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Friday open thread: internet serendipity
May. 12th, 2023 02:37 pmThis week’s prompt is brought to you by the utterly surreal situation surrounding This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s co-written novella.
Everything about this story is such an utter delight. A fan of the Trigun reboot posted a throwaway recommendation on Twitter for the novella (published four years ago), and somehow this led to the book climbing until it was (last time I checked), the current third-highest-selling book on Amazon. Not third-highest science fiction book, or third-highest epistolary LGBTQ time-travel spy romance novella, or any other such niche categorisation: third-highest-selling of ALL books on Amazon. There are now multiple think pieces and articles about the whole thing, of which this interview is just one example. The producer of the anime whose fan launched this massive uptick in sales has now announced an intention to read the book. The authors are going to watch the anime.
The fact that the recommendation that kicked all this off came from a Twitter user who goes by the name of ‘bigolas dickolas wolfwood’ is just the icing on the very surreal cake. It reminds me of what I loved about the internet when I first became part of online communities: just a bunch of strangers enthusing earnestly and sincerely about the things they found interesting, or the things that brought them joy, making connections with each other.
So my question is this: do you have any similar moments of joyful, surreal internet serendipity — in which a bunch of seemingly unconnected things collided with one another in such a way that something wonderful happened?
Everything about this story is such an utter delight. A fan of the Trigun reboot posted a throwaway recommendation on Twitter for the novella (published four years ago), and somehow this led to the book climbing until it was (last time I checked), the current third-highest-selling book on Amazon. Not third-highest science fiction book, or third-highest epistolary LGBTQ time-travel spy romance novella, or any other such niche categorisation: third-highest-selling of ALL books on Amazon. There are now multiple think pieces and articles about the whole thing, of which this interview is just one example. The producer of the anime whose fan launched this massive uptick in sales has now announced an intention to read the book. The authors are going to watch the anime.
The fact that the recommendation that kicked all this off came from a Twitter user who goes by the name of ‘bigolas dickolas wolfwood’ is just the icing on the very surreal cake. It reminds me of what I loved about the internet when I first became part of online communities: just a bunch of strangers enthusing earnestly and sincerely about the things they found interesting, or the things that brought them joy, making connections with each other.
So my question is this: do you have any similar moments of joyful, surreal internet serendipity — in which a bunch of seemingly unconnected things collided with one another in such a way that something wonderful happened?