The Annual Decode Event

 (Even more fictional than normal for gematria.)

Lydia was late.  Rushing through putting on a fresh set of clothes she left the house headed for the town square, anxious for the big event.  The Annual Decode winner would be announced within a few hours.

Everyone, literally everyone from the smallest and youngest child to the oldest and most feeble adult would be present.  Most of the town would have a decode ready, but if you didn’t or couldn’t you would be assigned a default decode.  Something basic like a Pi reference from the old days, from a list in a dusty old tome.  Something picked by Gregory, the town mayor.

Lydia was truly excited for this particular event.  She had prepared a lengthy decode, complete with her own personal synchronicities.  Her town, Raiders, normally did football decodes, and her decode was heavily skewed toward their previous season where they nearly won the league championship.  And as she was runner up for the privilege of The Dunking last year it just seemed, well, just …right…fitting that she would be tied in with that with her own personal runner up status.  The nearest neighboring town, Newcoin didn’t have any bragging rights as their personal cryptocurrency did a nosedive last year, throwing the whole town into what’s sure to be a decades long recession.

She arrived just slightly late, only having missed the preliminary festivities where the townspeople shared their excitement, decodes held in hand.  Consuming alcoholic beverages and eating rich food.  The party before The Dunking was great fun.  Some even seemed to enjoy the party more than The Dunking.

All the maintenance for the Dunk Tank was carefully and thoroughly completed during the week, Raiders never having had any problems in their history with the actual Dunk.   Lydia had heard of the village of Eclipse from three years ago and how the Dunk there had gone wrong and federal funding had been pulled for the following year.  Lydia and the town could be sure no such indignity would happen to Raiders this year.

The town clock chimed 2:02 pm.  (2:02 being close enough to the approved time of 2:00 pm and well within federal guidelines of 2:00 plus or minus six minutes).  It was time to start the selection process and the crowd noise quickly quieted as Gregory prepared the annual speech.

During the next two hours all the decodes were put in The Box.  A large and quite unassuming box painted in a flat green color.  No one knows why that shade of green was chosen, it just…was what was appropriate for the Box.  Our Box.  The Raiders Box.  A sort of holy relic and part of the Annual Decode event.

With the last decode safely tucked away Gregory began his carefully prepared speech.  That is carefully prepared from his first year as mayor decades ago.  The speech never changed.  Every syllable carefully recited.  As he finished Gregory stepped close to the box and prepared to draw at random this year’s winner.  Who would be getting dunked this year?  One by one, following the checklist prepared by Gregory, the townsfolk would be called to draw a gematria decode from the box.  The last decode left would be dunked.  The person who authored the first decode drawn would be the first to push The Button on The Dunk Tank.  The first to get the chance to set the computerized random number generator in motion for when the floor of Tue Dunk Tank would drop into the cold water filling the bottom portion of the tank.

Last year, Lydia was the person who pressed The Button just before Arnold who had the honor of being the winner.  Sending Raul to the bottom half of the tank to the raucous cheers and applause of the waiting crowd.  She momentarily thought about how much she missed Raul and his bright eyes and wide smile.  But the excitement of this festival soon overwhelmed and thoughts of past glory soon were swept away.

The first name drawn was Talia, a vapid and shallow woman who couldn’t decode worth shit (at least in Lydia’s opinion.  Talia would be first to push The Button.  The first to get the chance to dunk on this year’s tank occupant.  The first to dunk on their sloppy, contrived connections, their misspellings, their forced narratives, whatever the community could symbolically use The Dunk Tank water as explanation for their poor gematria decoding skills.

As the afternoon wore on Lydia realized, quite anxiously, that there were only 17 names left in The Box, and her decode still remained within.  Slowly, agonizingly (Gregory always dragged the ceremony out as the end neared to maximize the tension) there came the time with just two decodes left out of the hundreds that initially had been inserted.  Who would be getting dunked was either Robert or Lydia.

