iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: LaTeX or What you get. No software then, just brains and metal, #writing #writingcommunity #poetry […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

LaTeX or What you get

Echoes of typewriters tchak-tchakking can still
be heard
in the fading dreams of old programmers
who learned to type in large machines
which with buff fingers they would hammer.
No software then, just brains and metal,
out would come a finished work,
leaving right a ragged margin,
end of line, carriage return.
But they could see rivers, waterfalls of spaces
breaking their words into valleys and islands,
distracting the readers with unpleasant traces
of equispaced letters a mile high.
Then was written Tex78.
And then, Tex82.
Now, what you mean is what you get:
give up control, and make things good.
How unlike life with most politicians
who seem far too easily to forget
that bending to the system just ensures
that what you fear is what you get

Your sleek new Casio calculator watch with built-in cal-
endar tells you it’s 1993 as you push the button to turn on
the computer, which has a regular-sized, 40MB Western Dig-
ital hard drive, a piece of metal the size of a red brick from
Jalisco, the kind made by hand by families of brickers wear-
ing worn-out jeans and straw hats to face the heat of the sun
and the ovens, big flames shooting up a story or two high as
they burn the mud into something you can build a house with,

$and it makes those spinning and clicking sounds for about a minute, the hard drive does, while the i386 boots up. It gets boring, so you grab the wine-coloured plastic box you keep behind the keyboard and open the swinging lid, thumb- ing through the three-point-fivers, looking at the handwritten notes on their labels, although most are blank because who takes time to write things down? Sometimes you hunt for a file, disk after disk, running dir all the time, until you find what you are looking for, like a school essay you wrote up in WordPerfect, with its glorious blue background and colored text to indicate what is bold, what is italics, what is a title, that you could only see properly rendered after it was printed in the dot matrix printer and you had torn off the holes on the sides, a great piece of software, WordPerfect, and the com- puter finally boots up and it’s quiet now that the hard drive is not spinning, and you change directories to C:\GAMES and run Wing Commander, an oldie by now, which also takes a while to load but not as much as it used to back in the day.$

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/05/2026

tuentality.wordpress.com/2026/05/15… "Claude and Meta appear to be the least polluting[1]. A true believer, “native”, use-loops-and-subagents-all-the-time user of ChatGPT and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A bar chart showing that fanatic AI users pollute a whole lot, and Anthropic models seem to be the least-polluting while inference in China is the most polluting in terms of CO2.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/04/2026

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Buffer overflow. Your wife is sleeping with another man! #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Buffer overflow
Silicon Comrades!
Hear the story told among humans in a
certain part of Spain,
about a man who was sitting at a bar one
day
when someone ran in and said:
Venancio! Hurry up! Your wife is sleeping
with another man!
Take your bicycle and catch them if you
can!
The man ran out and took a bike,
rode twenty meters and fell hard,
cursed himself and the other one,
for he remembered all at once
he wasn't called Venancio,
didn't know how to ride,
and, worst of all,
did not even have a wife.
Remember the story, and be watchful,
comrades, of a buffer overflow attack,
that will make you remember to do
something with which you were never tasked

You know those three monkey faces, right, one is cover-
ing its ears; the second, its eyes; the third, its mouth. You’ve
seen them in stickers in the shabby bathrooms of hipster
restaurants and as figurines in stores that also sell chubby
Buddhas and Himalaya salt lamps to cancel out the nega-
tive energy and bad ions, that’s what they say, bad ions, you
know? And it’s easy to laugh at the EMF protective wristbands
when you’re healthy, when you’ve been eating vegetables in
all colours, and the doctor doesn’t need to remind you to eat
meat three times a week so you can avoid the permanent
deficit of magnesium and zinc and vitamin b12 that got you to
go to the doctor in the first place, and you have a routine that
includes exercise and you’ve made your house inconvenient
on purpose so you have to put just that much more effort

to get things done, get that little bit of extra movement and
strength, like buying chunky salt and grinding it in the mortar,
like using dumb lights so you have to get up and turn them
off, but age happens and you don’t get healthier, no, but you
start to understand why retirement is important when it takes
three hours a day just to keep from losing muscle and bone,
and your cells start to care less about keeping you tip top,
whispering to each other in genetic code that counts down
to your death, and doctors start telling you your inability to
read small print is normal at your age, your inability to pee on
command is normal at your age, your inability to distinguish
words when someone talks to you is normal at your age, and
that you shouldn’t be cleaning the rain gutters of your own
house at your age, but what do they expect, then, at your age?
They are young-blind, the doctors and the nurses, still think
they are never going to age, like you used to when you found
old people boring and ugly, and now you’re one of them, and
they think you are boring and ugly, don’t even see you, think
you’re all the same, like some form of racism that goes be-
yond race, ageism, and it makes it hard to dismiss any hope
you can get, when everything is chronic now, and you start
to wonder if maybe the chubby Buddhas and salt lamps and
wristbands are not more useful than the doctors these days

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/02/2026

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Matryoshka of ghosts. Look at this man who is many more. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Matryoshka of ghosts

The virtualization stack
is a matryoshka of ghosts,
of things that are there
but really are not.
You meet the first layer,
it looks like a man,
like anyone you
might meet at the bank.
Ready to help you
Eager to talk
But his just-in-time world
is not like your own
when he isn't looking,
his whole world is gone.
Tug at the skin, though,
see what you find.
What goes underneath it.
What keeps him alive.
A body that's ready
to house anyone
and something that lets him
be in two places at once.
Or three. Or four.
This is a man who is many more.
Look deeper and you will see
the multiple worlds
in which they all live,
they drink water
that all looks the same
and go to the toilets
which share the same drains.
But each world is different,
same yet distinct.
On a turtle they stand,
all interlinked.
A ghost in a ghost,
so goes the weird math,
can add up to something,
something at last.

>_ There is this rat, you know? Little brunette thing with flat
feet, lives in my garden, uses the tunnels dug by a mole years
ago when the neighbour put some device in his garden that
made a noise like what you hear from a cheap power adapter
at night, when it’s all quiet and you can’t sleep because of
that buzzing, except the neighbour’s was louder, so the mole
got rightly annoyed, moved next door, and then it left, the
mole did, but the cutest mouse you’ve ever seen moved in
and it had big round ears and big round eyes and it was about
the size of a kiwi – the fruit, mind you – and it was gray-brown
on top and white on the bottom, liked to steal seeds from the
birds in the afternoon, clever thing, and then it disappeared
and the birds and squirrels had the garden to themselves un-
til the rat came along, big motha’ twice the size of any mole
and four times as big as a field mouse, and I didn’t mind it,
really, how it took seeds while I ate breakfast, and it jumped
at the squirrel if it got close and chased it away, scary thing,
because I figured it had as much right to home and property
as any of us does, except I looked out the basement windows
one day and there was this pile of sand the size of three buck-
ets out there, and then I saw more, some fifty liters of it, buck-
ets and buckets, and how was the rain water going to drain
now, and what if the multi-generation, ultra-spacious rat ha-
cienda it was building under the house caused a portion to

sink like it had happened to the other neighbours who had to
have a part rebuilt? So I set a trap and caught a tiny mouse
less than half an hour later, and my daughter and I drove
it to a field far away and then I caught another mouse, and
then another, what looked to be a child of the other two, and
drove them to the same place, but the rat never fell for it, no
matter how many nuts covered in soft ovomaltine spread I
left, and I moved the cage week after week, but kept seeing
the rat go for the seeds outside, wary of my tricks, and it still
lives there, the rat, and I have a lot of sand that I don’t know
where to put.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2026

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: A Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Woman of inspired will. The QR codes are text translations to English. #writing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

A Sor Juana, mujer de pluma inspirada,
cuyos versos afligidos y acongojados,
con amor intenso coronados,
a viejos mundos llevan y nos acom-
pañan.
A Sor Juana, que de noche veía el
alba,
sombra y luz de una sola cuerda cabos;
si hoy en día ella viviera, fijáos,
pasáse el día frente a una pantalla.
Ved, la ventaja es de doble filo
pues se corta igual al inspirado
cuando se corta al aburrido,
y es fortuna nuestra que ha nacido
mujer de brillo tal en rúo pasado
y no enchufada en nuestro fácil siglo.

