Radioactive City

I used to write things like this when the blog was all chaos and provocation. The year is 2076 in my head, there’s a war over the last can of Red Bull, and me and Udo are in some pink-unicorn rebellion in Radioactive City. We send a message to the past with ten missions that don’t make sense—report your ex’s new boyfriend, hand out condoms at nursing homes, get naked, send love letters to teachers, show up at Jehovah’s Witnesses with magazines about German Idol. If you complete all ten, maybe the apocalypse won’t happen. Which is stupid. Which was the point.

This was the blog’s voice back then. Absurdist, crude, sexual, pointless. You weren’t supposed to actually do any of it. You were supposed to get that we were all just in on some cosmic prank, that seriousness was the enemy and randomness was the only honest response to everything falling apart. American Apparel was still a thing. Skins was still cool. The internet hadn’t learned to be disappointed yet.

I can’t remember why I thought any of this needed to exist, but it did, and it felt right at the time. Looking back it’s just weird and a little sad—this artifact of a moment when irony felt like a shield instead of a trap. But it’s still there, still saying something about what it felt like to be online in that specific year, in that specific flavor of chaos. Unmoored. Crude. Refusing to make sense. That was the point.