You know, the things we find horrible say a lot about us.
I wonder how others would react to these flash fiction stories?
A huge part of the reason these work is because of the context provided by the thread itself, allowing our imaginations to fill in why they're horrifying.
Also, in part because of the community's common touch-stones. You'll note that, on average, the themes in the boingboing version of this thread are a *lot* different -- particularly the joke ones. (And on the scale of things, PD isn't all that much different from boingboing. Try doing the same thread on a Ron Paul board, or on the TOE forums, where the cultural milleiu is skewed in very different ways.)
