Starve the beast at Sunday Game Night

From: Nathan
To: Game Friends

Game Friends,

Last week’s bloated missive was yet another example of the liberal excess that is ruining this email thread. Weighing in at 473 words and using an obscene 2700+ characters, that email represented an involuntary taxation of at least two point seven thousand bytes of your vanishing email storage capacity and, more importantly, three or more minutes of your life—unless you didn’t read it, in which case it was just wasteful. Those words could have been used in a perfectly good diatribe, but now they’re gone forever.

This week, I’m slashing taxes and instituting a strict 150 word limit. From now on, I’ll simply tell you that Game Night is happening this Sunday at 5pm and that you should RSVP and bring food or snacks to share. If I still have some words left, I might allude to the possibility of nachos. A word limit will improve the

From: Katherine
To: Game Friends

We are thrilled to be invited to join an economically minded group of (no doubt talented) game “players”, a place where time and efficiency are prioritized over the siren song of rhapsodic emails, that scourge plaguing our common modernity, its pleonastic head rearing up out of every unswept corner of our ever-increasing “free” storage of content and memories. Count us in amongst you tomorrow, sensible yet principled, bringing precisely no more than is required nor any less. We will uphold the ethos of balance, thrift, and a sparing use of time that is not only wise, but might I add most humbly, godly. We are yours in solidarity, towards the noblest effort of ever greater claim on the importance of every word, that it convey only what must be said and no more. Necessary and Sufficient!! We have no dietary restrictions and will bring something to share.

Dan, Katherine