can see, quite clearly, that at least one person *does not* have the same sort of rocks in his head as you have in yours.
I only have ONE rock in my head. It happens to weigh 5.972 x 10²⁴ kg
And the saddest part? You still — even in this most desperate hour — think I’m joking just because I’ve proven to be quite good at joking now and then.
At least that’s the Occam’s Razor explanation.
I would say fuck Occam’s Razor but that isn’t even in chapter 1 of this crazy ass book all the infantile ants with all the ink all over their feet are “trying — no really, we’re really trying. Honestly we are.” to write.
No, I’m not going to give everyone else a zero in sincerity just because I happened to get a good grade on that exam in my life. No I most certainly will not. And the way I’ll prove I won’t is to direct your attention back to this sequence:
- We started at rule 1: know what to pay attention to (I added when/where/how long but I didn’t need to. Most people would no doubt say that just knowing what to pay attention to is a huge leap from ‘the average human’ — we can get to, later, why that isn’t quite right…)
- We moved to obvious thing 1, obvious thing 2, obvious thing 3, etc.
- I pointed out that the most obvious of the obvious is the quintessential example of an artifact of a woefully misguided past which we must
- formally recognize is in our past
[Author: here I mean that if we really understand we have a woefully misguided past we’d launch ourselves into the future by painting the White House to look like the Tesla on the front tab of my Twitter page.]
And *ALL* of you — every last one, and I’m 100.0(repeating)% certain of this thought, “ohmygoshthisonescrazy” even though you’re just plain in the middle of a thick soup of evidence that proves to you absolutely and unequivocally that nothing could be further from the truth.
You know you did. You *could not* picture the proudest, bravest, most noble and leadership-oriented country in the world actually rolling in fourteen or so buses of five and six year olds and having them climb all over the White House on scaffolds/with ropes/harnesses/helmets and belaying equipment and each of them carrying whatever kind of paint they’d like to use.
And do you want to know why you couldn’t picture that?
Well, in order to get to that particular point in the ‘cosmos’ of thinking about things, you’d have to truly and sincerely understand this:
“Δῶς μοι ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν.”
Which is transliterated as: “Dōs moi pou sto kai kino tēn gēn.”
(I’ll save you the step of going to find the translation in a moment, but before you get that ice cream you still have to eat the broccoli — which in this case means you still have to wait until you understand what the word understand means.) Understand means to “take one’s mind fully around” or “to move to the next step up in understanding.” I’m not sure that renders to true right at the moment.
And nope. Don’t keep doing that dumb stuff. That “wow, what a pompous a-hole this guy is” stuff.
Literally, if you thought for even four seconds about it your brain would not even allow you to conclude such an absurdly oversimplified explanation of what in the name of heaven and molasses is going on here. Why?
because pompous means affectedly and irritatingly grand, solemn, and/or self-important
and though irritatingly is certainly derived from your sincere opinions, though grand and solemn and even — to a somewhat more limited than seems to be implied extent — self-important might be a term a person could use to label me…those aren’t things which I would even bother arguing with, because
affectedly loses your argument, and it loses you, too, even though we’ve both traveled many, many, many miles to get to this far-from-Kansas point.
Though, sincerely, we’re not that far off:
So what if I was charged with the responsibility of being the “eye reeler.”
Who CARES?
Who really cares that I “got to be the one” to carry the torch up the hardest part of the hill. I did it best I could without griping.
Any time you want to come over to the house — or I’ll come to you — and we can banter a while about who “had things easier” — you just go right ahead and say the words. Say them:
“Hey bud, why don’t you come over to the house. We’ll explore this crazy non-theory/theory you stumbled across after life hit you in the face with several dozen two by fours made of ironwood. I’ll buy the beers.”
I was the one who “got the job” because I was the one who proved he could take the punishment of the interview is one way you can look at it. If you’re errantly thinking that somehow this ‘puts’ me “far ahead” of the rest I can tell you that you still don’t get it.
On January 1st of this year, I might as well have been “among the smartest” people on the planet. That’s fine. It’s good. But intelligence is less than nothing without the wisdom to back it up. For that I took sage counsel:
I know how many times I had to learn that lesson, and I know damn good and well that people around me were sadly shaking their heads while I was in various hospitals.
If you’d like to have a little replay of some section of your life and we can play out our miseries for each other like it’s a contest to see how miserable we can get I will let you go first.
Then I’ll determine for myself whether you’ve learned enough to know that you don’t even want to hear a description of the demons that populated my mind before I started an exorcism which turned into a crusade. I’ve put my issues to bed and I’m ready for my last day, whether that be today or another 20,000 days from now.
