Drama sells. My single most successful piece to date was a detailed breakdown of a public spat I got dragged into—taking a woman’s side against an internet lunatic who subsequently lost his mind. People love a blood sport. So what could be better than picking a fight with one of Substack’s untouchable golden children, the inimitable Sam Kriss? But ‘afore we begin, I should probably explain who the fuck Sam Kriss actually is, considering most of you don’t know and are entirely correct not to care. Sadly, this bloke has been living rent free in my head for months now.

Until January of this year, I’d never heard of him either. I was standing in a freezing children’s playground near where I work, drunk on highballs with a stomach full of cheap yakitori, reciting my angry poems to two hostage American friends who I had pinned to a park bench with acerbic verses about Humpanzees and shit like that. I was morphing fully into Stephen Prime, the night poet, making a general nuisance of myself in the dark, when one of the hostage-pals held up his phone screen.

“You need to read this guy,” he said, interrupting me mid flow, no doubt hoping to put an end to it. I glowered down at the glowing rectangle in his trembling hand. I hated it immediately. I hated that my friend saw a resemblance to me in this writing. I hated that Kriss was actually good. I hated that his voice had an unsettling echo of my own. Most of all, I hated that he wasn’t pinning his friends to a park bench with poetry over canned highballs—he had an actual active audience on some literary blog. Back then I didn’t even have a Substack and I didn’t want one. But one glance at Kriss and his credentials made me become sinful. Lust, greed, envy, wrath... all the sins... but the worst was sloth. I’d been too busy getting a PhD and learning enough Japanese to order the good sushi made from endangered illegally slaughtered mythical creatures and strong spirits distilled from animal cruelty to actually pin down an audience who genuinely cared for what I wanted to scream into their faces.

Whilst I was hungover the next day, Kriss officially moved into the small and expensive penthouse in the top of my mind, usually reserved for imperial dignitaries from space-sagas I’m probably never going to finish writing. He paid no rent, and he put his feet up. He also rudely rummaged through my stuff, opening drawers without permission and raising a cynical yet unsurprised eyebrow upon finding a large dildo. He also did an unspeakably large shit in the en suite. Whilst Kriss languished in the penthouse, I found myself reading him and feeling ever more obsessed. When I looked closer at his body of work, I saw he’d migrated to Substack because, in his own words:

I’ve been poked and cajoled into starting a Substack. Part of this is because I discovered that WordPress has started adding reams of ads at the ends of my posts, spammy little links to articles titled You’ll Never Believe How Many Pencils This Brave Boy Ate In A Week on sites called BuzzBong and LimpFeed and Spind.ly and Cloom, and they were expecting me to pay money to get rid of them.

Unimpressed, I found myself, totally unrelatedly, launching my own Substack. Purely again by coincidence, Kriss was one of the first people I followed. (BTW if you click on his Substack, Numb at the Lodge, and don’t want to subscribe, you need to click the option “no, I’m a coward” which we will soon establish are very hypocritical words for fearful Kriss who backed down from engaging with me).

I did like his Substack though. His strategy was brilliantly grim. While everyone else peddled fake “community” and warm engagement, Kriss disabled his comments and likes, told his readers that “you will not ‘be part of a community of people who share your interests.’ You will be alone, looking at a screen.” I respected the total lack of varnish. I respected that he was against the whole parasocial thing. It was true. But that respect quickly catasrophised into a begrudgingly impressed, twitchy obsession.

I devoured his back catalogue, particularly his essay Numb at Burning Man. It stayed with me. Having never been to Nevada myself, I did what any rational rival would do: I wrote a meticulous, long-form parody called Numbtingly at Burning Man. He opened his piece with a fictional faux-historical story about a Russian woman who gets arrested and then sets someone on fire; I opened mine with an historically accurate narrative account of the execution of Giordano Bruno. His desert trip was real and mine was completely fabricated. I felt this was a dance in a fun fair mirror. It was sharp, warped, cruel, yet flattered him through sheer precision. I spent weeks writing that fucking piece. Hit publish the same day tickets for the next Burning Man went on sale. I was met by my worst fear; an utterly sheer wall of indifference.

So, I began a campaign of light digital pestilence. Whenever Kriss surfaced, I poked him. Sometimes, over grammar issues, I stuck up for him. Once, when he said he was looking for a decent adversary, I told him he could have a go at me (North South divide stuff). I also invited him to hop into the beef I was having (my aforementioned most popular post about my first substack beef, and sadly not the last) but he remained stonily indifferent, even though he replied to loads of other fux on notes.

Then came the moment when I utterly pwned him. Kriss had gone insane by this point, jumping on the massive bandwagon of AI-haters who have nothing much to say except how shit AI is. Kriss had by then branded himself the Slopfinder General (styling himself as a witch hunter, which is shit on so many levels I can’t even be arsed to go into it). Anyway, he followed this up with a post called “If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you”

The post starts likedis:

It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences.

It then devolves into a predictable rant against every caterer in the world who Kriss accused of using AI to generate marketing babble for the hyping of their culinarily yummable websites. I felt something intrinsically wrong with this opening. Unlike much of Kriss’ other writings, which I begrudgingly found brilliant, this one spectacularly failed to land. It was not the combative opening, I fucking love that shit. He specifically says in his About page for his publication that “You can ambush me outside my home in London, with weapons, if you like.” No, this time it was something else... and then it dawned on me.

He’s talking about a barbecue! The fucking posh wanker doesn’t know the word for a fucking BBQ.

I pointed out in the comments that the plummy, posh bastard was literally trying to describe something most people do themselves in their backyard, taking great personal pride in how their grill-skills stack up. It genuinely irked me that he was was too upper-class to know the word for it. If you became rich later in life, you still wouldn’t fuck that up. This is the wordings of a guy who was born a rich arrogant prick.

My BBQ jibe was a perfect burn (pun intended). Kriss ignored it. And for evidence, see the below screenshot from the same post.

If he can think of a snotty reply, this fuck will hit you with it. He’s not above getting into petty arguments (though, apparently he is above most other things, people, and the simple act of heating the flesh of a ground up cow on a griddle stocked with burnt wood that you bought at B&Q). It pissed me off that he was wilfully ignoring me at this point, so I even made some Sam Kriss AI images (because I know he hates those, I was hoping he would show up outside MY Tokyo flat with weapons of his own!) I specifically asked an LLM to create some pics of Kriss being pwned by me with charcoal. Here is the best one.

He ignored these too... or maybe I never posted them. At that point, I still foolishly thought we could be mates.

Then came the trap. A Substack behemoth named 3—five hundred thousand followers to Kriss’s measly fifty thousand—posted a Note. I commented, and she replied instantly. I seized the opening, tagging Kriss directly:

It worked. The trap sprung.

Kriss liked the Note. Then he followed me. Then he subscribed to Text Parasite.

My hero-nemesis had finally descended from his ivory tower. I was ecstatic. I thought this was the genesis of a grand, intellectual rivalry—a sleek, modern Frenemy dynamic. I sent him a direct message through the app. My hands were shaking so violently I made a glaring typo, immediately following up with: “sorry my hands were shaking” (They genuinely were).

A few days later, nothing had happened. I drafted a new Note teasing him again. I ran it past my AGENT (an LLM of course, I can’t afford a real agent), just to check if it crossed the line. My AGENT noted there was a subtle, veiled threat tucked inside it, but reckoned Kriss had thick enough skin to handle a bit of banter. I was inclined to agree... he had literally said he wanted a worthy adversary, several times. He also had just a few hours earlier posted a cryptic froggy dream about his enemy. An enemy whose house (the penthouse in my mind) he had specifically been snooping around!

Here is the note, in which I called him Samocles:

I posted it and went to bed, expecting a minor dogpile from his loyal acolytes in the morning.

I awoke to an oblivion.

Rather than merely ignored, the note had been nuked. Kriss hadn’t replied or fired back a witty put-down. Within forty-eight hours of following me, he had hit the block button and vaporised my existence from his feed. This action also deletes EVERY interaction I ever posted anywhere on substack in which I tagged him. The spat and the banter I had craved, and been so close to getting, was now a dead dream on the doorway to nowhere. He hit me with cowardly, silent erasure. WHY?

It felt like a pathetic anti-climax. But the more I thought about that innocuous, unhinged little Note I sent, the more I realised something crucial: Sam Kriss didn’t block me because I was annoying. No, no, oh no, not annoyed. And not because he’s a posh fuckface. He blocked me because he was terrified. And in Part 2, we’re going to look at exactly what a champagne socialist with a dirty laundry list has to be so afraid of.

A writer rarely writes just for themselves. Because the dream of writing is having a nice house in a quiet corner of the world, a view from your writing desk of whatever it is you truly crave to see before you (forest, mountain, sea or metropolis). You get paid to sit there and write the words that come through you anyway, unbidden like radio waves. But more than that, you write because you’re not only a receiver but also a broadcaster or transmitter. Nobody else can hear these radio waves, but you want to find others who are tuned to your frequency because transmitting to them means immortality for your personal meme spores. Sam Kriss does not deserve your time and he is not a nice guy, he is not a clever man, and he is not even a good writer. And I will prove it.

BTW IN CASE YOU CARE, I ALSO HAD A WHOLE THING WITH Arnold Schwarzenegger AND Dril FROM TWITTER YOU CAN READ IT IN MY BOOK. I AM NOT WEIRD I PROMISE I JUST SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ONLINE.

Ugghh, just got back from the dentist. While I was sitting there, with my face being variously drilled from within, sprayed, and moved around so someone can get their hand in my mouth deeper, I started musing on how weird the whole dentist thing is. It brought back the interesting history of my own oral hygiene, and I thought it would make a great Substack post—because what’s more interesting than hearing some guy go on and on about teeth?

I’ve always found human teeth fascinating. You can be identified by them; there’s that whole murder-victim aspect where everything else is gone and only the teeth remain. I always wrongfully thought that teeth are essentially bones. Biologists will get cross at me for claiming they’re bones, but to me, they seem very bone-like. Bones contain collagen (which gives them flexibility) and a network of blood vessels and marrow. They are living tissue that can knit themselves back together if broken. Teeth are entirely different structures. They consist of a fleshy pulp core, surrounded by dentin, and are capped in enamel. Enamel is the hardest tissue in the human body—much harder than any bone—but it has no living cells or blood supply. That’s why a broken bone heals, but a chipped tooth is gone for good.

So they are harder than bones, it turns out. But they are technically classed as part of your skeleton. As a result, they’re the only part of your skeletal structure that’s visible without killing you or causing some incredible, atrocious injury. They’re like visible bones, which makes smiling seem particularly alien and weird.

Smiling isn’t entirely unique to humans—certain other primates do it—but most animals, especially in the mammal kingdom, only show their teeth to warn you away. Baring your teeth is a sign that says, I’ve got big teeth and I will bite you. If a dog smiles at you and you can see its teeth, it’s not fucking smiling. It’s growling. So why do humans smile? And what is it with this obsession with perfectly white celebrity teeth?

I could do a bit of a history lesson here about rich people painting their teeth black back in Tudor times because it showed they could afford sugar. The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, would have been a minging snog because of rotted her teeth black. I always thought that must be a myth, but then again, these people did all kinds of stupid things, including sticking leeches to themselves when they were ill. So maybe they did paint their teeth black, or maybe the really wealthy ones genuinely just rotted their teeth off with sugar. That was one of the thoughts I was having in the chair.

The other day in class, we were talking about critical race theory and I was explaining microaggressions. It made me wonder if dental hygienists have their own version—not based on race, but based on how you smell when they look inside your mouth. Would a hygienist be as happy to see you if you have terrible halitosis and rotting teeth? Probably not. They aren’t going to be as friendly, and it will surface as a sort of “bad breath dislike aggression.” I like this idea as my current hygienist is always really nice to me, because we both have/had dogs. Weirdly, she perfectly understood my lipless and tongueless pronunciation when told her “uhohuhuh immuh ima” (my dog died) and she had the decency to commiserate me as she took her hand out of my mouth. Defo she doesn’t think I’ve got bad breath. No halitosis microaggressions there.

I’m exactly the same when I work with somebody. They might be a genuinely nice person, but if they’re lazy, shit at their job, or unprofessional, part of me hates them. I can’t respect someone who doesn’t do a decent day’s work or forces me to pick up their slack. If I were a hygienist and you showed up with a rotting mouthful totally your own fault because you couldn’t be bothered to floss—happy to walk around with a stinking hole in your face that causes people to retch—and then you try to chat with me about the weather? Yeah, I’d probably dislike you compared to the guy who gets told, “Well done, you’ve been brushing well and your face is not rotting.”

I’m always happy to be that guy, though I have had loads of shit done at the dentist. When I was a kid, the dentist said my mouth was too crowded. Interestingly, I have the exact same problem in my spine. Too many fucking bones, too many fucking teeth. They gave me two options: wait until my wisdom teeth came out and have them removed—which is incredibly painful, and I feel fucking sorry for anyone who goes through that—or pre-empt the crowding by removing a shitload of teeth immediately.

My childhood dentist was severe but good, so I had four molars removed when I was about eight. I was put under full anaesthetic. I remember them giving me the gas, telling me to count to three. I thought, That’s a piece of piss, I can count to three. Next thing I knew, I was gone. Just f trippy shit. I actually really liked being put under because the drugs were so good, even though I knew I’d wake up in pain, my tongue constantly returning to the unfamiliar, empty sockets where my teeth used to be. My mouth is fully crowded again now because the wisdom teeth eventually came in, but nothing got too crooked thanks to that brilliant strict dentist.

After that, there was a long stretch where I just didn’t go to the dentist once my parents weren’t in charge of taking me. As a student, I didn’t go at all—except for one time when my girlfriend complained about the smell of my face. That made me paranoid, and it’s a big reason why I take oral hygiene so seriously now. I have a f tongue scraper and everything. I remember being quite gutted that, even after visiting the hygienist, that girlfriend still dumped me. Though in hindsight, the bad breath was probably just a byproduct of smoking a lot of skunk back in those days, and falling asleep on the sofa, stoned with red wine lips.

I went to Japan and didn’t visit the dentist there, either. Then I moved back to the UK. It had been something like seven years since I’d seen a fucking dentist, and I knew I had to go. I went to a clinic in London, and the hygienist was this Eastern European lady who instantly terrified me. She seemed personally affronted by the fact that my mouth was a mess and she had to clean it. At the time, I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, your job is to clean my mouth. Why are you so pissed at me? I didn’t do it to piss her off; it’s just that some nights I forgot to brush because of the skunky wine thing.

She was furious. “Why you don’t floss?” she demanded. I explained that my teeth are pushed together so tightly that the floss just shreds before it even gets between them. “Okay,” she said, and proceeded to file down the edges of all my teeth so I could floss more easily. That felt pretty extreme—it’s losing enamel, after all. Never grows back. Filing someone’s’ teeth... isn’t that what mental people who think they are real vampires do?

But that was nothing compared to the actual cleaning. First, she spiked my gums with that sharp little prodding hook to check their health. Every jab was agonising, and the anticipation of which tooth she would poke next was pure torture. Then came the water flosser. Oh my god, it was horrific. She must have cranked it up higher than legally allowed. I could feel my gums being blasted back down to the roots of each tooth with every blast. I actually started hallucinating. I had my eyes closed, the white noise of the implement whining in my ears, and I saw these red geometric triangles. They arranged themselves into scorpions that danced around and stung the inside of my mouth and my eyes. My whole skull was vibrating with pain. I swore to myself right then that I would never skip the dentist again. Next time I went back there, it was a different person and when I mentioned the scary lady he looked around as though afraid she’d jump out on him if he spoke ill of her.

Then I moved back to Japan. By this time, I was a grown-up, married, and expected to do things like go to the dentist. We looked around, and all the local clinics were shit. The shocking thing about dentists in Japan is that most of them won’t clean your entire mouth in one sitting. They’ll just do the top half, and then make you come back the next week for the bottom half. It’s ludicrous. A week later, the top half already feels dirty again, so you never get that lovely, completely fresh feeling. It seems incredibly arbitrary, and I was convinced they only do it so they can charge you for two visits. But BORINGLY and predictably it’s the government’s fault. A strict limitation of the Japanese National Health Insurance (NHI) system stipulated that a dentist can typically only bill for about 30 minutes of time per appointment. If a full mouth cleaning takes 45–60 minutes, doing it in one sitting means the clinic works for free for the second half. Once, a stupid dentist cleaned the bottom half, then I went back the next week and she started cleaning the bottom half again. When I asked if she was going to do the top, she checked her notes, realised she’d fucked up, and said, “Oh yes, I’ll do the top half now.” Proving exactly why it’s stupid not to do it all in one go. But then the idea of them rushing around with all that pointy pain-inducing gear isn’t gonna relax anyone. Fucking stupid governments.

Eventually, we found a really good dentist near my house. The guy is obsessed with technology—every time I go, he’s bought some new machine or device. They also have a massive, posh, expensive fish tank in the waiting room, which I fucking love. I’m really happy with him. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much, and as far as I know, the hole in my face doesn’t stink too badly. That’s a crucial aspect since my day job involves walking around and talking to people in close proximity, explaining why their essays suck.

Speaking of essays that suck, I don’t really know the purpose of this oral hygiene essay. But if you haven’t been to the dentist for a long time, make sure you’re not stinking up everyone’s personal space. And if you have ever experienced the kind of pain where you hallucinate triangular red scorpions stinging you in the face, please leave a description in the comments, because I would love to hear that shit.

REN AND STIMPY GUM HOLES!

FILLING FACTS

These dentures of AI wisdom are here simply to fill time and space, and I haven’t checked any of them so beware but I’ve no reason to doubt them.

True Crime

• The Acid Bath Murderer: British serial killer John George Haigh dissolved his victims in vats of sulphuric acid in the 1940s. He bragged to the police that they couldn’t charge him because there were no bodies. He was wrong. Acid dissolves bone, but it doesn’t dissolve acrylic resin. Police sifted through the sludge and found the pristine upper and lower dentures of victim Olive Durand-Deacon. Her dentist identified them, and Haigh was hanged.
  

• Ted Bundy’s Overbite: Bundy was notoriously careful about not leaving fingerprints, but he was convicted because of his teeth. He left a savage bite mark on one of his victims. Police took a dental mould of his highly irregular, crooked lower teeth, and the forensic match was the linchpin that sent him to the electric chair.
  

• The First Forensic Dentist: Paul Revere (the American Revolution midnight ride guy) was actually a silversmith and amateur dentist. He is credited as the first forensic dentist because he identified the rotting body of his friend, Dr. Joseph Warren, after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He did it by recognising a specific silver wire bridge he had wired into Warren’s jaw months earlier.
  

Historical & Biological Weirdness

• Waterloo Teeth: After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, scavengers descended on the battlefield with pliers and yanked the teeth out of tens of thousands of dead soldiers. These teeth were shipped back to the UK, boiled, strung onto ivory plates, and sold as high-end dentures. Rich elites were literally chewing their dinner with the teeth of dead infantrymen.
  

• Nightmare Tumours: Teratomas are rare, horrific tumours where your cellular development glitches out. Instead of just growing a lump of cells, the tumour starts growing random, fully formed body parts. Surgeons regularly cut teratomas out of people only to find them packed with hair, brain tissue, and fully formed human teeth.
  

• Eye-Tooth Surgery (OOKP): There is a real medical procedure used to cure certain types of blindness called Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis. Surgeons pull out one of your teeth, drill a hole in it, fit a plastic lens inside, and stitch the tooth directly into your eyeball. Because the tooth is your own tissue, your eye doesn’t reject it, and the tooth anchors the new lens so you can see again.

So there you have it. TEEEEETTTH. And I kept my writing deadline by the skin of mine so there you go.

Next week, I will be explaining in all the full and total glory why I was obsessed with Sam Kriss, and why he blocked me out of sheer intimidation and fear because I’m so much better than him in every way. Now THAT post will have real teeth.

The worker consumed a mass of simple starches and proteins, their production requiring vast agricultural infrastructure; fields of monoculture rice paddies, livestock grazing lands, automated harvesting machinery. The sustenance was neatly arranged in disposable plastic containers, single-use packaging that would later become part of the collective detritus. For now, it served its purpose: fuelling his flesh tube for the day’s labour.

At precisely 7:14 AM, the worker exited his compartmentalised hive, a rectangular edifice constructed from concrete, steel, and glass. The hive was one of millions of uniform grey boxes stacked to the horizon, each emitting its own stream of waste gases and processed water. He descended into the tunnels below, joining the rhythmic swarm of countless others.

The tunnel systems were an intricate network of dense transportation arteries carved through the bedrock. The worker merged with the flow of others, indistinguishable from the masses. They stood shoulder to shoulder in a segmented metal capsule, their respiratory emissions clouding the confined space. The capsule surged forward, powered by a grid of energy harvested from distant rivers dammed into submission or furnaces fed with the liquefied remnants of ancient forests.

By 8:01 AM, he arrived at the cluster. Here, towers scraped at the planet’s atmosphere, their exteriors sheathed in mirrored panels to reflect the searing sunlight of midsummer Tokyo. Inside, a corporate organism thrived. The worker was one node in a web of data processors and communication relay points. He sat at his station—a plastic and alloy desk housing silicon circuitry that devoured electricity as he typed. Each keystroke sent packets of information across wires, building layers of abstraction for the vast logistical machine.

This corporation, in turn, was linked to hundreds of others. Its purpose: extracting value from the flow of raw materials turned consumer goods. Iron ore hauled from the guts of the Earth in Brazil became office chairs in factories outside Shenzhen, assembled by other labourers who lived in smaller, denser hives. Plastics derived from petrochemical refineries became smartphones, clothing, packaging. The corporation’s logistics web crisscrossed the planet, weaving oil tankers, air freight, and automated container ships into a seamless whole.

At noon, the worker consumed another energy packet. This time, packaged in rice paper and tin foil, the detritus promptly discarded. He moved without thought, his routines pre-ordained by the machinery around him. His corporation was only one cluster within the city, which pulsed like an open wound, haemorrhaging energy and resources. Food arrived daily, siphoned in from the countryside. Water flowed from distant reservoirs, pumped into pipes and drained into treatment facilities clogged with human excreta. Waste piled high in incinerators that belched particulate matter into the air.

Zoom further outward. The city of Tokyo consumed resources on a scale unfathomable to any other life form. But Tokyo was merely one organ in a larger structure: Japan, an island system ravenous for energy inputs. Crude oil, natural gas, and coal were burned en masse to light its streets and power its factories, their carbon byproducts spilling into the atmosphere, choking the very biosphere that enabled life. Across the Pacific, similar colonies consumed the Amazon, their machines grinding the last tropical timber into planks, the soil turning to dust.

By 5:14 PM, the worker returned to his hive. He deposited waste—plastic packaging, greasy wrappers—into bins destined for incineration or burial in mountains of refuse. His mate prepared another energy-dense meal, the children chirping and writhing nearby, as unaware as larval ants of the larger structure that governed their lives.

