/b/tard: an internet anthology series

Thread 000002 - So I Heard You Like…

"So I Heard You Like..." follows Nate Cho, a UX researcher working on a “Web 2.0 Museum,” an institutional attempt to package early internet culture into something safe, navigable, and fundable. Nate’s days are spent running usability tests, extracting “authentic” artifacts from old forums, and watching his manager Marcy take credit for his insights while sanding down anything messy or unsettling. His work is meant to evoke nostalgia without danger: MySpace, Geocities, early YouTube, but Nate privately knows that the real emotional core of that era lived in darker, uglier spaces like anonymous image boards. When Nate receives a hard drive labeled “2007 FORUMS,” he begins exploring raw database dumps of old phpBB boards and eventually 4chan archives. While parsing these files on an air-gapped machine, he discovers a strange, singular thread titled “So i herd u liek ______?” Unlike the others, the post behaves unnervingly: the blank flickers, responds to his keystrokes, and seems to invite input. Acting half-ironically, Nate types “control.” Soon after, subtle changes ripple through his life: Marcy backs off micromanaging him, traffic flows smoothly, service workers anticipate his needs. The world feels frictionless. Encouraged, Nate later fills another instance of the blank with “being admired.” The effect escalates. Coworkers praise him excessively, strangers fixate on him, professional opportunities materialize unprompted. Nate becomes the emotional and intellectual center of every room. But the gains carry an invisible cost. An intern named Maya, whose ideas and presence had quietly enriched the team, vanishes from everyone’s memory. Her contributions are rewritten as Nate’s own, her existence reduced to Mudkip stickers left behind like residue. Online research reveals that this phenomenon, “the blank,” was rumored on 4chan in 2007: a wish-granting anomaly that reallocates value by erasing people or passions elsewhere, with Mudkip imagery as its calling card. Nate attempts to reverse the damage, testing words like “undo,” but the system does not behave like software: it offers no symmetry or refunds. Despite recognizing the danger, Nate succumbs to fear and hubris. Convinced he can fix things by sacrificing himself, he enters his own name into a fresh blank. The result is catastrophic. Admiration goes global and absolute. Reality reorients so that all attention, meaning, and desire collapse toward Nate alone. People freeze mid-motion to watch him. Media, conversations, and even personal relationships lose autonomy, existing only to reflect him back to himself. Come join our community at ⁠Patreon⁠ [https://www.patreon.com/c/Verticle]!

Thread 000001 - Longcat is Longer than Forever

Welcome to our inaugural episode of /b/tard, our internet anthology series! "Longcat Is Longer Than Forever" is a contemporary cosmic-horror short story that fuses internet folklore, observational science, and existential dread into a single, unsettling narrative about what happens when collective attention begins to warp reality itself. Lara, an underpaid astronomer working the graveyard shift at a remote observatory, expects her nights to be filled with routine deep-field surveys: washed-out galaxies, distant quasars, the familiar comfort of a universe that obeys rules. Instead, she discovers something impossible in the data: a pale, elongated shape stretching across multiple exposures, bending light as if it has mass, drifting night by night through the sky. It looks absurd. It looks familiar. It looks like Longcat, a relic of early internet culture, endlessly stretched and shared as a joke. Bleak, darkly funny, and deeply unsettling, "Longcat Is Longer Than Forever" is a meditation on digital obsession, collective memory, and the terrifying possibility that jokes, once shared widely enough, stop being jokes at all... and start becoming laws. Come join our community at Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/c/Verticle]!