The tech industry got right behind last year’s hypegrift, many producers selling their entire annual output to the griftbros, leaving the ordinary public scrambling to obtain resources. The vendors didn’t bother increasing capacity, because they—like everyone—understood that a crash was imminent. If only they had thought it through; after the crash consumers satisfied their needs at fire-sales, receivers auctions and sometimes literal pitchfork-riots—abandoning retail channels. The vendors asphyxiated in a marketplace with huge supply and no demand. But of course you know all that. We grow mushrooms in these old server racks; if you choose to stay in our village you’ll spend a day each week tending the vertical gardens, while you apprentice with one of our artisans learning other useful skills. You already know how to code? Sorry, we don’t allow computers.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition #Title_Useful_Skills

As a left-handed person, the fact that cut/copy/paste shortcut keys are all on the left side of the keyboard is frustrating—I'm sometimes holding things in my left hand while idly computing.

Now, I /could/ define some custom key bindings, or place a macro keypad on the right side of my desk. Sure, ordinary people could do that.

You've heard of the false vacuum collapse, yeah? The theory that at any moment the universe may flip over to a lower energy state, incidentally wiping out life cosmically. Relax, I'm not poking at the vacuum. But there /is/ a symmetry collapse mechanism that's not dissimilar. If I nudge the Universe just *so*, left and right will exchange places, the phenomenon propagating at the speed of light across the entire multiverse.

Don't panic, I did it yesterday; you didn't even notice. Also I'm now right handed. *Fuck*.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

Fun fact: eighty-nine percent of people who have the new version of Minicode™ Workplace®—the one that has the unblockable “summarize this document in ①┠┈╂┈┈┈┈┨㊿ words” slider—leave that slider permanently set at ①. If you were wondering why this world is so messed up, I can tell you in (no point using more!) one word.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

They say that before the Thousand Suns, the sky was black, but for the pinpricks of other worlds. No one has seen it, for a dozen generations since the sky was lost to us. We have calculated a path through the debris, our vessel Noxifer will shoot down the sunsats; Nightfall will come.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

#BonusEdition for @sundogplanets

The *second* alien race we met told us it was VERY irregular for the Tang to grant a race access to the undernet and then later revoke it. They asked us what we did. We sent them RFC129301 (Encapsulation of IPv4 datagrams within the state vector of subspace network gauge solitons). We never heard back.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

Scalpers snapped up over ninety percent of the tickets for the rapture, leaving the faithful doomed to seven years of tribulation, or scrabbling to purchase salvation on the secondary market. Ticketek has denied deliberately facilitating this situation by failing to accurately weigh the souls of purchasers.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

I’m on record as saying I *despise* time travel; nothing good ever comes of it. But I’m making _one_ exception. NoBait is a browser extension that receives the “news of the week” via tachyon backscatter from next week, and filters out any of today’s news articles that turned out in hindsight to be nothingburgers. You can read the news without feeling like it’s some kind of guess-the-lie quiz show. All those “is there going to be a challenge for the Literal Nazi Party leadership?” and “Does TFG have HyperAnthrax? We obsess over blurry pictures of his tiny swollen fingers!” clickbait articles just _go_away_. Except this one I’m looking at now. It’s a *doozy*, you’re gonna love it!

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

I heard that the former USA reset their fighter aircraft numbering system after it got into the low hundreds because of that embarrassing incident where Colonel Alex Travers’ red team in the exercise Operation Pustulant Octopus won the day (despite like all “simulated battle” exercises being preordained to lose to the “good guys”) by sneaking jury rigged utility trucks under the radar defense instead of the expected flight of Super Sabers. Travers was unable to be disciplined since she had stuck to the letter of the preapproved-but-misunderstood battle plan.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition