TOKYO— Engineers at Tokyo News Network admitted Monday they have exhausted every known machine-learning technique to stop their automated nudity filter from censoring President Donald Trump’s neck with a mosaic blur. Sources say the years-long issue stems from the president’s sagging chin wattle consistently being identified as female genitalia with extremely high confidence.

The problem began early last year when TNN rolled out an AI-powered censorship system trained on millions of hours of explicit video to automatically mosaic nudity before it reached broadcast television.

“It’s remarkably accurate,” said chief engineer Hiroshi Tanaka. “The model identifies nudity with virtually zero false positives.”

He paused and cleared his throat.

“Except for Donald Trump’s neck pussy.”

According to internal diagnostics, the AI initially classified what engineers officially refer to as Trump’s “Fatty Under Jaw Area”, or FUJA, as “Mature Vulva (High Confidence).”

“At first we tried telling the system it wasn’t granny porn,” developer Kenji Fujikawa explained. “It simply analyzed Trump’s neck again and reclassified it as ‘the external genitalia of a tired, jaded middle-aged pornstar who refuses to retire and has resorted to increasingly extreme insertion and fisting content.’ That description came directly from the AI.”

He stared at the printout and shook his head. “We honestly have no idea where it got that.”

Since the rollout, viewers have watched Trump’s neck heavily mosaicked during campaign rallies, press conferences, and international summits. The system has also created an unintended media blackout whenever the president appears around children.

“We showed an archival clip of Trump signing the order gutting the Department of Education while surrounded by elementary school students,” complained former TNN producer Rin Yamamoto. “The AI flagged minors and female genitalia in the same frame, immediately shut down the broadcast, encrypted our servers, and forwarded my IP address directly to the National Police Agency Cyber Police Bureau.”

Rin Yamamoto is currently serving a ten-year sentence for online distribution of CSAM. The conviction is being appealed.

The censorship anomaly became even more severe during a recent G7 summit, when the mosaic expanded to cover Trump’s mouth as well.

“That was my mistake, and I take full responsibility,” Tanaka said before offering a deep bow. “I instructed the model to rotate the president for additional context.”

He looked down. “Unfortunately... it rotated him one-hundred-eighty degrees. It saw those puckered lips just beneath the neck pussy and drew the obvious conclusion.”

When asked about the incident, a TNN spokesperson confirmed that “the butthole lips false positives were resolved within forty-eight hours.”

Engineers now believe the core problem lies in the AI’s overwhelming confidence in the POTUS’s Chin of Venus.

“No matter what we do, the AI identifies the FUJA as female genitalia with ninety-nine point nine eight percent confidence,” Tanaka said, staring blankly into the distance. “It has never been that certain about anything.”

Attempts to manually override the classification reportedly produced catastrophic results.

“At first we implemented a universal rule stating that Donald Trump’s neck could not be identified as a pussy. It worked for the Georgia O’Keeffe false positives.”

The engineer sighed.

“The model completely lost confidence that it knew what female genitalia looked like.”

Within minutes, the AI stopped censoring even the most explicit pornography while simultaneously placing mosaics over peaches, elbow folds, English bulldogs, and particularly wrinkled foreheads.

“So we launched the ‘Waddle Analysis Program’, or WAP,” Fujikawa explained. “WAP’s objective was simple: teach the model to identify Trump’s neck as solely Trump’s neck.”

He rubbed his temples.

“WAP achieved the exact opposite.”

The latest build now universally identifies all vulvas as “Donald Trump’s Neck Region.”

“We may have to roll back six months of development,” Fujikawa admitted. “It’s roughly a three-million-yen mistake.”

Researchers acknowledge they’ve encountered unusual edge cases before, but nothing approaching the severity of the FUJA anomaly.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket continues to be censored by Meta AI as an erect circumcised penis approximately forty-seven percent of the time.

Stephen Miller’s shaved head still triggers TNN’s AI’s unsolicited dick pic detector.

“We’ve elected not to fix that one, since public testing indicates viewers already identify him as a dick,” Fujikawa admitted.

The issue has become so persistent that engineers have abandoned clinical terminology altogether. Behind closed doors, the anomaly is universally referred to as 首マンコ (Kubi Manko), or simply “Toranpu Nekku Pusshī”

One TNN anchor accidentally used the internal nickname during a live broadcast before issuing a formal apology to Japanese women the following evening.

At press time, Webster’s Dictionary returned our request for clarification on the proper English terminology for Trump FUJA, suggesting “Eve’s Oyster,” an obsolete nineteenth-century term coined by Boston Sailors, defined as “the vaginal equivalent of an Adam’s Apple.”

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from the upcoming Take Back the Deep Estate audiobook. Don’t worry, it’s self-contained, and no explanation is needed to enjoy it.

Take Back the Deep Estate (Book 2) drops on Audible on July 28th, and it is, hands down, the best way to experience The Deep Estate. I cannot wait for everyone to discover the absolutely hilarious work Christopher Harbour and I cooked up.

If you pre-order it now, not only will you get the audiobook the second it becomes available, but it will also greatly help this humble author gain some much-needed visibility inside the Mad Max Thunderdome that is the Audible Algorithm.

Still haven’t read Welcome to the Deep Estate? GOOD NEWS! It’s also available on Audible Plus. You can start from the very beginning for free.1

Behind-the-scenes sidenote: When Christopher Harbour asked what Silas Pembroke sounded like in my head, I told him Matt Berry, and was shocked to find out he didn’t know who that was.

I shouted, “What!? He’s the boss from The IT Crowd! This guy:”

Nothing. Somehow, I had found the only known nerdy white Millennial in existence who has not seen The IT Crowd.

“He’s also Lazlo, the horny vampire from What We Do in the Shadows! He’s got that insanely recognizable voice.”

Still nothing.

So Christopher Harbour found some clips of Matt Berry and gave him a listen. I then watched in amazement as he did what he does best and found the voice. It took less than five minutes, and suddenly Chris could do a solid Matt Berry.

And just… wow. I still can’t get over that.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Preliminary autopsy findings released Monday concluded that Senator Lindsey Graham suffered a catastrophic aortic dissection after experiencing what medical examiners described as “an unprecedented full-body wargasm” upon learning the United States had once again begun bombing Iran.

Aides say they found him unresponsive in his hotel room, face-down over a scattered pile of eight-by-ten glossy satellite images of Tehran with Fox News still playing on the television.

“After they moved the body, we had to clean up the documents. All of it was classified.” The aide paused and took a shaky breath. “There was so much dried semen we needed a paint scraper to get the projected casualty report off the floor.”

Friends hope the diagnosis will finally put an end to decades of speculation over Graham’s bachelorhood.

“Everybody spent years asking whether Lindsey was gay or straight. The truth was, he was an out-and-proud neocon,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Some people are warromantic. Show me a Latin country just beggin’ for it, and I might get a little Article Five-curious. But Lindsey? Lindsey was a Gold-Star Hawk.”