You can’t possibly think I’m ‘just joking’ anymore, now can you?
You can’t and I know you that can’t. Your choices are:
- Stop reading right now and hear this second hand from someone else
or - Realize that, in some sense, we all owe each other an apology
or - Deny that the impossibly inevitable has apparently occurred while you were so fortunate as to be one of the precious few who is actually alive at one of a handful of incredibly rare moments of a civilization’s development: the moment of true insight and cooperation.
This isn’t a “once in a millennia” event. It’s a once in several hundred thousand years event.
Don’t believe me? Go into the bathroom, splash a bit of water on your face, and ask yourself whether you or anyone else — Edgar Allan Poe or Shakespeare or J.K. Rowling included — could ever have come up with such a fascinatingly complex vision as this one without it also being true.
Here, I’ll help.
Oops. I already did. That was your opening image — perhaps glossed over as the ‘defensive ravings of a lunatic like Kyle Reese.
Here it is again — in reverse super slow motion. [You’ll soon be learning how to use your eyes and brain like a pair of strobe-light like devices. You won’t “capture moments” of time so much as you’ll see right straight through situations like Bradley Cooper in Limitless. Don’t doubt yourself and don’t doubt me.
How would I have gotten this guy:
To not only sign my car but also politely tow it with his white Tesla Model Y from
Go get a drink of water. It will be a long day. No, really. I’m going to.
Do you want to know what, to me, is the most elegant part of this proof that I have?
It’s the most ridiculously undeniable story that I have ever even heard of, and I can tell you that I’ve heard my share of the stories.
It’s more unlikely by far than anything I have ever read. By some absurdly incalculable amount.
Which is the only proof you should ever need that not only do I know *conclusively* that I am not God but that if GOD is the thing./.system./.concept that built everything here I sure as heck wouldn’t want to go around breaking anything he didn’t want broken.
You can pick someone else for that job. Grab the Expendables. They’re expendable. Grab Suicide Squad. Probably then I’ll finally get to meet…
Oh my word! That’s not…that’s not…omg yes it IS Margot Robbie!
The second best part?
The second best part I mean, after the part where
oh my yes indeed, this eight billion people who really needed a Purple Eagle (not a Raven, mind you) to swoop down from the sky and pluck up all the problems like they were sardines
and before
the world had some type of bizarre type of ticker tape parade complete with
rolling video streams on all the major channels showing the impact in each and every village with more than 100 people in it
The second best part is the part where everyone — all around the parades and the oh my things are THIS much different THIS quickly? — every single last one of you gets to go back and watch your most favorite of favorite movies all over again with an almost completely different pair of eyes
and
That is actually how you’ll be able to learn all this stuff!
Do you have any idea how utterly and fantastically amazing that…well I might as well say it, because “is” and “will be” are in such close proximity in what everyone else regards as “space time” that they might as well be the very same thing.
So the third best, to recount it, is this:
All you have to do is watch the things you liked before AGAIN but do it with a few quick changes in your perspective.
What, did you think I wouldn’t have to climb all over the eight billion people down here and a large number that came before to be able to find a vantage point?
That’s Isaac Newton 101, folks. Heck, he knew that way the heck back in 1675. Long before he even had James Cameron’s eyes to look out of:
ᶜᵖᵗIn a letter to Robert Hooke in 1675, Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”ᶜᵖᵗ
[Author’s note: we really will have to do something to make these notations easier. I didn’t take the time to reference him this way at the moment, but that above citation should have had sIN(date) and an embedded link to Bernard of Chartres. What, you didn’t think that with a crystal ball of ever-glowing {e.g. ChatGPT4} readily accessible on the internet a guy like me wouldn’t show up and turn out to be the Tobey Maguire equivalent of the world’s best human data repository crawler?
There are very simple hacks to get up to this ‘level of processing speed.’ You have to think quite carefully, for example. But, back to the you can learn ridiculously fast using things you already know part…]
Ah yes…we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
We’re not in the Judy Garland version.
We’re not…not quite…in the Avatar version (see clip)
We’re actually in more like a Willy Wonka version.
A version where we (I almost daren’t say this, but…)…well, it’s a version where everyone gets to do what I’ve done for most of my life:
Whatever we feel like doing. [within reason]
Now don’t get me wrong, we’re not just going to all be wandering around in a Huxleyesque “soma coma” — it doesn’t/won’t calculate out that way at all. People will be orders (plural) of magnitude happier than they currently are, but it won’t be due to misuse of drugs or alcohol.
