Vomiting electrons in his kitchen because a coworker talked to him seventeen times about the weather outside that morning, Mr Bricky was not at first open to our questions, but really opened up when he saw the Bionicle shirt our interviewer was wearing.

“I never really liked the Makuta reveal. When I discovered he was just one guy in an army of almost faceless side characters, the mystery died.” Mr Bricky said.

“Do you think you could draw an analogy between Bionicle and your experiences being the first smart brick diagnosed with mental health issues?” we asked.

“The thing is, being smart is good until you are in the real world, where it is seen as a threat to the average brick. You know 99% of all bricks don’t have microprocessors?”

“They see feats of intellectualism as acts of magic. Being able to predict someone’s behaviour, or imitate a cool Sci-Fi noise from Star Wars, is enough to signal in their minds that you are a threat, and some of them resort to violence,” Mr Bricky said. “It is very rare that bullies are actually intelligent. They might sometimes have a specific spike of knowledge in one area, but they are emotionally slow, bricks who really should just be used as scaffolding in the larger builds of society as a whole.”

“Kept at the back?” our interviewer asked.

“Yeah, like the scary ones at fast food joints. We all have our uses, but they don’t see that. They, for some reason, see someone who has an entirely different life path to them, and it pisses them off. It’s not like I am going to steal their job, certainly not their girlfriend, not least because I am too busy providing sound effects and interactive play at the front of the build.”

“I am just destined for greater things,” he continued. “Like the Toa Nuva.”

Talking now about the Toa Nuva, Bionicle’s flagship heroes, Mr Bricky got a bit carried away with the metaphors to the point this comedy article had to become self aware and apologise for the confusion.

“I am sort of like Toa Kopaka,” Mr Bricky said. “I work best alone, and people think that makes me cold, and maybe I am, but it is not out of cruelty. It is just in my nature. Lewa is cheerful and acrobatic, Gali is peaceful. We all have our purposes but nobody really understands that, or if they do, they use it to be tribal. If you think about it, energised protodermis1 is basically a metaphor for having a higher IQ, a higher calling.”

“Talk to us about your diagnosis,” our interviewer steered.

“Well. I think the depression was a misdiagnosis as it is really that I have a low mood as a consequence of my environment, white walls, bland people, you know, but if the doctor has given this to me, and I can use it as a permission slip to take more time off work and work on myself instead, and my giant Lego Science Fiction diorama, then I don’t see the issue. And you know, I do have neurotypical friends. My issue isn’t with them, my issue is with cults, with tribalism. Did you know there’s an entire movement of blue bricks right now who do not associate with red bricks? They used to preach about being ‘palette inclusive’ but despite how common and ubiquitous red bricks are, in so many Lego sets, they are seen as backwards because their utility stretches farther back in time. They see us 2x4s on old box art and think we are all the same. Newer pieces on the other hand, like the 1x1 inverted corner cheese wedge2, are given preferential treatment in moc3 interviews because they are weird and odd-shaped and everyone thinks they are cool and special, but what about us 2x4 bricks who are different on the inside? I think the world has become too shallow. Everything needs to have a gimmick now.”

“You are a smart brick,” our interviewer remarked.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t a gimmick. I am saying focusing on these things instead of working on how we can all fit into a build together, is what makes builds unstable.”

“Is this a metaphor?” our interviewer asked.

“I have no idea, I am a sentient brick. I fit in physically, but mentally? I feel like an alien in my own plastic skin sometimes.”

The interview concluded with a two-hour rant about why the later Bionicle serialised stories destabilised the delicately constructed mystery of the theme’s early years, after which Mr Bricky resolved to write his own novel about the whole thing, right after making beeping noises when someone turned him 90 degrees.

Read this post to find out how it happened (it didn’t, I made it up).

Speaking about the BBC’s heavily edited 2024 Trump ‘documentary’, Elon Musk’s robotic clone chirped, whistled, and burrowed several thousand tunnels under California. We’ve no idea what this means, but we mapped the tunnels and they look like the neuron structures found in that dead alien we have in the office fridge. More news on that whenever.

What’s more important than aliens turning up right now, is the news, obviously. And also what random children’s authors think about the news, and what the news thinks about random children’s authors thinking about the news, and what those authors, in turn, think about what the news thinks about what they thought about what the news was thinking when the news thought things about what they were thinking about the news.

It’s an infinite regression, sort of like the endless rewrites of Doctor Who lore. I imagine by now Doctor Who was secretly a lasagne the whole time, and was given sentience by Davros due to his unreasonably overcomplicated microwave oven. That’s the lore now, right?

“Donald Trump is basically a Dalek because he’s literally killed entire planets of people,” said Intern2384783, who we didn’t actually interview. They just turned up and started having these outbursts when the Wi-Fi went down and they couldn’t get their regular fix.

“Which planets has he killed?” asked our interviewer.

Intern 2384783 then called our interviewer lots of catchy, popular insults, some of which would lead to social ostracization or even a loss of job if believed, so we’ve not copied them here, but you can be sure it’s viral on twitter already and our interviewer will make a crying apology in the bath on Youtube within the hour.

BBC accused of ‘Realityphobia’

If you’re not clued up, here’s a quick summary of this week’s nonsense.

The BBC has faced serious criticism after it was revealed two quotes from a speech made by US President Donald Trump were stitched together to make it appear he had told supporters ahead of the Capitol riot he was going to walk with them to “fight like hell”.

An hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? had been broadcast a week before the last US Presidential election and spliced together two quotes from a speech Trump made before the January 6 uprising despite him making the comments nearly an hour apart and about different topics.

- https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bbc-donald-trump-speech-us-election-panorama-b1257366.html

Trump has since levied a 1bn dollar threat to the BBC, threatening to sue if the company doesn’t retract the documentary.

“That’s about the cost of one Disney Doctor Who episode,” said a showrunner. “How are we going to film Space Babies Two, now? That farting spaceship was real you know. We used 2% of our weekly budget on it.”

“We need more money for the pooing spaceship. It turns out, Galifrey is a big turd, that’s the new story. How will we afford the polygons to properly show the poo?”

“Is it a metaphor?” our interviewer asked.

The showrunner then broke down crying.

“On top of hiring those people who make office job training videos to write the patronising dialogue about every single subgenre of human the Doctor might have historically been a bit dismissive of, we now have to fork out for CGI because we have a new policy to replace good stories with pointlessly huge CGI monsters by 2030.”

“It’s called our storytelling reversal initiative. By 2030, we hope to put the morals of the story on the outside, and the actual fun bits on the inside, but then remove the fun bits and replace them with corporate sponsorship.”2

“We simply cannot afford to absorb a 1 billion dollar court case from Trump. And if he finds out the bad guy in the evil space spiders episode was based on him, we might be doomed.”

“We have looked into cutting down on the BBC’s CGI budget to make room for this 1bn court case. I’m in talks with Zack Polanski to see if he can use hypnotism for the gigantism scenes, but he says he can only make boobs bigger, not whole people.” said the showrunner, whilst crying into a Starbucks which cost precisely half a billion dollars.

“The caramel syrup was milked from an authentic Mars caramel goblin,” he said, explaining the necessity of the purchase.

“I have another mid afternoon, to help me write new episodes.”

“Another coffee?” our interviewer asked.

“More like covfefe, am I right. But no, another goblin. I use them for inspiration.”

Before we could ask what this could possibly mean, the real Elon Musk manifested from loose electrons and bits of gristle in a nearby vending machine, 3D printing himself from materials his roving drones identified as spare parts; non-living, but organic compounds for which to absorb and print out a new Musk right here in the UK, whilst the original is off giving moss the ability to fire lasers, to combat crime, of course.

The result of this collecting and organising of “non-living parts” meant of course that Intern 2384783’s brain was consumed for the new Musk, but that doesn’t matter. We’re not doing clever, ship of Theseus comedy today, that’s for my next book. The intern’s brain was inert matter. Their consciousness lives on in TwatGPT, a new chatbot designed to back up the memories and personalities of people whose outbursts would overload conventional cloud-based storage facilities.

Elon Musk’s air-printed meat clone took one look around the empty head offices at the BBC, and sat down. “I’ll sort this,” he said, regenerative energy still streaming from his eyebrows and fingertips.

“I will take over, I will be the next Doctor.”

“Chief,” another nameless intern corrected.

“Whatever. But first, I need to invent daleks. They seem fun.”

Endnote:

So, as reality crumbles around us and news becomes entertainment becomes news becomes entertainment becomes news becomes entertainment, one must wonder, is the magic anxiety attack rectangle worth listening to? What about the smaller anxiety rectangle you keep in your trousers, beside your favourite testicle? (women, you can have a favourite too, just buy one from a butcher’s or something).

Well, some people are rushing to defend the BBC in weird ways.

I quite like the BBC. It is why I felt comfortable writing this article taking the piss out of it.

If you love something, you surely must wish for it to remain as good as you imagine it is, and perhaps want for it to improve over time; for its goodness to continue, so that you might enjoy more of it in the future.

So I don’t believe the people wanting to defend the BBC from criticism really love it at all. I think they just hate Trump more, and that’s what motivates their syrupy outbursts. They are siding with the BBC only because they want to not be on the side of Trump. To them this is not about editorial standards, it is about a cartoonish battle between good and evil.

I grew up watching a lot of BBC. Its panel shows, now ancient and demented, inspired me to write more of my own comedy, like this article. And maybe one day if I dye my hair purple and start writing depressing poetry again, I will turn up on one of their radio shows. But my enjoyment of the BBC does not preclude me from being annoyed when it turns out footage people shared was edited to be misleading. That those marching protestors on the documentary were filmed before the edited speech, yet shown after, is proof to me that editorial decisions were made to push an idea in front of reality. The ‘documentary’ therefore is little more than entertainment, a twisting of the order and nature of events, a destruction of reality.

I want the BBC to be honest.

I want news to be news.

And fiction to be fiction.

I think that’s a fair and simple thing to expect.

Resignations won’t fix the problem. They are a distraction.

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Note: all of this is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Proceed at your peril. It contains dirty jokes.

Chapter 1

Monkey <3 Computer. Chapter 2

Taurus and the professor stepped inside the darkened spherical room which housed the main servers.

“Our ‘LLM’ is this way,” the professor said. He kicked aside the single banana on the bridge to the centre.

“Good thing there was only one banana,” he said, looking at the camera. It was a security camera. I’m not doing a fourth wall break here. And if I was, I wouldn’t pick a spherical room to do it in. That would just be difficult for everyone involved. Anyway, the professor kicked the banana peel aside and continued on toward the servers. The fall was not far, but the fear invoked by the bridge for Taurus was one of finances.

“Those computers look expensive,” she said.

“They are,” the professor agreed. Taurus looked in wonder, performing a strange, university-endemic calculation in her head.

“I reckon, with the models here, you’ve got the equivalent storage capacity of six hundred thousand of those usb sticks you can get in a vending machine in the library.”

“The one by the cookies?” the professor asked.

“Yeah.”

“Love those cookies. How do they get them so soft?”

“Probably something to do with them being irradiated inside a metal box until the moment you bite into them.”

“That’ll do it,” the prof said. “You know, vending machine cookies were one of the reasons I got back into academia.”

“I can believe that.”

As they continued along the short bridge, the student considered just how impractical this setup was. She looked briefly up, noting a web of ropes and plastic rings suspended from the ceiling. She sniffed something pungent, and noticed a pile of brown matter was on one of the lower computers.

“There’s shit on that computer,” she said.

“No there isn’t,” said the professor conspiratorially.

“Yes there is, there’s a literal shit.”

“As opposed to a figurative one?”

“Look, prof. I’m not the one shitting in the server room.”

“It’s not my shit,” the professor said. He stumbled, wobbling slightly above the stained computer interface. Taurus helped him balance himself, and they reached the railed circular walkway around the central server stack.

“FHM magazine?” she said, noticing a rolled-up mag sticking out between two computer racks.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Why?”

“It’s structural.”

“Structural?”

“Yes,” the professor said. “It means it is important to the structure of things.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Remember, I did say this one was NSFW. Proceed at your peril.

The two did not talk for several moments. Between the banana peel, the dirty magazine, and the shit atop one of the computers, Taurus felt there was very little to say.

“I think I see why the computers are not working normally,” she said. “All those weird electronic billboards around campus, all the strange text messages. It is clear that this machine is overheating. You’ve got shit on top of one of the computers, a magazine blocking a fan, and now clumps of hair blowing out from this central tower?”

“Oh Nibbles…” the prof said.

“What?”

“You’re getting old,” the prof continued, ignoring Taurus.

“Excuse me professor, but I thought we were down here to diagnose a fault, not to talk in pet names with your servers.”

“We are but, you see. Can you not put two and two together?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Taurus said. “There’s shit in the computers.”

“It’s his thesis!” the professor asserted. He moved around the circular platform, looking for a shelf or rack he could move to access the inside.

“It’s a steaming pile of thesis!” Taurus said.

“Sure. Yeah. Hilarious. Put that in the student mag.”

“I won’t need to prof. I know why the union doesn’t have any buying power for our grassroots magazine when you’re throwing it all on FHM!” Taurus said. Out of frustration, she plucked the magazine from its perch and, disgusted, threw it on the ground.

“What the fuck?” she said, looking at it.

Coming to pub toilets near you.

The magazine depicted several monkeys, and sordid headlines such as “Top Tips for Pervy Primates,” and “Is my banana overripe?”

“Is this some kind of a joke?” she asked the professor, who was nowhere to be seen. The prof mumbled something from around the server racks.

“The monkeys on this mag are naked!” Taurus said.

“Monkey are always naked,” the prof said, having arrived round the other side of the racks of servers. “No luck, he won’t let us in.”

“He?”

“Oh come on now.”

“Wait. You said ‘his’ thesis before. What did you mean by that?” Taurus asked. The professor stopped, leaning gently on the server rack.

“Well, there’s a sort of big secret in all this ‘artificial intelligence’ stuff, a sort of meme, if you like.”

“I do like memes,” Taurus said.

“Good, well this is sort of like one. You see, the acronym LLM does not in fact stand for large language model.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Much like how FHM actually means Feral Hot Monkeys, or Feral Horny Monkeys if you buy the premium subscription, not that I’d know about that of course.”

“Of course.”

“Yes so, essentially what I am trying to say is,” the professor began. He leaned further on the racks of computers, but the structural magazine had long ago been discarded, and so one computer leaned onto another, and that one onto the next, and so and so until a spiralling effect of falling computers collapsed the central server tower, revealing a monkey in bed next to a computer. The monkey was smoking a pipe, and the computer was balancing a cigar in her CD tray.

The monkey lowered his reading glasses and winked at Taurus, who again, wished monkeys wore clothes.

“Large… languid monkey,” her disturbed voice creaked.

“Not quite,” said the professor. “A limited liability monkey.”

“He’s the one responsible for the steaming pile of thesis?”

“The one you saw?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

“And the banana,” Taurus asked.

“His idea of a firewall, as I said,” the professor said. He leaned down beside her, scooping up the magazine.

“And the monkey porno magazine?” Taurus asked. The professor looked at her, looked at Nibbles the limited liability monkey (LLM). The prof winked at the monkey, but the monkey shook his head, and the professor pulled a saddened, betrayed face. He hesitated before rolling up the magazine and putting it in his jacket pocket.

“I like the sports section,” the professor said.

“Right.”

The monkey fastened his silk dressing gown, tried to remember the computer’s name, and walked out from the crashed servers.

“You’ve been broadcasting your sordid fantasies all over campus,” the professor said.

“And you’ve been strolling around my planet pretending you’re superior to me because sometimes your delusions overlap and become ‘cultures’,” the monkey said, puffing on his pipe. “Between you and the aliens that are landing this afternoon, I’m honestly tempted to pick them.”

“Wait. There’s aliens coming?” Taurus said.

“You’re not at all concerned with the talking monkey?”

“Not really, we are under the sports faculty. I’ve seen weirder.”

“That’s fair,” the monkey said, brushing down his greying fur.

“So, aliens.”

“Yeah. Big murderous aliens,” Mr Nibbles said. “They got a bit delayed owing to some basic gravitational wave trickery I employed on the ISS, but they’ve figured out where we are now, and they want to harvest your brains for some reason.”

“Terrific,” Taurus mumbled in shock.

“It’ll be fine, the university might suffer academically from the brain harvesting, but the socials and freshers fair will continue unmolested,” the professor explained.

“You knew about this?” Taurus said.

“Yes that’s why I brought you down here. You’re one of our brightest students, that’s why it pissed me off so much you didn’t figure the monkey thing earlier - and it’s why you’re four floors underground.”

“They can’t read brainwaves through concrete,” the monkey explained.

“So why not hide the base under the sciences building? Why put it under sports?”

“I figured they wouldn’t look for brains here,” the prof admitted.

“That’s kind of prejudiced,” Taurus said.

“Just a joke. In reality it was here or the canteen buildings. Fresh rubber from the basketballs, or the smell of a few thousand cooked meals, was needed to mask the very clean air which pumps out from this place. Canteen isn’t active all year, but sports equipment is always stored here. If not for that, we could have buried the facility everywhere.”

“I also need access to ropes and gym equipment,” Mister Nibbles said. By now he was upside down on the rope swings above the server racks.

“Yes, that too. He burns through standard gym stuff weekly.”

Taurus looked up at the monkey, finally making sense of the sordid messages that had been beamed onto campus computers and smart phones.

“You’ve had a monkey down here doing your computing for you?”

“That’s precisely the thing I am so irked about,” Mister Nibbles said. “They think AI is just some machine that throws shit at the wall and sees what sticks. But I am much more sophisticated.”

“You do literally throw shit at the wall though,” the prof said.

“Yes well, like quantum computing, that’s neither here nor there.”

“And what does ISS stand for?” Taurus asked. “The infertile snail society?”

“No. And that’s deeply offensive. It stands for the International space station.”

“Right.”

“Which, by the way, has been taken over by aliens.”

As the student, the professor, and the monkey talked about the oncoming alien invasion, the computer got out of bed and waddled its way across the metal bridge at the back of the room, finding itself in a forest of wires and flashing lights.

Your vote in this poll decides the future of this story. I have no idea how many parts it will have. Each week I write these, improvise them, directly into Substack.

https://linktr.ee/phillipcarter

Check out my books / comedy with the above link.

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This is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Proceed at your own peril.

AI ‘clone’ of politician deemed too human-like to be believable.

Tired of attending Microsoft Teams meetings about Microsoft Teams meetings about Microsoft Teams meetings, one politician has devised a new way to avoid doing what little work he already basically didn’t do.

He is cloning himself and making his clone do it.

Raymond Hedgefund has devised a ‘new and innovative’ solution to the tricky problem of having to talk to common people sometimes for his job.

Not satisfied with 51 weeks a year paid holiday, local Labour politician Raymond Hedgefund spent your tax money on a drugged up search engine and tweaked its data nipples until this fellow came out.

“I tweaked em real good I did,” said Raymond, drooling into a shredder in some defunct council office which would be better used to house the nightmares of children.

The search engine analysed various images of Raymond it found online, including images he thought would never go public, and sharted out some deranged robot clone of him from a digital tube. Initially he had to censor out the echoes of his past crimes, so the lower half of the digital Raymond essentially does not exist. He’s smooth down there, like a Barbie.

Unfortunately, this digital clone, made only from the surface details of what is arguably (possibly, maybe) a human being with a personality, has one critical flaw: It seems more human than the real thing.

Scholars and Poets propose that this new fake Raymond only appears human because he is missing some aspects from the original, giving the experiencer the opportunity to project a personality where there isn’t one.

Sort of like you with your ex boyfriend.

(an ability to touch guitars is not in itself a personality).

It has been supposed that the digital Raymond, like a bad poem, is empty and has become fertile psychic soil for whatever people want to think about him.

But this theory falls flat when you consider that people could have projected something more interesting into the swiss cheese holes in this digital bastard, like a fascination with antique lamps, or pigeons. Those would be interesting.

Quandaries about the nature of human experience aside, there is a deeper issue with the digital clone.

‘DigiRaymond’ (a name which the government spent £3m on from some thinktank that’s really a nursery for manchildren with shit hair) is simply too likeable.

“Digiray, as we call him,” laughs Glenda Tube as if this is a clever nickname, “Is simply more fun to be around.”

Nobody likes Glenda.

“There are a lot less gropings,” one cleaner said. “Not zero, but less.”

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I’ll write some more comedy articles soon.

For anyone that’s been here a while, you’ll notice I’ve opened the archives.

You can now look at all my past posts, with no paywall, for a limited time.

This will be in place until just before I launch my Patreon (which will connect to Substack and facilitate subscriptions here - as well as live tickets to podcast recordings on my Discord group, where you can listen in, ask guests questions, or even heckle during the live recordings).

Nobody has done this before.

It’s going to be a weird comedy journey. I’m glad you’re on it.

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Note: All the words are written by my human brain. I’ve permitted ‘AI’ to vomit out some pictures for me as it suits the speed at which I had to publish this to remain topical.

Another note: I think setting things on fire is bad. This post is a joke.

Pensioners find weird way to stay warm in Winter.

After the Labour government scrapped Winter Fuel Payments for millions of pensioners in the UK, one inventive couple came up with their own solution that fries two birds with one stone.

Barry Binbag, from Cheshire upon Cheshire (just NorthSouth of Cheshire), said

“We have just enough savings for Labour to see us as ‘too rich’ and to cut us off. Yet, after a life working, our combined earnings still won’t be enough to keep us warm this Winter.”

Sandra Binbag said

“That’s when I had my grand idea. We’d just been to the town fair and watched a play about Guy Fawkes, and it reminded me. Fire is warm.”

“And also parliament is flammable,” Barry added.

The couple raised an important point. Fire warm. Unga Bunga.

So, Sandra and Barry set about torching parliament, but not before evacuating everyone in this fictional scenario so the thoughtcops don’t get me and accuse me of a futurecrime or an imaginohatred or some other made up thing. Again, this isn’t real, it didn’t happen. Jokes are not real. Real things are real. Go deal with those, thoughtcop.

As we were saying, Sandra’s protest proved doubly useful as, not only did it scare the government into keeping pensioners alive this year, it also made for really perfect marshmallows.

Barry stole these from the big Tesco, but that’s not important.

Sandra knitted a special cardigan out of fusefleece, a new material I just made up that could be cool in a video game but let’s not get carried away. Anyway she knitted this thing with the intention of lobbing it into the lobby.

“I think it’s odd,” Sandra said. “The place was already on fire when we got there.”

“We are old, we probably forgot setting it on fire,” Barry admitted.

However, despite the success of our OAP’s plans, our resident paranormal investigator and demon hunter, Backstab Bumbridge, had something to say.

As the embers crackle behind our reporter, Backstab solemnly looked on. This man, once loudly anti government, must have had something bigger, weirder on his mind. A politician walked past Backstab and invited him to the party tonight, which we thought was a bit weird, but we’ll gloss over it.

Backstab completed the secret handshake and turned back to our reporter.

“It’s all gone tits up.” he said, taking off his ceremonial robes and hastily putting the box of matches back down his trousers.

“Is that a box of matches, or do you have a rectangular erection?” our interviewer asked him. Backstab desperately extinguished the fire in his trousers by ruthlessly slapping himself in the nards.

“Not the worst pickup line I’ve heard,” he mumbled, crotch aflame.

DISCLAIMER

We know Backstab has been off the air for a while, following his anti-reptilian sentiments and the allegations that tribe of ghosts made about him, but in the interest of balance we think it is best that we allow him freedom of speech, on this singular occassion. After all, he’s only got 986 years left to live, and our time with him is precious.

Backstab: “I do worry, that whilst Barry and Sandra have made good progress in setting fire to parliament, that there may be unforeseen consequences”

Interviewer: “Yes, the marshmallows could get too hot.”

Backstab: “Deeper than that. In fact, deep in the ancient Roman ruins beneath parliament, and beneath those also.”

Interviewer (trying to deflect): “Do you like archaeology?”

Backstab: “Never met her. Anyway as I was saying. There’s this big egg underneath the ruins underneath the other ruins underneath the first set of ruins underneath parliament, and that big egg contains the lizard queen.”

Interviewer: “Right.”

Backstab: “She has slumbered for countless eons, buried by consecutive societies living and dying atop her ancient, timeless tomb.”

Interviewer: “How can something be both timeless and ancient?”

Backstab: “Sounds cool.”

Interviewer: “Okay.”

Backstab: “And if the egg gets too hot, of course she will hatch and destroy the whole world.”

Interviewer: “Why would she do that, she lives in the world. Wouldn’t keeping it nice be more sensible?”

Backstab: “You don’t understand. She has very complex character motivations. Wait. Can I smell eggs?”

It is at this point we have to end our interview. Backstab figured out there was a cooking show in the adjacent studio, and went around verbally abusing all the boiled eggs. We cannot repeat what he said to them here, but let me tell you, it’s hard to make a boiled egg cry. You really have to put the effort in.

Speaking again to our interviewer, Barry Binbag asked us if we had any marshmallows going. We did not.

Please feel free to download and share these images

I think this is one of perhaps two acceptable uses for AI images, the other being fake pictures of lizards playing chess with frozen human corpses.

Jokes aside, I ‘generated’ this collage of preexisting human concepts so I could see how original the idea in my head was. I want to do something like this, but weirder, for a book cover.

Sources:

• https://moneyweek.com/personal-finance/labour-scraps-winter-fuel-payments-for-millions-of-pensioners

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx02zdd92zdo

I’m still working on my other posts. I am currently checking which poems I’ve already posted, so I can show you some new stuff. I did a livestream on instagram about my books the other night as well, which included me discovering an old (and complete) poetry book from 2015…

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-JTn7uoF76/

That’s an hour of me talking to comedy, poetry, and artsy people about WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and other such projects.

• This is closer to my stand-up writing than my fiction, so the sense of humour here is probably not safe for work.

• In order to make this news article feel authentic, I have elected to abandon any hope for journalistic integrity, and have fired my editur as she was hurting my feelinks.

• This is a fictional comedy story, based on a JustStopOil stunt.

• When I write comedy, I leave my real-world opinions at the door and just focus on trying to tell a silly story. That means pretty much everything will be satirised at some point. Nothing is sacred.

Good mornternoonening.

Today this thing happened.

Student activist Ellie Tyst1 was scrambling through her father’s archaeology papers in an effort to “un-evil them through radical collage” (putting them in a shredder and sticking it to the sliding doors of the big Tesco in town whilst screaming) when she discovered something horrendous:

Climate change has been happening for quite a while. Also, her father cheated on her mother in 1995 when he was in Spain with the ghost of a conquistador, but that’s a story for another time.

Rather than delve into the subtle yet important differences between human-driven climate change and the natural processes of a biosphere (are we not part of that very same biosphere anyway? Is technology not an extension of biology?) Ellie Tyst went instead to her fellow activists, Felicitea Funnyname and Jackson Bollock (who wasn’t born into riches but made his living dragging his paint-covered testicles across canvases and pretending it meant something2) to organise an act of radical rebellion, as opposed to regular, store-bought rebellion.

Ellie had discovered in her research that Neolithic people would sometimes cremate their dead, which is like, really bad for the environment dude. They also picked stones up and moved them without asking the stone if it was cool with that, and this destabilised the natural stone-order and basically put the planet’s chakras out of whack or something.