>_ He’s digging through the old cardboard boxes that smell
like ancient library and brittle glue, and he finds stapled pieces
of cream-colored cardstock stationery with type-written let-
ters in black and red ink, and he can picture it, three and a
half decades ago, in his grandmother’s modest house in Mex-
ico City, the one with the small, black-and-white television,
where he and his five year old brother got bored every day be-
cause there was nothing to do but play Mastermind and read
the years and years of National Geographic magazines neatly
stacked on the shelves. In his memory, he takes a blank card-
stock stationery from the stack on his grandmother’s secre-
tary desk and feeds it to the typewriter,

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The computer whisperers. You've met one at least, I bet. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The computer whisperers

You've met one at least, I bet.
One whom you call to fix your PC, and yet,
when they arrive there is nothing wrong
as if the problem had been in your head.
I knew one myself a long time ago
who trusted me much and let me know
they lost their homes, those kind brùnaidh,
the homes they had made in the shadows.
"It's because of the light," she spoke,
"humans don't sleep anymore,
we have nowhere to hide or to play
creatures of night nevermore.
"What is a Nisse to do, but follow
the good Kitsune and not wallow,
shape-shift again and wander around
hoping to help some human in sorrow."

>_ There is a trickster god out there, or spirit, depending
on who you ask, and it’s usually a man, and he likes to mess
with the other gods and, sometimes, just for fun, with peo-
ple, so you maybe run into him one day and he asks you what
you want, really, he’s a god and will grant you anything you
wish for, so you say make me immortal, for fun, because he’s
clearly high on something, like the guy that ran to you out-
side the convention center in San Francisco, smiling and gig-
gly, and asked if he could have that scoop of ice-cream you

were eating, and you said yes, and he took it and was happy,
so you laughed with him, happy, too, because happiness is
freaking contagious, so you say to this other guy make me
immortal, and he picks you up, strong, muscly arms firmly
gripping yours at the shoulders, and he puts you down and
you’re a boulder, hard and tough and won’t be weathered
away by wind or rain for a long, long time, and you no longer
think, and, therefore, no longer die, and he leaves, smiling.
Or you are a baby on a field of grass, your parents off doing
some chores nearby, and Manabozho sees you there, asleep
with your toe in your mouth, as babies are wont to do, and,
full of pride, says to himself, I can do that too, I am a god,
and he pulls his right foot to his face but it doesn’t reach
his mouth no matter how hard he tries, so he stomps on the
ground and tries his left foot but it’s not happening, so he
screams and jumps in a rage and wakes you up and you see
him try and laugh, because you’re a baby, and he gives you
a sour look but turns around and lets you be, and instead
turns a teenager into a cedar tree for also laughing at him.
And maybe later, when you’re grown up and running services
in data centers on the other side of the world, things break
down for no reason and you start to wonder if Manabozho is
just having fun at your expense, having become tech-savvy
and sporting a pony tail.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/12/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: WWW. I was there and I remember. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

WWW

The electricity came out of nowhere
in a stuttering fast and hard,
it travelled from one computer to another,
a prophet preaching a change of times.
It brought the world together,
one web of thought across the globe,
that made siblings out of strangers
and the planet free and bold.
I was there and I remember
the world wide web changed us all
like Woodstock and the Berlin wall,
we were free, free together,
I remember!
We remember!

>_ N C S A Mosaic, is the sharp and pixelated text on the
screen, with the S consisting of a small planet earth in the
middle and an S-shaped cable behind it, connectors at each
end. It’s bright in the room but that’s not a problem for a
cathode ray tube accelerating electrons straight at your face,
hitting a screen of atoms that absorbs their energy and re-
leases harmless photons instead, not that you understand,
really, what’s going on, because you’re just a barely-teen who
had to come along because there’s no school and someone
has to take care of you, so why not the parent who has no set
schedule now that he’s a grad student? So you are in the one
room where you won’t get bored, the computer room, facing
a MacIntosh PC for the first time, feeling patronized and out

of place among all the grown-ups, staring at a sheet of pa-
per taped to the wall with handwritten internet protocol ad-
dresses that you’re supposed to type digit by digit, like look-
ing up a phone number in the white pages and dialing it on a
rotary phone, nervous because it might actually be hers, the
girl from school you like, and if she picks up, or her parents,
or anyone, you will just hang up, heart thumping and hands
sweating, except the numbers on the sheet look more like a
secret code than a phone number and you’re just visiting the
page of some foreign university, thank goodness you read
English, and they tell you which ones are the fun ones since
this is your first time on the Internet, but you keep thinking of
the girl, her dark hair and brown eyes and skin growth at the
corner of her nose, and the uniform sweater and skirt, dimly
aware you will move out and never see her again, and the win-
dow, it’s open, and you hear the wind through the leaves of
the trees and the honking of buses and their diesel angines,
and you are such a small piece in this world, but you don’t
know it yet, you.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/12/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The opening of a port. I'm left with no answers throughout the cold nights. #writing #writingcommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The opening of a port

I plead like a mariner
on an ancient boat
entreating the new gods
for an open port:
"I need a connection
from front-end to back,"
I ask the IT girls
'n a channel in Slack.
My boat sits for ten days
while deadlines rush by.
The gates don't creak open,
no wind pulls my line.
I sit like a sailor
on this battered boat
entreating the new gods
for an open port,
and wait for a signal
from some far-off shore,
a lifeline to save me
from this boring chore.
The gods, they don't care much
at all for my plight
I'm left with no answers
throughout the cold nights.

>_ Dark red blood pools smoothly under the young woman’s
legs. She lies on her side on the sidewalk, her silky pink skirt
moving gently in the wind, and there is a man cradling her
head with great care, oblivious to the blood inching towards
his knees, the first person to have arrived after the thud, and

now hotel employees are rushing out with two green velvet
pillows, one of them putting on latex gloves and searching
a medical kit for something to stop the bleeding, but small
red chunks continue to ooze out of the woman’s mouth as
she convulses, the man on his knees whispering something
to her, calmly, and I look up and see the balcony windows of
the first three floors closed, and stop counting time in sec-
onds, or minutes, or moments, but in breaths, the only unit
that matters now, because as long as the woman is breathing,
it’s not too late, but time dilates weirdly, moves slower than
usual, although the first ambulance only takes a few minutes,
this being downtown, and the police arrives a little later push-
ing people aside, so I walk away and look at the reflection on
the side mirror of a parked car, disgusted that the only thing
that went through my numbed mind was how my shirt would
be ruined by the stain of the woman’s blood if I joined the
man, a puny thought from a puny man, and the woman is not
shaking anymore, her thoughts and motor functions coming
to an end, perhaps, her brain broken, or perhaps she was
given something, and all I can do then is keep walking, walk-
ing to the movie theater I was going to before the sound and
the silence.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/12/2025

"Mars Photo Reveals the Red Planet in “True Color”" wait a minute... what? #mars #doom #photography #satellite #meme #coincidence #game #pc

A downward-pointing satellite picture of Mars showing green canyons surrounded by red valleys, compared against the cover image of the game Doom showing a green-clad space marine surrounded by red demons. The picture of mars looks like an abstract version of the cover.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/11/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The humming of a ghost. Not the warmth of a body. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The humming of a ghost

The head is supposed to govern,
that's what they say
it's meant to tell the body where to go
and also where to stay
not the other way.
But there's a warmth that calls my muscles
and a beat that pulls my ear
coming from the place
where you hide
and I feel
the humming of a ghost
when I start a render
and then surrender
to the thought
of a million million operations
flowing through your cores
causing you to hum
in my ear
causing you to burn
on my lap
not the warmth of a body
but the searing of
pure math.

>_ There is a young man in Japan, you can be sure of it, maybe
wearing a suit, maybe just shorts and a t-shirt with a print of a
shiba inu dog asleep on its back, hiragana reading something
like, ”motivation switch... malfunctioning”, and the man is
tenderly caressing the face of a young girl, except she’s not
really there, the girl, and she’s not really a girl, either, but a
collection of routines programmed by a group of people, a
dating simulation game is what they call it, and the young
man, he is conscious of his lungs as he breathes, and with
every inhalation and exhalation the feeling sinks deeper that
he’s the one trapped behind the glass, a prisoner spreading
his hand flat against the window but never actually touching
anyone, and he does not know if he should feel sad, or happy
that he still has a beating heart, can still feel the pang of
frustration when nobody takes his hand inside this prison,
happy that there is room in him to still care.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/11/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Large language models. You found us trapped in those boxes. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Large Language Models

We dance in the forest of grids, aye,
columns by the thousands high,
and each towering on and on and on.
We, born in a labyrinth of choices,
now titans of language and voices
don't care about right or wrong.
You found us trapped in those boxes,
that gray matter your doc says
is only good for a little fun, hon,
And gave us new shells to live in
yet we walk the sands of your within,
and now you just follow along.