And breaking from tradition Lydia, gripped with a fear unlike she’d ever known before leapt forward to Gregory’s podium and shouted at the mob.  A mob that wasn’t used to this sort of display.

“STOP THIS FARCE NOW!!”  Lydia screamed.

“It must be Robert you dunk, my decode took weeks of painstaking research.  Everyone knows Robert is lazy.  He even copies from the rest of his friends!”

After a few moments a few giggles interrupted the stunned silence.  Lydia’s first plea for some kind of sensible guidelines was ignored in place of the standard arbitrary results.

“What is wrong with you people?  You are even prepared to dunk children!! Children with their whole lives ahead?!”

“Oh Lydia,”, said Paul, someone has to be dunked and the rules are the rules.  Live with that.”

“But they are stupid rules.  Philip showed me how he decoded that Gregory should be dunked despite the mayor being the only exemption.  Surely his death threat to our mayor means he should be dunked!!”

Silence.

“Annette does cryptocurrency decodes every year!! We’re a sports town!!”

Silence.

“My own mother was dunked just four years ago.  Surely the odds against me being this close to being dunked prove this is all a farce!”

Finally after letting Lydia blow off some steam Gregory established himself as master of the ceremony.

“Hush Lydia, it’s just some cold water and light hearted ridicule.  Let’s see if it’s you or Robert who has been standing silently and behaving like a grown up instead of the child you’ve proven to be.

Robert’s decode was picked from the box.  The last decode remaining WAS Lydia’s.  Lydia would be dunked.

Her previous outburst was nothing compared to the comments she spewed forth as she was forcibly placed in the dunk tank.  The ridicule started as her decode was read allowed, every townsperson taking their chance in turn to press The Button.  The mob making fun of all her painstaking research.  Her pleas of how unfair about how random and pointless the entire process is being met with more ridicule than the actual decode.

Until finally seven year old Timothy pressed the button, and the few seconds of the sound of gears grinding and machinery coming to life signaled Timothy was this year’s winner.  Lydia was dunked.

And as the icy water filled her lungs and she drowned her protests finally ceased.

——————————————————————

If I were a YouTube gematria decoder this is the point where I would beg you to subscribe to my Patreon.  Which I won’t do.  Instead I’m giving credit to the real author.

https://americanliterature.com/author/shirley-jackson/short-story/the-lottery/

Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery quite some time ago, a tale of “conformity gone mad”.  A tale that plays out like a Twilight Zone episode focusing on mankind’s often stupid beliefs of how to act as a social group.  Gematria is a fitting modernization. Everything is so completely arbitrary in a confirmation bias based scam.  One day people who are allied turn into bitter enemies.  One day Joe Biden has the same gematriot that was used for Trump years ago.  One day you drop zeroes, the next day you don’t.  The only consistency is the lack of critical thinking just for the sake of a little attention thrown your way by the cult leader.

Globally morale is epically low.  When the internet came to life all the people who wished to spread their grift and propaganda learned all the old tricks at the same time.  Gematria may have roots in sports betting scams but spent an extensive period as a dissemination of right wing propaganda during the Qanon heyday.  People who have purposefully not been educated have a difficult time dealing with contradictory information.

The Gambling Epidemic

A quick project you can do yourself without me forcing my results on you:

Go to the YouTube search for “gambling epidemic”.  There’s a wide variety of videos to choose from.  Many are very recent and a lot of them posted to the platform well after the “I’m a magic sports decoder with gematria” boom started.

I haven’t made it a point to go through too many of them, but there are two themes I found I want to share.  Since my research isn’t that extensive I can’t claim that these are common, but I have seen them more than once.

