Link to previous round can be found here
Previous Moves
Round 5 initial position:
Ts9s8s7s6s5s4s3s2sAsJs/xxxx9c8s7c6c5d4h3d2hAs7s/xxxxxTc2cAh6s9s/xxKdQd3s/Qs6d/Ts4dQhJhTh9h8h7h6h5h4h3hKc/Ac5s/xxxxKcQhJhTh9h8d7c6h5c4c3c2cAcKhQcJcTd9d7d/KhQcjcTc9c8cKsQs2h/4c2s
Stock = 0, Suits removed = 1
Checksum: 11 + 14 + 10 + 5 + 2 + 13 + 2 + 23 + 9 + 2 + 0 + (1*13) = 104
Red: I propose we simply clear Spades with “id, ai, ai”, study the resulting position for a few more days, then choose the best way to remove suits and/or turnover our next card. If we still can’t decide where the next turnover is, there is always the option of clearing Hearts next.
Green: Yikes, this is too complex even for me. I like the idea of not turning over a card and minimising the chance of rot13(shpxvat hc) by trying to do too much in one day. “id, ai, ai” it is.
Blue: I wanna start thinking about Spades, Hearts and Clubs. Therefore “id,ai,ai,hi,hf,ha,ei,ea,gi,gj (h12=i8)”, study the resulting position for a few days then choose whether to clear Hearts or turnover a card. Of course If Bart/Bug insist on a turnover today then I won’t stop them.
Actual play (Decision 35, 22 Nov): id,ai,ai, if,bf,bj, eh,ei,bg,bh, (b2=f1), bc, gh, ca,ca,ga,cd,gc,ha,fe,ig,df,fi,fh,ah,af,cd,bc → King of Spades
Green: I’m voting “ca”. The missing cards are AA2334556788JJ. We can’t claim a lock but one or two more good cards should see us home. At least this decision is relatively straightforward.
Red: I prefer “ba” working on a column with only three face-down cards. The alternative “ca” duplicates Tens in columns 3 and 6 so the usual advantages of not shifting a King to an empty column doesn’t apply. Removing the Clubs costs an empty column – that’s too suspicious even by my standards … uhhh just kidding 😊
Blue: I like “ca”. We have plenty of empties, so our main concern is avoiding “one-hole-no-card” traps – and the best way to achieve that is to focus on columns with the most face-down cards.
Actual play (Decision 36, 25 Nov): ca → Four of Spades (Bart + Bug + Blue/Green)
Actual play (Decision 37): fi, cf → Eight of Clubs (Trivial)
Actual play (Decision 38): ca → Ace of Diamonds (Trivial)
Green: Be careful, with only one empty column the obvious “ch” would be embarrassing if we turned over an Eight. Better to sacrifice an in-suit build with “gb, he, ce” so we are well placed if the next card is a Seven or Eight.
Blue: Another alternative is “gb, (d2=h1), cd” which doesn’t lose an in-suit build. We can afford to bury the Q of diamonds since a Jack wouldn’t embarrass anybody – except the impostor.
Red: rot13(OYHR VF FHF). We are very close to completing the second Spade suit so we don’t want the 3 of Spades buried under an off-suit 2-A. I support Green’s “gb, he, ce”
Actual play (Decision 39, Nov 27): gb,he,ce → Five of Clubs (Green + Red + Bart + Bug)
Actual play (decision 40): ic, ei, ce (trivial) → Three of Clubs
Blue: Everything is lookin’ really great/except for one thing that I really hate/we might not be able to navigate/ to the face-down cards in column Eight/sort it out before it is too late/My final plan is now ready to state – “cf, ha, hc, (e1=h4), (c4=h9) he”
Green: I like Blue’s plan a lot, although his rapping in the iambic pentameter leaves much to be desired. The missing cards are A235678JJ. The flexibility in Column 10 means either Two or Five is a good card. I don’t see any way to lose even if Red were allowed to call the next three cards.
Red: Green is waffling too much and “ce,bc” looks simplest. Either we revert to Blue’s plan or we can remove the Club suit using the Four of Clubs in Column 10. That’s four in the corner. Four in the spotlight, losing its religion. Note that we were lucky because the last two cards gave us exactly what we need to complete clubs without shifting that pile of rot13(fuvg) in Column 8.
Actual play (decision 41): dc,jd,cj,ec,je,df (no card)
Green: Bart’s intentions are clear. Turn over all cards in columns 2&4 then trust that the game is won even if the impostor were allowed to call the remaining cards. I vote “be,bg,bi” regardless of what the next three cards are.