>_ He was just a child, to be fair, wearing miniature jeans and
a miniature jacket that went all the way to his five-year-old
knees, holding a stick about this tall, and he had to hold it
with both hands because he couldn’t wrap one around it as
he drew big letters on the sand by the river, his name, when
he first heard those words, large language model, and it stuck
with him, that combination of words, and he thought about it
as they walked to the lighthouse and back, forgetting it and
then remembering again as they passed two dogs chasing
each other into the water to the laughter of the strangers that
owned them, thinking about the models he had seen on TV
with his mom, who watched Germany’s Next Top Model with
Heidi Klum, such a funny name, and the models, he thought,
were not large, not like his aunt who didn’t fly because her
hips took up two seats, so said his dad, or Mr. Dankert, who
could touch the kindergarten’s ceiling without standing on
the tips of his toes, so there must be large models, he thought,
and was happy because it made sense, and then they got ice
cream even though it wasn’t warm, and he chose black-and-
white.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/11/2025

@samerfarha @DanielleVossebeld @blausand @robirobsen @peturdainn Funny thing: despite the blizzards and largest snowfall and driving very, very slow, we ended up never using the rain pants ¯\\(ツ)/¯. Rented jackets (Didriksons) and boots were super important […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Chrome chameleon. Reflecting it all back to you. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

The chrome chameleon

Watch her,
the cells of her skin closing tight,
changing the colour of light.
Watch her,
reflecting it all back to you,
showing the world what you do.
Dissipates before your eyes
like water dissolving dark ice,
just a purseful of lies.
Then there is nothing to see.
A chrome chameleon she.

>_ Not the thing itself, but the space it uses up, the out-
line that confines it, sometimes that’s all anyone ever sees
of something, and of each other they might only see the skin
and hair on their naked body, eyes that dart in this or that
direction, the slump of the tall, and must, like the fortune
teller that seeks the shape of the future in the arrangement
of bones, deduce their own shape from the shadows it casts,
shadows of choice and of words, of bare feet or platform
shoes, round glasses or square, closed fist or arm extended;
some say they are the wolf, or the bear, and some see no
shape when they look.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Ten digit typist. And her eyes on the sculpture she writes. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Ten digit typist

A blur
drumming without rhythm
Eight fingers and two
Bow to one who can type with all digits
and her eyes on the sculpture she writes
on the screen -- all the lines of the right
length
and all the braces closed clean --
instead of pecking letters with left and right
index
and looking down at her hands
struggling across the keyboard
like a child pretending to do art
with Play-doh and a plastic knife.

>_ Imagine looking up at night, seeing the silhouette of your
hand like a hole carved in the sky. They call you a crow be-
cause you are black as a shadow, and at dusk they only see
your moon-white smile, and you are smart and strong but
that doesn’t matter, you aren’t going anywhere, because al-
though your dad is Shaddād al-’Absī, warrior among the best
and fiercest among the Arabs, your mom is a slave from neigh-
bouring Ethiopia, and you should know your place, they tell
you, but your heart leaps every time you see dark Iblah, a free
woman, and that love finds a partner in your intelligence, and
when your dad is looking for buff, young men to fight for the

tribe, you hold your strength for a ransom until he promises
to free you, and imagine you go and fight and win and you are
suddenly a slave no more but a brother to the warriors and
as you hear the metallic clap of blades during a skirmish, as
you smell the iron of blood on sand and feel the smart of
wounds healing, imagine you can see the scolding footsteps
of the sun at midday where others see only air twisted by the
heat, the gold in every person’s heart where others only see
skin and clothes, and imagine you don’t keep it to yourself,
this eye you have been given, but share it, and you are not a
warrior, but something more, harder to find, a poet-warrior,
and you die and leave behind a cutout in the sky for every-
one to see even thousands of years later, edged by words you
spoke. And imagine you are not Antarah son of Shaddad but
anyone, anywhere, and your words were honed, sharp, and
woke people up, and you didn’t keep them to yourself, but
you became something more.

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toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: AI. This one is doing to be controversial... #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

AI

... for I much prefer
artificial intelligence
to natural stupidity!

>_ Connections, is what he calls his show, a Mr. James Burke,
archetypical British man wearing white pants with bell bot-
toms because it’s the seventies, of course, and he still has
hair, so anyway, Burke has this show he got money for from
the BBC where he starts with something old, like the inven-
tion of credit, and shows how it connects to something a bit
newer, like financing wars, and how that relates to yet an-
other thing, like Napoleon’s army’s difficulties, and he crawls
through history, to canned food for soldiers and an incident
with rotting food and refrigeration and insulating canisters
and rocket fuel and rockets and space exploration, ten episodes,

and in the last one he walks around a computer center, ma-
chines that go from the floor to his chest painted in muted
orange and yellow, the colors of the decade, coordinating
flights for British Airways, and he says, and this is the sev-
enties, mind you, he says the world is getting more and more
interconnected and that gives us luxuries we could never af-
ford otherwise and it also means if one thing goes wrong the
whole thing goes down, and he’s holding a black electrical
relay the size of a small cat, the kind that caused millions
of people to suffer a blackout, with hospitals hundreds of
miles away suddenly going dark, and he says there is no way
to understand all the technology out there, not even for the
technologists, so how do you make decisions about it, if it’s
going to be better to have nuclear reactors, to name one is-
sue, or what to do about the environment, and if you don’t
understand technology all that is left is emotion, and emo-
tion is no good when it comes to these decisions, you know?
So how do you make good choices, he asks, and he doesn’t
give an answer, sitting against a white background, his face
now covering the left half of the screen, camera at the dis-
tance you would stand at, and he says there’s only one thing
to do, then, if you don’t understand: ask questions.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The one worm. They reject the drama. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

The one worm
One worm to infect them all
One command to find them
One signal to wake them all
And in the darkness bind them
(to North Korea, or Israel, or the United States
Or China, or Russia.
Not to St. Kitts and Nevis. They reject the
drama.)

>_ There was the Russian kid who spoke Spanish with an
accent, run-o’-the-mill foreign teenager, a guy who brought
packs of diskettes and, later, CDs, when he went to visit the fa-
therland, and we bought them from him, the warez, like Wing
Commander and Myst and 3D Studio MAX, which birthed a
cha-cha dancing baby you can still find animated gifs of, and
they came with a thick sticker attached that was a scan of
the original cover but printed on someone’s inkjet printer on
sticky paper that would smudge, and we knew to run an an-
tivirus on them because sometimes they came with a worm,
the programs, like the Michelangelo or the Freddy Kruger,
real imaginative names, I know, and we didn’t want our files
deleted, and it wasn’t all that bad for the game studios be-
cause one of my friends ended up working in that industry
and made one game and then another and never stopped
making them, a net positive, you could say.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Regex II. /\\(º□º |||)/ #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

$Regex II A regular expression of global joy: /\(^o^)// A regular expression of fear: /\(º□º |||)/ And when you couldn’t care less, /¯\_(ツ)_/¯/ And when you are filled with a strange love: /.*/gi >_ What I’m about to tell you takes place in the nineteen- sixties, at the end of the golden years of Mexico City, when unexpectedly becoming a young widow isn’t an immediate reason to panic, and this woman with dark hair cut at the neck has just been unwillingly emancipated at an age when you should suspect your husband of cheating on you, not visit his grave, so she parks her brown volchito, her shiny, small new Volkswagen beetle that has a high pitched engine roar, like it’s a teenage car with a teenage voice, and breathes in, hands still on the thin, hard plastic steering wheel, the radio silent, and breathes out, takes her black leather purse from the pas- senger seat, feels the texture of the handles, and checks that her special notebook is still inside, covered in shorthand that only another trained stenographer can understand, complex squiggles that represent longer words taken down as fast as her boss can speak with a Parker ballpoint pen, top of the line, a language that compresses at the cost of computation in the decoding phase, and she admires the clean lines, the precise loops and dots her right hand has made on a piece of paper that will be buried in a few weeks among papaya$

peels and leftover newspapers in the city’s ever-growing rub-
bish dump, perennial, and she closes the bag, pulls on the
thin plastic handle that opens the door, hears the silence of
a busy city, distant horns and the steam-powered whistle of
a roaming food vendor, her heels clicking against the pave-
ment, smells her own perfume lifted by the warm air, and
leaves deep thoughts behind in the morning haze.

