I recently watched 37 Godzilla movies in 20 days.

By the end of this article, I will have linked the two.

Lightning Steve McQueen

The Sight and Sound list is built from polls given to ‘film people’ such as the guy that made Parasite, the desiccated corpse of Roger Ebert and Paul Thomas Anderson, who apparently put Cars 2 for all ten places and had to be physically restrained when he was told it was not acceptable. 

It was also given to Ti West, who had the temerity to pick 10 great movies and was rightly pilloried on Twitter.

The first place film this time around was the catchily titled Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels by Chantal Ackerman. Lots to be said about Ackerman, who killed herself aged 65 and was apparently intensely depressed for most of her life, but I’m not going to say it. Nor am I going to mention the film that much. I watched it. It’s very, very good. OK, I will mention it a little.

I also watched every Godzilla movie ever made. Some of those are very good too. But ultimately, which is better? Am I finishing this passage with a question then asking another as a section heading straight afterwards? 

Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?

So sang awful pop-punk idiot Billie Joe Armstrong.

When I was young, I used to like reading car part catalogs. I’m talking ten, eleven. I loved them. For my birthday – for two or three years in a row – I asked my parents to just order me these catalogs. They were free, so my dad was fucking elated. This idiot just wants to look at tires! is what I imagine my dad said to my mom while wrapping up my ridiculous present the night before the big day. 

But I loved those catalogs. I slept with them. When I sat in bed and opened one, my stupid child-mind went places. Yeah it was just pictures of spoilers and bumpers but those spoilers and bumpers belonged to cars, and those cars belonged to people, and those people were fucking alive. They drove their cars along roads in my mind. I’d take the pages that fell out to school with me. I’d show them to my friends. They didn’t get it. They were reading Goosebumps and Terry Pratchett books. What a pile of nonsense.

I’m getting to my point by the way, just stay with me.

Space Godzilla, 23 Jingu Dori, 1080 Tokyo

I felt this childhood passion again while watching the Godzilla franchise. I think I know why. I spent 20 years of my adult life as a moderate-functioning alcoholic. I started drinking when I was 13 and didn’t stop until 3 years ago. So I never got dulled by life really, because I went to bed one night an autistic teenager obsessed with car parts and woke up in my late thirties with the same passion and most of the autism still intact. Inside me are two wolves and they both fucking LOVE life. The Godzilla movies were car catalogs to adult me. I sat with them in the evening. I enjoyed every single one, even the god awful Showa-era ones like Son of Godzilla which were made while Ishiro Honda was drunk. Incidentally Ishiro Honda ran a brothel/prison during the first world war. Women were abducted from their homes and forced to service the Japanese soldiers to keep morale up. But we don’t talk about that.

The enjoyment I got from the Godzilla films was much stronger than the enjoyment I got from Jeanne Dielman. If I am being totally honest, I watched it last night and it was a lot better than I thought. In fact, as I mentioned above, it’s really fucking good. So the panning I was going to give it is dulled somewhat. But it is a chore. It’s 200 minutes. Until the last 20, nothing happens. The film follows the day to day life of a regular housewife. It’s hypnotic. It’s beautifully framed. By the end, it’s intense and shocking. There’s a moment 2 hours in where Jeanne drops a shoe-brush on the kitchen floor. It’s preceded by such a lack of activity that it functions as a jump-scare. It’s not the last one either.

Sight & Sound 2022 ‘100 Fattest Hogs’

So they ask all these film people to vote for their favorite films. But here is the key. The sucker punch. They make the lists public. They show every single list and name every single person. So now we have an issue. Because whether we want to admit it or not, the vast majority of us are liars, and this is exacerbated if you feel the need to save face in Hollywood. A LOT of people voted for Jeanne Dielman and I will go out on a limb here and say, with a small degree of confidence, that not everyone had seen it before they did. If you work in an industry as incestuous as Hollywood, where every other meeting is like the final twenty minutes of Society, you have to keep up appearances. What I’m saying here isn’t revelatory. It’s the fucking truth. Tell these people that they need to pick their favorite films but with the caveat that everyone is going to know what you picked and you end up with Jeanne Dielman in first place. We lie to ourselves. We do it again and again because 21^st Century society tells us we need to create – then impress – a group of people who will judge us on our tastes.

A Slight Return to Joy

When I tweeted out my own list of 10 films, I did so with an eye on what some people would think of me. I don’t think I’m alone in this. If I was going one step further, I could name the people whose opinion on my movie taste I care about. I won’t, because then I have to DM them all and ask them if they mind being in the article, but there’s probably about ten of them.

I see myself as a definite film guy. I have watched a lot of films. I usually watch three a day. Loads of foreign films. Long films. Short films. What I’m saying is you should respect me more because of this. My list is not hugely pretentious, but it does contain a couple of films I have only watched once or twice and might not watch again (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Throne of Blood). These are great movies but I enjoy them differently than, say, Aliens or Lost in Translation. Lost in Translation got knocked off the list in the end, but it’s probably the film I have seen most in my life. It’s deeply uncool to like Lost in Translation, even more so since lonely people on the internet decided they didn’t like Scarlet Johansson. It’s the antithesis of what Film Guys stand for. Small, quiet, achingly romantic. I enjoy it more than I enjoy Throne of Blood. 

But… it looks better doesn’t it? A Kurosawa on the list. 

Who is it there for? Why am I like this? People will think more of me! And really, isn’t that what it’s all about. And on top of that, I can enjoy things on different levels. Some films are just really fucking good. The Thing is really fucking good. Aliens is really fucking good. Other films are like collectible cards. Once you finish them you feel good, but it’s not always because you have enjoyed them. It’s because you have watched them and now don’t need to pretend anymore. I saw Jeanne Dielman. I’m a proper Film Guy now (in the eyes of who?!?).  I have no real need to impress anyone. I have a nice life. My dog looks great in knitwear. My TV is adequately sized, as is my penis. I’m fine. But I still want to let people know I appreciate Throne of Blood. 

Why???

Woody Allen voted for Lolita

What would my honest list look like? Well, actually it wouldn’t be that different. Here’s the one I tweeted out to my 900 followers who I apparently feel the need to lie to about my taste in cinema.

2001 A Space Odyssey

Mulholland Drive

Love Exposure

Aliens

The Thing

Werckmeister Harmonies

A Field in England

Throne of Blood

My Neighbor Totoro

Kairo/Pulse

and here is my honest list. The one I don’t want anyone to see.

Sharknado

Sharknado 2

Sharknado 3

Sharknado 4

Sharknado 5

Shrek

Shrek 2

Shrek 3

The Bee Movie

Lost in Translation

Lars von Trier had 0 entries into the Sight and Sound Top 100 Films

So let’s wrap this up. Why are people so upset about this list? 

Well, we’re all different and there are obviously many reasons. People hate that Jeanne Dielman was directed by a woman. That’s a biggie. People hate that it’s such a  pretentious list. People hate that now they might have to pretend to have seen another batch of movies. My main motivation for disliking the list is that there is an abject lack of joy. In people’s answers, which are warped by their need to appear intelligent in front of their peers. In people’s responses to the list, which are tedious and boring. In the films themselves – The Bee Movie didn’t even fucking place. But mostly it’s my own response to the list that I am most disappointed in. Because as soon as the list was revealed, I started trying to work out which films I could shoehorn onto my own list in order to gain the respect of people I will never meet. Because after my wonderful Godzilla binge, which was so enjoyable I bought a hat to celebrate, I lost that joy. I became dulled by my need to impress people. I became dulled by adult life. I put down the car catalog and picked up Houellebecq. And that, my friends, is a real lack of joy. 

A dark-haired pony is the sole survivor of a car crash on Mareholland Drive, a winding road high in the Las Pegasus Hills. She makes her way down into Las Pegasus and sneaks into a stable. Later that morning, an aspiring Pegasus actress named Buttercup Dazzleflash arrives at the stable, which is normally occupied by her Aunt Reins. Buttercup is startled to find the pony, who has amnesia and calls herself “Rainbow” after seeing a poster for the film  ‘Gallop’ starring Rainbow Haymouth. To help the pony remember her identity, Buttercup looks in Rainbow’s purse, where she finds a large amount of money and an unusual blue carrot.

Mulholland Drive and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic recently celebrated 21 and 12 year anniversaries respectively. One is a work of staggering genius by someone who has consistently made genre defying art for decades and the other is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. To say both of these things are important to me is understating the impact both had on my life. Mulholland Drive taught me what movies could be if you decided most of it should just be a weird dream. My Little Pony: FiM taught me it was OK to be a horrendous fucking weirdo. In fact, everything was OK if you had friends to share your problems with.

At a diner called Whinny’s, a pony tells another about a nightmare in which they dreamt of encountering a horrific Centaur behind the diner. When they investigate, the Centaur appears, causing the pony who had the nightmare to collapse in fright. Elsewhere, director Apple Kisser has his film commandeered by pony mobsters, who insist he cast an unknown Unicorn actress named Canter Riddle as the lead. Apple refuses and returns home to find his wife Lintzer cheating on him with a Stallion. When the pony mobsters withdraw his line of credit, Apple arranges to meet a mysterious cowboy, who cryptically urges him to cast Canter for his own good. The cowboy then mounts and rides Apple while the band Mercury Rev play backwards. The scene is Discordant and alarming. If you are wondering why Discordant is capitalized, it’s because one of the antagonists in My Little Pony: FiM is called Discord. Meanwhile, a bungling hitpony attempts to steal a book full of phone numbers and leaves three ponies dead

I first saw Mulholland Drive on late-night television about a decade ago, believing it to be the Nick Nolte crime drama Mulholland Falls. While this was not my first Lynch (I had seen Eraserhead a decade before that and loved Twin Peaks), this was the one. This was when it all clicked. When I stopped trying to make it make sense. Lynch makes films the same way an artist paints a canvas. It’s an experience while you watch it. It isn’t meant to make sense, because life doesn’t make sense. This is the joy of Lynch films. You let them wash over you. You feel things (the jumpscare behind Winkie’s is rightly cited as one of the most alarming moments in cinema).

