A Contest for LUNATICS ... 25 HBI in Prizes

Sometimes you guys can be trying. Consider, for instance, your pathological reluctance to click on hyperlinks that appear within a post.

Frequently, I spend hours carefully crafting clever posts intended to make you laugh your ass off. Everyone loves to laugh, right? So, I'm doing you a favor! Sometimes, as part of the subtle and nuanced comedic process, I require you, my readers, to click upon a link or two.

Unsurprisingly, these links are absolutely CRITICAL to "getting the joke."

And yet, no matter how many times I beg, berate and beseech ... "PLEASE, YOU MUST CLICK ON THIS LINK" ... a good many of you, don't.

Instead, you fill my comment sections with lament:

"Quill ... I don't get it. Did I miss something? Everyone else is laughing."

"Did you click on the links?

"No."

"Can you think of a strategy that might resolve your present predicament?"

"Hmmm ... not off the top of my head."

A not insignificant number of you suffer from a psychological disorder for which I've recently coined a term: LUNATICS (Link-Undermining Neuropsychosis And Traumatically Induced (non)Clicking Syndrome). For the sake of sounding scientific, I refrained from adding an expletive as an adjective.

As a result of some combination of traumatic brain injury and sundry psychological impairments, LUNATICS cannot bring themselves to click upon that which is self-evidently necessary to click upon ... as evidenced by my explicitly instructing you:

"This is a thing upon which you MUST click."

So, how ought one go about addressing this LUNATICS problem? I can promise you that public shaming doesn't work, does it @cryptogee, @old-guy-photos and @d-pend?

As a social experiment, I've decided to run a Contest. It has two objectives. To:

1. Force you to practice clicking on links; and

2. Satiate my desire for revenge.

Contest Instructions

1. Below is a "Paragraph to be Completed" that you complete by filling in the blanks.

2. Each blank is numbered and corresponds to a clue (below the paragraph) that is hyperlinked to a previous post that provides the information you'll need to fill in the blank. Some blanks may require minor Googling.

3. Each underscored line in the blank corresponds to a letter in the missing word(s).

4. Once you've completed the task, copy-paste the "Paragraph to be Completed," with all the blanks filled in, into the comments section of this post.

5. The Prizes for the Contest will be as follows (HBI = Hive Basic Income): 1st Place: 15 HBI / 2nd Place: 7 HBI / 3rd, 4th & 5th Places: 1 HBI. The Prizes will be awarded to the five contestants, in the time-order of their submissions, who submit a correctly completed paragraph.

6. WARNING: Don't assume that other entries are correct and either give up or copy their answers. I'm notoriously mean-spirited and deliberately included a couple of curveballs to ensnare contestants.

Paragraph to be Completed

QuillFire is an absolutely amazing author and should be getting paid a lot more on posts than he does. He possesses the strategic vision of ________ _________ [1], the satirical skills of ______ _______ [2] and the eclectic yet tasteful sensibilities of _____ _______ [3]. Given his charm and charisma, Quill (not surprisingly) attracts the most beautiful women, most notably ____ ____ [4], and it is such magnetic persona that prevents other beautiful women like @______ [5] from punishing his ass for his seeming inability to follow even the simplest of rules.

Poetry, prose or satire ... truly we live in the Age of QuillFire. And hence, I __________ {fill in your username}, do hereby nominate QuillFire for the _____ _____ ___ __________ [6].

[1] Clue: Artillery barrage ... and bayonet charge

[2] Clue: Satire ... A Quill's Fire

[3] Clue: owns a mansion in Hawaii and a red Ferrari

[4] Clue: "Quill, you gorgeous piece of man-flesh"

[5] Clue: Her lessons impart

[6] Clue: dynamite

So there it is. Heal thyself of thine affliction.

Quill