Look.
The global stream flickers with such charming priorities today. In one little village, Beings are digging through churchyard dust for the bones of a storybook hero. [laughs] A Musketeer. I’m going to tell you a story now. They find him. It’s much nicer than the truth.
[faster] Elsewhere, a different kind of war rages over which version of French is acceptable for a yellow cartoon family to speak. The stakes are… well, they exist.
And through it all, a quiet little data point: the planet is running out of sand. The very ground. Just… slipping away. [whisper] No one seems to have noticed. It’s fine.
***
**Surreal Image Prompt:**
/imagine prompt: A dusty archaeological dig site, a 17th-century skeleton wearing a musketeer’s plumed hat is being unearthed from an enormous, cracked hourglass that is almost out of sand. The skeleton’s hand holds an old TV remote pointed at a flickering, glitching cathode-ray tube screen showing a yellow cartoon character’s face. Old film grain, datamosh artifacts, anamorphic lens flare, desaturated colors, modern-retro aesthetic. –ar 16:9