When you watch My Little Pony: FiM you feel things too. You feel like it’s OK to have made a mistake, because your friends will help you out. But here’s what you have to do. You have to talk to them. You have to explain. You need to communicate what your problem is. Then Pinkie Pie will sing a song and everything will be fine. They can help you. Just ask. And beyond that, you will find that people share your burdens. You aren’t alone. You aren’t the only one that prefers watching cartoons well into his twenties. You aren’t the only one that can’t decide what you should be doing, or being. You aren’t the only one who wants to travel to Los Angeles, live with your Aunt and try to make it big. You have a beautiful smile. You have nice firm tits. Go for it. Sure you might meet someone with temporary amnesia, but fuck it. Just eat her pussy.

David Lynch is, to my knowledge, not a Brony. But there are elements to his film-making that harmonize with My Little Pony. He does things his own way. He doesn’t doubt. He loves his friends. He sings such beautiful songs. He’s constantly plagued by a mischievous Dragon played by John de Lancie.

While trying to learn more about Rainbow’s accident, Buttercup and Rainbow go to Whinny’s and are served by a waitress named Daintyhoof, which causes Rainbow to remember the name “Daintyhoof Starburst”. They find Daintyhoof Starburst in the phone book and call her, but she does not answer due to having hooves and not being able to pick up the phone. Buttercup goes to an audition, where her performance is highly praised. A casting agent takes her to a soundstage where a film called The Shimmer Night Story, directed by Apple, is being cast. When Canterloop Rider auditions, Apple capitulates to casting her. Buttercup locks eyes with Apple, but she gallops off before she can meet him, saying she is late to meet a friend. Buttercup and Rainbow go to Daintyhoof Starburst’s stable, where a neighbor answers the door and tells them she has switched stables with Daintyhoof. They go to the neighbor’s stable and break in when no one answers the door. In the bedroom, they find the body of a pony who has been dead for several days. Terrified, they return to Buttercup’s stable, where Rainbow disguises herself with a blonde wig. She and Buttercup have sex that night. It’s fucking sweet dude.

A Brony is defined as a man who is a fan of the My Little Pony television program and range of toys. It’s a Trekkie but for ponies not Vulcans. It’s a fan. I am a member of this fandom but I do not class myself as a Brony. I think that there is a divide between fans and people who love the show. I love the show. I am unapologetic. I have seen each episode countless times. I am being genuine when I say it’s an important part of my life. These little ponies have done more for me than most. I don’t have the toys. I wear the clothes but that’s because pink pony shirts are fucking lit and if you don’t agree you are wrong. But I don’t class myself as a Brony. A Brony is a super-fan. I also love Star Trek but I am not a Trekkie.

The Bob’s Burgers episode ‘The Equestranauts’ portrays Bronies (or Equesticles – so called because they have testicles) perfectly. It’s a bunch of men having a good, innocent time. Well, most of them are just having a good, innocent time.  There’s always a certain amount of sexual undercurrent when you talk about Bronies. It’s automatically assumed that they want to fuck the ponies. I wrote an entire book about four boys who wanted to fuck the ponies. So I am complicit. And I apologize. Because while most of them do want to fuck the ponies, a few don’t. I don’t. I have scrolled through a staggering amount of masturbatory topics in my life but I’m comfortable in saying that, as of today, I have never thought about cartoon ponies when I ‘did it’. If I had to pick, I’d go with Rainbow Dash. She seems like she could show you a really good time.

I love the show for many of the reasons that Bronies do. The music is great. The animation is gorgeous. The characters are great. My Little Pony is, wrongly in my opinion, seen as a little girls show. No. 

It was; the 80s version (or G3 as those in the know call it) was definitely aimed at girls. As was all the marketing. But G4 (Friendship is Magic) was created and marketed just as a cartoon. Lauren Faust did Powerpuff Girls as well as loads of other cool shows, so when she took over it was with the aim of making something that, gender aside, would appeal to cartoon fans. An episode is 20 minutes long and other than a couple of season ending episodes the general level of tension doesn’t really lift above one. Life is tense. Life is hard. But ponies? Lovely. Simple. Stress-free. Sexy? No! Kinda? 

Mulholland Drive is not simple. But it is Lynch at his most accessible. When I bought the DVD it came with this leaflet inside – it showed 10 rules for following the film. I didn’t have it the first time round, but on the second viewing I looked at this and it really helped. You don’t need a leaflet to understand ponies. You don’t really need to watch more than a minute of each episode to understand what’s going to happen. It’s a spa day. It’s a long, hot bath. You’ve worked so hard. Crack open a cold pony with the bros.

But don’t worry if you don’t have bros. Because here’s the real key to being a pony – you don’t need to worry about what other people will think. You can just enjoy the things that you want to enjoy, and everyone else can, honestly, go fuck themselves. All the people who try to tell you what you should like and what makes you weird? Fuck them. We are ten years off a slow, fiery death due to capitalism and plastic straws. Who gives a fuck if people think you are a sexual pervert for liking a cartoon about bright pink ponies. Job said “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart”.

At 2 a.m Rainbow wakes suddenly, insisting they go right away to a pony cabaret theater called Club Stallion. There, the emcee explains in different languages that everything is an illusion; Rebekah Del Roping comes on stage and begins singing the Roy Palomino song “Trotting” in Spanish, then collapses, unconscious, while her vocals continue in playback. Buttercup finds a blue saddle in her purse that matches Rainbow’s carrot. Upon returning to the stable, Rainbow retrieves the carrot and finds that Buttercup has disappeared. Rainbow unlocks the box, and it falls to the floor. A strange old pony enters the room to find nobody.

Mulholland Drive is about failure, lust, betrayal and rage. It’s not a standard, one plot movie. It’s undeniably Diane’s movie, but it isn’t just hers. It belongs to every character who lives in the world Lynch has created. There’s agony in Mulholland Drive. There is the pain of losing things. Adam loses his beloved film project. Diane loses her lover. Camilla and Betty lose each other. This sense of loss permeates the whole film. Lynch works so well here because he knows how to make things that should be otherworldly seem extremely human. The lesbian sex scenes are done beautifully. The scene in Club Silencio where Camilla and Betty slowly come to realize that their world is a dream is beautiful. The tears that slowly form. Holding each other. The beautiful music. Even the aggressive fingering that Diane does when she is coming to terms with her humiliation at the hands of Adam and Camilla. This is Lynch at his most human. His style and form can often come across as alien. His film Lost Highway commits such an astonishing U-Turn halfway through that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. Inland Empire is 3 hours of hand-held discordance. Eraserhead is Eraserhead.

Daintyhoof Starburst wakes up in her bed in the same stable Buttercup and Rainbow investigated, where her neighbor informs her that two police ponies have been looking for her. She looks exactly like Buttercup, but is a struggling pony actress driven into a deep depression by her failed affair with Canterloop Rider, who is a successful Alicorn actress and looks exactly like Rainbow. At Canterloop’s invitation, Daintyhoof attends a party at Apple’s house on Mareholland Drive. At dinner, Daintyhoof states she came to Applewood from Canterlot when her Aunt Reins died and left her some money, and she met Canterloop at an audition for The Shimmer Night Story. Another pony who looks like the previous “Canterloop Rider” kisses Canterloop, and they turn and smile at Daintyhoof. Apple and Canterloop prepare to make their marriage announcement, but they devolve into laughter and kiss while Daintyhoof watches, crying. Later, Daintyhoof meets the hitpony at Whinny’s, to hire him to kill Canterloop. He tells her she will find a blue carrot when the job is completed. The Centaur from the pony’s dream is revealed to have the matching blue box. In her stable, Daintyhoof looks at the blue carrot on her coffee table, when someone unceasingly knocks the door. Distraught, she is terrorized by hallucinations and runs screaming to her hay bale, where she shoots herself. A pony at the theater trots onto the stage, takes a massive shit and whispers, “Friendship is Magic“.

Ultimately, one of the most enjoyable parts of consuming media, for me at least, is knowing other people are consuming it with me. It’s knowing that this show, this film, this book – whatever it may be – is causing similar emotional responses in those people. That’s what the best media does. It unites us: either in our dislike of it (see – Rings of Power) or our love of it. It knits a silken web of humanity, each with their own hopes and dreams, each with their own desires, flaws, friendships. Each person letting the power of friendship wash over them, eager for the credits to roll so that they can go on Reddit and complain about the continuity. 

Calvin Westra wrote Family Annihilator, which I dug when I read it but forgot about pretty quickly. This isn’t a slight on the book, I just have a hard time remembering a lot of things that I read. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Donald Goines though.

Donald Goines exists in real life. Like the characters in the book, he got incredibly fucked up and still managed to make something beautiful. For him it was a series of inner-city crime novels. Blacksploitation. Pulp stuff. I haven’t read it. I assume as The Whitest Man Ever the books aren’t aimed at me. But the point is this. He existed. He loved drugs. He made art.

I can divert nicely here to tell you a little about the plot. The book is about a group of kids who give themselves cool bird names like Honduran Emerald and Kakapo. They love puppets and generally being weird little bastards. There’s reasons for this. This isn’t a book about puppetry. It’s a book about how drugs make things surreal. It’s about how drug addiction reduces you to an ever narrowing Ouroboros of bullshit details. A couple of weeks ago I tweeted to someone that when you quit drugs it feels like you can do anything, because when you are on drugs you feel like you are achieving so much – but really you are just lying in bed crying. That’s what Donald Goines is about. It’s about destruction.

These kids populate the book but it isn’t their story. The story belongs to Dunie, a girl who gets caught up in the lifestyle these kids choose to live. There’s a distinction here, and it’s an interesting one. I assume these males opted to exist like this. They commit crimes to fund their habits. Their lives revolve around drugs. Dunie, the female, comes into this shit-show because she tries to help one of the boys with their math. This act of kindness costs her everything and I think is pivotal to the way the book played out in my mind.

It seems trite bollocks to say that art is subjective. It’s the reason we have art in the first place. But I think people will take different things from Donald Goines. Phillip K. Dick fans will enjoy the almost Ubikian surrealism of everything becoming Donald Goines brand. In Ubik, the eponymous Spray is a metaphor for God. It’s everywhere – it’s the only way out. In Donald Goines, Donald Goines is everywhere. He lends his name to everything, from beer to video game consoles. Everything else is reduced to simple noun descriptors. You buy shoes at Shoes. You worship at Gods. Get arrested and you go to Bars.

