It was 1998 and I was bored, so I went to watch a mediocre movie, Mortal Kombat. Since cell phones barely existed back then, I passed the time by staring at the movie poster.

When I looked closer, I saw a string of letters at the bottom, which piqued my curiousity. It was something like, http://www.moviepreviews.com/mortalkombat145394.html.moviestring.html. I assumed it was clue to some hidden treasure. I wrote down the secret code so I could research it. Researching hidden treasure is much more important than an education, because hidden treasure could be worth billions and an education is only worth in the $100,000’s it turns out. I discovered the key to the clue, the interpreter, was something called the internet.

It turns out that I did have to default to education in order to interpret the clue. I signed up for a class called Introduction to the Internet, subtitled “The key to unlocking mysterious strings of letters on movie posters.” Perfect. I asked my teacher how I could interpret this string of code, and he just said to type it into this “search bar”. I pulled out the clue and typed it in. What would my treasure be? To my bitter disappointment, it was just a movie poster of Mortal Kombat giving me the date when I could see the movie.

I had never been so disappointed in my life. However, it turns out that the Mortal Kombat site was just the first clue, hidden as a disappointing rotating gif. It led me to a virtual place where I could purchase nostalgia. A website that sold old VHS tapes of the Transformers TV series, which until that time, had been lost to my history. I returned to the website every day, knowing that as soon as I could save up enough money, I could buy things from people that lived really far away. It wasn’t the billions I was looking for, but the potential for that would come later.

The treasure hunt continued down a rabbit hole called the Internet Boom of the Early 2000’s. The Mortal Kombat people promised that if I purchased a string of letters starting with www. I could get billions. I made my first purchase of the letters, by getting ownership of Bendgardner.com. Unfortunately, it was too late to print money because of something called the dot.com crash.

The MK people later said I could be a billionaire by doing a thing called an internet diary, or a weblog. 11 years ago, I started this very blog, Ben’s Bitter Blog, hoping to cash in on my billions. By the time I got really famous on WordPress, as the Bitter Blogger you know today, they changed the rules for winning the treasure again. You now need to change your job title to influencer, be hot, and get lots of clicks.

Sadly, all those people had to do a lot of work to get their billions. I’m smarter than all of them, because any day now, the Mortal Kombat people are going to show up at my doorstep and reward me with my billion dollars with a big check to commemorate the occasion.

In the meantime, I will keep doing this blog and then Elon Musk will see it and want to buy it from me. But I will have more money than him, so I’ll keep it.

You might not see as much of me, though, because I will be too busy building diving in my Scrooge McDuck vault, which will cause me to be in the hospital for a while, because you shouldn’t dive in anything that isn’t water.

ARRRGGGGHHHHHH

Bitter 11 Year Blogiversary Ben