Please Come Back...

I wrote some more short epistolary fiction for the modern age, though I admittedly started it a while back, as you might note from any remaining small context clues. You’ll find (lengthy) explanations at the end of the post.

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Oh, you want to cancel your membership, do you…?

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	We’re So Sorry to See You Go ☄️
Date	8 Skifo 151

As you have requested, we have deactivated your Comet Zenith™️ membership. You will still have access to our library for the remainder of your monthly billing cycle, so feel free to continue watching until the 13th.

It should go without saying, but you’ve been a great customer, and we’d love it if you came back. If you change your mind, reactivate your membership and enjoy the Zenith of entertainment from Comet Film Studios™️ again to your heart’s content. We’ll even save your place for one hundred days!

If you need help, you know where to find us…

—The Comet Zenith™️ Team

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Miss Us? ☄️
Date	16 Skifo 151

It has been a week, %FNAME. Isn’t it time to sign back up with Comet Zenith™️? You can still watch all your favorites right here, any time that you might want.

Please note that you will not actually have the ability to watch any shows that we quietly deleted from our servers and erased all evidence of ever existing for tax purposes. But we did say “favorites,” and you can’t call it a favorite, if it never existed. Abe Lincoln said that, we think. Or maybe Sparky, Barney Google’s horse.

Remember, you can sign up any time during the next three months.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Do You Miss Us Yet? ☄️
Date	20 Skifo 151

It’s time to come back to Comet Zenith™️, %F_NAME.

In case you never quite figured out what Comet Zenith™️ is during the %LENGTH years that you subscribed to our service, we stream video from the Comet Film Company™️ library and other licensed sources to your computer, your phone, your tablet, your set-top box, or your throng of cyborg kittens, for you to watch at any time. We thought that you might want to know, since you haven’t come back, yet.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	It’s Duinday. Ready to Come Back to Comet Zenith™️ ☄️?
Date	25 Skifo 151

Enjoy Comet Zenith™️ again.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	You Must Miss Us by Now… ☄️
Date	28 Skifo 151

It’s time to come back to Comet Zenith™️, %FirstNAME.

We add content to consume every day, after all.

• Bobble the Clown Shark
• Caminandes — ⭐ New Episodes
• Can a Monkey Do My Job? — 🌟 New Series
• Floraverse Theater — ⭐ New Episodes
• The League of the Silver Bat
• Orang-U
• Penumbra W.A.V.E.
• The Rõivas Chronicles
• Soulclaine: Soulmates
• Zombie Chris

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	It’s Wikiday. Come Back to Comet Zenith™️ ☄️?
Date	3 Sablo 151

Enjoy Comet Zenith™️ again.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Come Back ☄️for Only 23₷‎
Date	8 Sablo 151

So what if that tier of service overlaps the original audio with recordings of Teddy Roosevelt’s stomach growling and displays sideways? Surely, your problem is that you don’t like spending a slightly higher amount for a decent service, so you probably need to know about the artificially hobbled Comet Zenith™️ service that we also make available to cheapskates valued customers like you.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	What Are You Even Doing with the Money You Used to Spend on Us? ☄️
Date	14 Sablo 151

We found some scientific papers saying that you should spend your money on experiences—maybe watching Comet Films™️?—rather than things, like the thing-like streaming packages that some of those other streaming services offer. They even use the term package, so you do the math.

And as people say, the best experiences are watching movies about police officers tired of respecting civil liberties and ex-Confederate soldiers overcoming adversity to rebuild their lives. Which people? Hush. People-people, OK?

Treat yourself to experience Comet Zenith™️ on this Don Quixote Day!

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Just Come Back to Comet Zenith™️ ☄️, %FIRSTNAME
Date	18 Sablo 151

Honestly, where else are you going to stream movies and television? We’ve heard that there are other streaming services out there, but most of them are much cheaper than ours, and they say that you get what you pay for. Therefore, Comet Zenith™️ must be better, QED.

• Austen Pride
• La Bohème
• Can a Monkey Do My Job? — ⭐ New Episodes
• Cosmos Laundromat
• Floraverse Theater — ⭐ New Episodes
• The Gods of Pegāna — 🌟 New Episode Every Gnuday
• Little Robinson Crusoe
• Penumbra W.A.V.E.
• Pepper & Carrot
• The Rõivas Chronicles
• Watch out, Bobby Make-Believe, the Gevkahahal Is behind You!