Red: I also vote “be,bg,bi”, but if we have N guaranteed empty columns regardless of unseen cards then we also turnover min(2,N-1) cards in column 4.
Blue: Interesting that Bart refused to turn over a card even though we were criticised for the same on Decision 35. In any case, let’s get this rot13(fuvg) over and done with. I also vote the same as Red.
Actual play (Decision 41b, 29 Nov): irrelevant
The final Moves
We have no trouble turning over the last cards in columns 2 & 4.
It is trivially easy to turn over all the cards in column 8 and the impostor has conceded “defeat” 😊
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 
Decision 35
I guess we knew a day would come with a lot of complexity. For reference, here are the counts of cards remaining unseen:
Remaining: A 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 T J Q K
15 left. 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 0 0 2 0 1
I don’t think taking off suits here ultimately moves us forward… we’re short a few good cards. I got as far in trying this “let’s remove ’em” line with spades and hearts and then it looked like clubs were going to cost me a space instead of getting me anything. Cards were not flowing freely out of the uncovered piles into happy sequences.
What we want is a mix of getting organized versus using up potential energy. I leave A-Q of spades in column 6, handy lubricant for making progress later with few spaces. Another reason? As it is we can put the 2 in the space any time and create a receiving 7. But having a space leaves us more flexibility.
Digging in Column 4 seemed safer in the short run. We can expose a card and have THREE spaces left… but it seemed there were fewer cards that might come up that could then help us. Not enough potential energy.
Digging in column 2 would work, but putting a 9 in a space — there are no 10s left that can possibly help us get it back. And 8s (for the 7 that is below on that column) are already in short supply.
My plan ends up digging for more cards in column 3. Why? I can expose a card there and still have 2 spaces. The details:
Forgive me if it’s not as clean as it could be, there may be unnecessary side trips, for instance when I “create a space” that could be held off until later.
eb,gb,jd,jb,gd,ef,af,af — created 4 spaces
ca,ch,ci,dc,ce,cg,ag — 1 card exposed from column 3, and 2 spaces
So what card might come up and results?
Plus 1 move — positive progress: 3, J — 4 cards
“wash” for now, no harm or gain: A, 5, 8 — 6 cards
make things worse: 2, 4, 6, 7, K — 5 cards
(there are no 9s or 10s or Qs)
How they interact in series one after another is hard to work out.
I see I could have an improvement for instance by swapping diamond 6 and spade 6 in columns 2 and 8. Probably there are other little details like that.
————————-
So what about the blobs?
Kind of disappointing. They all propose starting by removing the spades. Red and Green say “stop there to think”. If we try to get through this position 3 moves at a time, we’ll be at this a LONG time. Blue continues to do a bunch more clean-up past that point. It looked pretty reasonable to me, though as I recall there would be even fewer spaces left for turnovers. A drawback of my plan may be that organizing the suits we have takes a lot of spaces and if I use them up uncovering cards we could still end up “stuck” even with good cards. It may be that blue sees that danger and gets around it.
So, preliminary votes before peeking at SA’s answer sheet:
My plan
Blue
Red/Green
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Master Chi-Yuen and Esteemed Scholar Bart, I think I am going to need extra time here. My time right now is Monday, 22nd Nov. at 7:40 pm. Please allow me another 48 hours to respond.
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You are perfectly welcome to ask for more time. You *might* wanna consider breaking tradition and reading the Blob’s suggestions first before making your own. This is a very complex position, even for experts.
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Decision 35 Position 401
This position is as complicated as I have ever seen in 4SSS.
Master Chi-Yuen, you replied to my request for more time with “You *might* wanna consider breaking tradition and reading the Blob’s suggestions first before making your own.”
Kindly Sir, you don’t know me too well. When I go bad, I go all the way bad. When I take the top off a bottle of booze, I throw it out the window.
After way way waywayway too many hours of staring at this puppy and trying to make at least one more run besides Spades, I decided to go with no runs and three guaranteed Turnovers in Col 3. I really tried to do the additional run thing, even looking at three runs, using either Heart K to make something work. All that effort only left me with the feeling that something was possible but beyond my vision. I just couldn’t leave it alone and post the “Three Turnovers in C-Three” routine.
So I went over to the Dark Side where lives my AncientExcelCheeterSheeter. No halfway cheats for me.
Therefore I don’t think I should be allowed to vote.
