Venkatesh Rao

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”https://twitter.com/bryankam/status/1339060272653201408 …

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?”https://twitter.com/idlebell/status/1339098746395766786 …

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.’https://twitter.com/SirSchofield99/status/1339098977803919366 …

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.https://twitter.com/rizwanjavaid/status/1339043865030881280 …

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.”https://twitter.com/levity/status/1339130075061448705 …

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.https://twitter.com/sy_tzu/status/1339128397860134914 …

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.https://twitter.com/najarvg/status/1339049922692263937 …