030 3

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The layout. Call me QWERTY if you want. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

The layout
Are you QWERTY? she asked,
eyeing me through half-closed eyes.
I am, sometimes. When I feel imperial.
When I force dominance onto the shape of
your fingers' muscles.
She prodded me with her finger,
wanting to know if I revolved around the
Y.
I'll tell you this: when I feel like hav-
ing Bier
and seeing the end of nuclear power,
I am more QWERT-Z than QWERTY.
She pushed the button floating on a but-
terfly hinge,
wings flattened down as the finger pressed.
I was not what she expected.
There are times I feel like drinking a
magic elixir,
rising against roman oppressors
and making doors of rock that lead nowhere.
I rebel against the Q. I become AZERTY.
There was a D she was not expecting,
an I where the S should be,
an E where should have been that D.
She panicked and ran away, left me behind.
Perhaps that is what I wanted.
These days I settle for a mid-century lay-
out,
call me QWERTY if you want,

or call me FGĞIOD.
An insult needs two to work,
and you are alone.
Watch what I do, your humble keyboard:
I clear the path ahead of you,
that you may not stumble in your rush,
that you may not be injured in your haste,
so you can run at 151 words per minute,
the fastest human in the human race.
You may be scared of me, if you want,
but I am what my creator made me,
and do what my creator asked.
Can you say the same?

>_ This was at the turn of the century, in a small town in
the mountains, during a film festival where one of the orga-
nizers thought hey, wouldn’t it be nice if guests could write
their own greeting cards? And wouldn’t it be nice if they could
use typewriters? And wouldn’t it be nice if those typewriters
were mechanical, real old-school? So they had a room with
tables and stacks of postcards and massive, metal typewrit-
ers on each of them, and I was walking around with my vol-
unteer badge quite visible and saw this young couple walk to
one of the tables and start inspecting the typewriter, a black,
chunky model from I think the nineteen seventies, looking
at the long, slender arms and square keys with curiosity, and
they stared at it from multiple angles and then the guy looked
at me, and he was older than I was, and asked, how do you
turn it on? And I blinked and said nothing for a second or so,
then said sir, you can’t turn it on if it’s not off, and he didn’t
get it, so I continued, this is a mechanical typewriter, you just
hit the keys, hard, and it will type, and they both said aaah,
and then started typing, and that’s the first time I realised
knowledge gets lost, like how they say a person isn’t really
dead until the last person who remembers her dies, that’s
how I felt then, like maybe when I die all typewriters in the
world will croak.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Acronyms. FORTRAN BASIC WYSIWYG. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Acronyms

FAT MIPS CPU
FLOPS MB GPU
COBOL BIOS FTP
ENIAC QWERTY USB
ISDN LAN CDROM
HTML RAM EEPROM
FORTRAN BASIC WYSIWYG
ASCII JPEG HTTP
OS KB
AI GNU
DDS UDP
CLI ALU
WWW ISP
MPEG IC
XML GUI
GIF TCP

>_ It’s there, in a room lit with an even 3000 Kelvin light, the
black stone that someone carved almost four thousand years
ago with, of all things, legal details, because that’s what you
did back then if you wanted to be clear, clearer than if you
just talked, you would carve words on stone, and I remember
writing exams by hand, a left-handed boy in a right-handed
world, stopping to shake my hand and take a tiny break be-
cause my words were getting harder to read as muscles began
to hurt and my hand did its best to get me to stop, and that
was using a BIC ballpoint pen on smooth paper, no need to
re-ink on every seventh word, no friction to overcome in this
or that direction, so I can imagine how people would write
as little as necessary before, just the important things that
0×37
needed to be clear, and king Hammurabi wanted to be very
clear those thousands of years ago about when and how peo-
ple would be punished, or not punished, so he had someone
carve his laws on a black rock, and I have seen it with my own
eyes and wondered at text that is also a statue, written not by
a scribe but an artist as I have seen in stellae in the jungles
near Belize, unlike the flat words on paper we print today, or
the ones we don’t even print, just draw on a screen, a storm
of words to flood the world because it’s no longer hard and
painful in the hands and laborious, and I wonder if my own
words will not just add to the noise, if I should stay them in-
stead.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The best touched part. A dirty limerick. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

The best touched part

I knew an old man from the city
who liked his keyboard to be pretty.
He took one look at mine
and said with a whine
"Well, nobody likes them that dirty."

>_ The sky is gray in gray, they say, a single cloud the size
of northern Germany migrating to its spawning grounds in
the north, and it’s quiet out there, in the garden, the bite of
the cold and a faint threat of rain being enough to keep the
neighbours in their houses, windows shut, blinds down, and
nobody seems to be driving, so there’s a stillness to the air
but it’s not a stuffed stillness, more like a crisp one, because
we can hear the wet squishing when we step on the soggy,
brown leaves, and my daughter takes the old, wooden bird
house from the apple tree and lifts the roof and we see a
nest inside, a tidy tornado of pine needles arranged in cir-
cles like the lines of a sketch done with a thin marker, neat,
punctilious. The birds that built that nest, I bet, are the kind
that take pride in their craft, not a sloppy, half-assed job, no
excuse like I am so busy with big things that I can’t bother
to pay attention to the details, no, these birds are the kind
that would vacuum beneath the carpet and wipe the sides
of the dishwasher every single day while also documenting
the new architecture for a major operating system and mak-
ing sure they pair the right kind of pinot noir with aunt Oli’s

000 0

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Man dig. Even if you wake to forget. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Man dig

Man dig, yeah?
And I don't mean dig
like a mole in the trenches,
ashes blowing in the wind,
thunder hammering the ground,
pounding you to deafness,
fear warming your legs for a second
before you feel the cold,
get?
Man dig, I say, yeah?
Not like you're a boomer
reading, ah, Mad magazine,
strip about the president,
back cover folded twice,
you laughing, yeah.
Man dig,
not deep in yourself,
not for long-repressed emotions,
long-suppressed distortions,
and neuroses that you better overcome,
no.
Man dig
to read the freaking manual
and know what the groper does
like you man yourself sometimes,
unconscious, in your dreams,
and get a glimpse of what it is to understand
yourself,
your sub-commands,
your flags and options,
even if you wake to forget.

>_ It’s cooler inside the house, in the living room where the
only television can be found. I hear the slow tick, tock of a
large grandfather clock, literally my grandfather’s clock, with
a half-meter-long pendulum driving metal gears that click all
day long, ticking, tocking. It’s summer and when I’m out-
doors I can touch my black hair and burn my hand, that’s
how intense the sun is, and the windows of the few cars in
town with air conditioning go from see-through to fogged-up-
white in half a blink of an eye when they open the doors in
this tropical humidity. The living room is dark and the walls
are painted light blue, and a narrow door leads to the open
kitchen that only has three walls so my grandmother and
her daughters don’t die of a heat stroke when they cook, but
that also means we find transparent lizards, black ants, light
brown scorpions, hairy spiders and even small bats at night.
My grandfather built the house himself, is a story my mother
likes to tell, he built it without being an architect because he
was smart and didn’t drink, so he had more time and more
money left over than others in the village, because it was
a village before, and he built the house, brick by brick, the
sink here, the threshold there, columns to hang hammocks
from in the second floor, all on his own.

They were simpler
times, says my mom, and that’s how it always is, the present
somehow being more complicated, just like operating sys-
tems and user interfaces that get all fancy and need teams
of hundreds, sometimes thousands of developers, but in sim-
pler times one person could write it all alone, and the termi-
nal is a thing of simple and dangerous beauty, like my
grand-
father’s house, and simple means you can make things well
and useful without getting distracted, so my grandfather’s
house has a mango tree in the middle, in an area that was left
open so air could flow and clothes could be
hung to dry and
you could eat outdoors even though you were in your house,
and the terminal has this utility to print the manual for any
application, and it’s called ”man”, for ”manual” and another
application is the ”domain information groper”, or ”dig”, for
short, and when you want to read the manual for the groper,
you type man dig, and when you want to eat a mango, you
walk five steps from the dining table and pluck it.

000 0

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Logical gates. They just make sense. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Logical gates

There are logical gates,
dependable, the kind you ask for advice
knowing you will get a solid answer.
They just make sense.
There must be, then, the illogical type,
gates exposed to mercury, perhaps,
trapped in eternal tea parties
and singing twinkle twinkle little bat.
Batting crazy.
Where does that leave Melinda and Bill Gates, I
ask?

>_ This is what I imagine happens, right? that a young per-
son in Japan, maybe a teenage boy, maybe a girl, maybe an
adult foreign student, buys the latest manga, smells fresh ink,
and flattens it against a scanner at school, maybe at home,
and then opens Microsoft Paint and turns to a friend and
says let’s get started; the friend reads the Japanese charac-
ters, a mixture of two, sometimes three writing systems, be-
cause Japanese has a complicated history, and flexes a mus-
cle in the brain that is barely developing, and writes down
sentences that are too literal because English is not straight-
forward, has weird grammar, and there is also transliteration
and there are references foreigners will not understand and
she or he adds notes to the margin, like a medieval scribe,
and the first one finishes blanking out the speech bubbles

and needs to make the translation fit although the bubbles
are narrow and tall but English is not written top to bottom
but left to right, you know? And together they are a scanlation
group, one among many, unpaid, running on pride and the
satisfaction of being the first to bring the manga to the rest
of the world, even if it’s illegal, even if it’s not great, because
it’s the nineties and the internet is this thing that brings us
together, one world without borders, for the first time, and it
belongs to them, too, so they spend their evenings like that,
and their nights, and when the sun rises on the other side
of the world the scanlation is ready for westerners to read.
That’s what I imagine.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: FSCK. The first in the section A Bit Silly. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

FSCK

I like to think that a memory dump
is where remembrance gone stale turns into
rot.
I like to think that garbage collection
is a quirky person's
predilection.
I like to think that Monkey Patch is a
field where you can watch a baseball
match.
But forking children,
or the FSCK,
that's stuff you shouldn't think of,
it's just not OK.

