earlier today, god told me the truth about who goes tortured in hell for eternity. i feel obligated to relay this information to you. sorry, i need to dispense with the usual niceties like capital letters, and i’ll probably make some grammar and spelling mistakes. unforatunetly i do have some work deadlines and this is the best i can do on short notice.
the good news is that most of you aren’t going to hell. the bad, or i guess mixed, news is:
for some people, it will be kind of complicated to tell if they’re going to hell
those who are currently going to hell do have a chance to avoid it, under certain conditions
if you’re currently on track to go to hell, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll avoid going unless you read this message
the people who need to read this message probably can’t read it very easily, unless i get some help from a kind reader of this newsletter with some very specific skills
unfortunately, my newsletter isn’t very popular, so i’m hoping that you all can give this a quick read, give me the benefit of the doubt, and get this info to someone who knows gelao.
the long and short of it is, you will be tortured in hell for all eternity if and only if you have purchased a total of 319 toothpicks on all of the third tuesdays of april (ttoa’s) in which you have been alive. in most parts of the world, it seems that it has never been possible to purchase 319 toothpicks, since toothpicks do not normally come in boxes of 319 or in the factors of 319, which google tells me are 11 and 29 (please send me a comment below if i got this wrong).
unfortunately, this immediately leads to a potentially horrifying edge case. if any toothpick manufacturers have deviated significantly from their nominal box quantity — which would presumably be a “round-ish” number, most likely a multiple of 20 or 25 — and an unlucky individual happened to pick up the wrong combination of inaccurately filled toothpick boxes on the wrong days, their total could add up to 319.
upon realizing this, i flew into a blind panic. slamming google, wikipedia, chatgpt, anything i could find with queries about the standard toothpick box sizes used in different parts of the world. and my impression is that they’re generally sold in multiples of 50 or 100. it seems pretty unlikely that anyone would manage to get 319 in these cases, even if the manufacturer was off by a few here and there.
the main exception to this that i’ve been able to find occurred around the border between china and vietnam from 1965 to 1972. with some reverse image searches i was able to find photos geolocated to this area, which suggest that this area sold toothpicks in boxes of 80. here, the risk is much higher. if a person living in this area bought a total of 4 boxes on the ttoa’s and one of these boxes was accidentally missing a single toothpick, and this person died without buying any additional boxes of toothpicks on ttoa’s, this person would be tortured in hell for all eternity. i think the people living in this area mostly speak gelao.
honestly, if you’ve ever bought anything anywhere near this area, i would highly, highly recommend that you just buy 400 toothpicks to get out of the danger zone. it’s probably way cheaper than any indulgence the church ever offered. i actually got a brief window to ask god about this, and he said that if you don’t have a chance to do this, you will get to go to a limbo state where you’ll have, like, one last chance to fix your count? but i couldn’t get any more details out of him than that. honestly, i had the impression that even he didn’t really know how it worked.
other people who should probably be concerned: i think if you bought a normal 100 count box of toothpicks but somehow spilled a bunch of them before paying, your count might be based on the number you kept/picked up, so if you didn’t pick a bunch of them up, like they rolled under the supermarket shelving or something, and you bought the box anyway, there could be an issue.
i don’t know. i hope this is helpful. i would feel really bad if i didn’t do everything i could. and honestly, i’m not doing everything i could, so i do feel really bad. but at the end of the day i need to go fix some left joins or something and i want to make sure this work project i’m doing makes it into the bullet points of my performance review coming up in a few months.