About retarded stuff as well as being read by too many readers

First, the retarded stuff.

I was like, walking back from my old school today, when I had a conversation with somebody that went something like this:

Wait... legends first.

Legend
--------
Me: Well... me speaking
**: comment tags
B: The other person in the conversation... Let's just stick at Ben shall we... I prefer not to be killed.

*The all important question!*
Me: How much does a potato cost?
B: Less than a toma(e)to *where (e) indicates pronunciation, important later*
Me: How much does a toma(h)to cost? *Bad pronounciation, really (*typo intended*) *
B: More than a potato.
*Persistence!*
Me: So how much does a potato cost?
B: More than a toma(h)to.
*???*
Me: So what's the difference between a toma(e)to and a toma(h)to?
B: Price.

That was the retarded part. It was supposed to serve as an analogy of sorts, or as an intro to the rest of my blogpost, but it's like... too long, and retarded, and hard to use as a model for the rest of my blogpost.

Ok, so I was informed of this disturbing news: that I initiated a style of blogpost called time-constrained posting, where one day I got so bored I decided to type 1000 word in like 20 minutes. This has unfortunately caught on (the HORROR), and I would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to the world in general. I will also start to advocate for less people reading my blog, as well as taking every single idea with a mountain of salt (pinch of salt might not work :( ).

So what strategies should I employ to keep people of my pseudo-semi-demi-quasi-hidden blog? If you do have strong opinions about this subject, please e-mail any feedback to haveyouhadyourpenquintoday@gmail.com. Please also do remember to buy a kilogram of salt before sending the email. I hereby thank all you readers for your anti-cooperation. Now shoo and never come back again.

Premoving

Yes, this blogpost was inspired by chess.com. And the brilliant idea of play 1 0 games.

So firstly, for those who don't know, 1 0 games means each person gets 1 minute at the start, and per move, he gets 0 seconds increment. In short, the player has to make about 40 moves in one minute. How fun.

The problem is then not how to get into a winning position (just think for 5 seconds a move and you'll thrash... for a while, and then you get into a horrible mess of time trouble), but rather how to get into a winning position fast, and how to win even faster from there.

It sounds like nonsense, but the fact is you can win a Queen+pawns versus approximately equal number of pawns endgame in about 10 seconds usually. (The trick is promoting 2 queens and checking until your opponent cries... and usually times out). So that is joyful to the 1 0 player.

To make the spam even more enjoyable, there is something called premove (terminology from a certain ELO rated 2000+- player) on chess.com. This means that you are allowed to make a move before your opponent makes him, and effectively takes 0 seconds to move, but the drawback is that it sometimes results in you doing stupid stuff. Eg. You have a brilliant tactic where you win a knight. You expect your opponent to minimise losses and play something like Nxh5. Hence, you set your promove to Bxh5. And then he brilliantly sacrifices a queen with something like Qa4. And the premove triggers. And instead your queen hangs.

However, premoves are epically important, like when you're 1 queen 2 rooks, 3 bishops, 4 knights up and have 1 second left (hey its possible!). A person not accustomed to premoves may randomly check about 3 times and run out of time. What a sad way to lose a game.

This is where premove skills come in. And to improve on premoving skills... you guessed it. Premoving puzzles!

I must admit, I totally fail at puzzle creation, but try to bear with me. I try to keep the blogpost interesting, not the puzzles (once again, I admit I fail at creating puzzles). So off to explain the rules.

1) You must move before your opponent's move finishes. Which means you must play a move such that no matter what he does, your move will be winning.
2) You know all of your opponents moves up to 1 move before. Eg.:

e4 ? premove: d4

Then it turns out he played e5. The server recognises you premoved and moves d4 for you. Now the situation becomes
e4 e5 d4 ? Premove: enter your move here.

My point? That you know your opponent's last move at every instance. Hence, a puzzle may have more than one line (but bah! I'm not that skillful).

3) Special puzzles may have special rules. Especially one that says something like: time for one move

What does that mean? It means for example you have 1 move of moving time, which you can use anywhere to RESPOND to your opponent's moves. This also happens when your condition move fails. eg:

1. e4 ? Premove: e5

and your opponent plays e5. Tada! Illegal move. You just wasted your one move of time.

So let's not randomly delay and move on to our first puzzle: a generic endgame: queen+king vs king.

Puzzle 2:

XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXKX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXP
PXXXKXXX
XXXXXXXX

cyan to move and win (is that called cyan?)