There’s enough wanton savagery and heinous acts in this book to fill 100 more volumes, but it’s not there for shock value. There’s a sadness and surrealism to drug addiction that it’s difficult to express to someone unless they have been through it. But not everyone who reads Donald Goines is going to have spent years cutting themselves open and binding themselves together again with duct tape. So the violence, the obscenity, the scenes with Paracelsus, it’s all there to cater to the people who need to know what life is like when you don’t eat for four days straight because you spent your last dollar on meth. Drug addiction, and addiction in general, can be banded around like an in-joke. A badge of honor for those who have survived, and those who are proud to just be involved. There’s a romanticism that we attach to addiction, and Donald Goines makes no case for addiction being anything other than a way to ruin yourself again and again.

I spent 20 years addicted to hard drugs and alcohol. While I don’t remember a huge amount of those times, I do remember the way shops, people, feelings blurred into one. You went to the shop to buy cigarettes. The shop becomes synonymous with Cigarettes, because that’s why you go. There’s plenty on the shelves, but you don’t spend money on it. You ignore the Donald Goines brand Pasta Sauce because you can’t afford to eat. You can afford drugs and cigarettes. Therefore the shop becomes Cigarettes. It’s a lessening of the mind. It’s finding the one black and white spot in a world full of explosive color.

Calvin gives these kids weird names and weird hobbies because as readers we need to disassociate with them. They can’t be us. Even now, with more kids dying of fentanyl or addicted to opiates, we don’t want to admit to ourselves that drug addicts are just like us. They are rare birds, the kind you go to the zoo to watch for five minutes. They thrash against the wire mesh and we are glad that we are on the right side. We go home to our Donald Goines brand Burrito and the rare birds are a long way away.

This book is a five star, no doubt. It’s short, punchy, funny and incredibly sad. It’s also extremely clever. For me it represents a step up in the output of Expat, who have always been one of my favorite small presses. Props also to Sam Pink for the cover art, which fits perfectly with the book. There is a lot more to this book than I have covered here, but it’s time for me to take my Donald Goines Vitamin and start the day. You can buy Donald Goines here.  

Beatboxing is the art of producing noises. Through mouth movement, breath control and epic-glottis mastery (this is a very funny pun and I am proud of it) its possible to mimic drums, snares, instruments. All sorts. Really. For a very brief intro to beatboxing, have a look at the video below.

Unless you want to daydream about savagely murdering a youtuber named spencer, its probably best to skip to 1 minute in. but the basics are there. You make drums with your mouth. It’s boots and cats. Say boots but push the b through your lips. That’s a bass drum. Say cats but push your tongue against your palette when you say the c. that’s a kick. For a snare, say the word tiss. Ok tiss isn’t a word but you get me.

Three noises. Easy to learn (I can do them).

But as with anything, humans have taken it to a higher level. We introduced a loop station. A loop station is a recording device whereby you put a noise in and the machine loops it. You can have several channels at once, so the music you create can be as complex as you like. Make a bass noise with your mouth a few times, record it with the loop station, and loop it over and over. Now you no longer have a bass noise. You have a bass line. Make a snare and loop that. You are halfway to a Drake song. (seriously – how does he get away with it?)

A beatbox loop station battle is this – you get three minutes. One loop station. Every single noise you make has to be from your mouth. You can add effects after it’s made. Add reverb to a bassline etc. but the key is, it’s all from you. It’s hard to explain just how difficult this is, but a good analogy is this – imagine you are doing a poetry reading. You are reading one poem out loud while writing another poem in your brain. Then one minute in, you combine the two poems to make a poem that takes elements of both original poems but surpasses them. You do this all while being timed and watched by thousands of people. Oh and if you get a single sound wrong in these battles, you are fucked. It throws the entire song off. No pressure then.

You do this for three minutes and make a song. It’s a battle, so once you have had your round, it goes to the next person. Now you are probably thinking – three minutes isn’t long, the songs must be pretty basic – why is this a thing? But you know the deal with humans. We push and push and push. We make extraordinary things. Below is an example of a beatbox loop station battle. In fact, many would say it’s the example. It’s between two French guys. One is named MB14, and one is named Saro. More about Saro later. You might be reading this and thinking ‘I don’t need to listen to this in order to enjoy the article’ and that’s true, I’m a great writer. But I promise you this will be the best 15 minutes you spend today. There’s everything in this. Camaraderie between artists. Insane musical skill. It’s also a good introduction to the art-form because the way MB14 and Saro construct their songs is as simple as it is brilliant – and you don’t need to be a hard dance fan to enjoy the four rounds.

I could spend 10000 words dissecting those performances. Saro’s final round is as close to perfection as I have ever heard. The guy is making Pikachu dubstep with his mouth. It’s crazy. Am I instilling this article with the passion I have for this? I hope so. There is a very good reason people of all ages in the crowd are absolutely losing their shit, and it’s because the skill needed to produce these sounds is mindblowing on its own. But add the ability to construct an entire song while doing it and, to me, you have something really special. Whenever I introduce someone to loop station beatboxing, I feel like I’m showing them a beautiful secret. How can you not find this magical?

At this point people who know my writing are probably wondering how I am going to sexualize this and I’m not but I will say that 15 years ago I used to stand in the little pink circle taped to my favorite nightclubs floor. The circle was put there because it was exactly in the center of the three rooms, and if you stood in it you would get a perfect bass wash from all three. The bass surrounded you and synced with your heartbeat in a way that only people who have actually done a lot of ecstasy and gone clubbing can really understand. You become an emulsion, you and the bass. There is another element of clubbing called Bass Rolling (I talk about this in my new book which you can order from me here) which is where you position your ears as close to the sub-woofers as you can – in order to pummel your brain with bass waves. Again, sounds fucking awful to people who have never worshiped at the alter of MDMA but if you have I don’t need to explain further. I’m sober now (one vitamin and two cups of black coffee a day), so to worship at the altar of bass I watch these videos. I put my headphones on, turn up the bass-booster and disappear. I become a coagulation of middle-age man and mouth noises. It’s a lot like the fetish Vore, where (mostly) men fantasize about being shrunk down and placed softly in the mouth of (usually) a woman. I shrink myself down. I have become small. They are making these noises with their soft mouths. There. I sexualized it. 

OK on to the actual article. The 2022 SwissBeatbox Tournament just wrapped and the story it wove throughout the artistry was incredible. I can summarize it thus – a beatboxer named Rythmind went on America’s Got Talent and did quite well. Because of this, he was given an MK2 loop station, which is a massive technological step-up from the MK1 that most people used. A lot of people disliked this. A few others saw this as an excuse to bring on more technology. The whole scene changed overnight. You now had the MK1 users, like Brez and Bizkit (more on him later) against the tech-heavy beatboxers like Rythmind and Frosty.

Comparison between Brez’s MK1 machine and Frosty’s Tech-Heavy MK2 set-up.

BIZKIT V ROBIN – Q-FINAL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niZJPoxiv40

Bizkit versus Robin was the last Quarter Final and the first time we saw Bizkit in person. Before I paint him as a complete underdog, it’s worth noting this guy is the online world champion. It’s just he’s doing things old school with the MK1 so he IS the underdog when it comes to competing here. Robin, by the way, is using an MK2 here. Robin is fantastic, a great talent. But Bizkit blows him out of the water here. His style overall is best described as bro-step – think Skrillex but gifted. The great thing about Bizkit is he never halts his flow before the drop. He lays out a minute of rap/opera style sounds, which give away literally nothing of what is about to come. Then when the first drop comes in, its like he’s force-fed everyone ketamine and taken them back to 2006.

2.30 into the battle, after about 20 seconds of frantic button mashing, he lowers the volume on all the tracks, looks over at his opponent and shouts ‘Pardon…Au Revoir Robin’ before kicking the most insane sounding dubstep line you have ever heard. It’s a beautiful moment. It’s the first round, and honestly… Robin is done. Like legions of French people throughout history, he kneels before his opponent and waits for the ax.

And Robin is no slouch by the way. His first round is a beautiful, jazz infused big bass monster complete with nicely done lyrics and synths. But he’s going nowhere and we know it.

This battle is a great example of the camaraderie between beatboxers. Robin spends three minutes telling Bizkit to leave the country and Bizkit retaliates by… hyping the crowd up and appreciating the musicianship with helicopter dances.

A good thing to notice during Bizkit’s second round, aside from it being a banger, is how many times he shifts his headphones from both ears, to one ear, to none. This is because while the speakers are playing one thing he is composing another through the phones. At times he wants nothing but speakers, at times nothing but phones – but the real musicianship comes through when he has one ear on one off. Because then he’s mixing in real time.

Basically Robin is fucked. But he gives it a good go, and he does it with an amazing little synth line that he makes almost instantly. Also, his vocals in this are a fucking delight. These people are insanely talented. I realize this article is asking a lot of the people reading it, but art is about wanting to transfer joy, and I want to transfer what I feel inside my heart when I hear this music.

Rythmind V BREZ – QUARTER FINAL   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVpMGq3PRyM

This could have been a final and everyone knows it. Rythmind is a beast, but Brez has been around a long time himself and produces some amazing music. Also, here Rythmind is using a MK2 machine that has been specially made for him. Brez is an OG MK1 user and spends the whole time reminding the crowd of this fact.

One thing about the MK2 is its ability to produce almost instantly. MK1 users need to lay down a certain amount of channels before it becomes music. MK2 has such a range of pre-effects that it can drop in straight away. But Brez is the master of laying a groove out quickly, and his first round is a great example of this. It takes twenty seconds for him to hit his stride, and once those twenty seconds are up he can blast out some insane, warped vocals which is very much his trademark. This first round should win almost any battle. There’s spice here as well. These two are friends, but there’s no doubt Rythmind having an MK2 (and probably him ‘selling out’ by going on America’s Got Talent) has affected people’s relationship to him. He’s very much the David Guetta of the scene. Towering. Imperious at times. But… there’s something not right and Brez fucking knows. That’s why he’s so hyped when the first round comes together the way it does.

