i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that companies are still trying to stomp out.
Michael Moorcock: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of elric the enchanted
Moorcock: he's got red eyes to show how much of a bad ass he is
Moorcock: he's got a magic sword that eats souls
King: whoa!!
King: that's badass
Poe: that's pretty badass
Moorcock: elric's got this magic talking sword
Moorcock: and thing is that the more he uses it
Moorcock: the cooler he gets
Moorcock: but also
Moorcock: the more sexy evil
Moorcock: classic sexy corruption arc
Moorcock: the sword is all "DO EVIL, ELRIC"
Moorcock: "C'MON, NEWB"
Moorcock: and elric is all "noooo i don't wanna"
Moorcock: "stop making me so sexy and evil"
Moorcock: "i don't wannaaaaa"
Moorcock: and the sword is all "SHUT UP PUSSY, BE EVIL"
Moorcock: "YOU WILL BE EVIL, OH YEAHHHH"
Moorcock: "I AM STORMBRINGER, THE BLACK BLADE, AND I'M THE TOWER OF POWER"
Moorcock: and elric is all "noooo stahp it"
Moorcock: "I AM THE BLACK BLADE"
Moorcock: "FORGED A MILLION BILLION YEARS AGO"
Moorcock: "MY COSMIC CYCLES ARE FOR ETERNITY"
Moorcock: "OH YEAAAAAAH"
Moorcock: "CARVING OUT DESTINY"
Moorcock: "BRINGING IN THE LORDS OF CHAOS"
Moorcock: "BRINGING UP THE BEASTS OF HADES"
Moorcock: "SUCKING OUT THE SOULS OF HEROES"
Moorcock: "LAYING WASTE TO KNIGHTS AND LADIES"
Moorcock: "OH YEAAAAAAH"
Moorcock: "MY MASTER IS MY SLAVE"
Moorcock: "YOU POOR FUCKING HUMANS"
Stephen King: wait
King: wait that sounds familiar
King: no way
Moorcock: that's right
Moorcock: Blue Oyster Cult did a song about elric
King: no fair!
King: how come you got a song about elric?
Moorcock: because he fucks like a champ
Barker: ok mikey tell us more about this badass elf
Moorcock: he's not an elf
Moorcock: he's a member of a completely different pointy-eared fantasy race
Barker: uh huh
Barker: so an elf?
Moorcock: HE'S NOT AN ELF!!
Moorcock: he's super cool!
Moorcock: hawkwind did a whole album about him
Barker: about elric the elf?
Moorcock: he's not an elf!
Poe: clive stop teasing him
King: actually, clive's got a point
King: he does kind of sound like an elf
Barker: what's this hawkwind album called?
Moorcock: chronicles of the black blade
Barker: ha ha ha
Barker: omg that's nerd shit
Moorcock: i'm not a nerd!
Moorcock: I'm very cool!
Mary Shelley: sup fuckers
Shelley: heard there was some nerd around here about to get his ass beat
Barker: oh yeah he's right over there
Moorcock: i'm not a nerd!!!!
Michael Moorcock: no! i'm not a nerd!
Moorcock: here, listen to "Needle Gun"
Shelley: what is this, prog? i don't listen to nerd music
Todd Keisling: hey wait a minute
Shelley: actually no
Shelley: you're right
Shelley: this music slaps actually
The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.
Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?
From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Lovecraft: hey everyone, just so you know
Lovecraft: Cthulhu isn't a she but a he
He'd feel deeply enraged if anyone regarded him as sissified!
Poe:
King:
Koontz:
Barker:
Barker: ok sure don't misgender cthulhu
Poe: clive
Barker: important safety tip, got it
Lovecraft: i'm just saying, cthulhu is clearly a guy
Lovecraft: he's always going around and doing supremely manly things
Barker: like getting hit by boats?
Lovecraft: yes exactly
Lovecraft: that's super manly
Lovecraft: 2 Gun Bob will back me up
Robert E Howard: that's just plumb macho, pardna
Lovecraft: i think there might be some confusion about cthulhu's gender
Lovecraft: because, you know, he's an incomprehensible squid god beyond human ken
Lovecraft: so looking at his hectocotylus would instantly drive you insane
Lovecraft: cthulu is really the peak of masculinity if you think about it
Barker: oh yeah? how do you figure that?
Barker: how do you define peak manliness howard
Lovecraft: oh well that's obvious
Lovecraft: peak male performance is a reedy academic given to fainting
William Hope Hodgson: are you tired of bullies kicking sand in your face?