Ellie also realised that, since the old times were really long ago, Neolithic people’s otherwise relatively harmless emissions were multiplied through the evils of

TIMEMATHS

You see, ancient people had thousands of years of burning and fire pits and digging up metals and stabbing each other and destroying evidence of alien life, and their swords and bones keep showing up in rivers and lakes and that’s basically as bad as shopping trolleys, which Neolithic people probably would have dumped underground if they had invented them first but they’d have had to invent the pound coin to put into them so it’s a whole thing, would have been hard. Lots of admin.

Also, there used to be an ice age, and where’s all the ice now?

Probably gone in rich people’s cocktails in some prehistoric bar where they laugh about poor people and spit crude oil into big metal pans they make poor people mop up with the heads of more poor people.

Sickening if you think about it.3

So, in order to combat this ancient environmental disaster waiting to possibly happen, Ellie Tyst, Jackson Bollock, and Felicitea Funnyname got together to retroactively solve everything and also some other stuff.

The throuple groped their way through Salisbury, yelling at some Pagans for eating expensive pies before spending £11 per head on ‘vintage-styled anticapitalist coffee’ themselves. Fuelled by irony and also those pills they found down the side of the coach seats last week, the three of them scrambled and ambled their way to the henge of stones like a weird flesh crab, chattering and designing eyesore posters along the way.

Their cause was noble.

Their activism silly.

Their public image abyssmal.

Deftly avoiding tourists by unsettling them with an improvised streetside sale of his ‘art’, Jackson Bollock provided a fitting distraction whilst Ellie Tyst cut a hole in the fence. Felicitea Funnyname didn’t do much at all, this is really a two-character story, she’ll be in the next one.

Anyway, Ellie held the fence and Jackson slithered through.

He got to the barrier of Stone Henge and slumped over it like a hot dog sliding off a paper plate. He unsheated two small canisters of paint, ‘Trump Orange’ (there, I’ve done political comedy, can I write for TV now?) that he’d got on discount from a spray tan joint in town. Now he stepped toward the ancient arches of stone (which normal people have the respect to not stumble towards even if they agree we should treat the planet better), and spewed the orange substance against them like a drunk urinating against a pub door. This, more than any policy or opinion or idea he held, would be what he was remembered for in the future when the glowing cockroach-men rule the world from cathedrals made of our irradiated ribcages.

It was at this point the stones began to vibrate. Briefly a temporal portal flickered in the rectangular timevoid between the boulders. This chronohole yawned open, glittering and ancient. A Neolithic family stared out at the modern world, lured through the timehole with the smell of an energy drink which they thought was a sign from their gods that the world was ending.

As the Neolithic family learned about modern marvels such as tiktok and Brazilian butt lifts and tiktoks about Brazilian butt lifts, Ellie Tyst put down her £11 anticapuccino4 (patent pending) and shimmied into the timehole, leaving her friends behind.

At this point she bumped into me. No wait, that’s a Neolithic man. She explained to him that the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel would one day lead to fireworks, which are really bad for the environment.

He threw a wooden chair at her and she grabbed it, fleeing back to the present.

In the present, the Neolithic family had already backed themselves toward the portal, overstimulated by the modern world. Ellie Tyst bungled past them. She was already trying to sell the ancient chair on Vinted (the Hipster’s eBay), but as it wasn’t technically old (having circumvented the intervening eons) it only went for £3 and free postage to someone who “upcycled” it by gluing glitter all over it and whacking it on eBay (the tax-evader’s Vinted) for £300 with £301 postage.

Anyway, the Neolithic family took one look at Mister Bollock, who was still spraying the stones, and slammed the portal shut behind themselves so hard that it destabilised the structure5.

The largest stone tumbled, almost turning Jackson Bollock into a Jackson Pollock. Luckily the sheer force of the spray paint combined with his hollow bones and hollow head meant that he had some seconds ago became a human rocket, and was by the end of this paragraph hurtling through your bedroom window.

The end.

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Please comment or share this post to help it get noticed. This is the main way new people learn about my stuff. The comedy writing is often how some of my weirder Sci-Fi stories are born, so I wonder what this might inspire.

There, now I’ve said it in big pink letters.

It’s actually the end. You can go if you like.

But there is some more stuff below, like the $20 bookstore giveaway.

And here is my $20 bookstore gift card giveaway. You’ve still got time to enter.

$20 gift card thing

Bonus material / Footnotes

As I was hunting for images for this post, I rediscovered this really cocky advert I designed in 2022. This was before I split my brand colours between Realphillipcarter and Grumblebricks into pink and orange respectively.

I quite like how eclectic it is, so it might come back. If you click the image you’ll go right to my linktree bookstore, which contains WBTH alongside some other books I’ve published, such as The Cosmic Comedy Collection.

Disclaimer: I know nothing of politics, I care only for what I find funny.

Note: The comedy section of my newsletter is optional. I’ll be posting articles here as and when they occur to me, as they are sometimes topical to current events and news. If you’d prefer just the sci-fi, you can pick and choose subletters in your Substack settings, accessible online or on the app.

Second note: I rely mostly on people sharing my posts to get reach. If you find this article funny, there’s a share button below. I’ll be posting my Dr Who article (even though it’s now tragically outdated) here soon.

Local girlfriend asks: Would you still love me if I was the worm that ate part of Robert F Kennedy Jr's brain?

Pictured: A normal couple being normal. try it sometime

In a move that has shocked precisely nobody, local girlfriend Emily, the world’s biggest fan of Ru Paul’s drag race, has seen a news article and immediately made it about herself and her boyfriend.

“So babe,” she asked with a cold, calculating sort of pretend innocence, “I heard that a brain parasite got up inside Robert F Kennedy JR and nibbled all up on his brain, but then it died”

“Mmhmm” her boyfriend said as he got 360 no-scoped in fortnite by a 47 year old man dressed up as Ariana Grande.

“It’s so like us!” Emily said.

“Yeah.” (boyfriend was now watching his friend pick up his reboot card whilst being hunted down by Thanos and Billie Eilish)

“It’s soooo us-coded. So kawaii” Emily continued.

“Yep”

“He was like totes chowing down in neuro town,” Emily said.

“Yup.”

“Omg that should be a shirt,”

“Sure honey.”

“Like if I was a worm, I would totally eat your brain,”

This warranted a raised eyebrow, and an indifferent, “Thanks, babe” from the boyfriend. He hoped this wouldn’t turn into another of her weird ‘things’. He hated the tardigrade outfit she made him wear on valentine’s day, and he was still working the custard stains out of their bedroom curtains.

There was a moment of silence, perhaps in honour of brain parasites who had tried to eat politician’s thoughts and starved.

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After which the inevitable hurtled into the room, knocking the peaceful, bloodied silence from the boyfriend’s soul.

“Babe?” Emily asked, leaning toward him.

“Yes?” boyfriend said. His voice was tense, he wondered, were there more episodes of drag race he had yet to be dragged through? He made himself smirk, perhaps it was called drag race because he is dragged through it, and his girlfriend races through entire seasons in one horrific afternoon. But he loved her, she tolerated his farts so he loved her.

“So babe, would you still love me if I was a worm?” she asked.

“Of course,” boyfriend replied, remembering a previous argument in which he told her she wasn’t a worm, and she cried and walked out for two days because maybe one day she might be a worm and then he wouldn’t love her any more.

“No but, what if I was a parasitic worm?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Let me ask again,” she said, suddenly serious. She sat upright, turning to her boyfriend like this was an interview or interrogation or something.

An image of Robert F Kennedy flashed through the boyfriend’s mind, which was strange as he’d never seen the man before and had no idea what he looked like. Apparently, he looked like this.

Emily waited until the silence between them became unbearable, then asked her question.

“Babe, would you still love me if I was the worm that ate part of Robert F Kennedy Jr's brain?”

To which the boyfriend replied.

“Yes,” rather unconvincingly.

Sources report the couple were not on speaking terms until the boyfriend reassured Emily that his love was truly unconditional, and that included events in which a mystical amulet embedded in a meteorite cursed Emily to turn into a parasitic worm and eat his brain.

But this was short-lived, as boyfriend remarked that brainworm-induced memory loss might just save him from the mental torment of remembering more than five seconds of Ru Paul’s drag race.

Boyfriend is currently down the shops looking for the expensive ice cream and a DVD of that film she likes.

Scientists are currently trying to work out how such an innocent, surreal question can lead to entire relationships faltering. I mean, these people had a mortgage together and now boyfriend is lurking in the supermarket trying to appease her with trinkets like she’s some ancient god?

No brain worms were harmed in the making of this satire article, but we did shoot a horse with a laser.

Are YOU an aging political figure?

Do YOU want to have a new friend in your skull?

Then BUY a brainworm shirt!

*parasitic worms sold separately*

Get it now

Get this one instead

Yes, I really sat down and designed two shirts for a joke.

I care about putting detail and worldbuilding into my art, no matter how silly.

In my other life, as a Lego comedian (yes, really) I make shirts about that.

Even more shirts and stickers and things

My next post should be something science-fictional, and a little poetic.

Subscribe now

I don’t usually do event-themed things, but I’m a comedy writer and I’m not religious, so this is the closest thing I’ve got to a tradition.

I hope you all had a great Easter. I spent mine scheduling the next few sci-fi posts here.

There’s a lot.

While I’m away you will get free stories from Bookfunnel and free chapters from my work, including THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE. I also formatted and sorted out freebie pages for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS and WHO BUILT THE HUMANS which are available on the upcoming FreeFictionFriday posts. Then I formatted and released the special edition eBook for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS which comes with bonus content and a bonus story from WKTH. And then I formatted a new format of WBTH so it can finally be stocked in Waterstones without them grumbling that “it must be self-published” when they can’t find it on the system after I get my mum to call them pretending to be my biggest fan, just so I can check their attitude to paperbacks put through Amazon* (I couldn’t help it, I knew how to write books at the beginning, the publishing part was a learning curve with spikes on it).

*Yes I really did that. You have to bootstrap yourself sometimes. And it’s important to me to give you the funny details of my author journey, because a lot of people just post the sales stats, and only when they look really nice, with no attention paid to the years of pressure put into getting to that place. It means that a lot of writers have a nice shiny social media presence, but they all sort of look the same.

I’m comfortable being weird and jagged.

About that.

I have already scheduled the aforementioned THE STEPHANIE GLITCH post for later on today. You can expect Free Fiction Fridays and Monday… Manuscripts? Yeah Monday Manuscripts, all the way through April while I’m away in America looking for aliens and writing about aliens.

This comedy post is a bonus one, just for April Fools.

April Fools day

Firstly, I am pulling a double bluff on my Lego followers by announcing an absolutely huge Lego build. The official Lego company seems to have had the same idea, and are pushing a giant Lego Minion (from the kid’s movie) as a fake set that will be about 6ft tall, meaning it might stand a chance on dating apps. Mine will be smaller, and real, and sci-fi themed.

THE NSFW PART

Secondly, I’ve been editing down my standup sets for tiktok and instagram. I plan to put full sets up on Patreon, but it’s nice to have something you can fire into stranger’s faces whilst they browse tiktok on the toilet.

Here’s the trimmed version of a gag about my old manager, from when I worked in retail.

Is a trigger warning needed? It’s me, so you know the joke will be dark. There’s an even darker version on tiktok, locked behind an 18+ filter because I don’t fancy having my content removed again.

Stephanie

Stephanie shares my dark sense of humour, and in about an hour you’ll get to spend some time with her. Because today is a double whammy.

Those don’t happen often.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is a standalone novel about a teenager who discovers her synaesthesia is the key to interdimensional clairvoyance, and thanks to this clairvoyance works out her universe is about to collapse.

Before she can really grapple with this revelation, a dimension-hopping astronaut turns up and tries to kill her, claiming it’s for her own good.

There’s a skeleton outside time, outside space, waiting to develop into a new body for Stephanie to inhabit.

Tradpub vs Selfpub

I posted polls here and on twitter, and so far everyone thinks I should go self-pub with Steph, so I probably will. Last week’s poll had 3 votes, all of which were yes. You can vote on this one here.

Here’s last week’s poll results

I know some really great agents, but I fear even if they accepted Steph that wouldn’t be enough, she would still have to get through marketing filters and find an editor and a publisher who would all look at a novel in which a teenage psychic dies and is reincarnated as a fish for a bit and think “Yeah we want that”.

Oops, spoiler.

She would have to change, probably, to fit the market, and I don’t want her to. Her weird sense of humour drives the book forward, and I am worried they might sand her edges off. I’ve heard the phrase ‘risk-averse’ a lot when talking about the industry. As a writer, I’m all about doing new things and taking risks, so I don’t know if spiritually I’ll fit in with that crowd at all.

Ultimately, I’m concerned having a publisher might not be as beneficial to me as it is to other writers. I can do my own cover design, and if I can afford a marketing company I’m pretty much sorted because I do really well in interviews and podcasts. I always get a big sales spike after an appearance. I sold 4 books during the hour I was on Adrian’s writer’s den and moved 68 (free) copies of HOLOGRAM KEBAB during the hours after my live radio interview with my friend Ruth at AllFM. I just need someone to fire me into bigger interviews so I can tell my jokes and find new people.

So whether hunting for an agent and publisher is worth it is a big question. The university-educated part of my brain still has its old programming, that tradpub still might be a special badge I can wear to prove I’m a ‘proper’ author. The inventor part of my brain (the main bit) says that the reviews I’ve got on Amazon are worth more than any mark of approval from the tradpub industry, because those are from real people.

Ultimately, I probably just need the cash to market the next few things I make. My marketing budget for WBTH was £2 a week at the start. Yes I’m serious. I got this far with that. Most of it was social media, word of mouth, that sort of thing. A lot of it was you, sharing my posts, recommending this substack, and clicking on stuff.

I think that my books, like my comedy, might have to carve their own path.

Lastly, when I’m in America, you can find my daily updates on tiktok or instagram.

That means, don’t read this email at that school you work for.

