Powerband

You know you want to be like him.

ΩOur motivation survey is now closed. I have analysed the results using a secret NASA supercomputer and can offer the following conclusions.

Of the 50 responses, 68% of people had the primary motivation of improving their 8a scorecard. You might think ‘Hey wait a minute… that wasn’t even an option!’ but you have in fact been cleverly outmanoeuvred by yours truly. You see, despite anonymity it was apparent people would still lie and select another option rather than admit the horrible petty truth, that they are slaves to Jens Larsen and his number-crunching. To get around this, we did some ‘in-depth psychological profiling’ of a number of ‘volunteer’ climbers (this was made possible by the lovely people at Guantanamo Bay Military Prison) to find what alternative categories they would pick to replicate the 8a tick if it weren’t present. So, if you voted for ‘climbing as hard as possible’ (14 of you did) you admitted that all you really care about is numbers, big numbers. How else is hard climbing defined?

Another 13 selected ‘having fun with your mates on the rock’ which was the obvious ‘red herring’ option. Nobody is actually motivated in this way, we all know that climbers don’t have ‘mates’ or even friends. Climbers just have other climbers that they go climbing with, these people aren’t friends, they are enemies that need to be burned off and defeated on 8a. As the saying goes: keep your friends close, but because you have none, keep your enemies close and pretend they are friends. What better way to beat someone on 8a than by sabotaging their climbing from close range? People use all sorts of tricks for this; spooging up holds, anti-beta, mixing chalk with lubricant, bad shoe recommendations, telling stories about someone falling off the top and breaking their leg, stealing their lunch, tipping out all their water (this doesn’t work on JP),  telling people that unclimbed blank faces are Derek’s new V10, etc, etc.  This obviously false option was included due to the psychologically proven fact that, when given a list of options that doesn’t actually include their first choice, some people choose an option that is obviously false through protest. Clear evidence of this is people watching Adam Sandler movies. Nobody would actually chose to do so, it’s just the movie they wanted to see wasn’t on, so they made a protest choice of such ridiculous bad taste everyone would know what was going on. You 13 people are horrible despicable liars who are kidding yourselves.

Six people were honest and admitted that their primary motivation was burning people off. You are lumped in with those above, because we all know that it’s hard to burn people off in person, so allegiance to 8a works well as you can track what other people are doing and lie on your scorecard so you are always ahead of them. You can also go back and downgrade the problems they have just done that you had already done, thereby making them look bad. Very clever.

Another person joins this group through selecting ‘getting mentioned on Powerband’. They may have thought they were being funny by selecting this. But it was only funny as a second ‘red herring’ category and that joke was mine and shame on you for piggy-backing on it. Actually, in this case you were telling the truth despite yourself, you wanted to admit your number-crunching ways but couldn’t bear to, so when you got a option which hinted at this but in a humorous way you selected it as if you were joking, because it allowed you to tell the truth. How are you going to get mentioned on Powerband? By climbing big numbers, think about it. When was the last time we reported someone climbing an ungraded slab? Never, that’s when. Shame on you.

Which brings us to the minority groups.  Now that we have identified you, we are better armed to marginalise you. 10 of you selected ’spreading small particles of skin and chalk as far and wide as possible’. By the way, I voted for this category. For years I’ve been campaigning for the more prodigious distribution of small skin and chalk particles in our natural places. It’s great to know there are more people like me out there. Brothers and sisters of the dust, I salute you!  Seriously though, what is wrong with you? You people are the detritus of the world.

Two of you claimed that your primary motivation was ‘avoiding being mentioned on Powerband’. Pull the other one. The only reason you saw the survey is because you check this site every five minutes to see if we have mentioned you yet. You are pathetic. Haven’t you figured out how this works yet? You pay me, I make up a story about you climbing something hard. It’s that simple. Want to get mentioned? SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

One person selected ‘doing first ascents’. Just the one. There are a number of people who are such competitive ego-maniacs that they can only bear to climb their own problems. Trying a problem somebody else has done already is somehow beneath them (actually because every time they fall off they feel crushed by the knowledge that somebody else already climbed it before them and this puts them in the foetal position for several hours). If nobody else has done it before they can fool themselves that the problem is really hard and that they are a pioneering hero. However, I happen to know that none of those people look at this site, for the obvious reason that it would shatter their delusions. So this one person must be someone who has put up lots of boulder problems in Castle Hill Basin that we have reported about. Either that or they are a liar.

Now to our final category. Twice as many people (two to be precise) selected ‘doing second ascents’. Given that you outnumber our first ascentionists two to one you have quite the competition going on. Luckily, there is a bit of a backlog of unrepeated problems; as we all know, every conceivable problem in the Basin has already been ascended by Joe Arts in his tramping boots. In any case, you are just trying to burn off your mate and get the second ascent before him or her, so you are basically in the burning-off category anyway.

That concludes our survey. As far as I can tell, you are all either completely deluded shameless number crunchers or else openly aggressive and competitive number crunchers. That’s not true, a fifth of you are freaks who take wicked pleasure from the pointlessness of spreading chalk and skin around the universe (presumably if you had spacecraft you would travel wider than you do at present). Hopefully through seeing these results we now all understand each other a little better.

Stay tuned for our next survey, where we will ask ‘Who is the second most-annoying climbing media personality?’ we all know who is top of the heap in that regard. Thanks for voting.Ω