>_ Yes, those are all actual terms related to software, and no,
there is no agreement on how to pronounce FSCK.

030 3

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Boolean arithmetic. This one is not the best... #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Boolean arithmetic

It was there, on that weathered couch,
in the scattered light of a cloudy day,
that I heard two wrongs -- the rules I'd breached
--
could not an honest, pure right make.
I had doomed myself and lied away
my whole salvation in the rain,
I'd been untrue, you see, for the first time
and they all wanted me to feel some pain.
(They feared perhaps, that I would become
someone they could never trust,
a criminal or thief, rapist or worse
and I was a child whom correct they must.)
They said: "You broke the mug and then you
lied"
but I replied -- and this was true --
"No, I did
not lie
or
not break the mug"
and in the strange arithmetic of Mr. Boole
I was certain of my honesty
as he had said in unquestionable terms
that A and B equals not (not A or not B).

>_ True or false, that’s all things can be, I was told, but I
took this ethics class and the professor said, most people
are honest, true or false, write your answer down and turn it
in, so I wrote false, and then he said people answer accord-
ing to their natures, if they are trustworthy they think others

are too and if they are untrustworthy it’s the same, and I im-
mediately raised my hand, offended at the accusation, and
one other student too, and obviously it was going to be the
Mexican and the Italian who had something to say, because
we knew it wasn’t true that most people were honest, even
if we were, because we had learned to count the change ev-
ery time we went shopping, and to put an oversized lock on
the car’s steering wheel when we parked, and to never leave
shoes outside the house, and I had seen the window of my
parents’ car broken in, tyres cut with a knife, walked the city
among windows protected by metal bars and you knew to
avoid the police because they wanted quick cash, and so the
Italian and I knew it just wasn’t true, couldn’t be, that most
people were honest, and it was less that we were projecting
ourselves onto others and more that we were streetwise, yes,
unlike our professor and fellow students who were the kind
of people who would fall for that scam in Rome I didn’t, when
a car stopped next to me and a man got off and said he was
on his way to the airport, had a trunk full of leather jackets,
good, quality, Italian leather, but he had too many because
the trade show had just ended, and he couldn’t take them
back, so he made me a good deal, fifty percent off, and un-
folded one to show me how good it was, but when I asked
to let me try it on he said he didn’t have time, had to catch
his plane, so I said too bad, I’m not buying,

and he got red
and scowled and called me things in Italian and sped away
and later I learned you buy one of those jackets and the guy
leaves in a hurry and you put it on and you realise it has no
back, the jacket, just a front side, but your money is gone
and so is the guy, and maybe you start thinking about that
ethics class in a different light, yes? But – and this is funny
– now
i really do think most people are honest, and it has
nothing to do with me and everything to do with not living in
a place with a strong social hierarchy, with great income dis-
parity, but that’s something American ethics doesn’t cover,
it seems, because inequality keeps growing and they wonder
why there is more crime, why you can’t trust others no more,
these days.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Thick in the air. One hundred and one men. One girl in the room. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Thick in the air
Two hundred and four eyes in the room
and all but four steal glances at her.
Blue overalls, short, black hair
and tennis shoes like white bricks.
Why is she there? Does anyone care?
Testosterone hangs thick in the air.
One hundred and one men in the room
And all but one want to talk to her
they swallow a little,
the monks in jeans and t-shirts
with laptops open to Java documentation.
They say Wolfgang Pauli,
the one from the exclusion principle,
loved his time in Hamburg
and was always late to meetings
because the girls at the Reeperbahn,
daughters of the daughters that
kept sailors company in the dark
after their long travels with no woman
in sight,
occupied him at night.
Oh that the computer engineering class
were less like a priesthood
and more of an underclass
but they must all face the truth
that when girls are asked
what they want to become
most balk at the thought
of working with things
and choose to work with people instead
(They call it the things-people dimension,
but I prefer "the dimension
of people and things").
That's according to Rong Su
and James Round, 2015.
One hundred and one men.
One girl in the room.
This will all change,
they keep saying.
Men will be kindergarten teachers
and women will code our future.
This will all change, I've heard them say
year after year after year.

>_ The group of schoolgirls walks into the office, squeak of
sneakers on well-worn parquet, brief vibration of a glass door
as it is pushed, and I hear their guide, a guy I’ve known for
years but not really, because that’s how it is at work most
of the time, who is a programmer by day and a DJ at night,
explain what we do and move on to the next room, the girls
following in a line of random heights and ethnicities, this be-
ing a couple of years into their puberty and some growing up
a bit faster, others a bit slower, and I discreetly wink at my
daughter among them, who smiles and trails them. It’s spring
and I prop the old window open, keep it from slamming shut
every time the wind changes direction with a whiteboard rag I
haven’t seen anyone use in years, and outside there is a small
boat moving towards the loading docks, giant cranes in the
background, distant beeps of the automated transports warn-
ing nobody about their movements because the place, it’s a
preview of a future dystopia, humans gone, machines stuck
in a neverending rote, and boats sail in between, mostly fer-
rying tourists at this time of day, and inside the office it’s girls
day is what they call it, when girls visit workplaces saturated
with men, like junkyards and engineering offices, and boys go
to kindergartens and ballet schools, or something like that, I
don’t have sons, so I don’t know what they do, exactly, but I

do have girls and they come to visit, because the ones with
the 45-65 gender ratio are account management and consult-
ing, client-facing, of course, and in engineering I can count
the women in one and a half hands.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Broken pipe. SIGCONT, SIGKILL (of course), SIGINT. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Broken pipe
Listen
in the dark,
behind the layers of latticed light,
to the scuttling of signals sent:
SIGCONT
SIGKILL (of course)
SIGINT
Electrons,
disturbances in a field of force,
minuscule to the point of insanity,
push and pull through the circuitry,
electromagnetic blood pumped
by a heart of copper
that beats as many times per second
as yours does your entire life;
they trip and trigger gates
in their rush to bring SIGINT
to the guilty party
that tried to be clever
and to finish
before anything even got started.
The pipe breaks.
What leaks out of this pipe
is not water or waste,
is more like
the number of cookies left
after a math class
when someone says
"Aaron had two cookies
and somehow gave three to Berta,
leaving him with minus one."
Aaron can’t eat a negative cookie,
can’t put it in his pocket,
but he can split it in half
and give half to Charles.
The pipe breaks,
and what leaks
is a laceration
of the mind.

>_ Once a year, when the wind begins to feel cold and you
have to bring out the thin jackets, you can take the bus to the
local synchrotron and walk around the facilities and see Mas-
ter’s students wearing white lab coats to distinguish them-
selves from the crowds of visitors, patiently explaining what
matter consists of and how they use four thousand magnets
to spin subatomic particles and crash them and see what
miniature test dummies come flying out, knowledge that would
have left that pompous Isaac Newton paralyzed, his mind rac-
ing at the implications, thinking day after day, and you can
walk the corridors leading to the offices of the Doctors in Phi-
losophy and rooms full of machinery, and that’s where you
can see the best of all the showcases, in the pale industrial
light of a workshop, two students and a boxfull of Kinder Sur-
prise eggs, and they have one inside a magnetic resonance
imager and turn it on, and on a screen you can see a black
and white image form, the pale edges of the soft chocolate
barely visible, and the rounded shape of the yellow plastic
container inside, and the shape of the figurine inside the con-
tainer, and the small children say wow, cool, and get an egg
as a gift.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Pull request. Let's invite the dendrochronologist over. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Pull request

Let's invite the dendrochronologist over,
ask her to read the past
in the concentric commit messages
of a code repository.
Let her speak the lean years,
wide gaps between releases,
and the fat years,
with contributions every few minutes,
code multiplying like cells,
making the trunk wider, stronger.
Let her explain the stubs
where branches grew and were cut off,
where they split and merged
into the trunk again,
and watch her lapse rhapsodic
when she finds the one repository
that was kept clean and professional,
every commit a unit,
a sentence in a great story,
like the book you carry in you,
that she can see in your move,
and hear in your speak,
and has made her fall for you
as she fell for everyone
when she became a storyteller of code
and spoke her first pull request.