Hodgson: take my new course on achieving peak manliness and, in just 5 weeks, I'll make you into the reedy anemic academic that everyone will respect for their mind
Hodgson:
Hodgson: no sorry this isn't working
Poe: howard is there some reason that you felt you needed to clarify this
Lovecraft: i just feel like there's been a lot of sus pictures on deviantart lately
Lovecraft: also, i feel like people are starting to make a lot of assumptions ever since steve revealed that it is a she
Poe: it is a she?
King: yup that's right
King: it is a she
Poe:
Poe: well that's a bit confusing
Poe: but for you, steve, i'll make the effort
Pope Leo: eyyy its me, da chicago pope
William Peter Blatty: gasp! your holiness!
Blatty: what an honor! i
Blatty: i just
Blatty: i just
Blatty: wow!
Blatty: [geneflecting wildly] just wow!
Blatty: c'mon everyone, show some respect!
Blatty: it's the pope!
Barker: cool, good for him
Blatty: oh my god
Blatty: he doesn't mean that, your holiness
Pope Leo: eyyy its all good
Blatty: [geneflecting intensifies] oh my god, he's got the patience of a saint!
Pope Leo: eyyy listen i got somethin' ta say
Blatty: listen up people! the pope's got something to say!
Poe: oh he's got an encyclical?
Pope Leo: dat's right
Pope Leo: yeah i got your encyclical right here!!
Pope Leo: ok listen up yous guys
Pope Leo: da chicago pope is talkin'
Pope Leo: first of all, be it known through alla da whole world of catholicism
Pope Leo: dat the only way to eat a dog is wit' tomato wedges an pickled peppers
Pope Leo: ketchup is heresy
Blatty: very wise, very wise!
Pope Leo: now second of all
Pope Leo: i gots some words about all this here AI
Pope Leo: in fact it reminds me of a quote by da smartest guy i've ever known
Blatty: ah yes yes
Blatty: you speak of Jesus Christ of course
Pope Leo: nope
Pope Leo: i'm talkin' gandalf
Blatty:
Blatty: what
Pope Leo: dat's right
Pope Leo: in da immortal word of gandalf da gray
Pope Leo: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set"
Pope Leo: think about it
GRR Martin: hey jirt did you hear
JRR Tolkien: what?
Martin: you got quoted by the pope
Tolkien: i got quoted by the pope?
Martin: yeah
Tolkien: THE pope?
Martin: yeah
Tolkien: the pope in rome?? the holy pontiff??? god's ambassador on earth????? THAT pope???????
Martin: yeah
Tolkien: well well well
Tolkien: now look who's laughing!
Tolkien: hmm hey clive
CS Lewis: what
Tolkien: remind me, has the archbishop of whatever ever quoted aslan?
Lewis:
Tolkien: i'm sorry i can't hear you
Tolkien: what was that again?
Lewis: no
Tolkien: ha ha that's what i thought!
Tolkien: oh it's no big deal
Tolkien: just the top guy in catholicism talkin' about gandalf
Tolkien: nope nope not a big deal at all
Tolkien: sorry you can never experience that, clive
CS Lewis:
Tolkien: but that's what you get for picking anglicanism
Tolkien: lmao loser ass religion
CS Lewis: hey! it's a perfectly valid faith!
Tolkien: yeah whatever
Tolkien: "anglicanism"
Tolkien: lol you don't even know what you're getting
Hiron Ennes: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the works of vermin
Ennes: a l'art dramatique in three acts
Ennes: best paired with a mild sauvignon gris, served slightly chilled, for maximum elucidation
Ennes: and your fanciest, frenchiest cheese
King: wow, hiron!! this sure is fancy!
Ennes: hmm quite
King: and this wine! it's real swell!
King: um
King: sorry is something wrong?
Ennes: pinky finger extended, stephen
King: oh right sorry
Ennes: after all
Ennes: [chuckles] we're not animals now are we?
Ennes: this story takes place in tiliard, where good taste is everything
Ennes: just imagine a world run by evil, aristocratic ghouls
Ennes: whose main concern is good taste
King: well
King: well, i can picture that first thing
Ennes: tiliard today
Ennes: With bustling streets, machines, cafes
Ennes: And the nice, the wise, the eccentric and insane
Ennes: There’s prisons made of lead
Ennes: And gargoyles of iron shreds
Ennes: and guy moulene killing insects dead
Ennes: clever little guy with his clever head
Ennes: guy moulene works as an exterminator
Ennes: one day, working a job on the rue d' la chrystalized dreams, he pokes his poison clister into the wrong nest
Ennes: and finds a giant centipede
Brian Keene: a giant centipede, you say?