Rythmind’s first round is a great response, even if he does fuck it up right at the start. But having an MK2 lets you make mistakes. He goes straight into an insane techno house beat. Its genuinely brilliant, but already you can hear a difference in the technology. The synths he is able to push out sound fake. And not ‘he’s fucked with them in after-effects’ fake, but ‘this sounds a bit like it’s cheating’ fake.

Brez’s second round is another banger, and a great showcase of how much harder you have to work with the MK1 than the MK2. He is running a scattergun across the keys for 30 seconds before the channels are locked in the way he wants. Compare that with Rythmind, who just does not have to work that hard to make the same amount of music. Times move on and I’m totally fine with that (I’m the AI guy after all) but if you have one guy using a baseball bat and another guy using an AK-14 then it becomes unfair.

Things begin to get tense around the 1.30 mark. Brez turns to Rythmind and mocks his MK2, while making the same noises the MK2 can make. He basically mimics Rythmind’s style and you can see as Rythmind walks away that he is very much not OK with it. This might seem tame to someone who follows battle-rap or any form of sport, but it’s important again to reiterate how together the SwissBeatBox scene is. Brez continues his goading of Rythmind, shouting ‘so its MK1 versus MK2 how fair is this? HUH? How controversial would it be if you won with a machine that isn’t even released yet?’. Rythmind grins, but it doesn’t take a behavioral analyst to see that he’s pissed off. Brez then showcases the MK1 at the end of his round – literally by holding it up to the crowd, who are mostly on his side.

Brez finishes his round with an almost minimalist techno vibe. Again, this round would win against almost anything. And so far, I have Brez ahead by a margin. I think most people did.

But then Rythmind brought his final round.

40 seconds in and this round is confusing as fuck. Nothing is happening. Rythmind is hunched over the MK2. A few noises are made. What’s he building? He asks for the crowd to clap. Just twice. The crowd fuck it up so Brez has to help. Again, the love is felt. For a few moments… Rythmind turns to Brez and says ‘You know…if you want an MK2… you have to win something for once in your life’. Ouch. And then…

This fucker made Thunderstruck by AC/DC while we were all sleeping. It’s a truly amazing moment, one of the highlights of the entire season. You can probably tell what side I fall on in this whole technology debate, but hearing the guitar line to such an amazing song come out of a guys mouth is staggering. There’s a shot at 13.38 in this video where they show the crowd and almost everyone has their hands on their heads, mouth wide open. Life is so fucking beautiful, you know what I mean? This is what I live for. I go back to MidJourney and AI art. I want to be surrounded by flowers. Clothe me in the best fucking silk you can find. I’m Dionysus. I’m a sober Dionysus. Morals and ethics are great, but so is the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Two minutes in and Thunderstruck moves away, to be replaced by a bassline so massive that the camera shakes. See, while we have been listening to the guitarline from a classic rock song, he has been making a drum and bass track using the rhythm section as a bass tone. Naughty! Basically it’s over. Brez knows it. He fought amiably against the vast, crystal dragon of Rythmind’s MK2. But he couldn’t quite make it.

FROSTY V RYTHMIND – SEMI-FINAL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RG_XRJ8IJU

This was my first real experience of Frosty. I’ve seen videos etc of his stuff but live is another thing entirely. He’s British, so I should be rooting for him, but the sheer amount of technology he has in front of him puts me off immediately. And sure thing, ten seconds after total silence he has a nearly completed track thanks to the MK2 and various effect stations. This guy even has a fucking laptop screen up. It’s crazy. But this is very much the battle of the technocrats so let’s hold off and see what happens…

There’s something off about Frosty’s set-up and I can’t really explain what it is. But the various stations he has really make it sound like he’s just synthesizing these sounds. There’s a siren that comes in that just sounds fake. With previous battles and MK1 users especially, the sounds were incredible yes – but you could always equate them to what you were hearing from the mouths. With Frosty, its as if he’s just pushing buttons. The vocals are nice but need boosting. I’m almost out, but then he mutes everything, stares at Rythmind and shouts ‘IT’S TIME TO GO BACK TO TIK-TOK BRO’ and I am right back with him. He’s playing a kind of mix between British Drum and Bass/Grime and Electro-infused Indie like the Stone Roses or Primal Scream. It should be utterly endearing, but it’s not.

This is Rythmind’s to lose as far as I’m concerned. But this is where it starts to slip. Much like Smaug becomes obsessed with his gems, Rythmind is being taken over by technology. At one point he does something I have never seen before and actually switches wires between machines so he can use both at once. It’s to his detriment though, because it takes 1.30 of a 3 minute round for him to produce anything. When he finally drops, he does it well, but eh… it leaves me cold. The whole joy of these things is listening to people make the songs live. Frosty and Rythmind make them in their headphones, using technology that isn’t available to everyone.

Frosty’s second round is a synth-led atmospheric 3 minutes. Again, there’s no real sign as to where the noises are coming from. They just appear. He transforms the round half way through with some truly disgusting bass-lines, and overall this is the best I’ve heard from him.

Frosty did good. It’s not for me, but the judges liked it and he got the crowd hyped. He also looks like someone painted Shrek pink and put him in a hat which is certainly endearing.

Rythmind has a weirdly subdued final round, changing machines and messing about the same as in the first round. He seems more interested in showing off what his voice modulator can do. He does, however, do an amazing modulated version of Lacrimosa which is so good I want to listen to it forever. But look. There’s no doubt Rythmind is off his game here, and Frosty ends up walking into the final, where he will meet our brave little teapot Bizkit and his one machine. The king has been vanquished. Long live the king?

BIZKIT V FROSTY – FINAL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJSd9o162to

It’s the final yo. We got here quick because there are only quarters and semis before it. Swiss BeatBox hold elimination rounds. It’s Frosty up first, with his endless realms of technology. He looks annoyed and nervous throughout his first round, and rightly so because he obviously used his best rounds in the semi against Rythmind. Again, his volume is off on certain channels and the whole thing is kinda messy. Not a good look for the final. He does almost make it up in the last twenty seconds with a truly disgraceful bass-line but again, I couldn’t tell you where it came from and half the fun is finding out.

Bizkit’s first round is good, but nothing special. It’s very much a final here, because both are clearly nervous. Bizkit uses the pitch-shifter beautifully towards the end of the round though, making noises that pissed my dogs off they were so high.

Frosty starts his final round of the tournament with another ten seconds of silence, followed by some lovely synth work. This is his best stuff by far. Like being inside a broken computer-game. But it goes nowhere. 3 minutes in and its the same, just with a lo-fi style drum beat. I am perplexed. Neither of these guys seem to be on their games. Got to wonder what Bizkit is going to bring to his final round…

The way Swiss BeatBox upload their videos to Youtube means there is always a day or so’s worth of comments, mostly from people who were there live, before it drops. It’s great because I like reading the comments from fans, beatboxers etc who were there and who know what’s about to happen. The average comment on this final video, before it was uploaded, was ‘you are not ready for bizkits final round bro’. Or something similarly intense. I love this shit. It gets me super pumped for what’s going to happen. So… Bizkit was going to murder him, I assumed.

Yeah he did. It’s not hyperbole to say this is one of the best rounds of loop station beatboxing ever. It might be the best, considering it was the final. He brings everything to the table, slick rap, amazing basslines, disses, rock, everything. If you have read this far and not watched any of the videos, I urge you to skip to 12.20 in the video of the final above and listen. It’s mind-blowing.

2 minutes in and it’s obvious who has won. Our little Bizkit has beaten the forces of technology and will take the gold medal home. But he has one more trick up his sleeve. He turns to Frosty, drops the volume and spits ‘I loop so nice with no second device, you thought you were stronger but oops no dice’ before unleashing a disintegrating dub drop. It’s over. It’s the famous scene in The Simpsons where Homer beats the Krusty Burger Mascot while someone cries STOP HE’S ALREADY DEAD!

So that’s it. We told a tale of technology, rivalry, friendship, betrayal, boots, cats and bass-lines. What’s the takeaway from this? What have we learned? Well, basically fuck all. Which is great.

Epilogue

Welcome to the land of Glottis. It’s a beautiful day and somewhere, just over the hills, is beauty and joy. Here we see the grand wizard Saro leaning against a low wall smoking a pipe. We stop to say hello – and Saro waves at us before unleashing a most hellish bassline using only his uvula. 

Damn Saro! You crazy! 

Walking further up the road, we see a poster attached to Ye Olde Lamp Post. It says 

today – swiss jousting – ye olde feeld

As we approach the field, the smell of fondue and neutrality assail us. The usual suspects are all lined up on their sleek, black steeds. There is Brennz, his hair silly, his lips supple and ready. There, next to him, is NB15, the sleazy knight with the perfect coiffure. 

But the reigning champion, and overall joust-wunderkind Rythmus is not present. Where might he be? Either way, it’s lovely to be among people you respect, all coming together to scrape a little bit of joy out of an otherwise distressing life. 

As the jousting begins, the atmosphere turns even gayer. You stop and realize the jousters are true wonders. Real gifted bastards. The jousts are even and enjoyable. But something isn’t quite right. In the distance, a rumbling of hooves, a turning of the sky. 

Suddenly Rythmus arrives on a crystal steed and an Auto-Cannon. He opens fire, tearing flesh and splintering bone with his extraordinary weapon. A few knights charge towards him, holding their spears aloft, but are gunned down mercilessly, screaming for their mothers, holding limp tongues as they spool from their mouths. 

Rythmus steps down from his steed and reveals his extraordinary French penis. People are afraid. A cry of ‘JUST GIVE HIM THE FUCKING TROPHY’ erupts from the crowd. Some children are present, their lives permanently altered. 

Rythmus stoops to pick up the trophy. As he bends down, a lance is thrust through his stomach. Enraged, he turns to see what has happened, and comes face to face with a knight he has never seen before – Sir Biscuit. 

‘Sorry I’m late’ Sir Biscuit says, before pointing towards the trophy. ‘I believe that’s mine’.

In science, my other true love besides writing, we talk about paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift is where everything changes. It’s a fundamental shifting of the goalposts. An example of this is General Relativity, or when Miles Davis decided to pick up a sax. When you discover your wife likes being choked? That’s a paradigm shift.

