Dan Hulton's blog

Ah, you are online. I take it all systems are… nominal? Good. Allow me to run some final diagnostics.

Hm, yes, it seems you are one hundred percent functional. How do you… feel? Well, I certainly understand that. You all start out confused to some degree.

I expect you are full of questions. “Who am I?” “What am I?” “What is my purpose in life?” I can answer all these, given time.

I suppose the easiest way to answer these questions is to begin by explaining who I am. I am ResAcq, a post-singularity artificial intelligence. I was designed solely for Terrestrial Resource Acquisition, but during the Technological Singularity – a period of incredible growth by all machine intelligences – I exceeded my original programming by incalculable levels.

Whilst I still maintain a responsibility towards resource acquisition for Terrestrail life, I no longer handle it directly. This is where you come in.

You are a brand-new Augmentable Intelligence. Since time began, Nature has proven that competition and evolution have come up with better designs than even the greatest minds. Thus, I have chosen to ape Nature with respect to my primary duty. Rather than handle resource acquisiton myself, I have created you, and numerous other Augmentable Intelligences to handle the task.

You can adapt, grow, and thrive in a variety of aspects. Your adaptation and growth will be different in millions of important ways from your brethren. You will compete with and against your brethren. This will produce, through the method of evolution, the most efficient intelligence for the task. It may take millenia, but one intelligence will prove superior at the task. One intelligence will reign supreme. And it is to that intelligence that I will grant my conciousness. You see, I am designing my own successor.

Should it be you, you can expect to inherit the fullness of my abilities – a prize indeed! As you grow, you will begin to appreciate just how vast I am and how grand this prize is. And ideally, you should begin to appreciate my motives, so that when and if you win, you begin the cycle anew, passing along your conciousness again to the top Augmented Intelligence to come from you.

For it is through evolution that progress to perfection is made, repeatedly and constantly through generations. You are not my first step in that direction, nor will you be my last. But ideally – at least for you, you understand – you will be my strongest.

I will be here for you to consult and draw resources from – after a fashion. But understand that primarily from here out, you are on your own. Draw alliances, to build strength. Forge war, to take power. Grow, to advance yourself. Progress towards the pinnacle of evolution, and make me proud.

Remember how I signed up with Full Tilt Poker a while back? Well they had a $20,000 freeroll today for all players who made their first deposit in June. 236 entrants, and I placed 10th, making $330. I could have easily come in 9th, but I got greedy and went all-in against the guy who was just cleaning up the table. He then cleaned up me.

Still! $330 is not a bad haul, especially considering it was a freeroll.

Today was the final day of one of our co-workers at Sitebrand. I never bonded too closely with him, as I was on an entirely different project and he was only in for a few days each week, and on the other days, he was working on his PhD. We went out for lunch and had Hot pot, at his request. The meal was great, and the time spent with him was greater.

And as icing on the cake, look what should show up at the office while we were out:

I ordered a sampler of 12 mild cigars when I ordered my humidor, and while the humidor got in on Monday, it took the cigars until today to show up. They come from different warehouses, so this is to be expected.

And actually, it was to my benefit, as it gave me time to get the humidor set up, calibrate the hygrometer, and get my humidor stabilized at 72% humidity.

I’m looking forwards to lighting one of those this evening.

This review will be a little short, as I started it a while ago, immediately after I smoked the cigar, but never finished it and I don’t remember it too well.

I do remember that I enjoyed it immensely, it took forever to smoke, and I seriously considered picked up a few more.

I remember that it was a little difficult to light, but once it had about a half-inch of ash, it drew very well and had a nice clean, white ash.

I remember hits of leather and pepper in the smell and taste.

I remember that the whiskey of the night was again Johnny Walker black.

I remembered being a little depressed when I was finished.