Ennes: almost godlike
Josh Millican: almost godlike, you say?
Ennes: now this centipede is so big
King: how big is it?
Ennes: why, it's almost as big as the overbearingly gauche flavor of a petite pinot cancaret (1835) incongruously paired with poached oceanic salmon in cream zitron remoulade
Ennes: and this centipede is so long!
King: how long is it?
Ennes: as long as the inter mezzo of Albernauch's retro-cabrian oratorio 'The False Daughter of Jarumundi Bonk: An Operetta on Craft' (1745)
Ennes: [chuckles] and we all know how long that was
Barker: oh yeah totally
Ennes: and of course we all know what they say about 'The False Daughter of Jarumundi Bonk: An Operetta on Craft' (1745)
King: oh yeah absolutely
Barker: oh yeah steve?
Barker: what DO they say about it
King:
King: uhhh
Ennes: cliveford please, it's gauche to put stephen on the spot like that
Ennes: of course as we all know, the thing about 'The False Daughter of Jarumundi Bonk: An Operetta on Craft' (1745)
Ennes: is too much staccato, not enough vibrato
King: ha ha ha!!
King: oh man it's so true!!
King: ha ha ha!
Barker: stop laughing steve, you don't know what that means
King: i
King:
King: no i
King: i do
King: i'm always saying that about 'The False Daughter of Jarumundi Bonk: An Operetta on Craft' (1745)
Barker: too much staccato, not enough vibrato?
King: y-yeah
Barker: about 'The False Daughter of Jarumundi Bonk: An Operetta on Craft' (1745)?
King: y
King: yeah
King: joe quick can you explain opera to me?
Joe Hill: what? no
Ennes: let me tell you, this centipede was big
Ennes: one time i threw a soiree
Ennes: he showed up real drunk
Ennes: leaned across my apertivo bar and called me a punk!
Ennes: well, i took that remark rather tongue and cheek
Ennes: but just to be safe i made his next drink weak
Riley Sager: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the horny alcoholic woman
Angela Carter: typical man writing women, i see
Sager: do you?
Sager: do you think a man wrote this story?
Carter: yes, i
Carter:
Carter: wait
Sager: look closer
Sager: i'm not saying i'm a man
Sager: i'm also not saying i'm not a man
King: oh i get it
King: you're nonbinary!
King: see, my boy joe told me about nonbinary, it's when you exist outside th-
Barker: we all know that already steve
Sager: no no not nonbinary
Sager: a secret third thing
Sager: what am i? man? woman? you'll never know!
Carter: what the hell is this? i'm observing the wave length as hard as I can and it's not collapsing!
Sager: that's right!
Sager: i'm the wind, baby!
Sager: that's right, i'm a secret as mysterious as William Johnstone's niece!
Sager: and my gender is a secret that i'll take to the grave!
Carter: your website says he/him
Sager: goddamn it!!!
Sager: foiled again by my own hubris!
Sager: the horny alcoholic woman looked out the window
Sager: AND SAW THE KILLER [mic drop]
Sager: AND THE KILLER SAW HER BACK [mic drop]
Sager: AND HE REACHED FOR HIS KNIFE [mic drop]
King: how many mics are you holding?
Sager: i buy 'em by the pallet!
Sager: i call this the tale of the final girl
Grady Hendrix: [riding skateboard] hey dudes and dudettes
King: it's grady hendrix!
Poe: grady hendrix!
Koontz: grady hendrix!
Lovecraft: grady hendrix!
Barker: grady hendrix!
Sager:
Sager: [narrowing eyes, mumbling] grady hendrix
Hendrix: who wants to see me do some sick flips
Barker: ha ha oh hell yes
Hendrix: i call this the quadruple reverse ollie
Koontz: whoaaaaa!!!
Sager: it's not
Sager: it's not that good
[Hendrix launches straight into space]
Sager: i mean, anyone could do that
Hendrix: i call this the giga-misty flip
Koontz: wow!
Hendrix: i call this one walking the dog
King: crazy!
Hendrix: i call this one the widow maker
Barker: holy shit!
Sager: i dunno
Sager: don't you guys think it's kind of showboaty
Sager: i mean don't you?
Sager: i mean
Sager:
Sager: don't you?