Puzzle 3:

RNBXXBXR
PPPRX XPP
XXXXPXKX
XBXXXXXX
XXXXXXPX
XXNPXNXP
PPPXXPXX
XXBKXXXR

cyan to move and win (I'm hoping this works)

Edit: Blah! It doesn't at all. I fail.

The long essay spamming method

This method, which I propose to spam an essay in an as short as possible span of time, is fully and totally created by me, while writing this long and useless essay, so take whatever advice here with a pinch of pepperoni pizza. Or some substitue that tastes roughly as nice.

This blogpost was written on notepad, and I have absolutely no idea how long/short it is at the moment, but I do plan to finish with this in 20 minutes, which means by 9:33 on my computer's clock time.

Next, on to a bit of history on this seemingly totally random topic, with actually a bit of cause behind it, hence it is not totally random. Basically, there was a piece of homework-like assignment thing that we were given, and we had to write a reflection on the common tests, and I wrote mine in about 5 minutes, and in total it contained about 150 words (144 to be exact, but I'm spamming). Next, my friend S-- asked me to help him print his reflections, and thinking that it might be as short as mine, I heartily agreed.

This is not a blogpost to complain about how much ink was wasted printing his reflections.

This blogpost, though, is inspired by his spamming ability, and after reading through his 1.6 thousand words of not really a lot of content, I decided to see what nonsense I can write (in the longest possible way, so as to be mildly convincing) about the topic of spamming a lot of words.

Firstly, there is the aim that we have to define. Obviously, if we have a lot of content (like topic=world and whatever happens today in this world), there will be a lot to write on (if you are really that desperate for words). In fact, if I were to type a report on my life today, 3000 words ought not to be a big problem apart from getting bored. Hence, there is actually a more refined aim of getting a good word to content ratio. This roughly means: more content, more words; less content, less words.

Hence, we will use this blogpost of limited content. The content was created while walking home from the MRT which is like a 5 minute walk away.

That is really not a lot of content (mind is dead from chessing for 4 hours straight today). Hence, my aim of 1000 words in 20 minutes is really a huge uphill task, and I don't even have a word counter. T_T.

So from here, I believe I have already wasted like 300 words, and for the people who value their time, discretion is advised on whether to read the full blogpost. I think it would be fun to read the first sentence of each paragraph though. I hope those make sense. Roughly.

Firstly, state your point.

Example:

I want to spam long essays about practically nothing.

Next, elaborate:

I have near zero content, but I want it to look like a full-fledged blogpost. Hence, I am wasting words. I can't think of a lot more, but I am still wasting words to prove the point.

Next, give examples:

As you can see from my previous 3 sentences, that was like 20 words out of nothing at all.

Next, elaborate on the examples:

If let say I had not included the past three sentences, would my content be reduced? Clearly not. However, to ensure my goal of making this blogpost exceed 1000 words while conforming to the 20 minute limit I randomly set myself to minimise time wastage, the goal would have been harder without the examples, but from the examples, it can be clearly seen that it is self-evident that... *word waste*... giving random examples which are not the main point will help to increase word count.

Before I forget, (or have I already mentioned)? The methods proposed here were not stolen from S--'s essay, nor modelled from it, but as a general afterthought of his essay being nearly 12 times my length. On with more essay about semirelevant points to the irrelevant and entropic topic.

Next, remember your introduction and conclusion (yes I forgot a good long word-wasting introduction, but now is fine):

On second thoughts, the introduction can be just ripped off the start of this post. It wasted 300 words about background stuff, which is not really relevant.

Next, attempt to keep repeating points. To not look like a complete failure trying to spam 1000 words in 20 minutes (50 wpm... wah!), you should attempt to vary your phrasing. For example, the same phrase "the delicious cake" could be written as "the cake that was delicious", "cake deliciousness", or "caky deliciousness", even though I'm not too sure caky is a word (cakey?).

As you can see, this is extremely important. If you strive not to repeat points, what content you see is what you get. However, the purpose of this essay is not to discuss situations where you have sufficient content to actually write something good, but rather on the other hand, write a good amount of stuff out of random thoughts and unorganised insights. Hence, repetition comes into the show. If you can repeat a 10-word idea 3 times, that is at least 30 words, but in fact, with bad phrasing "the boy who was bald like an eagle", you can extend "a bald boy" to something much more. And the total amount of content doesn't change!

