To Ariana Grande-Butera

Plan was simple. Procrastinate. I should have waited three days without doing anything, from 25 Sep. I had three options:

1) Do what I said, when I said I would
2) Wait another three days
3) Wait an indeterminate amount of time

So I was going to wait until someone acted differently (option 3). @9玥、's video count has been increasing by 1 per day on both of her accounts since 26 Sep. If this pattern varies, then it could mean that she is trying to communicate something.

But of course I'm messing it up, just 30 minutes after midnight.

First, I'm throwing shade: Ariana is the 7th-most-followed Instagram account, with 362 million followers. This is more than any account on TikTok, Douyin, or Facebook, and only MrBeast has more subscribers than this on YouTube.

But her posts only get 500k to 2m likes. A Chinese actress (actor) has 22m followers, a video with 13m likes, and 3~6m likes on typical videos (F for Videos tab).

I think that on some platforms, accounts get boosted by bots. Not by intention, but just because following popular accounts helps the bots evade detection. Wikipedia has old follower counts, though this just shows all accounts going up. I don't know any well-known people who have been withdrawn from public life for a fair comparison.

I'm basically commenting on three posts: stuck in an elevator, a post with lyrics, some of which are from the song freak, and closing night memories posted by @teamariana.

What I see in these photos: people, both male and female, who are not trying to fix problems.

Most likely, most people in the world would say that they aren't trying to fix problems.

I checked the lyrics to petal to see if they were the words in the post, and this line,

'Cause this music and I will never die

made me think of the novel, Soul Music, and the real-life plane crash that the novel's plot refers to, I guess. I probably read the novel in like 1998, but I can still confidently say that the character Buddy valued being famous more than being alive.

Based off of just the lyrics in the post, I had been going to say something like, "No matter who you are, most people in the world don't care about you. You should always be trying your hardest to get what you want, without apology." But from the lyrics to petal,

'Cause all of my favorite stories
End in some kind of catastrophe

The poll about the evil supercomputer. I'll copy here it:

"An evil supercomputer with a power level that's over 9000 enforces a rule: if two people fall in love, they will be separated for 20 years. It's like a military family moving away, but all communication including texting is disallowed. This can only happen to a person once; after that, they are safe. No one has yet found a way to destroy the evil supercomputer. What would society say is moral: to wait 20 years, or to find someone else to love?"

How would you respond?