Stephen King: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, I call this the tale of
Elon Musk [rising from bushes] eyyyy stephano king
Musk: itsa me, elon musk!
Musk: ima just here to say dat ima NOT mad abouta da boys series finale
Musk: donta put it inna da newspaper that ima mad!
Musk: da enda ova da boys issa fake anna gay
Barker: fake and gay huh
Musk: si
Barker: damn get a load of this guy
Barker: the most popular poster on ebaumsworld circa 2005
Musk: mama mia!! whattsa matta you??? i break you face!
Musk: ima STILL the most popular poster on ebaumsworld!!
Barker: sure you are pal
Barker: everyone thinks you're real cool and good
Musk: i ama real cool and good!
Barker: yeah sure pal exactly
Barker: that's exactly what i said
Barker: hey how about you post a picture of that owl who doesn't believe things?
Barker: that's also super hip and timely
Musk:
Musk: mama mia! da enda da boys, i no lika it!!
Barker: oh no? was it cuz of the bit with the disrupter?
King: what's the disrupter?
Barker: oh it's this rich tech bro character who's so annoying that they shoot him into space
King: haha! oh that's elon all over!
Musk: NO ITSA NOT!!
Musk: itsa not me atta all! I'm NOT mad about that!
Musk: in fact i'ma laughing!
Barker: sure pal
Musk: i posta da laugh cry emoji to show how unbother i am
Barker: ahahahaha
Barker: ha ha ha yeah i'm convinced ha ha
Poe: clive
Barker: wait i'm not done
Barker: ha ha ha
Barker: ok now i'm done
King: garth what did you think of the end of the boys?
Garth Ennis: [ripping himself out of straitjacket, tearing 'censored' tape from mouth] oo watch out! i'm a mad man! step back! this ain't your daddy's comic! I'm a wild man! I'm out of control! I don't care whose toes I step on! I'm an animal!
Ennis: i'm crazy! i'm discombobulated! i got ants in my pants! Stand back! I'm Irish! [edgy gibberish]
King: yeah but what do you think of the adaptation of your comic?
Ennis: i don't like that they got rid of the mothers milk titty drinking subplot
Edward Lee: yeah man! what the fuck
Michael Allen Rose: welcome to the bizarre world of Michael allen rose
Rose: oh my god! lady! no! stop!
Rose: put your clothes back on!
Rose: what if your husband were to see?
Rose: i'm right here, michael
Rose: sorry, i love your show, but i have to kill you both
Rose: pew pew pew pew pew pew!!!
Rose: Oh!! you got me! you got me!
Rose: i feel so very…
Rose: biIIIiiiIiizzzaaaAAAAaaaAAarre!!!
Rose: for this special bizarre meeting of the midnight society
Rose: we have FOUR brand new bizarro authors
Rose: are you ready
Rose: to get
Rose: biIIIiiiIiizzzaaaAAAAaaaAAarre???
Carlton Mellick III: i was born ready
Mellick: bring them on for judgement
AE Hofmockel: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the reaper's strike
Hofmockel: listen, what would you do if all those hard-workin' stiffs in the grim reapers union local #536 went on strike?
Hofmockel: all those unclaimed souls just accumulating on the curb, week after week
Koontz: gosh! i wouldn't like that at all!
Hofmockel: that's right
Hofmockel: look, we're reasonable grim reapers
Hofmockel: we just want management to come to the table and bargain in good faith
Hofmockel: [singing] look for the union label
Hofmockel: what if, during the grim reaper strike
Hofmockel: a romance blossomed between a barista and the striking reaper
Hofmockel: who is specifically responsible for reaping e-coli?
Hofmockel: because, yes, even bacteria die
hofmockel: even bacteria die
PJ Bresnahan: what if there was a machine that could suck the joy right out of your body?
Bresnahan: boy! that would sure suck, wouldn't it?
Bresnahan: but what if
Bresnahan: what if we could monetize the suck
Bresnahan: what if they could suck the joy out of you and then sell it to rich people?
King: haha! what a crazy idea!
King: they couldn't do that
King: it would be wildly unethical
Poe:
Barker:
Koontz:
Lovecraft:
King: i mean, it would, wouldn't it?
Jonny Gensler: after losing his son to a school shooting, a father becomes obsessed with rebuilding himself out of Legos
Poe: as a metaphor for rebuilding his fractured life, perhaps?
Gensler: maybe
Gensler: but also for real
Gensler: oh wait did i say Legos?
