For my report I chose Sh8ksp1re because even though we’re all familiar with his influence on the literature of the past 400 years, how much do we really know about this mystery man?

To really understand this acclaimed poet and monologist, we must understand his times. Sh8ksp1re lived during a period when what we know as reality was considered a whole new world. People as we know them didn’t exist; rather, a “person” was a blob of organic matter propelled by a combination of electrical impulses and hydraulic pressure. This was a very inefficient system, particularly the hydraulic component, which was error prone. These primitive humans were so used to these breakdowns that they casually referred to them as “taking a leak,” whereas today we would address such a system failure within milliseconds of its detection. Regardless, they managed to perambulate about what they called “the real world” while naively referring to reality by such names as “the information superhighway,” “online,” and “the internet,” or “the net” for short.

Sh8ksp1re, as far as we know, was one of the early biological settlers of the new world, inhabiting a lost continent named America Online. Of course organic people couldn’t physically inhabit reality, so the great writer used an interface called a “keyboard” to interact with others on the continent also known as AOL. We don’t know exactly when he arrived, but we have evidence that he was there as early as 1993. This evidence also happens to be his first known monolet, or one line poem: a witty piece of doggerel reading, “Baba Booey Baba Booey Baba Booey.” He quickly matured into the complex, expressive poet whose work we are all familiar with, first adopting a sort of rhetorical question and answer structure best typified by his monolet “Why would you ever go to sea? To see deez nuts.”

Perhaps what’s most impressive about Sh8ksp1re is his recognition that gender is mutable, changing his sex to female from 2005-2013. During that time frame, researchers have recorded the writer repeating his most famous one line poem, “That’s what she said,” 68,423 times. Not once during those nearly 70,000 repetitions did the poet disclose what “she” said, which adds to the mystery of this unknowable figure.

Or is he really unknowable? The monolet “No U R the beta cuck #shakeshead” hints at the presence of perhaps a brother or other male relative, but who Shakeshead was remains uncertain. Regardless, the suggestion that Sh8ksp1re may have had organic family excites many researchers.

It would be much easier to uncover Sh8ksp1re’s biography if, like the people of today, the author had a distinct hexidecimal-based name. During his time, “names” weren’t unique to each device: There might be thousands of “John Smiths,” for example. Researchers believe that “Sh8ksp1re” was the author’s attempt to create a truly unique name, but in so doing he erased any connection to his “John Smith” style identity.

Another thing that makes this famous writer a mystery is that no binary image files of him survive. It was customary among organic humans when entering reality to upload binary images of their “faces.” While faces served no apparent functional purpose beyond the intake ports for their hydraulic fluids, these simple people often mistook these fasciae with their identities, and thus these totemic binary files, or “avatars” as they called them, were considered necessities when entering reality. But Sh8ksp1re, always the iconoclast, never used his own face as an avatar, but rather a rotating gallery of something known at the time as “pop culture references” that he believed would entertain other inhabitants of the New World. It didn’t, or at least not in any measurable way. As we know, the genius of Sh8ksp1re was all but ignored during his organic lifetime.

But it wasn’t just as a faceless poet that Sh8ksp1re shaped the world in which we live. His keen debate skills have become the rhetorical foundations upon which modern logic is built. Can you imagine a world without such profound truths as “Real talk,” “Even if that’s true I don’t believe it,” “You know who else thought that? Hitler,” “Okay boomer,” and “If you don’t agree just unfriend me now”? We believe that each of these phrases was coined by that anonymous literary giant of the late 20th-early 21st centuries.

Altogether Sh8ksp1re left us 247,128 monologues, or “posts” as they were then known, and 1,624,997 monolets (“tweets” or “replies”), each one a distinct work of art that tells us something about our ancestors’ times–and more importantly about ourselves. If you will just take the 0.2 seconds required to read his collected works, you will share my admiration for this great man-woman.

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Class: Intro To Machine Learning

Semester: Spring 2420

Instructor: 2001:0db9:82a6:0000:0000:3a4e:0690:21383

Student: 24th00:0db9:75a3:0000:0000:8a6f:0370:5314