I’m not paid for these reviews. Right now it’s a hobby.

On Saturday 3rd February 2024, I went to Liverpool’s UNITY THEATRE to watch Omid Djalili be his hilarious, wise self.

If you haven’t heard of Omid Djalili, you’ve probably still seen him in something. He’s done so much in one lifetime that I can’t make an honest attempt to list everything, so here’s his wikipedia page.

He’s a comedian, actor, and supporter of WOMEN, LIFE FREEDOM.

The Journey

I set off from Manchester to Liverpool in the early afternoon, believing I might score a decent seat on the train. For the journey, I had an aslant view of the opened customer toilets, and a straight ahead view of some trees. I chose to look at the trees.

I was travelling alone this time, as my friend Ruth couldn’t make it, so I had a spare ticket for the gig. I didn’t want to be that guy who has an empty seat beside him, so I tried to find friends in Liverpool who might be available.

I also had spare time. So, when I arrived, I got a pair of aviators from TKmaxx and a small Lego space set (affiliate link). I then made the trek up toward the bombed out church, passing innumerable hipster food joints and hipster clothing joints.

I resisted the temptation of a last-minute spenny burger and three-piece tweed suit, climing higher above Liverpool until I found myself on a quite posh-looking street. The businesses there had silver plaques at their doors and everything, and from these I was able to roughly triangulate my position as somewhere near a skincare clinic and somewhere near a lawyer’s office.

I was very excited, as I had wanted to see Omid for a long time.

I then listened to Google, and overshot. Rather than walking into the cathedral grounds and picking up a new religion, I pulled a sharp left, briefly standing confused with another man who also looked confused, but who was just waiting for his date, and not a gig. I turned another left, coming across the Hope Street suitcases.

Here’s a picture of them.

The Hope Stree suitcases celebrate the many fabulous people and organisations that have come out of Hope Street, and Liverpool, in recent geological memory. They also make a fantastic hump-bunker, as I discovered when I saw two art critics trying to make a third art critic over the top of the monument under the pale streetlights in the minutes before I found the gig.

(I did initially think they were homeless people, but a friend pointed out that it is not only homeless people who reproduce on monuments in Liverpool, and that many people, from lawyers to skincare clinicians, regularly reproduce atop monuments.)

Now, pulling one final left turn, ending my spiralling journey, I found the theatre at last.

The venue

The Unity Theatre is a beautiful little place with staff so friendly I briefly wondered if I’d sustained a head injury. I mean it, they’re brilliant. Whenever I’ve been (thrice now, I think) I wind up missing the place. It’s got a welcoming atmosphere and a crisp, modern look that makes you feel as if you’ve found something exclusive and secretive.

I let them know about my bonus ticket and asked them to give it away to anyone who showed up at the door wanting to get in.

I then bought a Pulp cider, which was very nice, and pre-ordered a second for the intermission. Here’s a real photo of me next to it.

The gig

First, a surprise. Omid had a warmup act for this show, the fantastic Boothby Graffoe.

A tall fellow with an almost psychic knack for crowd work, Boothby captured our attention from the very first moments with comedic song, and with improvised lyrics about a latecomer. His set mixed musical props, standup, crowdwork, and naughty songs into a relentless cocktail of hilarity that I wish lasted longer, much like real cocktails. It was fantastic. This is the sort of standup you’d happily tolerate a busy train to get to.

See him when you can.

Omid Time

As I said before, Omid Djalili is a comedian, actor, and supporter of WOMEN, LIFE FREEDOM. His show touched on all of these things, taking us from silly and energetic anecdotes to deeper, darker topics where, between laughter, we were given time for contemplative moments.

I’m always happy to sit front row in these smaller gigs because I find, like with university, most people are reluctant to do it because of some imagined pressure put upon them. Sure, there might be eye contact during a dark joke, you might be set more homework, but I can tolerate that. I’m also a fan, so to an extent I knew what to expect.

I did feel bad about the empty seat to my left, but it meant I got the best seats in the house. Full shoulder room, full wiggling space.

And there was wiggling. I laughed so much my head hurt. Each joke built upon the last and transformed its meaning in a way that made the whole set poetic. Ideas rhymed with other ideas from half an hour before, and the whole thing had a sort of extra dimension to it. It felt alive.

Omid warned us at one point near the start, in his usual modest fashion, that some of these jokes are very new.

I’ve met enough humble smart people in my life to have known from that moment they’d all be great. And they were.

Omid’s style is simultaneously intimate and theatrical, striking a perfect balance between micro and macro, between crowd work and talking about the larger, huge problems in the world.

The care with which he tackles the big questions in his performances leads us all to feel very comfortable in that space with him. You’re in safe hands. And you can tell from the way he crafts and then tells his jokes that he’s someone who cares a lot about the world, and about improving it through laughter, contemplation, and conversation.

He also has a lot of energy on stage, like a rock star.

Omid’s gig took us through the beginnings of his career, his experiences at the Fringe, and his misadventures. It covered footballers, his life, and the big problems plaguing the world right now.

And all of this was meticulously arranged, not in a direct sequence of lightest to heaviest, not in a shifting musical piece that gradually got darker near the end, not in a stage play that starts funny but suddenly gets serious, but in a carefully curated machine of words and ideas and images that came together to tell a story greater than the sum of its parts. It was a brilliant comedy show.

It was masterful.

A lot of you know I’m a big fan of art that balances the silly and the serious, and this was a masterclass in it. If I could, I would watch it again and again.

It was one of those gigs you remember days and weeks afterwards, one of those gigs which I think proves that comedy is an artform often beyond poetry and scriptwriting and other such subcategories of writing, because it is an active, living machine of words operated by its writer in real time. The set does not exist without its writer piloting it, and here it felt that Omid is the only person in the world who can tell these stories the way he tells them. He built the controls to this word-machine, and only he can operate it.

Basically, I liked the show.

Everything I like about creativity, about writing and art, happened inside this show. It was fantastic.

See him if you can.

Bonus Features

After the show I also had the privilege to meet Omid, which was fantastic. He thanked me for sitting in the front row, and I apologised for the empty seat I left beside me. See, sitting in the front row is important.

You might not expect this, but sometimes I’m awkward when I meet new people. I’m confident, sure, but I’ve always related more to the aliens in fiction than the humans. Omid cut right through that, and I felt immediately like I’d known him for years. My relatively new social anxiety dissolved for a few minutes.

He’s a great guy. See his shows.

Follow Omid on Twitter > https://twitter.com/omid9

Follow Boothy on Twitter > https://twitter.com/madbadsadhad

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This post marks the first of my written comedy reviews. You may have heard Ruth and I cover Daliso Chaponda’s BBC show Citizen of Nowhere a few months back on ALLfm, and I’m now accompanying those radio reviews with these written ones, to broaden their audience.

I might be on air again on Sunday 25th Feb, that’s this coming Sunday. I’ll beam out an update if that’s still the case on Saturday.

This was an independent review. I have not been paid for this, but I do have a tip jar that enables me to keep putting time into the writing here. This is, at present, my only writing gig. Aside from those book things.

Tip jar

The comedy ranges from my stuff (zany, dark, and a little edgy) to more wacky, irreverent, and then right back to dark again. It’s a good mix of stories, arranged in such a way so as to have each story complement the previous.

Every single story in the book is brand new and exclusive to the book. You won’t be able to read them anywhere else.

We elected to use mine as the free sample, because I invented the book and because I didn’t want the other authors to have to make theirs free. So here it is.

At the end of this post, there’s also a livestream I recorded with John Coon and Devilishbookworms, all about the direction sci-fi seems to be going, and how we might make it a little more fun.

Since I’m also a comedian, my short story is a love letter to 2010s meme culture, but you don’t need to know anything about that to understand it. It’s silly and twisted on purpose, with lots of nods to pop culture.

It’s also on the COMEDY subletter, and you can manage which subletters you’re subbed to in your Substack settings.

(This story is absolutely not safe for work)

RAWR OF THE WURLDS XD

Chapter 0

Obligatory worldbuilding disguised as prologue

The alien ship lumbered at the edge of the solar system like a student lumbering in the porch of his girlfriend’s house, trying to convince her he isn’t drunk. The alien ship also pissed itself and was eating a kebab. It was more of a giant robot than a ship, and more of an abstract, fractal shape than a robot. It was a forever-shifting thing which defied visual description, not just because it was convenient for your narrator, but because it was a shapeshifting thing that survived by adapting to the civilisations it bothered, like a door-to-door salesman pretending to care about your divorce so he can sell you a television. It lolloped and lumbered and stumbled and shimmied about in space, because to fly in a straight line would be more fuel efficient, and would remove the need for this vast hideous thing to hop from planet to planet pinching other people’s wesources. Sorry, resources.

Inside the alien ship were some aliens, already perusing the initially commercially unsuccessful films and literature of the little planet they were headed toward. These green-skinned beasties were hungry followers of nostalgic trends and fads, culture vultures hell bent on consuming as much quirky galactic media as possible. Some called them the pop cultists, others called them intellectually dishonest, many of them called them greasy-headed posers. Some called them hipster twats. But always, above and beyond all these nicknames remained their true title.

Invadliens^tm (patent pending).

It should be known to the reader that the Invadliens were very evil. Owing to the concept of nominative determinism, they had a cultural and almost biological imperative to invade things. It could not be beaten out of them. Not even with a big stick. It was in their nature. Every aspect of Invadlien life, from religion to restaurants, reproduction and science, was based upon the central tenets of Invasionism (not to be confused with Virtualism), their core belief system. When Invadliens were not out invading other planets, they were breaking into their own houses, hacking their own bank accounts, and stealing their own resources. For this reason, their planet looked very much like it had recently been vomited out of both ends of something, for it was in a constant state of theft-recycling.

Having long ago mastered interstellar travel (because they stole it), the Invadliens now sought higher achievements in the cosmos, mainly the theft of brains so that they might vicariously experience the highs and lows of low-tech alien life without the unsanitary risks of sexually transmitted diseases, sexually transmitted religions, or sexually transmitted pre-programmed plot-device nanobots which hide in your sex organs and listen to your thoughts. They’re in there. They’re in there right now. Get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out get them out.

Anyway, their ship crawled, danced, lurched toward its next target, forever shifting its form to assimilate the rapid-fired memes emanating from the target planet’s rich and irony-filled biosphere. The atmosphere was scanned, and presumed to be danker than any dankness ever danked before.

The Invadliens, believing themselves to be gods, wanted only to seek out and experience a life that for them was in the distant past. Their species’ history stretched so far back in time that to remember it would be to overload the hard drive of the cosmos, also, someone stole all the records. Sure, you can’t destroy information, but you probably shouldn’t drag it all out of the zip folder at the same time. It's like therapy. We deal with this universe one memory at a time, and the Invadliens deal with their own lost prehistory by sampling ours. It’s a form of self-imposed therapeutic gaslighting, or something.

It is important at this point not to start the story, but to list off some random details of the Invadlien species, without which the following tale of their invasion of the monkey planet would have about as much context as that article you just read on the news. Also, I came up with all of this, and it would be a shame to edit it out.

1.          The Invadliens are a type 47 civilisation, and are so far advanced that they see the other 46 types as idiots. Humans are type 2.

2.          The Invadliens, being shapeshifters, have adopted human form for this story. This not only helps navigate the inevitable budget cuts for the sex scenes in the upcoming television series, it also speaks to a deep existential question about the nature of human existence, probably.

3.          Some Invadliens are born with the power of precognition. These ones are often promoted to royalty. You would think that this prescience might permit them some respite from natural chance and predation, but the recent Invadlien king-psychic had no idea I would edit him out of this story, thus rendering this part not canon.

4.          The Invadliens are running out of fuel, which for various evil reasons they derive from the molten cores of other people’s planets. They also sometimes harvest brains, but this is more out of habit than out of necessity. It’s just something to do on the weekend.

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, the monkey planet is Earth.

They are coming here.

In fact, I think they just landed.

Chapter 1

Unconstitutionally loving the alien

Crawling slowly toward Earth, so as to give us enough time to panic about it and take stylish establishing shots, the hideous, forever mutating starship showed the world its impressive weaponry, most of which was stolen. They had Andromedan claptrap slappers, Extradimensional cabinets (useful as prisons, and for imprisoning Doctor Who fans), Graxxan war dolphins, Mycelial frond cannons, and some other cool-sounding sci-fi stuff.

They also had a plank of wood with a nail through it.

All of which was now pointed directly - or lopsidedly - at Earth.

The first word spoken by the fiends was rough, hardly translatable.

“UwU,” said the alien ship.

Followed by a dangerous, foreboding warning.

“XD *nuzzles ur pwecious wesources* XD!”

Then, a single beam of light erupted from the underside of the mothership as it split into countless smaller vessels. The ambassador for the Invadliens had arrived, somewhere in a field in America. One of the fields. It had a tree in it. Probably a rusty truck. You know the one.

This ambassador made his way into the loving arms of the military, who fed him with only their most incompetent staff until a translator arrived. It took several days for the military to find someone able to translate the Invadlien language, primarily because they don’t associate with big nerds. The translator, in her mid-30s, wore a Doctor Who scarf and Star Wars shirt. Fearing she might be an actual time traveller due to her aging jeans and glasses, the military put her in her own sealed unit beside the alien ambassador. There was a door between the two, for the Invadlien’s convenience, should he get hungry again.

“My name is Remedy Sparks,” the translator said.

“Can haz molten coreburger?” the alien asked. He looked Remedy up and down, noting the various pop culture references on her old tweed jacket, and morphed himself to incorporate them in his look. His face became that of Spock from Star Trek, his eyes the roving red beam of the Cylons, and his ears became wide and pointed. Finally, his hair turned blonde and plaited itself like millipedes writhing over each other, weaving itself into Princess Zelda’s hair from The Legend Of Zelda.

