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Title text: Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid-2060s when the next Interval begins.

Explanation [ edit ]

F'nor is a character from the popular[citation needed] sci-fi/fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. He is posting a Twitter comment (a "thread" that's only one comment long, hence "1/1") about "Thread", a massively destructive alien organism from the same series. Pern is a fictional human-colonized planet and the main setting of the series.

Typically, when starting a series of tweets (used to post content longer than 140 characters), one will start the first tweet with "Thread: " and end it with 1/X. The second tweet will read 2/X, and so on. If X, the total number of tweets, is unknown at the start, it will be listed or 1/many or omitted: 1/

Here, there is a play on the Twitter thread and the actual threat to Pern.

The use of threads on Twitter became significantly more common in 2016 and through 2017. The title text dubs this "Threadfall." In the Pern novels, Threadfall is also the name for the beginning of 50-year cyclic periods when Thread attacks the world of Pern and its inhabitants, which occur between relatively safe "Intervals" of around 200 years. Since according to the title text Threadfall occurred in 2016, it should be expected to continue for ~50 more years until the mid-2060s, when the next Interval will begin.

Transcript [ edit ]

[A mock-up of a “tweet” from the site twitter.com is shown. It contains a mock-up of a user photo of the fictional character F’nor that resembles Hairy, including a tiny line sketch of F’nor’s brown dragon Canth flying overhead. Below the tweet are several action buttons typical of a Twitter post for comments, replying, likes, etc.]

F’nor @fnor Thread: The greatest threat to our life on Pern 1/1

Trivia [ edit ]

On Friday, the header was replaced with a message from Randall about how he would be visiting the U.K. on the following week. It read as follows:

I'll be visiting the UK next week! You can join me in London from September 30-October 2 (at New Scientist Live, The Royal Institution, and Intelligence Squared), then from October 3-6 in York, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Ely, Oxford, and Cheltenham.





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