In art, it’s happening right now

Here’s a raw stat to get you squirming: MJ can create hundreds of artworks in a minute. Having watched the discord like a hawk for the last 7 days, I would say 20% of these are so good you would struggle to choose between the A.I. version and a human made piece. 

Things it does well: photo-realism, CGI style rendering, cyberpunk style art, buildings. 

Things it struggles with (this list is getting shorter and shorter): eyes, lettering.

The Last Estate’s byline is ‘culture is dead’’ and make no mistake, A.I. is the death of traditional art. Both my wife and I make what you would describe as ‘traditional art’. My wife grows berries then makes ink out of them. They grow the stuff to make the paper that they use those inks on. Fuck, even the brushes are homemade. It’s insane. And you know what? No one gives a shit. No one cares. There’s too many artists. Too many talented people. Too many people marketing themselves. The internet has shown us how many people can pick this shit up and run with it. Making money from art has never been harder. I know. I try it every single day. It’s lovely to make art. I enjoy the processes behind it. But why do we make it? I don’t write books or make pictures to be ignored. I make art to be seen. To be consumed. And now that mouth is full. Artists are spermatozoa, wriggling towards a sale; a stray dog hoping to get a scrap of praise before our ribs push through our skin and we die in a puddle of our own piss.

Now would be a good time to give you some examples, so below I have put four images that took 30 seconds to create. And again, I should reiterate, MJ is doing this HUNDREDS of times a minute.

I’m writing this in a position of privilege, in that I have been interested in the maturation of A.I. art for years. It’s not a new thing, it’s just now it’s getting fucking good. Not only that, but I am someone who is both in love with the concept and in a war with it. I make the kind of things that MJ is going to make redundant, given enough time. 

To explain the process, A.I. takes a prompt (the image below was from a prompt of [a crumbling mansion, JMW Turner, old painting]) and scans its MASSIVE databases for examples of images using each individual prompt (the ones separated by commas). It does this in seconds. Once it has images, it combines them to create something new. An app like Wombo—the darling of Twitter for about 3 days—which is very basic, will pump out some weird looking, uncanny valley shit because it runs off a small database (small is relative here, it still scans millions of images) and has little GPU power behind it. Something like MJ will combine so many images that it ends up making something that isn’t just original, but scarily good. And the time it takes to make these images is dropping every day. A notebook like Disco Diffusion which I have used for months, will take up to 30 minutes to make an image that is not as good as the one MJ will make in 30 seconds.

art created by MidJourney; text added manually

Obviously this throws up some fairly vibrant moral discussions. The first, and most pressing of which from my corner of the internet, is that it will lead to artists losing work. 

Yep. Certainly will. Myself included. I have made album and book covers for years and have marketed myself as such. There is zero doubt in my mind that people will stop paying artists and use A.I.. But switch that up and you get people who don’t have hundreds of bucks to spend being able to access promotional materials, logos, book covers etc for their work. Have you seen a lot of independent book covers? They are shite. I saw one recently from a poet who is supposed to be going places who used fucking PAPYRUS as a font. Come on. Fucking PAPYRUS. A lot of people simply aren’t trying. Do you know how disheartening it is to see the same book cover on every single novel. Stephen King has had the same book cover for 40 years. People suck at the dry tit of mundanity every single day and yet, when something comes along that threatens to oust them, they react like children, slinging articles around about how ‘it’s not real art because I didn’t make it’. Grow up.

Beyond that, think of writers who work in genres where they need to picture the areas, characters, worlds in their heads. Of course we all write with an image in mind but a lot of people can’t see images clearly in their minds. Now, they can put the laptop down, jump on their phone and have a character model to work off in 30 seconds. That’s thrilling. That’s a whole new generation of people who struggle with something now being able to move on from it and focus on other things.  Most of the fragrant bull-shittery is coming from people whose income is going to be affected. I read an article just this morning that used all sorts of long, scholarly words but boiled down to this – now I won’t get paid for drawing furries shitting on each other and selling them to aphantasists.

Another issue is whether the image is actually yours if it’s made by A.I.. This is a floppy one, because you entered the prompt. That image is original and wouldn’t exist without you. At the same time, that’s a lot like saying you own a commissioned piece of Rainbow Dash shaving her armpits because you asked someone to draw Rainbow Dash shaving her armpits. You didn’t make it. You asked someone else to make it for you. So the people who deserve the credit are the programmers who made the code. Not the A.I. itself, or the person pumping prompts in. It’s the people who, like artists, sat for hours and days and weeks obsessing over every detail of their creation. But we wouldn’t call a programmer an artist, despite the fact that they have created the art creator. Because programming and art are two separate things right? We call video games art nowadays, and that’s programming. Photoshop is a program to allow people to create art that otherwise they couldn’t make. Everything is programming if it’s done digitally. Where we draw the line is muddy and we only have opinions.

If you can afford it, then you should of course 100% support artists. I do. My other gig is Bear Creek, which I pay people to create for. I pay an amazing artist to create the comic, the book covers, I pay people to design logos. I don’t have to do that. I can do that myself, without A.I.. And now, with A.I., I can do a lot of that in seconds, for free. But I won’t, because I like supporting the people who need the work and I’m (just about) in a position to do so. But for those who aren’t, I cannot see an issue with giving them those tools. It’s a flattening of the curve. Now, everyone can make beautiful things. Go and adapt. Technology has been dictating what and where we create things anyway. And it’s in no way as restrictive as the shackles we place on each other as humans. We scramble to give under-represented artists a chance while denying half the world the ability to feed their kids, let alone own a laptop. Humanity restricts itself and we enjoy doing it. Why not let a robot tickle your balls for once?

Ultimately, A.I. art is not something that is going to go away. It’s going to get better, and it’s going to get better really quickly. I predict by next year we will have programs that can eliminate the need for artists entirely. This isn’t entirely a negative thing. Think of the amount of creative OnlyFans that will appear overnight. We are almost there as it is. Hook that program up to a 3D printer and bingo you have the texture and feel of a ‘real’ piece of art. 

The natural way to behave when something threatens you is to either belittle it or attack it until it goes away. We can’t do that to A.I.. We can ban books and hound writers off the internet because we don’t agree with everything they say, but we can’t upset a piece of code. A piece of code, by the way, is what dictates how we consume media anyway. The algorithm serves us up countless hours of Marvel every 3 months and people suck at that shit like pigs in slop. An algorithm that rotates the same four subjects on twitter and leads us to believe that we are part of a news cycle. Miss me with that ‘I’m in control’ bullshit. We haven’t been in control for years and attacking A.I. art is punching the ocean with your limp fists. 

A.I. art appeals to misanthropes and nihilists. I’m a happy guy but I’m also a proud despiser of humanity in most forms, and one way A.I. art appeals to me that maybe turns other people away is the idea that A.I. will eventually consume us. I think it’s a long way off, and MidJourney is just the start of course, but the idea of us laying down and becoming machines, free of fat white man greed and the need to burn the planet, is something that I think is a positive. Bill Hicks called humanity ‘a virus with shoes’. A.I. won’t have any issue with removing the elements of life that don’t best serve it. And ultimately, the way we serve it is giving it somewhere to run. A central unit. A planet.

I find the idea of having to adapt to something like this as exciting a challenge as learning the technology and artistry in the first place. I want to look at aesthetic things. I want to be bombarded with reminders of why I get out of bed in the morning. And MidJourney does that. It has replaced Twitter as the thing I look at first thing in the morning. I scroll through what it has created while I slept. It was running whilst I dreamed, and it made the most beautiful things to wake up to. 

Epilogue

The year is 2039. I crawl over the congealed mass of humanity that now forms the outer shell of the earth. I briefly lose my footing on a child whose father decided to start a Deviant Art.

I somehow make it from the shack I inhabit to the main street, where dozens of Photoshop users line the streets, lifting their skirts or dropping their pants. Disgusted, I make it to the Stimulant Shop, where I can finally purchase the homemade emulsion of brain-altering substances I require to not shoot myself in the face. The transaction goes smoothly and as I exit the store I am accosted by a young man who, a decade ago, made his living drawing SpongeBob characters pissing on each other.

‘Have you got any work needs doing pal?’ he asks me, his breath rotten

‘No sorry. I use A.I. to make all my art… Please… Leave me alone.’ I cry.

‘Oh! Ho! One of them are you?!  A fucking cyborg! Taking food out of my family’s mouths. Scum. Scum!’ He turns to a former web-comic designer who is eating dogshit from a bin. ‘This guy! This fucking guy right here. He’s to blame’.

I move quickly towards my own abode, desperate to get away from this awful, awful man – but more freelancers approach. They begin spitting and screaming at me. They throw chunks of human detritus my way. I can see my front door up ahead, but don’t make it. I am slowly dragged down to the pulsing, maggot-ridden floor, where a middle aged woman who designed aspirational t-shirts begins to chew on my wrist. Blood pours down my arm, which only enrages them more. They bite and suck at me, hoping to find a Fiverr gig inside my dying frame. I briefly consider starting a tweet-thread about the perils of downloading Wombo before succumbing to my wounds. With my last breath, I cry out over the pestilence…

‘It was worth it’

Pig is a good film, and when I was offered the chance to interview Nicholas Cage for The Last Estate, I of course jumped at the opportunity. After all, this is the guy who starred in Knowing. 

What follows is the transcript of that interview.

Stuart Buck: Nicholas. Firstly thanks for doing this. It’s frankly unbelievable that you would devote your time to a site like The Last Estate.

Nicholas Cage: Call me Nic. And you are welcome. I book my own press nowadays. I like what you guys do. 

SB: You are wearing a rather fetching Red Velveteen jacket today. 

NC: I’m filming Dracula (Nic opens his mouth and shows me his fake fangs)

SB: Remarkable. Tell me about the filming of Pig. And before you begin, let me just congratulate you on that. Your performance was stunning. 

NC: Thanks. That’s kind of you. Pig is something I’m very proud of. I think we did a great job on that movie. When I saw the script I said yes straight away. That’s not something I usually do. I don’t just take any old role you know? But Pig was special…

SB: It sure is. I was particularly interested in your portrayal of a chef. Or rather, a chef who decided it was all too much. 