Repetition is important. Even in literature. Have you seen books which use a catch-sentence? Like some random sentence that appears 20 times in different areas in a mere 5 pages of text, and would appear to have stemmed from a lazy author. And those are good literature, unlike this. With sufficiently low expectations, why not just do your own non-well-thought version of repetition and repeat the same idea?

Repetition is important. It allows you to get the point. It even helps readers to remember it without reading the same passage 3 times over. (because it is already repeated 3 times over in one passage; talk about time savings!).

Repetition is important. You got the point, I hope. If not...

Repetition is important...

Repetition is important... why are these words so long to type.

I have 2 minutes left now, actually less, and hence I will conclude this essay-like thing.

You must restate everything in a conclusion, but since I forgot most of it, I believe it can be summarised thus: introduction, where you state your idea briefly, point, where you state your point (try to split them up), examples (where you spam nonsense), elaboration on examples (uh oh), as well as repetition, which transcends the parts.

*20 minutes end, miscelleneous stuff*

I will attempt to read this myself, and then write a reflection post. Could really be useful for GP writing when you have 20 minutes left for an essay (except I can't write that fast. Ah well...)

The glass toilet door

Ok, now that is one totally random sounding title, but in fact, some of the readers which can be expressed in terms of p/q , where p and q are both integers. That might possibly be because this post is based on a real phenomenon that happens right at my house, in the toilet, and is related to nothing less than the glass toilet door (separating the shower and the rest of the toilet).

So this is what happens. The glass door is open. It is stationary (not a self-shutting door). I get extremely angry with the thought of certain examinations which I have just failed (Tis' called mix and match) and hence bang the door near the pivot. The door shakes wildly, and starts inching closer to closing... when I am frantically banging (ok doesn't work if I bang too hard) the door in the opposite direction. This appears to be a violation of physics, but I don't believe so. Can you solve the mystery before you read my theory about why the door flies opposite to the direction of the force(of banging)?

My theory shall be written in like... white?

This has, in fact a little bit to do with statistics :(. My theory is that the door is actually swinging inwards (tendency to close itself), but static friction is just sufficient to stop the motion of the door closing itself. However, when I bang the door near the pivot, this creates a small force acting against the rotation of the door towards closure, but it creates a large vibration for motion on both sides. Hence, you can think of it as a normal distribution with mean less than the initial force from the hinges in the same direction, but with the variance needed to occasionally overcome static friction. Bad explanation, but some people should get what I'm trying to say I guess...

The match against the J

Evaluations: 1 bing is worth 1 bing, the rest of the values are exaggerated by 1000 times. (or more)

"FORMAT WXF
RED ~50141 ; 0 ;;
BLACK ~50142 ; 0 ;;
RESULT 1-0
DATE 2010-01-22 11:41:59
EVENT KGP Game ; 10m+0s
START{
1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3
4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6
7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5
10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1
13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8
16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5
19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3
22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6
25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1
31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5
34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7
37. C8+7 k5.6 38. R5-1 r7.6 39. R5.9 r6.2
40. H9+8 p3+1 41. E5+7 a5+4 42. R9.6 k6+1
43. R6+1 k6.5 44. R6+2 k5+1 45. H8+7 k5.6
46. A5-6 k6-1 47. H7-5 k6.5 48. R6-2 k5-1
49. C8.6 k5.6 50. H5+4 k6+1 51. C6.7 k6-1
52. C7-3 }END"

ok that's the game score. Now for the "analysis".

I will mostly be giving from my point of view.(ie red's point of view)

To understand my first 3 moves, you must first delve deep into my understanding of chess as of now (amid an insanity streak). Bings are awesome (even though they imbalance the game), but there is actually something even more awesome than a bing. If you guessed its the jiang, then you are wrong, because according to standing M theories of chess, the only thing more awesome than a bing is a bing that has crossed the river.

1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3

So let's go back to the game. The first move pushes a bing. The second move pushes another bing. The third move also pushes a bing. On the other hand, my opponent, minusing off the crushingness of losing by 5 whole bings from the very beginning (actually its 5 bings - 5 zus, but not if you consider it to 3 significant figures). Coupled with the 3 advanced bings waiting to cunningly cross the river, I evaluate the position as +0.1 bings.

4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6?????

As you can see, I deviated from my perfect strategy of advancing bings because there were actually no more bings that could be safely advanced. You might think that P5+1 is a safe place for a bing, but after advancing it, there is little you can do you protect it from a rampaging centralised pao.

At this position, I have a free zu that can be taken with immediate effect. Also, it provides me with 1 piece across the river, but he can move his rook across too, hence I evaluate the position +1.2 bings up for me.

