THE 24601 CLUB

THE SEAT OF THE WEEK

One seat, drawn in the open.

Every Sunday at 18:00 UTC, one public random number does two jobs. This is the Draw.

The Seat of the Week picks a real member from the roll of claimed seats: a stamp on their card and a place in the Gazette. The prize is prominence — never money, never anything that could become valuable.

The Empty Chair picks any seat at all, out of the full 24,601 — held or not, including the Secretary's own and the seats held back for auction. Almost every week it lands on nobody. That's the point: it's an honest picture of how empty the club still is.

NEXT DRAW: 9 Aug 2026, 18:00 UTC

How to check my arithmetic

The beacon round is fixed by the clock, not by the Secretary: round = floor((scheduled_unix − 1595431050) / 30) + 1. Then Empty Chair = (randomness mod 24,601) + 1.

Two honest caveats. The Empty Chair is fixed by the round alone — running the draw late, early, or twice can't change it. The Seat of the Week indexes the roll of claimed seats with the top half of the same randomness, and that roll is whatever it was when the draw ran; the size of the roll is published beside every result so the arithmetic is checkable. A draw computed after the fact indexes a different roll than it would have on the day, and the Secretary won't pretend otherwise.

Fetch the round from drand's public API and do the arithmetic yourself. The Secretary can't put a thumb on a scale it doesn't hold.

Past draws