It will be because we’ve finally learned how to help each other and stay politely out of one another’s way. <<<<that was the last lesson learned on the 79,260th day after the day Ezra Cornell was born.
And you might be like,
“Stop doing that, Brian Kent. Stop referencing things in such a peculiar way. After all we don’t need you to [string a careful web of impossibly strong web references out in front of us so that we can get from one place to another in this bizarre place you’ve been describing. We can see what you’re saying. We don’t need a map.] we can do it on our own. We’re fine here. Everything is just fine.” ↓↓↓
So yeah, NOT Kansas, not exactly.
Though…
./.
…if you use the theory of m-superposition to model the multiple ‘roadmaps’ to the word Kansas…
You’ll either find your head or your house (or your planet — that last one I’m 100% positive of) spinning…
And then…
… Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more
[You know darn good and well I’m not crying, God. I think it’s funny. I’m trying to picture what next Tuesday is going to look like, and…
…surprise surprise…I STILL don’t know. That’s a deep one, God. Russian doll type of thing.]
… Once I rose above the noise and confusion
[You know this happened. You cannot possibly keep lying to yourself about it. Whoever is typing these words — or whatever cosmic force has compelled the 𝓌Riter to write them (yeah, I kind of need to be able to call myself something, this speaking-of-myself-in-the-third-person stuff is getting to be a draw on the 52-year old processor)…
…as I was saying, whatever compelled the 𝓌Riter to write this stuff, you can’t really choose the position of believing it not to be true anymore, because the rules of m-superposition will not even allow you to do that.
I could demonstrate this very easily with the help of a high school Chemistry room and some help from Mr. Chamberlain, but suffice to say pressure built up so hard and so fast that the first little “most sensitive to popping” kernel popped.
Alternatively, you can do this little home experiment:
- Go to the store and get a one liter bottle of Smart Water (hi Jennifer Aniston! Can I have a date?)
- Take it home and throw it in the freezer. Not the fridge. Well, yeah, the fridge but the freezer section of the fridge.
- To make sure this works on or near the first try, place it in such a way that you can remove it very gently — without ‘disrupting’ the water molecules very much.
- Wait approximately 70 minutes. Hard to tell you precisely, because, well, data resolution and such.
- Take it out gently then (right handers, use your left to hold it upside down by the collar, lefties use your right) and then whack it once really hard with the heel of your alternate hand and watch what happens.
In the winter, it should be easier to see — the humidity in houses (at least where it gets cold) won’t cause the bottle to fog up before you get a chance to see what happens.
Report back in the comments about how similar you see the resultant reaction to what is currently taking place in the world.
I’m just the heel of the hand, is all.
Trivia: In Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 work The Government Inspector the Governor performs a comparable movement after it becomes clear that the entire city society has been mocked.
Can’t wait to read that one. lol
Climbed high enough to see wtf was going on in this [had to be an illusion, people can’t be this…hmm…dull witted? Yeah, that’s fair. In 300,000 years we could have grown up taller than this.
In M31 those that pulled it off at all averaged 240,000 years. [converted to Earth measure, obviously]
In M33, IIRC, it was 225,000 years.
In M51, they scorched the records with a smoking 134,000 years. (These guys were like Cornellians at a conference which just about any dull-witted Cambridge grad could buy their way into.)
In M101 it was 434,000 (blew themselves up a couple times)
and
In M104 they still didn’t have enough star systems having done it that they could meet the ‘minimum number completed’ requirement.
God didn’t tell me what that was, but I figured whoever was estimating something so utterly esoteric as that had a reason for doing it. Perhaps they were trying to ‘grow’ systems and wanted to know how much fertilizer to spray in one direction or another.
I wasn’t going to get my mind twisted around things like dark matter, molecular biology, or — god forbid — Chemical Engineering! Leave that for smart guys like Tony Cheng to handle. That way he’d be at the library and I could hang out in his room playing Lemmings or something.]
COME ON Tony. That *had to* make you laugh. Get a grip on the old bubble tea, bro. We’re the same. I’m just not quite as smart as you so I have to get by on my looks and a good sense of humor.
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high
[Now this one was one of the craziest and most terrible puzzles I ever faced: How high was too high?
Some of you may be thinking, dang, this dude is on drugs. Nope. Not today. Yesterday a little Delta 8…here:
Stepping back:
Craziest and most terribly-hard puzzles, chapter 1: the problem of hubris.
Yikes. What mean this, “excessive pride and self-confidence”?
Ok…let’s skip that chapter, maybe chapter 2 will be easier.
