“So I guess the world is actually ending now!” tweeted a former Gawker editor, and the tone there is instructive: atavistic, a return to the site’s early editorial voice, at once wide-eyed and over it, giddy and etherized, a jaded and pitiless amazement, the flat relentless tone that had seeped into the water of the internet, and if the internet has moved on since then, if that is no longer quite the voice of things, on this day it is having a renaissance.

Well then OK!

YEP THEN SO WITH THE IMPENDING DEATH OF US.

One Vox writer posted a photo of what he announced was his own penis, under the headline EZRA, CHOKE ON THESE CLICKS.

Angela and Strawberry, Kurt honking it to hentai, people remembered the good times.

Can we all just admit now that Harambe was never funny.

Tweet pegged to a screencap of sixty-nine dead in Peoria shopping mall bombing: *me as nukes melt my face*: “nii..ce.”

When bombings were reported in Egypt and Iran: The whole internet loves nuclear apocalypse! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the apocalypse is racist.

Small brain: Drumpf killed us, as I predicted.

Big brain: The entire US military-industrial complex across Democratic and Republican administrations for decades is to blame, and the US people are without exception culpable for this moment.

Galaxy brain: Centering the US in the narrative just because they have the most nukes is colonial bullshit.

Universe brain: Death Tastes Good.

Photos of kittens are exchanged in comments sections, and there is the sense among these commenters that they have short-circuited the system, beat it, at least momentarily, with kittens.

I needed that!

This too!

Awwwwww …

Vine: [eight kittens in a New Balance shoebox]

And a bulldog on a skateboard, and a black cat batted in the nose by a stealthy orange kitten, and the perfect pug, a basket of perfect pug puppies.

And the first and last tweet of a brand-new account, an egg that has just joined Twitter, perhaps for no other reason than to post this response (netting two faves, zero retweets) to a retweet of a twenty-one-month-old tweet of an etonline.com story about a YouTube video headlined “Seeing This Puppy Scared of His Own Hiccups Will Change Your Life!”:

cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute cute.