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	New Shows to Watch on Comet Zenith™️ ☄️
Date	21 Sablo 151

There is new content being added to Comet Zenith™️’s content library every day.

We could tell you what content we have added recently, but we prefer to perpetuate an air of mystery. You can find out by signing back up and searching around for items that you don’t remember seeing before.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Our Top 12 Most Watched Shows ☄️
Date	25 Sablo 151

Are you looking for something popular to toot about? 🦣 Is something on this list an old favorite? We’ve got you covered.

• Bobble the Clown Shark
• Caminandes — ⭐ New Episodes
• Dustrunners — ⭐ New Episodes
• Floraverse Theater — ⭐ New Episodes
• The League of the Silver Bat
• Little Robinson Crusoe
• The New Adventures of Lightbringer
• Pepper & Carrot
• The Philo Vance Mysteries
• The Plastic Age
• Valkaama: The Next Generation
• Watch out, Bobby Make-Believe, the Gevkahahal Is behind You!

There you have it, a dozen shows and movies that other people are watching.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	$FNAME, Here’s to the Best 23₷ You Can Spend, This Month ☄️🍻
Date	2 Cerbolavado 151

Just between friends, you can tell us if you crave the experience of watching television, but with the audio replaced by enhanced with wax cylinder recordings of Teddy Roosevelt’s stomach rumbles, and the image on its side. It’s our favorite way to watch Comet Zenith™️, too.

And if you don’t, you can also just send us the money and not watch. We’re cool with however you want to do this.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	$FirstNAME, You Don’t Know What You’re Missing ☄️
Date	5 Cerbolavado 151

Sign back up to Comet Zenith™️ tonight to find out what’s new and watch old favorites.

• Cosmos Laundromat
• Elephants Dream
• Little Robinson Crusoe
• The New Adventures of Lightbringer

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Try Comet Zenith™️ Again, $firstname ☄️
Date	9 Cerbolavado 151

Let’s let bygones be bygones, and get back together. 😉

• BBS: The Documentary
• La Bohème
• Can a Monkey Do My Job? — ⭐ New Episodes
• Continuity Drift
• Elephants Dream
• The New Adventures of Lightbringer
• The Philo Vance Mysteries
• The Plastic Age
• The Rõivas Chronicles
• Valkaama: The Next Generation
• Zombie Chris

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	$FN, Do You Remember Watching The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman? ☄️
Date	12 Cerbolavado 151

You can watch it again, any time.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	You subscribe to Max Amazing behind our backs, don’t you 😠
Date	16 Cerbolavado 151

Yeah, Max seems cool, but he’s not so amazing unless you enjoy using an old water bottle for your bathroom. Is that what you’re into?

We would never judge you, here at Comet Zenith™️, if you do. We’re just…curious, in a completely healthy way.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	😢 Please give us another chance? We miss you! ☄️
Date	17 Cerbolavado 151

If you want us to force you to use old water bottles for your unmentionable business, we can learn to accept that. Do you not like our logo? We can change. We want to change. We promise. It’s the Comet Zenith™️ guarantee.

After all, we already changed so much by canceling our ground-breaking original shows showcasing a diverse group of voices to replace them with Large Language Models reproducing everything that you’ve already seen on the Internet, all while raising our prices. And we might change even more, scrapping all the existing content in favor of legless virtual reality films. You might even say that Comet Zenith™️ is the best at changing, unlike a certain Max Amazing.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	☄️ Who’s Amazing Now, Max? 🤣
Date	18 Cerbolavado 151

Awww…It looks like somebody scraped up all the paint on the giant space phallus owned by that other company you’re streaming movies from. We don’t know who it was, but we’ll bet that heroic company streams much better original movies. They certainly don’t know you like we do, %%FirstName.

And now that the world’s largest phallic symbol looks as decrepit as the anatomical part that somebody is surely compensating for, maybe it’s time that you get your service from someone who does know you so well. Again. Come back, we mean.

Let’s see Captain Video board that to go into (cough, cough) “space.”

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Sorry about That… ☄️
Date	19 Cerbolavado 151

OK…

Some things may have been said, over the last few days, %$F_Name, that were out of line. We admit that.

It’s just that, you know, Comet Zenith™️ has some really great shows and movies that nobody watches, not even the great AI-generated shows that cost us no money to produce and have no creativity to them, and we know that Max Amazing can’t be as satisfying as we—I mean our shows—were. Alcohol may have also been involved with our comments and heavy equipment rental history, a teeny bit.