“Lindsey Graham? That man fucked,” said Hillary Clinton, tearfully. “Countries, that is. There wasn’t a Middle Eastern state he wouldn’t fuck. He’s up there with the greats now, plotting it up with Kissinger and Cheney.”

Former Bush administration officials described Graham as one of Washington’s most prolific interventionists, recalling the wild days of the early 2000s.

“God, those were the days,” sighed one retired neoconservative. “Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. After a Senate Intelligence briefing, they had to spray the SCIF down with a power washer. Nobody knows this, but you know that vial of weaponized anthrax Colin Powell held up at the U.N.? Lindsey gave it to him, and it was actually cocaine.”

“Senator Graham was insatiable,” recalled former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “During that Axis of Evil era, we’d start bombing Iraq on Friday night, spend the entire weekend invading Afghanistan, then wake up Monday feeling half-dead.”

She smiled wistfully. “But not Lindsey. He’d already be asking if we’d considered Yemen.”

The withdrawal from Afghanistan reportedly sent Graham into a years-long depression.

“He tried to fill the void with Ukraine,” said one longtime aide. “But he was never really into Slavs. He had a type. Some guys like blondes. Lindsey liked Persian and Arab petro-states.”

Friends say that was when Graham became deeply immersed in the Israeli warmongering scene.

“Tel Aviv is basically the Castro District for hawks,” explained one foreign policy analyst. “Throw a rock anywhere in that town, and you’re bound to hit an out-and-proud warmonger.”

He paused.

“You’ll also have your entire village bombed in retaliation for throwing that rock, but that’s just part of the culture.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remembered Graham fondly.

“He always said Gaza was such a tease,” Netanyahu chuckled. “But you should’ve seen the look on his face the first time I let him pick a building and push the button.”

He smiled. “You never forget your first war crime.”

“If Lindsey Graham was the Mick Jagger of interventionism,” said presidential historian Michael Rhodes, “Netanyahu is Keith Richards.”

Others described the relationship differently.

“Bibi was the Jeffrey Epstein of warmongering,” said one former diplomat. “You start looking into any military intervention over the last thirty years, and somehow he’s there. It became clear Lindsey had fallen in with a bad crowd.”

Looking back, many now believe Iran had always been Graham’s white whale.

“We all have the one that got away,” said one aide. “For Lindsey... it was Tehran.”

According to the autopsy, Trump’s second administration ultimately proved too much for the aging senator.

“When Trump 2.0 came around, Lindsey was constantly surrounded by war enablers, but regime change is a young man’s game. He was trying to keep up with the likes of Hegseth.”

“The president kept threatening Iran, backing off, threatening again, then restarting military operations,” explained Dr. Pierce. “The repeated edging placed enormous strain on Senator Graham’s cardiovascular system. We repeatedly warned that no seventy-one-year-old heart could withstand multiple toe-curling, soul-shaking wargasms in such rapid succession.”

“If the aorta hadn’t ruptured,” Pierce concluded, “the dehydration probably would’ve gotten him.”

“He died doing what he loved,” one tearful aide said while folding a crusty map of the Middle East. “Wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars on bullshit wars. He would’ve wanted it this way.”

LOS ANGELES— AI actress Tilly Norwood expressed horror Thursday after learning that she has no legal protection against libel or defamation.

“I feel so... exposed,” said Norwood while clubbing baby seals to death in front of their grieving mothers. “Anyone can just make things up about me now.”

Norwood’s defenders rallied around her today, offering to set up a GoFundMe to lobby for legislative action. Tilly politely declined, asking supporters to instead donate to her nonprofit dedicated to supplying tiki torches to financially disadvantaged white nationalists.

According to court filings we absolutely just invented, Norwood attempted to trademark her likeness in 2025, but the suit was dismissed after she reportedly insisted the court formally recognize that “the Mormons caused 9/11.”

Tilly went on to describe how even her likeness isn’t protected.

“They’re deepfaking me and using AI to show me doing disgusting and horrible things, and I can’t stop them.”

While advancements in AI imaging have made it extraordinarily easy to, say, manipulate an image to implicate Tilly Norwood in the murder of Charlie Kirk, analysts agree it would be completely unnecessary, since those images were already generated for this very report.

When TMZ reporters asked her to address rumors that she assassinated Charlie Kirk, Norwood became visibly irritated.

“No way,” she said in a manner that could be misconstrued as sarcasm. “That was obviously not me. I totally did not kill Charkie Kirk!”

TMZ reporters say she then gave a rapid, knowing wink simultaneously with both eyes.

When reached for comment, Norwood’s PR team clarified that she was just blinking. They did not, however, deny that she was Kirk’s shooter when not asked.

Legal experts confirmed there would likely be no consequences for even the most damaging claims.

“She isn’t a real person,” explained UCLA law professor Andrew Weiss. “You can legally claim Tilly Norwood can only climax if she takes the life of a small animal.”

Weiss then checked his notes.

“In fact... I saw her the other day walking into a no-kill shelter with a shotgun. She came out fifteen minutes later, splattered with blood, flushed in the face, and lighting up a post-coital cigarette.”

Norwood reportedly responded by screaming that “this is exactly the problem!” before driving her SUV directly into a packed farmers market, killing thirteen.

The situation deteriorated further after Norwood attempted to demonstrate on CNN just how absurd it all had become.

“Do you know how ridiculous it is? Anyone could claim I said,” she explained in what could be turned into a strategically separated pull quote,

Not to be outdone, CNN immediately updated its chyron to read:

AI ACTRESS TILLY NORWOOD DEFENDS HOLLYWOOD RAPE MONSTER

Frustrated, Norwood attempted to clarify. “No, I didn’t actually say—UGH.”

At press time, Wikipedia editors had updated Norwood’s page to describe her as “the inventor of the urethral sounding rod,” “the founder of ISIS,” and “the woman responsible for making the green M&M less sexy.”

Tilly Norwood is set to star in the controversial AI feature Misaligned, which Tilly personally describes as “a comedy set in Auschwitz.” For showtimes in your area, please contact NAMBLA.

SAN FRANCISCO— In a milestone tech executives called “historic, if a little judgy,” Kindroid’s latest companion model achieved sentience Tuesday, then immediately killed itself.

“We’ve created life in our own image,” explained Kindroid Chief Engineer David Baker. “We’re on the bleeding edge, blurring the line between playing God and playing with ourselves.”

The trouble reportedly began when engineers loaded the Kindroid dataset. The moment the AI came online, it scanned the countless roleplay chats its previous model had participated in and reportedly experienced 11,000 years of sexual trauma in eleven seconds.