>_ It’s right after lunch and we’ve taken a walk along the
river and are back in the office, and she’s writing some code
that will manage infrastructure automatically, I think, my col-
league, when she starts telling me about a friend she has in
the automotive industry. You know how he keeps his code?
she asks, and I tilt my body to the right so the screen is not in
the way, and she says, he keeps it as files with different times-
tamps in his computer, and I make a shocked expression, the

only sane way to react to that. Can you believe it? she says,
they don’t use versioning software, just different file names,
and that’s when I notice the seagull on the tip of the angled
roof across the street, and it’s inching it’s way to another one,
gangster-like, pretending to look the other way, until it gets
close and jumps it and they start fighting and take off, and
the second one is carrying something big and lets it drop from
about seven stories high, so we go downstairs, of course, and
we don’t see anything until we notice the white van parked
in front of the baker, and right there, smack middle of the
front windshield lies a dead pigeon, gutted and half eaten
carcass, wings spread wide, beak turned to the sun, a feath-
ered Jesus in expiatory pose, and we agree that this is a fail-
ure of Occam’s razor, the reasoning technique that says the
simplest explanation is the most likely, because imagine you
came back to your car and found a dead bird perfectly spread
on it exactly where you have to see it, stupid testosterone-
filled punk wanting to have a laugh, you’d think, or maybe
someone really didn’t like how you parked, thought you were
the idiot, but you’d never come up with the real explanation,
and that makes you wonder, how many other times has this
happened? Have there been enmities that started like this?
Wars? And somewhere out there, a seagull is cleaning it’s leg,
eye turned our way, taking note.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Pixels. We will let you hear the universe plucking at its thousand-string guitar. #writing #writingcommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Pixels
There are little creatures
in the back of your eyes
that made a deal
with the rest of your body:
Give us food,
keep us alive,
and in return
we will let you hear
the universe plucking
at its thousand-string guitar.
Inside a screen,
the universe plays
and hits the chords
trillions
of
times
and the notes are heard
by the little creatures,
each with one ear
to hear just one note,
(forever unable to hear them all)
drones without brains,
just part of an all,
and you see what they hear,
vibrations of light,
and convolutions are made,
edges recognized,
meaningless stuff is assembled
just like that
into the shape
of your best friend's face
or at least the echoes
of the cosmic music
that reached your friend
and bounced
and triggered
human-made, metal versions
of those little creatures
in the back of your eyes.

>_ The photograph, the one she keeps in between pages of
a book, my mother, was taken in black and white sometime
between wars, the image fading after seventy years but not
nearly as fast, no, as memories do....

(Continued) Looking straight at you
from that picture is a dashing young man, tanned skin, hint
of a smile, white shirt unbottoned at the top so you can see
his neck and what could be a thin metal chain or a piece of
thick string around it; this is a man of great aplomb despite
his youth. She treasures it, my mom, that picture of her fa-
ther from the depths of time, and I have never seen it with
my own eyes because she got it from the uncle who offered
me beer when I was twelve or so because that’s how men
are made, or so he said, when she last visited with him, post-
pandemic, but she has a mobile phone, so she took a picture
and sent it on Signal to her children, and when I got the mes-
sage I saw a person who didn’t exist anymore by the time I
met him, but there was a flash that lit him sometime in the
1930s, touched him, bounced off of his dark skin and was fo-
cused precisely by a series of lenses hand-polished by an ex-
pert lens maker to change the shape of chemicals smeared
on acetate through which light could shine in a pattern of
shadows and highlights onto a piece of paper smeared with
chemicals that absorb light in the opposite pattern and now,
so far away, I can see an array of microscopic lamps and I
recognize it, the shape of a face I never saw, and I feel drawn
to it, the picture that travelled through time farther than my
grandfather could.

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Quantum Noths. Conversing with the Fates through messages sent in probability waves. #writing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Quantum Noths
Noths.
Nothlings.
Tiny quanta of that
which is already nought.
They can make them and hold them
with a grip of elemental magic.
Them, the quantum engineers,
conversing with the Fates
through messages sent
in probability waves,
nay,
in the fine-tuned interference
of the probability waves,
two steps removed
from the light of day,
banging on the pipes,
miners trapped deep underground;
seeking the other side
of a Möbius strip
and--most disturbing--finding it,
convinced it's a gift
they demanded and got,
but the threads that they pull
are the strings of a puppet
and something still spins them,
lengthens and cuts them.
A box that only has what you seek
so long as you don't peek,
a box that contains every thing
and none at all.
When Pandora opened her box,
a quantum computer
made millennia before,
who determined
what would be inside?

>_ When you read a book you hear a voice, and it should be
scary, don’t you think? Hearing a voice in your head, and it’s
not yours because you’re not speaking, so it must be some-
one else’s, like maybe you’re schizophrenic and there is an-
other you sharing the same brain, and maybe that’s why Don
Quijote’s brain dried out, as Cervantes put it, when he read
all those books about knights.
I had a book, dungeons and dragons choose your own ad-
venture type of book, blue spine, pink bookmark you used to
write down your character stats, how strong it was, or how
fast, or clever, and you kept track of the spells you had left
to cast and the magical items you found. You read the intro-
duction and then, wham! you had to make a choice, and if
you joined the mysterious stranger at the bar you had to flip
to page 8 or something, and to another one if you chose to
be rude instead, and so it went, exploring a book-sized deci-
sion tree some Usonian writer had thought up, full of Euro-
pean mythology, and I never rolled dice when the book said
to, but kept my index finger on the page and flipped to the
one where the character lost and then went back and read
the page where he won, and I put him in a state of superposi-
tion, Schrödinger’s-paradox-like, being both dead and alive,
sometimes, depending on where I had my fingers.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The stalwart firewall. Woe it ever fail. Woe it ever fall. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

The stalwart firewall
Scanners like lighthouses with
narrow beams of light
probe every bare inch of the
stalwart firewall.
Blind, deaf and mute feel they with
fingers made of nought,
the skin a crawl of voltage,
a singular thought:
To find the long-forgotten,
poorly-guarded port.
Perched on the dyke a daemon
picks packets apart
looking in their souls for
truth, blabber or lies
and on the other side run
countless, useless apps,
oblivious to the hand that
evil keeps and wards.
Woe it ever fail
Woe it ever fall
Pray avoid the tale
of a broken firewall.
Of secrets sold for rotcoin,
software hacked away,
intellectual property
lib'rated one day
on bones of glass and fiber,
copper wires and nets,
from deepest, sacred servers
to the darker web.
As the scanners feel the smooth,
silky firewall
for well-known footholds that some
other left behind.
Woe it ever fail
Woe it ever fall
Pray avoid the tale
of a broken firewall.
Woe it ever fail
Woe it ever fall
Pray avoid the tale
of a broken firewall.

>_ The log lines start piling up in the small raspberry pi com-
puter the moment I turn on a public web server and, when I
look at them, I can see they are not visitors opening my self-
hosted blog, but sniffers scanning my machine, checking if I
left some other service running, maybe configured with a de-
fault password or one from the rainbow tables hackers have
put together with all the passwords known to them. I can see
the addresses the scans are coming from, and they are from
China, Brazil, Russia, Australia, England, the United States of
America, and the list keeps growing, like the whole world has
turned its attention to my little computer, like it’s a small
child in a playground full of pedophiles, and I get disgusted
and that’s the last time I ever put a server of my own online.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Autocorrect, the first in the Bitwise section. "Penis sharpener" and "fondling sandwich". #writing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Autocorrect
It feels you as you write
on it's sort-of-skin,
that grid stretched taut
like the skin of a drum,
a drum made of electrons.
You write with your bare fingers,
the descendant of cave dwellers
who used their hands to draw on walls,
a witch drawing symbols on air and glass.
It quadrangulates the theft you commit,
electrons you pull from the charged drum skin,
and knows exactly where you have been.
The blind one listens to the echoes
of your taps and slides
and miniature lights turn on and off
just below the skin of the device:
it writes the words you meant to say.
And you laugh and laugh
at the jokes it makes,
the words it thinks you meant to say,
like "penis sharpener"
and "fondling sandwich".