Our tempers got the best of us, and we hope that you’ll forgive us…and come back to Comet Zenith™️.

We would also really appreciate it if you didn’t mention this or that last e-mail in any deposition that anybody happens to ask you to file on the topic of corporate sabotage or vandalism. 🙏

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	U up?
Date	3 Bambuo 151

Watch some Comet Zenith™️ tonight.

• Bobble the Clown Shark
• La Bohème
• Can a Monkey Do My Job?
• Floraverse Theater — ⭐ New Episodes
• The League of the Silver Bat
• Orang-U
• Pepper & Carrot
• The Philo Vance Mysteries
• The Rõivas Chronicles
• Valkaama: The Next Generation

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Did We Tell You to Spend Money on Experiences, Yet?
Date	10 Bambuo 151

We send a lot of e-mail to a lot of former customers, $$FNAME, so we don’t always remember. Did we happen to send you a bunch of references to studies about how you should spend your money on great experiences—like vegging out on your couch watching old TV shows on Comet Zenith™️—rather than things, like access to some other streaming service? You could argue that those “things” also include food and shelter, but we also don’t know what sort of nonsense you waste your money on, if you can’t even send us 23₷ a month.

Anyway, experiences are good, things not. Comet Zenith™️ good, Max Amazing not. Come back to Comet Zenith™️.

• Austen Pride
• BBS: The Documentary
• La Bohème
• Elephants Dream
• Karma Kameleon’s Adventures on Earth!
• The New Adventures of Lightbringer
• The Night of the Living Dead
• The Philo Vance Mysteries
• Stardrifter — ⭐ New Episodes

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	We Want to Touch the Light 🙌📻, the Heat We See in Your Eyes
Date	17 Bambuo 151

Please come back. We can’t live without you! You had us at “I have read and agree to the terms of service.” We’re just a streaming service, standing in front of a former subscriber, asking them if they want to restart their membership.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Can We Start Over? ☄️
Date	18 Bambuo 151

It has come to our attention that the team in charge of our customer retention e-mails may have gone slightly rogue. The employees responsible have been reassigned, and Comet Zenith™️ would like to extend our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience or discomfort this may have caused.

The employees in question, we hope it will satisfy and please you to know, did not have your address written down anywhere in their belongings or in their shrine dedicated to you. When we asked if they had your address anywhere, they laughed at us maniacally while declaring that they will get you back at all costs, confirming the negative results of the search, we think.

Oh, and speaking of retention, most people can’t pull off a few extra pounds, but you’re definitely doing it. Good for you!

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	Your Three Months Have Almost Expired ☄️
Date	21 Bambuo 151

This is a reminder that your three-month grace period is almost up, %FIRST. In a few days, your viewing history will get deleted from our database. If you would like to preserve that information, you should re-join us soon.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	⌛ Time Is Ticking Away… ☄️
Date	1 Pedalo 151

OK, look. We know that something went wrong. Maybe it has to do with canceling a bunch of critically acclaimed shows that people cared about even though we refused to advertise them or tell fans how to support them. Or maybe it has to do with scrapping fan-favorite projects after completion, because our accountants said that we could save a few dollars on our taxes. Nobody likes taxes, right? Maybe you don’t want to watch new content exclusively generated by AI based on slop that we scraped from the Internet without permission. Or maybe you think that our prices have gone too high for the value that we offer, when you could buy most of what you watch on physical media twice for what you pay us in a year. Maybe you even don’t like that we’ve had our video playback mining cryptocurrency, and will only show you the latest episodes of our most popular shows on time if you buy NFTs. You might think that legs belong in virtual reality offerings, or think that virtual reality, cryptocurrencies, and AI all waste absurd amounts of energy to no useful end. Or maybe you just don’t measure up as a customer. Honestly, nobody can probably ever know which, though we have our theories around the Comet Zenith™️ offices.

Regardless, you have two hours left to work through your problems and reactivate your subscription.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	⌛ Time Is Still Ticking Away… ☄️
Date	1 Pedalo 151

00:44:58

You have about forty-five minutes to renew. We know that e-mail only makes sense as an asynchronous communications mechanism, but treating it like an online chat makes more sense from a value-to-shareholders perspective.

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	⌛ You May Have Run out of Time 😱 ☄️
Date	1 Pedalo 151

Did this e-mail get out to you in time? You’ll only know if you click the button…

Click the button. Click it…

From	customerservice@cometzenith.corp
To	username123@xybercorp.mail
Subject	We Have Extended Your Deadline! ☄️
Date	2 Pedalo 151

Rejoice, %%FNAME%%, because Comet Zenith™️ has given you one last chance to renew your subscription and preserve your viewing history.