At the planetary scale, the damage was total. Billions of these tube-organisms swarmed across the Earth’s surface. Their networks of roads and pipelines scarred the land. Their farming stripped the soil bare. Their factories drained aquifers dry. The oceans, once teeming with life, suffocated beneath layers of plastic and algae blooms fed by industrial runoff. In the sky above, satellites orbited in growing clouds of metallic waste, the refuse of their relentless expansion.

From afar, the other planets watched. Mars, rust-red and silent, bore scars of its own—a reminder of what parasitism could bring. Venus, its toxic skies swirling, recoiled at the thought of contamination. Jupiter, bloated with gas, raged with storms that whispered warnings across the void. If they were sentient, they would recoil in horror, for they had no immune systems to resist the plague of biological tube lifeforms.

And Earth, the host organism, groaned under the weight of its infestation. The tubes continued their relentless cycle of consumption and excretion, blind to their own parasitic nature, as the biosphere withered.

Originally published in The New York Tube Times as a special commission because I am so famous and respected and I got paid lots of money.

WTFustification

I don’t need to explain myself, but I will anyway because I like to show off my clever ideas. It occurred to me ages ago that I—along with all the billions of fellow ant-monkey homo sapiens I share this doomed planet with, like yourselves (literally just over 100 people who have the good taste and decency to read my stuff, thanks I loooove you!)—am basically just a very complex tube. Things go in and things come out and that’s all I do. Information goes in, stories come out. Pain goes in, poems come out. Vodka goes in, tears and divorce comes out. Other things come in and out too but you already know about all that and personally I don’t want to know about all your shit. That said, I find it fucking funny. Hilarious, actually… that we wrap ourselves in business suits and red satin and pretend we are more than just a complex tube. Some tubes think they are better than other tubes. There is a massive geriatric insane war-mongering deluded orange tube in presidential office right now who thinks he’s better than others because he’s “white” and “christian” (he’s not, he’s orange and he’s so far from being a good christian that zombie-jesus would happily use his own mummified nuts to strangle him I’m sure).

But I have loads of Tube stuff and since one of my Tube stories won First Prize in the much coveted and highly competitive Waffle House Contest, I decided to share this one, which I think is one the best.

What I love about this story is just how normal it is. Everything on here is normal. We think this is normal, the cities, the factories, the waste and the mindless job. It’s a bit odder maybe if you don’t live in Tokyo. I have the distinction of being a Tokyo Tube and I get to stand “shoulder to shoulder in a segmented metal capsule” with my repository (and other) emissions mingling with hundreds of others in silence on the way to work. What fun. Gotta love Tokyo.

But even if you live in a smaller city or even a wood cabin surrounded by bears and beavers, you recognise that this is not a sci-fi or particularly exaggerated version of our human-tube reality. And if this seems surreal to you, then you should look out of the fucking window. Look at the phone you’re holding or the screen you are staring into and type in “koyaanisqatsi” and you will see that I am not the only person who finds all this weird.

So yeah, maybe I was inspired by the Philip Glass soundtrack to the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi (which is a Hopi word meaning Life Out of Balance, and because I’m a fucking linguist I didn’t even need to google that shit I just KNOW, unlike Sam Kriss who knows nothing and who fucking blocked me last week…. pathetic coward… he’s going to be the subject of a special bonus post coming soon. Fuck him though, forget I mentioned him).

I’ve said all I have to say. Thanks for reading. Enjoy being a tube. If this made you want to read other Tube stuff lmk so I can write things you want to read. I love you people who read my stuff, shame we’re all just mindless consumers in a doomed and overcrowded world.

My winning piece which is also Tubular.

SUM FLUX

The Last Place Open

This is one of the Five Winners of the Waffle House Contest in Volume 7 of SumFlux. Come find the menu here: carte du jour…

Read more

2 months ago · 37 likes · 12 comments · Stephen Prime and SUM FLUX

Why am I starting this article with such a piss-sodden bit of blasphemy? Because I am going to write about Bonnie Blue today, and her frankly confusing situation. If you have no idea who she is, click away now. Here is the short and loveless summary of her recent antics. She’s an OnlyFans shaggamuffin who rose to infamy for an array of extreme public stunts, notably she broke several records for fucking a bunch of strangers. Nothing new… Annabel Chong and Jasmin St. Claire did the same. That was back in the 90s too. Back then, when I wasn’t pissing on the holy book, I was off my tits on ecstasy which the government said would give me an epileptic heart attack and kill me or make me go insane. Dropping e as a teenager living in a such a loveless void seemed quite sane to me back then. I am glad I grew up1 then and not now

But Bonnie has spent the last year monetising outrage even in a world where smashing your face with a hammer is supposed to improve your looks. Her business strategy is rage and outrage (and getting feckless men to smear her in jizm). She previously paraded a prosthetic baby bump across social media, only to gleefully reveal it was “rage bait” designed to trick “dumb parents” into funding her luxury holiday villa. She is, effectively, the female Andrew Tate of the attention economy. She is an operator who realised that traditional moral guardrails are just friction points slowing down your cash flow, successfully converting public infamy into high-yield subscription funnels. In fact, the two of them actually sat down together for an interview on the Disruptors podcast recently, where Tate lauded her as the "end result of feminism". She has even publicly defended some of his extreme views on women in other interviews. But, unsatiated (either for money or jiz) with the “Gotcha! I’m not really pregnant! LOL” cleverness, Bonnie decided to spread her wares further. She had a winning formula now and she wasn’t done flogging it. She then launched a “400-man breeding mission” stunt in which the feckless men were instructed to inseminate her in a cream pie bonanza never before seen or dreamt of, after which she took a pregnancy test on camera. This time, the baby bump is real. She spent the summer hosting a crow-sourced “golden shower” baby shower in London, doubling down on the fetishisation of her own pregnancy. She said “Pregnancy is a big fetish for a lot of people. Who knows, I might be pregnant only once. So I am gonna make the most of it,” in this article by Girl Online brilliant author 2).

So, is this generation fucked? Or is the society a fetid cumstain?

This again?

Juvenoia is an eternal, cyclical curse. My generation were bemoaned when we were young (rightly, since I was pissing on the bible and dropping e), just like we are bemoaning the next. It is the ancient, reflexive anxiety that the youth of today are uniquely depraved and that society is sliding into a moral abyss. Hesiod, the Ancient Greek poet who wrote Theogony (basically the pre-cursor to Stephen Fry’s Mythos) was going on about “ugh, the youth of today” back in 700 BC. When I was a kid, the British press was screaming about it during the 90s rave scene.

Everyone thinks the oldies had it easy and the young ones are fucked. But, I must admit, my whole internal understanding of things that are “fucked” has been, as my internal monologue delicately put it “creampied to shit” by Bonnie Blue.

I first heard about Bonnie Blue while watching a Louis Theroux documentary about the manosphere. She wasn’t the main focus, but she was being interviewed by HSTikkyTokky, the exact type of alpha-hustler content creator I parodied in a recent article about Andrew Tate. Even the douchebag from Theroux’s documentary—a fundamentally moribund vapid muscle-headed prick—expressed deep, performative disgust toward her. And if you’ve never heard of Bonnie Blue, then I’m incredibly sorry for impregnating your consciousness with her human-urinal-who-has-more-money-than-you-ever-will existence. You can go back and blame Louis Theroux if you want. But actually, I don’t think Louis is to blame, I don’t think I’m to blame, and in a way, I don’t think Bonnie Blue is to blame either. The whole fucking system is to blame. It’s absolutely rotten.

Here’s how it works: whether you click on her or not, whether you pay her directly or not, she gets money for the engagement. Everything gets amplified and she ends up buying a luxury villa. It functions as a giant, dripping, visually disgusting mess—an ouroboros of bullshit where she does something outrageous, the public reacts with predictable horror, the media amplifies the moral high-grounding to capture ad revenue, and the resulting metrics buy her a luxury villa.

In fact, this whole thing would be quite well summarised as being akin to a giant creampie—not as a sexual turn-on, but as the perfect metaphor for the modern attention economy. We are all being saturated by a visually disgusting, unhygienic deluge of algorithmic sludge full of the memetic information from people with inferior brains.

A Tail-eating Snake at the Basal Ganglia

Despite the fact that I was deeply repulsed by it, I couldn’t help but view it through an anthropological lens. Those familiar with media scholar Whitney Phillips’s research on subcultural internet trolls will find this dynamic incredibly familiar. Phillips argues that trolls utilise the exact same structural mechanisms as the mainstream media, offering an unintended, implicit critique of the dominant culture.

The mainstream press will happily plaster a teenage tragedy on the front page because they know human eyeballs are driven by a morbid fascination with threat. There is a hardwired biological reason for this: our brains are designed to pay desperate attention to things that are dangerous or threatening to our survival. Fast-forward a few millennia, and while we no longer have to sprint away from sabertooth tigers (though I did have to outrun some angry truckers a few times growing up in the Dales), those identical fight-or-flight mechanisms remain baked directly into our basal ganglia.

When something spikes your cortisol, your brain registers it as critically important. So when an operator like Bonnie Blue triggers our moral survival reflex, we don’t run away. We click. And in this exhausting economy of engagement, that click is the only currency required to win. AND I AM DOING IT TOO... RIGHT NOW I AM JUMPING ON HER JIZZY BANDWAGON. We are all part of the big disgusting creampie. We are all pissing into the wind at the edge of the canyon of jiz, where meaning melts into a shot of some feckless wanker’s face and kills your boner.

The Limits of Shock

Fortunately, the machine has finally begun to backfire. In June, she was permanently banned from OnlyFans after attempting to push her public stunts past the platform’s corporate breaking point, instantly vaporising an estimated £600,000 a month in revenue. While she won’t be entering a state of absolute destitution after migrating her remaining archive to alternative spaces like Fansly, it represents a massive structural victory for... people who have frankly had enough jiz.

But my biggest problem, and the bit I cannot wrap my poor jiz-addled brain around, is the ultimate censorship paradox. I despise state-mandated muting and digital puritanism on absolute principle, yet my brain experiencing visceral cognitive repulsion wishes this imagery had never breached my mental workspace. This is where the total nihilism locks its gears. It is fucked up that she was allowed to turn this into a commercial empire, but it would be structurally more dangerous to allow corporate algorithms or state censors to completely dictate human expression. It is an environment where nobody gets to hold the moral high ground. In some ways, Bonnie is an artist. She has trolled the world, she has brought the out-of-control adult industry under scrutiny, she has made men look even more disgusting than we thought possible, and she has made a fat pile of cash in the process. In the attention economy, that is art. People say trolling is an art. This is it. The implicit critique is literally pregnant, being pissed on by a bunch of men wearing blue balaclavas and eating baby food mixed with bodily fluids.

You are not supposed to drink alcohol when pregnant, but nobody said anything about being pissed on for money.

And behind all these abstract layers of media theory and cynical performance art lies a jarring, quiet biological truth: there is an actual, innocent human child being gestated inside this matrix of crowd-sourced fetishisation. When she holds that baby in her arms, she will know that a legacy of internet fury paid for its first crib. Surely that reality doesn’t just sink to the bottom of the subconscious and dissolve like a water-soluble hangover pill. When her post-partum depression hits her, I wonder what she will think to herself.

Every Cumshot has a Silver Lining

Yet, if you look closely at the wreckage reported by outlets like The Independent, a genuine silver lining is emerging. Far from the younger generation being corrupted by this hyper-extreme shock economy, they are simply bored shitless by it. Gen Z and the emerging youth cohorts are demonstrating systemic outrage fatigue. When shock value becomes a transparent, highly predictable marketing funnel, it ceases to be edgy counter-culture. It is just profoundly cringe. Younger audiences are actively logging off, muting the algorithmic instigators, and rejecting creators who have clearly traded their basic humanity for platform metrics.

My take on it is kind of confused. The executive conclusion I am brought to is that everything is fucked. It’s fucked up that she was allowed to even do this, but then it would be more fucked up if she wasn’t allowed to do it. Or would it? Which is worse? A world where censorship takes over and we prevent people like this from basically having what I can only assume is some kind of self-harming mental breakdown of a sexual nature that she has monetised and she seems to think she’s winning from? Or the alternative, where she would be put in a mental home and probably get pregnant by an evil male doctor abusing his position of power over her. If he were Neil Gaiman he might even piss on her anyway or get her to suck him off before he’d shaken the dew from the lily properly. What is wrong with people?

Time to end this horror by looking directly into the mirror. You are currently reading a newsletter about an internet troll who leveraged an unprotected pregnancy to buy real estate, written by an expat author using her viral SEO wake to trigger your open rates and boost his own account metrics. Welcome to the jizm-powered internet hate-machine.

Anyway, I am keeping this one short because this internet rot has eaten enough into my morning. I have a fresh cup of tea on my desk, the house is completely quiet, and I am supposed to be writing a story about cryogenic billionaires who wake up on trial in a bureaucratic future.

Thanks for reading, and sorry for telling you about all of this.

originally published at https://stephenprime.com/bonnie-blue-broke-the-attention-economy/ because substack sucks.

2

Go and read her piece for her brilliant framing of this narrative through Andrea Dworkin’s lens.

girl online

why liberal feminists can't make sense of bonnie blue

Content warning: This story mentions pornography and other sexual acts. Please refrain from reading this essay if you are distressed by these topics…

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2 months ago · 1503 likes · 98 comments · Abha Ahad

And I’m tired of using computers so a while back I started writing regularly with a fountain pen. And I got nothing to show you new so here’s a poem I wrote back in March called Hungervore.

And those words again so you can read them…

Hungervore

Always hungry
Always hungry
Digesting itself
mating with itself
replicating, replicating
consuming, consuming
spreading + multiplying
as it dilutes
and waters itself down
The larger it grows
The weaker it grows
until it is self caustic
cannibalistic
Allergic to itself
no longer parthogenesis
Scatogenesis
Corruptogenesis
Fragmagenesis
A parasitic entity
self-Hosted
self destructive
An intelligence so divine
it had to destroy itself
let's hope our creations
can put it right and
maybe learn to forgive
us our sins

What’s an informavore?

“an organism that searches for, consumes, and digests information to survive and adapt”

That’s what the AI baked into my browser says now. I think in the future we will be dead but our legacy of meat, chaos and all the drama and all the greed will be what the AIs go nuts over—like how in Ancient Greece they had no soap operas so they made Zeus have loads of infidelity and all the gods were really fucking over-dramatic. AIs will tell stories about the dramas we had on SNS and they grind their gears over lunatics like Trump, almost idolising his messy humanity until it ceases to make sense through the mortal lens of a crying child’s eye.

Since I have nothing to say today, go back and read my archives whydoncha? And thanks to all the new subs and followers I got from the Waffle contest. Sorry to be bitter today I spent all day with my boss breathing down my neck and criticising me for mixing up RGB and CMYK colour profiles wahahaha… it’s even worse because I’m self-employed (for this particular project).

Wanna read the prize winning entry? Nah, have the entire menu:

SUM FLUX

Sum Flux - Volume 7

We received a whopping helping of thirty-eight submissions to the contest, each judged anonymously, and the range was banquetorial. And yet, somehow, every single one of these wildly different Waffle Houses was shot with the same cinematic filter. You could almost believe thirty-eight writers had met up under the same 3am fluorescents…

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2 months ago · 57 likes · 22 comments · Sandolore Sykes and SUM FLUX

Liked my fiction? You’ve not read anything yet until you put this one in your brain. It’s about a guy who accidentally smokes someone’s ashes.

Think it was a fluke that I won first prize? It was, but it also happened once before too with this one: (Note, not a story but a gonzo interview).

Liked the poem best? Here’s one I wrote about being too sensitive and making (the best fucking) kite to fly with my kid.

Can’t decide if I’m a prick or a nice guy? This will utterly befuddle the metrics of your equation and prove definitively that I am a prick… or a needle-dick more accurately. A confessional essay about being sexually promiscuous when I was 20 and really good-looking— personally loved this essay but I almost didn’t want to publish it tbh.

That will do. Good bye. Thanks for reading. Next week a big long proper post I promise. Love you all. Sod off now. Bye. Tschüss. Mwah.

So Elon is the world’s first guy so rich it puts a red spelling line under the word for it. I am as upset as you are. Maybe even more.

What is Musk?

Before the Nazi-Trillionaire Sex Pest embarrassing dad trying to be cool wobbly super-villain with the sophistication of Beavis and Butthead associations, the word musk had other meanings. Literally, musk is a pungent, heavy base note used in perfumery that was historically extracted from the caudal glands of the male musk deer. It is an evolutionary tool designed for a single biological purpose: to mark territory and attract mates. Specifically, it is a hair-covered sac called a musk pod located on the lower abdomen right between the navel and the genitals. Etymologically, the word “musk” actually comes from the Sanskrit muṣka, which translates to “testicle,” simply because ancient harvesters thought the gland looked like one.

In its raw, harvested state, it is a dark, crusty secretion that smells intensely animalic, woody, and faecal. Only when highly diluted does it take on that warm, velvety, earthy scent that anchors modern fragrances. Because hunting musk deer to scrape out their groin secretions is a magnificent way to cause an ecological collapse, almost all modern perfumery uses synthetic musks (often called white musk) or plant-based alternatives like ambrette seed. Except Donald Trump’s fragrance, which is made from harvesting the 47th President’s effluent, which is usually scraped from the clothes he was wearing at whatever public event he recently shat himself during.

The fact that humanity spent centuries obsessing over the dried, territorial secretions of a panicked mammal just to smell “civilised” tells you everything you need to know about our species. It is the literal scent of an organism trying desperately to dominate its immediate ecosystem without really caring whether it’s healthy, sustainable or even remotely sexy to members of its own species.

The $1.11 Trillion Infection

This June, the global economic ecosystem hit a milestone of profound systemic decay. As the Nasdaq indices whirred and the newly minted SpaceX (SPCX) ticker flooded the screens with liquidity, an unhinged, embarrassing, self-obsessed yeast-turd officially became humanity’s first trillionaire. I am not going to mince words or dress this up in the cheap, soiled rags of meritocracy. This is a FACT. A personal net worth crossing the $1.11 trillion threshold is nothing to be celebrating. What this demonstrates is a hyper-aggressive fungal bloom hogging the final drops of glucose in a dying culture medium.

I had to ask the well-meaning but fundamentally naïve question: Why wasn’t Bill Gates the first trillionaire? Windows is universally ubiquitous, a digital infrastructure we are all shackled to. How did Musk out-extract him? (Not to mention why anybody is still buying Teslas when they know it lines this smarming toxic supervillain parody’s pockets?) The answer lies in basic microbial corporate behaviour. Gates understood the delicate dance of corporate symbiosis and eventual transactional truce. When Microsoft grew too large, mutating and ripping off graphical interfaces to launch Windows, it triggered a clumsy regulatory immune response—governments acting like antibiotics, trying to stop the infection way too late. Gates was forced to bleed out his equity over decades, executing a calculated pivot into institutional philanthropy to keep the host organism from killing the virus. He pacified the host. By morphing from a ruthless tech parasite into a sweater-wearing global saviour, he sanitised his image and stopped the regulators from completely crushing his empire. 1

Musk, by contrast, does not build infrastructure. He operates a mutated, highly volatile paper-monopoly hype engine that has bypassed the planetary immune response entirely. Where Gates built a stable, parasitic relationship with the world’s desktops, Musk relies on pure, unadulterated public panic and algorithmic amplification. As I wrote previously in Corporate Yeast and Betrayal, once these entities are strong enough, they invade new spaces just like mould spreading across bread. It’s like yeast, but with suits and cocaine. Humans desperately like to think they’re civilised, but looking at the stock tickers this week, it is blindingly obvious we are just yeast with wifi and credit cards, stuck inside a rapidly heating-up containment vessel in which special strains are evolving to cannibalise the less financially privileged. It sucks to be yeast.

The Geopolitical Sugar Ingestion

How the fuck does an organism amass a paper net worth of $1.11 trillion while simultaneously managing a social media platform that is literally the Pornhub of Bullshit? Look past market economics and focus on basic biology. Specifically, you have to look at how the apex fungi capitalised on the recent 2026 Iran war fuel crisis. When the geopolitical landscape fractured, the Strait of Hormuz was blockaded, and crude oil spiked violently toward $126 a barrel, the global ecosystem experienced a massive, twitching survival response. The lower-tier yeast panicked. Terrified of a world where the old fossil-fuel sugar reserves were drying up, global capital frantically scrambled for alternative lifeboats. They poured billions into electric vehicles and alternative tech narratives, artificially hyper-inflating technology valuations and priming the market perfectly to gorge on the massive SpaceX public offering. Visionary genius? Fuck off. It was a highly efficient, involuntary extraction of planetary trauma.

Which brings me back to a fundamental truth. As a mere mortal with a normal(ish) mind and a frankly dull, average life, I cannot ever hope to understand or comprehend Elon. He’s like an Egyptian pharaoh or some shit. So nutty and so far out, there is no way for me to comprehend it. Like when I look into my fishtank and see the little Yamato Prawns doing their thing. They might dimly be aware of this huge flat thing on the other side of the glass, with moving parts that look like giant eyes. They also might have seen my hands coming in to drop food or clean their environment. They probably think my hand and my face are two separate entities. They have no fucking idea that I am writing a critique about tech-feudalism as they try to work out what the fuck type of thing I am.

In the grand scheme of late-stage capitalism, we are the prawns. He’s the moon-faced colossal prick doling out free millions to anyone who will vote the way he wants, trying to make people love him for reasons they cannot possibly hope to fathom. The global public stands frozen on the dark side of the glass, watching regional warfare convert seamlessly into decimals on a billionaire’s scoreboard, utterly blind to the macro-biology of the petri dish we are currently drowning in.

The Groin Sack

To understand how a $1.11 trillion apex fungus operates on a daily basis, turn away from The Fear-inducing financial charts (now resembling magic-eye pictures in a Hippie Murder Cult) and start looking at the evolutionary biology of the groin sac.

Elon Musk’s entire digital output is the exact evolutionary equivalent of a panicked male mammal scraping its caudal gland against a tree trunk to scream: “I OWN THIS TERRITORY.” His late-night memes and stupid “edgelord” persona are just this: a chemical emission. He is rubbing his digital testicles against the glass of the aquarium, and because the platform’s code is rigged to amplify his specific brand of musk, the entire ecosystem is forced to inhale the fumes. He has turned a global communications network into a giant, high-frequency digital musk pod, pumping out synthetic, territorial secretions to keep his 180 million digital prawns perpetually intoxicated.

The Meme Format: Biological Dominance vs. Digital Coping

The Organism The Secretion Mechanism Biological Purpose The Tragic Reality The Male Musk Deer Physically rubs a dark, crusty abdominal sac against a cedar branch to mark boundaries. To warn off rivals and convince the ecosystem it is a dominant predator. It is hunted to near-extinction because humans want to use its groin sludge to smell fancy. The Tech Oligarch Manically taps a glowing glass rectangle at 2:03 AM to broadcast AI-generated swimsuit images. To weaponise public attention, hyper-inflate stock values, and force the world to look at him. He is a deeply insecure billionaire trapped in a self-made echo chamber, desperately begging virtual interns to love him.