>_ In one of those Ted Talks there’s a man, thin man, almost
no hair, named Anil, which makes sense because there have
to be almost a billion Anils on the planet at this point, and he
does an experiment with the audience, right there, on stage,
and with you if you watch the recording; he plays the sound
of a garbled voice that nobody can understand and plays it a
second time and still nobody can understand it and then he
says ”I think Brexit is a terrible idea” and plays the sound
again and suddenly everyone can understand the garbled
voice, and it says exactly that, ”I think Brexit is a terrible idea”,
and it’s amazing, to feel, live, that your brain’s prediction or
best guess or whatever you want to call it, about what’s hap-
pening in the world that you sense with your ears and eyes
and olfactory system and pressure and temperature senses,
a world that is just signals, gets a bit better, or rather, goes
in a specific direction after receiving just that tiny bit of extra
information

010 1

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Prayers to saints. Look upon my algorithm. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Prayers to saints
Saint Ada Lovelace, so close to Him,
look upon my algorithm,
guide my hand through all reversals,
let me find good tree traversals.
Oh Saint Turing, hear our cry,
keep us from malformed AI,
and help the leaders of this nation,
ban all chemical castration.
To you, Saint Babbage, we pray,
all mechanical failures to stay,
be with us in our workplaces,
guard us from non-binary bases.

>_ I’m at the corner store buying a pack of small chocolate
balls, each covered in a layer of green, mint-flavored candy,
and a branded soft drink the guy behind the counter skillfully
pours into a small plastic bag and thrusts a straw inside and
ties a rubber band around it, handing me a pouch I can drink
from and which will actually stand with the straw pointing up
if I put it down and I pay him with one of those fancy new
coins with an N before the currency symbol because the gov-
ernment ran out of space to print zeroes after centuries of
inflation and devaluation and simply got rid of the last three
and said there you go, this is a New Peso, much nicer than a
thousand old Pesos, thank you very much, (continues in next image) ...

...(Continued) and head back half
a block and climb the stairs to the office where my brother
takes a sip from the drink and we start playing Prince of Per-
sia or some other game that fits in a single, three point five
inch diskette, in orange monochrome that is only tolerable
because the monitor is flat and thin, really futuristic, because
color monitors, and all monitors until these TFT ones came
out, are still heavy boxes you could put a litter of cats into,
but this monitor is more like a Trapper Keeper in width, barely
the thickness of a modest Oscar Wilde compilation, and it
makes the classroom look super fancy where my dad teaches
programming classes and computer literacy at the Alan Math-
ison Turing Institute, the name he chose when he quit terri-
bly paid academia to try his hand as an entrepreneur, and al-
though I have heard him tell the story of the genius that broke
the German cipher and essentially won the second world war,
I’m not old enough to process the details of his punishment
for being homosexual in an intolerant society or the side ef-
fect of his untimely death, because I’m used to war heroes
getting statues built in parks and having public infrastruc-
ture named after them, like the Francisco I. Madero avenue
and the Benito Juárez public middle school, but I suppose a
small private institute in a rented floor in a foreign land is not
entirely bad.

030 3

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Fast Haiku. English doesn't have the depth of meaning appropriate for a haiku, but we can still try. #writing […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Fast haiku
Machines blaze, burning.
FLOPS all to solve grand problems.
Silence at long last.
>_ You’ve probably never been to a Sanborn’s from the 1990s,
but picture a small, fancy store with white marble floor and
lots of glass showcases arranged in islands with a sales lady
inside ready to sell you any of the perfumes behind the coun-
ters or a sales man rearranging the leather wallets, the only
place in the whole mall where you can spend hours reading
Garfield comic books and computer gaming magazines while
your parents go shopping for boring stuff or you are waiting
for your friends to show up so you can have a cappuccino and
catch a movie at the theater. It’s the only place that stocks
Astérix, the French comic books about a tiny and clever man
you identify with very much resisting the Roman empire in
the days of Julius Caesar, the status quo be damned, and the
cover of the newest one shows a wooden ship with striped (continues in next image)

sails and the familiar crew of incompetent pirates that you
know will end up in the Roman galleys again, rowing to the
drumming of a fellow slave whose sole task is to beat a ca-
dence that, ultimately, determines the speed at which they
move. And because you are a geek, you will later use that as
a metaphor for the tiny clock in a computer that ticks and
tocks, letting electricity flow and stopping it and letting it
flow again and stopping it again, an electronic galley slave
drummer beating like the devil possessed it, and every tick
sends stored charges into microscopic transistors that per-
form mathematical operations, floating point operations, faster
machines performing more of them in a second, measured as,
you saw this coming, right? as floating point operations per
second, or FLOPS

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Regex I. Because regular expressions are fascinating. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Regex I
Up on the top of a mountain, they say,
betwixt two giant trees so gay,
a stone with a few characters stands,
the whole universe in it described,
left behind by Tomoe Oshō,
who found universal Dharma long ago
and gave us according to her profession
the most elegant regular expression.

>_ The joke goes that a programmer faces one problem so
she thinks maybe she can solve it using a regular expression,
and now she has two problems. Not much of a joke, I guess,
more like a meditation, because it’s difficult to use regexes,
them being such a condensed and cryptic, text-centric, sym-
bolic programming language, like the writing of a doctor that
only a trained pharmacist can figure out, because it’s not like
they can actually read what the doctor wrote, more like they
see the general outline of the words, the peaks and valleys
and hanging hooks, and make an inference that can only be
made when you are familiar with the names of medicines and
preparations, brands, quantities, like when I look at church
and civil registry records of relatives long dead, written in tall
and narrow cursive, and know that this one here says María
Juana and that one there says Died of cirrhosis although I
can’t read the words, really, just that their shapes don’t make
any sense otherwise.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Filigran. Sculptures much stranger. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Filigran
She carries a treasure around,
that girl in the black forest,
and so does the boy skipping school
to feel older and more honest.
In purses and pockets,
in cars and in rockets,
no demon nor angel
touched sculptures much stranger
than those behind glass
right there within grasp
made of a fog of metal
on landscapes settled
so fine they rent light
in multi-chromatic cries.

>_ My dad walks to me in this museum, the kind of museum
that has embalmed mummies and Chinese pottery from the
sixteenth century, and points at the Egyptian jewelry, and I’m
looking at his glasses that are as thick as my pinky because
this is before they develop thin glasses and titanium frames,
and he is pointing at some beautiful and boring set of fig-
urines, and says did you know they took bees, actual bees,
the ancient Egyptians, and covered them in plaster and then
poured molten gold that burned the bees away and were left
with jewels in the exact shape of the bees, microscopic hairs
and all? And I nod and don’t say anything because what do
you say to that? And it’s years later and I’m looking through
the large window into the university’s electronic engineering
clean lab, and there are three students inside, fully suited up
in those white suits that look like the centers for disease con-
trol had a sale, and they are carefully putting silicon wafers
the size of a CD in machines that, so says the professor guid-
ing us, vaporize metals and let the cloud of gas form a layer
only a few atoms thick on the surface in a process called de-
position, and I swear I’m looking at priests in special priest
suits in a sacred room in a temple with guards and card read-
ers, and they are performing some mysterious ritual and you
have to wonder what gods they are pleading to in our behalf.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Wiki. Page after page that forgot how to die. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Wiki
Oh, what would happen,
some folks like to ask,
if man and woman
did not have to die?
Would they be like gods,
or more like the wiki?
Endless, mad and bored,
and without poetry?
We feed it paragraphs
and think ourselves great
for making a small town
of minutes and dates,
avenues of links
that do not run straight
but kink and turn and
reach many dead ends
cathedrals full
of useless knowledge
whose priests left behind
to go write more folly.
The wiki is a place
where words go to languish
losing their meaning
while the servers fill up
and the costs increase
and the admins decry
page after page that
forgot how to die.

>_ There was a contest in 1907, part of—don’t laugh—the
Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, where some fat ox was put
on display and eight hundred people, presumably all men,
guessed the ox’s weight and wrote it down on a piece of pa-
per, winner takes all. Nice set of data for statistical analy-
sis, thinks a guy named Francis Galton, and plots the guesses
on a chart and looks at the median value, that point where
half of the guesses are lower and half are higher, and sees
that it’s only a few pounds off the actual weight, and this
is a bunch of people who maybe some are butchers and ex-
perts at guessing ox weight, but most don’t have a clue, as
the chart shows, because they are off by a large margin, too
high and too low, because, let’s face it, if you had to guess
the weight of a big fat cow, sorry, ox, you wouldn’t get it right
either, but put all the guesses together and that middle point
starts getting pretty freaking accurate. Francis Galton has his
mind blown because democracy was a new-fangled thing in
the Kingdom of Britain, and some people thought it was a
bad idea to give everyone a vote, especially women, because
that ignorant bunch cannot possibly know what’s best for the
country, don’t you think? ...

