6/ Tired of hearing "corporations are not people," Galt, Inc developed an AI to design an anthropomorphic representation of itself based on internal data and employee photos.
Unfortunately, no matter how they tuned it, the AI only generated lizard faces.
8/ Through the dirty windows of the Covid-shuttered bakery, the empty display cases, once full of scrumptious cookies, were visible. Camped under the awning, a derelict homeless woman watched a rerun of the Hallmark Christmas movie she'd once starred in.
9/ The man with a hook for a hand, his face dark under the hood of his anorak, limped slowly down the rainy pier, his wellingtons squelching in the puddles. At the end of the pier, a woman in the wet dress screamed, "Help! I'm being murdered by a cliche!"
10/ The mayor swore to get 100% of the town vaccinated, and after a mighty effort, it was done. But after the last person in town was vaccinated, with much fanfare, a great melancholy descended on the town. Things had returned to normal.
11/
"Wise master, I aspire to goodness, but evil surrounds me. What should I do?" asked the seeker.
"There is no certainty of grace in this life," the master replied sadly, "All we can do is take notes on the evil around us, and review them weekly."
12/
"Sir, the AI has locked into a self-improvement recursion and has locked the bunker doors. It has enough backup power to launch the missiles!"
"Isn't MacGyver in there?"
"Yes sir, but it's no use. The AI has collected all the paperclips!"
13/
“What the hell happened here?” the alien ambassador asked.
“A mad emperor, aided by venal aristocrats, pandered to the paranoid insecurities of a crazed, conspiratorial religious mob, and 300,000 people died.”
“And what do you call this system of government?”
“Democracy!”
14/ Joe looked up at the canopy, letting the shade-filtered sun wash over him. He closed his eyes, and breathed in a deep lungful of the forest air.
“What did you say this forest bathing thing was called Hiroaki?”
A bird fluttered overhead. Plop.
“That version? Shirin Yucku”
16/
“The problem, Karen, is that your life is out of alignment with the universe. That’s why you got canceled. Yoga can’t fix that.”
“Do you mean my chakras? Should I try meditation? A juice cleanse?”
“No, I mean you’re a lawful evil soul trapped in a chaotic neutral world.”
18/ What did the CBC reporter say when the Canadian airship carrying a cargo of maple syrup crashed in Toronto, leaving the shoes of millions all sticky.
"Oh, the viscosity!"
20/
The physicist made a time machine that could only travel to the future after 1992, but soon got bored. All future times seemed alike.
“Why don’t you make a parallel universe portal gun instead?”Fukuyama suggested.
“No use. The end-of-history multiverse is ergodic.”
21/ The famine was in its third year. The royal granaries were finally empty.
The starving citizens gathered around the palace.
“We demand to see the king!” they said.
The queen appeared on the balcony, tearfully smacking her lips. “I’m sorry, there’s only one leg left.”
24/ The market had reached saturation. No amount of marketing seemed to drive up sales.
After another grim quarter, the Gillette division head made the call.
“We have no choice. Prepare the announcement. We are adding another blade.”
25/
There was no cover, so the victim had no choice but to try to run from the sniper, trying to dodge. But he got shot anyway. Unfortunately he was in a zigzagzugzwang.
26/
The giant sat outside the Galt Bar, drinking and raging about how parasitism was destroying the world. Finally he downed an entire barrel at once and passed out.
“What’s with him?” Hank Rearden asked John Galt.
“Atlas chugged,” Galt shrugged.
27/ Election results on the planet Lolcowia had been delayed yet again, as losers in every race alleged conspiracies.
The galactic council ambassador began shopping for souvenirs and packing his bags.
“We’re shutting down the embassy. This planet is down for the recount.” https://t.co/X8WcigIFIN
28/ After a strenuous series of delicate, high-profile missions, the galactic ambassador landed on the pre-contact backwater planet Tradu for a vacation out of the spotlight.
“It’s a retconocracy,” he explained to reporters. “Nostalgia fields so strong, they can’t see me.”
29/
“Ambassador, you’ve been roving the Galaxy for 150 years, visiting 1000s of planets for Galactic Council missions. How do you stay organized?”
“I use an online zettelkasten hyperspatial memory.”
“But what if the ansible link is slow to load?”
“Oh, then I use Moleskines.”
30/ The autodidact wrote up his 1000-page theory, and sent the PDF to top academics. All but one ignored it.
One replied, requesting a bound paper copy.
“I’ll mail it asap! At least 1 person sees past my lack of credentials!”
“Actually, never mind. I found my lost doorstop.”
31/ Life was utterly shitty on the planet Ga, yet everyone claimed to be flourishing.
“Ga’s atmosphere has an unknown contaminant we are still analyzing,” the galactic ambassador wrote in his report. “Collective memories of eudaimonia have rotted into endemic pseudaimonia”
32/ On a conference call, people from Austin were talking about how much they liked it there.
A San Franciscan cut in, “You’re all NPCs, SF is still the real.... ewww, OWW...”
“Hey, you ok?”
“Nbd, just stepped in some poop and got jabbed with a needle. What was I saying?”
33/ The dying writer looked quietly at the last copy of the folder containing his entire oeuvre, meticulously organized by date and theme. 204MB of self-absorption, self-reference, and self-importance. A life wasted. Two shelves worth of dead-tree.
He clicked ‘Move to Trash.’
34/ Kiriyama sat by his window, sketching his favorite anime character again. He had drawn her a thousand times, in a thousand poses.
A noise startled him, and he dropped his pencil. He sighed and looked down. The pile of pencils in the alley below was nearly a foot high now.
35/ The helicopter gunship hovered above the town square, yawing slowly, guns firing steadily, mowing down the protestors. The drone footage was HD quality.
“Grab the video before they take it down,” the head designer told the intern, “it’s going in the next version of the game” https://twitter.com/irishdrug1511/status/1339254811611394049…
36/ The Galactic Council rescue ship prepared to leave the orbit of nuclear-war-devastated planet Redbluia, with the last two survivors on board.
“Any regrets?” the ambassador asked Ragkar.
Ragkar gave Blugkir, sitting across the aisle, a dirty look.
“Wish he wasn’t aboard.”
37/ The Four Khans were arguing about which of them was the greatest actor.
“Clearly, I’m the most popular,” said Shah-Rukh.
“I’ve made the best movies though,” said Aamir.
“But I’ve done the riskiest ones,” Saif Ali said.
Salman smiled silently. Then he took his shirt off.
38/ The day the bot trained on his tweets went online, the famed raconteur stopped tweeting. From then on, he would only occasionally QT the bot, without comment.
Slowly, the two death-spiraled in towards their singularity tweet.
Until one day, the bot tweeted a single space.
40/
“Sir, we should take Porkon 9 off the 40 under 40 centuries Promising Planets list. They’ve hit post-scarcity too early. Early-onset hedonistic collapse has set in. They’re not going to develop warp capability in time.”
The galactic ambassador sighed. “Sybarite amirite?”