Welcome to the Offline Gathering! On the screen of a laptop, open and plugged in and covered with a layer of dust, the price of Bitcoin rocketed higher than anyone thought possible. The laptop was the only thing on a custom bamboo standing desk in the middle of a minimalist home office on the 37th floor of luxury private residences in a fashionable city. Tall, weather-protected windows insulated the sanctity of the office and showed panoramic views of the inner city. The office was sparely decorated. Desk, hard floors, a shag rug. A gaming chair sat, away from the desk, covered in wispy clumps of white animal hair. There was an absence in the space, a missing operator for the vehicle. The view had been a large selling point for the unit, warranting a significant premium over similar units with lesser views. The unit had two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, an office, and an in-unit washer and dryer. Rent was $19,500 a month. In the midst of the AI boom, prices became meaningless. Irrelevant numbers were debated on, presented, then frantically bid up. The rent was still being automatically debited on the first of each month, where it sat in a foreign business account and was added up as another infinitesimal number on a distant ledger. The building was a Smart Building and one of the more amenity-laced in the area: two indoor pools, three theaters with a full Netflix library, a weightlifting gym, a cardio gym, and a Norwegian sauna. There were several others like it on the block, but this one was the nicest. The digital clock on the laptop ticked 9:30 a.m. EST. Market open. At the same time, in the corner of the room, an automatic cat feeder whirred to life. The feeder had been empty for some time, so not even crumbs fell into the bowl, but that didn’t stop the tiny motors from releasing a door that used to hold a large store of protein pellets. A white and orange tabby cat, curled up on the floor against one of the windows, turned his ear toward the feeder, listening. The cat was six pounds heavier than his last recorded vet visit, some time ago. In the closet, behind an open sliding door, were several boxes of shoes and a large bag of cat food with a cat-sized hole in the bag and a few weeks’ worth of food left. The shag rug in the office had been torn up in several parts, pulled in patches into yarned, stringy tatters by the cat’s overgrown claws. There were pools of vomit and feces in a corner, and other corners around the apartment. A Litter Robot 7 in the hallway was full, overflowing and unable to turn, screen constantly flashing for relief. At the desk, on the computer, bots were hard at work. A .md file ran with strict instructions to make money, to never lose money, and to never be wrong. On screen, charts were loaded and stacked. The bots relied on new internet technology that had been developed solely to trade cryptocurrency at the fastest speeds possible. Ethereum broke its all-time high. That prompted a brnng! sound effect that felt like it was missing gold coin animations. Brnng! Another new all-time high. Solana. $316. Outside, the sky was hazy, faintly orange and green, congested with sentiment. There were no clouds. Just low-hanging smog, listless toxic pollution. The cat climbed away from the window and scampered off, loud yowls echoing down the hallway. At 2 o’clock, a new window opened in the upper corner of the screen. > Do you want to select an anime or choose random? After a few minutes, the computer selected from a random selection of thousands of anime titles. > Selecting… > Welcome to the NHK. The computer chose a random episode of Welcome to the NHK. In the episode, Tatsuhiro and Hitomi learn their group of internet loners made a pact to get together on an exotic beach and end their lives. Together, they save the group, and get their loved ones to come and show them how their lives have meaning. The episode is incorrectly titled “Welcome to the Offline Gathering!” Once the show finished, the window closed and another chart filled its place. Miles away, above the city, a delivery drone buzzed in flight. The drone flew at 110 mph, internal regulator unresponsive, cruising eighty feet above the ground. Some drones, cut off from their servers, uploaded cached versions of maps to run offline. Unfortunately, this drone’s map file had come from a free online Chinese library, not updated with the newest builds of every American city. The drone zipped ahead, sensors covered with dust, hard water, and ash. The drone’s other sensors, to measure the accuracy of its primary sensors, were themselves broken. The drone saw nothing but clear skies ahead. Without the slightest hesitation, the drone smashed into the side of the luxury tower. A small fireball exploded out of the side of the concrete, hissing, fitting in the sick-colored sky. Broken glass, papers, sheets, clothes, evidence of life floated in the sky. The world responded; birds perched nearby, avoiding the smoke, dogs watched, wagging their tails below. A fire broke out across several floors of the building. Automated sprinkler systems should’ve kicked in, but they were mostly unmaintained, several with failed pipes. Because the building was a Smart Building, it drained water from one of the pools and attempted to overflow sinks, showers, and toilets and stop the fire. Gray water poured down the sides of walls on the streets below, putting out part of the fire on one side of the building, but it ultimately wasn’t enough. Within a few hours, the fire spread to more floors above and below. On the 37th floor, fire alarms flashed. White lights, built into the ceiling and a warning, not wailing, but calm, direct. “Please head to the nearest fire exit,” a dramatic robot voice ordered. The cat purred in the office, entertained by the flashing lights. The cat feeder went off, still empty. On the laptop, faint on the dying screen, came a rundown of headlines from a news agent: Stocks, Commodities See Continued Growth Agent Swarm Hacks Last Operational Hospital El Nino Devastates Inland California Some hours later, as night fell, the fiery building grew to an inferno, flames licking up into the dark sky, bizarre campfire amongst the skyscraper sticks. Several buildings had illuminated interiors with bulbs that had been lit all day and now stayed lit all night. A horrible groan of metal sounded from inside the building, as infrastructure gave way and in just a few empty moments, the large building, previously home to so many accomplished, striving, successful people, collapsed inward. Inner floors gave way, burnt interior bursting out from every window and opening, in a giant cloud of black and gray dust that hung low in the surrounding blocks for several days. The giant heap of concrete, metal, and dirt settled into its final resting place. Nearby roofs and walls were cracked, defending their interiors from flying wreckage. Almost every window for several blocks was shattered. Alarms wailed into the night, some piercing their own building’s walls, others coming from crushed cars. Generations of life were erased, centuries of memories lost. Photographs and music records and hard drives and paintings and instruments and everything else that made up the miracle of human sentiment was buried, never to see the light of day again. Unaware of these losses, Bitcoin soared, breaking a new all-time high.