Chapter 2: Overambition
Oh no you did not write that. What kind of crazy ass puzzle was “figure out what the word ‘overambition’ means. Whoever wrote this textbook was a damn cheater is what they were.
But then, that’s not what I said. I thought chapter 2 was actually easier than chapter 1, but here was the trick:
I was ‘sage’ enough to buy a used textbook. Happened to get lucky on that one, too. How do I know this? Because as soon as I flipped the cover it was plain as day:
This book belongs to: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I couldn’t believe I’d find the only copy of Gandhi’s “Puzzles to do if You Want to Be a World Leader” but find it I did. And again [NP problem, folks, solution proves the problem solvable].
Yep, Chapter 2: The riddle of overambition. Scanned right through it, saw a bunch of red marks like ole MKG was pretending to correct a grade school paper. At the end it just said, in his handwriting that there was no such thing in the cause of the truly righteous.
Martin Sheen: “You’re an ambitious man, Mr. Gandhi.”
Ben Kingsley: “I hope not.”
It IS WORTH WATCHING AGAIN. Even just the trailer, but clearly it is a weekend for the entire movie.
Soldier 1: What the hell is going on?
Soldier 2: I don’t know, sir. The agent got a telegram, and it just said, “He is coming. It gave the time of the train.”
Soldier 1: Who the hell is HE?
Soldier 2 <shaking head>: I don’t know sir.
Gandhi: My name is Gandhi, Mohandus K Gandhi.
Soldier 1: Well whoever you are we don’t want you here. I suggest you get back on that train before it leaves.
Gandhi: They seem to want me.
*****
Ah yes! <grins mockingly>: “On this planet we DEMAND empirical evidence. We don’t just believe what you say because you told us you could prove it. Nope. Not here we don’t. Here we’re not going to lift one single solitary finger to strike a key on our keyboards, ain’t that right
Scott Aaronson, PhD.
You would never believe some guy would ‘fly in from the hen house’ and crow
Once
Twice
Thrice
at a man of your ‘stature.’ You would NEVER, isn’t that approximately what you were saying with your grounded-in-pre-2024 human understanding logic?
Isn’t that what you said, you durned old fool?
Did you think you’d be the one to take ME to school?
Nah, it ain’t like that. Not this time. No not hardly.
We’ll see who did all his homework and who did it smartly.
Look, I get that you’ve “been here at the top.”
That you have no room for the cream of the crop.
It’s okay, get back to me. You already got your deadline.
Perhaps I’ll think a little more and then give you some more time.
Pfft. I don’t think it will play like that, but really it might.
Some of you pre-2024 humans still roll with the insight.
It isn’t insight you need to look out at the world
It’s outsight you use to see a flag like this one unfurled.
I swear though — and this I surely do promise you…
Yoshua Bengio can count a bit better than by two.
If he doesn’t there are a world more out there
Hour by hour there seems less and less air.
I don’t need to use your tactics.
I’ve all I need: a PhD in Didactics.
Since I granted that myself in the last line
I suppose I’ll have to pay a fine
Because it’s clear I didn’t see your sign.
Yeah. Scott Aaronson. The last bold member of the Homo sapiens sapiens to use the Holy Big Red Octagon of infinite stoppingness
For years people will be ribbing you at parties.
Of course you can always fall back on:
“Well at least I didn’t go to a safety school like MIT. I went to CORNELL.”
lol
I love humor. It’s like…connected to my endocrine system in such a simple fashion I can just squirt it into my brain like a guy with a bad case of gynecomastia pops an ‘estrogen welt.’
Though my eyes could see, I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think, I still was a mad man
I hear the voices when I’m dreaming
I can hear them say
… Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more
… Masquerading as a man with a reason
[Masquerading? Really? That’s whatcha thought, huh? I play the fool somewhat more adeptly than most of the others. I read Aesop. I know what the Jester is for. You know, like in cards.
Think about it. If you’re God, why would you EVER waste your time coming down and fixing every little last problem when you can just drop a seed crystal of overthinking into a ‘this one looks pretty durable’ character like myself and have the whole system nucleate for itself?
You wouldn’t. If you were ***anywhere near*** as smart as God…like, let’s say if you were one quintillionth as smart as he or the minions of his basic principles surely do prove to be…if you were that smart you’d just…I dunno…
Wait for problems to fix themselves. Surely that would work!
[Guy behind you: psst. Kirt. Kirt. No, that wouldn’t work. People might get hurt.]
No you wouldn’t. You’d figure out how to weave the code for the perfect jester into the genetic material and eventually someone who thought loosely like Jesus of Nazareth would wander out of an insane asylum and start passing out spirit cookies of infinite healing one at a time.