Will Justifiers: CSI or Space Rover still be available to watch when you come back? Nobody knows! Maybe we’ll have pared our library down to only Jello-sy, the world’s first AI-generated VR reality show. But you’ll know that you’ve done a good deed sending your 23₷-or-more to us.

After this, we will delete your viewing history, and you can never access it again, because we definitely don’t archive every bit of data forever in case we can sell it down the line.

Hey, unrelated, but would you happen to know how to get the variables to work in the MaiMer marketing system? Comet Zenith™️ management apparently “decruited” the person responsible for implementing all that, two years ago, and you seem like a nice enough person.

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The completists might want to go back and click the buttons. Mostly, I only left messages explaining why you shouldn’t click them, but occasionally dropped in some information on my choices that didn’t belong in the following.

Background

This piece started with inspiration from the almost creatively terrible e-mails that Netflix once sent when you disable your account. I don’t know if they’ve improved them or still send out this slop, but at the time, I recommended canceling the service specifically to see them to everybody I knew, due to their complete ineptness.

If I ran that project, I would primarily have the software look at the user’s watch-list, and generate e-mails to the effect of, “hey, weren’t you waiting for the new season of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? Well, guess what just dropped! 🎆” That feels like a rich space, because it shouldn’t take much effort to also say “since you gave a thumbs-up 👍 to The Beetle, you’ll probably want to know that Yi (Marjorie Lindon) Deng stars as Silas Marner’s Molly Farren, available to watch on Thursday.”

I use public domain novels, here, so that the examples don’t get bogged down by specifics, but the idea matters more than the shows. They know what their customers watch. They can make reasonable guesses that other shows and movies with similar features would perform well with those people. We know that they can do this, because they use that as a selling point while you subscribe.

Instead, though, they sent insipid, generic messages that have subject lines like “Miss Us, Yet?” or “Happy Tuesday, John! Time to Come Back to Netflix,” and include some small number pictures of movies and shows that I would almost certainly never watch, based on my watch history.

Once, they came close to getting it right. They looked at my history, and generated an e-mail asking if I remembered watching Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—literally the last thing I watched there, in fact, while I waited for my subscription to end—and whether I want to sign back up to watch it again. For the record, the (not Free Culture) film worked as well as you might expect, given the (also not Free Culture) play’s excellent pedigree, but I don’t think that I have ever watched anything on Netflix, then watched it again, so it feels like an absurd tactic from the people with data to know better. But at least they tried to act like my preferences comprised a relevant part of the choice to renew, with that one. The rest of the e-mails came off as hilariously bad.

Therefore, I decided to take that mess as a starting point and see how bad it could get, including the old spam problem of the people writing the mail-merge programs breaking their merge process and leaving incorrect variables (such as %FNAME) littering their work, getting excited about every useless technology trend, and the weird endgame of sending multiple messages in succession to warn about impending deadlines. I hope that the drone writing these eventually figured out which variable actually works in their system…

I have to admit, though, that some e-mails have more truth to them than they probably should. For example, they actually did send me an unhinged e-mail citing the study about spending money on experiences, though they didn’t try to imply that other streaming services wouldn’t count.

Names and the Calendar

For the record, the Comet Film Company comes from Laura Lee Hope’s Moving Pictures Girls book series—originally published from 1914 to 1916 in the United States—where location shoots routinely go horribly wrong, stranding the cast and crew of that book’s film in some abandoned and/or dangerous part of the world. Riffing on that as if they had since grown to become a major studio, I threw together Comet Zenith—“zenith” as the astronomical term for the point directly above you, used as a thematically appropriate nod to the “pluses” and “maxes” that pervade the space—as the streaming service backed by Comet’s parent conglomerate. To be fair, though, I also picked the name because we have both a comet emoji ☄️ and a comet/meteor Font Awesome glyph to use in the subject lines. Max Amazing, both the streaming service and its implied founder, makes its first and (one imagines) final “appearance” here, and you can probably guess what company and founder I had in mind for that, based either on the name itself or the uncomfortable rocketry fetish. I then used the Common calendar’s days of the week¹ with the Pataphysical calendar, thirteen months of twenty-nine² days each, month names translated loosely to Esperanto, setting everything later this year, though only because I liked those month names…

