That was chilling, and very well done. Thank you! o.o

Encouraged, because the same prompt will generate new ideas and stories by different writers with each iteration. The point here isn't to come up with brand new prompts 100% of the time, but to spur imagination and allow everyone to stretch their brain cells accordingly.

This is a fantastic short. I loved every second of it, and it was the sort of idea that had popped into my head when I made this prompt. Very well done!

I love cats that do things like this.

Because you just KNOW that one of two situations normally follows a shower in this scenario:

1. Reach for towel, get cat ears and head which trigger automatic response to pet kitty, and get rewarded with loud purr and slightly confused but content look from kitty.

2. Reach for towel, grab cat head, cat screeches and claws the living fark out of the errant hand, wrist, and attached arm. Immediately withdraw now bleeding and ripped up hand into shower and grumble/curse at the feline, who has not left the spot and instead is staring at you, daring you to try that again.

And my experience in this situation is almost always inevitably #2.

A lot of the pre-mass-public social media in the 80s and 90s was actually heavily moderated and fairly civil, because the bar to entry was pretty high.

1. Afford a PC.
2. Afford a way to connect PC to an online service.
3. Depending on the service, pay additional fee for Internet specific access.

You could create anonymous names, but your ISP, your online service provider, would know your real info, so getting banned was a lot more of a threat at the time as a result.

You can raise that bar to entry monetarily, and you'd likely get a similar chilling effect. Not necessarily 'great' as a solution, but it is a solution.

Well social media isn't going away, if a paywall doesn't work, there really isn't a solution beyond everyone adapting.

That might actually work better than you think.

Social Media's cesspool is a natural effect of allowing everyone full unfettered access to communicate with everyone else anonymously with almost no repercussions beyond a banned account, which is zero barrier to entry because you can just create a new account and keep going.

If a pay wall exists, the vast majority of these people won't be spending money just to troll others, and the noise will drop off significantly. Granted, the biggest paid actors that try to flood social media with propaganda might still exist, but then again, they might not if it costs them millions of dollars for accounts that they have to keep re-spending every time the farm gets banned.

TL;DR - Mass Trolling exists cuz it's free and anonymous. Remove both of those and it'll likely either vanish entirely, or get niche'd into oblivion.

So... are you an artist that paints, then?

:3

(Adorable kitty)

Heyo. South-eastern Michigan reporting in. Where I'm at, it's -2F outside, with windchill at -30F. And we had a power skip for about 5 minutes an hour ago. For five minutes. Long enough to seriously reconsider where I'm living. Scary...!