Gensler: i meant to say Brick-Its
Gensler: a non-actionable, uncopyrighted analogue to Legos which has no connection to the Lego Corporation Inc
Barker: so they got to you too, did they?
Gensler: i don't know what you mean
Barker: those creeps in big Lego
[Lego sneaks away]
Barker: you better run, Lego!!
Bitter Karella: and my story
Karella: that's right, i'm here too
Karella: this whole bit was an advertisement the whole time!
Karella: joke's on you!
Karella: my story is called monoceros
Eugène Ionesco: [coughs] rip-off
Karella: n-no it's actually totally different
Karella: it's about a guy who turns into a unicorn
Franz Kafka: [coughs] rip-off
Barker: a guy who turns into a unicorn huh?
Karella: yeah, exactly
Barker: that sounds like some kind of metaphor
Karella: no it's not
Barker: it definitely sounds like some kind of metaphor
Barker: gosh darn it what could it be
Barker: it's right on the tip of my tongue
Koontz: it sounds like a queer awakening metaphor
Barker: yeah THAT'S it ha ha
Barker: wow from the mouths of babes right?
Karella: no that's not it at all
Karella: it's about a guy who LITERALLY turns into a unicorn
Karella: it's very surface level, nothing queer at all
Poe: nice dress, btw
Karella: oh thank you!
Karella: i'm so glad i made you say that
[advertisement]
Rose: that's right, it's four
Rose: count 'em
Rose: four brand new bizarro novellas from the New Bizarro Author Series from RoshamBo press
Rose: fresh from the presses in November
Rose: read them with someone you love!
[/advertisement]
Another thing the TERF scum are never able to answer is how exactly their alliance with the fascists has actually helped women. How have the rights of women been protected by the Trump regime? By Orban? How has aiding and abetting the Tories, Reform and the Republicans actually advanced the cause of feminism?
Of course, we all know why they can't answer this.
Sarah Gailey: Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the river of teeth
Gailey: it's about the most dangerous game of all
Stephen King: is it man?
Clive Barker: what kind of question is that, steve? of course it's man
Barker: it's always man
Mary Shelley: phht
Mary Shelley: man ain't so dangerous
King: well, actually, mary, it probably would be more dangerous than hunting a lot of other animals on account of
Shelley: shut the fuck up, steve
Shelley: i said what i said
King:
King: no but really
Poe: steve, she's talking about men
King: oh
King: oh right
Sarah Gailey: actually when i talk about the most dangerous game i am not talking about man
Shelley: told ya
Gailey: i'm actually talking about hippos
King:
Poe:
Barker:
Koontz:
Lovecraft:
Shelley: hippos ain't that dangerous either
King: oh now come on mary you can't expect us to believe that you'd stab a hippo
Shelley: why wouldn't I?
King:
King: i mean
King: i mean it would take more than a knife to take down a hippo
Shelley: not for me
Dean Koontz: but hippos aren't dangerous!
Koontz: they eat plants!
Sarah Gailey: oh dean
Gailey: oh dean dean dean
Gailey: actually according to statistics did you know that more people are killed by hippos than by lions?
Koontz: whaaaaaaat?!?!
Gailey: i know, right?
Gailey: did you know that there was a plan by the us government to import hippos to the swamps of louisiana
Barker: yeah we all heard that NPR story
Gailey: well, we all know that plan was never implemented
Gailey: what this story asks is
Gailey: what if it was
Gailey: what if the swamps of louisiana were now infested with evil, man-eating hippos?
Gailey: and there was only one man who could stop them
Gailey: a grizzled, battle-scarred veteran of the hippo wars out for one last score
Gailey: and no hippo is safe
Gailey: that's right
Gailey: colonel horatio T. Mchefferbottom III and her royal majesty's 12th airborne hippo division is back in action for a ripping bunch of two-fisted tales of wholesale hippo slaughter
Gailey: the swamps will run blood
Gailey: there's also romance too
Gailey: don't fool yourself
Gailey: the hippo may look cute, maybe even harmless
Gailey: but the so-called river horse is a remorseless murder machine, designed by God only for death
Gailey: you ever looked into the eyes of a hippo
Stephen King: everyone, listen up! my boy joe is going to tell a story tonight!
Joe Hill: dad you don't need to do this
King: everyone!! pay attention!!
King: this one's gonna be good!!
King: just like all his other stories
Hill: dad please
King: i love my beautiful boy!!!
King: everyone, you're going to love this one
King: ok joe go ahead
Joe Hill: submitted for the appr
King: IT'S ABOUT A DRAGON
Hill: dad!
