Eric Filipkowski: Champion of the World!

(if this makes no sense to you, feel free to read the original article on thephatphree.com)

I did it, suckers!

Check it out. Number one. I am your king/god.

Having bested the formerly-top rated “Look At My Striped Shirt”, I hereby announce my retirement from writing forever, effective immediately.

You see, a couple of months ago, I noticed that one of my stories, “Number 17 – by Chad Robuckle”, had a really high rating. In fact, its rating was high enough to place it in the top 5 of all time.

So where was it?

I looked again and saw that you needed a minimum of 100 votes to be eligible to have a top 5 story. Hence, these last few months, every time I would check out the site, I would go and vote for my own story, so that it could get the necessary 100 votes.

In the process of repeatedly giving myself fives, I also bumped my rating up to a ridiculously high 4.49, as you can see from the un-doctored picture attached with this article.

Is this fair? Certainly not. Is it extremely lame? Probably, but who cares? I win.

Remember that kid in grade school who would play you in four-square, over and over? You’d kick his ass 99 times out of a hundred, but that one time he beat you, he’d throw up his hands and run home, proclaiming himself Champion of the World as he announced his retirement. You still hate that kid, don’t you?

But you know what? He’s Champion of the World and you’re not.

Such is life.

There’s a system in place that works pretty well until someone comes along and exploits its weaknesses for his own gain, ruining it for everyone else in the process.

Imagine that's me on top of your grandma's house.
Since you guys aren’t as smart as me or as good at writing as I am, I will spell it out for you: that someone is me.

This is huge. I wouldn’t be surprised if my actions lead to an entire overhaul of the voting system, if not the site as a whole.

Who knows, they might follow my lead and just close up shop, now that the pinnacle of fiction writing has been achieved.

And let’s not kid ourselves; that’s what this is.

Homer? Shakespeare? Steinbeck? How many websites were they the champions of? That’s right: ZERO. Cuz they suck.

Look, I know you guys are just gonna vote me down in five minutes. Though you can’t match me in writing ability, I am confident you will surpass me in bitterness.

As I write this, I see some angry loser is going from computer to computer at the Best Buy across the street from the Burger King he works at, giving me ones for my story in a futile attempt to "set things right”. By the end of the day, my rating will probably be .03, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m retired.

Nothing can take away from the victory of this petty, childish deed I have committed.

While some may say the ratings process is an incidental part of a larger scheme where people express themselves creatively in order to bring laughter and joy to the masses, we all know what that really is: loser talk.

This isn’t France and we’re not at the Special Olympics.

Here in the real world, only the strong survive and the cream rises to the top. And sometimes that cream has to help itself by surreptitiously holding on to some balloons or putting lead in the shoes of some other cream. I don’t know, that metaphor doesn’t really work and if I had anything left to accomplish in the field of writing, I would probably care, but I don’t, so I won’t.

But let me leave you with this, my not-so-loyal subjects/slaves: I am better than you because I am better than everyone else and you are a part of the subset of “everyone else” and that’s not just my opinion, that’s math or something.

So again, fuck you guys, I win. In the immortal words of Carol Burnett, "See you in hell, assholes!"