THE EXQUISITE CHESS PROJECT
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About the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Stratalist…
Far out in the unchartered backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think the internet is a pretty neat idea.
This planet has a problem, which is this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
There was however, a small, eclectic group of mostly-hairless primates who - probably because they lay claim to very few of these green pieces of paper - were more concerned with other things, like coloring, eating paste, and smelling markers. As these people grew up, their crayons became Photoshop and their markers became Strata3D, although for the most part, they continued to eat paste.
This group of oddballs and miscreants slowly began to warm up to the internet when they found it was populated in part by others much like themselves, and so they formed a cyberspace village affectionately known as the Stratalist.
So popular was Strata3D that vast numbers of people from all over the Galaxy gravitated toward the list in the hopes of gleaning nuggets of wisdom or sometimes just to cry out and know they weren't alone. The enevitable corporate and user web pages sprung forth and an unusual dialect evolved which only the Stratalist members understood. The farflung stratalisters, their dialect, and the myriad Strata cyber tourist destinations soon became so vast and unwieldy that a publishing venture was formed to compile this compendium of information into one source. The resulting body of work is this website, called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Stratalist.
Although you may find this website unspectacular, you should take notice that its title, portions of the text and graphics bear more than a passing resemblence to a wholly remarkable book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by the late great Douglas Adams, which is required reading for all Stratalisters. Although this website is a parody of his hilarious five-book trilogy, the creator of this website wishes to publicly and shamelessly thank the author for this great read as well as his contribution to the healthy self-mockery of humanity.