I’m in the middle of traveling. Yesterday was so hectic that unfortunately I didn’t get any time to sit down and work on my project, which is a whole chunk of reality I’ll have to carefully grapple with. However, there was a fun bright spot. In the Ubers around where I live they sometimes have these tablets strapped to the front seat so the passengers can engage with this silly in-ride service called Octopus that cycles through a bunch of super-shitty, lowest common denominator content for your amusement. Every couple minutes it gives you the opportunity to play a game for a prize. The one I like the most is the trivia game. You have to answer as many questions as you can within the time limit and you gain 1 point for a correct answer and lose 1 point for an incorrect answer. At the end, if you’re the top score across the entire country that day, you can enter your phone number. If your score remains on top all day (subsequent ties are broken in your favor, so you would have to be beaten outright to lose) across all Uber riders playing the game in the whole country, the next day you get texted a code to redeem a $25 Amazon gift card.
I’ve won before so I know it’s real, and I learned this morning that I won yesterday! Yay! I don’t ride in too many Ubers and they don’t all have these tablets but I think winning is pretty cool. It’s like it pays for the Uber. My winning score was 19— though it was enough, I feel I still have more potential than that, since I didn’t have any attempts without at least 1 wrong answer. The questions range from insulting (What does a wedding commemorate? Marriage) to obscure details about U.S. presidents. It can be very stressful to wait for another attempt because you have to sit through the service’s boring unskippable content cycle and because speed is of the essence. If you get a top 10 score you win nothing but can still put your initials in; I tried to be rude and put stuff like ASS and CUM but it wouldn’t let me which is BS because those could certainly be someone’s initials. Maybe my name is Albert Samuel Smith or Charles Ulysses Morgan.
A while back I told myself that whenever I finished a book I would allow myself to purchase a physical copy of a book I wanted that wasn’t available online, but I haven’t really remembered to do that, so maybe this gift card can go to that.