For the shows and movies, I imagine Austen Pride as a teen drama, probably set in an Austin, Texas, high school, based on the works of Jane Austen in a different context, like The Gods of Pegāna probably serves as an anthology series based on the Lord Dunsany series, The Philo Vance Mysteries presumably bases its story or stories on the character from The Benson Murder Case, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman presumably attempts to present a meta-textual comedy loosely based on the novel—all in the public domain—and The League of the Silver Bat presumably comes out of the world of my own novel, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Bobble the Clown Shark or SCP-993 describes a (fictional) animated television series from 1949, Karma Kameleon’s Adventures on Earth! or SCP 4228 describes another (fictional) animated children’s series, and Penumbra W.A.V.E. or SCP-3949 describes a (fictional) 1980s anime-inspired animated series, descriptions licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. I mean La Bohème to refer to the 1926 film based on the opera or a modern production of the opera, now in the public domain. Caminandes actually exists as a Blender Foundation-produced short animated series, licensed CC BY 3.0. Can a Monkey Do My Job?, Jello-sy, and Zombie Chris originated as concepts in the now-defunct Fictopedia community, licensed CC BY 3.0. Continuity Drift presumably runs a television series based on the comic covered for the Free Culture Book Club (by pseudo, CC BY); likewise with Dustrunners and the novel (by MCM, CC0), Floraverse Theater and the Floraverse comic (by Glitched Puppet, CC BY-SA 4.0), The New Adventures of Lightbringer based on the comic (by Lewis Lovhaug, public domain), Pepper & Carrot based on the comic (by David Revoy, CC BY), The Rõivas Chronicles based on Headshot (by Julien Boyen, CC BY-SA), Soulclaine: Soulmates a kind of modern romantic comedy version of Solitudes and Silence (by Conrad Baines Talbot, CC BY-SA), Stardrifter based on the audio series (by David Collins-Rivera, CC BY-SA), Valkaama: The Next Generation based on Valkaama (by Tim Baumann, CC BY-SA). Cosmos Laundromat comes directly from the Blender Foundation’s Project Gooseberry licensed CC BY 3.0; Elephants Dream comes from the first Blender open movie project, discussed for the Free Culture Book Club, also licensed CC BY 3.0. BBS: The Documentary does pretty much what it sounds like, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Little Robinson Crusoe came out as a 1924 comedy film, now in the public domain. The Night of the Living Dead, you probably already know as the 1968 zombie horror film, published without a valid copyright, and so in the public domain. We covered Orang-U for the Free Culture Book Club, by Matt Lee and Ryan Dougherty, licensed CC BY-SA. The Plastic Age came out as a famous 1925 Clara Bow film, now in the public domain. Watch out, Bobby Make-Believe, the Gevkahahal Is behind You! imagines a series based on the 1915 comic strip Bobby Make Believe with a Halloween special featuring the Gevkahahal, something that I created loosely patterned after an SCP story. Justifiers: CSI comes from Bulletproof Blues by Brandon Blackmoor and Sean Weir et al., licensed CC BY-SA. Space Rover is by Malcolm Wilson Multimedia, licensed CC BY-SA. I chose some of these to stand in for conventional Hollywood projects that you might recognize, but knowing which probably won’t affect anybody’s opinion of the story.

For the side-references early on, Abraham Lincoln has a reputation for having said clever things, and almost an entire cottage industry has appeared since his death attributing random quotes to him, in modern times characterized as a part of general misinformation on the Internet. Barney Google provided comic relief in the sports pages of newspapers starting in 1919, starring in a comic called Take Barney Google, for Instance, known since 1934 as Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, a comic with somewhat broader appeal that continues through today. In 1922, still firmly entrenched in sports, Barney—a short wealthy man in a top-hat and tails—bought a useless but endearing (non-talking) racehorse named Spark Plug, nicknamed Sparky, which appears to have kicked off the tradition of using that nickname. Teddy Roosevelt similarly had a reputation for witty comments, but more importantly, we have recordings of him, if probably not his stomach. And the 17 Bambuo message paraphrases an assortment of tropes and clichés from and quick references to modern romantic comedies, unfortunately relying on Fair Use rather than Free Culture licenses, but the need to have readers actually get the joke seriously constrained my options…

Money

Comet Zenith marks prices in spesmiloj, as much because it didn’t see much use after its attempted introduction in 1907—and therefore won’t offend anybody by using their currency—as because Unicode includes its distinctive symbol, U+20B7 or ₷, unrelated to my choosing Esperanto month names. Using the currency also nicely dodges the need for the number to feel realistic and/or tie the story to a particular era when the prices might match, and it also helps me avoid identifying any specific part of the world. When you read the story, it guides the implied value of 23₷ based on the current prices of artificially hobbled (ad-supported, probably standard-definition, maybe limited in the number of devices permitted to stream) services, in other words, rather than 23₷ telling you that I started writing this in a particular year when that equated to the price of artificially hobbled services.