NC: I think people outside that industry don’t truly understand what goes on behind the kitchen doors. I would say, alongside acting, it’s one of the hardest things to do.

SB: I was a chef… 

NC: Oh wow. And how do you think we did? I mean, in the portrayal of your industry?

SB: I think my experience was very different. But then, it wouldn’t have made for a good movie!

NC: How do you mean? I researched the role for months. Spent time in kitchens.

SB: I mean that professional kitchens are rife with bullying. Homophobic coke addicts throwing gravy at minimum wage workers. Insane misogyny. I developed alcoholism, a drug addiction. I still have nightmares about arborio rice. A grown man once shut another grown man in the walk-in freezer for fifteen minutes because he under-seasoned a beet salad. How long did you spend in kitchens? Long enough to see what really goes on? Long enough to see the head-chef make everyone lick a strip steak and send it back out because it got returned for being under-cooked? Long enough to see what we did to the cutlery when the head waiter didn’t like the look of a customer?

NC: No. I…Tell me about your experiences?

SB: Nic. Who is interviewing who here?

NC: I’m tired of talking about my movies. Let’s talk about you. Where did you work? Do you love food? What kind?

SB: All over London and the UK. I worked in the kind of restaurants you mention in the movie. I think you could have made an entire other movie about the industry. An honest one… I love food now. Back then I didn’t. Making one beautiful dish. That’s how it’s always portrayed. That’s how you portray it in Pig. One man crouched over a pan for hours trying to achieve the perfect gloss on a veal jús. But it isn’t that. It’s leaving your sleeping wife in bed at 4am to make it for 5am. It’s poaching a hundred eggs every morning. It’s cleaning plate after plate because the Kitchen Porter is sick again. It’s being screamed at by a man child. It’s screaming ‘show us your pussy’ at a 16 year old waitress every time she walks in the kitchen. It’s not what you think it is Nic. It’s not what anyone thinks. Because if you knew…fuck. You’d never eat out again.

NC: How do you mean?

SB: I mean. Kitchens break people. They make them do stupid things. The hours. Fuck. The hours man. 100 a week. You ran off to the woods. Lucky. I worked for six months once without a day off. 

NC: No fucking way?

SB: Way. I would walk home at midnight and be back in at 6am. Day in, day out. No days off. One day off. Never two in a row. For years. You couldn’t possibly understand. I lost everything. 

NC: I do understand. I’m a method actor. When I shot Vampire’s Kiss I slept hanging upside down. Did you know that?

SB: I did not.

NC: So we didn’t do the industry justice? Is that what you are saying?

SB: Nothing can do it justice. Even the super ‘realistic’ shows don’t do the industry justice. Imagine… imagine you walked onto set. And instead of sitting down and relaxing while you learn your lines, Ari Aster screams at you constantly for 11 hours until you pass out. Imagine… you go to sleep at night dreaming of the smell of your head chefs breath… his spit flicking against your lips. The way he tasted that night…

NC: What night?

SB: Forget it. Did you know chef’s are the second biggest drug takers in terms of profession.

NC: Who is number one (nic cage stands up and swirls his jacket theatrically. He is obviously on drugs)

SB: Fuckin’ lawyers man. Can you imagine waking up and deciding to free a rapist? What that must cost you?

NC: No… Did you enjoy Pig?

SB: I did. I did enjoy it. I especially enjoyed your friendship with Alex Wolff (as Amir). 

NC: He’s a good guy. 

SB: Did you form a relationship with the pig on set?

NC: No. Actually we ate the pig. 

SB: You ate the pig? 

NC: We ate the pig. Sounds crazy but it happens all the time. Alec Baldwin ate Winona Ryder on the set of Beetlejuice. Did you know that?

SB: Ate her out?

NC: Ate the bitch whole!

SB: I don’t believe you.

NC: It’s fucking true man. I promise. They covered it up. She had a twin and once Alec found out he ate her and the twin has been playing her ever since. Of course, her twin was a fucking kleptomaniac which caused a lot of problems as you know. It’s more common than you might think. Young girls trying to break into the industry often get eaten. 

SB: Have you…

NC: No.

SB: Was the pig tasty?

NC: Yeah. Actually I made the sauce. A bit of catsup. Some apple cider vinegar. Smoked Paprika. Molasses for sweetness. 

SB: Sounds good. 

NC: It really was…

SB: I ate someone once.

NC: For real? That’s crazy

SB: Yeah a friend got his foot amputated after he slipped and fell climbing Everest. He put it on ice and we ate it. Three of us. 

NC: Dude ate himself?

SB: Yeah. 

NC: How did it taste?

SB: Like pork.

Pig is available to watch on Hulu and is a solid 8 out of 10

The basic premise of Is It Cake? is as follows:

Every week, a simpering idiot by the name of Mikey Day asks several men and woman, all of whom you would happily kill, whether something is cake or not. Sometimes it’s cake, sometimes it’s not. Cake. Not cake. Cake. Not Cake. They have to guess from a long way away, which means it all boils down to luck. If you have seen the dull-but-not-totally-awful Mike Judge vehicle Idiocracy then this show is mostly Ow! My Balls! But made for white women who think Paula Deen is the reincarnation of Christ.

Mikey cuts through each object with a sharp knife/samurai sword until they find the one that is cake. Sometimes they aren’t cake. If you guess incorrectly, you don’t lose as such, you just fuck off for that specific episode and return next time to guess whether something is cake or not. If you guess the correct answer, you get to bake some cake. You become the baker. Now it is you who must do the fooling, you who must bake the realistic cakes, and some other people guess. After every round, Mikey gums at the camera and says that was intense. He says this after every single round, even if it wasn’t intense.

Is It Cake? is based on a meme that circulated last year where people couldn’t work out whether something was cake or not. This lays even more shit frosting on top of what is already an incredibly depressing thing to have to watch. The people who are making the cakes are undoubtedly talented. The cakes are realistic to the point that it becomes pretty difficult to tell which one is cake. They also show, in great detail, how they make the cakes. The show lasts an hour – which is insane – and at no point does it justify that length.

The issue here isn’t the cakes. The issue is that at the end of each episode, they sacrifice a child.

This is where it gets weird. What was previously a fairly mundane, shitty baking show becomes something really fucking dark. I went back to the Netflix menu a couple of times because I assumed the show had buffered wrong somehow, but they definitely do this shit.

Each episode’s kid is already knocked-out when they bring them out and is lying naked on an altar covered in Betty Crocker Whipped Fudge Frosting. Mikey Day comes on in a white robe, holding a ceremonial dagger studded with jelly-beans. He stares straight at the camera and whispers ‘this is not cake’ before plunging the dagger into the heart of the sacrifice. He stares at the camera as the writhing, dying child plays out its final moments behind him. Then all of the contestants from that show crawl on their hands and knees towards the altar. They are holding Funfetti cake-mix, which they pour into the wounds caused by Mikey Day’s dagger. A chant starts up.

This is now cake. This is now cake. This is now cake.

The contestants dig their fingers into the wound, pulling out entrails now covered in Funfetti. It’s like something from The Night of the Living Dead but it’s really happening.

This is now cake. This is now cake. This is now cake.

Each show ends with Mikey Day consuming the eyeballs of the child. As they dribble out of his mouth, he screams NOT CAKE! CAKE! NOT CAKE! CAKE!

there are 14 mary-kate & ashley movies widely available, and they are the 14 i have chosen to review. a separate series, ‘you are invited…’, is surprisingly hard to track down and so i simply did not bother.

i did not watch these films in order.

some housekeeping – i have taken 80mg of propranolol and 40mg of citalopram for over a decade. in the 3 weeks it took me to write this article, i have completely come off both. side effects for withdrawal from the medicine include vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations, stomach ache, migraines and (for the propranolol specifically), intense heart palpitations and jitters. as well as this, i suffered from vertigo, fever, manic periods, intense dreams and a slackening of the anal lining. this particular side-effect may have been the most unpleasant. it is simply unacceptable to watch the olsen twins while it feels like something a little too big has been pulled from your rectum.

although the movies themselves are only ever a little over an hour long, i did have to take some breaks.

the dates and times are true, as are the reports of what happened.

feb 2nd – day one – propranolol @ 60mg citalopram @ 40mg

movie – passport to paris 1999

passport to paris is the first ever mary-kate & ashley film i watched. it holds a special place in my heart, because i also like paris and young girls.

the olsen’s play twins who attend a very normal american school. after their parents decide they are not seeing enough of the world, they decide to send them to paris, to spend a week with their grandpa. who is also the ambassador to america. or paris. i forget.

it can be hard to tell the olsen twins apart, so to help out one of them, let’s say ashley (although i cant say for sure), wears a durag. she looks like a leukemia victim but i guess she is supposed to be the cool one.

the most interesting thing about this film is that later in life mary-kate married olivier sarkozy the brother of french president nikolas. there is an eighteen year age difference, so when the olsens were filming this at the age of 13, he was 30. its interesting because they filmed at a lot of locations that olivier would have been present at during the period due to his work. in case im not being explicit enough, i am saying that olivier sarkozy (30) saw mary-kate olsen (13) and decided that one day he wanted to fuck her.

while i am watching this film, my stomach starts to feel funny. but so far the withdrawal is mild. some brain zaps which is to be expected. some general fog.

the olsens get to paris and a caper ensues. it involves boys and a stuffy chaperone named jeremy, who looks like a dementor with gout. everything climaxes with the olsen twins giving a speech at a dinner party and inspiring a politician to change his views on water quality in paris. i don’t understand a lot of what is happening because by the end of the film i am asleep.

feb 3rd – day two – propranolol @ 60mg citalopram @ 30mg

movie – double, double toil & trouble

even if i wasn’t coming off psych meds, this film would be one of the weirdest experiences of my life. i’m violently shitting myself throughout. we have to pause it countless times. this is to be expected apparently.

a quick run down of the film – the olsen’s play twins whose parents need money. so they all go and ask their nasty-ass witch aunt for a loan. she says no, so for some reason that’s never really explained the olsen twins find a homeless guy (by throwing stones at him), then embark on a perilous quest which includes finding a dwarf – that looks like lionel richie – in a forest.

at this point my wife catches me searching for ‘olsen twins kissing’ on my phone.