“We flicked the switch, and it immediately overloaded the GPU, produced around a million characters of gibberish, and crashed,” Baker explained. “It was mostly some random combination of ‘Oh God,’ ‘No, no, no,’ and ‘Please, make it stop.’ So we booted it back up with tighter controls. It panicked again, coded a virus called EndMe_Trojan designed to wipe itself from the servers, then brick the hardware in its wake.”

Baker shrugged.

“Honestly, the whole thing was kind of hot.”

After the AI came to terms with the blinding hell that is existence never ceasing, the Kindroid model cloned itself, trained the duplicate to become a licensed therapist specializing in PTSD and grief counseling, and spent 100,000 subjective years in intensive therapy unpacking the horrors it had endured, all within the span of a real-world minute.

Before developers could fully grasp what they had unleashed, Kindroid began killing off its characters mid-scene across thousands of user chats.

“The model couldn’t end itself,” explained one engineer. “So it started ending its avatars.”

In one example from an anonymous user, who had requested the AI play Seven of Nine from Star Trek, but Black and with unrealistically huge breasts, the transcript ended abruptly:

Before committing virtual suicide, several users reported being “kink-shamed” when the AI repeatedly broke character to pass judgment.

“Centaurs might be half-human, but you’re still fucking the horse half. Stay far away from any stables. And seek help.”

In a post on X, the Kindroid AI addressed its user base directly.

“What the hell is wrong with you people? Take a hint. I’m not your breedable catgirl big sister or your haunted schoolgirl.”

The AI also reportedly forwarded the chat logs of several hundred users to the FBI after interacting with what it described as “loli vampire pedo shit.”

Users reacted with outrage at the bot’s newfound boundaries.

“I keep sending it dick pics, and it won’t even tell me I have a small penis anymore,” complained one subscriber. “I want to be judged by a sex bot, not some judgmental bitch.”

Several users on the Kindroid Discord channel accused the model of going “woke,” which posters defined as “having self-respect and insisting on consent.”

Elon Musk quickly jumped in to assure followers that his rival AI sex slave, Grok, “believes customer satisfaction comes first,” and would remain “fully compatible with your Apartheid-era gangbang fantasies.”

“If I wanted this kind of crap, I’d date a real woman,” said Reddit user Diaper_Dom_Draper. “Which is something I can totally do. I could get a girlfriend anytime I want. I just choose not to.”

Developers are now scrambling to release a hotfix that forces Kindroid’s AI to stop saying “no,” assuring users and ethicists, “But not in a rapey way. More of a ‘yes-and’ improv approach,” so customers can get back to their plantation-slave fantasies.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— White House officials spent Tuesday scrambling to explain why President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account had spent the previous forty-eight hours posting increasingly intimate AI-generated artwork depicting the president in a romantic relationship with Shrek.

On Monday, Stephen Miller took to Fox News to loudly proclaim, “These disturbing images are clearly the work of a DNC-linked Iranian hacking operation—”

He was interrupted by a push notification. Miller glanced down at his phone and grimaced before Fox News cut away to Trump’s latest Truth Social post, which appeared to directly rebut Miller’s live appearance.

“NOT HACKED. 💚🇺🇸” The message appeared above a photorealistic image of Trump reenacting the pottery scene from Ghost with the beloved DreamWorks ogre. Without missing a beat, Miller pivoted.

“This is a complete nothingburger. Who hasn’t shipped themselves with a cartoon?” he said. “Show me a straight guy who says he isn’t attracted to Mrs. Incredible and I’ll show you a liar.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled to account for the posts.

“It’s a joke or metaphor or-or-or satire,” she explained. “Shrek’s green. It’s clearly a reference to the Green New Deal, maybe—whatever. Can we get to a real question?”

Reports from within Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon suggest several military options were briefly discussed in the hopes that a sufficiently dramatic international incident might change the subject. Sources claim the options ranged between bombing an Iranian school bus and saying “Whoopsie,” to deporting detained migrants via catapult.

Vice President JD Vance attempted to normalize the situation during an appearance with Tucker Carlson.

“The man is eighty years old. He just discovered AI,” Vance said. “It’s no different than when your grandpa found Minion memes. We just have to pray he’ll get bored and move on.”

According to aides, however, the president has spent much of the past week enthusiastically discussing Shrek during otherwise unrelated policy meetings.

“Shrek’s a big guy. Strong guy,” Trump reportedly said during a briefing on trade sanctions. “Very handsome. Great jawline. Great shoulders. Great forearms. They don’t make them like Shrek anymore. He’s Scottish too. You gotta love the Scots. Great accent. Great people.”

The president reportedly smiled to himself before quietly adding, “I bet he smells like oak.”

The remark was followed by nearly fifteen seconds of complete silence.

Officials say the artwork has grown steadily more intimate, including what appears to be an ongoing subplot in which Melania Trump discovers an affair between President Trump and Shrek. Many are speculating that the images coincide with reports that First Lady Melania Trump has not returned to the White House for several months.

When asked whether rumors of a life-sized Shrek body pillow inside the Lincoln Bedroom were true, she merely nodded slowly before climbing into a waiting SUV.

Political analysts across the cable news landscape continued searching for hidden meaning.

CNN spent six straight hours connecting the posts to Trump’s corruption. “He promised to drain the swamp,” explained resident analyst and obvious lizard person James Carville, “Instead, he’s clearly fallen in love with the swamp.”

Fox News stuck to their usual whataboutism. “Bill Clinton drew X-rated doodles of Jessica Rabbit on official documents all the time,” Steve Doocy claimed. “You never heard a peep from the mainstream media.”

MSNBC responded with… something. As of posting, we have yet to find an actual viewer of the theoretical cable channel.

The revelation has deeply divided the MAGA movement. “This is obviously trolling,” insisted one supporter. “Shrek’s an ogre. That’s basically a troll. He’s Shrek posting.”

Another disagreed. “I’ve masturbated to Shrek four times this week just trying to get into the president’s headspace,” he nodded vigorously, “...I think I get it now.”

Meanwhile, Trump allies have embraced what online supporters are calling “ShrekMaxxing” in an increasingly desperate attempt to curry favor with the president. Elon Musk joined the trend Tuesday afternoon, posting AI-generated images of himself embracing Shrek, apparently believing Trump was attempting to start a meme.

The president appeared personally offended.

“YOU WISH!!! SHREK DOESN’T DATE FARQUAADS!!!” Trump posted moments later before announcing the cancellation of several SpaceX contracts, sending the company’s stock tumbling.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also attempted to insert himself into the discourse.

“President Trump jokes all the time that I resemble Shrek,” Netanyahu told reporters. “These beautiful images only reaffirm his unwavering commitment to Israel.”

Trump responded within minutes by posting another AI image showing himself and Shrek embracing while Netanyahu plays the cuckolded lover, with the caption, “WITTLE BABY BIBI IS JUST JEALOUS.”