Earlier drafts used entirely fictional currencies, then changed to cryptocurrencies—technically open source, I suppose—to take advantage of Font Awesome’s icons even though I didn’t like the prospect of appearing to support those ecosystems, before discovering the more “native” solution. In retrospect, I could’ve probably gotten away with the old Dutch rigsdaler (₻ U+20BB), the old French livre tournois (₶ U+20B6), and a bunch of others that saw use recently enough that readers may have used those currencies, even though those would all imply a geography and (maybe) political regime. I also could plausibly have stopped my evolutionary process at cryptocurrencies and had the story appear to endorse bitcoin (₿ U+20BF) or ether (Ξ U+039E or Greek capital Xi), but as mentioned, I never loved that idea. If you need to do something similar, though, Wikipedia’s article on currency symbols has a section on historical currencies. And let’s not forget the placeholder currency symbol rattling around since ASCII code-pages (¤ U+00A4), which I probably would have used (and probably did use) years back, given that ASCII didn’t leave us with many options.

I also could’ve gone in an entirely different direction, by arbitrarily picking a symbol out of Unicode and deciding that it belongs to some new currency. I mean, if ether can use Ξ, then surely nobody would begrudge me appropriating the Old English letter that (Ꝥ U+A764) or wynn (Ƿ U+01F7), the gha (Ƣ U+01A2) from transliterating Turkish, the cuatrillo (Ꜭ U+A72C) for transliterating Mayan, Phoenician letters, Glagolitic letters, or many other possibilities³ that would cause far less confusion than a modern Greek letter. But I actually do like the spesmilo, so it stays.

Domain Names

Oh, and the e-mails come from cometzenith.corp, because ICANN decided to no longer process applications for .corp, .home, and .mail top-level domains in 2018, due to their widespread use in private networks. Or put into plainer language, you’ll probably never see a legitimate URL with those three suffixes, meaning that nobody can “squat” on the Comet Zenith URL for nefarious purposes⁴. Likewise, our absent protagonist has an e-mail address at xybercorp.mail for the same reason, Xybercorp itself coming courtesy of The Spiraling Web by Ryan Somma, licensed CC BY-SA.

Whew! I now hope that somebody runs with something in this story, because I needed to spend a couple-thousand of words on explanations, and we haven’t even gotten to the image credits. Speaking of which…

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Credits: The header image is Stalkers by Danielle Helm, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The tablet image comes from the Cutie Pi Enclosure, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license. The vandalized rocket is based on Falcon 9 rollout with TurkmenAlem52E-MonacoSAT to SLC-40 by SpaceX, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

1. Note that this wrecks one of the nice things about the Pataphysical calendar and other thirteen-month calendars, that every month runs for exactly four seven-day weeks, and each month starts on the same day of the week. Months that run for twenty-eight days don’t divide by weeks of six days. But I didn’t want to saddle this with recognizable names for the days of the week. ↩

2. With occasional exceptions—one annual, one in Leap Year—the twenty-ninth day doesn’t exist. The fourteenth of Sand does mark the day of Don Quichote, champion du monde, though. ↩

3. I won’t bore you more than I already have, here, but Unicode has so much in it that probably won’t ever see use outside an academic paper, making them useful when appropriating somebody’s culture feels inappropriate. Although, take some care in “gray areas,” such as ghost characters that probably won’t see real use elsewhere, but using them as pseudo-Japanese text would probably feel like the same sort of garbage Japanese misappropriation that we see throughout Western Culture. ↩

4. OK, yes, you can find outfits that will sell you domains with certain forbidden or otherwise unused TLDs, such as Alter NIC’s various successors. But to access a site with that domain, you would need to supplement your DNS resolution with something that the vendor controls, which the overwhelming majority of people won’t do without a compelling reason. And even if they do, I don’t believe that any current alternate DNS roots offer those three TLDs, for the same reasons that ICANN declined to do so: Registering them means that your domain name might get hidden by many home and corporate networks, making the names unreliable. ↩