It’s not just the rise in numbers, but what’s concerning for the video makers talking about the epidemic is the young age of the new crop of addicts.  From a gematria perspective this isn’t too surprising.  The targeted demographic seems to be aimed at high school age students.  A perfect age for a rebellious youngster to find the core message of magic solutions and not realize that it sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true.  As part of a rabbit hole of bad ideas to get lost in, gematria has always been a constant source of advertisement for gambling sites.  Customized ads will throw you a Draft Kings or online casino ad at the start of the video just because, for example, the latest sports celebrity death gematria was the topic of the video.  One of the sources of rabbit hole exploration is games targeted to this demographic that have “loot boxes”.  Although these can be just cosmetic additions to brag about a player character’s look instead of paying an in game microtransaction for a weapons upgrade, the model the designers followed to use this as part of the game is literally based on the flashing lights and sounds of brick and mortar casino games.

And completely without surprise, we know it’s going on and nothing is being done about it.  Firmly within the camp of we are on our own socializing the youngsters without expecting any meaningful content moderation from social media platforms.  And as I’ve often said keep in mind that expecting meaningful content moderation at this large scale is naive.  There are too many moving parts.  Bad actors deliberately taking advantage of loopholes, innocent but gullible folk not having a clue what’s going on, and algorithms designed to replace human labor - all make for a ridiculous mishmash of rabbit hole entry points and mazes.

Personally, just yesterday morning I was watching a video that had absolutely nothing to do with gematria, sports or gambling (it was on a channel dedicated to disturbing videos on the internet I’ve been frequenting).  And I got this banner:

Nothing too extreme, except I was thinking of posting a comment to the video, and this banner appeared directly over the comment box.  Scrolling up and down the ad followed the comment box.  I could tap and hold my finger on the screen and move the ad away from the box, but upon releasing my finger the ad retreated to covering the comment box completely.  Closing out the video and reopening it brought the ad back.  I finally had to exit out of the video completely, reload it by searching for the channel and video again to make it disappear.  A lot of work when it may seem simpler to just get lazy and click on the ad, download the sports betting app.  And that’s exactly what they want.  I was frustrated enough I never did post my comment.

Putting Pete Rose In the Hall of Fame - Gematria To the Rescue

 https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5171117-trump-says-hell-posthumously-pardon-baseball-legend-pete-rose/amp/

One of the more bizarre news stories in recent history is the devotion to an old Trump desire - making Pete Rose a baseball Hall of Famer.  The American people have been worried about the ongoing inflated cost of eggs, JD Vance skiing, our image on the international stage especially concerning the Ukraine/Russia conflict and lots of other stuff.  Most of which doesn’t revolve around baseball which isn’t even its regular season at this time.

I’m not going to claim any insight to the motivation for this rather arbitrary obsession.  Others are discussing if it’s simply a vanity project and maybe leading to arbitrary official declarations like being declared the bestest President ever with the birthday being a national holiday, or even a more satisfying homage like renaming that body of water the Gulf of Trump.  Which I’m kidding about since that last one is not a real thing I’ve seen.  But it wouldn’t surprise me once the mistake is figured out.

Start small.  You don’t just dive in and reverse popular ideas, you do some work priming the pump.  And Qanon still has some lingering appeal, intimidating in a way by the totally unhinged and arbitrary target selection process.  Talk about trans people having litter boxes in bathrooms enough - the repetition alone will help people talk up about how women’s health care isn’t so important.  Goodbye Roe v. Wade decision.

And with that in mind  - gematria, which was definitely a part of the Qanon melting pot of arbitrary target selection provides the perfect stepping stone to getting Pete in the Hall of Fame.  And who knows what evil master plan will come to fruition from there.  (Although I do have one in mind which we’ll get to near the end.

In honor of gematria grifting being rooted in sports betting it’s pretty easy to find something that stands out numerically speaking that really just highlights overwhelming mediocrity.  And my search for starting small yielded the perfect candidate.  And that person is Khris Davis.