Here’s what I came up with.
Do the Spade run
.id,ai,ai … V=1
Club Q-8 to K, cover with Spade 7, move Spade A
,if,bf,bj … V=1
Void Col 5, move Heart 4 to Col 7, Dia 5 to Col 8
.eh,ei,bg,bh … V=2
Swap out 7’s, Spades to Col 3
(b2=f1),bc … V=2
________________________________________________________________________
This is as far as I could see clearly. I tried many many many times to continue and could go out a few more steps, but I just do not have the mental capacity to see far enough to say “this is good” or “no can do”. I just could not believe that there wasn’t something good available but it was beyond my grasp. Once I had this position in front of me with my AECS I was able to go forward.
________________________________________________________________________
Move Heart 4 again
gh
Gather Spades in Col 1, Void Col 7
.ca,ca,ga,cd,gc … V=2
Move Heart 4 again
.ha … V=2
Fill the voids, do the Heart run,
.fe,ig,df,fi … V=1
4&3 of Dia to Col 8, Spade 9 covers Spade 10, Club 2 on Spade 3
.fh,ah,af,cd … V=2
Take Turnover in Col 2
.bc
It is, like, 30 moves, done in two steps. 55 years ago I might have been able to do 30 moves in my head, now it is impossible.
Ok, let me see what the honest people did.
Red… Just do the Spade run
Green… Just do the Spade run
Blue… Did the Spade run and went for a bit more organization. “id,ai,ai,hi,hf,ha,ei,ea,gi,gj (h12=i8)”
My problem with doing the Spade run without a further plan was using up that 3 in Col 4. It is just too valuable a card to cover on the first move unless you can see how to use it again, which points to a Club or Heart run. Likewise the Club 8 which is exposed with the Spade run is very valuable, I could see to try to use it to unlock Col 2 before covering with the Club 7-6 from the same Col 2, that planted the 7 SwapOut, Spade’s and Club’s idea.
And now for Esteemed Scholar Bart. Excellent as always, thank you.
eb,gb,jd,jb,gd,ef,af,af — created 4 spaces (ESB how do you do that long Dash?)
ca,ch,ci,dc,ce,cg,ag ___ three guaranteed Turnovers Col 3
Before I went over to the dark side, I was thinking of the same results on a similar path. There are many many paths available. Mine differed by leaving the Spade 10 in Col 1 and placing the Club 10 + Spade 9 from Col 3 on the Spade J in Col 6, thereby having Col 1 Atomic. Additionally I rejected attacking Col 2 with only four Turnovers for the same reason as you, moving the 9 does not create an Atomic.
My “No Run” version was:
.eh,ef,af,gh,gj … V=2
.ce,cb,ci,cd,jd,cf,ef ___ three guaranteed Turnovers Col 3.
But then I went Vaderville.
.
Soooooooo, Master Chi-Yuen and Esteemed Scholar Bart, My Mentors, what are youse guys gunna’ do with this mess I have created and dumped on you? I reaffirm that I should not vote.
Master Chi-Yuen, remember when I asked “What could possible go wrong”? The answer was ME !!!
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The blockchain has been updated. Hopefully the next decision is slightly easier 🙂
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Decision 35, revised
I am very impressed with what SA came up with — his first answer — and enthusiastically change my vote to his plan. I actually followed it through with my decks of cards and all the steps seemed legal — not something I would assume about any sequence of mine that was that long. And I believe he leaves us in a very good position. It looks like he got to a position sort of like one of my explorations, where taking the clubs off would give up 2 spaces and get only one back (from the removed suit), but he was wise enough to stop before that point, leaving the clubs on the board, and go for the turnovers at that point.
I had waved my arms and spoken of preserving potential energy versus order, expecting that an extensive plan like SA’s would lose potential energy, but I went to look at it concretely and asked how each of the cards we might turn over would affect our position. It looks to me like his leaves us in a better spot than mine. In particular, 8s improve his position while just being a wash on mine, and a king is a wash for him and a loss for me. Mine is not better than his for any rank.
GM may well have a better way through all this (leaving SA and me like chess grandmasters gaping at Alpha Zero).
But I’m still puzzled by how GM presented the blob recommendation. What kind of a move is one where you only go 3 steps forward without discovering any new information? I can see we often have to follow heuristics, but one just 3 steps long?
