Ruby's long had leftward assignment (x = 3) and recently got rightward assignment (3 => x). The problem here is obvious: we need a vertical assignment operator. In a complete abdication of good taste and common sense, this talk will walk through correcting this heinous oversight. We'll abuse otherwise-respectable metaprogramming tools like Ripper and TracePoint to add a fully functional vequals operator. While this talk is almost 100% bad-ideas-by-volume, you'll learn a few tricks that you can use in your day-to-day work (or at least to terrify your co-workers).