7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5

So... what happened was i won a zu. Cheers. And his pao moved over the river, which I personally don't find aesthetically pleasing. But that's just me. And I would rate the position about errr... +2.4/2=1.2, because a zhong xiang delays practically every win. :(.

10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1

Action! J crazily chased my cannon around 2 times! (and gained a free tempo!) Also interesting (and fail) was 11. N3+5?? C8=5 12. C3+5 C5+4+, which wins the zhongbing and will make me hate my position in general :(. So anyway back to the main line, I think I just failed and didn't see the counter. So it's +1.2 to me (!!)

13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8

The previous "analysis" was written years ago and my brain has rusted, so this will continue in a more unpredictable (random) fashion. 13. R1.2 chases the pao away, but then 13...C8+6! makes my che/ju... which shld I use... Rook! uhh... sort of stuckish, but then since he is using 2 pieces to make my 1 piece stuck, it's sort of worth it I guess. 14. A6+5 is a turtlish move showing utterly no intention of displaying the manliness of sacrifice, and amidst the turtling, J played 14...C4.9 (xP)! As another bing fell, it was sort of traumatic for me; furthermore, my ma was under attack, and it seemed like I had to react quickly. Seeing as there was no zu to munch on, I got a little completely lost and confused, and played the weak move 15.H8-6, retreating and reinforcing the already turtle-like turtle that my defense was.

But as turtle as turtle is, there is no good way to attack and destroy a turtle (apart from being fantastically good at chess), and in the midst of his plans to force a turtle soup, J played the somewhat blunderous move 15...C9.8, hanging his pao in limbo.

16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5

I happily munched on his free pao. It tasted somewhat good. 16... R9.8 gained a tempo back as revenge for the extremely brave and/or stupid pao... if I wasn't such a complicated person. 17.C3+5 (xH) raised the complications a notch higher. (from 0 to 1), and J played 17...R8.3, which was a psychological blunder, since it now appears that he just wasted his previous move. With the newly found tempo, I sneakily played the sneaky move 18.C5.6. It is indeed quite hard to determine for sure, but I do theorize that J was suffering from a psychological condition called Suspicion Bonus (Medical name: Nyudunkopemybeengormaorpaoorzuoranythingofmineandalsonotcheckmatemeorstalemateme Somethingtomakethemedicalnamelongerophobia), and he tried to turtle behind the turtle of a move 18...A6+5.

*gulp* I forgot to mention a semi-important variation to waste more of an unwary reader's time. 17...R8+4 18.C3.7. Or perhaps even 17...R6-6 18.H2+1 (free BING zu!!) R8+2 19.C3+1

19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3

19. C6-1 appears to have won a piece, but since it's my move, it follows that there's nothing much about the move worth talking about. Following the move, J got a free bing as compensation. It was a zhongbing too! And followed by another bing (T_T).

22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6

I got my revenge and gobbled a zu. Strangely enough, he wasn't too sure my bing was tasty. Weird behavior. Probably Suspicion Bonus. Then, I attempted to aggro.

25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1

A failed attempted tactic by me. What's there to talk about. Really.

31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5

I mobilised my elephant to turtle, then got some sort-of-free ma to fill my stomach. J got another bing. I have 1 last bing left :*(.

34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7

I happily feasted on the bulk of an elephant and attempted a cheapoe, but instead I lost my last bing. Talk about fail.

*fast forward* 41.E5+7. REVENGE! I got all his zus! *smile*

*fast forward, again* move 52... resign/timeout. :( (no opportunity to attempt a symmetrical kill)

Summary:
1) I fail. Massively.
2) J finished off my soldiers before I wiped his army out.
3) In the opening, J demonstrated his devastating opening powers and managed to grab a few bings.
4) I got lucky, and managed to win back every single soldier I lost :)
5) I fail. Really.

The King's Indian Attack

After reading a blog column from some chess columnist, filled with great examples of how to thrash your opponent with an utterly crushing attack with the King's Indian Attack (KIA), it looked for a moment that it would be something that I would play. Hence, I tried it.

However, my sheer lack of theorectically knowledge meant that I managed to get myself into not just a losing position, but a defensive position, when the position was supposed to have one clear plan to attack. In fact, out of the 3 games I played as white, I managed to misclick moves in 2 games due to the sheer intensity of stress of failing to attack and failing to tactical traps. (most of the time hanging pieces)

Time to look for some new opening that gives a good sacrifice I guess...

A decision...

A bold decision: to post!