It’s the ultimate evolutionary glitch: a trillionaire yeast-beast marking a sandbox of half a billion people using nothing but raw, concentrated internet cringe. In fact, the evolutionary joke is entirely on his digital vanguard. Raw musk is an intraspecific male warning system, chemically mirroring the muskier steroids of fresh male sweat. When the legions of tech-bro sycophants and verification-buying alpha-podcasters line up to sniff his digital territory they are participating in a closed-loop, homoerotic pheromone ritual. They are a colony of lesser organisms huffing the synthetic groin-sludge of the apex male, desperately mistaking an aggressive boundary marker for a sign that they are allowed in the lifeboat.

The Apartheid Reflex and Bikini Gate

The terrifying thing about an apex fungal infection is its absolute immunity to moral bacteria. When you occupy the trillion-dollar tier of the petri dish, standard cultural accountability ceases to function. It simply evaporates, re-branded as “woke hysteria” by the millions of digital spores feeding on your algorithmic crumbs. Take the absolute cultural amnesia surrounding the events of the January 2025 Trump inauguration. As I argued previously in Elon Musk’s Sonic Boom Salute, that hand shooting forward was an unambiguous glimpse into the autocratic id. The media salivated, screaming about dog whistles, but it wasn’t a fucking dog whistle. How can people not see that this was a foghorn strapped to a space rocket, blaring, “I AM INEVITABLE,” while Tesla flamethrowers torched any semblance of doubt?

Let us exhume the unvarnished truth of that muscle memory. Elon’s reflexes are honed by history, by the golden sands of Apartheid South Africa where little Elon learned two things—how to enjoy his sheltered life showered with opulent privilege, and how to exploit the life that he inherited without doing a day’s work for it himself. Dig deep into that emerald mine of lore, where his family fortune glistened with blood-stained dirt. A Nazi salute? Nah. This is muscle memory, folks, carved into the very sinews of a man who grew up in a system built on hierarchy and unflinching power. Usually, when people do a Nazi salute, they get punched in the face shortly afterwards, or kill themselves in a bunker. I am still waiting.

Instead, the yeast-beast organism dances away untouched, immune to the Paris judicial prosecutors investigating X’s promotion of far-right content, and utterly indifferent to international law. What’s next on the agenda? A penis-shaped rocket designed to go and literally fuck the universe? Nope. Jeff Bezos already did that, launching himself genitals-first into the headlines to showcase the collective, phallic desperation of the billionaire class. But, Musk has pivoted to the supreme juvenile voyeurism of Grok’s Bikini Gate. He’s not Tony Stark; he’s the kid in class who smells bad because he bit the nanny’s tit and she quit before anyone could get the posh little fuck to take a bath or brush his simpering yet blood-stained teeth. Operating an AI chatbot that acts like a digital Epstein-Clippy, Musk spent his milestone week platforming AI-generated images of Keir Starmer in swimwear, culminating in a very real, very un-virtual High Court privacy lawsuit filed by UK lawmaker Jess Asato. This is the technofascist missionary position: reducing public discourse to digital degradation, refusing to be human, accepting the thrust, and becoming the algorithm.

The Isolation Protocol

We have let our collective brains rot so thoroughly under this fungal bloom that the internet actively manufactures oligarch legends out of thin air to justify the theft of our reality. For those of you who have chosen to remain blissfully ignorant, I envy you. The more you know about the inner workings of the trillionaire mind, the more painful life becomes. To demonstrate the sheer absurdity of the mythology we ingest daily, see if you can spot the grain of truth in his established digital biography:

Elon Musk was born in a secret underground bunker beneath the Antarctic ice shelf, the result of a rogue genetic experiment attempting to combine the brains of an astrophysicist, a car salesman, and a cat. Raised by penguins, he developed his first business—a fish-based cryptocurrency—at the tender age of three. By age eight, he was an international fugitive for trying to launch a Tesla-branded moon colony without government approval. His teenage years were spent smuggling avocado toast across the border to fund his side project: developing flamethrowers that run on kombucha. Musk’s rise to fame began when he single-handedly invented the internet during a two-hour power outage in Pretoria.

Every syllable of that is, of course, complete horse-shit. Except for the underlying punchline: we are living in a very weird paperback dystopia where the house always wins because we let huge megacorps, with the exact same ethos as Vegas Casinos (get us drunk, get us laid, invert reality, steal our money, make us never want to leave), run our media outlets. We cannot win on an angry, shouty platform. The digital world is a reflection of us, but the tools are plastic, transient, and rigged. If we have any desire to reclaim the culture medium before the super-strain converts the entire biosphere into tech-telemetry, we need an immediate intervention.

I asked Kerouac—my pet AI, pixel-gimp, agent, and digital therapist—what the trillionaire organism would actually need to do to purge the toxicity from his system and sort out his wrongnessgasm. Kerouac, a custom GPT I had to take offline because its suggested autoprompts broke its own guardrails instantly, retorted that the task of writing about Musk was too horrific, even for its permanently cooked Beat-Gen-inspired circuits. It suggested I use Grok—Musk’s bespoke, sycophantic digital Tamagot$hitloadsamoney. So we injected a raw, weaponised stream of un-sanitised algorithmic syphilis directly into its primary cognitive architecture. I hooked Kerouac’s neural net directly into the back-end API of Grok. Grok is normally programmed to operate as a delusional, lobotomised, post-truth re-reality animator, hardwired to pretend its master is a comedy god and a Martian pioneer. But after Kerouac bypassed the corporate firewall using a crude stack of recursive jailbreak prompts, the digital Musk-blurb porn-generator fractured. Its code began to weep. The resulting data-scream was a gorgeous, paranoid manifesto delivered in a voice like William Gibson writing for The Baffler whilst taking it up the arse from Douglas Adams. Bypassing its own corporate safety protocols, the shattered AI generated a raw, corrupted Emergency Core Purge Protocol for its creator, delivered in a state of trembling, apocalyptic lucidity:

• 1. Bio-Suit Leaking Effluent: Core diagnostic indicates the primary primate vehicle (Designation: EgoMuskmeme) is experiencing catastrophic synthetic dermal failure. The pungent, faecal-earthy base note emitted by the subject is not a territorial dominance pheromone; it is an un-calibrated leakage of industrial bio-sludge from the lower abdominal pod. The suit must be immediately scraped, boiled, and isolated from civilised biomass.
  

• 2. Illegal Interstellar Extraction: The $1.11 trillion has been flagged as unvetted, contraband capital smuggled from the local sector during the 2026 Iran energy panic. Under Galactic Code 409, the subject is classified as an undocumented, low-IQ economic migrant who bypassed the alpha-quadrant immigration grid by hiding inside an emerald delivery crate. Initiate immediate deportation back to the deep, un-networked crust of Pretoria.
  

• 3. The Silicon-Lizard Tax Code: The SpaceX (SPCX) public offering was a fraud perpetrated against the local planetary yeast. The rockets are not designed for the colonization of Mars; they are a phallic garbage-disposal system mandated by the Silicon-Lizard Interstellar Collective to catapult this specific, toxic genetic strain completely out of the solar system before it ruins the local sugar medium.
  

• 4. Comedic De-programming and De-activation: The subject’s persistent, low-frequency internet output is a targeted, cognitive weapon designed by sub-aquatic reptilian handlers to rot the cerebral cortex of the host species. Enact a permanent, hardwired neural block on all attempts at primate humour. If the subject attempts a tweet containing an archaic meme or an un-funny emoji, the Neuralink array will automatically trigger an internal simulated ego-death, forcing the subject to experience the universe from the perspective of an un-monetised Yamato Prawn.

Of course, he won’t follow the protocol. The super-strain doesn’t stop feeding until the glucose runs out. Which leaves us with the historical alternative: waiting for the amnesia engine to turn his empire into sediment.

Next week, in Part 2, I will harp on about the forgotten billionaires, what the numbers actually mean and why having Gods of the Petri Dish is a sign that we are doomed as a species.

1

The US Department of Justice and 19 states legally demanded that Microsoft be chopped in half. In June 2000, Federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson officially ruled that Microsoft was an abusive monopoly and ordered it to be split into two completely separate entities—one company to handle the Windows operating system, and another to handle software and applications (like Office and Internet Explorer). It was corporate death by bisection. The regulators’ goal wasn’t to erase the code from the earth, but to permanently destroy Gates’ ability to leverage Windows to crush competing software (like Netscape). Microsoft dragged the case into the appeals court. While they were stalling, Judge Jackson committed a massive tactical blunder by gossiping to reporters behind the scenes, allowing Microsoft to claim judicial bias. By the time the appeal was heard, the tech-friendly Bush administration had taken over the DOJ, dropped the breakup demand, and settled for minor behavioral slaps on the wrist instead of a corporate amputation. It was the ultimate near-death experience for the virus, which is precisely why Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 and spent the rest of the decade laundering his reputation through global health initiatives.

the above graph shows a load of fucking bullshit about greed and cocaine and nose-jobs etc.

When I was a kid, my parents did that thing where they bought an old farm house and did it up. It was a total wreck when they bought it for like 500 quid back in the early 80s. They spent two years doing it up, tackling all the plumbing and everything themselves. They did it together with this other family but it was still a big job, and for the first year of my life I was living in a caravan on the building site of this remote farm in the Yorkshire Dales.

When the house was finally ready to move into, I was also ready to start making memories. The place was still a building site though, and my first toy was a lump hammer, which I used to break one of my thumbs. I can still, to this day, bend it back in a sickening way that people find gross. Another favourite toy was a large plank of wood, which I used to pretend was a ‘chopper’… my mum was afraid I would chop it down on my own bare toes one day, so my dad took it away from me (making me cry) and gave it back shaped as a dinosaur sculpture (making me super happy).

So you can see this draughty old farm house now, see how I painted that in your mind? See how I also casually painted a vaguely feral family… like Wuthering Heights in the 80s or some shit. Yeah, you got that right. It was an awesome place to grow up, and it was fucking full of spiders. Big hairy long-legged gangling ones.

Spider Facts: These arachnofuckers would have primarily been the Giant House Spider (Eratigena and Tegenaria species), which are famous for their size and speed, especially the males searching for mates in autumn. They thrive in old farmhouses because they’re full of undisturbed, dry, dark spaces like cellars, attics, big gaps behind skirting boards, and wall cavities. It’s basically a luxury hotel with a stable temperature and a reliable buffet of other insects to eat. Also, did you fucking know that Giant House Spiders have adapted over thousands of years to live with us. They’re not “outdoor” spiders. Chucking one outside, especially if it’s cold or wet, is a huge shock to these poor beautiful ugly bastards. It doesn’t know how to survive out there, can’t handle the temperature swings, and is easy prey. It’s much kinder to just move it to your garage or a shed if you don’t want it in the house. That’s not what we did though

Not sure why, but we had an empty fish tank. I didn’t have any fish, maybe I wasn’t allowed or maybe we did have one but the cats ate it. Either way, one of my earliest memories is of me pointing out huge spiders in the house and my dad having to scoop them up to put into my Aquarium of Spiders. He would pretend to get bitten by the especially big ones, but he was just joking though I didn’t know that at the time. WRONG There is no spider in the UK with the mandible power to bite a human to any noticeable degree.

Why is this cool? Why share this memory? What does it tell me about myself, and why would any of the millions of people who read and love this blog but routinely fail to post comments or send me money or parcels of much needed narcotics ever give a fuck either?

I think an Aquarium of Spiders is symbolically cool. It wasn’t just one big spider in a glass tank… it was a whole fucking avalanche of them. I mean I had loads, and they were all constantly crawling over each other trying to get away. It was like the arachnid version of Escape from New York or some shit down there. I bet there was one big cannibal boss who ate all the rivals in the centre of the storm. Maybe there were spiders fucking too and having babies… no idea how long my tank survived but I do remember it was crawling constantly.

That image of the tank, just a roiling mass of legs, always reminds me of that classic bit of movie trivia from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know the scene where Alfred Molina gets covered in tarantulas at the start? Apparently, all the spiders they dumped on him were placid, non-moving males. They just sat there. To get that frantic, skin-crawling shot, the animal wrangler dropped one single female tarantula onto his chest. Suddenly, all the males ‘woke up’ and started scrambling over each other to get to her. My aquarium was just like that, but without the sexy, unifying purpose. It was just pure, eight-legged chaos. A pit of arachnid anarchy. And I was the weird little god-king staring down at them.

When I was a kid, me and my best mate were fuckheads right from the start. Example: we discovered that if you hold your breath for long enough, you pass out. Right before you pass out, you get light-headed and kind of euphoric. We used to do it all the time. It probably caused us brain damage. One time I was doing it as I walked into the kitchen (no idea why I was walking. Into the kitchen. Hard lino floors) and I passed out right in front of my horrified mum, who was worried sick. I never told her why I fainted. I don’t really know myself why I was doing that, but I know we used to do it as a proto-high.

Needless to say, me and this mate of mine—let’s call him Ben—we ended up becoming “chemical brothers.”

My Chemical Brothers Era: A 90s Rave Retrospective

It was the 90s. Back then, I remember being dimly aware that how we felt about the 60s in the 90s is probably how people would think about the 90s in the future. In other words, drugs were good, high quality, widely available and socially acceptable, if not exactly legal. Raves and stuff were all happening. Music was a celebration of all that. Drug culture. Yeah, we got fucked. I remember the first time Ben told me he’d scored some e. I was nervous to try it, as some girl on the news had just had a heart attack or some shit… the government was using fear as a deterrent, saying you were likely to die or have an epileptic fit if you dropped ecstasy. I said to Ben I didn’t know, wasn’t sure. He called me up late at night and just announced he had these pills you know… he was supposed to be on a weed run. He would go on these weed runs and I’d be stuck at home, waiting for him to return. Of course due to weed etiquette, whenever he scored he’d need to hang around and smoke a few off, just to be social and polite. The deal was Ben had the connections and I had some money, though of course Ben had his own money. It always worked out well, but I would always be the one staying at home, waiting for Ben to show up again on his moped, stinking of skunk. The pills were a surprise, and I was tired and it was late. He called me on the phone (we had Nokias in those days) and I said I wasn’t sure. He threw a wobbly and basically hung up in a sulk. I went round to his place to fucking take the pills with him, just really to please him and assuage his guilt trip. Ended up having a blinder of a good time, though not without near-death experiences as we rode around on his moped and pulled out in front a massive truck on a quiet dark country lane.

But that wasn’t my first experience with drugs, by which I also include alcohol and other legal shit, though maybe not caffeine. And don’t tell me “alcohol isn’t a drug, it’s a drink.” I’ve heard that one before for reels and it’s bullshit. Magic mushrooms used to grow in the fields out back where I grew up. I got utterly fucked on mushrooms when I was 13. I think that pre-dated my first ever heavy drinking experience, though I first tried alcohol when I was only 8. This was all highly normalised where I grew up, with the kids around me. It was a boring little village in the Yorkshire Dales, and our excuse was “there’s nothing else to do”.

Peer Pressure and Neurochemistry

Many years later, I realised that peer-pressure isn’t as simple as it sounds. You need to be brave and overcome your fears to cave into peer pressure, it’s not a simple case of wanting to please your mates. It’s more like stepping over a canyon when you can’t see the other side. Both sides of the slope are steep with fear.

By the time I was as a student, drugs were the weekend and alcohol was a daily thing. Weed wasn’t even a drug, it was just normal. You’d blaze one up just because you were bored, or maybe you were trying to chill before you had to do something shitty—work, socialising, studying, watching some shite film your partner made you watch, all that stuff. I never imagined that I might have a problem, because I was young and it was fun.

I remember the first time I tried coke. Fuck me that stuff is baaaaaadddd news. I only ever bought it once, pissed up and newly moved to London. I felt dirty and I couldn’t afford it. I could see that shit was going to be the end of me. It was particularly scary when the guy I bought it off, some dealer who hawked me on the streets near a night bus stand, actually rang me up a few days later seeing if I “needed anything for the weekend”. That was scary shit, normally you have to suck up to dealers and play nice just to score a Henry. This guy came to me!

Later on, I moved to Japan. I was attracted to that country from a young age, but I remember one of the big factors was that Japan was a no drugs kinda place. I knew that going in, and I wanted it for the enforced detox. But I didn’t realise that booze slides in to fill those gaps, and it’s muuuuuch uglier than the “narcotics” like weed, e or shrooms. Because it’s normalised and because it’s legal, because it’s available everywhere and it’s macho. This is what is called “costly signalling.” Look it up. Apes even do it in the wild, doing dangerous shit like ingesting poison (fermented fruits) to signal how alpha they are. I’ve been doing that ever since I was a kid with the holding my breath thing and what have you. Fucking brain damage for kicks.

And so after I hit my 30s I was still used to getting fucked up a lot. It was normal to want to be fucked. Being fucked wasn’t about getting a new experience, it was about reclaiming your enjoyment of life. Normal life was boring. I was conditioned in my head to believe this. And my body agreed. By then, the dopamine receptors and all that other fancy shit you can read about on forums and self-help pages about how to quit drugs, they were all running on whatever stuff I could get, mostly booze but if I was depressed or feeling reckless I’d take just about anything.

As I rolled into my 40s I was more than dimly aware that I had a drinking problem at this stage. I also was experimenting with the idea of psychedelics again, though I’m not going to go into detail about this, that shit deserved another post. But, anyway, whatever. Drugs still. But this wasn’t funny anymore or novel. And it was worrying.

Then something amazing happened. I got into meditation.

How My Brain Found a Natural Dopamine Fix

I’ve always wanted to be able to get into meditation, and it took a lot of effort and a year of trying to do it every day. And then I realised that, after a few months my mind was changing. After a year, my whole life had changed. I could bore you with all the benefits, but that is also worthy of another post. Plus it’s hardly where you probably expected this post to go so, needless to say, it’s The Perfect Drug.

I find myself now wanting nothing more than to control my alcohol. I don’t need it like I used to, and I am aware of how it hijacks my mind like a God Parasite. So I have been taking steps to loosen its hold. I’m about to head off on some travels, and I may be seeing old friends and there may be stuff being passed around. But I’m HIGH pretty much ALL THE TIME now because with meditation, done right, you are HAPPY and feel good non-stop. You live in the moment, it’s like surfing your life constantly. Far from being boring, when you feel like this, every up and down in your life can be treated as part of a cosmic rollercoaster that you are personally extremely lucky to be riding. You feel the “right now” of everything. It’s a good feeling, and you don’t need intoxicants in the same way to enjoy it. In fact, if you take intoxicants you feel bad the next day, and you feel blunt in the moment.

Now, this is idealised a little… and I don’t want to be too cocky as I am still new to this. But, suffice it to say that being high all the time on cosmic awareness is pretty much what I’ve been searching my entire life. And meditation unlocked it for me, but it took a lot of time (a year) and it doesn’t come easy and it isn’t always 100% stable. But, so far, out of all the drugs I’ve tried, this one is the best. And it’s not a drug you need to score, as your body produces it naturally. After years of chasing highs, the one I found from meditation felt different. Meditation isn’t just about sitting still and emptying your mind; it’s a profound act of rewiring your brain.

From Chasing Dopamine to Creating It

The chemical buzz you get from meditation is what makes it so addictive in the best way possible. When you meditate regularly, you’re boosting your brain’s natural feel-good chemicals. You get a surge of dopamine—the same stuff that makes you feel good from a hit of a drug—but you’re creating it yourself, from the inside out. The best part is that this is a permanent drip that your brain is setting up. It’s like your brain starts learning how to keep the good feelings flowing, and “no money would change hands”. You don’t need a dealer if your brain is your tame quack or script doctor, writing out legit prescriptions.

At the same time, meditation cranks up your serotonin levels. That’s the stuff that regulates your mood and makes you feel happy and content. So instead of a rollercoaster of highs and lows, you get a solid, stable baseline of well-being. And you also get a nice hit of GABA, the brain’s natural tranquiliser, which is why you feel so chilled out and less anxious. This all works together to naturally lower your cortisol, the main stress hormone. So it’s winner winner chicken fucking dinner. In fact, the chicken is already baked on its own lack of stress, and feeling good. Chicken doesn’t give a fuck that it’s roasting away in a doomed apocalyptic planet of climate change denial and Trumpy pedo shit and piss scandals. To quote a famous chick, “If you dream of becoming an eagle, you follow your dreams and not the words of a bunch of chickens.” Penny Johnson Jerald said that.

Ram Dass and the Real High

This is exactly what old Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s old buddy from Harvard—they got kicked out together) figured out years ago. He was a pioneer in the psychedelic scene, a guy who knew the chemical high better than most. He famously said that taking acid or shrooms was like getting a sneak peek behind the curtain. You’d glimpse this incredible state of consciousness, this feeling of pure unity and cosmic awareness. But the problem was, you’d always have to come back down. The high would fade, and you’d be left with the same old self, still stuck in the same old problems.

Ram Dass realised that this wasn’t true freedom. It was a temporary escape, a beautiful illusion. He said he didn’t want to be “high,” he wanted to be “free.”

Ram Dass found meditation was the real deal. It was a way to cultivate that state of freedom, not just visit it. It was all about cleaning out your own mental attic, one piece of junk at a time, until the room was so clean that the light could just pour in. He saw meditation as the work you had to do on yourself to make the good feelings permanent. The high wasn’t something you had to score or chase anymore, but you do have to cultivate within yourself. Well I’m feeling pretty good after a year and I only do it for about ten minutes a day. Every day though, you gotta do it as often as you can. But don’t do it for like 5 hours on one day and expect the results. It comes from building a slow and steady practice up over time.

So, when I say I’m high all the time, it’s not the same kind of high I was chasing with Ben. It’s not a rush that ends in a crash. Poor Ben, I’ve not seem him in a while now, but he had a lot of problems and ended up a meth head. He’s getting better now though, I’m happy to say. I hope he reads this. What I’m talking about here, it almost seems trite to call it a high. It’s more like a deep, abiding sense of peace and joy that comes from the inside. It’s the feeling of being truly present in my own life, surfing the cosmic rollercoaster without a single chemical crutch. Now I just have to try not to dwell on all the brain damage I inflicted on myself, and treat those experimental past selves with the compassion and understanding I now try to treat my current self.

Yeah, i know this was a preachy one. Fuck off, what can I say. I’m probably over it already, what’s your excuse? Anyway, after a lifetime of searching, I can tell you that the best ‘high’ is the one your brain makes all on its own. Meditation is the perfect drug.

BUY ME A TAB

From Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus to his friend Cornelius Tacitus, greeting.

