You are about to read d-m-u’s latest blog post. So it goes. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Center yourself. It’s a difficult task, as you know. We got a bunch of robot computer people sittin’ around with their faces stuffed in computer screens. Breathe. Ignore all the robot computer people commotion around you.

You must of course find the optimal reading position. Maybe curled up, maybe flat. Adjust the light, get your tea, sort out the cat. In a chair, on the deck, on a hammock. Upside down, in the yoga reading position.

You know in your heart of hearts that, although this sounds almost like the Lovecraft, surely d-m-u wouldn’t be so prosy and derivative. No, it must be merely coincidentally bleak, like a New Jersey November. Perhaps it is merely a variation on a theme. You have mused for many long hours over the indescribable irresistibility of the self-referential text, and thus you understand the philosophical draw inherent in metafiction. A novel that knows it’s a novel: the infinite appeal of the postmodern.

You don’t expect anything much at all from this particular blog post. You, after all, are the kind of precise, principled person who no longer expects much of anything. So it goes. There are plenty of young idealistic fools who live in tomorrow’s fleeting expectations of extraordinary experiences. You are beyond all that folly. The best you can hope for is simply to avoid the worst. And since you have ascribed such a wisely jaded quality to all that lies in the present, you believe that surely you can afford to indulge in the innocent, careless hopes of the reader, for whom time is merely a pleasant fallacy.

And so you go looking for the recently-merged post, through the thick swathes of Articles You Haven’t Read, glowering at you from the brambles of the internet. But you pay no heed to the Posts You Needn’t Read, the Posts Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Posts Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Things Read Before Being Written, through the sections of

the Articles You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Articles You’ve Been Looking For For Years Without Success,
the Articles Dealing With Something You’re Working On Right Now,
the Articles You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read Later,
the Articles You Need To Go With Other Articles You’ve Read,
the Articles That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Dread.

But this is where the similarities end. Your copy of this post is not, after all, corrupt. It does not contain the same section written an infinite number of times. It is not a stand-in for a Polish novel. You will not return to the manageiq website in search of an uncorrupted version. Nor will you speculate on whether or not d-m-u is actually named Bazakbal. You, dear reader, will thankfully continue on with the remarkably short post, in which some nouns have metaphorical value only.

On Tuesday, X finds an obscure URL and discovers ten pull requests. On Thursday, Y finds in the vastness of the internet three pull requests, somewhat eclipsed by the kerfluffle of Wednesday’s sprint review. On Friday, Z discovers four new pull requests lurking in the manageiq repos. On Friday morning, X finds three pull requests that still need to be backported. The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality - i.e., the continuity - of the ten pull requests. It is absurd to imagine that three of the PRs have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, four between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, three more between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed - at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of people - at every moment of those three periods.