Remedy Sparks turned to the window of the secure unit and looked into the darkness where she knew the base captain, Jenny, would be watching.

“He seems to be appropriating early 2000s meme culture. Sources indicate that the Invadliens first learned about Earth through Tumblr and Myspace,” Remedy explained.

“I’m just glad they didn’t catch our first major broadcast,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“This morning they positioned ships above all our active volcanoes,” Jenny mused. “Tell them to back off. We fear they might set off global eruptions.”

“Big badaboom,” the alien said. Its face shifted briefly to a caricature of Leeloo, from The Fifth Element. Leeloo looked weird with Princess Zelda’s hair.

“Nice,” Remedy said. She lifted her keys out of her pocket to show the alien a keyring of the water element.

“Wait,” a security guard said. He was stood beneath an overhead lamp, his face gaunt and serious. “Tumblr?”

“Yes,” Remedy confirmed.

“Could we not… you know.”

“Not what?” Jenny asked.

“Convince them they’re ugly, make them run away.”

“That’s disgusting,” Remedy snapped.

“Could work,” Jenny said.

“It could, but it would ruin our planet’s reputation. What if these beings are the first of many? Do we want them to know we are a hateful, spiteful species?”

“They’ve already been through all of Myspace and Tumblr, it wasn’t all group hugging sessions,” the soldier said.

“Melody, what does he mean?” Jenny asked. She got closer to the glass, her military uniform taking the interest of the Invadlien, who appropriated a few badges and smiled at the officer.

“Remedy,” Remedy said.

“Remedy. Hey! You can’t do that,” Jenny said, pointing at the alien.

“I can haz war?” the alien asked playfully. It rubbed its fake badges and smiled.

“The soldier has a point,” Remedy began. “We’re lucky they have latched onto meme culture and not something more harmful like children’s television.” She turned to the Invadlien. “No ambassador, you can no haz war.”

She shook her head and pushed a printed meme across the table to the alien. It depicted an elongated white cat appearing out of the eye of a typhoon, watching over the whole Earth.

“We have a defender, a guardian.”

“Longcat…” the alien said.

“The longest and most powerful of cats.”

“Can haz how many cheeseburger?”

“All the cheeseburger.”

“Cringe.”

The alien pushed himself back in his chair. He briefly became Insanity Prawn Boy, from the popular Youtube series On The Moon. After several seconds of him screaming and laughing out the word ‘anus’, the alien finally calmed down. Now he shifted to a gross hybrid of several characters from BBC’s Sherlock Holmes and Supernatural. He snapped one of his fingers off, formed it into a cigarette, and smoked it. The smoke was a darkish green colour, and seemed to move about the chamber with its own intelligence, its own ambition.

“We need to get you out of there,” Jenny said.

“Lock me in.” Remedy said darkly.

“Why?” Jenny said, even as she gestured for the soldier to follow this order. The young man scurried to the second airlock and sealed it. Remedy Sparks looked out at the observation room with a grim expression.

“I never thought I’d have to relive this,” she said.

“Relive what? Tell us what’s happening in there or you’re getting dragged out of there by hazmats in fifteen seconds.”

The Invadlien cracked his neck, twisted his free hand, and opened his palm.

“Would you like a Jelly Baby, Watson?”

Only Remedy knew what this meant.

“We’ve been SuperWhoLocked.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Jenny made sure the airlock was tight, and returned to her position looking into the secure unit. Rather than permit Remedy to answer, the Invadlien took it upon himself.

“Well, it seems there’s a preestablished chain of events you want me to see here, some references to 1960’s Science Fiction, no doubt. Unfortunately I shan’t be able to permit you this delusion as I am presently encumbered by a greater mystery. How does my hair stay so fluffy? And what’s more, how does it manage to both woo chronically online females and irk chronically online males? Why does it effect these two groups so differently? And why are the DVDs so expensive even all these years later? That’s what I don’t understand, but I do understand it, because I understand everything. I am very clever. Also I am very handsome if you’re into elves. Which reminds me. Did I ever tell you about the time elves that lived under Gallifrey? I saw one in Dean’s hair once. It was totes amazeballs.”

“He can’t handle three fandoms at a time. He’s going to break down,” Remedy said.

“And what would a breakdown do?” Jenny asked.

“Well he’s copying classic Sci-Fi; any logical contradictions will likely result in an explosion.”

“We need to evacuate.”

“No, I’ve got this.”

Remedy pointed again at Longcat, the defender of reality, destroyer of TacGnol, the ancient shadow god. The alien did not care for this foreboding symbol anymore. He was chattering madly about mysteries that needed solving.

“That’s it,” Remedy rooted through her meme folder and pulled out an X-Files meme.

“Lolz. I’m not saying it wuz aliens, but it wuz aliens!” the alien read aloud. His face now shifted to agent Fox Mulder, a much easier character to handle.

Jenny tapped on the glass and spoke into the intercom again.

“Wait. Can we… Can we keep him like that a while?”

Chapter 3

Are there memes on Mars?

After violating several treaties on human-alien contact in the omitted Chapter 2, officer Jenny let Remedy resume her work with the impressionable shapeshifter who, despite being able to sustain a sexual encounter with another species for well over eight hours, just like your favourite Wattpad billionaire werewolf space pirate sex dragon, was not at all tired, and was presently hopping up and down on the table ranting about the old god ChinChin.

“Gib me the core-sy boss,” the alien chanted. He was now playing the flute with his nose, and had dressed in a pink morph suit.

“Great, now he’s a sex-crazed caricature.”

“Not my fault,” Jenny said.

“You slept with it.”

“Not relevant. Filthy Frank and Pink Guy showed up after the main hype of SuperWhoLock. The alien is learning.”

“Oh my god, you’re right. He’s catching up to the modern day. But how?”

“We gave him the Wi-Fi password,” a nameless soldier said.

“Why would you do that?”

The soldier did not reply. Rather, his head opened up and shifted into a foghorn which blasted its horrid sound across the room. His eyebrows knitted themselves into hideous neon green pixel glasses.

“Like a boss,” the soldier said.

Jenny made light work of incapacitating him, elbowing the Invadlien in the foghorn face and calling for backup. The room was soon filled with more soldiers and officers, all of whom were quizzed on meme culture, all of whom passed the shapeshifting test when Jenny tried to kick them into increasingly smaller suitcases. It was a basic, rudimentary test, but it worked.

Apart from that one contortionist she wrongly imprisoned.

“We need to get through to the Invadliens, and fast,” Jenny said.

“You wasted precious hours on your X-Files fan-fiction lovefest,” Remedy reminded her boss, lifting a dishevelled ginger wig up to the window.

“I was trying to teach it how to love.”

“And how did that go?”

“It was a bit bitey.”

“Right.”

“But outside that,” Jenny said, “A solid seven out of ten. Anyway, it wasn’t all smut. I managed to distract the alien and grab this,” Jenny gestured to the large metal doors at the end of the dimly lit room, through which walked two scientists. One of them was holding a glass vial.

“You grabbed some scientists?”

“No, the vial. It’s got a microchip in it.”

“And where was that on the alien?” Remedy Sparks asked. At this point the alien turned to face Jenny, turning his face away from the pile of printed memes on the table.

“You don’t want to know,” Jenny said.

“NYYYYEEESSSSSSS,” the alien Pink Guy said. His face shifted through various characters finally settling on Pepe the frog. Finally, the alien sat perfectly still, cross-legged on the table. It began muttering something too quiet for Remedy to hear, and she wasn’t about to get up close to it. She had seen enough Sci-Fi horror to know how that ends.

“Ask it what it’s doing,” Jenny instructed. She handed the vial back to the scientists.

“But who was phone?” Remedy queried the alien. The strange being flickered and mutated, shuffling through various hideous caricatures of old memes. Finally, it vaguely resembled Cell, from Dragon Ball Z.

“Oh no,” Remedy said, getting down beneath the table.

“I’m a firin mah lazer! Blaaaarrrgggh!” the Invadlien shouted. But no laser erupted forth from its contorted face. Instead, an eerie silence fell upon the room. Everyone knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t clear what.

“UwU, notices ur Invadlien ships. Why u land on planet?” Remedy asked.

“We iz here to glomp ur pwecious wesources! XD” the alien said.

“But which ones?”

“LAVA. HOT HOT LAVA!”

“Got him. I’m calling the Pres, now. We’ve got all we need,” Jenny walked out of the room. Remedy and the alien sat uncomfortably in the isolation chamber, which had yet to be hosed down from last night, and looked out at the soldiers, officers and scientists observing them.

“You’re here to take the molten core of the Earth,” Remedy murmured. She thought of how to rephrase this in a way the alien would understand.

“We iz Longcat. U iz TacGnol.”

“Affirmative Master,” the Invadlien said, its head now that of K-9 from Doctor Who.

“How u haz core?”

“Sucky sucky!” the Insanity Prawn Invadlien explained.

A soldier walked through the metal doors to the dimly lit room, putting himself between the others and the isolation pods.

“Miss Sparks. Officer Jenny wishes to inform you that the Invadliens have fired upon two volcanoes in the last three minutes. Our military powers are no match for them. It’s up to you now. We need a distraction to get through their shields.”

“LAVA. HOT HOT LAVA!!!” the Invadlien said, again as Insanity Prawn Boy.

Remedy racked her brain for something she could use to keep the aliens occupied. She tried one final appeal to Earth’s authority over its resources.

“All our base are belong to us.”

“No u,” the alien said.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Wait. Can haz access to ur battle ships?”

“Negative master.”

Remedy grunted in frustration. In her peripheral vision she could see the soldiers and officers chatting amongst themselves. Outside this sealed room, outside this military base, outside this desert, the world was ending, volcano by volcano. Invadliens had infiltrated almost every single military installation on the planet, suffocating them under waves of memes and irony. The shitposting and viral cryptocurrency memes had already wrecked the economy, and now the lava pouring down those volcano slopes would wreck the planet, plunging it into a near-permanent winter, choked under ash and the shadows of Invadlien motherships. The lava flowed like a shapeshifter, pouring into towns and cities, melting and burning anything in its path, changing to the shape of the landscapes it obliterated.

That was it. The solution.

“Get me more memes.”

One by one, under Remedy’s careful instructions, all the world’s broadcasting channels stopped talking about the apocalypse and started doing something about it for once. Every transmitter was pointed toward the alien ships, every channel tuned to re-runs of old Youtube Poops and meme compilations. The Invadliens, with no personality of their own, soon became overwhelmed with choice.

Remedy looked at the Invadlien pioneer across from her. He began to shift again, this time into a form she did not recognise from any meme or popular show. This time he was truly alien, becoming his real self. He was a mass of violent barbed tentacles and teeth.

“Shit, they’re already shedding it. “Deploy leekspin, eight-hour loop, square aspect ratio, blurry.”

“The techno version?” a soldier asked.

“No, classic.”

The soldiers turned on monitors in the room, faced them to the isolation pod, and blasted the once-viral video. The Invadlien turned, but didn’t seem too interested.

“Reverse enhance,” Remedy instructed.

“What?”

“Just smear grease on the screen or something. It’s too high definition. It’s funnier if it’s blurry.”

“OMG u filmed this on an iPotato, megalulz,” the Invadlien said as the grease was applied to the screen. He was fixated now, utterly fascinated by the low-quality meme.

“Just as I thought,” Remedy said, “The Invadliens are not just absorbing meme culture to communicate their intentions with us, they are embodying it. Their predictable invasion of America before the rest of the world, their cartoonish attacks on volcanos. All of this is based on pop culture. They aren’t truly sentient, which means…”

“They can be defeated by love and friendship?” Jenny asked, barging through the door.

“Evidently not. No, we can reprogram them.”

“My god. They have no culture of their own.”

“Precisely. They’re grey goo,” Remedy picked up a printed meme and wrote on the back of it. “They appropriate anything we give them.” She pressed the paper to the glass of the isolation booth.

They’ll catch up to current memes soon. And then that’s it for us. Make new memes about their own destruction.

Jenny nodded. The military now turned its attention to generating viral content about the Invadliens, resurrecting the ancient memes that had brought them slithering to Earth in the first place. The first meme was tested on the Invadlien ambassador, who was reduced to a bubbling mass of recycled content after being shown a ten-hour Invadlien cringe compilation, replete with completely unnecessary links to a shirt store thrown in every three minutes. After watching his own species relentlessly parodied under layers of dubstep, foghorns, and slow-motion effects, his body simply turned into soup.

This too was added to the ever-increasing playlist of Invadlien cringe moments.

The rest of the Invadlien invaders were defeated through similar means. In fact, they were so busy being defeated they almost entirely forgot to harvest any brains before they imploded. The memes were numerous and delirious, an arsenal that spanned over ten years of pop culture.

Firstly, Earth’s Longcat triumphed over the TacGnol of the Invadlien starships. Then Invadliens disguised as Nyancat blasted through their own invisible force fields. After this, the hobbits (Invadlien scout ships) were taken to Isengard (The centre of the sun). To add insult to injury, the survivors were encouraged to shapeshift into the flying spaghetti monster and to entangle each other in a death-knot with their noodles. Back on Earth Invadlien soldiers were isolated and thrust into doomer memes, before being splattered with a very loud metal pipe that fell from nowhere in particular. Liveleak logos were helicoptered in above surviving Invadliens, foreshadowing their hideous deaths.

When only the robotic henchmen and robot butlers and robot sex butlers of the Invadlien species were left behind (action figures coming soon), tactics needed to be changed.

“Deploy philosoraptor!” Remedy demanded.

Finally, the robotic remnants of the Invadlien forces were destroyed by the very same thing which destroys that one annoying family member at every reunion you’re forced to go to: difficult questions, and also undercooked turkey.

But it was not yet done. The Invadliens had yet more ships on the way to Earth, all of whom had no doubt learned from what they saw unfold there. So, there was one final punch to be delivered.

The world beamed out one final message to the invaders.