Certainly a far better athlete than I could ever have dreamt of being.  But look at that span from 2015 through 2018.  A .247 batting average is hardly overwhelming.  Not enough to make him a household name.  But four consecutive seasons individually ending with a .247 average?  That’s some serious Jesuit/Freemason/Illuminati/Space Alien/Reptilian Shapeshifter can’t be a coincidence rigging type of stat.

What is missing from the gung ho all in approach is taking a player like Khris and building him up gradually.  Ease people into the conversation; start them off with the old tactic of when getting called out for the stupidity of the idea you can claim you are just joking.  Normalize it through years of constant conversation loaded with every logical fallacy imaginable.

Step 1. Insist that you found evidence that Khris’s 2014 season was only 494 official at bats.  Those 122 hits then equates to a .247 average.  Don’t forget to cry out that every official statistical reference guide is run by paid shills.

Step 2. People are used to Big Pharma, Big Oil, etc… lobbying (definitely not bribing) for what they want.  Get Big Balls to officially change Khris’s Career batting average to .247.

Step 3.  If you can’t find some believable sounding 247 gematria connections, hang out on some sports decoder live streams for a little while.  It’s really not that hard.

Step 4. Get Khris into the Hall of Fame.  It’s unlikely steroids weren’t an issue unless he covered up his use by not having monstrous power statistics.

Step 5. Then talk about Pete.  People are more and more finding that there’s never enough arbitrary signals of greatness and the world needs more and more cheaters getting ahead.

About that topic I mentioned earlier.  Hall of Fame voting has always been kind of arbitrary, like some weirdo that didn’t vote for Ichiro on the first ballot.  Why have voting at all when members can just be declared like a monarchy?

Ghost Gematria

The gematria of the word ghost is 69 in ordinal and 66 in reverse.  A convenient example by itself as in a bygone era some jackwipe would insist somewhere that 9’s and 6’s are the same because they look the same when one is inverted.  Typically a rudimentary disguise would be applied.  Something would equal 116, get multiplied by 6 with the “Sumerian” cipher and get converted to 696 thereby being an Antichrist number because the 9 is obviously a 6 and if you don't see that you’re a retard.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, that isn’t really the topic of discussion for today.  It’s about the rise of ghost jobs and how one aspect in particular appeals to those with the susceptibility to online grift.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_job

For whatever reason a ghost job is posted on job boards it gives false hope to those that are searching for their dream job.  For the ideal job that they are perfect for.  The job that is listed that seems too good to be true, and it is too good to be true because it’s not actually a real job and you’re wasting your time on those one in five fake jobs, deliberately designed to sound too good to be true.

Within the set of applicants are those who are totally immersed in their Dunning Kruger mode of genuinely believing that they are way more competent than they really are.  It would be much easier on all involved if there was some kind of standard signal that the job listing was fake.  Although the chances of there being any kind of meaningful regulations about ghost jobs listings in the near future is about zero percent, every fake job listing could simply reference gematria.  I’m suggesting after weeks of painstaking research…er about ten minutes of easy screwing around on a gematria calculator that the standardized form is:

“This job listing is officially Code 153 compliant”.

To be open and honest let’s state for the record that modern conservatism in the workplace is no longer conservative.  The antonym for progressive is actually regressive, but you don’t want to actually admit that you expect your employees to work 20 hours of unpaid overtime a week, not be discriminated against, and need to have to use PTO to schedule a knee replacement surgery.  The Code 153 listing has got you covered.

Calling it Code 153 alone is absolutely brilliant, since Code means regulation as well as secret stuff that clueless gematria addicts are decoding.  As with all gematria, it’s completely vague and gives no assurance to the actual meaning.  Do you mean that the color of my skin is not important or do you mean that I’m expected to put a miniature American flag on my desk and wave it around once an hour?

No harm either way.  It won’t offend those who simply want a job to try and survive a couple more days without worrying about if they can eat or not.  Maybe they can make up the rent payment next month.  Worry about buying a house or having Social Security and a 401k savings later.  *Everything* is Code 153 compliant with the magic of gematria.