King: i'm sorry joe i couldn't help it
King: i'm just so excited
King: my boy joe wrote about a dragon
Poe: hm i gathered
King: you're all gonna really like it
King: it's a sprawling, multi-decade epic, a real moby dick of horror
King: it's like joe hill's It
King: except instead of a clown, it's got a dragon!!
Hill: i wouldn't describe it like that
King: it's exactly like that
Joe Hill: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of king sorrow
Hill: it's about a group of friends who use a grimoire to make a faustian pact with a dragon
Hill: as you do
Hill: so for this story we're going back
Hill: back to the 90s
Hill: when our hero isn't busy wearing flannel and listening to grunge rock and receiving AOL CDs in the mail, he's summoning dragons
Hill: so they summon this evil dragon
Hill: from the fiery depths of the hell dimension
Hill: and this eternally evil demon monster from beyond infinity looks at them and says
Hill: COR BLIMEY GOVNA BIT O A STICKY WICKIT INNIT
Hill: NIMMY UP THE WICKERSHAMS BOBS A DONUT RIGHTO
Hill: anyway this story deals with a major moral dilemma that i'm sure all of us have struggled with at some point
Hill: is it ok to make a contract with an eldritch dragon from another dimension to do murders?
King: boy
King: we've all been there!
King: am i right, guys?
Poe: what
Hill: in a broader sense tho
Hill: the real question is
Hill: is it morally justified to murder evil people?
Mary Shelley: yeah
Hill: well wait just a second mary you haven't heard all the caveats yet
Shelley: i said what i said
Hill: mary, stop it! you're not supposed to answer it
Hill: it's a gedank experiment
Hill: you know, like
Hill: it's supposed to make you think
Shelley: yeah i thought
Hill: no!
Hill: no not like that!
Shelley: do i get to kill the people myself
Hill: no you just name them and then the dragon does the actual killing
Shelley: fffffft
Shelley: what's the fun in that
Lafcadio Hearn: oo! it's like death note!
Shelley: shut the fuck up nerd
Hill: guys be serious
Hill: what if you had the power to murder, like, really evil people?
Hill: it would still be murder
Hill: would you want that on your conscience?
King: hm really makes you think!
Hill: exactly
Barker: yeah makes you think about who you would murder
Hill: no!
King: joe is right, it's a real moral dilemma
King: i mean, i don't know if i could sanction murder
King: even if it was the worst, most irritating, most annoying person in the world
Barker: you sound like you have a name in mind, steve
King: what? no no of course not
King:
Joanne Harris: mary did you come over to my house earlier Mary
Shelley: no
Harris: yeah, sure ya did
Harris: don't you remember?
Harris: you were kind of menacing lurking in the shadows at my threshold like some kind of uncanny inhuman doppelganger?
Shelley: no
Poe: that does sound like you, mary
Harris: remember you were acting all weird and off-putting like a bizarre simulacrum of humanity?
Shelley: no
Harris: like a fae or a demon or something?
Shelley: no
Harris: you were talking about how you're a big fan of Chocolat?
Shelley: oh well that's true
Shelley: i am a big fan of Chocolat
Harris: you said you loved chocolat and wanted to share a few honest thoughts
Shelley: that doesn't sound like me
Poe: i don't know, mary, you are known for sharing honest thoughts
Shelley: no i'm not
Shelley: i let me knife do the talking
Poe: oh yeah
Harris: you said "Your stated goal, of dropping an exotic stranger into a small french village, is not just a gimmick. It is a sharp, intentional exploration of 'Sensuous and thought-provoking... subtle and brilliant' DAILY TELEGRAPH'."
Shelley:
Shelley: i never said that
Harris: You said "Chocolat isn't just 'Moody and atmospheric... a richly textured tale' INDEPENDENT, it's Truly excellent' LITERARY REVIEW."
Harris: then you spoke in a series of incomprehensible glyphs
Harris: also, i couldn't help but notice you used a lot of em dashes
Harris: and had 25 fingers
Shelley: wait a fuckin second
Shelley: i know what's going on here
Harris: you do?
Shelley: it's that fuckin AI doppelganger
Harris: you have an AI doppelganger?
Shelley: yeah, well, apparently
Shelley: i swear to fuckin hell
Shelley: when i get my hands on that fuckin AI clone
Shelley: there is gonna be so much stabbing
Shelley: you won't even believe how much stabbing there's gonna be
Harris: oh i believe it