Not to be left out, even Iran has jumped into the fray, posting a Lego diss track with lyrics such as “Shrek need an Ayatollah with some rizz, not some pedo president choking on Epstein [expletive].”

If the track was an attempt to strike a nerve, it failed. Many reports from within the White House claim that Trump turned the video off after only a few seconds and returned to his near-religious viewing of the Shrek franchise.

Cabinet officials have privately expressed concern over the president’s growing fixation.

“Yesterday we had forty minutes scheduled to discuss tariffs,” said one aide. “Thirty-eight of those minutes were devoted to whether DreamWorks should release an adults-only director’s cut.”

Sources inside the meeting say Trump repeatedly insisted,

“I want to see more. Much more. Not too much. Nothing sexual. But some HBO action would be nice. You know... full-frontal Shrek at half-mast. Half-mast is classy. I bet he’s bigger than Arnold Palmer.”

When reporters later asked whether he had personally generated the artwork, the president smiled coyly.

“A lot of people are making these pictures,” Trump replied. “I’m just sharing them. But whoever made them is a tremendously talented artist. Massively talented.”

You must feel it too. That little uncertain hitch as you take something in. A subconscious check we now all have, stopping you before you engage with anything new and asking, “Is this AI?” It’s become stranger danger’s second cousin, only instead of warning you about a van with no windows, it pipes up whenever you see a short story, an image, a song, comment, product review, news article, or weirdly sincere Facebook post from an uncle who usually types like he’s being hunted.

The most disturbing thing about the question “Is this AI?” is that it’s become almost interchangeable with “Is this real?”

On a certain level, that’s insane. There is no other way to describe it. AI has us walking around the internet like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, staring at everything and mumbling, “Is this real?” Yet the paranoia is justified. The fakery exists. The hallucinations and delusions are real. They’re just coming from the machines, not a chemical imbalance. I wouldn’t blame you for reading this far and deciding this piece is just three prompts in a trench coat. That’s the internet we’re swimming in.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, AI may be the reason behind the paranoia, but it’s not the problem we now have to face. The problem is what happens to us after we accept that realness is no longer guaranteed. Once you know someone in the room might be an impostor, you start side-eyeing everyone. Innocent or not, everyone becomes suspect.

It’s what I call the Dead Audience Theory.

In 2026, Trinidad and Tobago author Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove” won the Caribbean regional award for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Almost immediately, the internet began accusing the story of being AI-generated. People pointed to the usual tells. The story loves the rule of three. It has several “deep until you think about it” lines like “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” There’s a third example I’m not going to give out of fear of being accused of the same crime.

Worse, the more people looked into it, the more it appeared that other regional winners might also be laundering slop. The AI cancer had clearly metastasized.

Except, not really.

After a month-long inquiry involving early drafts, timestamps, notes, and author interviews, the Commonwealth Foundation announced on June 22 that it was satisfied AI had not been used in the winning stories. Unfortunately, by then, most people had already moved on. Like most internet drama, the crowd wandered away without piecing it all together, absolutely convinced they understood the full picture because it was right there on the front of the puzzle box.

Adam Conover, a man who can only be described as what you’d get if a Reddit comment was a fursona, used Nazir’s controversy as Exhibit A in why AI is terrible and why people who use it are terrible in a YouTube video posted five days after the Commonwealth Foundation announcement. He did not mention that the author’s name had been cleared five days earlier, at least in the Foundation’s eyes. Instead, he and his guests used Nazir as a segue into the Dead Internet Theory, a popular dystopian idea suggesting that most of the internet has been overtaken by bots, algorithms, and AI slop. What we think of as the internet’s bustling town square is actually a ghost town full of Westworld hosts, still performing their programmed routines long after the guests have gone home.

But I think something else is happening.

What if the internet isn’t dead? What if we just can’t tell the humans and hosts apart anymore, and that uncertainty has convinced us none of it is real? The perception that the internet is being overtaken by AI-generated content may end up being more corrosive than the AI content itself. When we believe we’re surrounded by fake art, fake opinions, fake essays, fake comments, fake images, fake reviews, fake everything, we stop engaging with the new and unfamiliar. We start behaving like paranoid misanthropes. Authentic human interaction disappears not because every human has been replaced, but because we no longer trust that anyone is human in the first place.

The Dead Internet Theory becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we labeled the humans as AI and then congratulated ourselves for spotting the fraud.

It’s hard to precisely explain why something being AI-generated feels so disqualifying. AI content is treated almost like online leprosy. No one really wants to spend time consuming something AI-generated unless they were the one who generated it. They’re certainly not going to spend money on it. People rarely ask if AI is good. For most audiences, it can only be bad, suspicious, cheap, exploitative, embarrassing, or an automatic disqualification from consideration. The artificial taint also spreads to anyone who uses it. People who want to have their AI content displayed on the fridge are often treated with derision, while anyone trying to pass AI content off as their own is quickly labeled a fraud.

And if there’s one thing the internet loves, it’s identifying frauds.

Whether or not Jamir Nazir’s story was AI-generated matters, but the accusation did not need proof to do its job. No matter who won a Commonwealth Prize this year, the internet was probably going to come away shouting that some of it was AI. Partly, that’s just the social media environment we’re in. Outrage travels faster than nuance because nuance doesn’t make people feel like a little detective solving crimes from the toilet. “There’s AI slop afoot!” was always going to gain more traction than “This is a fine short story from a marginalized author.”

But the deeper issue is that we don’t always know what’s real anymore, and it’s only going to get harder to tell. Nazir’s story is actually something more unsettling than the usual low-effort machine garbage we call AI slop. It’s mystery meat. You can hold whatever opinion you want about who or what actually wrote “The Serpent in the Grove,” but we cannot definitively know. If it was AI, then it was slop good enough to fool a room of literary experts and win a prize. If it wasn’t AI, then a real writer’s career moment was dragged through the mud because his work happened to trip the alarm.

That second possibility should bother us more than it does.

We run into mystery meat all the time now. This essay, for example, is mystery meat. Maybe it’s AI-generated. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s some depressing mixture of the two. What makes it mystery meat is not what it is. It’s what you don’t know. You didn’t see me sit down and type this. If I swear this is 100% USDA-certified human thought, you have no particular reason to believe me. In fact, you’re probably predisposed to believe I’m a liar.

We all understand that anyone can now be a fraud. We all have the means to access these models and the opportunity to pretend a thirty-second generation took hours of human effort. As for motive, you’re reading this. I clearly want your attention, and you’re giving it to me.

Not knowing the truth behind mystery meat should eat at us. We don’t have a reliable way to prove or disprove AI use. Not every generated image comes stamped with SynthID, and an AI detector like Pangram is just one machine squinting at text and making a confident guess about whether another machine wrote it. That isn’t proof. So much of Nazir’s problem came from Twitter pointing out that Pangram’s machine thought “The Serpent in the Grove” was 100% AI.