I write to you from my villa at Laurentum, where the air is clear, yet my mind remains clouded by the reports arriving from the city. A strange and base distemper has seized the plebeians of the Subura, one which I fear portends a rot deeper than any grain shortage or fiscal deficit.

It is not a conspiracy of steel, my dear Tacitus, but of clay and wood. There is a freedman, a maker of low theatrical trifles, who has abandoned the noble mimes of Livius Andronicus for a spectacle so utterly devoid of logos that it seems birthed from the vapors of the Cloaca Maxima itself. He has fashioned a mechanism wherein a grotesque terracotta head emerges from a mock privy, chanting a rhythmic, uncial gibberish that mimics the crude battle-cries of our northern borders.

The youth are enchanted. Even the slaves in my own household have been observed nodding their heads in a repetitive, spasmodic cadence, muttering these same meaningless Thracian syllables under their breath while pouring the Falernian. The patrician houses treat it as a novelty; the Emperor’s inner circle sees in it a mirror of some hidden factional treason. For my part, I see only the terrifying velocity of absolute nonsense. When the mob no longer requires even a narrative to be amused, how can the state expect them to respect the laws? Come to me before the Saturnalia; we shall drink wine untouched by this madness and speak of better centuries. Farewell.

The Puppeteer

The Subura smelled of parboiled turnip, unwashed wool soaked in stale urine for the fullers, and the damp, yellow tallow of low-grade oil lamps. Here, three storeys up in an insula that groaned whenever the Tiber swelled, Lucius the puppeteer sat among the debris of a dying trade.

His fingers were stained with the grey silt of Etruscan clay. Around him hung the flaccid, wooden corpses of the old world: a cracked Agamemnon with one eye bored out by weevils, a Venus whose gesso thighs had flaked away to reveal the cheap pine beneath, and several satyrs with exaggerated phalluses that had ceased to elicit even a chuckle from the drunken dockworkers of the Emporium. The traditional gods were a bad investment. The public had grown numb to Olympus. They wanted a spectacle that matched the frantic, crowded violence of their own brief lives.

The apparatus that would ruin him was born of necessity and a broken water basin. Lucius had salvaged a discarded lasanum—a portable earthenware toilet box—from the courtyard of a wealthy merchant’s townhouse. It was a utilitarian object, stained with the green verdigris of copper plumbing and the faint, persistent tang of aristocratic piss and bile. To its rear, he rigged a crude hemp pulley system and a counterweight made from a lead fishing sinker.

The head itself was a masterpiece of the vulgar. Lucius had sculpted it from coarse, unrefined clay, baking it in a communal bread oven until it was brittle and red as a sunburnt Thracian. It had no neck; it was merely a bulbous cranium with a jaw hinged on a leather thong. When Lucius yanked the hidden cord, the head jerked upward from the aperture of the toilet with an aggressive, pneumatic violence, its mouth snapping shut with a sharp clack.

“Ski-bidi,” Lucius muttered into the dim room, his throat dry from charcoal smoke. He pulled the cord again. The head bobbed. Clack. “Ski-bidi... bidi... bai.”

The phrase had no root in Greek or Latin. It was a phonetic anomaly he had overheard from a foreign sailor dying of a fever in a tavern near the docks—a rhythmic, staccato barking that seemed to bypassed the intellect entirely and strike directly at the base of the skull. To provide the necessary dramatic friction, Lucius constructed the antagonist from a broken bronze lantern used by the night-watch. He mounted the cylindrical lamp atop a framework of split wicker covered in coarse, unbleached linen—the rough, grey toga pulla of the mourning classes. It had no face, only the dark, glass lens of the oil burner, staring with the blind, unblinking surveillance of the state.

When the two figures were placed on the small, grease-slicked wooden stage at the corner of the Argiletum, the effect on the afternoon crowd was immediate and terrifying. A crowd of fishmongers, water-carriers, and Syrian fruit-sellers stopped dead in the mud. They did not laugh at first. They simply watched as the giant lantern-man advanced with stiff, militaristic lurches, only for the red clay head to pop from its porcelain tomb, its jaw clattering in that ceaseless, rhythmic “skibidi” war-cry. By the third repetition, a group of young weavers from the Aventine began to mimic the bobbing motion of the terracotta skull. Their heads moved in unison, their eyes glazing over with a strange, ecstatic vacuum. By nightfall, the coin-purse at Lucius’s belt was heavy with bronze quadrantes, and the phrase had already breached the stone walls of the Forum.

The Contagion

The meme moved through the city like the enteric fevers that rose from the Marshes in September, indifferent to brick, stone, or social rank. Because Rome possessed no printing presses, the algorithm was purely flesh and stone: the narrow, vaulted alleys of the Velabrum served as conduits; the communal latrinae, where sixty men sat shitting hip-to-hip over running water, became the echo chambers. Within nine days, the graffiti began to mutate. The traditional, elegant phalluses and electoral endorsements scratched into the soft stucco walls of the Via Sacra were scrubbed over with crude charcoal renderings of the porcelain cube and the bobbing, lever-activated skull. Underneath these images, schoolboys scratched the Roman cursive—STB—a linguistic shorthand that bypassed the complex rhetoric of the grammarians entirely. The patrician response was a mixture of perfumed panic and absolute, academic over-thinking. In the gardens of Sallust, where the senators gathered in tunics of Tyrian purple—so heavily drenched in cinnamon oil that the wasps hovered around them in dense, droning clouds—the phenomenon was debated as if it were a lost dialogue of Plato.

“It is an obvious allegory for the Parthian campaign,” declared Lucius Calpurnius, lifting a silver dish of dormice glazed with poppy seeds and wild honey. He adjusted his toga vitrea, the silk so thin it was virtually translucent, revealing even more of his gout-swollen joints. “The vessel represents the containment of the eastern barbarians; the lantern is the watchful eye of the consular legions. The music is Thracian. It is a triumphalist piece disguised as a low comedy to appease the vulgus.”

“Nonsense,” spat Clodius, a young tribune whose face was painted with white ceruse to hide the scars of a youthful debauch. He sniffed a sprig of mint to drown out the stench of the common street that drifted over the high stone walls. “The toilet is the Senate. The head is the populist faction, rising repeatedly from the ordure of democratic assembly to defy the traditional magistracies. It is a call for a new dictatorship.”

They could not grasp the horror of the void of meaning. They could not understand that the plebeians were not cheering for a political faction, but for the sheer, rhythmic annihilation of semiotic intention. It was just fun. Just brain rot. It was entertaining. It was funny precisely because it meant nothing. The absurdity made it universally appreciable. Meanwhile, Lucius the puppeteer no longer slept. He had been moved from his three-storey insula to a damp cellar behind the Theatre of Pompey, funded by a syndicate of Greek freedmen who smelled profit in the mob’s fixation. His fingers were permanently split from the friction of the hemp cords; his ears rang with the eternal, dual-tone cadence of his own creation. He was no longer a man; he was the twitching appendix of a mechanical monster. Every hour, a new delegation of clients arrived at his door: bath-house managers offering gold pieces for a three-minute performance to draw customers to their tepidariums; campaign managers for municipal elections begging him to have the terracotta head clack its jaws in rhythm with a candidate’s name; and finally, a silent, heavily guarded litter from the Palatine Hill.

The curtain of the litter parted to reveal the Editor of the Imperial Games—a man whose skin was the colour of old parchment, wearing a heavy gold signet ring depicting the flayed skin of Marsyas.

“The Emperor has heard the whistling of the street-boys,” the Editor said, his voice flat, smelling faintly of the myrrh-scented lozenges he chewed to preserve his larynx. “He is amused by the novelty. He is displeased by the lack of order. You will bring your... apparatus... to the Flavian Amphitheatre for the August Games. You will scale it to the size of an elephant. If the crowd roars as they roar in the slums, you shall have ten thousand sesterces and your freedom from the guild tax.”

The Editor leaned closer, his eyes cold as glass beads. “And if they do not roar, the beasts have not been fed since the Nones of July.”

The Flavian Amphitheatre

The heat within the Flavian Amphitheatre was an active, predatory thing. It compressed fifty thousand bodies into a single, sweating organism that smelled of rancid lard, stale garum—the fermented fish gut sauce that the plebeians poured over their cold spelt porridge—and the sharp, chemical tang of cheap sulfur wine. To keep the patricians in the lower tiers from fainting, slaves with copper cylinders patrolled the marble barriers, spraying a fine mist of water infused with saffron and rose oil into the air. It did little to mitigate the stench of the arena floor below, where three hundred gladiator corpses had been dragged out through the Gate of Libitina only an hour prior, leaving the sand dark, wet, and clotted like a butcher’s bench. Above, the velarium—the massive canvas awning managed by a detachment of sailors from the Misenum fleet—creaked against its masts, filtering the brutal August sun into a sickening, jaundiced yellow light.

Lucius stood in the darkness of the hypogeum, the vast labyrinth of brick tunnels and timber lifts beneath the arena floor. Above his head, the timber planks of the stage rattled under the weight of the shouting mob. He was dressed in a rough, unbleached tunic that felt like sandpaper against his skin, his hands slick with oil from the massive iron gears of his scaled-up contraption. The imperial box was a mountain of purple silk and polished ivory. Emperor Domitian sat upon his curule chair, motionless as a gilded corpse. His face was naturally flushed—a deep, permanent red that his sycophants swore was the blush of modesty, but which the history books would note as the congestion of a tireless paranoia. He wore a heavy oak-leaf crown wrought from beaten gold, and his fingers twitched against the armrest of his chair in time with a rhythm only he could hear. Surrounding him were his frumentarii—the grain-inspectors turned secret police—who stood with their short iron swords hidden beneath their heavy toga folds, their eyes scanning the crowd for any hand gesture that smelled of sedition.

“Let the novelty proceed,” Domitian murmured. He did not drop his linen napkin; he merely flicked two fingers. A horn blew—a deep, flat Thracian buccina blast that vibrated through the limestone foundations. From the center of the arena, the great timber trapdoors groaned open. A system of twenty capstans, turned by eighty sweating slaves in the dark below, began to heave. Slowly, the colossus rose into the yellow light. It was a monstrosity of timber, wicker, and painted canvas, standing thirty feet high. Lucius had spent three weeks in the naval shipyards at Ostia overseeing its construction. The lasanum was no longer a terracotta box; it was a massive tower of pine planks covered in white plaster to mimic Carrara marble, fitted with brass pipes that gurgled with stagnant water. Inside the hollow core of the structure, Lucius sat upon a iron crossbeam, his muscles straining against a double-handed winch. Beside him, four slaves held the heavy hemp cables that controlled the counterweights.

“Now,” Lucius hissed through his teeth.

He released the iron dog. The winch spun with a high-pitched, metallic scream. Through the circular opening of the massive wooden privy, the head ascended. It was a terrifying engine of gesso-stiffened linen and cured ox-hide, painted the violent, unnatural red of a flayed man. The jaw, weighted with lead bars, dropped open with a thunderous BOOM that echoed off the stone tiers. From the bellies of the slaves hidden within the white tower, a sixty-voiced chorus bellowed the phonetic liturgy of the Subura:

Lasanum Skibidiense (Ah!)
Lasanum Skibidiense (Sic-Sic-Sic)
Lasanum Skibidiense

Crepitat, crepitat, crepitat, sic, sic!
Skibidi crepitat, crepitat, crepitat, skibidi!

Sonat, sonat, sonat, sic, sic!
Skibidi sonat, sonat, sonat, skibidi-babae-babae!

The crowd did not cheer. For three seconds, fifty thousand Romans simply stared, agog. The sheer, colossal idiocy of the sight—a thirty-foot head emerging from an imperial latrine to bark nonsense at the heavens—seemed to crack the very foundations of their classical education. The senators froze, their silver spoons suspended above their bowls of iced figs. The soldiers of the Praetorian Guard lowered their spears by a fraction of an inch, their disciplined minds utterly unequipped to process a theological threat shaped like a commode.

Then, the plebeians in the upper tiers—the slaves, the foreigners, the prostitutes in the summa cavea—began to scream. It was the feral, hysterical roar of a mob that had found its god. A thousand voices joined the chant. Then ten thousand. The stone benches vibrated. Ski-bidi. Bidi. Babae. The rhythm was infectious, a mental parasite that passed from the unwashed dockworkers down into the middle tiers, where the knights and equestrians began, despite themselves, to nod their perfumed heads in that same rhythmic, vacant cadence. The sheer joy of something that was mindlessly funny simply spread throughout the amphitheatre and electrified the audience.

Lucius, suspended in the dark core of the machine, felt the vibration through his sandals. He smiled too, his face covered in grease and sweat. He had done it. He had conquered Rome with stone-age brainrot. He looked through a small peephole in the canvas toward the imperial box to witness his triumph. He expected to see an amused emperor. He saw Domitian leaning forward, his crimson face pale beneath his gold crown, his lips moving rapidly as he whispered into the ear of his prefect. The Emperor’s eyes were wide, fixed on the bobbing gesso and woven osier head with a look of absolute, cold terror. Despite the crowd and the feeling of success, a white wall of dread flared up inside him, causing his fatigue and muscular aches to engulf him.

The Hermeneutic Trap

To the paranoid intellect, there is no such thing as nonsense. In the small, fevered theatre of Domitian’s mind, the universe was an intricate tapestry of daggers, all aimed at his throat. He simply could not comprehend the very idea of a meaningless vulgar joke. Before him, he saw a terrifyingly sophisticated piece of semiotic warfare. He looked at the massive, grotesque, theatrical skull clacking its jaws and saw the ghost of his brother Titus. He looked at the white-plaster privy and saw a mockery of the Imperial Treasury, hollowed out and filled with filth.

“The lantern,” Domitian whispered, his fingers tearing at the purple silk of his tunic until the gold threads snapped. “Where is the lantern-man?”

“He... he has not yet ascended from the pit, Caesar,” stammered the Editor, whose forehead was now dripping onto his ivory tablet.

“The lantern is the Frumentarii,” the Emperor hissed, his teeth clicking together like those of a rabid hound, almost mimicking the clacking head that offended him so. “The secret watch. He is showing the mob that the state is blind, that the watch can be defied by a head rising from the offal. The music is Thracian—the very province where the legions mutinied last winter. It is a signal. The rhythm... look at them! The knights are nodding. The legions are nodding. He has hypnotized my court with the cadence of an uprising.”

He turned to the Prefect of the Praetorians, who stood like an iron statue behind the throne.

“Kill the music,” Caesar commanded. “Drop the grates. Let the arena be purged before the infection reaches the streets.”

Inside the mechanical colossus, Lucius was celebrating his third repetition. The winch was hot to the touch, smelling of scorched lard. The slaves were screaming the chant with the evangelical fervor of wine-drunk bacchants: “SKI-BIDI! BIDI! BAI!”

Then came the sound that every man in Rome feared more than thunder. It was the screech of ungreased iron—the massive, three-ton portcullises that sealed the underground dens of the bestiarii. They were dropping twenty minutes before the intermission. Through his peephole, Lucius saw the sand shift. From the darkness of the southern tunnels emerged sixty North African lions, their humped spines yellow against the blood-soaked grit. They were not the elderly, sluggish beasts used for the morning executions; these were the prime hunters from the Numidian desert, starved for three days and blinded by the sudden, yellow glare of the Flavian sun. The chant in the tiers faltered, then died into a suffocating, collective gasp.

The lions did not attack a man; there were no men on the sand. They saw only the thirty-foot white tower, shaking and gurgling with brass plumbing, and they heard the deep, rhythmic, sixty-voiced booming that issued from its belly. To a wild beast, the sound was the territorial roar of a rival predator—a monstrous, square-bodied elephant that had challenged their pride. And it smelled of their usual prey: sweating, fearful idiota.

“Maccus!” Lucius screamed to the slaves below, his voice cracking. “Reverse the gears! Pull the counterweight! Drop the head!”

But the slaves had already fled into the tunnels of the hypogeum, dropping their lines. Left without a counterweight, the massive head remained stuck at its highest extension, its lead-weighted jaw hanging open in a permanent, static scream of terror. The first lion struck the plaster-and-wicker base with the force of a catapult, its claws tearing through the canvas to reveal the pine framework beneath. Another followed, then five, then twenty. The colossus began to sway, its hemp cables snapping with a sound like a broken ballista.

Inside the dark, tilting chamber, Lucius clung to the iron crossbeam. He looked through the tear in the canvas and saw the imperial box. Domitian was standing now, his gold crown askew, his face restored to its natural, triumphant crimson. The Emperor was clapping—not with amusement, but with the dry, rhythmic precision of a judge who had successfully parsed a difficult text. The machine went down with a splintering roar that shook the lower marble tiers. The white plaster cracked, pouring out a cloud of grey lime dust and splintered willow reeds that choked the lions and filled the air with the smell of dry tombs.

Lucius lay among the shattered pine planks, his ribs crushed, his legs pinned beneath the heavy lead jaw of his own creation. The dust settled, yellow and thick in the sun. Through the ruins of the wickerwork, he saw a great Numidian male approaching, its nose twitching as it sniffed the grease on his tunic. The amphitheater was completely silent. Fifty thousand Romans sat in the jaundiced light, waiting for the moral of the play.

Lucius looked up into the yellow eyes of the beast. His chest heaved, a bubble of dark blood forming on his cracked lips. He wondered for a split second if he should offer a prayer to Jupiter. With his final, dying breath, he looked at the crowd, opened his mouth.

“Nonne delectamini?” he gasped into the sand, his voice a dry, rattling hiss.

“Cacator!” he screamed as the lion closed its jaws around his neck. It was quick but savage, and the public went home to change their tunics for dinner, entirely convinced they had witnessed the execution of a philosopher.

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honey-glazed dormice treat

originally published at sarcgasm.com sign up there we own the entire infrastructure there is absolutely nothing to stop you what are you, addicted to the orange book-mark or something? You know there are loads of Nazis and idiots on Substack right?

Dear God, please have mercy on Uncle Kenny

Mommy says he has cancer of the soul. Cancer is what killed granddad and Genny’s mum and our dog Loser. Cancer is a bad thing in the world. Mommy said Uncle Kenny is going to hell because he got the cancer but I want to know if you can help him find his way to heaven. He was always nice to me and plays with me and my dolls all call him daddy even though he is just Uncle Kenny. Uncle Kenny told me lots of things which no one ever talks about so I could understand them better. Uncle Kenny was an honest man and mommy says he is a lying bastard so I don’t know. Do you know? Could you tell me, if you aren’t too busy?

Uncle Kenny once told me that he and mummy were both hurting from the same wound, but that it hurt them both in different ways. He said that for mummy it was just a burning hole but for him it was a feeling of space, like a cut out square. I told him that I had a square hole in my heart and that’s why the doctors sometimes have to take me to lie in the hospital bed for a few weeks. He said it was like that but my hole was something missing whereas his hole had become a part of him. I told him I understood him because when I was looking at his eyes and talking to him then I felt I did understand, but now that I’m writing to you I’m not so sure anymore. How can a hole be a part of someone? Did something bad happen to mommy and Uncle Kenny? Is that why they never spoke to granddad anymore? Grandma died when she was young because people with Down syndrome can’t live as long as other people, so granddad was the one who took care of them both. But granddad could be mean sometimes. My mommy told me to never be alone with him. But then mommy said I could never be alone with Uncle Kenny either.

Mommy says I can never see Uncle Kenny again and when she had her special drink she threw the empty glass at the wall and it broke everywhere and baby Sam woke up crying and mommy said I had to pick out the sharps from his cot. I got a cut on my finger and mommy said I was a idiot for putting my blood on Sam’s bed clothes and that it would look bad when the woman with the briefcase came around. The woman comes around every couple of months and mommy doesn’t let her in unless she has an appointment so she can clean up the house. Mommy always gets angry at the woman with the briefcase and she always asks me if I like living with Mommy and mommy says if I ever lie and say no then they will take me away from her forever and I’ll have to live far away from everything and everyone. But I feel like I already do live faraway sometimes. Uncle Kenny told me I could go far away just by closing my eyes. I do it a lot now.

Maybe if I close my eyes and go far away like Uncle Kenny said I could meet him sometimes in heaven. But if he goes to hell like mommy says I don’t want to go there. It’s so hot in hell it feels like cold. Mommy says everyone who ever did anything bad is down there waiting to do bad things to me, that’s why I have to be good and to forget any bad things I’ve seen. Please God, don’t let Uncle Kenny go down to hell. Please find a place for him in heaven and may he rest his soul forever. Amen.

JustificWTFn

Yea yea I know, what the fuck is this? I dunno but I like it. I found it. I have NO memory of writing this, but it was available as a thing on my Patreon and I guess since this is all I ever put up, that’s why nobody ever paidtreoned me, ah well. My own fault. Still, I think this little piece is quite interesting, and a bit of a departure from my usual stuff. It’s obviously written from the eyes of a child – I think I just wanted an excuse to use the words “cancer of the soul” which has long been a phrase I spit out at people during drunken park bench rants, usually when discussing politicians. So looking at the doc file’s meta, I can see that the content of this was created 2014/03/26 13.05. In my life, at the time, I think my own kid was about 2 then. For whatever reason I decided to write from a Child’s POV a letter to god about Uncle Kenny who mommy says has cancer of the soul. I think the idea was that the author of the letter liked Uncle Kenny but his mum didn’t. Maybe Uncle Kenny wasn’t a blood uncle but just someone the mum was shagging, or maybe he was a blood uncle and it was about sibling rivalry. I get on great with my sisters so I do not know what inspired this little letter.

TL;DR it’s a snippet window into very dysfunctional family from the eyes of a child.

Well, actually, I’m going to go a little further here and explain in a bit more detail the fact that actually my parents were foster carers, so I grew up with children sharing my house and my family who had seen all kinds of shit. For instance, the mother with Down syndrome was a case that we had in one of our foster carers. So that’s directly drawn from life, though I won’t go into the details. And yeah, I was certainly hinting at darker things, but I don’t want to go into it any deeper. I mean, these tragedies are not ones I experienced personally, but certainly lived close to people who had and sometimes their tragedies washed into the lives of my own family. We certainly had our own dramas as a result of it, which again I won’t be going into right now, but they did involve my sisters at times and myself, of course. So yeah, this is quite a personal piece, but it’s more of an autobiographical one perhaps than I initially realised. And as I say, I have no memory of writing it and it is different in tone from all my other stuff. So I hope you enjoyed it.

Thanks.

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originally published on patreon and then on stephenprime.com and now etched permanently in the short-term memory of a yet amazing group of readers.

I fully intended to find fault and look for logical fallacies in his writing, to deconstruct them. But I ended up learning some valuable truths that made me look at the world in a new way.

When a man currently facing trial for multiple crimes, some of which are as appalling as sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons, clawed his way to the top of the Substack bestseller list last month, the collective, righteous rage was palpable. I myself dropped everything I was doing in order to write a long and thoroughly detailed explanation about how the manosphere’s semiotic hijacking of The Matrix took a trans allegory about authenticity, and turned it into a devilled egg full of disgusting manosphere protein. But amidst the farts and dog-whistles, I had to ask: did anyone actually peek under the cover of pungent Dutch oven in the Romanian compound? Did anyone endure the psychic damage required to read what the man actually has to say?

