I was grabbing a screenshot for the post, and since I also happen to love numbers I thought it would be funny if the score contained one of my favorite numbers- 666 somewhere in it, or maybe just a 66...anywhere in the ballpark. To me the number 666 means exactly what it says in the Good Book. It's the Number of the Beast and also the Number of a Man: six-hundred, threescore and six. It represents Satan.
It's still one of my favorite numbers. My favorite number is 13. I really do love quite a few other numbers...1, 2, 3, 6, 7 ,8, 9, 11, 33, 44, 66, 88, 888 and so on all the way up to the wondrous and never-ending number of Pi. Boy is that a doozie or what. Still 13 is it for me, but 666 is a great number. It's a hearty number. It has alliteration, repetition and great rhythm. It comes in threes. But like the number 13, many people avoid it whenever possible and some are outright afraid of it.
I forgot the story of how the number 13 got to be bad luck or whatever it is, but of course 666 has biblical connotations. As we know many multi-story buildings omitted the 13th floor altogether. The elevators would go from floor 12 to 14. It was like it didn't exist. I thought it was hilarious even as a kid. Naturally I loved the band "13th Floor Elevators" for the name alone. Luckily they were pretty good.
I'd give the edge to 666 for having more impact than the number 13, but you never know. It does represent evil and not bad luck, and to some people that's worse. On the other hand many people are embracing the number 666. Over the last ten years or so it's been starring on a wide variety of t-shirts, as one example. The number 666 has been on t-shirts forever but it's always been used as a part of another thing, like a band logo or a Satanic theme, but lately it's been appearing solo...shirts with a giant 666 on the front and nothing else. They might mention Aleister Crowley or Anton Lavey or Church of Satan or whatever in small print here or there but 666 is usually the only thing on the shirt. And there's a lot of them. In fact I wish I had a dollar for every 666 t-shirt they've printed so far. It'd be a bit more than $666.
Some people wear them simply as a fashion statement and don't believe in the Devil any more than the Man in the Moon, but many people do, and they're showing which side they're on. Maybe they aren't even into numbers and don't particularly favor 666 over other numbers, just what it stands for. I love the number 666. Does that mean I worship Satan? Hardly. My guy's the other guy. Big G. In fact although I really do love the number 666 I'm basically scoffing at it. Numbers don't scare me anyway. They shouldn't scare anyone else either really, although in many cases they do. There are of course lots of people who take numbers a hell of a lot more seriously than I do. To me 666 represents Satan, Satanism, pure evil and Hell itself, but since I don't fear the Devil I don't fear his area code either. Respect yes, fear no.
The number 666 sometimes frightens people who aren't particularly "religious" and don't believe in God or Satan. As one example there are lots of stories about people getting license-plates with 666 as the number, and all the horrible things that happened to those cars and their drivers- wrecks, thefts, injuries and even deaths. Of course those things happen to people with any number and without even thinking about it for one second people will say it's just a coincidence, and that's understandable, but it's perfectly clear the people who went through all the bad stuff don't think so, and almost all of them didn't consider themselves to be particularly "religious."
Sure one or two things can be coincidence, but there comes a point where just by the sheer number of "coincidences" that the whole thing ceases to be considered a coincidence. There's a name for it that I can't remember but oddsmakers in Vegas will actually book things based on the number of "coincidences" there are, relating to the same thing. It's the same as when you take the odds of something happening or not happening. BTW you can bet on almost anything you could imagine. Real bookies take real bets on much, much more than just sports.
I don't know what it is but say there's a million-to-one chance you'll die from being struck by lightning, or slipping on wet cat shit and hitting your head and dying, or knockin' them boots with that sister you met in the food line last week...seriously, when the number, or the odds against one gets big enough it's considered to be zero, even though mathematically there's an infinitesimal chance. Oddsmakers wouldn't take that bet, even though normally a bet against high odds wins for the house most of the time, at a certain point they pass.
Having said all that I'll say that I'm not saying at all that this is anything but a coincidence, plus it's a singleton (a single occurrence). What I am saying is that it was mighty interesting and amusing and a bit weird...coincidence or not. For nothing else than my appreciation for 666 and my own amusement I decided that it'd be funny if I was somewhat close to a score of 66,000, + or - 500 or so. It was no big deal and I was only going to give it one try but I thought I'd try to take a screenshot when I got as close to 66,000 as I could, like 66,750 or whatever, and I'd be lucky to hit that first try, just for the heck of it. What a dork, right?
You get bonus jewels if you match more than three of the same kind in a line. I you line up four, one of them turns into an exploding jewel, and if you match it with two or more of the same color it blows up and takes out all the jewels touching it, or 9 including itself. If you match two rows of two with one move you get a jewel that shoots lasers in all directions and wipes out the whole row above and below and to the left and right. If you match five in a straight line you get a jewel that you can swap with any one touching it and it will clear all the same jewels on the board.
As jewels fall to replace the ones that disappear it can start a chain-reaction where you move one jewel and it's like a house of cards and the jewels keep matching themselves as they fall, and they'll explode and shoot lasers. It can be a clusterfuck of exploding jewels. Usually you can only make one or two matches with one move, but sometimes you might get 7-8 or more in a row.
Odds-wise I knew the odds of landing on 66,000 would be very slim but doable, but the odds of hitting 66,600 would be astronomical. There's no way to control how many points you score with one move, or stop it on a certain score. You get X-number of points for matching three or more of the same jewel in a row, and the points increase for each round. In round one you get 100 points for matching three jewels. Often making one match leads to a cascade of one or more extra matches, from moving only one jewel.
As you probably know if you've ever played matching games, when a line of three or more jewels is connected and disappears from the board, and other jewels fall randomly down from above to take their place. For each additional match made by moving only one jewel the point value doubles, then triples and so forth. With one move you might score 300 points or you might score 3,000. There's no way to come close to getting a particular score or stopping or pausing the game at a certain number.
I got a kick out of it when the score was sitting somewhere around 64,500 or whatever, and I made one move and it started a cascade, and when it stopped it was on the number above...66,015. I had to chuckle. You have the first two sixes, and then the third- 0+1+5 = 6. In the most basic form of Numerology, which, contrary to what most churches would tell you isn't evil, any two or more numbers are added together, and if that gives a number of two digits or more, those numbers are added together (reduced I guess) until you get a single number, or a significant number with more than one digit, like 33 for instance.
In this case 66,006 could really only be represented by 66,015. One more match would've put it at around 67, 000, give or take. I wanted to get as close as I could to 666 and I nailed it. Isn't that interesting? It's a coincidence but it's my kind of coincidence. THIS HAS BEEN A COINCIDENCE.
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