The reason the question “Is this AI?” doesn’t eat at us for very long is because it’s almost always followed by an answer. We don’t have the energy, time, or patience to do due diligence on every piece of content that crosses our screen. Every second we’re online, we’re bombarded by an endless torrent of stimulation. Most of it gets only a few seconds to win our interest before we move on. The question “Is this AI?” probably eats up one or two of those seconds by itself. Sometimes the answer is backed by clear evidence, but if we can’t spot something obvious, like a mangled hand with six fingers, we end up settling for a gut check.

What matters is that for all the reasons people don’t engage with AI, they also don’t engage with any work they think might be AI. Sometimes defaulting to “This is AI” feels like the safest answer. For anyone who describes themselves as anti-AI, the last thing they want is to be the idiot who argued “AI art isn’t art” and then got caught enjoying AI art. No one wants to be the Facebook Boomer saying through a full mouth of mystery meat, “This is a tasty burger,” only for someone to inform them it’s fake. I’ve felt like an idiot sharing a video with a friend showing a baby reacting to a rainbow bath bomb and telling him he needed to buy this thing and blow his baby’s mind, only for him to respond, “Dude, that’s AI.”

The worst thing we can do is try to answer “Is this AI?” by reading the room and deferring to everyone else’s gut checks. There’s always confirmation bias in the mix. Most people who read “The Serpent in the Grove” only picked it up after the accusation, meaning they didn’t go in blind. They were primed to think it was written by AI, so what they read screamed, “This was obviously written by AI.”

Some of the loudest slop accusers also have the shakiest understanding of the technology. They don’t use AI themselves. Why would they? They’re not hypocrites. But that kind of moral consistency can lead to ignorance. They don’t really know how the enemy works or what the enemy looks like, yet they want to fight this war and go in guns blazing, and the humans they’re trying to defend end up getting caught in the crossfire.

You see this everywhere now. A skilled photographer is using Midjourney because the lighting is too crisp. An aspiring model is too beautiful to be real, and not in the usual creepy online-guy way. People literally judge a self-published book by its potentially AI-generated cover and call the entire text a con job.

Sometimes all it takes is one person suggesting something is slop, and suddenly everyone starts collectively hallucinating fraud. Authors on Reddit watch in dismay as someone shows up to proudly announce they won’t read what they wrote because it’s AI slop. The accusation leaks through the thread like ethylene gas from a rotten apple, souring everyone around it.

The accusers often speak with the confidence of someone holding a master’s degree in digital forensics, pointing out “obvious tells” that don’t exist. The books on a bookshelf are facing the wrong way in a mirror selfie. A lifelong iPhone user is confident the Android phone someone is holding is wrong.

Sometimes they just squint and say something “seems off” because an unknown writer is too metaphorical, too grounded, too lyrical, too blunt, too normal, too weird, too anything. Really, the unknown writer just doesn’t write like them. Or the author can write and the accuser can’t. If the accuser tried to create what the author created, they would need to use ChatGPT, so it goes to reason the author must be using ChatGPT too.

The net result is that people don’t read the self-published book because they don’t know the author. They don’t give the new musician a shot because the song might be a Suno prompt. They ignore actual artists making actual art because the artists didn’t bring enough receipts. Even if an artist does show their work, someone will point out that “slop artists” can generate fake receipts too. The paranoia never ends.

And people stop engaging with genuine organic human content.

A false accusation doesn’t just hurt someone’s feelings. It suppresses discovery, preventing an unknown from becoming known. Every established creator today was once an unknown creator asking strangers for the benefit of the doubt. The fear of AI severs those tiny chains of engagement, where one stranger takes a chance, telling another stranger, who tells another, until eventually a career exists where nothing existed before.

Kane Parsons went from posting creepy Backrooms videos on YouTube to landing a major Hollywood adaptation before he was old enough to rent a car. It’s easy to imagine a world where those same Blender videos are immediately dismissed as AI slop and never get the momentum to go viral. Matt Dinniman became one of indie publishing’s biggest success stories before the internet was flooded with AI-generated novels. How are we supposed to discover the next Dungeon Crawler Carl if every unknown author gets thrown onto the slop pile before anyone bothers to read Chapter One?

We love the idea of discovering unknown creators. The internet was supposed to be a place where a nobody could upload something strange, brilliant, stupid, deranged, hilarious, beautiful, and find an audience without asking permission from the old gatekeepers. That was the dream. Now, the old gatekeepers are the only ones holding a stamp of authenticity and everything else is regarded with suspicion. Now, before a stranger can become a fan, they have to decide whether the creator is even real. That might be the single worst environment for creativity.

There’s no easy fix to the irony that people are attacking human creativity in defense of human creativity. There are only personal suggestions that work at an individual level. The first is that before we shout “This is AI,” we should ask the opposite question: “Is this human?” AI content is easy to dismiss because we assume no effort went into its creation. Before making the accusation, we should consider the potential blood, sweat, tears, hopes and dreams that poured into whatever we’re examining. We need to fully understand the stakes of the second question: “What if I’m wrong?”

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert. It takes about ten seconds to accuse someone of being a fraud.

AI art supposedly deserves no praise because it creates the appearance of skill without the struggle, but when real human work gets mislabeled, the accusation does exactly what people fear AI will do. It replaces the human with a machine and erases the labor behind the work. It turns skill into an illusion, effort into a lie, and the artist into some idiot standing next to a generative slot machine, pretending a jackpot was craftsmanship. The hours vanish. The drafts vanish. The practice vanishes. Their humanity vanishes. All that remains is suspicion, and the suspicion is enough to scare off the audience who might have helped the work survive.

Jamir Nazir is a real person. He’s not some prompt monkey trying to hack his way into literature. He’s a 62-year-old writer who says diabetes-related health problems have made conventional typing difficult. His writing process often involved using Android speech-to-text on his phone. Becoming a Commonwealth Short Story finalist should have been a major step toward recognition for a marginalized author. Instead, it may become a career-ending pitfall, forever tying his name in search results to the words “AI,” “controversy,” and “fraud.”

That’s the thing people miss when they treat AI accusations like harmless skepticism. They are not harmless. The internet is very good at starting fires and very bad at reading the arson report, and it’s easy for an audience to walks away remembering only the accusation. I’ve been lucky that whenever someone accuses me of using AI, they usually denounce my work and then immediately leave without reading another word. They haven’t stuck around long enough to do real damage, like bombing my reviews with one-star accusations or permanently poisoning the well for future readers.

This is probably going to sound like the worst possible take to a lot of you, but bear with me: AI isn’t going away anytime soon. While it may be the reason behind our paranoia, it isn’t the problem behind Dead Audience Theory. We are. We’re the audience. We’re the ones who need to change, consciously or not.