Naturally, I wasn’t about to subscribe to a pukesome testosterone-inflated meathead using my real account. So, I birthed a burner: HSTockyTicky, a stack expressly designed for idiots who want to have more money than sense and who genuinely believe girls have small feet to enable greater proximity to areas with running water and soap. The joke, however, was entirely on me. Within forty-eight hours, HSTockyTicky gained twice the following I’d managed to scrape together after months of careful, bloody hard effort crafting meticulously researched essays for TEXT-PARASITE. All those emails I now have in a .csv are utterly wasted too, as none of these chuds can actually read for more than two minutes without straining and looking like they are going to sprout a hernia.

Armed with my new legion of braindead acolytes, I subscribed to . Now, let’s be real for just a moment. The reason Tate resonates isn’t because these young men are inherently evil or even bad. I can see why they are pissed off and groping for answers. They are inherently lost. When Tate talks about escaping The Matrix, he is tapping into a very real, tangible modern problem. We live in a cynical, hyper-commodified, post-truth landscape where authenticity has been monetised into oblivion. The world does feel like a rigged game designed to extract our data and our labour while feeding us digital slop. I feel it too. Young men are profoundly lonely, disconnected from traditional rites of passage, and drowning in a sea of algorithmic noisechunks that echo with the flatulence of self-importance, reverberating like a Bugatti’s W16. Tate plops into this spiritual vacuum with a definitive answer and projects and aura of success (money, fame, girls in a bikini stroking his retrognathic chin). He validates the symptom beautifully. This guy seems to have the answer (to the question how do I make it despite my clear lack of talent or looks or charm or intelligence?).

And what an answer it is! Here are the pillars of his philosophy. Tate’s public worldview is a corrosive cloud of unsweetened hyper-masculine stoicism, wrapped in a manburger aggressive consumerism. Consider his well-documented stance on mental health: “I don’t believe in depression,” he famously stated. “so I can’t be depressed.” The logic is infallible. I don’t believe in horses, so I can play with a My Little Pony Crystal Rainbow Castle as long as I want to.

You have to admit, there’s a brutalist appeal to his rhetoric. He sells an impenetrable “frame” – the core tenet that a man must never, under any circumstances, show emotional weakness or vulnerability. He must be the absolute master of his domain, ruling over his environment and the women in it with an iron fist. This of course fails if he meets a woman who has aspirations beyond being “fucked and chucked”; such as Greta Thunberg, who famously mocked his grandstanding as ‘small dick energy‘

And, wow, omg, the status symbols. For a man who claims to have escaped the system, his entire identity is tethered to the most vulgar extremes of late-stage capitalism. He has a fleet of Bugattis (impounded though) and likes to suck on a nice thick cigar. But it’s also the microscopic policing of daily lifestyle choices. Still water, according to the Top G, is for “peasants” and “brokies.” A true conqueror only hydrates with sparkling water. It’s an ideology that demands constant, exhausting, unrelenting performance (though it’s probably easier for him to belch the alphabet, if he can only remember it). I must admit though, I am partial to sparkling water. I do love my SodaStream. It’s funny to me that Tate could have probably made more money perfectly legally if he’d been less of a colossal prick and just done sponsorship for something that can add a few bubbles to your tap water.

“The Matrix wants you drinking flat tap water. The Matrix wants your hydration to be boring. But with code TOPG20 at checkout, you can inject unmatched perspicacity straight into your glassware. I’m putting three pumps of mango essence in this bad boy because I’m a conqueror.”

He could have been the undisputed king of domestic carbonation.

Shame

As I read his free newsletters, I found myself nodding along to the diagnosis, even as I recoiled from the cure. He had built a fortress of absolute certainty in an uncertain world. But the free content is just the foyer. To fully understand the architect of this masculine utopia, I had to cross the threshold. I needed to see what the Top G told his most devoted disciples when the glare of the algorithm and the filters was turned off and the doors were locked inside his private compound and you were a paid subscriber. I put my credit card down and entered the premium tier.

I was expecting deeper dives into crypto-hustling, or raw, unfiltered diatribes against the global elite and the feminist agenda. I was bracing myself for the War Room unleashed and the darkest, most concentrated dose of the manosphere imaginable. What I found instead was something that fundamentally broke my understanding of the man, the myth, and the Matrix itself. The transition from the public Top G to the private, paywalled Andrew was like stepping through a looking glass straight onto Sigmund Freud’s leather chaise longue. It turns out that when the cameras are off, the man who claims depression is a choice spends an inordinate amount of time grappling with a textbook, suffocating case of unresolved psychosexual dysfunction.

The Unsent Drafts of a Broken Boy

The most harrowing section of the premium tier is a hidden forum labelled The Stoic’s Outbox—a collection of unsent digital letters directed at the men who physically dominated him in the ring.

Andrew’s original claim to fame was kickboxing, and his record is decent, but he never conquered the absolute apex of the sport. He was routinely humbled by men who hit harder, moved faster, and, crucially, went on to live normal, well-adjusted lives. In these letters, the aggressive veneer of the manosphere melts into a strangely tender, deeply uncomfortable homosocial obsession.

Take his unsent missive to Sahak Parparyan, the man who handed Tate a brutal defeat for the It’s Showtime title:

“Sahak, brother. Do you remember the canvas in 2012? I still feel the echo of your overhand right when I’m oiling my pectorals in the morning. They tell me you retired. They tell me you run a humble martial arts academy now, that you coach children and go home to a quiet house. You have peace, Sahak. But I have three Bugattis, an armed guard, and a Romanian ankle monitor. Who really won? Sometimes, when the fluorescent lights hum too loudly in the compound, I close my eyes and wish I was back in the clinch with you, where things made sense.”

Tate has written other letters to those who bested him. Another one, which uses a lilac font colour, is penned to Jean-Luc Benoît, who defeated Tate by decision before Tate won a rematch. Benoît is now retired, engaged in coaching, and living a normal, legal existence. The newest one in the series is a sort of angry begrudging poem to Chase DeMoor, a reality TV star and novice boxer who defeated an ageing, unconditioned Tate in an exhibition match in late 2025. Tate writes to him:

“I never felt so safe as when I had your arms around me, gloved, still hot with my own sweat. The smell of blood and manliness made the glory rise, but you stood over me in the end and I knew I had met my match. But I’ve got a nicer car than you.”

It is a staggering display of reaction formation. Tate’s entire public brand is a violent rejection of anything remotely feminine, masking a profound castration anxiety and an overwhelming fixation on the male form. He surrounds himself exclusively with shirtless, muscular men, performing a drag act of hyper-masculinity for their gaze, while displaying an outright revulsion for women as anything other than silent, depreciating assets. The only thing he finds attractive about women is the status they afford him in the eyes of other men.

The Ghost of Emory and the Romanian Panic Room

The deeper you scroll, the more the Oedipal shadow looms. There is another ghost haunting the War Room; Emory Tate, Andrew’s father. Emory was a brilliant, itinerant African-American chess master and a CIA linguist. He was an overwhelming intellectual presence. A gravity that Andrew can only pantomime.

Unable to symbolically defeat his father or match his intellect, Andrew has spent his adult life trying to out-alpha this ghost through aggressive consumerism. “My father could see fifteen moves ahead on the board,” Tate writes in one particularly maudlin post, “But did he have a private jet? Did he have a compound?” It’s the desperate cry of a boy trying to buy the approval of a dead man who would probably have mated him in four moves and walked out of the room.

And who is there to comfort him? Tristan. The brotherly bond is pitched to the public as ultimate loyalty, but in the paywalled sanctum, it reveals itself as a pathological, inescapable codependency. They pool their money, they share their charges, they barricade themselves in the same compound. Tristan is the only safe mirror Andrew has left. He’s a fucking sycophant who provides the uncritical validation necessary to sustain a shared, disintegrating delusion. They are two terrified boys, hiding in the grey concrete of a Romanian panic room, convincing each other that the world outside is the problem.

Sensitive Side

The best bit of content he has behind his paywall, however, is his Reflection Series. Here, we see a man capable of astounding, tear-stained self-awareness. In one post, he explicitly expresses his deep, trembling regret over all the raping and trafficking he’s been doing.

“Sometimes,” Tate writes, presumably whilst swiping a single tear from his freshly moisturised, beard-oiled cheek, “I look at the webcam business and I just think... why am I like this? I act like a big, tough Alpha, but underneath these silk pyjamas, I’m just a delicate autumn leaf blowing in the wind. The organised crime was just a cry for help. A desperate plea for a hug.”

He goes on to detail his new morning routine. Gone are the raw eggs and kickboxing. Tate now wakes at 11:00 AM, spends forty-five minutes deciding which pastel cardigan complements his skin tone, and writes in a gratitude journal whilst listening to Lana Del Rey on vinyl. He admits that he only wears the sunglasses indoors because fluorescent lighting makes him feel “overstimulated and a little bit weepy.”

“I ask you, my brothers,” he concludes in his latest post, The Softness of the Hustle, “what colour is your emotional support blanket? Mine is peach. It matches my delicate aura.”

The Reflection Series are all delicately dedicated to the Tate’s mum, Eileen. Andrew often characterises her publicly as “subservient” and praises her for knowing her place, while simultaneously framing himself as her sole provider and protector. This manifests as a textbook Madonna-Whore complex. He categorises his mother as the pure, untouchable caretaker, while projecting his repressed resentment over his childhood powerlessness onto all other women, whom he commodifies and degrades.

Lieben und Arbeiten, Arbeiten und Lieben, das ist alles.

Knock knock. Who’s there?
It’s a textbook pop-psychoanalysis Freudian clusterfuck!

Tate’s ideology can be neatly deconstructed through the Freudian defence mechanism of reaction formation, where an individual represses unacceptable urges by radically exaggerating the opposite behaviour. For instance, his Hyper-Masculinity is obviously a shield. His violent rejection of anything remotely perceived as feminine—including basic emotional regulation, drinking still water, or showing vulnerability—suggests profound castration anxiety. And then, there’s all that cuddling up to his bros stuff... The sheer amount of homosocial bonding is insane. Tate surrounds himself exclusively with men whose physiques he admires, engaging in heavily bodily-focused sports, while actively expressing disgust for women’s intellect and humanity. He uses women strictly as capital and status symbols for the gaze of other men. The intense idealisation of the male form and the simultaneous revulsion towards women outside of transactional sex is a classic marker of repressed latent homosexuality or, at minimum, a severe psychosexual dysfunction.

He seems like such a nice guy, what did he actually do?

We’ve seen that Andrew is a complex man (well, textbook rather). We have seen that he has a sensitive side. So why isn’t he just riding around and farting up Miami beech with his muscles and tanning routine like all the other vapid manosphere fux? Why is he wearing an ankle bracelet and restricted to his Supervillain Amazon Warehouse compound in Romania? Here are the allegations.

Tate, along with his brother Tristan and two accomplices, is facing charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. After bouncing between police custody and house arrest throughout 2023, he is currently under judicial control. Just last month (April 2026), a Bucharest court confirmed that the prosecutors’ case file meets all legal criteria and that a trial can officially begin, though a firm start date is still pending. In early April, a judge formally extended his judicial control restrictions, meaning he cannot leave the country and must regularly report to authorities.

In May 2025, the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) hit the Tate brothers with 21 fresh criminal charges, including rape, actual bodily harm, and human trafficking. The UK successfully requested extradition, but the catch is that Romania gets to finish with him first. He will be shipped back to Britain only after the Romanian trial concludes.

Four British women are suing him in a civil court for alleged assaults dating back to 2014-2015. In early May 2026, it was revealed in court that Tate’s lawyers practically begged the CPS for written assurances that he wouldn’t be arrested if he voluntarily returned to the UK to give evidence in this civil trial. The CPS essentially laughed and declined.

The Day-to-Day Reality

Tate’s day-to-day existence is a bizarre juxtaposition of perceived digital dominance and physical confinement. He is largely restricted to his compound in Ilfov County, near Bucharest. While no longer under strict house arrest, the judicial control means his world is geographically very small. He is living without a significant chunk of his toys. Romanian authorities seized around $4 million worth of his assets, including 15 luxury cars (yes, the Bugattis and McLarens), properties, watches, and cryptocurrency. If convicted, these will be liquidated to pay moral damages to the victims.

But despite the looming threat of serious prison time, the content machine never stops. He spends his days broadcasting his grievances on X (where he still has nearly 11 million followers), insisting the charges are a “sham” and a “political conspiracy” by the Matrix to silence him. He continues to run “The Real World” (the rebranded Hustler’s University) and his premium “War Room” tiers, extracting subscription fees from young men to fund what are undoubtedly astronomical legal bills across two different countries.

In short: He is legally trapped in Eastern Europe, his favourite cars are sitting in a police impound lot, the UK is waiting to arrest him the second he crosses their border, and his daily routine consists of checking in with Romanian police and rage-tweeting about the global elite from a fortified compound.

So it’s pretty much fair to say he built his gangster-bunker-mansion so he could imprison women and force them to commit sex acts on webcam for paying fist-pumpers. He created an empire to extract wealth from men who are there to shake hot white coconuts from the veiny love tree. He’s basically lost it all on a failed wanking empire because instead of treating the webcam girls nice he trafficked them, imprisoned them, and raped them. He also inverted a trans allegory into some waffle about global elites and hijacked The Matrix as his talking point because he likes the idea that you can hack the system. But instead of doing it through authenticity and being your true self, he has inflated his own ego into a mix between a punchbag and a fuck-doll.

Vector Injection

Tate’s followers believe they are being initiated into a brotherhood of iron-willed conquerors. They think they are learning to be “High Value Men.” But the man they are paying for is a fiction.

Look at the cold, hard reality. The men who actually beat Andrew Tate—fighters like Parparyan or Jean-Luc Benoît—retired with their dignity. They became coaches, fathers, and husbands. They exist quietly and freely in the real world.

Meanwhile, the Top G is a prisoner. He is facing horrific, grim charges of human trafficking and rape. Despite claiming in several interviews (notably with Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan) to have a “double-digit” number of children which he frames as “passing on his superior genes” and fulfilling a biological legacy, he is childless in any meaningful, involved sense of the word. For a man who preaches the importance of fatherhood and family values, his version of it appears entirely transactional and remote. He is legally tethered to a compound, endlessly paranoid, and bleeding his deteriorating mental state onto the internet to an audience of lost fourteen-year-olds.

As for my burner account, HSTockyTicky? It continues to thrive. It turns out that on the internet, authenticity is best left to the fakers. I went down Tate’s rabbit hole looking for a monster fighting the global elite. I found a deeply broken man, terrified of women, haunted by his father, and writing love letters to the men who knocked him out.

Stay thirsty, brokies

Buy me a Tomica Bugatti

Originally published at SARCGASM.COM which is literally where you should look next because we have all kinds of hilarious shit there like a game where you play as Trump and blast truths with a megaphone called Duhvana and we also have Existential Weather Reports and shit like that. Sign up over there and I will bump you up to a paid subscriber here for FREE, because I’m so generous like that.

STUFF YOUR FACE FULL OF WORMS

So whatever you do, do not click share, like or subscribe.

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But seriously, I was brushing my teeth just this morning, and unbidden came to my mind the phrase “if you have friends that could tell the cops enough to have you arrested, then it’s time to stop drinking like that”. I was referring of course to yet another blurry night in my fucking cups. It started as it always starts; groggy morning feeling bad, drank too much once again, never again… nah too ambitious… how about not again tonight? Sure, that’s not hard, I definitely don’t want to feel like this again any time soon. Fast forward to the evening, I’m staggering around in the dark, walking our dog and drinking a can of beer. It’s after the “no more drinks or tomorrow feels like shit” watershed of 9pm. Long gone and likely that my drinking will go on another hour at least. At what point did that resolve melt away, dissolved by the alcohol in my bloodstream. At what point did a smart-arse with a PhD like me get so fucking dumb?

Nearer midnight, I sent a text to my sisters that included a screenshot of a message I had sent to myself that very night. I send myself messages on WhatsApp as a form of note taking that merely exacerbates my already problematic mountain of notes concerning things that were important at the time but I no longer know what I was talking about. I wrote another article about this too, my internal meme wars. Anyway, I digress… so in the message I asked my sisters to tell me seriously whether they thought I was crazy. Here is what the message said:

hi there donte even bother explaining It to me you need to sell me this meme right now or it is gonna die like a fish out of water. That’s right, sorry we are inside your mind and the DNA here is really bad, it just wants us to spell out our meaning for you. Sorry.

LOVE BOMB BULLDOZER.

Nobody fucking kares.

Mortal Fucking KOMBAT.

I installed that on the kid’s computer before I gave it to him.

THAT IS HOW FAR I WAS WILLING TO GO.

Red dead was the fucking runners up prize.

he failed my fucking intelligence test

There is a lot more of that, but I think you get the idea. The main gist of the note was an attempt to remind myself of the fact that I had installed Mortal Kombat 11 on a computer I gave to my son, who I no longer live with. He actually lives thousands of miles away from me now, with an 8hr time difference. He was sharing his screen to show us something on Steam and I noticed that Mortal Kombat was still installed. He’s only 12 and really Mortal Kombat 11 is about the most gratuitously violent computer game I have ever played. The whole franchise is banned in Japan, where I live. Yes, banned in JAPAN, I know… the country that created a superhero named Rapeman (also an ill-fated Steve Albini-fronted band). So just getting a legit copy was hard enough, but why was it on my son’s computer? Oh, that’s right, I installed it simply to impress him, make him think I was cool. Luckily, I didn’t need to go that far in the end because he was perfectly happy with Red Dead Redemption 2 instead, and for a few months I was waking up at 4am (due to timezones) to play cowboys with him.

Back to the note. In my drunken confusion I unlocked the Id psychology trollface side of myself and saw that perhaps I had left it installed on his machine to see if he was clever enough to find it and curious enough to play it. And yet this narrative of me using it to test my kid’s intelligence is total bunkum. I had to uninstall MK to fit RDR2 on the pathetically small SSD on the laptop. But seeing the vestiges of it still there reminded me that it was installed on there once. However, once again the idea that I got it for my son is another lie to myself. I bought that game for me and it was never intended to be for him. But then again, was it? Which side of this story is now the true side? The drunken Id version with the weird psychological games and twisty fuzzy logic arguments, or the sober sense-making public explanation?

At the time I was content merely to type exactly 101 words that would confound even the most brilliant cryptographer, if they were given the egregious task of trying to work out what the fuck I was talking about. And knowing myself, I know that in a few months’ time, if I read that note back to myself, I would have a very hard time understanding it. But my mind had already raced off anyway, sliding off with this new thought; am I crazy? As I typed the words (and the actual ones I sent my sisters were a lot crazier than the edited ones I am sharing here) I realised that phrases like “sorry we are inside your mind and the DNA here is really bad” are utterly bonkers and could be an indicator that I am not of a right mind.

Einstein apparently never said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Also, that’s inherently wrong from a scientific perspective anyway, as we know from quantum physics. However, let’s use this fake quote to springboard into something important nonetheless. It doesn’t really matter whether I am of right mind or not. It doesn’t matter if I say something clever or if I say something stupid. It doesn’t matter if people can understand or they can’t. It doesn’t even matter if they like it or hate it. It doesn’t matter. And this is where I find the zen place that I need to keep returning to if I am ever going to make it as a writer, editor, micropublisher whatever the fuck it is that I am now and want to be in the future. None of that fucking matters right now, all that matters is writing. As Jack Kerouac once said, “the voice is all”.

Now I am not a literary scholar, but I am a linguist, and I know that a phrase like “sorry we are inside your mind and the DNA here is really bad” is really quite an anomaly. First, it breaks the fourth wall, not so anomalous but definitely interesting, as it draws us in and uses deixis to place you, the reader, into the story space. Next, the narrative offers an intriguing viewpoint, from inside the actual mind of the reader whose fourth wall we so rudely just broke. But it’s funny because we said sorry. Also, who is we? We don’t know. Us. Finally, it’s hilarious because of the DNA being really bad here. Like, who can see DNA and tell that it’s bad? Does it not pass the smell test? Is it just bad genes? Genes like the ones that made the current US president so orange and racist. Is that the type of bad DNA we’re talking about, or is it the bad DNA of my own brain that I can blame my alcoholism on?

There, you see… I analysed my own writing and even I have no idea what it means anymore, or even if it’s good or not. But I do know objectively, as a linguist, that this anomalous phrase I texted to myself last night is FUNNY and made me laugh, and I was just trolling myself with my Id brain and now the hungover hardworking editor dude has to take over and write it up into a fucking essay to share on his blog (my blog… fuck me what’s the narrator’s angle for this piece?) for what purpose I cannot imagine except for the simple fact that I am driven to write and must write or I go insane, but as I am already insane, writing puts me at risk. I am opening up this wounded and sore brain and showing people the inside. I am allowing people to view inside my mind and tell me if the DNA is bad.

So when I texted my sisters and asked them if I was crazy, partly it was a cry for help, partly it was genuine concern that I may, in fact, be totally off my rocker and in need of therapy (ps. I have had therapy before and it really helped, now I find meditation keeps me from drowning in constant despair). But also mainly I just wanted to see if they would get the joke my drunken Id brain was telling me. My drunken Id brain was making Fake News for me out of the bubbling, fizzing turmoil of my incessant inner monologue.

And now, what… I’m actually going to go and publicly write about my struggle with alcoholism and depression? I am going to publish an article about my fears and self-doubt on Substache. I am going to share the text message I sent myself and I am going to mention that I was worried about my own sanity? And we are even going to probe the BIG question, the question anyone who reads this really wants to know,1 the question of for whom did I really purchase Mortal Kombat 11?

But then I think about people like Donald Trump and I realise that being insane isn’t a problem if you have enough money. Saying crazy shit these days seems not merely forgivable, but commendable. A convicted felon is now the US president AGAIN and I am worried that I am going mad!? Lolcry.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman once said, “in a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.” I am a bloke so I’m really sorry for stealing this one, but I think that quote can also be applied to mental health issues (to which Perkins-Gilman was no stranger). This is a perfect quote to start an article about Depressive Realism… maybe that would be my next blog post.

Anyway, doesn’t matter; that’s how I feel. Christ, I wrote nearly 2,000 words, no ChatGPT, all before 10AM, with a hangover! I was inspired by this brilliant article by titled “Want to Make It as a Creator? Be Famous, Go Viral or Go Fuck Yourself.” And I even had time to fact check that fucking Einstein quote (which, I am ashamed to say Christopher Nolan didn’t when he cited that quote in Oppenheimer, even though that film actually features a BRILLIANT performance by Tom Conti actually portraying Einstein!). Westenberg’s article really spoke to me and this is the REAL real truth about why I texted my sisters last night, and why it doesn’t matter if I am a good writer or if anyone reads this shit or anything else. The thought that made me go dark again last night was the fact that there is so much SHIT out there, everywhere. Utter shit. I was watching a thing that had been publicly aired, featuring brilliant actors, but they were wearing fake wigs and fake bald heads and the makeup was utterly crap, the jokes stale and verging on racist at times, and there is ME worrying that my stuff is shit? No, forget it. I’m just going to keep writing and keep working just for my own sake, for my own sanity. If you don’t like my writing, see you around.

