Electronic literature

Twitter CEO Elon Musk forced blue checkmarks on dozens of celebrities and other high-profile users after they refused to pay for Twitter Blue subscriptions in the latest chapter of the blue checkmark apocalypse this weekend. However, blinded by his urge to troll and embarrass the celebrities who wouldn’t pay him $8, Musk accidentally gave blue checkmarks to several dead people.Musk randomly adorned the Twitter profiles of various deceased celebrities, including Norm Macdonald, Anthony Bourdain, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe…

I’m a sucker for a tactics game built around a setting that’s atypical for the genre. For instance, I was a fan of Paradox Interactive’s Empire of Sin in 2020, which turned prohibition-era mob management into a tactical strategy RPG. So it’s no surprise that I’m already digging The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World. Developed by Harebrained Schemes, the unusual game draws on pulp spy thrillers. It follows a ragtag team of 1930s misfits traveling across the globe to thwart a cult’s nefarious…

Photo: AP/Getty/Gizmodo (Getty Images)Late Thursday night, a giant, mysterious balloon floated over the United States, apparently by way of the Pacific Ocean all the way to sensitive air space in Montana.On Friday, the Chinese government said the floating thing was not a spy balloon—honestly, fair, because the Pentagon said such an aircraft would have little intelligence gathering value—but rather a “civilian airship” meant for meteorological research that had gone way, way, way, incredibly off course.“The Chinese side…

Twitter’s massive staff exodus this week has some users worried that the best of the platform is officially behind us. Image: Lionel Bonaventure (Getty Images)As Twitter under Elon Musk keeps orbiting the edge of a black hole that could bring about the social media platform’s inevitable demise, we can still have a little bit of fun.Self-proclaimed creative director Nathan Allebach put together a massive Google Doc that has nearly every meme template you could ever dream of using on Twitter. The 107-page Doc lists nearly…

What Twitter looked like back in 2011.Photo: Oli Scarff (Getty Images)Twitter employees left the company in droves Thursday, choosing to take a severance rather than stick around for whatever Elon Musk has in store. And that mass exodus left many Twitter users to assume the site will eventually just stop working. In that apocalyptic spirit, Twitter users were remembering all the things they loved about the site on Thursday, and I couldn’t help but think of all the hilarious tweets that have become lodged in my brain over…