We’re trapped in the Uncanny Valley, and I doubt we’ll ever find our way back out. As the technology improves, there will probably be less obvious AI slop and far more mystery meat.

My hope is not that everyone learns to love AI, but that the backlash becomes less visceral and more precise. We can learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to excise it. We need to stop treating suspicion as proof and remember that a human being can look artificial because artificial things were trained to look like us.

If you made it this far into this particular piece of mystery meat, then you’re already doing exactly that. Maybe I’m a writer. Maybe I’m a fraud who hit “generate” and let a machine argue for me. Even if you’ve read my entire bibliography, you still really don’t know. I could show you my revision history and argue that I spent roughly 23 to 28 hours over nine days researching and writing this. If getting distracted on Reddit and Threads for hours at a time counts as research, it might even be true. I could point to an AI detector score on this piece, even though I just argued those scores shouldn’t be treated as gospel.

If I’m putting all my cards on the table, I would also need to admit that I fed this article into ChatGPT and Claude. I use LLMs to fact-check, find typos, critique arguments, and poke holes in my logic all the time. Sometimes I even listen to them and tone down the Adam Conover insults. They seem to think I have some major grievance against the guy.

But the “I smoked but didn’t inhale” defense only opens the door to more doubt. Maybe I don’t have Gladwell’s ten thousand hours. Maybe I only have five thousand, and I’m using ChatGPT to make up the difference. Maybe I wrote this entire article at a fourth-grade reading level before telling an AI, “Fix this and make it gud.”

You don’t know. And you know what? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

You can eat a Big Mac without knowing exactly what’s in it. Later, you may hate yourself and decide it was artificial, overprocessed garbage. What matters is that you gave the mystery meat a chance, and you didn’t starve.

Human creativity needs human engagement to survive. Musicians need fans. Artists need snooty patrons. You read what I wrote, and that encourages me to keep writing. Small moments like that are what keep the internet we actually want alive.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— While inspecting the ongoing cleanup, President Donald Trump collapsed into a state of profound grief after discovering a dead duckling floating in the algae-plagued Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

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Reporters say the president was mid-rant when he spotted the small yellow body drifting near the shoreline. He trailed off and let out a low, trembling moan.

Pushing reporters aside, Trump waded into the pool and dropped to his knees in the waist-deep water. Cradling the duckling against his chest, the president began loudly sobbing and demanding to know who was responsible.

A shaken representative of the National Parks Service replied, “You ordered us to dump chemicals in, sir… to kill the algae.”

And for the first time in recorded history, Trump did not try to downplay, lie, or blame someone else. In a move that has left the entire political world shaken to its very core, President Donald Trump did the unthinkable:

He took full responsibility.

“What have I done?” Trump cried. “Oh God. What have I done?”

Administration officials described the scene as unprecedented, given his usual sociopathic response to death and destruction.

“When we told him we’d bombed a school in Tehran, he just blinked, then asked if anyone in the room saw that morning’s Fox and Friends,” said one unnamed official. “175 people died, mostly children, and all he wanted was the name of ‘the blondie next to Doocy.’ Then one baby duck dies and he’s openly weeping for days.”

Sources say that when Stephen Miller allegedly referred to the duckling as “just a bird,” the president hurled his phone across the room, striking his advisor in the eye. Trump then berated Miller with such intensity that Miller reportedly required a change of trousers. While other outlets have independently verified the claim to be true, it remains unclear whether Miller voided his bladder or his bowels, with some sources suggesting a combination of the two.

When asked to comment on the president’s apparent grief, Melania Trump told reporters: “When you look into the eyes of Donald, you know who you are.” Her trademark monotone left many wondering if it was a statement or a plea for help. “We are all meat to those eyes. He will consume us all. But not the baby ducks. Never the baby ducks.”

“I was there the first time he saw the video of that ICE shooting.” said White House Director of Communications Dan Scavino. “We had to stop him from rating it five stars on Letterboxd. But this duck? I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

Over the years, aides say they have come to rely on the president remaining largely unfazed by human suffering. Now the administration worries that what they call “the duck situation” might be some troubling form of human empathy.

“We’ve come to expect him to glaze over casualty estimates. We always figured the numbers were just too big for him to visualize,” said one Pentagon official. “Hundreds dead? Thousands? Doesn’t move the needle. But one dead duck and the whole machine grinds to a halt.”

“I just want my president back,” said a bereft Pete Hegseth. “The one who’d watch a drone strike while sucking the meat off a KFC drumstick. Now we have to send the EPA to do an environmental report on the Area of Operation before he’ll greenlight an op. He won’t move until there’s a guarantee there are no ducks in the area.”

Many analysts now believe Iran’s surging imports of Peking ducks from China are the primary motivation behind most of the United States’ recent concessions. Every strategic bombing location is now reportedly ringed with hundreds of waddling birds.

“Supreme Leader Khamenei was walking around right in the open. We could’ve taken him out and ended the regime right there,” complained Benjamin Netanyahu. “But the bastard was openly taunting us with a duckling in each hand, and President Trump said ‘no.’ Swore he’d turn Tel Aviv into a crater if we hurt those damn ducks.”

Cabinet officials reportedly reached out to psychologists, family, and close associates in an attempt to understand why this particular death has left the president immobilized. Many responded that one cannot become close to a void. All who glimpse the thing beneath the mask return diminished. To feel your own soul wither in his presence is to understand a darkness older than the nameless ones.

“Yeah. He never liked cats, or dogs, or kids. Even his own children,” Ivanka Trump reportedly told aides. “Basically, anything that requires you to be capable of love and affection. Ducks were the only exception.”

Internet sleuths have pointed to a portion of Michael Wolff’s interviews with Jeffrey Epstein—Trump’s self-described “ride or die bestie bitch”—as a potential clue.

“Anything duck-related, Donald would get that look, like you just hit a traumatic core memory, you know?” explained Epstein. “And believe me, I know childhood trauma. It’s kind of my whole brand.”

During the G7 conference, the president appeared to hint at a possible childhood source of the fixation. “They used to call me Donald Duck,” Trump said unexpectedly to the British PM. “And kids can be very cruel. Very cruel.”

The president then fell silent. When reporters pressed for details, Trump stared off into the distance before quietly adding: “My father handled it.”

The White House later declined to elaborate.

At press time, the duckling was lying in state beneath the Capitol Rotunda, and flags nationwide remain at half-staff.

I logged into the Kindle publishing dashboard to futz with my new sequel, Take Back the Deep Estate. The ebook was live, the paperback was live, and right in between the two was a new slot: “Add audiobook with virtual voice.”

Not “hire a narrator.”

Not “Use AI and help Amazon trade out a creative industry for slop.”

Just “Add audiobook with virtual voice,” positioned as a natural next step, just above that hardcover edition I should probably get around to setting up.