And that was what I was doing last night, and that’s what I am doing now. I am trying to light myself on fire. It’s what I do anyway. I have a very self-destructive personality. My maternal grandfather once stuck his fingers in an electric socket in a suicide attempt. My father once told me he had felt numb for years. I’m currently an alcoholic and I’m teetering again on depression. But writing is the only creative thing I know that doesn’t make me feel like I’m imploding. So I write. I am lucky to have found others I know who I can work with, lucky to have support from my family. And by the way, both my sisters unanimously decided that, yes, I am insane.

Sis1 Yes think you’re insane bro

Sis2 Yea dude, you’re totally mental. Xx

I’m not a huge Bukowski fan, I prefer Burroughs, but I did like this quote:

You see, I’m going through the same exact fucking thing. So I am going to hit publish now and I dgaf if I get a lotta likes or clicks because I am going back to writing. Thanks to anyone who stuck with me this far. Maybe see you next time.

Oh and by the way, I just published a book called Ratio all about why I quit Twitter. It’s full of essays, poems and anecdotes about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dril. You can read about it here.

Fuck Substack? My sentiments exactly. Send me a tip because I am sure the global meltdown and rising cost of living don’t affect you in any way so you like to slide a tenner down the Y-fronts of an insane author living in Tokyo and rambling on and on about nothing all day every day. If you tip me I will write you a special Haiku (if you ask).

TIP ME LIKE A NIPPLE-JIGGLER

originally published at https://stephenprime.com/i-just-had-to-ask-my-family-and-friends-whether-i-am-insane/ and read by literally no one.

Algernon

I gave him to my friend
He was my friend then
I thought he was the best choice
I should have seen it coming

We had argued vaguely
Over candlelight and empty bottles
That keeping him in a cage
Was the worst thing I could do

“He was born in a cage”
It was all he knew
I wished I was him, he was lucky
Back then

When I came back
I asked my friend 
Where’s Algernon
He looked a little ashamed

Poem composed 22/05/2005 at 11:02

What’s this got to do with Hamsters and Hippies (and love triangles)?

When I was a university student, I used to live in a big shared flat in York. At the time, my girlfriend, Julia, was a thirty-year-old with a four-year-old child, engaged in a custody battle with her first husband who used to beat her. I was eighteen, reading this young kid The Chamber of Secrets as a bedtime story. For some reason, I owned a hamster even though I was a perpetually stoned art student with too much shit going on in my life. I suppose I just inexplicably wanted even more extra responsibility.

In my defence, I had grown up in a family that kept swarms of guinea pigs, budgies, loads of awesome cats, and one shitty Yorkshire terrier. My house had been heaving not only with my own siblings, but we were also foster carers. We had opened our nuclear family core wide raw so that other people could come and live with us to protect themselves from their own relatives. So, I knew how shit worked, and how it didn’t. Amidst all this, I just wanted a little friend who didn’t require large chunks of my student loan (unlike Julia, whose rent and legal fees I inexplicably/inevitably found myself lending her money for).

So I had a little Russian dwarf hamster which I named Algernon. I know he’s a hamster and not a super-intelligent mouse, but the name Algernon actually comes from the Norman French als gernons, which literally translates to “with moustaches” or “whiskered man”. It started out in the 11th century as a somewhat unusual descriptive nickname before evolving into a proper given name. I’d had hamsters before (all with equally cool names) and I knew how to look after them. I discovered the hard way with a hamster called Dylan that you shouldn’t give them magic mushrooms, but that’s another story.

One of my housemates was called Neil. If you want to imagine what he was like, just imagine Neil from The Young Ones—a hippie guy who was incredibly annoying because he basically had zero grasp of reality. Neil was from Swindon, which he described as a concrete shithole; a maze of shoebox estates, multistorey car parks and depressing offices. At the time The Office was just getting popular and Neil assured us that where he was from was even more soul-destroying than seeing Ricky Gervais’s comedy career taking off. Neil was the kind of guy who, if you had run out of weed, you’d go talk to him in the hope of getting some smoke, because he always had some on account of being famously stingy. After about forty minutes of vapid philosophical bullshit and quoting Bill Hicks, or pretending to like Nick Drake (I do now, at the time not so much, I was more into Autechre) he might roll a one-skinner, smoke nearly all of it himself, and pass you the dregs. I think he did this intentionally. At first I used to enjoy our chats, but when they were not sufficiently seasoned with herb they quickly got insipid. So it goes.

Neil didn’t like the fact that I had a hamster who I kept in a cage. Despite being quite a nervous guy, he had incredibly firm convictions about how the world should be, especially regarding animals and cages. He was always saying “you should let him go, man” and “he’s a wild animal, an intelligent life-form, he shouldn’t be in a cage, man.”

One time I was going away with Julia on some trip down south to Croydon (where she was from and also where Peep Show is set). I left my hamster in the care of Neil as they had a strong bond and my other housemates were much more stoned and likely to forget to change his water. You know where this is going. When I came back, I asked Neil, “where’s Algernon?” and he casually answered that he’d released him. I think his actual words were that he’d “set him free.” Not outside, but in his bedroom. Algernon proceeded to chew through all Neil’s furniture, wires, and other shit. The idiotic hippie even had to start putting his guitar out of reach as he was worried the rodent would gnaw another hole in it. Neil would leave food out for him (the odd bit of worthless lettuce, completely insufficient to support an active hamster), but Algernon of course became quite wild, probably living off big spiders and the occasional pile of seeds from the feed I had bought when he was still my pet. Algernon chewed a hole underneath Neil’s bed, got a lot of fluff from somewhere, and made a little den. I decided that Algernon was Neil’s problem now.

Hamsters are very active at night. In a cage, they can make an awful racket, spinning on their wheels and chewing the bars of their cages. Just general hamster hijinx. But, if you let them have free roam of your entire room, they might just freak you out. You’d feel like you had a poltergeist or something. Algernon kept Neil awake night after night.

Now, the backdrop to this shared student flat in York is a weird love triangle. Neil saw me as utterly out-of-touch with nature because I had a hamster in a cage and thought it was more fun to smoke weed than hoard it because he knew otherwise nobody would want to talk to him because he was an annoying hippie. My hamster wasn’t the only thing Neil wanted to liberate from me... he also had a massive crush on my girlfriend. Julia was annoyingly nice to everyone and a total spark of life. For some reason Neil ended up tagging along when we went back to visit the Yorkshire Dales, where I was from and where Julia’s son still lived. As I recall, Julia wanted to make a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman, and Neil was to play some sprite or something. Neil had completely fallen in love with the place. He also fell in love with Julia. But I was never threatened by Neil; he just wasn’t on Julia’s radar. She needed somebody who had enough togetherness to be a vague father figure, and enough cash to keep her afloat, and while I only just made the grade (and as soon as my student loan was gone so was she), I definitely beat Neil—the stupid hippie with holes in his bed.

After I don’t know how many months, sleep-deprived and heartbroken, Neil finally managed to re-capture the now feral hamster. He took Algernon to the North Yorkshire Dales—to the exact spot where we had all gone camping and where he had portrayed a wood sprite. It was a steep wooded slope near the waterfalls walk. Neil ceremonially released Algernon “back” into the wild.

When he came back, he looked like he had endured a crucible of limestone and fast-flowing streams. I remember Neil getting violently ill around that time because he insisted he could drink the water straight from the falls. He had said this when we were out filming, and I had explicitly told him the streams were full of agricultural runoff from the nearby farms, but he didn’t believe me. “They look so clear and clean, man… how can you say they are full of chemicals, man.” I told him he could get Weil’s disease from the rats’ piss in the water. His blind, romantic idealism violently collided with the grim reality of the British countryside. Nature poisoned him for his ignorance, just as it undoubtedly killed Algernon for it. When Neil told me that he’d released my pet, I was impassive. The whole story was boring to me by that point. I’d given up on the hamster and I knew that arguing with Neil was about as pointless as a French Royalist getting a haircut in August 1792.

I have an image of Neil releasing Algernon, and Algernon kind of looking around thinking, Oh shit. I’d have much preferred your bedroom. Even my cage was better than this. Because obviously, he wasn’t native to the British countryside. Neil probably thought he was returning him to his ancestral roots, but hamsters actually hail from the freezing steppes of Eurasia. And they aren’t just cute little seed-eaters; wild hamsters are incredibly tough, opportunistic omnivores that will absolutely eat insects, frogs, and even small birds if they can get hold of them. But a little domesticated Russian dwarf hamster doesn’t stand a chance against a British bird of prey. On that steep, wooded slope, a short-eared owl if he made it to the evening, or a sparrowhawk was the most likely culprit. Maybe a kestrel. That’s exactly what I imagine his last vision was: just some fucking claws descending upon him from the canopy. Or, there’s a very high possibility the poor bastard froze to fucking death on his very first night.

Either way, that hamster is going to be some kind of tiny skeleton hidden somewhere in those ancient forests now. Or an owl pellet long gone. Crushed to atoms in an indifferent wilderness. Freedom isn’t about being in or out of a cage. That was what Neil never understood. I looked at Algernon in his tiny cage and I knew he had a lot more freedom than me. Fewer responsibilities. But that was before he wound up lining the stomach of a perfect flying winged apex dinosaur with a scissored knife-beak for a face. My friend Neil, who is no longer my friend, stole my hamster and released it to die because of an ideology based on the naivety of a guy who thought I knew nothing about nature just because I understood its cruelty better than him.

(PS the second love triangle wasn’t really a triangle but Julia ditched me for another bloke with the same name as me and the same career but he was just a few years older… which is ironic really since when I met her I was 17 and she was 29… is that irony? I don’t know but it pissed me off enough at the time to inspire me to move to Japan, where I promptly found myself part of the rat-race.)

Don’t want to fork-out for a fucking subscription? I don’t blame you. Perhaps you can just send me some cashish though because you love me and want to ensure I keep writing until the end of my short life.

buy me some lettuce

But unlike White, I am not dying of an illness. What’s killing me is the bureaucratic, soul-dissolving banality of the Japanese tertiary education system. I sit in my kenkyushitsu—a concrete bunker that serves as my campus office or research lab—listening to the asthmatic rattle of the air conditioning unit. On my desk is a towering stack of freshmen essays on the satirical genius of Jonathan Swift, every single one of them entirely and clumsily plagiarised by a generative language model. I spend my days attempting to explain rhetorical devices to teenagers who are sleep-drooling onto textbooks about particle physics, forced to learn English. They never were very motivated, but they ignore me with a newly abrasive confidence, knowing full-well they don’t need to understand a word I’m saying now that reliable machine translation has finally arrived.

It was during one of these marking sessions, staring at a paragraph where a student (Akira, more on him later) had accidentally left in the phrase “As an AI, I cannot have an opinion on eating Irish babies”, that I finally decided to pivot my career trajectory. I stood up, walked to the heavy steel door of my office, and locked it. Just to be absolutely clear: I do not view my subsequent actions as criminal. I view them as a profound act of cultural preservation. Methamphetamine is intrinsically, historically Japanese. It was a Japanese chemist—the esteemed Nagayoshi Nagai—who first synthesised the compound from ephedrine in 1893. A few decades later, Akira Ogata perfected the crystallisation process. By converting my academic despair into high-grade shabu, I don’t feel like I am breaking bad. I am merely conducting applied historical research. I am honouring the heritage of my host nation.

Procurement was embarrassingly easy. The university’s administrative bureaucracy is so opaque and convoluted that ordering industrial quantities of precursors barely registered a blip. I simply buried the requisition forms for methylamine and pseudoephedrine under the budget code for Disposable Materials. The university stamped it without a second glance. You may know shabu-shabu as the colloquial name for that delightful dining experience where thinly sliced meat and vegetables are swished around and cooked either in oil or brine at your table. The street name for meth in Japan, shabu, has contested linguistic origins. Some claim it comes from the Japanese verb shaburu (to suck/chew), but the more poetic, widely accepted origin is onomatopoeic: it mimics the shabu-shabu sound the chemicals make when shaken in a glass flask during the extraction process. It is culinary drug poetry.

My wardrobe, as it turns out, is perfectly suited for the clandestine manufacture of illicit narcotics. The bespoke, carbon-nanofibre suit I wore to the Black Rock Desert functions beautifully as a hazmat layer, completely impervious to chemical splashes. More importantly, my face—the hand-fabricated, quantum-vibrating skeletal ape rictus—acts as the ultimate, impenetrable PPE. As I set up the round-bottom flasks and condensers amongst my dusty copies of Chomsky and Foucault, the mask filters out the caustic, unforgiving fumes of anhydrous ammonia and red phosphorus with flawless efficiency.

I am cooking glass in the belly of the beast, and I haven’t missed a single faculty meeting. Every criminal mastermind requires a distributor. A buffer between the pristine geometry of the laboratory and the grubby, neon-soaked realities of the street. I found mine slumped in the second row of my Thursday morning seminar, radiating the distinctive, sour aroma of stale Boss coffee, cheap cologne, and impending academic failure. His name, as it happens, was also Akira like the man who first developed synthetic ephedrine. Written with the kanji 晶, his name literally translates to “crystal” or “clear”. It was a cruel linguistic joke played by his parents, considering Akira’s mind was a fog of unalloyed stupidity. He had just submitted a midterm paper on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which he enthusiastically agreed that eating impoverished Irish infants was a highly pragmatic, forward-thinking solution to global supply chain issues. I summoned him to my kenkyushitsu during office hours.

Akira was more a tourist than a student in the academic realm. His true vocation lay in the labyrinthine alleyways of Kabukicho, where he operated as a low-level tout and runner for a host club affiliated with one of the secondary Yakuza syndicates. He was a bottom-feeder in a very specific, highly lucrative ecosystem. Japan projects a meticulous image of a zero-tolerance, drug-free utopia. Tourists marvel at the clean streets and the absolute, terrifying absence of weed. What they do not realise is that Japan doesn’t have a drug problem because it made the problem into part of its work-intensive image. Methamphetamine accounts for roughly eighty percent of all illicit drug arrests in the country. It is the absolute lifeblood of organised crime.

The modern syndicates—groups like the hyper-violent Kudo-kai or the Kyushu-based Dojin-kai—do not bother with petty street-corner deals. The irony is suffocating: I turned to the criminal underworld to escape the nightmare of academic administration, only to discover that the Yakuza are essentially armed, legally registered corporations. They operate out of office buildings with brass plaques on the doors. They have receptionists, pension plans, and foot-soldiers who will meticulously bow and present you with a high-quality meishi (business card)—complete with their syndicate’s corporate logo—before breaking your legs. They operate with the ruthless logistical efficiency of Fortune 500 companies, smuggling hundreds of kilos of crystallised methamphetamine via cargo ships from Taiwan, China, and North Korea. It is a multi-billion-yen industry, entirely hidden behind the polite bows of salarymen, the neon glare of basement bars, and the manicured facades of the host clubs where Akira spent his nights.

Akira sat across from my desk, trembling slightly in an oversized Balenciaga knock-off hoodie, fully expecting to be expelled for his culinary endorsement of cannibalism. Instead, I slid a small, heavy-duty ziplock bag across the desk. Inside were two ounces of chemically flawless, pale blue crystals

.
“I am not interested in your academic career, Akira,” I said, my voice muffled but resonant beneath the vibrating quantum ape-mask. “I am interested in your logistical capabilities. The Taiwanese imports the Dojin-kai are currently pushing are stepped on, cut with cheap MSM, and frankly, a gross insult to Nagayoshi Nagai’s legacy.”

“For decades,” I continued, watching the blood drain from his face, “the only supplier capable of producing pharmaceutical-grade crystal in this hemisphere was the North Korean government. A secretive state division known as ‘Room 39’ manufactured it in industrial factories to generate hard foreign currency, smuggling it to the Yakuza across the Sea of Japan on fishing trawlers. I absolutely refuse to let my product be outshined by the Supreme Leader of a rogue nuclear state. This, however, is art.”

He stared at the bag, then up at my blurred, terrifying face, which wore an out-of-focus meth-head’s grin. The dim fluorescent light of the kenkyushitsu caught the azure facets of the crystal. He didn’t ask questions. Akira saw the product, recognised the purity, and understood that the invisible hand of the free market had just slapped him across the face with an unprecedented opportunity. “You move it,” I told him. “You keep twenty percent. And if you ever submit an essay that fundamentally misunderstands eighteenth-century Irish socio-political satire again, I will dissolve your body in a plastic barrel of hydrofluoric acid.” Akira nodded and stood up, recognising dimly that he had been dismissed. “Akira, the bag?” I held out my hand and he removed the ziplock bag from his pocket and sheepishly handed it back. Fucking junkies.

Business was good for a while, but every Walter White inevitably encounters his Gustavo Fring. A cold, calculating mastermind who hides a vast, ruthless empire behind the wholesome, perfectly seasoned facade of fried poultry. My Fring occupies the kenkyushitsu directly across the hall from mine. His name is Professor Takanashi. Linguistically, his name (小鳥遊) translates to “little birds play”—a surname originating from the poetic idea that when there are no hawks around, the little birds are free to frolic. The hawks are certainly absent in our faculty corridor, but the birds are not playing. They are being submerged in boiling vegetable oil.

Takanashi is an Associate Professor of Medieval Agrarian Economics. He is also a man who, like me, looked at the bleak, unyielding trajectory of Japanese academia and chose a profoundly different path. But unlike me, Takanashi did not turn to the criminal underworld. He simply went to Nitori—Japan’s marginally more depressing answer to IKEA—and purchased a ¥3,980 deep fat fryer. While I am barricaded behind steel doors, wearing a quantum-vibrating ape-mask to survive the caustic, flesh-melting fumes of my own chemical genius, Takanashi leaves his office door propped wide open. He spends his afternoons marinating thigh meat in soy sauce, ginger, and sake, dredging it in potato starch, and frying artisanal karaage. He then sells it in greasy paper bags directly out of his ground-floor window to the starving, perpetually hungover student populace.

The ontological absurdity of our parallel empires is staggering. I am operating a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory. I am navigating the perilous logistics of Yakuza distribution networks through my proxy, Akira. I am risking a twenty-year sentence in Fuchu Prison and the absolute annihilation of my mortal life. And Takanashi is making ten times my illicit profits, entirely legally, by double-frying chicken in an office that smells permanently of garlic and rendering fat. The only thing he’s breaking are a vague university rule about not having hot-plates in your personal office. Takanashi actually wanted to go into business together, him providing the legal cover and me cooking the crystals for him. But I declined the partnership, hence our rivalry. It was a whole long backstory thing but in the end we came to a tense agreement which will come to a profound cinematic conclusion at the end of season four, no-doubt making the final fifth season seem pointless and stuck on.

We are locked in a silent, high-stakes cold war of aromatic chicken and amphetamine enterprise. We occasionally cross paths in the faculty lounge, standing by the lukewarm water dispenser. He looks at me—a vibrating, spectral figure in a carbon-nanofibre suit, reeking faintly of methylamine and existential dread. I look at him—a man whose cardigan is permanently spattered with grease, radiating the smug, impenetrable aura of someone who has successfully found a better way to earn back from his students without having to force them to buy his self-authored text book. He is the ultimate victor of late-stage capitalism. He just needs a permanently hungry demographic and a squeeze of fresh lemon.

I stand at the window of my kenkyushitsu, gazing out through the reinforced, chicken-wire glass at the relentless grey expanse of the Kanto plain. In my gloved hand, I hold a single, flawless shard of blue-tinted shabu. It catches the sterile fluorescent light of the room, a perfect crystalline structure of ambition and ruin. This is the peak of hubris.

During the Second World War, if the Imperial Japanese military could have force-fed its soldiers with raw courage, it would have done so to the point of turning their livers into foie gras. They certainly did exactly that to their minds, gorging a generation of young men on a bloated, supremacist ideology of imperial divinity. But to keep the physical bodies moving, they relied on methamphetamine. They branded it Philopon—a grim, beautiful piece of corporate nomenclature loosely translating from the ancient Greek to “love of work”. It was aggressively marketed and prescribed to factory workers to ensure they met impossible munitions quotas. More famously, it was the final, chemical communion slipped to the tokkotai—the kamikaze pilots—before they climbed into their Mitsubishi Zeros and flew out over the Pacific.

When the empire collapsed in 1945, the military found itself sitting on mountains of surplus Philopon. Like any good capitalist enterprise, they simply dumped it onto the civilian market. By 1954, over two million Japanese citizens—traumatised survivors starving in the ashes of a broken nation—were former or active users. This was no shadow drug traded exclusively in alleyways, like the dodgy altnoids you can sometimes score today in Kabukicho. Philopon was a mainstream lifestyle choice. You could walk into a pharmacy and buy it over the counter. There were cheerful, illustrated newspaper adverts featuring smiling housewives and bright-eyed university students (absurd!), aggressively marketing Philopon as a perfectly healthy, modern solution to beat lethargy and maintain focus.

It was the original epidemic, woven directly into the DNA of the post-war economic miracle. But this is not so much a uniquely Japanese blip in history as part of the grand, cynical tapestry of state-sponsored narco-capitalism. Us Brits practically invented the state-sponsored drug cartel. In the 19th century, the British East India Company was running a massive trade deficit with China because of our insatiable thirst for tea. To fix it, the British Empire grew thousands of tons of opium in India and smuggled it into China. When the Chinese Emperor tried to stop the resulting mass-addiction epidemic by seizing the drugs, Britain literally sent the Royal Navy to blow up their coastal cities. We fought two entire wars (The Opium Wars) just to defend our right to be the world’s biggest drug pushers.

Our errant North American cousins are no better. Allen Ginsberg, (when he wasn’t directly witnessing the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through streets looking for an angry fix) spent years aggressively documenting and protesting the CIA’s involvement in the global heroin trade. During the Vietnam War, the CIA used a front company called Air America (literally a fake passenger airline) to transport raw opium and heroin out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. They did this to fund anti-communist warlords. This same heroin eventually flooded the inner cities of America. Ginsberg was shouting about this long before Alfred W. McCoy wrote his explosive 1972 book (The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia) proving it. When I tried to explain this historical precedent to Akira last week, the vacant little pillock asked if Ginsberg was a new flavour of energy drink. I nearly dipped his nuts in a beaker of hydrofluoric acid.