HOWEVER, I went back to look at Blue’s suggestion, and decided it was actually very bad, though it looks reasonable. For partial evidence, if we want to do a turnover, it costs us 2 spaces to get 1 turnover for columns 2, 3, and 4. And speaking intuitively, that’s because a lot of stuff stayed unresolved in columns 2 and 3 that should have been resolved. Yes, we can get a turnover in 8, by putting a king in a space.
What I think SA’s plan honored (and mine sort of recognized, obliquely) was that Column 8 is a danger zone that is best left alone. The 7 of diamonds and king of hearts each needs a space, for not much gain, and we can remove hearts without touching it.
So… I’ll say Blue is probably the impostor, for going ahead with a bad plan that lead us to almost certain disaster, while the other two at least suggested doing very little until we could think more.
And then I’ll sit at the feet of GM and find out the truth. Although I like SA’s plan, I would still estimate we would lose 10% or more of the time if the turnovers are bad.
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Esteemed Scholar Bart, thank you for your kind words, Kind Sir. But all reference to my work must contain an asterisk due to the fact that I used a second visual aid, the position after the 7 Swap Out.
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The blockchain has been updated. Hopefully the next decision is slightly easier 🙂
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Decision 36 Position 557
The oblivious and easy is to move the Newly Found King one slot to the left, and if that is the consensus, I stray again.
We need to move a King or the Club 10 to get another card. Let’s rule out moving the 10 at this point in time. I say move the Dia King, one less turnover to another void. Another thing I am going to suggest is making Col 6 Atomic, it is now or perhaps never. At this point in time, to me, turning over two Jacks seems more likely than what has to happen to make the Club run.
.fe,de,da
Allow me to get some other opinions
Green and Blue both like moving the 10. I just quickly rejected that due to the five hidden cards. Let me think again. It just “feels” wrong to me. Blue’s comment of “plenty of empties”……….’haint no such thing.
Red goes for the straightforward ba.
I’ll stick with me for now and probably change my vote after reading Esteemed Scholar Bart’s clarity.
Esteemed Scholar Bart hasn’t posted, I’ll go first and double back later today.
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Decision 36
Queen of spades on king is obvious and even reversible. Messing with columns 4 and 8 is not sensible as it closes off possibilities for no gain. We might do some of that other stuff when we are reducing our space count from 2 to 1, but not as it goes from 3 to 2. We’re losing no powers of rearrangement yet.
So, which of column b or c to we put in the space? The fact there are only 3 cards under the king versus 5 under the clubs doesn’t matter much at this stage. But there is still a valid reason for moving the 10 of clubs. If we do get both jacks soon, we may want to reclaim both columns that now have 10s in them.
Kibbitizers? Since it’s not strictly necessary, maybe that’s why none of them mention the queen of spades put on the king. Green and blue both like ca, which I also slightly preferred to ba. Green gives no reason, just expresses joy that we’ve got a good situation. Blue mentions this “one-hole-no-card” trap problem. GM mentioned this overall possibility a year or so ago. I can see it could happen in theory. I can also see a case where you would be relieved if that last card exposed in a column reveals a space after it is moved, whereas revealing another card we don’t need at that point would make us less happy, and my intuition is that second situation is at least as frequent as the “one-hole-no-card” situation. I wonder if GM can plot a reasonable line of play here with particular cards showing up that would bring up this “one-hole-no-card” situation. Note that I gave my own reason for wanting to expose from the bigger pile.
I prefer the green/blue plan to the red plan.
Now, as for SA…
This is where my brain is helped by moving that queen of spades now and realizing we have effectively 3 spaces, not 2. So while SA’s musings on what to do next are possible, they don’t need to be considered until we have more info. He says “it is perhaps now or never”, and I say that is specifically and clearly untrue. Most (all, I think) of what he suggests can be done just before we fill our last space, but in fact after this move we will still have 2 spaces available, not just 1. We can look at TWO more cards before forced to make the irreversible moves he suggests. I haven’t looked hard for cases where we would be better delaying — they would probably involve 2 or 3 unusual cards coming up in a row. But “delay” seems better in case some such cases are lurking.
Of course I’ve wasted many column inches speculating on future possibilities myself. Column 8 sleeps happily, a complete suit (rankwise) under another king. We lack only a J and 4 of spades before we can remove the 2nd spade suit, and we might well want to do that before we start on column 8. If a 3 and 5 of clubs come up, we can and might want to remove a club suit without touching that pile. Only when an 8 comes up is it likely to pay to start digging through that one.
