TomReb?

For the past three or four years, I've played this game called Blogshares -- a fantasy stock market involving blogs. I'm kind of like an MFA student, I know just enough to be an asshole. Oh I kid! Anyhow, it was only recently I figured out how to buy artifacts so I could monkey with the stocks. To be perfectly frank, I don't really understand the way it all works -- for example, I used a bunch of artifacts to first cause a PR disaster to lower Silliman's blog price, then I restructured the blog so I could acquire 20% of the shares so I could initiate a hostile takeover. This means I bought the stock at 3x the price. After all that, I created some "PR Buzz" to boost the price back up, but it sort of tanked 20 minute later -- and then I decided it would be a good idea to reindex the blog and then it tanked a bunch more. Long story short, I'm down a $130 million dollars. Now I'm waiting for someone to push me out and take the stock away for 3x the price so I can recover some of what I lost, but nobody's done that yet and I'm betting there's a very obvious reason why . . .

. . . anyhow, that was all practice for my main goal, to reclaim my rightful shares of Radish King. See, I owned that stock years ago, and then somebody came along restructured it and hostile takeovered my ass. I didn't even know what happened, but poof, there went my Radish King. As Ms. Loudon's publisher, I feel it is my responsibility to own her stock on Blogshares. You see, I invest in my authors.

A couple weeks ago I tried to take it over, but didn't have enough artifacts and it was promptly snatched back from me. Today (armed with more artifacts), I tried again and again, the original owner just took it right back a few hours later.

Then the current owner invited me to join his/her premier corporation -- a corporation with a code of ethics against "manipulating stock prices." Apparently the way I'd been doing it was nothing more than a series of dick moves -- and the members of this corporation hold themselves to higher standards.

Anyhow, that was nice and all, but I have my own corporation and there I'm the "Alpha Poet" -- like I'd ever walk away from that!

Or would I? Soon after I received the corp invite, this person wrote and explained the benefits of joining: "we can help you increase your artes very quickly by offering cheap deals on the required ideas, lots of useful info to help you succeed with shares and ideas, and corp incentive competitions. . . We also give you a cash premium if you make our corporation your main corporation, along with shares to increase your portfolio."

My corporation doesn't do that -- all my corporation does is offer .01% interest. I don't know how to make it do anything else -- cause I'm a poet!

And then, this person dangles Radish King saying that if I join their corporation and make it my main one (forsaking the corporation I founded!), he/she will give me all the public shares of Radish King.

The only thing I ever really wanted!

Too good to be true? It all sounds a little Scientologisty to me. Am I being groomed to become Katie Holmes' replacement? Once I'm in, is there any way out?