You go onto Tumblr
You see a post from @posts-from-a-darker-timeline
You’re momentarily confused because it sounds like a thing that you just read on a news site
You go onto their blog; every single thing that you read, as far back as you can scroll, is just things that have actually happened. There’s posts about vaccine protesters; posts about NFTs; posts about January 6th; posts about the pandemic; about Trump; about Brexit; about fucking Harambe for God’s sake
You look at the notes on each post; a few of them are people panicking like this is news to them; most of them are variants on “Oh shit, I need to look at the blog name!”
You select a random reblogger, and look at their Tumblr; it’s full of happy, well-adjusted people, but you just can’t seem to reblog any of their posts; every time you try, you get a message that you’ve never seen before:
“You are not authorized to share in this content”
You hit the back button, but it takes you back to the top of posts-from-a-darker-timeline
In mounting trepidation, you check to see if there are any new posts
There’s one: a fake(?) tweet from the leader of your country, lamenting the massive loss of life in the freak storm that just hit your city
You put your phone down
You look out the window
In the distance, you hear the wind starting to blow
Tags:
#storytime #death tw #unreality cw #apocalypse cw #…so what you’re saying is that I get minutes-to-hours-scale advance notice of disasters #(mixed in with some noise about changes to Tumblr’s formatting and other such minor issues‚ but still) #that’s often not enough‚ and it #might turn out not to be enough *this* time in which case I will have no further opportunities to make use of it‚ but… #…like‚ I stand a much better chance of surviving the freak storm now than I would have if I hadn’t read the tweet‚ right? #I don’t have time to evacuate but I’ll get a head start on bunkering down #in the future (if I survive that long)‚ I’ll set up my phone to react to a new posts-from-a-darker-timeline post in a manner #approximating the way it would react to an emergency broadcast #get as many other people as possible to do the same #(the exact details depend on what circumstances allow one to view primeverse Tumblr) #(if we can only get my phone to do it‚ that requires different implementation than if anyone can just point any device at a particular URL) #in fact‚ I should at least dash off a quick post about this immediately‚ in case I *don’t* survive the storm #leave some breadcrumbs for others to investigate #(”you can view primeverse posts but not reblog them” sounds like a job for the fundamental theorem of software engineering) #(can I screenshot them? point a camera at the screen and take a photograph?) #((…honestly‚ ”a friend posts a screenshot of a tweet that hasn’t been written yet and then #immediately dies in the disaster the tweet describes” sounds like a thriller-novel plot hook in itself)) #((maybe I’m just the prologue to *that* story)) #tag rambles #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #story ideas I will never write
Brinens and Things 