Today I have 1013 followers on Twitter, but last night I had 997. The milestone seemed like an opportunity to interact with some folks and get some help scrambling over the hump.

A while back, a literary journal I review books for was in a similar position: The folks in charge of their funding were coming to town and they wanted to show off 1K Facebook friends — they were already pretty close, but still 30 or so off the night before the big visit.

I took to Twitter and started messaging about the journal, linking to the Facebook page. For some reason, in the midst of my messaging, I thought “I should ask William Gibson to retweet this message to his followers. He’s a writer. He’ll get it. He’ll want to help.” There was no reason for William Gibson to help or even notice the message in his stream, but he did notice it, and he helped. Following Gibson’s RT the site’s Facebook page was well over the 1K mark by morning.

Yesterday night I messaged William Gibson again asking if he might give me a hand with an RT. He did. He’s a writer. He gets it.

Thanks again @GreatDismal!

Gibson’s latest book is The Peripheral Here’s the description on the Amazon page:

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job Flynne didn’t know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That’s all there is to it. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.

And in keeping with recent posts, here’s Gibson at the Chicago Humanities Festival last November discussing “Technology, Science Fiction & the Apocalypse.”

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Yesterday I posted about the connections between evangelical Christianity and belief in the biblical End Times. While I was flipping some new stories into our {R}emnants Flipboard mag yesterday afternoon I found another story about the end of the world involving a recently-discovered video that Ted Turner had made for CNN to play when they sign off as that final trumpet blows. Here’s the scoop from Jalopnik…

Thirty-four years ago, at the launch of Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Turner declared. And in anticipation, he prepared a final video segment for the apocalypse:

We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. We’ll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June [the day CNN launched], and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ before we sign off.

People thought he was joking. We have proof that he wasn’t. Below is the never-before-seen video the last living CNN employee will be required to play before succumbing to radiation poisoning, the plague, zombies, or whatever crazy end Turner saw coming.

It lives on CNN’s MIRA archive system, under the name TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO. Reflecting its status as an artifact, not to be used except in the ultimate emergency, it’s in standard definition, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, perfect for the cathode-ray tube televisions of the 1980s.

…I was an intern at CNN back in 2009. Specifically, I worked at the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Wolf was a nice enough guy, as people from Buffalo tend to be, but that’s not really so weird. What was weird was seeing the apocalypse video.

I was originally told about it by a college professor of mine, who had worked at CNN for over 20 years. It sounded mostly like a mythic joke, the kind of thing that Ted Turner, the all-around “eccentric billionaire” archetype, would mention offhand. Bison ranches, the America’s Cup, four girlfriends at once, the last word on the last day on earth—why not?

…Rumors of the doomsday tape’s existence have popped up from time to time, as early as 1988, in the case of the New Yorker, and as late as 2001, in the Daily News.

…The video didn’t take long to find; it turned up after a quick search in the database. There is no date attached, but the title reads “TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO.”

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Religion is all fun and games until someone takes their mythology too literally and then takes it to the squad car, the pulpit or the White House. It’s fun to make fun of fundamentalism, but when it comes to The Apocalypse, these playas ain’t playin’. The Daily Beast has the bad news…

It’s the end of the world as they know it. So why do evangelicals worry so much?
Say “evangelical Christian,” and most people will probably think of Biblical fundamentalism, and opposition to the sexual revolution, feminism, LGBT equality, evolution, science, and secularism of all sorts. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton, however, wants you to think of something else: the End Times.

Today, fully 77 percent of U.S. evangelicals believe that we are living in the End Times, the last period before Christ returns to Earth to judge us all. That’s compared with 40 percent of Americans, and 51 percent of Protestants overall—still high numbers, when you think about it, but imagine a huge crowd at a mega-church or Christian Right political event. Three quarters of those people believe the end of the world is nigh.

Sutton’s new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, argues that this belief is not incidental to the evangelical movement, but central to it. Focusing on the birth of fundamentalism (roughly, the 1880s through 1940s), Sutton marshals quotation after quotation from the leaders of the movement.

For example: “We are on the brink of a world catastrophe and impending judgment,” said Billy Graham, who also asked, “Are the last days here?” way back in 1949.

Perhaps more disturbingly, Ronald Reagan said privately in 1971 that, “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” One wonders if his subsequent battles with the “Evil Empire” were animated by this belief.

And the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, which calculated the year of the apocalypse to be—wait for it—1988.

I admit, it’s hard not to read American Apocalypse without smirking at a century of such failed prophecies. Will we ever learn?

Check out the link above for the rest of the story. In the meantime, here’s Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola trying to bring on my favorite apocalypse…

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