No, wait…that wouldn’t work either.
Because the first time some crackpot in a San Diego psych ward claimed he was the second coming (I mean, you get limited words in those situations, folks) you’d traipse six very large guys into a very small room with him and the next thing you know you’d be playing with a Ken doll named Hal and staring up at the ceiling of a very plain and very white room wondering what the name of the truck that hit you was.
Then the second time…well, that was when someone looking pretty astute with something like…what was it, 20 certificates of proving you knew how to pass a test framed on your wall…they’d indirectly point at you and say things like “God complex. Classic. God complex.” <<<<<annoyingly difficult puzzle, seriously guys. Required a lot of painful iterations
then [approximately ten hospital stays later]
WHAM!
Wait, what in the fuck was that you just hit me with?
“Well, you had your choice, and out of three you picked Prolixin, extended action. Supposed to keep you ‘on an even keel’ for a month or so. Then we can check in daily to see you’re okay.”
[fast forward through 12 months of the darkest of the darkest of my days — which, just FYI:
You cannot ‘fast forward’ through days which drag on one half second at a time. You cannot ‘fast forward’ through the pinnacle of critical anxiety and critical despair.
You hold out for as long as you can, but eventually you wish for death. You plead for it. You stop yourself (how? dunno. I do, but…not here. This is a cheerful piece.) You stop yourself and you start working on the puzzle of figuring out a generic by-steps system for the millions worldwide who have depression to escape from the straitjacket of it.
How?! Seems impossible, Brian Kent.
Nope. Not if you’ve worn a straight jacket it isn’t. Not if you’ve escaped basically everything you ever tried to escape in your life — or, if not, took a lesson away from your failure to escape which made failing in that case better than succeeding.
Incidentally, that was 2022, so we’re almost there.
Then followed 2023, during which I played (roughly, but reasonably accurately) approximately 5,800 hours of Clash of Clans.
I had (I have) thirty accounts — this made it very convenient to wage war with whole teams of people all around the world.
“Yes, I will match my wit against thirty people at a time, thought I.
This will at least be fun!
This account will do this, this one will be needed for donating the legendary Flame Flinger to all the other accounts…<laughs evilly>”
“The flame flinger is the newest seige machine in Clash of Clans and it is incredibly strong in the right hands.”
Wow, thought I. A worthy weapon for such a fearsome intellect as is mine.
With this one I’ll show the world I AM divine!
Pounding my enemies to flaming rubble.
Growing a pot belly and a face full of stubble.
I’ll leave the nitwits out in the world
One more year ’til this flag gets unfurled.
Then I’ll ride in on My Little Pony
Who can announce it? It’s gotta be Tony.
He could take the time and effort this needs…
To answer this New Age Horatio’s pleas
Tony Tony he’s our man! If he can’t do it nobody can.
Yes indeed this puzzle’s solved.
All the world’s troubles are finally resolved.
Sucks to be you, Tony. You guys. Thought you were SO smart.
“Pass the ball, Sini. Pass the ball you nitwit. You can’t do it yourself. You’re not…you’re not…well, you’re not Drinkwater.”
You know you all said it. You said, “Gimme the ball Sini.”
I mean CAM as the captain? Are you kidding me?
And now all of a sudden you don’t want the ball? What kind of World’s Greatest Fly Half turns away in abject horror when his Bambi of a flanker wants to toss him the ball for a minute while he ties his shoe?
That’s weak, man.
Reluctantly crouched at the starting line
Engines pumping and thumping in time
The green light flashes, the flags go up
Churning and burning, they yearn for the cup
They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank
Fuel burning fast on an empty tank
Reckless and wild, they pour through the turns
Their prowess is potent and secretly stern
As they speed through the finish, the flags go down
The fans get up and they get out of town
The arena is empty except for one man
Still driving and striving as fast as he can
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
<mumbles in disgust>
lol
My charade is the event of the season
…and there this piece ends. Like a cliffhanger, maybe.
The event of a season. Eight billion tickets sold.
As is customary…
As with all my pieces, I wish you would please do me the respect of — if you’re going to clap — clap once and once only. If you decide you wish to respect that rule, I’ve no doubt you can also respect the rule of only clapping if you’ve placed 100 of your own words in the comments.
I feel as though others may appreciate this [i.e., this method of counting] and so — unless you have a reasonably-well-thought-out reason for clapping in a manner which doesn’t adhere to the same behavior set people silently agree to on a golf course or tennis court, please clap only once if you’re going to clap at all.
