alot

[|The Alot is Better Than You at Everything]

As a grammatically conscientious person who frequents internet forums and YouTube, I have found it necessary to develop a few coping mechanisms. When someone types out "u" instead of "you," instead of getting mad, I imagine them having only one finger on each hand and then their actions seem reasonable. If I only had one finger on each hand, I'd leave out unnecessary letters too!



If I come across a person who seems to completely ignore the existence of apostrophes and capital letters and types things like "im an eagle and im typing with my talons, so dont make fun of me cuz this is hard," I like to imagine that they actually //are// an eagle typing with their talons. It would be a hassle if you had to hop in the air and use your feet to karate-chop two keys simultaneously every time you wanted to use the shift key to make a capital letter. Also, eagles lack manual dexterity, so I can understand why they'd want to leave out apostrophes. Eagles are all about efficiency.



But there is one grammatical mistake that I particularly enjoy encountering. It has become almost fun for me to come across people who take the phrase "a lot" and condense it down into one word, because when someone says "alot," this is what I imagine:



The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

For example, when I read the sentence "I care about this alot," this is what I imagine:



Similarly, when someone says "alot of ___", I picture an Alot made out of whatever they are talking about.









If someone says something like "I feel lonely alot" or "I'm angry alot," I'm going to imagine them standing there with an emo haircut, sharing their feelings with an Alot.



The Alot is incredibly versatile.









So the next time you are reading along and you see some guy ranting about how he is "alot better at swimming than Michael Phelps," instead of getting angry, you can be like "You're right! Alots are known for their superior swimming capabilities."



 [|PLEASE STOP!!]
When I was a child, one of the things I enjoyed doing was hitting other children with a stick. Many of my classmates also enjoyed doing this. We would walk through the forest in back of our school, trying to find the biggest stick we could feasibly wield as a weapon. When we found the right stick, we would lure an unsuspecting child out of the teacher's sight during recess and attack them. We called this game Stick War and it was the best game ever as long as you weren't the one being beaten mercilessly.



We were able to secretly play Stick War for almost three whole days before one of our asshole classmates ruined it by calling for help when we wouldn't stop hitting him. Our teacher was furious. She sat us down and told us that from then on, if any one of us felt like we were being treated unfairly, we could yell "PLEASE STOP!" and the offending party must stop or face dire consequences.



Life after Please Stop was very different for us. We could no longer overpower our weaker classmates with brutality.



No matter what was happening to you, you could always count on Please Stop to prevent it from continuing. It was a magic bullet of pure power. We respected it. We feared it.

It didn't take us long to learn how to abuse it.



We began using Please Stop for everything. We used it to settle ownership disputes and to bend the rules of freeze tag. If we didn't want to learn about numbers, we would shout "PLEASE STOP!" at our teacher. It became a single word - "//PLEESTOP//" - uttered triumphantly in a loud burst.

Please Stop quickly made its way into our home lives, too. I clearly remember sitting at the dinner table, yelling "PLEASE STOP!" at my mom because she was trying to make me finish my meatloaf. My sister and I became Please Stop ninjas, constantly finding creative new ways to wield the ultimate source of power more effectively.

But one fateful day, we flew too close to the sun and ruined Please Stop forever. I remember that it was summer. I had just come inside from catching grasshoppers and I was sorting them on my sister's bed because I didn't want to get grasshopper guts on mine. I tried to sort them based on how many legs they still had - the intact grasshoppers would be dried out for display purposes and the mangled ones would be used in dissection experiments which were not done for scientific reasons, but more as an excuse to chop up grasshoppers with my mom's butcher knife.

My sister was horrified to find me trespassing on her side of the bedroom.


 * My sister:** "Don't sit on my bed!"


 * Me:** "It's a free country! I can sit on your bed if I want!"


 * My sister:** "PLEASE STOP!"


 * Me:** "PLEASE STOP SAYING PLEASE STOP!"


 * My sister:** "PLEASE STOP TELLING ME TO PLEASE STOP SAYING PLEASE STOP!"


 * Me:** "PLEASE STOP TELLING ME TO PLEASE STOP TELLING YOU TO PLEASE STOP SAYING PLEASE STOP!"

We had discovered a glitch in the system -- Please Stop was flawed. It could be used against itself //infinitely,// thereby becoming useless. We were in a ******* Mexican standoff.

It felt like we had forcibly ripped apart the universe and were now staring at a gaping black hole where our powerful weapon used to exist. What had we done?

Over the course of the summer, the other children in my class also began to discover the flaws of Please Stop. Parents could not be controlled by it. It was hard to yell it effectively when your mouth was crammed full of your own socks. It was even harder to yell when your head was underwater.

By the time we returned to school in the fall, we had resigned ourselves to settling things the old-fashioned way, with sticks and rocks. But we were bitter and jaded, having placed our faith in something so obviously corruptible, so even Stick War lost its former appeal.



There was a brief ray of hope when someone invented "Please Stop to Infinity" to solve the escalation problem, but shortly afterward someone else invented "Please Stop to Infinity to Infinity" and we were right back where we started.

As we grew up, we learned to solve our problems through "//talking"// and "//compromise,"// but I think secretly we all still yearned for the days where we only had to yell "PLEASE STOP" and anything we wanted was ours.

=== [|7 Games You Can Play With a Brick] ===

If you have a brick or a pile of bricks, you may be thinking "bricks are really boring." But you're wrong. There are probably a million ways to have fun with a brick. Here are seven of them.


 * 1. "Brick Tag"**

The rules of brick tag are simple: if you get hit by the brick, you're "it." You can also play brick freeze-tag, but it is not recommended since a game involving blunt-force trauma to the head doesn't really need to be complicated by not being able to tell if your friends are dead or just not "unfrozen" yet.




 * 2. "Brick Roulette"**

Have your friends stand in a circle around you. Put on a blindfold. Spin around as fast as you can while holding the brick with your arm fully extended to build up maximum force. Let go.




 * 3. "Jump Over the Brick"**

Put the brick on the ground. Jump over it. See how high you can jump.




 * 4. "Truth or Brick"**

Tell the truth or get the brick.




 * 5. "Drop the Brick"**

Find something tall. Go up on top of it. Drop the brick.




 * 6. "Brick Conquerers"**

Mess the brick up. Hit it with a stick, stab it with a sword, set it on fire - the goal is to inflict maximal harm on the brick.




 * 7. "Duck, Duck, Brick"**