Even after reading SA, my rank choices are:
green/blue
red
SA
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The Bart/Green/Blue/Green party has been locked in.
After a few more easy decisions we have 11 face-down cards remaining. Let’s hope this is not a bad beat. Otherwise we might have to commit the cardinal sin of Spider Solitaire and fork the blockchain #justkidding
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Esteemed Scholar Bart, after my post and before reading yours, I had realized the exactly what you pointed out, that it was NOT now or never. I should have mentally moved the Spade Q as you did. Lets do a Bart, Green/Blue and Bug party.
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The Bart/Green/Blue/Green party has been locked in.
After a few more easy decisions we have 11 face-down cards remaining. Let’s hope this is not a bad beat. Otherwise we might have to commit the cardinal sin of Spider Solitaire and fork the blockchain #justkidding
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The least likely near-term progress we are likely to see is completing a club suit, as we need both the 3 and 5 to show up. Better to maximize the chances of everything else, keep everything else as atomic as possible. “e” is a junk pile.
gb, he, ce.
This is definitely touch and go, whether we win or not.
As for the kibbitzers. Green and Red reach same conclusion I do. Blue is definitely “sus” based on this, and on the previous recommendation. This late in the game, there’s likely little time left to lead us astray. So that’s my final verdict: BLUE is the bad guy. I believe any earlier missteps by other players were just different judgment, and blue sometimes went along with the best move to keep his cover. Leading us badly astray in a complex situation near the end was his best chance, and the previous recommendation was spectacularly bad but looked reasonable. This misstep he suggests is pretty lame, but he’s out of time.
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The Blockchain has been updated, and judging from the body language one of the Blobs is getting rather nervous
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This round of comments points out my worst weakness. I had totally forgot/missed that the Dia. run is not continuous. So I did a bad and just turned over another card. Of course we should protect against an 8 at the expense of an unlikely Club run and I again vote with Bart, Green and Red.
Bad Guy? Me.
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The Blockchain has been updated, and judging from the body language one of the Blobs is getting rather nervous
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Decision 41
It does look like it will be very hard to lose at this point.
This is my plan: dc, jd, cj, ec, je, df
This removes a club suit and leaves us with four spaces and 5 cards sitting under a couple of Queen-king pairs. Everything but column 8 is very simple.
Blue’s idea of sorting out column 8 before it’s too late seems exactly wrong. Probably we still can’t lose, but Blue’s plan means we have to look a little harder to be sure of that. His plan means we give up our ability to receive a 7 gracefully, and moving that king of hearts into the space, exposes… an ace! Ace? Boo! We don’t like exposing aces. Leaving this column alone has been a good idea for the past several turns, and it still is. Could it ever be “too late”? What four cards could you hide under the column to cause trouble? Both jacks, surely. There just aren’t any other two cards to pair them with that don’t leave us with the others retaining or even increasing our number of spaces.
Red saying we got really lucky to get the 3 and 5 of clubs doesn’t seem too insightful, as a great many other cards would also have put us in excellent shape. It is however funny that it was the rarity of that 3-5 clubs combination that led me to turn column 5 into a junk pile last time as our best bet.
Votes:
My plan
Red plan
Blue plan
Green doesn’t give a concrete plan, but just waves his hands and declares victory.
Blue is confirmed as the impostor once again, if any confirmation was needed.
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The blockchain has been updated. The next decision may well be the last – if you are willing to turnover multiple cards in a single action.
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I should think to do the Club run and gather Spades in Col 6.
.dc,df,jf,eg,je,ce … V=4 c,e,i,j
So what cards are left?
S .. J
H .. 8,7,5,3,A
D .. J,2
C .. 6 ….. = 9
My question to me is “Is it time to attack Col 8?”
I have to break this down into steps.
Dia 3 temp to Heart 4, Dia 7 to a Void, Swap out 10’s, Heart K to a Void
.hg,hc,(a3=h2),hi … V=2 e.j
Club 7 to Club 8, Dia 7 to Dia 8 … V=3 c,e,j
.hi,ch
.
.
Master Chi-Yuen, Esteemed Scholar Bart, Kolorfull Kibitzers and any and all Lurkers, I really love this work. But my personal life is calling and I just do not have the large blocks of time right now to spend on this position that it deserves. Asking for another day will not do the trick this time. So I must leave you with this:
Do the Club run and attack Col 8. I cannot see that this is best, but I feel it so. I wanted to prove that we could take one turnover before attacking Col 8 but I have neither time nor ability to do so.
