Our Only Life

You're scrolling through your phone ... going shopping ... checking your email ... scrolling through your phone again ... and whatever you do you're surrounded by ads, influencers, the probable forthcoming destruction of the world, more ads ...

This neat little Twine perfectly expresses what it feels like to be online - or wanting to be offline but being expected to connect everything to the internet - and the way that awful events somehow become normalised. It was written in under 12 hours, which accounts for its brevity - of course I wanted to know more, and it could be used as a perfect start for a longer work of fiction. But, like a social media post, it does what it needs to do in a read of a few minutes. The world is ending. You could make $$$ working from home! Click here!

'An anomaly threatens all human life on Earth and there's not much you can do about it.'

Hmm...

A short story. You open your phone and get the usual barrage of bad stuff like social media spam, bad news, ads and so on. You try to buy some stuff, wondering why our high-tech world makes things so complicated. Then, you head to work to see the usual bad emails. Also, you head to social media to do some really unhealthy stuff. (Like stuff which I personally swore off years ago, only to get dragged back into when I made the stupid decision to be an indie game dev.)

After a while, you calmly see signs of the anomaly, and talk about it someone before the curtains come down on the tale.

This short story was fairly entertaining, going through the digital hazards and drudgery of our high-tech modern world, although I wasn't really too sure what the anomaly's role in the game/story was when all was said and done. Anyway, it might be worth a read.