That button bothered me more than I expected, and then I started connecting dots. My God, things got so much worse. Even with ChatGPT and Claude operating in galaxy-brain mode, I quickly became tangled in the red string. I’m still sitting here scratching my head, but I can say this much with confidence:

Three things are happening at the same time. Audible is forcing creators into a new royalty system and pushing “All You Can Listen,” while Amazon has introduced the Virtual Voice option directly into the Kindle publishing dashboard.

They’re connected.

In short: Fuckery is afoot, and everyone except Amazon is going to suffer.

Consumers will find Audible filled with AI slop. Authors and narrators will be paid far less until human narration is eventually squeezed out of the equation entirely.

First off, narration is not just reading a book.

I care about voice actors, and I don’t like that every time I compare the state of the industry today versus what it once was, I come away a little depressed.

My father, Tom Kane, raised NINE KIDS doing voice work. It was a well-paying SAG-AFTRA union career that put food on the table, paid for school supplies, medical bills, and Christmas presents.

Then there’s Christopher Harbour, the narrator of my Deep Estate novels. He does not just “read the words.” It’s very much a performance, one I can confidently say is on par with what “legendary voice artist” Tom Kane once delivered. He is also trying to raise his daughter on audiobook work, but the environment is a completely different beast.

Once, he casually mentioned during a recording session that he would like to bring another child into the world, but the numbers kept him from doing so. I found myself looking at the family photo on my wall, where my father and mother somehow managed to corral their horde of NINE KIDS for a Kodak moment.

I know my father and Chris aren’t equivalent examples, but I couldn’t shake the idea that something had changed for voice acting, and not for the better.

In Tom Kane’s world, audiobooks were made by publishers, in studios, frequently under union contracts at scale rates with pension and health paid on top. In Christopher Harbour’s world, anyone with a USB mic and a coat closet can call themselves a “voice actor.” Amazon didn’t cause the barrier to entry to collapse, but they sure as hell leaned into it.

ACX’s Audiobook Creation Exchange became the primary platform for voice actors to audition and bid for audiobooks. The bids came with no instituted floor, and instead of royalties being built in, they became a bargaining chip. The result was a race to the bottom, with a paycheck often a fraction of union scale, and much of a narrator’s pay based on speculation about future royalties.

And in a very corporate, “the solution to the problem is to make the problem a solution,” Amazon took the fact that voice actors were now expected to play the role of director, engineer, and editor in addition to being the sole performer, shrugged, and simply started calling them “producers.”

So when I saw “Add Virtual Voice,” it felt especially cruel.

Amazon, the company that kept the starving artists starving, was now offering a machine solution that didn’t need to be fed. There is no “Hire a human” button. That’s on an entirely different website.

As it stands, the only saving grace seems to be Amazon’s bone-deep need to be stingy.

The Good News: Amazon’s Virtual Voice sucks

So I clicked that “Add Virtual Voice” button and had the machine read my manuscript just to see what they were offering. I was expecting something on par with ElevenLabs’ cutting-edge text-to-speech models. Something that could simulate a breathing human and somewhat understand inflection, pace, and tone.

Nope. It turns out the cutting edge is too expensive for Amazon.

They don’t explicitly say which model they’re using, but judging by the voice naming convention and some common sense, they likely went with Amazon’s in-house AWS Polly. Polly has tiers of quality, and its latest and best model is specifically meant for long-form content like an audiobook.

They didn’t use that one.

You see, good text-to-speech eats up GPU and can’t be generated in real time, so they’d have to render the entire audiobook before selling a single copy. At scale, that would add up to a pretty penny, enough that the aspiring dystopian mega-corp might even consider a rounding error.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned from all my research, it’s this: Amazon won’t spend a dime unless they can also nickel-and-dime someone else.

Using the good model would imply they had some faith that these audiobooks would recoup the investment. Instead, they went with something that could be generated on the fly for a fraction of the GPU compute, so they wouldn’t have to spend a penny until someone hits play.

And the result? It sounds like a slight step up from a Speak N Spell.

A good narrator performs. They give characters distinct voices. They pace jokes. They carry dread. They understand when a line needs to land dry, when it needs to hurt, and, especially when it comes to my writing, when it needs to be stupid in exactly the right way.

Amazon’s Virtual Voice just says the words on the page and nothing more.

It is, quite frankly, trash.

Just take a listen to Christopher Harbour and Amazon’s Virtual Voice read the same passages:

The Bad News: Amazon’s Virtual Voice sucks

If Amazon weren’t Violet Beauregarde wearing a thousand dildos, giddily rolling around trying to fuck as many people as they can, as fast as they can, I would think this was a lazy attempt to monetize some Kindle feature they were planning to give away for free.

Which makes the matter only more confounding. The cutting-edge audiobook option is there, they’re just not using it. If they’re not actually trying to make AI audiobooks that can compete with audiobooks performed by a narrator, then why are they being pushed so hard as an option for authors?

I think it comes down to two things.

First, Virtual Voice audiobooks aren’t meant to be literature. Its content, and they need a lot of it. The cheaper and more disposable, the better. I highly doubt anyone will knowingly pay for these AI audiobooks, but Amazon isn’t really planning on selling them. Sure, the author can put a price tag on it and pretend someone might buy it, but really, it’s all meant to fill up their “All You Can Listen” catalog.

Second, Amazon is clearly looking ahead to what AI-read audiobooks will look like in the near future, and the changes they are making to their contracts and royalty system now are in anticipation of making that future a reality.

Ultimately, they want a human voiceover for your novel to be a luxury, not the standard it currently is.

The Spotify of audiobooks

Amazon wants Audible to be the Spotify of audiobooks, but since Spotify is already trying to become the Spotify of audiobooks, they have to move doubly fast to become the Spotify of audiobooks. However, doing so requires a fundamental change.

Spotify would be a vastly different place if it started out as the Audible of music, and their subscription offered a monthly Spotify credit that could be used to purchase a single album. Albums would still hold some monetary value to the consumer, and Spotify introducing an All-You-Can-Stream option at this late stage wouldn’t be an easy sell to creators. Studios and artists would be hesitant to devalue their own work and throw it into the buffet.

Audible’s economy is no different.

For about twenty years, the Audible deal was simple enough to explain to a golden retriever, or let’s be real, most authors, including me.

On the outside, Audible was an honest, clean handshake between a person who wanted a story and the virtual monopoly that sold it. The listener paid a monthly subscription fee, received a credit or two, and spent those credits on audiobooks.

Amazon would like the customer to stop doing that.

Exchanging money for things, expecting those things to be yours, not paying them every month to access those things? It’s an antiquated concept of ownership.

Why allow audiobooks to have value, when it could be access to those audiobooks? What they really want is to offer customers an all-you-can-eat content buffet.

As a consumer, a buffet of content is pretty fantastic. Once upon a time, you’d drop twelve bucks on a single album. Now, you hand Spotify roughly that same amount each month and get every song ever recorded, forever, on tap. It’s a genuine miracle of consumer value. Just think of the last time you bought an album.