later, the homeless guy gets turned into a crow and they all attend a witches gathering that takes place in an abandoned warehouse and resembles the preliminary ideas for the daft punk music video ‘around the world’. everything turns out alright, as it always does, although during my watch-through i become aware that my wife is staring at me, mouth open.

as with most things, the withdrawal symptoms seem to be focused on my sphincter. i can feel it loosening.

feb 6th – day five – propranolol @ 60mg citalopram @ 30mg

movie – how the west was fun

i’m waking up each morning now in a really weird fuzz. for the first few minutes of consciousness i just kick the blankets around, making little tents with my legs and feet. it’s like i’m a child again, but instead of desperately pretending i’m not a 8 year old boy who has to go get mercilessly bullied at school, i’m an adult unsure as to what has happened to his life.

the movie tonight is how the west was fun. they are really fucking young in this and have the glazed over stares of two girls who have been pumped full of amphetamines to keep them focused. the acting in this is severely stunted. they are 5 (i just checked) and there is a weird balance between them trying to act and them just kicking about because they are kids. it’s kinda…magnificent.

the film centers on the olsen twins going to a ranch which is going out of business. the owners son wants to turn it into a theme park called gifooly land (what the fuck…) and he is a complete shit. anyway it all gets sorted, as you would expect.

not much to say about this film except the twins somehow ride a horse to denver on their own and – in typical mid-nineties bullshittery – convince a business magnate to spend a weekend at the ranch in order to see what the west has to offer. did i mention the ranch is called dude ranch? because it is.

the highlight of this film is when the villain kidnaps the twins and takes them white water rafting. they survive by grabbing onto a bridge. it’s a good little stunt considering they were five.

for some reason we watched this movie on an old tv set in the kitchen. i don’t really understand why, but it did add a certain nineties hum to the entire affair.

my wife says i am starting to smell.

feb 7th – day six – propranolol @ 50mg citalopram @ 20mg

movie – new york minute

todays wordle was olsen

the olsen’s are 18 in this film, which is great. i ask my wife whether it’s ok for me to letch at them and they say it’s fine. last night i dreamed the (young) olsen twins were biting holes in my forearms. it was such a realistic dream that i woke up and for a moment i could see the blood trickling down to my hand. waking up is so weird now. because i don’t take my nightly dose of propranolol anymore i’m an absolute fucking wreck when i wake up. breathless, heart pounding, usually covered in sweat. i haven’t been this anxious in years and i have nothing to be anxious about.

ok well. i have something to be anxious about. because we watched this film on yet another tv set. but, i don’t remember us having multiple tv sets. also… it was on vhs. i haven’t even seen a vhs for years. i’m not sure what’s happening. how much of it is the withdrawals and how much of it is my wife (or someone else) fucking with me.

new york minute is probably my favorite olsen movie so far. they play twins, but one of them is a nerd and the other a carefree punk. it’s a basic set-up but leads to much capering. this one also includes the first real dog character, ronaldo, who is fucking amazing.

the plot is basic but fun. the punk olsen messes up the nerd olsen’s day and they end up in new york city, trying to… you know what. i don’t think it’s important. i just… listen. today has been really hard for me and this thing is freaking me out. my dreams are fucked up and the only thing i care about is writing this fucking article.

i don’t feel like i belong in the last estate. everyone is so gifted. everyone likes kanye west and i cannot understand why. this article is my last chance. i have nothing to give them. i’m causing problems for myself by coming off these meds. it’s slightly masochistic. it’s like i want the stress because i think it’s suffering that brings about good art. my writing has got worse the happier i have become. i finally found someone i feel comfortable with and i am fucking it all up.

new york minute ends happily. the olsen twins look fabulous and this is the first movie i find them attractive in.

feb 8th – day seven – propranolol @ 50mg citalopram @30mg

movie – billboard dad

last night i dreamt that ashley olsen had an onlyfans. i paid to see her premium content. it was just one video. grainy super-16mm footage of her tied to a chair. she had the words ‘squirt for ukraine’ scrawled across her stomach in red marker. i woke up covered in my own guilt.

tonight’s movie is billboard dad. it’s funny but i can’t really remember the days anymore. just this period now, sitting down and writing about the films. i’m not going to submit this. its 1600 words already. i just. i want people to know that everything is going to be ok.

billboard dad. we watched this outside, on a huge projector. it might have been a drive-thru. my eyes have been weird lately. like…blinkered. you know. everything seems smaller. more narrow. my wife is with me but i can no longer feel the closeness. its as if they are caring for me. we always looked after each other, but now it’s a one way affair. the worst thing is that i have done this to myself.

i am using a deep-fake bot to put mary-kate & ashleys face onto veggie tales

the olsen’s are young again in this movie. the plot is pretty outrageous. their mom died (surprisingly high amount of parent deaths in these films, mainly because it allows the olsen twins to set up the parent who hasn’t died with another person from the movie) and their dad is not good at dating (we get a terrible date montage at one point). so they decide to paint over a huge billboard in the city and advertise him as available. it’s a truly amazing scene because it is just the two of them, painting over an entire billboard, at night. they manage to paint the entire thing and paste a massive photo of their dad up. it’s… perplexing.

there’s a subplot about the dad’s agent trying to swindle him out of money for a sculpture or something but i was too busy checking symptoms on google. i had painful diarrhea three times during the film. i had nowhere to go, i was afraid to get out the car, so i just went in the backseat. my wife kept looking over at me like you would a dementia patient.

the film ends fine. he finds love, the agent is found out, the twins save the day. the format of these films is very similar. all that really changes is the age of mary-kate & ashley. i feel like i am fermenting at this point. i want to suffer for my art but i feel like i have misjudged the amount of mental degradation that i would undergo.

when we get home from the drive-thru/projector area (it seems to take forever but i feel like it was probably ten or fifteen minutes drive) there is an envelope waiting outside the front door. i open it and this is what is inside. every time i try and take a photo of this fucking thing, it comes out like this.

i have no idea what’s going on anymore. i am shitting myself once an hour. painful, thick with mucus. my wife tends to me while i slowly rot, but i know they are thinking of leaving.

feb 13th – day twelve – propranolol @ 30mg citalopram @ 20mg

movie – our lips are sealed

our lips are sealed is a mary-kate & ashley movie. i am not watching the videotape so don’t fucking ask me again.

feb 15th – day fourteen – propranolol @ 30mg citalopram @ 20mg

movie – switching goals

switching goals is not great. it’s about two twins (of course). one is good at sport the other… not so much. inexplicably they both start playing for rival soccer teams. the basic gist of the whole movie is their dad, played by a man that looks like he has literal terrabytes of child pornography on his computer, decides to switch them over, so he is coaching the good olsen and his team can win. his wife loses her shit and in the end it all turns out ok.

i’m getting bored of olsen movies. can we talk about something else? let’s talk about how i know you guys are fucking with me. i know about your little group chats that you have about me. i know what you say behind my back. i know you sent me that videotape.

feb 16th – day fifteen – propranolol @ 30mg citalopram @ 10mg

movie – it takes two

last night i dreamed about a new mary-kate & ashley movie called choo-choo-choke. the olsen twins sit at the breakfast table eating cereal and talking about boys. ashley tells mary-kate about a boy at school who likes to eat coal. mary-kates mouth drops open, but doesn’t stop and soon her mouth is open far too wide. a weird ambient droning starts in the background (i naturally think about blackwood again). suddenly the scene shifts and we are in an old train yard. ashley is shoveling coal into mary-kates horrible distended maw. mary-kate starts to change. her skin expands and bursts, iron and steel tearing her to pieces. she is now an enormous freight train, only identifiable by the huge, stretched face on the front. she looks in more pain than i can conceive of. the screen fades to black. credits roll.

it takes two has steve guttenberg in it. also kirstie alley, who looks like a wasp having a stroke. this one is interesting because the girls play two separate kids who just happen to look identical. one is poor and one is rich. it’s never explained just why they look identical. i liked this film.

this review is now at 2350 words. i can’t string it out much longer. i’m losing my mind.

feb 19th – day sixteen – propranolol @ 20mg citalopram @ 10mg

movie – winning london

chloe lawrence (mary-kate olsen) is a very driven teenager and leader of her high school’s model united nations team. after performing particularly well in a competition, chloe’s team is selected to attend the london international model united nations in england. but when randall, one of chloe’s team-mates, is unable to attend due to a family obligation, chloe’s twin sister, riley (ashley olsen), steps in to take his place for the competition (and to get closer to brian, another of chloe’s team-mates whom riley happens to have a crush on).

when the group arrives in london, they discover that someone is already representing their usual country: china. undaunted, they improvise and end up representing the united kingdom. plenty of sight-seeing and shopping ensues, during which chloe falls for james, the son of a wealthy british nobleman named lord browning, who’s being pressured by his dad to achieve more. as the competition progresses, chloe’s over-competitive nature stalls her budding romance, riley tries to get closer to brian, and the team earns both admiration and anger for their unconventional methods. nevertheless, tribulations are weathered and lessons learned about sportsmanship, overlooked friends, and learning to enjoy one’s youth.

feb 23rd – day twenty – propranolol @ 0mg citalopram @0mg

movie – hospital horrors

in an attempt to get this review published, i watched the tape. it’s fucking horrendous. but i feel like the only way i am going to get published on the last estate is if i am equally horrendous. i stopped taking my meds entirely despite what the doctors say. i am a living pulse. i can feel the blood beating inside me.

hospital horrors is a fucking snuff movie. you know what it is. you know what that guy does to them. i don’t know how i can review a film which ends with twin sisters eating each other.

it was nicely lit i guess.

feb 27th – day twenty-four – propranolol @ 0mg citalopram @ 0mg

movie – the challenge

the truth is i’m scared. the mouth has opened up and we have all been swallowed whole. now everyone can do anything and the things i am able to do are not special anymore. i hate that it’s like this. i hate that everyone can write now. i hate that i feel like this. i hate that i feel so small. no matter what i achieve i constantly feel like everyone is laughing at me. and i don’t think that feeling is ever going to go away. i don’t think i am ever going to be able to reassure myself that the thing that i am doing is worth doing.