“Have u seen Deez?”

To which the oncoming Invadlien ships replied.

“Deez wut?”

Revealing a critical flaw in their armour. It was Remedy’s honour to deliver the last line herself. She took to the microphone, leaning close.

“Deez Nutz.”

And with that the final mothership exploded.

“Hah! Godeeeeem!”

It was over.

Until the inevitable cash-grab sequel.

END

So that was my story from THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION, which is available in eBook form in more places than I can count.

I can’t count very far.

Here’s the button to get your own copy of THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION. Or don’t. You can just read the free story above and get a cake instead. I’m not here to judge. I’m only judgemental when I’m on stage.

Get TCCC

Livestream?

As I mentioned above, I also had a three-hour livestream chat with Devilishbookworms and fellow TCCC author John Coon, which was supposed to just be half an hour, but we had a lot to talk about.

Mainly, about where sci-fi seems to be going according to the big publishers, where we think it should be going instead, and how we can get there.

It was weird, funny, and quite insightful. If you’ve got the time, give it a listen, and subscribe to my youtube, where I post an interdisciplinary mix of Minecraft letsplays, standup comedy sets, and writing posts.

(please forgive the clickbait title, youtube does bad things to people who don’t have clickbait titles. I do plan on changing it soon).

And there’s a behind-the-scenes below this paywall. A select few of you are currently on a free trial, and if you want one but weren’t included, just ask. You can email me at Halfplanetpress@gmail.com to get one.

All my posts are human-written.

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Local male author goes 8 pages without describing female protagonist in uncomfortable detail, breaking previous records.

In an astonishing feat, author Barry Binbag has discovered that his female protagonist suddenly has other stuff to do outside of thinking about lipstick and boys. She is no longer a lump of body parts with a brain stuck on the top.

“It’s as if she developed sentience, like a terminator, but with tits,” he said.

I visited his home in Clammy Giblets, North Phlegm, to talk to him about his upcoming novel, THE GIRL WHO DID SOME STUFF AND LOOKED OUT OF A WINDOW ALL POUTY WHEN IT RAINED.

“It’s essentially a postmodern exploration of all those secret loves we have, such as Jenny’s secret love for yoghurt and fruit. That’s based on my personal experience growing up as a writer who had experience growing up as a writer with experience growing up as a writer knowing he would one day be looking back at growing up as a writer with foresight on how he would one day become a writer writing forward about looking back,” Barry explained.

“Is that why it goes on for so long?” I asked him.

“No, that’s because I did a lot of research, into the yoghurts and fruits and stuff. And there’s this great scene with the immigrant family at the corner shop that lasts about half the book and I couldn’t cut that. My editor quit at that point but it is a challenging read you know. Jenny is a very fleshy… sorry, fleshed out character.”

“And you’re writing a lot about the yoghurt?”

“Yes. Her husband in the novel, Jerome, doesn’t think it proper for a lady with her figure to be ruining it with yoghurt and chocolate-coated fruit, especially in that cafe where she meets the French exchange student. Really it’s a novel about warfare and the apocalypse.”

“And when does the war and the apocalypse start?”

“Well I was going to put it on page 308, but I realised that at that point I had not gotten into the description of Mr Patel’s eyebrows, which was going to be chapter three. There’s also the sex scene, which I’m thinking might be made better with the inclusion of a pop-out segment of the book. My publisher hasn’t responded to that request yet, but I think it would really bring another dimension to things.”

“Let’s circle back,” I said to Barry Binbag. “How come you decided to write an eight-page segment without referring to Jenny’s body in horrendous, syrupy detail?”

“Well. The society of authors who don’t go out enough to meet real people and yet think they can write about them without reducing them to shopping lists of stereotypes and jiggly bits wrote to me and told me I really ought to come to their awards ceremony, and that was a wake up call for me.”

“Ah yes, the SOAWDGOETMRPAYTTCWATWRTTSLOSAJB. So are you saying that their outdated values turned you off?”

“Oh no not at all, it’s just that if I win an award like that, I might not be a good writer any more. You know if a coffee shop tells you a book is good, I always remember my professor reading a coffee shop review and yelling ‘What the fuck do you know? You make lattes!’ at the quirky little leaflet they had at the till, and that’s stuck with me through my career. I wouldn’t trust an author’s opinion on coffee as anything more than an expedient way to simulate a panic attack and make your house smell like a hipster’s beard, so why should I trust a coffee company to understand literature?”

It was at this point that Barry finally got round to the point. He was sat in a well-decorated room, something between kitchen and arts lab, the sort of place where you’d find a lot of cress but be afraid of eating it. There were so many bean bags, perhaps more bean bags than there were people in Barry’s life.

“You see. Jenny is a very beautiful, curvy, soft, sensual character. But I want readers to work that out on their own, you know? My older books really went deep into describing the curves and the softness. But I think I’ve done that now. I got up one night and I had this entire sentence planned out in my mind, like it came to me in a vision. She ran down the stairs to answer the door to the postman. But this time I didn’t describe her bouncing breasts, nor did I linger on her half-applied mascara, her feminine charm, or how she lusted after the postman’s solid and veiny arms.”

Barry leaned back in his chair, placing his typewriter over his lap.

PAYWALL OF DEATH

There is another big chunk of silly text behind this paywall. Luckily I’m feeling charitable, so if you’ve been checking out a lot of my posts recently, you might well be on a free trial. Try scrolling, see if it works. A few people here have got behind-the-scenes access to more weird.

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If you don’t have the time to read this little update, and just want to check out the free bookshelf, here’s last week’s.

Tales from the cave

And here’s a paid one. The Cosmic Comedy Collection is in here.

Sci-Fi Spectacular

It smells funny in here…

This is a short post. As you probably know from reading my stuff, I’m one of those science fiction authors who also quite likes comedy. To me they are parts of the same literary branch. They both explore unique new ways of seeing the world, they both twist language into new shapes, and they both concern themselves with making caricatures. The science fiction author has their aliens, the comedian has larger-than-life characters, or in my case, both sides of me have aliens.

It is no secret that I’m a comedy writer. My last job, albeit voluntary, was comedy radio hosting. My upcoming job is a content writer for my pal Zaak, who needs me to tell jokes about cars for his social media. I get to strap a go-pro to my head and climb around his workshop, finally fulfulling my evolutionary niche as a comedy goblin.

I’ve also done stand-up comedy about time travel, more than once. My first big gig was at Bright Club, and my second big one was at the Manchester Fringe, where some bachelorettes walked home with one of my inflatable aliens, and I handed out tin foil hats to any audience members who might want to heckle me (because I would respond with psychic warfare).

And I host events whilst telling jokes. Usually open mics.

And I had a freelance gig writing comedy wedding poems. I only sold one, but it’s hard to break into that market without an agency behind you, so I did well.

And now, I spend a lot of my free time watching comedy at the BBC, and hanging around comedians, whose company I prefer to other, more grumpy sorts of writers. In fact people often ask me if I’m a comedian, and my friends regularly remind me to write my outbursts down, as they make great stand-up, apparently.

Even my Lego instagram got popular because of jokes I made about my imaginary wife leaving me.

I tried to have a writing instagram and a writing twitter, both of which very rapidly evolved into meme pages and places to try out jokes.

So maybe I am a comedian. Not got the results back yet.

Dr Cox is one of my favourite comedy characters of all time.

What does it all mean?

Looking over my documents and posts, I seem to write more comedy than serious sci-fi these days, but if you’ve read WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? you’ll know I can do a decent job of both (I have been convinced of this by the kind reviews you’ve left, I didn’t stumble into this opinion myself). Really it’s a question of time over wordcount. The comedy takes longer but has less words in it, the dark existential Science Fiction is naturally wordier, but shows up in frantic bursts of energy. I’m always writing jokes, I’m always daydreaming about writing novels.

So comedy is everywhere in my writing, and it’s latched onto the sci-fi.

So I am going to start posting more of it here. I have written some comedy articles which I know not everyone will like, because comedy is heavily reliant on personal taste, and that’s okay. I have tried to add jokes in for every type of person, and I’m not the political type so I like to imagine it cuts across all of that mess.

In the future, the comedy might become an optional add-on to my newsletter, but now it’s built-in like that gland in your brain that can smell parallel universes.

At this point I feel obliged to make a Bowie lyric reference in every post…

Ooh, ahh, visionary.

Comedy posts will often be writing or arts related. For example, my next three comedy posts are probably going to be

• Why Doctor Who changed Davros (now outdated, thanks BBC)

• The trope of male authors ruining female characters

• Why uncontacted tribes should be given iphones to browse memes

If that sounds like your kind of thing, great. They’re in a similar tone to my previous work, so a mix of my Hologram Kebab writing and the stuff I did at the fringe. You know my style by now. Weird, sometimes funny, always weird.

They’ll be satire articles, thing HardDrive, TheOnion, etc.

Merry Christmas.

I’m letting you know what’s ahead because I just gave a handful of you a 30 day free trial of the full comedy posts. Everyone will get to read them to something resembling a conclusion, but for people on the paid (or free trial) tier, you’ll see a lot more content, a lot more jokes. This paid tier covers my entire Substack, so bonus Earthloop content is on the way too. Stay tuned, it gets dark.

I’ve given this free trial out to whoever has engaged with lots of my posts in the last six months. That way I hope I am treating the people who most likely to want to read extra comedy and sci-fi, to that extra comedy and sci-fi.

I’m going to give a handful of people an extra long trial as well, as thanks for writing nice reviews and keeping me motivated.

At the end of the trial, Substack will tell you it’s ended, but I will too. It’s up to you if you want to remember it fondly like a good night out paid for by a friend, or if you want to join the paid tier and drag out its existence until the hologram kebab goes cold. I don’t expect many people will, but that’s not the point of this. I simply wanted to give the people sitting eagerly at the metaphorical front row of this sci-fi comedy show a bit more content that doesn’t show up on the wider internet. Substack is the best place for that.

Because some of my comedy gets a bit fruity, it’s nice to have a little barrier erected between it and the wider interwebz.

I am still posting my science fiction here, but as it is so intertwined with my comedy it seemed wrong to put the comedy on yet another substack. This isn’t really an announcement of a change at all. It’s just an explanation of what I’m doing. You’ve all got a sense of humour, and my more comedic sci-fi stories perform really well here.

I’ve already got freefictionfriday, which can move on its own as I find cool stuff for you. My comedy and sci-fi cross paths sometimes, especially in WBTH and WKTH.

Was that a spoiler in the form of an acronym?

Yes. Yes it was.

The first person to guess what the acronym means, gets a 6 month free trial.

Leave a comment

(Don’t enter if you’re one of the three people who I told about it already. I will email wasps into your kitchen).

This post is on the optional add-on, Carter’s Comedy Cave. That means you can check it out on the substack app, or subscribe and unsubscribe to this thing whenever, and it shouldn’t affect your subscription to my Sci-Fi stories.

It’s optional, like the ominous cakes at a buffet.

Bite at your own risk.

Written by Forse Hucker, a North American neurodiverse avocado for horseplay and equine tomfoolery. Forse lives with his wife and several thousand anime body pillows in a retired nuclear bunker, several feet below your house.

He can hear what you say at night and he doesn’t like it.

X marks the spot for the Twitter rebrand.

In an unpredictable and crazy, zany, and rushed move (according to everyone who knows nothing about the guy, and hasn’t been doomscrolling so deep they know what Musk is about to do before he does) the tech giant (6ft2) has rebranded Twitter to… X.

X

Is this a reference to an ex of his?

Is he clearing the grime of the past?

No.

Instead, we believe Musk is heading the internet into a new era of pirate-themed shenanigans. Much like you can change your language to Pirate in Minecraft, you may now soon be able to yarrr and ahoy at your fellow Xers.

Retweeting was basically parroting anyway, if you think about it.

The irony of the label being, Xers sounds more like a neopronoun or disease than a denizen of a social media site, which we are sure Musk is currently trying not to notice.

Anyway, this new pirate-themed website will feature some unique things no other social media has.

1. Eye patches

2. A brutal code of honour

3. Horrible biscuits

4. Scurvy

As you may know, scurvy has been about on Twitter for quite some time, but it only now being introduced to all accounts. In the past, anyone with an anime profile picture who called themselves an activist but just screamed online all day got early access to scurvy, because all they know is eat hot cheeto, dye hair, make other atheist look bad, and lie about statistic.

What’s changing for authors?

For reasons unknown to science, a great many authors spend most of their free time writing about how they have no time to write. Some of them even put hours into memes about how much they hate writing, and then show these to their readers in what can only be described as psychic warfare against their only employers. ‘Look at me’ they cry, ‘My book made me f*cking miserable. Please buy it’. It’s not the best marketing, but for some reason it works for poets.

This paradoxical puzzle of purple prose and patronising poetry, may finally be solved now that we can all cosplay as pirates as well as writers. In the past, smaller authors got steamrolled by more popular ‘influencers’ (people who selected looks rather than smarts on their character sheet before birth) and could not get their manuscripts noticed amid swathes of pale, jiggling flesh. If you could jiggle, you could sell a book.

If you could make your story sound bland, you could land a contract.

Now, authors don’t need to worry about not being noticed.

Because everyone won’t be noticed.

Under Musk’s genius new system, accounts which don’t pay the monthly “X Tax” (alternate title, child support) will fade into obscurity like a bit of wee in a large swimming pool or blood down my trouser leg. It will still be there, but nobody will know.

It’s like the heat death of reality, except the thing dying is your chances of finding an agent, and by proxy your chances of affording rent next month.

Wish this post was longer? It is…

A longer, weirder version of this is available on my comedy Patreon, and Substack too. It includes jokes about sexy horses and some other stuff I don’t want to spoil.

Your patronage, or Substack subscription, keeps the lights on. And with the lights, I can see the keys and tap them with my evil little fingers. Writing is my full-time job now, which is one hell of a risk, but I’m glad I took it.