I post this without looking at what the others are thinking.
I vote for wherever my Mentor Esteemed Scholar Bart goes.
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The blockchain has been updated. The next decision may well be the last – if you are willing to turnover multiple cards in a single action.
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Decision 41b.
Sorry for the omission in my recommendation. I’ve made it clear I want to leave column 8 alone, so what else could we do? But everyone seemed to get the idea. Thinking about this decision, I realized I deviated from the ethos of “make no unnecessary move” by making all those other moves to simplify things. I was implicitly moving to a “See, get to this point and we can’t lose” mindset, so not in line with the past procedure.
GM seems willing to switch to that mode too if we’re willing, to keep things moving along. We’re all agreeing that “we’ll turn over at least 3 cards” is kind of an “I bet you we’ll still win if we do that”. Obviously anyone who realizes he is prone to mistakes in thinking would just turn over one card in case that card revealed such a mistake and a way to fix it — it couldn’t possibly be a worse choice than turning over 3 at once.
I’ve very much enjoyed this exercise, but what would have made it better for me is if the GM himself had told us more often when he would do something different and why. Giving 3 options is good, and perhaps even vital when the position gets more complex, but then telling us immediately after we vote is something I’ll learn more from. In the last decision, everyone agreed that it’s almost certain we’ll win, but if blue’s plan had a 1% chance of failure and mine had none — or vice versa — I would be interested to know that. Or whose reasoning made more sense.
Here, at the end of this game, if GM does now tell us what he would have done differently in some earlier situations, it will likely be a lot of work for him to put such a post together, and more work for me and SA to refamiliarize ourselves with the situations. But don’t get me wrong, I would eagerly read and study such a post by GM!
At the end of the last game I sort of complained that whatever SA and I recommended, we did what GM wanted anyway. The remedy I had in mind was not GM actually following our recommendation, but just being open about how that was how it worked, and after each move explaining why he did that.
It must have been interesting, at the least, to decide what the blobs would say. And probably disappointing that SA and I missed various subtleties.
Another way to use the blog would be for any of us to put together a screenshot of a situation and say, “What would you do here?” and find out what the others think and why. Putting an image into a blog reply isn’t best and might not even be technically possible, but if GM had an email we could send suggestions there, and he could only choose those to post that he wanted to.
However, this blog has to be fun or rewarding to GM to be worth doing, not just his students, so I’m happy to follow his lead as best I can.
And one note for the bug: I fear you set too high a bar for yourself with that one move where you worked things through so thoroughly. I think GM also implied that a more intuitive answer would be fine if it falls within the time constraints of what you’re usually able to do.
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This game is indeed a win and there is no point asking for any more decisions. Well done to Bart/Bug on a thoroughly deserved victory!
Perhaps I might have stretched the team too far (with Bug indicating his personal life gets in the way etc). It’s hard enough to play a perfect game of Spider when you don’t have to work out who the impostor is. Even I got a bit lazy on decision 35 when I was struggling with something at work. But what’s done is done. At least Bart/Bug seemed to enjoy the journey, and so did I
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Master Chi-Yuen again I thank you for spending so much of your time with us.
My feelings mostly echo those of Esteemed Scholar Bart’s; what is missing here is your instant critiques whilst the position is at the front of our vision. But I do hope you give a review of where you believe the most critical layouts were and how we may improve our play.
I must add that as you played The Three Kolorfull Kibitzer I felt that much of your direct personality was lost or perhaps diluted. So much of my silliness is a play off your silliness and I think we missed that this round. This format was new to all of us and I think I missed many of the subtleties of your prose. Also if we continue this I should think you would be better at injection more of yourself as this time you were learning how to be three colors at once.
As always I am Happily Hopping along behind where ever you lead.
Esteemed Scholar Bart, as always and as it should be you took the lead on most of this play, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add a few points here and there.
Nicely done, Nicely done,
We Be One-n-O.
Damn, it don’t rhyme when you win, only when you lose.
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Thank you so much for the award, GM! I.M. Flattered. Was that “Bartacus” or “Bart ‘ll cuss”?
One tiny detail. You have typically replied to both of us to say “the blockchain has been updated”. I get notified about both of them, and SA could confirm if that happens to him too. If so, I think the WordPress notification system runs as “notify person about comments anywhere in the reply tree, not just below one of their responses”. So you could also put it in as a top-level comment. And this scales up better if you get more followers, lol. Relevant if you do choose to do any “call and response” thing again.
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