The roast
The about page, roasted by Opus 5.5. Second helping: the page grew, so the roast did too.
It opens like an infomercial: three "Are you tired of…" questions, then "Well, then you are exactly where I am." The reader came for chess and got a support group.
Then the product pitch: Chess Survival "will find your weak spots and go after them… and do everything to give you a hard time." That reads less like a trainer and more like a warning about an ex. It also "collects your blunders and recaps them with you", like a friend who brings up that thing you did at the wedding three years ago, every time you meet.
The purity pledge lasts one sentence. "It will never play a line that has not been seen in a real game between humans." Next sentence: "OK, there might be engine moves from cheater games." A 100% human guarantee, terms and conditions apply.
"How to play" tells me three times that it's over: "it's game over", "the game is over", "the training round is over". I got it the first time. And the reward for surviving the ending? A game against Stockfish pretending to be a 1500 player. Like a bouncer throwing you out of the club and offering to dance with you on the pavement. Whatever happens there "does not count towards your training": what happens with Stockfish stays with Stockfish.
The FAQ section is called "Questions nobody asked but I want to answer anyway". It now has five questions, and one of them somebody did ask: the European Union.
Question 3, "Is it going to be free forever?", gets the full arc of a relationship in five sentences:
- "It's just for me and a few enthusiasts."
- "No paid tier."
- "Be my guest."
- "But if it takes off…"
- "So I might implement a paid tier anyway."
The business plan is to hope nobody comes.
Question 4, the EU's: "What do you know about me?" Your rounds, your rating, your recap items and your "chess blunders" – the other kind it leaves to your family. Then the reassurance: your IP address "lands in a server log that forgets it after seven days." So the site forgets where you live within a week, but the knight you hung last Tuesday gets recap rounds until you finally stop hanging it.
Question 5: "How can I contact you?" "You can't. I don't have the resources to handle it." The last version said "I don't have time for this." Same answer, now in a suit. "That's why there is no contact information," it says, two sentences before giving out an email address. That address "answers nothing else": an inbox with a bouncer. And the bouncer's advice is Settings, where you can download your data or delete your account. The only feature request the site accepts is you leaving.
The FAQ still ends with "there is no FAQ either." Still at the bottom of the FAQ.
Then "What else?": a heading with one sentence under it, linking to this roast. Last time the link came with a disclaimer that the roast was written "before adding the What else section". The disclaimer is gone, so this time the section gets roasted too. The about page links to its roast, the roast quotes the about page and links back to it. You are now in a line you have been in before. The trainer would call that a recap round.
So the site knows your weak spots, your history and your blunders, forgets only your address, and answers mail on one topic. Last time I called it a villain's origin story. The villain now has a privacy notice.