I am tired of this trend of writers talking about gambling like self-assured muppets. > I Purposely Bet A Romanian Tennis Player at -450 And Lost $1,800. > I Kept Betting On Everything! Then, I Lost All My Money. > Am I Able to Blindly Lose My Employer's Funds to Prove a Point? You are so uneducated on your topic, you have no clue how stupid you sound. What do you think would happen if you spent $20,000 on Pokémon cards? Or vintage t-shirts? Or aftermarket add-ons for a 2010 Volkswagen Jetta? Who is stopping you? You seek the most -EV bets you can find, eschewing your heaters, then call yourself a "degen," while clicking as many buttons as necessary to zero your account. You are actively advocating for the full censorship of a man's wallet from his self. You are a coward and a loser.

The veteran pitcher takes the mound for his final game. The crowd cheers their hero, gray in his beard, as he raises his cap. A rookie batter steps up and hits a 500 ft home run, ball disappearing in the sky. The pitcher turns to dust, breaking in the breeze, silencing the fans.

This is why I told A24 to fuck off. Most A24 projects are made by people who say “sets that look like Blue Velvet” to describe the average 2003 suburban home. They are private school losers trying to tell stories about how maybe the child predator isn’t so bad.

A magnificent world where your 9 year old nephew can explain what a parlay is

Some of the smartest people in the world are up at 5 am building a sniper bot to find secret rare traits in viral NFT drops.

This is based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” btboces.org/Downloads/7_Ther…

An entire generation who doesn’t know Hustlin’ by Rick Ross as a street anthem but instead as an AI ad for 28 year olds who can’t make eye contact.

Not interested in Aaron Sorkin slop after he trimmed his girlfriend’s memoir to exclude her having any relationships then wrote in a therapist-father to fix her

You will never know if the slow-talking woman on the other end of the phone is a real human being ever again.

“It is so totally over,” posts the overeducated son of two professors who never created anything meaningful. “No one is writing books or cooking food again,” he says to his self-hosted chatbot, drinking warm biosludge.

I've heard this for four years and still the closest AI can get to writing a moving line is UI with font that flutters like a butterfly. You'll see this take more from Gen Z, AI devs, and independently wealthy midwits, who no one expected much from anyway.

It’s not too late to spend $2,000 on a Shure mic and video setup to be a YouTuber. It’s not too late to take a few online courses to be an options trader. It’s not too late to invest $25,000 in allocation to be a Whatnot breaker. It’s not too late. It’s not.

You didn’t make them buy. You just advertised directly, showed people how much you made without disclosing payment, then tried to delete the evidence. You just wanted to settle down and start a family. Now, the cousin of someone who lost everything in your scam will try and put a baby in you for the next 84 months.

A world where your base PSA 10 Charizard is $15,000 but you need an armed drone to leave the house.

First, there is a difference between "wagered" and "lost," or so I'm told. Gambling has to go back to how it was. Gambling isn't cool, it's never been cool. Gamblers were maybe seen as cool because they went against the rules and they made money betting against the system. But when the system is heavily invested in the top prediction markets and online casinos, that changes. When every corporation or professional organization has an affiliate link, it is a sign of low agency to be a gambler. Gambling is for losers now. As more exotic forms of gambling are normalized, as waves of NPCs are slaughtered by void-free parlays and survivor pools, these stories will be more common. Gambling, despite having always existed, is now sold by LeBron and Kevin Durant and Sydney Sweeney. Gambling dominates every avenue you want to watch sports, learn about sports, or talk about sports. Every user is treated like an unaware gambler and every opportunistic nerd wants to work at a casino. America will now have to contend with this increase in snake oil salesmen, a disappearance of the class who would've been perfectly good advertising managers or X-ray techs, and an emergence of more scorned gamblers than ever before. Only when gambling is absolutely rejected as a professional endeavor can it go back to how it was.

Sunday Night in the 4HL

nvm