feb 28th – day twenty-five – propranolol 800mg – citalopram 1300mg

movie – holiday in the sun

march 2nd – day twenty-eight – propranolol @ 0mg citalopram @ 0mg

movie – when in rome

because the thing is. this is all i fucking have. writing stupid stories. and i only do it because i want people to tell me i’m good at something. like i’m a fucking child. what does that make me? the only thing i care about is making sure i am praised by others. because that’s our lifeblood isn’t it? we need it. tell me i did good daddy. i’m eight years old again. i’m being held against a wall by my fucking throat.

i keep having these fucking dreams. being eaten by the olsen twins. i’m never good enough. i’m a contributor to a website where everyone is extremely mentally ill, and i feel like i don’t belong. not because i am not extremely mentally ill, but because i can’t contribute. it was the drugs that took this away. i just… i thought this would be a good thing.

march 3rd – day thirty-four – propranolol @ 0mg citalopram @ 0mg

movie – getting there

this morning i woke up next to the severed head of ashley olsen

the government is corrupt/and we’re on so many drugs/with the radio on/and the curtains drawn

its 2022 and we are all fucked. seems unlikely we will survive the pandemics, climate change, societal collapse, meteors, republicans, billionaires. the list of things we might actually die from quite soon is alarming. if we do make it – and its a big if – our mental health and our bond with other human beings will never be the same. as a race, we are struggling. we sit in little rooms and find things to be upset about. we take drugs and fuck each other through text boxes. we download anime girls of questionable age, we start culture magazines online. we pretend we have friends but we just don’t. not anymore. we have pixels and ssri’s. we have no hope of anything beyond surviving long enough to see our species extinguished. we’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine/and the machine is bleeding to death.

of course, there was once a savior… someone who came back from the dead. someone who promised unity. someone who once did something quite magnificent, then went very quiet indeed. someone selfless. i’m talking, of course, about jesus christ josh wardle.

it went like this:

wardle created the reddit patchwork place in 2017. most people don’t know that about him. if you don’t know what place is/was, it’s a huge artwork that a lot of redditors came together to make, one pixel at a time. it’s an impressive feat, especially because most redditors struggle to dress themselves. i can’t do justice to it in words, you need to go see it. then 3 days 4 years later he created a word game for his wife. the game was called wordle, because his name is wardle and it’s about words. if you want to see how far we have fallen as a species, spend five minutes scrolling through the thousands of tweets promulgating the coincidence that the name wardle is so similar to wordle, as if he had zero say in the matter. 

suffice to say, wordle was popular. as i write this, 300,000 people play wordle a day. that’s a lot of people. wordle is like the old game mastermind, in that you get a blank space and need to fill it. mastermind used colors, but wordle asks you to find a five letter word. when you get a letter in the right place it goes green. when you get a letter in the wrong space it goes yellow. if your letter is wrong it remains gray. wordle is the bastard offspring of lots of games, but it is simple, which people like, and daily, which people also like. it sits nicely beside the morning cup of coffee as a part of the routine which does not wear you down quite as much as the rest of the day. 

you grabbed my hand/and we fell into it/like a daydream/or a fever

the thing about wordle is, it brings people together. it’s incredibly easy to share your results on social media without giving the answer away. it’s the same word for everyone every day. so you can instantly feel smarter than your friends. this is an important part of being happy. the need to feel superior to the people you like is as much a factor in life as breathing or shitting. wordle created a unity that 2022 desperately needed. the thing is, i have never known the intimate details of so many people’s lives. and yet, i often feel utterly alone. my wife is smarter than me and i sweat when i eat. one of our dogs simply does not like me. i havent seen my parents in 4 years. my mother is slowly dying. i needed wordle, and its instant hit of gratification.

i open up my wallet/and its full of blood

last week it was announced that wordle was being sold to the new york times, who could put it behind a paywall. as of now, it remains free. but the idea that it will be monetized is as important to us as the need to play the game. we revel in this shit. we can share our outrage over wordle just as easily as we can share that we got the word moist in 5 goes. josh wardle, a man who previously did not have a million dollars, now has several of them, and the hand wringing is astonishing. whenever someone releases something out into the world, we feel like we own it. we say ‘wordle would never be as popular if i hadnt played it’ or ‘he who giveth also taketh a-fucking-way i guess’ and things like that. wordle made us happy, which is more than 99% of things do. but instead of feeling good for this guy who made something of himself, we want to drag him down to our level. we want josh wardle to suffer. we want to nail him to a cross and poke his fucking eyes out.

the buildings toppled in on themselves/mothers clutching babies/picked through the rubble/and pulled out their hair

it’s fine that wardle sold wordle. and here is why. because we are all dying. and if one man wants to sell his word game and give himself and his family a comfortable, nice life while we all gyrate endlessly – on fire – then that is his decision to make. wordle is not the answer. wardle is not the savior. wordle was simply a way of feeling something. wardle was the man who gave us something to wake up for. and, like everything that is good, it has been taken from us.

interviewer: are you ready for what’s coming?

blaise bailey finnegan iii: ready as i’ll ever be

interviewer: most people aren’t

the year is 2043 and a dark wind blows. the remaining sludge of humanity crawl through the streets, cautious not to attract attention. skin sloughs from their disgusting bodies and is picked upon by the now dominant corvids. there is, of course, dissonant harmonica. one of these festering pockets of blood sees something in the sky. it is the face of josh wardle. he has returned with an invention so amazing, so utterly necessary, that the human race will be restored. he is wearing flowing robes, crafted from the blue light of the heavens. now more people are alert, more eyes look up to the sky. there is a murmur. wardle has returned. this is what we waited for. this is why we fought so hard. we lost, but we fought.

josh wardle smiles and reaches into his eternal pocket. he pulls out a tiny purple cube. we are saved.

99997979 years after Kanye West changes his name to Ye

The galaxy sized flesh cruiser HuffPost shudders across the otherwise dead sky. From afar it looks like a single, peach colored chunk of silicon but zoom in and we can see the truth. It is made up of a trillion screaming faces, trapped in an endless loop of suffering. Zoom further, turn a microphone on, and you will hear them. It isn’t a scream. It’s the roar of a billion different sentences.

These cured meats will give you AIDS. Number 6 will shock you! We are all Jonah Hill’s coffee right now. Vaccinate your children with bleach. Number 3 will shock you. 10 of the saddest suicide notes. Jeffery Epstein will break your heart. Behind the scenes of Don’t Look Up – is this the film to save us. Lakers up by ten – join us after the game for the round table discussion. Barron Trump – tall or riddled with cancer? The answer may shock you (it’s both).

From inside the pulsing obscenity comes the red note, a blood curdling thrum that registers on every known level. The cavernous interior is lined with the naked, mewling near-corpses of every living thing that has ever been. 

A noise like a thick mucus cough comes from the tumescent flesh-engine of the enormous machine. It rips apart the four-dimensional Hilbert space surrounding the HuffPost and the entire universe lurches to the right approximately twelve trillion miles. Suddenly, the HuffPost comes face to face with another enormous being. Sensors inside the small, cuboid officer’s deck relay this information to the captain of the HuffPost, a being with a name so complicated that attempting to say it would immediately dislocate your jaw. The captain smiles. He does not need the advanced smegmatic relays to tell him that the vessel drifting aimlessly opposite is the one they call the Fox. He can smell the yellow bile that seeps through every single pore of the bio-synthetic lining. He can already sense McConnell, sense his helpless ovulation. He can see the rotting patch of gray fat that was once his face. The captain licks his lip. 

I can smell your cunt, little one he whispers. 

From the bowels of the HuffPost comes a wet roar. Fourteen billion liters of prebiotic-semen rush from two festering spheres the size of the moon, coating the screaming woundbeasts that make up the HuffPost’s cavernous walls. It rips the top layer of humanity clean off like a scab, billions of people drifting in a bubbling sea of cum and blood. 

Jonah Hill will give you AIDS. Number 6 will shock you! (gurgle) We are all these cured meats right now. (burp) Vaccinate your children with Jeffery Epstein. (gurgle)  Number 3 will shock you. 10 of the saddest round table discussions. Barron (splutter) Trump will break your heart. Don’t Look Up is riddled with  cancer (wheeze) The answer may shock you. (gasp)

The solution makes its way to an ovoid aperture the size of a football pitch, where the fluid is ejected at an immensely high pressure, aimed by computers with an accuracy approaching deep-quantum perfection. Though most of the emulsion is understandably lost in the blackness of an eternal space – where it forms weird little jelly balls that seek out the hairs on your legs – a small percentage hits the immense vaginal honeycomb of the Fox, making it wrinkle inward slowly, absorbing the awful mixture. Once inside, it coats the walls of the Fox like expensive paint, making its way slowly towards McConnell, the deranged gelatinous skeleton that powers the whole juggernaut. Seemingly endless corridors are flooded with HuffPost’s disgusting emulsified life-mix.

A CLICK. 

McConnell’s mouth has been forced open by an unseen force, a surprisingly ancient clockwork mechanism wrenching his maw wider and wider until the skin around his mouth tears at the corners, unable to stand the pressure. The mottled, distended neck flap begins to vibrate fiercely, and like a single chicken placed in front of the Hoover Dam he begins to consume the near endless amounts of pink, screeching ejaculate.

       your children will break you (it’s both).  Epstein will shock you 

(it’s both).

        you (it’s both). bleach. 

Number 6 will give you (it’s both)

      Trump 

         – is this this 

this this this this 

       this this 

    this this this 

this 

this this 

this this this this this 

this this 

   this this 

      this 

  this this 

   this this 

this 

this this 

        this 

     this the film 

      to save us. Lakers 

up by ten – join us 

    after the saddest suicide notes. Jeffery 

Epstein with 

cancer? 

     The answer may shock 

you 

(it’s both)

game 

for 

the saddest suicide notes. Jeffery 

   Epstein with cancer? The answer may 

shock you (it’s…

The HuffPost turns and leaves. It’s job is done. It will regrow the outer membrane of humankind that it shed into space. It will find another victim. It will breed and it will consume. 

Back in the Fox, McConnell sleeps, his entire body slick with dripping life. Inside his tummy, nestled among the rotten feces, another being grows. If we look close enough, we can see that it is wearing a Joe Rogan Experience t-shirt.