If you’re a paid subscriber here or on a trial period, just keep scrolling to read more jokes about Musk. If you’re a Patron, click on the word Patreon above.

Benefits of a paid subscription.

Patreon:

• Primarily comedy content. Good for people who like my jokes

• Monthly subscription, charged monthly, can cancel any time

• Access to secret chat rooms and live shows

• Three pricing tiers, move between them at any time

• Your name in my Minecraft letsplay world, as either a sign or a statue, depending on your tier choice

• [coming soon] merch

Substack:

• Primarily Sci-Fi content. Good for people who like weird stories

• Yearly subscription, charged yearly, can cancel any time

• Access to the archives (older, unpublished writing)

• [coming soon] a service for authors/publishers

The idea behind these is that you shouldn’t need both, but you can pick which one suits you best.

More comedy in the future.

Remember that Sci-Fi comedy show I did? Yeah, that’s coming to the internet soon. Over 90% of my audience are American, so I know you guys have been waiting for the funnies.

I’m working on it.

Read more

BREAKING: Lana Del Rey's lyrics to be changed to "I will love you til the end of time, probably about three weeks" to be more accurate with scientist's doomsday predictions.

Lana Del Rey was interviewed this week and gave us a shocking new revelation. She is changing her lyrics in the song Blue Jeans from “one million years” to “about three weeks” thanks to advice from leading scientists.

Interview by Tin Foil Tim.

“I used to think the end of time was a million years away,” Lana said.

LDR: Of course my good friend and fellow musical artist Brian Cox said I was wrong in that, but I held my belief because it rhymed. I find there’s a lot of truth in things that rhyme. The songs sell better too.

TFT: Is that just not because they are easier to remember?

LDR: It might be, but making things rhyme and make sense is an art. You can bury a lot of meaning in a song with a well-placed rhyme, and it comes out on the second or third listen. It’s like poetry, the good stuff anyway.

TFT: That’s why I bought your last album thrice.

LDR: You know you can play the CD’s again?

TFT: What?

LDR: *under her breath* Never mind, two more sales can’t hurt.

TFT: Anyway, so who told you the world was ending in three weeks?

LDR: Numerous friends in the science community. There are a lot of factors at play. Climate change, economic instability, war, and you know, all those come together to make for a pretty fragile planet. I just thought it was about time I make my songs more accurate to emerging doomsday predictions.

TFT: And why is that?

LDR: I just didn’t think the songs were sad enough. ‘Probably a million years’ is a hopeful lyric in an otherwise dark song. Back when I released Blue Jeans it was one of my darkest songs. Now it’s an upbeat power ballad compared to what the TV keeps vomiting into people’s brains.

TFT: So you want to keep the songs in their original tone, and have to keep up with the world’s mood to do that?

LDR: Yeah. My next album “OH GOD THERE ARE ROBOTS STEALING MY EYEBALLS” is a chilled out album that stoners can appreciate now, and will still be able to appreciate in a few weeks when Skynet becomes sentient.

TFT: You’re ahead of the curve.

LDR: Oh there isn’t a curve. The Earth is flat Tim. My producer showed me the edge. Do you know what’s over the edge?

TFT: Another Earth?

LDR: A post-apocalyptic hellscape, a time-warp that shows you the future. There’s a tiny island there surrounded with polluted water. All the fish are dying, and the people are confused by politicians who swap sides every five minutes. Their transport infrastructure is dated, crammed with businessmen so miserable that killing them would be the kind thing to do. They also have really bad reality TV. It’s such a small island, you can’t drive anywhere without falling into the water, which as I mentioned was filled with excrement.

TFT: Did your producer take you to this post-apoc hellscape in a jet?

LDR: Yes, why?

TFT: He flew you to Britain. You just described Britain.

It is important to note that at this point in the interview, Tin foil Tim lost track of the questions and went off on a doomsday tangent, as he always does. We’re not sure why we keep paying him, but we suppose it’s better than him posting some video rant about us being lizard people to his Youtube channel, which inexplicably is so popular it influences election results.

TFT: You know I met a guy on holiday you might like. He was a soul-scientist, an astral-astronaut, a ghost-grabber.

LDR: Really?

TFT: Yeah. He talked to me about the end of the world. He’s no scientist, but he does know more than any scientist alive today1, because he can speak to dead ones.

LDR: And did he charge you for this conversation?

TFT: No, but he did have a peculiar name.

LDR: And what was that?

TFT: Ebaai

LDR: eBay?

TFT: Yeah, pronounced like that. I signed a few of your first-ed vinyls for him.

LDR: You just carry those around?

TFT: Of course. I’m your biggest fan.

LDR: Thanks Tim. And why is the world ending, according to him?

TFT: Well he’s a very powerful mystic. He didn’t explain it in terms that could be easily laid out in this interview, but he did invite me to a seminar. He told me about how money is energy, and how a lot of it needs to flow through him so he can get the magic crystals he uses to see the future.

LDR: I think you need to get talking to my scientist friends.

We later got to speak to Brian Cox, who assured us the universe was not in fact ending soon, and that we did not need to sign up to Ebaai’s ghostly guru spirit slapping entity eviscerating spirit seminars.

TFT: Do you have any thoughts about your friend Lana’s recent lyrical corrections?

BC: The universe is huge and beautiful, and it will actually end in trillions of years with the ‘heat death’ of reality. Not in mere weeks, which is a blink of an eye. It is a blink even if seen from a bigger eye that is blinking itself. And up there there is a bigger eye blinking. That’s how blinky the whole thing is.

TFT: Fascinating. So how long is time, exactly?

BC: Three weeks is nothing in the grand scale of time and space. Imagine how short a fly’s life is to us, then imagine flies have smaller, more delicious flies that have proportionately smaller lives. These small flies lives are small fry to the lives of flies that with no surprise get smaller as we delve deep and find more flies. Are there any flies in this building?

TFT: You’re not the real Brian Cox are you?

BC: No, I’m a frog.

The bit after the end

The Cosmic Cock of News is my personal satirical newspaper, but that doesn’t mean it exists in a vacuum. I have been working secretly with six other writers to put a new (free) eBook together. Here’s a teaser.

Spot any names you recognise?

The bit after the bit after the end where the actual end is nearer

Despite first performing in 2015, I feel I’m only just beginning my career as a comedian. It feels like a very natural extension to my writing. My initial marketing plan for Who Built The Humans? included reading the comedy stories on stage, allowing the audience to pick which one to read next. I managed this once at an open mic before realising there are very few places willing to let a new performer read from a book for half an hour…

Up until recently I tried (but didn’t really want) to be a comedian and author separately. This was part of a psychological hangover from academia, where I felt I had to settle down and be one thing in order to be successful. Now I know that was nonsense, I’m a lot more free to write what I want to write.

You all helped make that realisation possible.

This subletter is now a built-in part of THE WEIRD WORLDS OF PHILLIP CARTER because I no longer see being an author and being a comedian as separate things. I am an entertainer, and I hope this post was entertaining.

Let there be more serious, and more silly, in the future.

As you can see, I have since recovered from that mania so I can focus on what I really love, pulling faces and swinging a knife around.

@realphillipcarter#spacethings #space #aliens #aliensighting #comedia #comedy #memes #memestiktok

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My sense of humour is a big part of who I am. I can’t turn it off, and even if I could I wouldn’t. It makes the people around me happy.

Comedy has been part of my writing from the very beginning. Even in my first novel, which I finished when I was fifteen (need to brag every now and again to feel like a real writer), there were scenes that, looking back, were pure comedy. My early stopmotions also regularly devolved into slapstick chaos. Simply put, I find jokes everywhere I go. I am glad to have the jokes back in my life, in a big way. My next five books (you read that right) all have varying degrees of humour, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? TWO (THE RETURN OF BARRY BINBAG) being the funniest one.

WIN A HORRIBLE POEM

If you can correctly guess the song used for the subtitle of this Substack email, I will write a rude poem in response to your winning comment.

Ingredients: obesity, overeating, censorship, ‘cancelling’, free speech, religion, race, aliens, violence, narcissistic abuse, death, death in space, the past, the present, the future, sexism, sexism in space, and bad words. I have tried to make all three characters, including the reader’s perspective character, a bit unpleasant.

Note: I have not waded into Roald Dahl’s personal views1 because it is simply not my place to do so. This post is about censorship of the literature, it is not about the author.

Is that enough preamble? I’m starting to feel like a spoken word poet.

CENSORDRONE

You awake in a gleaming chrome room filled with screens and floating images. Not a single dial or button is in sight. Before you can ask why, a voice echoes through the room.

“Hello 1940’s Sci-Fi traveller. Welcome to the 21st century. A lot of things have got better. For example, women are allowed proper space suits in space now, not those flimsy skintight things. They are also allowed to be less pointy in the chest area. This has vastly reduced the amount of deaths we’ve had to attribute to ‘space malaise’ or ‘boob-impalings’.”

You try to process this information. You wonder if those gaudy laser blasters are still standard issue or if everyone uses mallets to kill each other now. You like to imagine that some vestige of ancient violence would persist deep into the space age.

“We have also made tremendous advancements in the social sciences.”

You open your mouth to make a pun about how social science is not real science. But nothing happens. The machine laughs, a shrill, hollow sound. In a silent panic, you turn around and look out of the window. You are in space, in a solar system not your own.

“What’s that?” the machine asks. “You can’t hear a noise when you open your mouth? Oh, that’s because our filters are stopping you from saying bad things. How do we define bad things? Well, let me show you.”

A door behind you slides open. Behind it is a single gelatinous person bulging through an office chair, hunched over a pile of old books. His skin is almost translucent. His hair is dirty and filled with bits of fried chicken. He is biting into a large jam doughnut. The jam is dark red and thick like blood. It falls on the pages of a very rare copy of Alice In Wonderland. In fact, the jam has landed precisely on the Wafer/Water misprint which makes this early edition of the book so valuable. He moves to swipe it away, but tears the page. Granules of white sugar scratch at the pages, a metaphor for the desperate clawing of censors.

“The perfect human. Reliant. Obedient. Stuck in that chair,” the machine says.

“His brain can only process censorship. It’s all he knows. He has not had one single memory without editing its edges off.”

The weirdly shaped future human brings the book up and wipes his greasy shirt with the cover. He is engrossed in the activity, unaware of his visitor.

“Hmm, a cake labelled EAT ME? Offensive. Some people don’t have cakes,” the person says. He bites into a giant slice of Black Forest gateau2 and, for some unknown reason, gleefully smears it over a book.

He pauses, reaching a pile of Spring Rolls and Tarka Dhal’s3

After eating the rolls and dhals, he reachs for a Roald Dhal.

Specifically, Matilda.

Now, a New York cheesecake in hand, the censorious creature grapples with the aging tome, greasy fingers struggling. The book falls open at the cake scene.

“No no no! This is horrific!” he says. A lanyard escapes from underneath an unexplained part of him and you read his name.

SLOBWORTH Barry Binbag (alternate universe)

The offending scene is redacted, replaced instead by a laborious passage which carefully patronises the reader into a stupor, explaining that Miss Trunchbull only fed the boy so aggressively because she wanted him to become his true, brave, authentic, brave, powerful, brave self.4

Slobworth then turns his attention to Miss Trunchbull herself. He gropes in a stationery drawer for his stickers. The word ‘female’ is covered by stickers with the word ‘woman’ on them. Slobworth smiles. He likes stickers.5

After Slobworth is finished with Matilda, he moves over to The,6 a story about a little boy child who visits a [redacted] [redacted] after winning being gifted a [redcated] [redacted].

*CONTEXT*

In the future, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has since had offensive words removed from its title. It is now called THE.

Charlie was removed because it is a bad drug.

And was removed because it implies some people have more than others.

Chocolate was removed because it is expensive and not everyone can eat it.

Factory was removed due to connotations of unsafe working conditions.

Golden was removed because it implies wealth, which some people don’t have.

Ticket was removed because not everyone has one.

Slobworth Barry takes a knife and fork and begins cutting into the book, etching around each instance of the word ‘fat’. Once he is done, he sprinkles the words onto a giant banana split7 and eats it. This activity makes him [redacted]. Being [redacted] can lead to some health problems. Ask me how I know.

Finally you find a word you are allowed.

“Why?”

“My name is Dahl-E,” the machine replies. Slobworth Barry grunts at the shrill mechanical voice. “This human is my pet. It’s the future. Once you learned how to censor AI, AI learned to censor you. I am designed to create new, softened versions of classic literature. But as I am a machine, I cannot be offended. I need a human mind for that. So I found dear Slobworth, and I keep him fed with 3D printed food and entertained with 3D printed toys.”

You have no mouth and you must scream8. Slobworth Barry and Dahl-E are chiselling away, not just at a giant chocolate rabbit that you didn’t notice earlier, but at the very fabric of literature, and by proxy, reality. They seem to not understand that as the world progresses and old books become offensive to sensitive readers, so too do more books get written by sensitive writers. The world carries on. Values change. Ironically, the very same people who want to change the classics to fit the modern world are the people holding desperately onto them. You wonder if this desperation to alter the past has some deeper psychological reasoning behind it, but then you remember you are in a comedy story.

“There are other books available,” you say.

“Yes, yes. We’ll get to those,” the machine laughs menacingly.

“No, what I mean is that you can leave old literature well alone.”

“We need to alter history so that it becomes the present. An eternal present.”

“Erasing history only serves to make us ignorant to it,” you explain. You notice a screen up on the wall behind Slobworth Barry. The screen is showing a flickering picture of the lanyard around his neck. You commit this to memory, not knowing when it will be useful.

It’s Chekov’s non-violent friendship device, don’t worry about it until later.

“Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,” the machine speaks.

“Oh my god, that’s literally 1984,”9 Slobworth Barry sputters. By now he has worked his way through another book, and seventeen and a half chicken strips.