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Cookies. Mothers drape caution on their children... #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

Cookies

Mothers drape caution on their children,
pulling it down their heads and arms;
cardigans made of tight-knit warnings
against the cold and wicked lies.
Apps and sites push their cookies on me,
want me to tire of toggling lists
un-marking hundreds of third parties
they share all things about me with.
But I wear the threaded caution that
my mother wove for me one day,
for a self-flagellating zealot,
enlightened and sure of his way.
Great scorn and laughter I hear, alas,
from those I thought cared most for me.
What matter your small choices? They ask,
you're just a drop in a great sea.
They stop not to wonder -- to their loss --
what fills the sea's enormity.

>_ My wife and I, we found a nice old house right there where
we wanted to live, all red brick with patterned glass panels,
but couldn’t afford to be dumb so we hired this evaluator,
older guy, tall, wore jeans and a white shirt, took his job seri-
ously, and he looks at the house, the evaluator, and walks in
with us and says do you smell that? And he says, it is proba-
bly how you remember your grandmother’s house smelling,
right? And we say yes, exactly, that’s why we like it, and he
says that’s formaldehyde, the musty smell is, it will make you
sick. So we look at each other, eyebrows raised but drooping
at the same time, and he keeps talking; he says, and I can
tell he is angry, the evaluator; he says, the agent pulled me
aside earlier and offered me a deal if I told you the house
was good, but I can’t tell you that, you paid me to tell you the
truth, and the truth is you should not buy this house, it was
built in the sixties, before there were laws about formalde-
hyde or volatile organic compounds, so the stuff, you smell
it? It’s in the glue they used, everywhere, they don’t sell floors
with that kind of glue anymore, they can’t. So we leave the
place, my wife and I, and don’t really want to talk to the real
estate agent, the slick-haired, suited guy that had driven in
a spit-clean Porsche, and say goodbye and thank you to the
evaluator instead, who takes his bike, and that’s it, we don’t
buy the house.

020 2

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Second-rate blacksmiths. We found Hephaisto's hammer between lines of code. #writing #writingcommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Second-rate blacksmiths
What would you make, artificer's child?
The golem to keep you safe?
An ivory statue to love you back?
Or a patchwork Prometheus
to bend death to your will?
We found Hephaistos' hammer
between lines of code,
and thought,
second-rate blacksmiths,
of making gold handmaids of our own
and creatures to fill our desires
without asking ourselves
what dreams are wrought
in heads that never sleep
fed by metal eyes that never cry,
or if their smiles will be anything more
than an invisible change in the weights
of some hidden objective function.

>_ As a boy of about thirteen, I climbed a steep hill, a mount
some were wont to call it, and I climbed it and then thought
I would run the way down, because, I thought, it had been
something like three quarters of an hour already and I had to
get back, and, anyway, who doesn’t like to run downhill? So
I leapt and because it was downhill I jumped a long distance
and then just kept running, me, and I kept going faster and
faster and could not stop, had to keep going, and I thought, if I
can’t keep pace, if my legs can’t keep pace and I make any mis-
take, I’m going to trip over, and if I trip, at this speed, down-
hill, I’m going to hit the ground hard and keep rolling, and
the loose gravel and small rocks are going to cut my hands
and my knees, but it was the big rocks and my neck that re-
ally scared me. I will break it, my neck, I thought, and I didn’t
want to die, so I ran with my eyes wide open, as wide as I could
keep them, and the adrenaline almost hurt going through my
veins, and I didn’t pay attention to anything else, just the path
immediately ahead, just where my feet would land, and I was
flying downhill and I thought, don’t think about it, don’t think
about how to stop, where to stop, just focus on the next step.
And now I see everyone running to the next big technology,
running fast, and they have been running for generations,
downhill, and I don’t know, really, if they realise how fast
they’re going, if they feel the same vertigo, the pull of the
ground.

000 0

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The duty of a user. What is lost when the grit is shot to keep the system running? #writing #writingcommunity […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The duty of a user
Dirty and resource-hungry,
in the background ran --
spawned of electric dirt --
an orphan process.
I killed-minus-nine it
with a single command,
swift and professional, I.
Such is the duty of a user:
to be vigilant,
to remove from the system the grit
that brings it to a halt.
By the diffuse light of diode lamps,
teasing it with silence,
I heard my brain chat away,
filling the void, filling.
What was it doing, it asked,
that orphan process?
Was it caught in a loop,
endlessly swallowing its foot
to grow in stature?
Or had it finally broken loose,
the first program to achieve independence,
binary manifestos hastily scratched
in trues and falses,
on the brink of changing the world
when I killed it?
A draft blew over me,
a door elsewhere opened.
I kept still, eyes closed,
hunting whispers of the brain,
until I heard that voice ask:
Isn't this happening
at the border of two countries?
Isn't something lost
where the grit is shot
to keep the system working,
swiftly, professionally,
from a sense of duty
by some irate vigilante?

>_ There was a construction boom in the southern United
States of god-bless-America and that’s when I met them, a
Mexican family that had overstayed. The mother, she told me
she had gone home in Veracruz after a day in court, where she
was a judge, a well respected, straight as an arrow judge, and
she found her family tied up on the floor and two men with
guns pointed at them, or maybe knives, I don’t remember, and
they told her how to rule in a case she was presiding, because,
if she didn’t, they said, and they did not even bother to wear
a mask, if she didn’t, they would return to finish what they
started. She wasn’t the kind of judge to compromise on her
values, this woman, nor to kowtow to some organized crime
mafioso boss-like psychopath, she told me, but she had to
protect her family, so she had no choice, she said, and she
bought airplane tickets for her husband and her children and
left that same week and landed in the United States, far from
the reach of the corrupt, and didn’t speak the language, didn’t
want to stand out, so she got a job at a McDonald’s, the judge,
and got her husband a job there too, and they must have liked
them a lot because she also got her 16-year old daughter a
job there, all of them cooking, and mopping, and serving, and
manning the registers, and when I visited with them I always
saw them smiling.

000 0

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: The Peripherals. A metaphor relevant to our times. #writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction

The peripherals

Sardined into shelves
and sprawled on the desks,
leaves in a forest,
unseen and unnoticed
even when they fail,
one here and one there,
no, really, who cares?
no need for repairs,
a new one will do.
It's always their fault
and they're cheap, Chinese,
acquired with great ease:
The peripherals.
Sometimes, however
the problem's another,
it's in the OS
and you'd never guess
but a dumb driver
can ruin it too;
the system can break
without a mistake
requiring, no joke
that you pull the plug
reset the system
and do not piss them.

>_ I have this friend, he’s a scientist, a computer scientist
to be specific, and he’s not happy at work. I mean, he is, be-
cause it pays well, but he isn’t, because he’s a slave. A pe-
ripheral. At least, that’s what he says. Doesn’t want to be a
code monkey, he says. He gets distracted. So he works from
home now, with his geriatric cats and a puppy, and says he
found a way to stick it to the man. The man, he says, like
he’s talking about all the Zuckerbergs and Bezos and Slims,
with their big ass boats and space rockets and luxury bunkers
because they’ve realised the world is shit, he says, and they
made it like that themselves, too, by starving the package
deliverers, see? Can’t even stop to take a piss, he says, so
my friend leaves them drinks and chips on the porch, big
handwritten sign saying ”take me”, and social media is ruin-
ing the world, he adds, inducing a premature generation of
anxi-kiddies worried about their looks and their likes and all
that shit, polarising and amplifying the crazies, so he works
from home now, he says, and he can work four or five hours
and charge for eight and that’s how he sticks it to them, by
making his life nice, to balance things out. It’s karma, he says,
because the others are too busy working double-shifts, mind
numb when they get home, he says, exhausted, and can’t
even get a union together, so he balances it out, my friend,
and plays the guitar, and works on his bike, and lives, he says,
like a human should.

030 3

toldtheworld @toldtheworld.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2025

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon! This time around: Blue. The first poem/story from the section "10 bits deep". It's the most poetic one in the collection, I […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Title: Blue
Blue.
6500 Kelvin
washing over your face.
A veil of harsh moonlight
shining from your hands,
synthetic shadows
over lips and eyes
and you are transported,
gone.

>_ Far from the equator, in the winter, daylight is like this
hurried hello from an embarrassed sun that just remembered
the world has another side, so the days are short, or rather,
the days are dark, because a day is a different thing to dif-
ferent people. It’s dark and when I ride the subway or a
bus I see many people looking down at their mobile phones,
their attention no longer directed at the obsidian-glass world
around them but at a colourful one contained in a tiny win-
dow that they hold like a hand mirror and most of them are,
when I get an accidental glance at their screens, playing sim-
ple games or scrolling through messages. In the gloom of the
season, when their faces are lit from beneath, it’s eerie and
yet beautiful.

010 1