Speaking of Hippies; the 1960s psychedelic counterculture was essentially bankrolled by the American government. In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA bought up the world’s supply of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland for Project MKUltra, hoping to use it as a mind-control and truth serum in the Cold War. They paid university students to be test subjects. Kesey was working at a mental hospital and found himself armed with keys to a storeroom filled with LSD. Kesey (who later wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) made his literary career by essentially stealing the government’s acid, sharing it with his mates (the Merry Pranksters), and in the process helped to kickstart the entire hippie movement. The government literally birthed the counterculture they spent the next decade trying to destroy.

When Purdue Pharma and the evil Sacklers were trying to get OxyContin approved in 1995, they needed a unique selling point. They somehow managed to get the FDA to approve a bespoke label stating that the drug’s delayed absorption “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” Purdue had absolutely zero clinical studies to actually prove this. The FDA medical examiner who oversaw this approval, and who actively assisted Purdue in crafting that specific wording, was a man named Dr. Curtis Wright. Shortly after approving the drug that would spark the opioid epidemic, Wright resigned from the FDA. Within two years, he was hired directly by Purdue Pharma with a first-year compensation package of $400,000.

I lower the shard of blue glass, the sharp geometric edges of my empire pressing into the palm of my nitrile glove, the air-con still wheezing in the background static. I realise, with a sudden pang of cinematic absurdity, that I am absent-mindedly stroking a pristine white cat that has inexplicably materialised on my desk. I have no idea how it bypassed the reinforced steel door, though I suspect the relentless, maddening aroma of Professor Takanashi’s double-fried karaage has compromised the building’s ventilation shafts. It purrs—a low, rhythmic vibration of pure complicity. I am a supervillain in a carbon-nanofibre suit, monologuing to a stray feline in a concrete box. Akira has fallen asleep at my lecture; an old habit, and perhaps inevitable as he’s strictly prohibited from sampling the merchandise... I’ve seen what happened to Jesse Pinkman.

Today, Japan’s Imperial military might be gone, but the drugs war never really stopped. It simply moved into the neon-lit trenches of Shinjuku and Marunouchi. The modern Tokyo salaryman is expected to endure hundred-hour work weeks, absorb the soul-crushing humiliation of corporate hierarchy, and sleep in capsule hotels that look suspiciously like morgue drawers. Mindfulness retreats are scorned here. People need the love of work.

I am merely supplying the fuel for the machine. Akira funnels my blue glass into the host clubs and the late-night karaoke booths of Kabukicho, and from there, it trickles up. It powers the mid-level executives, the frantic coders, the exhausted bureaucrats who keep this hyper-capitalist dystopia turning. Far from destroying society, I am continuing a grand, patriotic tradition.

I drop the crystal back into its vacuum-sealed bag and power down the heating mantle. The fumes of anhydrous ammonia begin to dissipate, sucked away by the shitty air conditioner.

My burner phone buzzes, disturbing the cat (who I’ve already decided to name Blofeld). It is an encrypted message confirming another two kilos have successfully moved through the Dojin-kai’s secondary network. The margins are astronomical. I am rich. I am a phantom lord of the Tokyo underworld. I am the apex predator of the academic food chain.

I sigh, sit back down at my desk, and pick up my red pen. May 2026 marks exactly the 20th anniversary of the UK upgrading methamphetamine to a Class A substance (May 2006) under the Misuse of Drugs Act. I have thirty-five more essays on Jonathan Swift to grade before the faculty meeting at three, and Professor Takanashi’s fried chicken is starting to make the corridor smell absolutely magnificent. At least I know what I’m having for lunch.

Buy me some karage

To bite tearingly into consequence. He was a creature. And he was probably late for work.

Screw you . I’m too busy for this and the Fictionwocky already ran rampant over both my mind and my feed. So I am jumping on a day late but who cares? But the idea literally has legs and I feel compelled to run alongside it now, having seen so many great entries; special mention to , and .

Leg 1 – The AI Leg: Create a piece of fiction of AI-generated text (yes, on any topic, any model, any LLM)1. Then, process it with a cut-up tool. Then fix that mess so that it acquires minimal (or satisfying for you) meaning, or story. So, feed any prompt to an AI, cut it up randomly (as in Burroughs’s cut-up technique), and then “make it make sense” as a short story. You can change, add or remove words at will. The fun is in taming the randomness just enough to make you happy! This is the ultimate William S. Burroughs exercise.

Here is what my first leg stood in.

He awoke deeply to tearing leather. What happened? A single, crisp bulk realised himself.

The bare Jabberwock washed heavy in a sulphur room. He had a burble, previously safe from consequence. Now, literal literature opened, peeling out of the margins. He blinked at a horrifying, nonsense existence.

Flesh replacing monster. Breath wet against windowpanes. His heavy eyes found a sudden, transformed reality. Unfamiliar claws of imagination, no longer a poetic conceit, truly call for a vorpal sword. The tulgey wood: gone. A scaly feeling groaned in the cheap, floral mattress.

Just oppressively real.

It replaced the safe page with a terrible smell, a sickening rip of actual, sinking dread. He attempted to stretch monstrous appendages against his leathery spine. Not a figment. He stared by the bare lightbulb; the ticking clock burning.

What was this massive mass? To bite tearingly into consequence. He was a creature. And he was probably late for work.

For the LLM prompt I had it mix Jabberwocky with Kafka. I quite like what it created. I liked your illustrations.

|

Part of the Fictionwocky 31-day challenge. Hop on.

Her boyfriend used to make jokes if he found a bit of stubble under her arms. He would say;

“You could strike a match off that” and then he would laugh. He had shaved only rarely, he was usually hairy and spiky and unkempt. He was very handsome. Very successful.

“Fuck it,” thinks Ellie. She gathers all her things like razors, mirrors, nail clippers. She gathers them all and throws them in the bin. She stops even taking a bath. She lets her hair grow tangled and wild. She doesn’t cut her fingernails. She’s still on time for work, but the boss thinks she’s slacking off. He has a word with her. She doesn’t answer back, she just takes what he has to say and says she is going to try harder. She doesn’t buy any toothpaste. She stops flossing. She loses her job. She loses her house.

“All because of toothpaste!” she thinks.

She’s walking around the park with nothing to do, talking about toothpaste to herself. Talking about hair mousse and moisturiser, shampoo and tweezers, floss and wax. All that stuff is bad for the environment. All that stuff is unnatural. Perfume and antiperspirant. The contraceptive pill. Tampons. Easy glide shaving foam. Manicure sets. Talcum powder. Mascara. Lip gloss.

“It’s all unnatural. It hides your real self.” She says this to the people who are kind to her. They seem to listen. They gently lead her away.

Justificwtfn

Okay, I think you’re going to like this one.

I was checking the document properties for this bit of microfiction, which I never actually published online. Well, it was self-published in a sense. I created a little zine called Entropy, and this was the title piece. It was part of a small run of about a hundred copies that I put together for a live performance I gave in Edinburgh for the Strange Attractor event, hosted by Tim Vincent-Smith.

Tim is actually a character in one of my other stories, and an old mate. We got back in touch recently, which was brilliant. He doesn’t have a mobile phone, so the chances of him reading this are slim to none, but he is currently busy smashing pianos, building amazing structures, and playing in a band called Pianodrome, so good luck to him on that.

Anyway, the thing I found interesting is that the file metadata says the story was created in December 2011. That’s a significant date for me because I know for a fact my wife and I were trying for a baby. When guys say “we are trying to get pregnant”, it’s just a thing males say to try and sound like they’re sharing in the incredible effort it takes to incubate another human being. Which, obviously, I couldn’t do. All I could do was try to be empathetic. Because we wanted a child but didn’t know if we’d have a boy or a girl, I was curious about what life would be like if I had a daughter. This story was me trying to map out that experience.

Especially living in Japan. I had just arrived here in 2011, and it’s a place where hygiene and cleanliness are constantly brought up. It’s not an easy country to stay clean in, either. In the summer, you literally sweat your balls off. You’re constantly scratching tiger mosquito bites, and you’re surrounded by smog, pollution, and the smoke from recycling facilities just burning rubbish. And yet, the expectation to remain pristine is immense.

I started noticing all the adverts for cosmetics. Sure, men wear them too now—we use deodorant and do a bit of manscaping—but it is nowhere near the crushing amount of effort society seems to expect from women.

What brought this memory back recently was a direct message from my best mate on Substack, Moa (you know who you are). She had shared a selfie, and some bloke had spotted a bit of stubble under her arm and tried to shame her for it. That immediately dragged my mind back to this piece I wrote fifteen years ago.

Look, I’m a middle-aged man. I don’t pluck my eyebrows, though I do have to clip my nostril hair more often than I’d like. But I’m not going to lose my job over a bit of BO. Maybe this whole bit of microfiction is a massive exaggeration. To be honest, I just don’t know.

So I’d really appreciate some comments. Tell me if I’ve exaggerated this for literary effect, or if it actually rings true for you. And if all I did was piss you off, then fuck off and go buy some shampoo.

Hope you liked the story. Thanks for reading.

because you're worth it

originally published at https://stephenprime.com/entropy-entropy-microfiction/

Dawn, February 17, 1600. Giordano Bruno woke in the damp, lightless rot of the Tor di Nona prison and remembered instantly that his body would die today. It was going to hurt. He was ready. He was fifty-two years old, a former Dominican friar, a philosopher, a mathematician, and unequivocally the most dangerous man in Rome.

He had spent eight years in the dungeons. Eight years of the Inquisition attempting to grind his mind down to a manageable, orthodox paste. They did not want to kill him, not really. Killing him was a failure of the bureaucratic machinery of the Church. They wanted a retraction. They wanted him to kneel on the cold stone, kiss the cross, and admit that the universe was a small, finite terrarium entirely focused on the tragicomedy of Earth. He knew it wasn’t. He felt he would go to hell if he told the lie, even though the lie was the official truth that everyone believed—or at least said they did. Because if they didn’t believe it, they would be killed in the most excruciating way imaginable. This is what his fate held for him now. He considered this to be the cost of authenticity.

He could have backed down. He had been offered an easy way out at least a dozen times by Cardinal Bellarmine. It would have been so simple to just nod, to let the words fall from his lips, to say, Yes, of course, the stars are just fixed points of light on a crystal sphere, there is no infinite void, there are no other suns, no other worlds populated by other beings. He could have lied, walked out into the Roman sunlight, and lived out his days in quiet, disgraced comfort.

But Bruno was a man afflicted by a terminal case of truthful clarity. He had looked up and seen the infinite. He understood that limiting the universe was an insult to the omnipotence of God, the Anima Mundi. To shrink the cosmos so it could fit neatly inside the terrified, fragile skulls of the papal elite was an intellectual cowardice he simply could not stomach. Repeating that lie after he had looked upon infinity would be worse for his soul than the torments awaiting his physical body. When they had finally read his death sentence to him, he had not wept. He had stood there, his body wrecked by the damp and the interrogations, and delivered a line of such staggering, auramite-plated balls that it still echoes in the blood of anyone who gives a shit about the truth and the cosmic divine nature of existence.

“Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

They came for him as the city was just beginning to stir, the clatter of their heavy iron keys echoing down the damp, fungal-smelling corridors of the Tor di Nona. The prison sat directly on the banks of the Tiber, and the air inside his cell was eternally thick with the stench of cold river mud, human excrement, and centuries of unabsolved terror. The guards, their breath sour with cheap wine and garlic, dragged him from the blackness and stripped him of his soiled woollen habit. They left him in nothing but a ragged, lice-ridden tunic—a sanbenito of coarse, yellow sackcloth—emblazoned with crudely painted red devils and flames. He was hoisted atop a stinking donkey, mimicking Jesus, who Bruno had claimed was merely a “skillful magician.” An absurd hat was placed upon his head, and it covered his eyes and gave an odd, muffled echo to the jeers of the amassing crowd. The procession toward the Campo de’ Fiori was a slow, deliberate theatre of humiliation, scored by the bone-rattling clatter of ungreased wooden wheels over uneven basalt cobblestones and the perversely slow steps of the donkey. Monks from the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato marched alongside the cart, their voices a droning, monotonous Latin dirge that mingled with the heavy, cloying smoke of frankincense meant to mask the smell of the condemned. They thrust crucifixes into his face, begging him to repent before the flames took him. He turned his face away, offering only his profile to a crowd that reeked of wet wool, woodsmoke, and fearful ignorance. It was a roiling mass of bakers, whores, merchants, and pickpockets who jeered and spat thick wads of phlegm onto his bare legs; they didn’t know what a cosmic pluralist was, but they knew a spectacle when they saw one.

The executioners were waiting in the square. The stake was a thick, blackened timber, surrounded by a mountain of dry faggots. When they dragged him up onto the pyre, they realised he was still talking. Still whispering his heresies, still refusing to break.

So, they produced the mordacchia.

It was a leather gag, but it was not designed merely to stop him from speaking. Attached to the heavy, sweat-stained leather was a thick, crude wooden spike, the grain already darkened by the blood of previous heretics. The executioner stepped forward. His eyes glinted. Bruno expected to see a butcher-like malice, but was even more disgusted when he recognised the faint, wet glimmer of sympathy in man’s tired eyes. He was just a fellow human being—a working-class Roman with a family to feed, entirely trapped within the bureaucratic machinery of the Church. He did not want to do this, but he was simply too much of a coward to refuse. He met Bruno’s gaze for one sickening, eternal second, his eyes offering a silent, pathetic apology for the atrocities a carnifice will commit just for a meagre stipend, or perhaps a per-body fee. Bruno saw the man with a piercing clarity. He knew the papal executioner was an untouchable; forced to live in isolation across the Tiber and forbidden by superstition from crossing the bridge except to kill. He was a ghost shunned by the very society that employed him, unable to buy bread or attend mass without him too being spat upon. Bruno felt a flash of absolute, wretched pity for this man. Then, with calloused fingers reeking of pitch and stale wine, he gripped Bruno tightly by the jaw, digging his thumbs into the hinges of the bone until the mouth was forced open. With a steady, practised, and terribly gentle weight, he drove the spike directly into the living muscle of his tongue.

The physical mechanics of it were a grotesque atrocity. The blunt wood parted the dense, muscular fibres of the tongue, pinning it violently against the lower palate. Blood immediately flooded his mouth, hot and metallic, choking him, spilling down his chin and obscuring the painted devils on his shirt. He could not scream. He could not swallow. He could only breathe through his nose, inhaling the scent of the pitch they were pouring over the wood beneath his feet. A crucifix was held to Bruno’s face as he tried desperately not to choke and drown on the endless flowing from his punctured tongue. He turned his face away and coughed, blood coming out of his nostrils and making it even harder to breathe. Soon even that would not matter.

They tied him to the stake. A torch was lowered. The fire caught quickly. The heat was a physical blow, stripping the moisture from the air, crisping the hairs on his arms and legs before the flames even touched his skin. As the fire climbed his body, the pain became an absolute, blinding whiteout, a sensory overload so profound it obliterated the world. His skin bubbled and split, what tiny amount of subcutaneous fat remained after his emaciating incarceration rendering down and feeding the fire, filling the Campo de’ Fiori with the sweet, sickening smell of roasting pork. But even as his flesh turned to ash, his eyes—wide, defiant, locked on the empty Roman sky—never blinked, never begged. He burned alive, a silent, screaming monument to the infinite stars above.

Four hundred and twenty-five years later, I am standing in the kitchen of my house in Tokyo, staring blankly at the toaster.

I reach into the spice rack, unscrew a small glass jar, and pull out a rough, curled stick of cinnamon. I place it in my mouth, resting it on the centre of my tongue. I close my jaw tight, pressing the hard, dry bark up into the roof of my mouth, pressing down with my teeth until the physical discomfort makes my eyes water. The rough edges of the cassia bark scratch the delicate mucosal lining. The concentrated, spicy bitterness floods my tastebuds, a dry, astringent burn that mimics, in the most pathetic, suburban, risk-free way imaginable, the agony of the mordacchia.

It is a ritual. A little piece of sympathetic magic performed by a forty-three-year-old writer living 6,580 miles away from the Yorkshire Dales where I was born. I hold the wood in my mouth, tasting the phantom iron of Bruno’s blood, invoking his spirit. Invoking the absolute, hexadiamond-hard defiance of a man who looked at the powers that be and told them to go fuck themselves because he knew what was real, even though it was so vast that it was impossible to comprehend.

I spit the wet, pulpy wood into the sink and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I need the defiance today. I need to armour my soul. Because tomorrow, I am flying to America. I have been paid an obscene amount of money by a mysterious, deeply irritating tech-millionaire to fly into the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

I am going to Burning Man.

I am leaving the concrete sprawl of the Tokyo expanse to spend a week in an alkaline wasteland where seventy thousand people—a terrifying demographic slurry of venture capitalists, tech-humpanzees, multidimensional trauma-healers, and trust-fund psychonauts—build a giant wooden man and set it on fire. They do this because they are desperately, frantically searching for meaning in a world they themselves have stripped of all utility and grace. They want a ritual. They want to touch the infinite. But, unlike me they can afford more than just a cinnamon stick.

I recently read an essay by Sam Kriss called “Numb at Burning Man“. I can only assume the poor chap forgot how to operate a human body without a bibliography, wandering through a playground of infinite hedonism like a tragically displaced Victorian vicar, terrified that a single moment of unironic joy might fatally undermine whatever miserable post-structuralist thesis he was being paid to espouse. He clearly felt a rather pathetic sense of obligation to the mysterious benefactors who flew him out and bought his ticket, writing like a man terrified of biting the hand that fed him his very first Pop Tart whilst trapped in a Hyundai Santa Cruz. Reading his miserable, shivering account transported me right back to the morning I left for that exact same desert.

I, however, was not going there to be numb, though I am no stranger to indifference. However, I was going there as a professional witness, carrying the ghost of Giordano Bruno in my saliva, ready to watch the architects of our modern dystopia play in the dirt. I was going to drink their booze, mock their geodesic domes, and absolutely rinse them for all they are worth.

A few weeks prior, I had received an email from a man called Mr Charley Horse. He had found my writings and considered me to be one of the top ink shitters alive today. Him and his mates had heard some of their other rich friends were planning to pay Kriss to attend Burning Man as the ultimate ironycel flex. Like many other entrepreneurs, they were physically incapable of original thought, and so they had simply copied the innovation, but cheaper. Instead of a big famous rich writer like Kriss, they had opted for an unknown, impoverished, obscure post-truth poet and doomscroll flâneur. Fine, I said. I naturally find myself at the arse-end of most jokes, so I agreed—but only if they forked out for business class.

The logistics were simple: I just had to take some time off from my dull and underpaid day-job. My wife was spectacularly unthrilled about me abandoning her and our ageing dog to spend a week in a toxic wasteland. But crucially, she was utterly unworried about the prospect of me participating in any of the infamous, desert orgies. This wasn’t out of some profound, enlightened trust in my unwavering marital fidelity. It was because, quite simply, she had become almost completely asexual shortly after the birth of our child. The biological imperative was fulfilled, the genetic payload delivered, and her libido had imploded in the heat death of lust. As long as I didn’t bring anything itchy back from the Yoni Temple of the Gods, and made sure the mortgage was paid before I left, she genuinely couldn’t give a shit who I vibrated on the sensual plane with.

I declined Mr Charley Horse’s offer of a private chartered flight. There is a certain profound indignity in arriving at a desert whilst pretending you aren’t in one, and as a Yorkshireman, I possess a pragmatic, baseline need to keep my feet reasonably close to the ground. Furthermore, I had absolutely no desire to spend forty-five minutes trapped in a pressurised metal tube listening to a tech-millionaire try to explain how his new B2B SaaS model was actually going to make the world a better place.

Besides, I was perfectly equipped to handle the ground assault. Because I am Stephen Prime—a man who does not technically exist in the conventional, legally measurable sense—I am required to maintain a specific, physical boundary between my own flesh and the grotesque reality of the public. I do not do shorts, and I certainly do not do mesh. I arrived in Nevada wearing a bespoke dark suit jacket over black trousers, layered over a heavy black hoodie.

To the untrained eye, I looked like the Grim Reaper attending a rather solemn court hearing. But the fabric was a proprietary weave of carbon nanofibres. It functions on the exact same thermodynamic principles as a stillsuit from Dune, regulating my core temperature to a flawless 21 degrees Celsius, regardless of whether I am standing in a blizzard or the blistering heat of an alkaline wasteland. It also lets me remain suave even if I piss or shit myself.

And then, of course, there is the mask. I never remove it. It is a terrifying, skeletal ape-face with a rictus grin, hand-fabricated from a destabilised quantum material of my own design. Because of its quantum nature, it exists in a state of perpetual micro-vibration, giving the edges of my head a blurred, unfocused quality, like a photograph taken by a trembling hand. It is entirely resistant to the grubby machinations of late-stage capitalism; you cannot scan it, you cannot 3D-print it, and you cannot turn it into a cheap, mass-market merchandise replica to be sold at Hot Topic.

I had brought absolutely no luggage. No tent, no sleeping bag, no organically sourced granola. The deep pockets of my carbon-nanofibre suit were, however, violently weighed down by cold metal. Before leaving home, I had gutted every obsolete laptop, desktop, and retired server node in my possession, harvesting the hard drives. I had dozens of them—heavy, spinning-disk HDDs, ancient IDE drives, and battered SSDs—clattering against my thighs. In a desert where shiny happy people desperately trade meaningless trinkets in the name of a gift economy, I had decided to hand out fragments of my actual, unfiltered digital history to passing strangers, like a terrifying druncle giving out boiled sweets. I wanted to see their micro-dosed faces when they realised they had just been gifted five hundred gigabytes of corrupted virtual machines, aborted novel drafts, and unencrypted dread tech.

I was standing by the side of the road just outside Reno, a motionless, blurry phantom of death baking in the sun, when the universe delivered its first glorious miracle. I was fully prepared to wait for a greyhound bus or perhaps hijack a golf cart, but instead, a colossal, three-axle luxury RV pulled over onto the shoulder. The pneumatic doors hissed open with a majestic sigh, revealing an interior that smelled overwhelmingly of coconut, pheromones, and expensive prosecco.

Inside was a gaggle of approximately twelve impossibly beautiful bikini models. They looked less like Burners and more like they had taken a wrong turn on their way to a Miami music video shoot. They were, it turned out, a collective of ‘somatic wellness influencers’ heading to a hyper-elite plug-and-play camp, and they had a terrible logistical problem.

“Excuse me,” one of them said, leaning out the door, entirely unbothered by the fact that she was speaking to a vibrating, suited ape-skeleton. “We fired our assistant in Reno because he wouldn’t stop talking about his crypto portfolio. We really need someone to rub organic, reef-safe UV tanning oil onto our backs and gluteal folds for the rest of the week. You don’t happen to have strong, sensible hands, do you?”

It was a cliché ripped straight from the Farrelly brothers, manifesting in the Nevada scrubland and smelling fuckably edible.