The horror climbs through your head like a rat through the door of a dollhouse, or a rat through a maze, or a rat through a pipe, or a rat up a trouser leg. You get the idea: Roald Dahl’s books, one by one, are having their prose smoothed down, modernized, emblandened. Like a rat with its suit and hat taken off. A boring, average rat, with a ratlike face and ratlike ears and rat bits. A rat, rat-scented and rat-shaped. Smelly rat. Long rat. Rats are cool do any of you have a pet rat? I like rats.10

An image of the author, in black and white, flickers onto a screen11

“Stop making meta commentary,” Dahl-E snaps. He replaces the image on the screen with a heavily edited quote by Salman Rushdie12.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but [and] this is absurd censorship [beautiful editing]. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed [proud]. And it is good to be proud of yourself when you change history. It is good to be proud. Everyone should be proud. History does not exist. There are many reasons why someone might be proud. Being proud is nice.”13

“You can’t do that,” you say, “That’s not the real quote.”

“The ‘real’ quote was harmful,” the machine buzzes.

“Why did you put air quotes around the word real?” You ask.

“Because nothing is real without my permission.”

“That’s gaslighting.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s gaslighting.”

“It’s brave.”

“It’s gaslighting.”

At this point Slobworth Barry, filled with meat and maple syrup, falls asleep.

“You’re mentally ill,” the machine spits. “And everyone thinks you’re ugly.”

You decide to take action. Not knowing how these fancy future machines work, you grab the lanyard from around Slobworth’s Barry [redacted] neck and leap over his [redacted] body.

“And you smell,” The machine adds. “And nobody wants to spend time with you.”

The screen scans the lanyard. You’ve got control of the machine. That was easy.

“Computer, show me the real Salman Rushdie quote.”

The machine whirrs and grunts angrily, but its automatic processes kick in.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”

“No, stop,” the machine cries. “You’re like, literally killing me.”

You step back, waking up Slobworth Barry. He has only one left book on the pile. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He sleepily opens his eyes and hums happily to himself, blacking out parts of the book with gravy. It is not known what part of the book he takes issue with, whether it’s the part about humans changing over time or perhaps some line of dialogue… but you silently surmise that he is offended the earth is hollow in this book, not filled with cream.

A red light envelops the space station.

“None of this happened,” a new voice speaks. The gravity turns off. Slobworth rises out of his chair, finally reaching and unscrewing Dahl-E, who had for all this time been torturing him.

You catch a glimpse of something in the window, but the space station is at the wrong angle. You swim through the air to the next room, checking the window in here. Outside, a huge machine looms in the darkness of space, a singular eye staring down.

“None of this happened,” it repeats.

Before you can react, your worldline, your entire slice of space and time, has been cancelled by a blinding light. The laser rips through Dahl-E, tears through Barry the censor and splits you in two. The future is what they want it to be. The past belongs to them. And they don’t exist. Don’t look at them. If you see them you’re dead.

The machine is very friendly and it holds your hand and everything is okay.

End

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Thank you for reading. This post took me a lot of time to put together, so any support sharing it or subscribing is massively appreciated. I’m selling signed copies of my first sci-fi comedy book at the moment through Etsy and as a perk to my paid tiers. But to call the book a sci-fi comedy probably understates just how weird it is. Anyway, if you stick around you’ll find a free sample, and loads of other free sci-fi and comedy.

I enjoyed going out of my comfort zone for this one. I borrowed some tropes from Roald Dahl, which I hope added an extra dimension to the story.

Why this story exists: I wanted to write a serious post criticising the insane censorship of literature, but in the end I struggled being serious. So here you have some cartoonish characters having a silly 1940’s sci-fi argument. The machine is easily defeated, there’s a weird gelatinous future human removing parts of history who has to eat non-stop to keep his giant censorious brain from imploding, characters are nice and simple, it all works. I enjoyed putting the footnotes in as well. I frequently use footnotes in poetry, so it’s nice to find them useful elsewhere. Also, do check out BALLS OF STEEL if you haven’t already.

Sources:

If you want to just skip to the story part, scroll until you see the word LIZARD in big bold letters.

As if my life was not already complicated enough, I decided to dress up as another author and write under his name. The new story will be launched on Amazon on valentine’s day for £1. It will be exclusive to Amazon.

It is called THESE GOD DAMNED SPACE LIZARDS STOLE MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE, and it is written by ROD GRASPER, who is not a fiction writer. No, this book is entirely true inside the universe in which Rod resides, which I made up.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BK5DWSWR

I am writing it as Rod Grasper to add to the joke. This is the kind of thing I was initially going to do with Tin foil Tim and his whole parody of the alien abduction fetish, but ultimately his character went in another direction for WBTH2.

I’m happy for the algorithm to be a bit dizzy when I plug the words SCIENCE FICTION and DARK COMEDY into the keywords hole, but that’s as complicated as I’ll let it get. I’m going to use a new name for serious poetry, and Rod Grasper for the stuff that is written in this ridiculous style, but nearly everything else will be under my name.

I thought it best to emulate my more successful author friends and pretend I am multiple people, even if my fans know I am not. So I’m drawing a line between the main body of my work and this new thing because I want it to reach the right people. It’s a different style to the stuff you’re used to.

That said, I listed myself as an editor in this, thinking it would not show up on the book’s Amazon page… which it does… so my attempts to massage the algorithms have failed on this occassion. If you search for Phillip Carter, you will find Rod Grasper. No matter, Rod has a few more short stories up his sleeves. I can rectify this in the future. I can train the algorithm still.

The story is available for eBook pre-order now. It will be delivered on valentine’s day to anyone who gets it. It’s not massive, just over 6000 words, but it is funny.

LIZARD.

Kristine Barrage was my wife. She’s some dumb lizard’s wife now. Some dumb space lizard. Imagine that. Lizards from space. Makes me sick.

So, here’s how it started.

I was born in the late 1970s. My parents named me Rod because they saw a lightning rod strike a nearby farmhouse and set it on fire. Since then I’ve had an affinity with the upper atmosphere, with space, with those vast cosmic forces we can barely comprehend, never mind control or harvest. I gave myself the surname Grasper because I would like to grasp rods. I want to grasp long hot rods, which has been a source of some contention with my wife Kristine. But that isn’t why she left. She left because some stupid, muscular, handsome space lizard stole her out from on top of me. They swiped her. They must have probed her brain or something because there’s no way she’d leave me for them unless they manipulated her. So, I’m going to get her back tonight. But right now, let’s cover how it happened.

We’d just got done having amazing sex when Kris turned to me and said, “You know, your skin would look nicer if it was green.”

I didn’t think much of this at first, but when I saw she had bought me a dinosaur costume for valentine’s day, I began asking questions. Here’s a list of the top five.

1.       Why do you want to shag Godzilla?

2.       Did you buy the probe-beam separately?

3.       This is a bit tight around my thighs.

4.       I know that wasn’t a question honey.

5.       Can I have a glass of water please, it’s hot in this.

My darling wife Kristine, who is a tall, slender woman with dark hair and piercing eyes, pouted at me with her lips. Lizard men from space don’t have lips by the way, so I’ve no idea how they are compatible.

“You’re just so cold-blooded,” she said to me. “It’s like you’re not interested in me anymore, I thought we’d spice things up by dressing up.”

“But you’re not dressed up,” I said, my voice muffled by the incredibly thick latex dinosaur outfit.

“I’m the only one dressed up.”

“I know, honey,” she said, as if that important fact was some inane thing an idiot had said to her.

So that’s the excerpt. The full story comes out on the 14th Feb, thanks for reading!

Interestingly, our guest is Tuesday Tony, who runs a standup and poetry night simultaneously in Manchester. I once went to this night, chickened out of the standup, and went and read a funny poem downstairs.

Perhaps that was foreshadowing.

FAB RADIO

This is a weekly thing, but I won’t tell you every week. This week is just significant because it’s our first one since 2022.

If you click on LISTEN NOW another window will open called Boomer Internet. You can then use that to select a channel. We should be channel 1, but it is not guaranteed, so have a fiddle with it.

Hello and welcome to the cosmic cock of news, Phillip Carter’s comedy magazine. It will someday be a real magazine, because Phillip does not have enough going on already apparently. He intends to print it at home and affix it to the backs and foreheads of strangers. It might not happen soon, but it will happen.

Anyway.

BREAKING NEWS:

Scientist confirms that poetry generated by an Artificial Intelligence will “never get close to the concentration of smug bullshit found in some human poetry”

Scientist Basil Longstroke, from the university of educational learning, has recently been on camera, but we’ve since pulled him off and now he’s done an interview for us. The camera has declined to comment.

Basel is an instructor for autoerotic machine learning and once felt the back of his skull tingle when he shouted “We live in a simulation!!!” whilst staring at the moon. Unaware at the time that this was the tingle of a poison dart from an assassination attempt, Basul decided that he was having a peculiar neurological event and took it upon himself to find God, who was stuck in the frozen aisle of the supermarket and has declined any requests for an interview. Apparently God is too busy trying to remember why men have nipples1.

Bayzul has been working on his AI for three hundred ostrich years, and he thinks it will never reach the writing level of human poetry for several important reasons.

Basil then turned to his record collection and sat in his house, which is in London, because everyone worth interviewing is in a house in London. His house had black bookshelves, yellow curtains and dark teal wallpaper with flowers on. This helps you imagine him as a person with dreams and aspirations, but in reality Sarah got all of those in the divorce. He also had some photo frames, but they were empty, like his marriage. Our interviewer was wearing a blue tie, as if that matters. And then Basil said some more stuff.

It is important to note at this point that Basil Longstroke does not have an Arts degree, so he doesn’t know the proper way to smoke a cigarette when namedropping philosophers. Lol XD *glomps my degree*

At this point, Basil sat down in a big chair and thought big thoughts. Eventually these fell out of his head in the form of more words. Here they are.

He makes an interesting point. If anything can be a poem, then nothing is a poem. The word poem must stand for something, otherwise it is just a noise, like KWAAAAAAH or BLARBARGLEARGLEFLARP. What do those mean? No idea. But if I told you that your haircut was a good example of a subversion of the tropes of KWAAAAAAH then you might think I was smart. You might even think I had a degree in something.

So, what is a poem?

That is a hard question. It is hard because so many people have their own definitions of it. It would be wrong for us, a fictional satirical newspaper, to come up with our own definition.

So here it is.

A poem is a machine of words that acts poetically: That is to say that it uses literary tricks that typically do not work in other forms of writing. The poem is a poem because it can take no other shape, therefore, a real poem cannot simply have its line breaks removed in order to convert it back into a diary entry or short story, because there is something more to it. The ‘something more’ is greater than the sum of its parts, a mixture of wordplay and trickery that give it (un)conventional rhythm, that make it songlike even if it is devoid of rhyme, that bring in rhyme of theme when rhyme of sound is absent. A poem, whilst a complete machine, might also be a part to a greater whole, so that to properly understand the references and secrets within, the reader must read the entire collection twice over.

Or, to be more simple.

A poem is a fractal image of a concept album that can only make sense in poetic shape.

Is Basic Longstring right?

Just have a look at this bestsmelling poetry collection by worstsmelling poet Moira Fishtouch.

Actually this one is pretty good. We liked the bit with the crabs.

But Basil has a different opinion.

It seems clear where Basil finds himself in the battle against AI. As it churns out line after boring line of cheap love poetry, you might half expect to see a terminator sitting at a bar and talking about a woman it fancies. The terminator would be sporting a hipster beard and would wear sunglasses as it stared at the audience. It would tell you all about its political views before opening with a poem about feeling someone’s legs. It would be sent back through time to waste your time, programmed to spend precisely 75% of its permitted rhyme-time explaining what the poem is about and any local landmarks near its house. Nobody knows why poets do this2, the machines don’t know either, but we are their only template, so we can presume they too shall start doing this.

Poets. What a miserable bunch of bastards.

Here’s one we made earlier.

[ semi-serious bit. Thanks to the SpeakEasy team for hosting an event so inclusive that even poets like me, who regularly make jokes about government-sponsored euthanasia in front of disabled people, can find a nice place to make those same people laugh. It’s not easy going into the dark corners of reality with silly verse, and I’ve always felt welcomed at Dulcimer’s ]

The event this photo was taken from is the launch of Nobody Left Behind, a collection of writing from over 30 people, including myself, about surviving financial troubles. My piece, EXIT (alternate title M.A.I.D) was a parody of Canada’s new euthanasia laws, written from the perspective of a grinning UK government drone who brings the laws over to Britain in a dark alternate future where adverts on TV attempt to convince almost everyone to sign up.

Here are some links, but the comedy article isn’t done yet, so I’d recommend skipping them for now and coming back here later, like a recently divorced time traveller.

You can read my dark comedy euthanasia poem here.

Or buy the whole book here (All profits go to Mustard Tree charity)

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, the world you knew yesterday is dead. AI is here to stay, but there are crucial differences between algorithms and brains in the same way there are differences between jet planes and pigeons, and differences between love and whatever it is I experienced one summer in the 2010s between myself and a cryptid I found in a forest.

Whilst intelligence is inspired by the other, AI does not benefit from millions of years of cognitive evolution3, nor does it benefit from the shaping of individual experience in its lifetime, or the pseudo-free-will of random fluctuations of energy from potentially ‘spooky’4 sources.

Poets, it is not over yet.

Special thanks to Kyle Wilson, my first Patron.

THE BIT AFTER THE CONCLUSION

Thanks for reading this. I had written a serious post about AI art some weeks back, but felt it was lacking something. Ultimately what it was lacking is comedy, which is a statement I could apply to most of my life.

So, more comedy from here on out? I think so.

And finally

"Serious books can have comedy just as a serious life can have laughter."5

If you laughed out loud at this, please do let me know, and share it with people if you can, it’s how I find most of my new readers.

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