overthinking those beans

back in the golden age of glitch, many of us were collectors of things that were rare.

not because they were worth anything or did anything, but because they were useless and silly and it was fun.

and even though beans were one of the most common things in the game, there was an expression that a thing was as "rare as a plate of beans", meaning that essentially it did not exist.

there was no such thing in the game as a plate. beans, yes, but no plate.

and then some developer made a plate of beans. it didn't do anything, but a few people had them. you know, because they were rare.

and near the end, when people were trying to second guess and speculate how glitch might have been saved, one person was thought to have said that the postmortem was just overthinking a plate of beans.

and the next thing we knew, the rare and coveted plates of beans were all over the place. the developers had written it so that if you typed "/beans" into local chat, a plate of beans would drop at your feet.

and then to compound the coolness, you have the option of overthinking the beans, which yielded a confirmation box:

"are you sure you want to overthink this plate of beans?" with the choices "yes!" and "cancel".

and if you clicked "yes!", it waited a second before giving you a second confirmation box: "are you really sure you want to overthink this plate of beans?"

and then after two seconds "are you really, really sure you want to overthink this plate of beans?"

and then after four seconds "are you really, really, really sure you want to overthink this plate of beans?"

the catch is that while you are waiting for the interval to double so you can overthink the beans, you cannot do any other game activity.  not walk, not eat, not meditate. as long as you are overthinking the beans you cannot move on.

you may draw your own conclusions.

once out of sheer bullheadedness and a joy in the perverse futility of it, i overthought the beans until i was really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really sure.

you do the math.