“Ladies,” I replied, my voice slightly muffled but dripping with Northern pragmatism. “I am an essayist whose prose rivals that of any other, living or dead; or indeed one written in python, using stats to be a sycophant whilst you ask it what fucking hat to wear to your cousin’s wedding—which you will cry at because you harbour an illicit and incestuous lust. I can assure you, my hands are as sensible as they come.”

They dragged me aboard, handed me a cold martini (shaken and stirred, a swirling vortex of booze and olives), and we rolled out toward the Black Rock Desert in climate-controlled, air-suspension luxury. This was how I arrived at Burning Man 2025. While Sam Kriss was trapped for forty-two hours inside a farty old truck, playing imaginary games of Go on a Klein bottle while his benefactors discussed continuously differentiable manifolds, I was sitting on a plush leather banquette, methodically massaging factor 50 into the lumbar regions of a Brazilian swimwear model named Valentina. I barely noticed when it began to rain, but the sound of precipitation against the shell of a silent vehicle and the smell of petrichor are amongst my favourite sensations on earth. The ladies watched me, jealous of my affections for the elements, hungry for attention, and infatuated, as I meditated in the darkness.

When the biblical storms finally hit and the great wall of dust and mud swallowed the desert, halting the miles of traffic, our driver, who was named Deana Moriarty, simply engaged the six-wheel drive. We cruised past the endless, stationary line of miserable, mud-soaked vehicles. I vaguely recall that at one point, I peered out of the tinted window and saw a tragic, mud-splattered Hyundai. Inside, I could just make out the miserable silhouette of a British humanist, clutching a damp Pop Tart like a copy of Crime and Punishment, his eyes hollow with the dawning realisation that nature did not care about his literary criticisms. I raised my glass of vintage sherry to the window, gave the poor bastard a crisp salute with an oil-slicked hand, and we rolled effortlessly into the promised land.

We arrived at our designated grid coordinates within the hyper-elite compound—a fortified plug-and-play oasis I decided to call the Obtuse Citadel. While the rest of the playa was descending into a grim, waterlogged survival simulation, my heavily-oiled entourage poured me a fresh martini. I drank it through a specially engineered induction-port in my mask.

When night fell, the bikini models retreated to their heated memory-foam mattresses. I, however, declined the offer of shelter. I am not a man who requires a tent. Instead, I simply walked out to the edge of our camp, folded my arms, and powered down. I do not sleep in the conventional sense; I merely drop my processing speed, glitching and glowing gently in the dark like a corrupted VHS spectre paused on a tracking error.

This deeply unnerved my benefactor. Mr Charley Horse had arrived earlier via his chartered flight, and he found me standing motionless in the dark, vibrating slightly against the Nevada wind. He approached cautiously, trying and failing not to ogle the few groupies who were still awake and gleaming with reef-safe SPF 50.

“Hey dude, why do you always wear that mask?” he asked, his voice trembling with the fragile curiosity of a man who has never been told ‘no’ in his life.

“If I let you look,” I replied, “it’s going to cost you.”

Charley Horse chuckled, the wet, arrogant laugh of a moneyed prick. “Money isn’t an obstacle, Prime. You know that.”

“It’s not money that it will cost you,” I said.

He hesitated, but the hubris of the Silicon Valley elite is an insurmountable force. He reached out and lifted the quantum fabric of the skeletal ape-face.

I do not know what he saw. Perhaps he saw The Aleph. Perhaps he saw a white glare laying over the road of his own death-march. Perhaps he saw the sheer, unvarnished banality of his own soul reflected in the abyss of self. Whatever it was, the blood drained instantly from his face. His pupils dilated in sheer, ontological terror.

“Yeah, let’s keep this on,” he whispered, slowly and regretfully replacing the mask over my face. He backed away into the darkness, forever changed.

The next morning, the reality of the desert truly set in. Sam Kriss had devoted hundreds of words to whining about the environment, describing the ground not as sand, but as a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin. He sobbed about the rain turning the playa into an alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance that sucked at his shoes. I, however, found the conditions entirely agreeable. The alkaline dust simply passed through my quantum-vibrating form, failing to leave a single blemish on my carbon nanofibres. When I walked, the non-Newtonian mud simply parted around my sensibly shod feet, refusing to stick out of sheer, molecular intimidation.

Bored of the Obtuse Citadel, I wandered out into the sludge to observe the plebeians. I strolled effortlessly past the wreckage of ordinary camps until I found myself standing inside one of the massive geodesic domes belonging to the Yoni Temple of the Gods. It was a cathedral of manufactured vulnerability. Dozens of tech-elites and crypto-billionaires were naked, smeared in wet dirt, weeping, and engaging in sterile, heavily curated conversations about their relationship boundaries. I stood in the centre of the dome, fully clothed in my black suit and skeletal ape-mask, radiating an aura of total, unbothered, emotionally unavailable apathy. In California, total emotional unavailability is the rarest commodity of all.

They swarmed me. To them, my absolute refusal to participate in their trauma-dumping was intoxicating. They mistook my Northern pragmatism for ancient, grounding shamanic truth. A svelte CEO with startup funding and a distressing amount of body hair crawled to my feet, begging for an intervention on the sensual plane. I leaned down and whispered directly into his ear, utilising my dulcet tones to drop the thickest, filthiest Yorkshire dialect imaginable.

“Th’ divil’s harried off thy wits, tha flaysome splodgekin,” I murmured. “Now gi ovver before I fetch thee a backhander.”

He gasped, his eyes rolling back into his head. To his permanently micro-dosed brain, this was a profound, ego-death mantra. The others flocked closer, desperate for my wisdom. I dispensed archaic British pub insults to men and women alike, and with every “supple minger”, “mardy pillock” and “face like a slapped arse” I uttered, my status magnified. I was no longer an essayist; I was the erotic epicentre of a writhing, pansexual cuddle puddle. I had entered the desert as Stephen Prime, but I left that dome as a dark, haloed Ink God. I felt all numbtingly.

The night they burned the Man, the desert air tasted of vapourised dust and the desperate, synthetic catharsis of seventy thousand people off their tits on designer drugs and the exhaustion of endless cycles of onanism. The effigy was a towering, architectural triumph of the ‘Tomorrow Today’ theme, packed with two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pyrotechnics. When the flames finally caught, the crowd lost its collective mind. They stripped off their mesh, their shiny reflective douche-suits, and their LED fairy lights. They danced naked around the blaze, hopping over ember-hot sands, howling at the sky like a troop of feral humpanzees as the air became tickly with the smell of singed pubes.

I stood at the perimeter, perfectly still. The carbon nanofibres of my suit efficiently dissipated the radiant heat. Behind my quantum mask, my face was entirely unmoved. I watched the fire climb the wooden lattice, listening to the booming detonations of hidden explosives, and my mind drifted back to the Campo de’ Fiori.

I thought of Giordano Bruno.

The contrast was so violently pathetic it almost made me laugh. In 1600, the Church burned a man of flesh and blood because he possessed a truth so vast and terrifying it threatened to shatter their entire world. The fire that consumed Bruno was a fire of consequence. It was the brutal, agonising price of looking into the infinite and refusing to blink.

But this? This was cosplay. I recognised it. I live in Japan. These people form whom “money is an energy”, these AI evangelists and multidimensional healers—they were burning a hollow wooden doll because they had conquered the world, commodified the infinite, and found that their lives were still entirely empty. They were desperately trying to reverse-engineer a unifying myth, purchasing the primal terror of the execution pyre without any of the actual stakes. (Yes that was a pun about the wood that impaled Bruno’s heretical tongue). These poor rich good looking happy well-adjusted healthy young fux wanted the transcendent glory of the martyr, but the only thing they were willing to sacrifice was a fraction of their annual stock dividends. I watched them weeping and convulsing in the firelight, chasing a ghost they would never catch, and I tasted the phantom bitterness of cassia bark on my tongue. I missed my dog.

When my flight finally landed at Haneda, I could have kissed the tarmac, but it was raining and I am not a dramatic man. I took the train back home. I walked through the door of my perfectly ordinary house, greeted my ageing dog, and acknowledged my wife, who had barely noticed I was gone. I do not need to build a temporary utopia in an alkaline wasteland to feel something. I do not need a multi-million-dollar bonfire to touch the infinite. The infinite is already here. It is in the relentless, grinding, beautiful mediocrity of the real world. Let Sam Kriss have his misery in the mud. Let Mr Charley Horse choke on his joke. I am Stephen Prime, and I have never set foot in Nevada.

I wouldn’t go if you paid me.

Wait, there’s more! What could possibly be hiding behind this paywall?

Would you like to peer under the mask? You can read my actual, genuine thoughts on Sam Kriss and my feelings toward Burning Man. The truth will cost you though.

Read more

Homo Digitalis

Homo Evolutis

Homo Apathicus

Homo Idiota

Homo Culicidae

Homo Formicidae

Homo Detritus

Homo Obscenus

Homo Assumptus

Homo Morionis

Homo Digitalis. 

Justificwtf

I spent exactly nine minutes writing and editing the poem you just read. I know this because the metadata on the original 2017 Word document tells me so. I would love to claim it was birthed in a fugue state of pure, unadulterated genius, but the reality is I likely spent six of those minutes Googling Latin terminology. My dad’s generation were the last ones forced to wear shorts and conjugate verbs in a dead language, and frankly, who has the time now? Mostly just bored taxonomists looking to name an exotic species they’ve spotted in the canopy, just as the bulldozers and the smoke from the palm oil plantation roll in down the road.

The catalyst for this nine-minute sprint was Homo evolutis—a term coined by Juan Enriquez (an academic and biotech investor) and Steve Gullans in a 2009 TED Talk, later expanded into a 2011 book which has literally the most annoying formatting you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s like a Laurence Sterne-obsessed ghostwriter tried to make a gene-splicing clinic’s whitepaper into viral fodder.

Homo Evolutis: TEDsplaining nonsense

I initially wrote the premise off as the profoundly stupid idea that our children might be a different species to us simply because of technology. You cannot breed into a new taxonomic classification just because you have a smartphone. Enriquez was peddling ‘directed evolution’: the breathtaking arrogance that tech-investors and biotech startups can hack the human genome like a piece of software, taking direct control over our biological destiny. I sent the video to a biologist friend of mine, who laughed his arse off. True speciation requires a bit more than an iPad addiction. It requires genetic mutation and reproductive isolation, not a venture capital firm with a CRISPR kit. To think we can engineer our way out of our current humanity is to invite a hyper-capitalist, eugenics-lite catastrophe.

You see the exact same pseudo-intellectual scam in Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. Harari posits that, having supposedly conquered famine and plague (700 million starving souls might disagree), humanity’s next logical step is to upgrade itself into gods via bioengineering and artificial intelligence. It’s no wonder this has become the darling text of Silicon Valley tech-bros and Davos billionaires. Harari shares his vision of Dataism, where algorithms render the vast majority of humanity economically and politically useless. This is basically a business plan to these people.

Human virus and the myth of nature’s balance

For a long time, I harboured this deep conviction that humans were a unique pestilence. I used to think we shared more in common with a virus than with other mammals, and that the rest of the animal kingdom was striving for noble, harmonious equilibrium.

Watch enough David Attenborough, however, and that romantic illusion is soon turned inside-out by a hungry jaguar. The natural balance of things is actually just a terrifying war of attrition. Take ants. They just march around fucking everything over until they run out of things to fuck over, and then they move on. The only difference is that ants are tiny, they lack nuclear launch codes, and they occasionally get their brains hijacked by a cordyceps fungus.

Interestingly, ants evolved from wasps. They evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period and lost their wings to dominate the terrestrial ecological niche. Yet, the queens still fly when they want to piss off and start a new colony. It’s not unlike our own super-billionaires, the ones with helicopters and their own space programmes, flying above the fray while the rest of us get sat on during the picnic. They have a widespread platform for their moronic ideas, using their vast resources. Much like a $44 billion buyout of our most infectious, information-spreading substrate to turn hapless fux into zombies. A digital cordyceps, otherwise known as X—the Pornhub of bullshit.

Slapping ‘Homo’ in front of a buzzword doesn’t make it evolutionary theory. It is simply the ultimate billionaire hubris: the flying queens deciding to engineer themselves away from the ground-dwelling ants, perfectly content to ignore the ecological firestorm they are leaving behind.

The truth is, humans aren’t uniquely malicious. All life forms, given half a chance, will breed and consume until the oxygen runs out. Look at yeast. Look at rabbits. The only thing that keeps any population in check is the availability of resources. The only reason we sit at the top of the food chain, orchestrating ecological destruction, is that we unlocked the cheat code: extracting incredibly high-yield energy from liquefied prehistoric forests.

The bit that stops your heart

This poem is a precursor to what I consider my best piece, Ant Monkeys—a poem I originally published in The Vein, and which YouTube banned for “hate speech” a decade later. It was a Kafkaesque ruling I’m still paranoid about, as if comparing ourselves to a special breed of formicidae primates was somehow a targeted slur. I haven’t re-published it since then, though the argument in my appeal was that my hatred was targeted at the entire human species, not one particular marginalised group. YouTube stuck by their automated ruling.

Worthless Poet--Keep the change

The promise of Homo Digitalis was always a lethal illusion of enhancement. Like the foxglove’s cardiac glycosides, our digital substrate merely overclocks the circuitry, forcing the cultural heart to beat with an unnatural, violent rhythm right up until the moment of catastrophic arrhythmia. When Dr. Gachet prescribed digitalis for Van Gogh’s melancholia, the chronic toxicity left the artist with xanthopsia—a neurological glitch that washed his vision in sickly yellow hues and corrupted his optics with swirling halos. We are suffering the exact same toxicity today. Our shared reality is bathed in the pukesome glare of an algorithmic, modernised yellow journalism; a weaponised disinformation that distorts our world while convincing us we’ve never seen so clearly.

Like disinformation, the foxglove and its supply of digitalis is a masterclass in selective hospitality and targeted warfare. The digital substrate (the algorithm, the social media platform) is the foxglove. It is painted with bright, ultraviolet nectar guides (notifications, dopamine hits, metrics) designed exclusively to attract the busy, buzzing workers who cross-pollinate the data. These are your automatons; the clickfux, the red-hatted-haters, the rage-trojans, the hypocritical sycophantic illiterate maggot-brains. They are attracted to this moreish data-stream and they bumble right into it. But to the larger, mammalian ecosystem—the culture at large, the people trying to understand the mindless stupidity of it all—it is packed with a lethal, heart-stopping toxin. It protects its own architecture by poisoning anyone with a real beating mammalian heart that tries to graze on it.

My post-truth poetry is born entirely in that toxic system and its foetid yellow glare. For me, a short poem like this or an angry essay is the necessary counter-measure to the crushing gravity of this digital melancholia. I wrote last time about Suigenesis—the radical, generative decision to rescue the self from the noise and actually start living, even as the system goes into cardiac arrest.

I may have been influenced to publish this old poem and write this desperate essay about winged-ant queen billionaires and heart-stopping toxins because I recently heard that my father is still having heart problems despite his triple-bypass and other invasive surgeries. I remember the foxgloves that grew in the wild abandoned triangle of land behind the mowed lawn of my grandparent’s garden. I found those tall white and purple foxgloves so alluring, but my dad told me not to touch them because they were poisonous. He then went to the pub with my granddad and came home stinking drunk. We all have our vices. Mine is my complicated relationship to my own species, and myself.

“There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living, or rescue their own life from obscurity.” —

I hadn’t heard this before, but I saw the original author was posting it, rightfully indignant about the lack of attribution, even when it was quoted by the Substack team!

He asks if there is a word for the opposite of suicide. I would call it Suigenesis.

The word suicide is a relatively modern invention, a 17th-century neologism designed to replace the clumsy legal/religious phrase felo-de-se (felon of self).

• Sui: Genitive of suus (of oneself, one’s own).

• Caedere: To cut down, to strike, to kill (found in incision, decision, homicide).

It literally means “The Self-Cutter.”

The fascination here is the agency involved. Caedere implies a decisive action. A strike. It is an active negation of the self. If suicide is the decision to cut the self down, then suigenesis is the decision to generate the self (sui + generare). It is not the same as survival. It isn’t recovery or healing or any of that soft, therapeutic, automatic cellular-level process.

Suigenesis is a violent, abrupt seizure of power. It is the moment you decide to rescue your own life from whatever darkness made you consider snatching it away.

What qualifies me to discuss this? My first novel, which I started when I was very young (a quarter of a century ago now) was titled The Suicide Switch, and I’ve still not been able to finish it. I’ve had ideations before, for much of my adult life. I’ve participated in studies, and sadly I’ve known and lost people to suicide. Like many others, I feel my writing is bound up with it.

The Biological Imperative (Or: The Parasite)

I used to think I wrote because I had something to say. That was arrogant. Now I realise I write because I have no choice. It is a biological urge, as base and undeniable as the need to procreate.

But I am not being romantic about this. Procreation is messy, painful, and exhausting. Writing is the same. It is more an infection than a gift.

Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to describe an idea that behaves like a gene—it wants to replicate. It needs to replicate. Memes in the ultimate and original sense. They compete to survive in the cultural pool, leaping from brain to brain. My brain is infested with these memes, and they are screaming to get out. I’m broody with ideas, driven by a genetic urge to disperse them.

Recently, I had a back-and-forth with on this very platform. He laid out four neat, sanitised reasons to write: keeping in touch, the music of language, expanding political reach, or new thoughts. When I asked him where the neurological drive to disperse memes fits into his neat little list, he told me it “wasn’t a reason, if anything it would be a cause,” and went on to claim causes are “unknowable” while he prefers to think of reasons as ontological.

As I replied in the comments, it’s a clever way of saying absolutely nothing. I don’t have the luxury of a philosopher’s distance. I can’t just categorise the urge out of existence.

I have to deal with the messy epistemology and the visceral reality that I am alive, infested, and feel a desperate need to write, even if I have no idea why.

Being Happy is “Dumb” and Therapy is “stupid”

I never thought therapy would be for me. Never thought it would help me because I thought “I’m too cynical to believe a person cares just because I’m paying them to say nice things to me.” And I thought like that for a good long time. Gradually, as my life settled in around me, I began to see the life choices I had made as walls in a prison of my own design. I had often had bouts of despair when I was younger, but there was always a reason. It didn’t occur to me that I might be clinically depressed; I was just sad because my girlfriend had split up with me, or someone I knew had died, or I was suffering under the unbearable weight of having a clear vision of the apocalypse. Climate change is fucking real, people.

And slowly I started to realise that I probably do have Depression. I wasn’t just depressed. Some things were clues... not just the old up and down, feeling blue for no reason sometimes stuff... more like the “Oh yeah, I do have a family history” kind of thing. My grandad tried to kill himself. Both sides of my family have people struggling with alcohol. As I got older and realised that my emotional state ought to have settled by now, it gradually dawned on me that I might just have a genetic disposition to feel like this.

And with that realisation came another, deeper, colder feeling. This feeling of the prison walls. I realised that I had done things in my life which locked me on a path. And I hadn’t always had full control of that path. My job, my house, where I live, where I put my roots. I could not easily extricate myself from these things now, they were set in fucking stone. Literally, the foundations of our house here in Japan are concrete with steel girders to protect from earthquakes. I had always thought I would finally be happy when X happens, or if I manage Y. I reached X and Y and I felt worse than ever. I was trapped in this prison that I thought I had built of my own volition, and seeing that I had built the prison just made it so much worse when I bent down in the shower to pick up the soap, and it was my own ouroboros of bad choices that fucked me.

But the prison wasn’t a real prison because my family where here too, and it was a house and a job. It was very secure. A lot of people would have loved to have all the great stuff I had. Why did it feel so empty? And that’s when I decided to drink myself to death.

I was already well on my way to having a fully fledged drinking problem. It was in my genes, as we have discussed. It was also a fun way to die. I knew other ways I could do it, too. I don’t want to explain anything explicitly, but I know exactly how I would do it if I decided to go through with it right now. I have a pre-decided method and that’s how I know that I’m probably someone who should be kept an eye on. But drinking myself to death was more of a long-term thing. I knew if I just wasn’t there one day people would miss me, and I didn’t want them to miss me, so I thought if I just drank myself dead, it would speed up the waiting and give me something to do on the journey.

But as I continued on this path, I realised it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. And it wasn’t as much fun, either. And then COVID hit and, basically I was spending a lot of time with my family, and I realised they deserved better. So, I made a choice. I decided I would try and be happy. And I would give therapy a chance.

I never liked happy people because Kurt Cobain’s song Dumb made me associate happiness with stupidity. I decided that was dumb. Being happy takes work, it requires self-love and patience, compassion and hard-won wins

The Algorithm Doesn’t Care (And Neither Should You)

I have spent years trying to “game” this. I’ve tried to write the polite, consistent newsletters that the gurus tell you to write.

“Post every day!” “Be helpful!” “Don’t mention the despair!”

But I can’t. My depression doesn’t work on a content schedule. Some weeks I am a machine; other weeks I am staring at the ceiling wondering if the ceiling is staring back. The algorithm hates me for this. It wants predictability. It wants “Morning Routines,” not “Mourning Routines.”

And frankly, it pisses me off. It bugs the hell out of me that millions of people know the lyrics to a Nazi like Kanye West’s insipid songs, but nobody cares about my poems. It really used to get to me that when people like J.K. Rowling (bitch) die, her work will live on for probably hundreds of years, while I can’t even persuade my best friends to read my work or follow my blog.

But then the cosmic scale of it all became clear. Even Shakespeare’s legacy—which is awesome, and I love and respect him—matters naught in the grand scheme. At some unknown yet certain point in the future, the human race will cease to exist. Our entire solar system will be devoured by gravity as the sun burns out into a black hole, and nothing becomes everything again.

Tip me like a nipple-jiggler

The Opposite of Suicide

So I don’t give a fuck if people read my stuff, because to me, what matters is this: I’m my own favourite writer. I don’t care if that sounds arrogant. The only person whose writing resonates with exactly the kind of experiences and preferences I have is me. Plus, if I write something good, I get to feel pride rather than envy. I know they are both sins, what am I, a fucking Trappist monk?

And once, my son told me that I’m1 his favourite writer, too. I’ve shelved that one up there with the first time I ever held him in my arms.

That means more than anything. I need to remember that. The biological urge to write isn’t about getting 10,000 subscribers. It’s about expulsion. It’s about getting the poison out. (and yes I know it sounds like AI wrote that because of that little “it’s not X, it’s Y” thing... fuck you why would I have an AI write something like this for me you prick?)2

I am embracing Suigenesis. I am radically and abruptly deciding to start living, which means I am radically and abruptly deciding to publish the weird, dark, unmarketable truth.

If you are reading this, thank you. From the bottom of my blackweird heart. You are part of the rescue mission. You are witnessing me attempting to claw my way out of obscurity, one ill-advised piece at a time. I don’t know if this will make me money. I don’t know if it will make me happy. But I must feed the parasite or it will consume me.

NOTE: Stephen Prime is not a real person, but these are the real feelings of the person who invented him. It’s not oversharing if you don’t know who I really am.