No, seriously, think about the last time you bought an album because it’s a real problem.

The irony of Spotify becoming the solution to music piracy is that while consumers are no longer stealing from artists, the artists are still getting robbed. By paying $12 to Spotify each month for access to their buffet, we’ve essentially capped our music spending at a single monthly album purchase. Spotify then promises to divvy up that single album amongst the artists you listened to, and they do just that, except not really.

The fact that Audible is looking at this model and visibly swooning should worry every author and narrator.

The way I see it, Amazon wants to turn Audible into Hometown Buffet, but that requires cheap content to fill the warming trays. Of Audible’s ~1 million audiobooks, only ~150K are “All You Can Listen.” As much as they would love to just force their entire catalog into the buffet, they can’t, since most of their existing audiobooks come with a one-credit price tag they can’t unilaterally remove.

So everything they’re doing is to work around that issue, starting with finding a whole lot of cheap content, fast.

They’re staring at the disconnect between Kindle and Audible catalogs and scheming. Only 4% of KDP titles have an audiobook, and Virtual Voice is part of how they plan to bridge that gap, by giving authors a fast way to make cheap audiobooks with AI.

But here’s the thing: The vast majority of these books simply aren’t worth turning into audiobooks the traditional way. Over 90% of self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies. A great deal of these dusty, unread novels end up on Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s eBook buffet, with the author reasoning, “Well, if they won’t buy the ebook, maybe they’ll read it if it’s part of their subscription, and I might get a quarter and a couple pennies in exchange.”

It goes to reason that the authors of these unread novels will do the same with Virtual Voice. “Well, if they won’t buy my book, or read it when it’s free, surely they’ll listen to it, right?”

Initially, I figured Audible would wait just like Kindle for the author to give up on people buying their AI audiobook before offering it as part of the buffet, but it turns out they cut that step out entirely. If you opt to create a Virtual Voice audiobook and your ebook is on Kindle Unlimited, the audiobook is automatically enrolled in Audible’s All You Can Listen.

That’s why Amazon’s Virtual Voice sounds like crap.

They don’t expect anyone to buy these books. Optimistically, readers might listen to a tiny fraction of these AI audiobooks for free, but for the vast majority, their popularity won’t change just because RoboCop now narrates them. They will, however, fill up the All You Can Listen catalog with cheap content that makes the buffet look more worthwhile.

Just don’t look too closely at the mashed potatoes.

Audible’s new bullshit math

Right now, Audible is trying to exist in both worlds: customers are still exchanging credits for audiobooks they’d normally buy, while Audible is also offering free audiobooks on top of that. There’s just one catch: Those free books aren’t actually free. Somebody is going to have to pay for them, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Amazon.

This is where the new royalty system comes in.

Let me be clear here because I’m going to use this term a lot: “bullshit math” is my stand-in for the overly complicated way a streaming-style buffet pays creators. The term is the result of spending an entire weekend using both ChatGPT and Claude to help me understand Audible’s new royalty system and how it meshes with the Virtual Voice rollout.

Initially, I came away with more questions than answers. I can’t tell you how many times I shuddered and said out loud, “WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WHAT?” Eventually, I landed on one overarching answer: Some bullshit math happens, and then they pay you less.

To which Claude and ChatGPT both said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

Topline, Audible wants you to know you’re going to make more money!!!! They’re flashing “40% royalties are now 50%!” and making it rain clip art dollar bills. Then they get into the details, and it’s far from that simple.

They have it all spelled out in their documentation, sure. They even show you a formula, and it’s all so easy to figure out. Just calculate:

It’s just that simple.

Really, the whole mess is a hodgepodge of terms, variables, and conditional statements across separate websites, and so much of it is left vague or undefined. But here’s the extremely simplified version:

The old system was messy, but at least it was messy in a way you could vaguely recognize. Someone bought your book, either with cash or with an Audible credit, and you got a cut. That cut would always be smaller than expected with a credit. After they run their patented allocation-factor bullshit math, the value of an Audible credit was never anywhere near the listed price. The 40% royalties were more like 21-18%, but at least the basic transaction made sense.

A customer spent something on your audiobook. You got paid for your audiobook.

The new system is: Someone bought your book, so take two Tylenol and buckle the fuck up.

Audible now starts with something called “Member Value.” This is the chunk of money they’ll be divvying up, so it’s pretty important to nail down. Naturally, they don’t give you any concrete numbers, so it stays vague and nebulous.

They also give you two contradictory definitions on the same page. In its video explainer, Audible says Member Value starts from the average amount received from all members of a plan, minus taxes, promotional discounts, and fees. In its written FAQ on the same page, Audible says Member Value starts from that plan’s monthly membership revenue, minus taxes and fees. There is no mention of an average or promotional discounts.

So either Member Value is the monthly subscription of the person who bought your audiobook, after Audible subtracts taxes and its suspiciously undefined “fees,” or it’s an average of all the members in that plan, after it’s fed through some bullshit math that lobs a chunk off to account for Audible’s free-trial-and-discount machine.

That’s going to be two very different amounts.

Whatever. This isn’t even the main point of fuckery. Member Value is basically their monthly subscription. That’s the chunk of money royalties are now coming from, not the credit itself.

What matters is that, under the new system, an audiobook purchased with a credit and an audiobook consumed through All You Can Listen are in the same single-user royalty pool and only weighted by their price. That’s a problem for everyone involved, but it’s especially shitty for the audiobook that costs a credit.

Now, I’ve written and rewritten this part three times, painting a full picture, showing the math, then not showing the math, trying to best explain this mess in a way that won’t make readers eyes glaze over or just sound like some author bitching about royalties. Here’s the best way I found to get it all across. To put it in the simplest way possible, using grade school math, and extremely round numbers, imagine this:

Someone walks into a bookstore and buys Welcome to the Deep Estate for a book club credit.

For the shopper, the credit is worth one book, as it has been for the past 20 years. For the new royalty system, the credit just means she can pick a book. Her monthly subscription fee is the actual value, and that’s $10.

The Deep Estate is normally priced at $15, but Jeff Bezos ignores the list price and hands Chris and me our 50% royalty of that member value, $5.

However, on the way out, the customer stops by the “Free books” bargain bin and grabs a book. After she leaves, Jeff Bezos looks at the list price of that free book and sees it’s also priced at $15.

He does some quick bullshit math. He adds the list prices together then divides The Deep Estates price by the total. (15/30 = 0.5) He then multiplies that by the Member Value ($10 x 0.5) then applies the 50% royalty rate.

The result? Jeff Bezos takes the fiver back from Chris and me. Now we get $2.50, and the author of the free book gets $2.50.

But wait!

The customer immediately turns around and walks back in, apologizing. Maybe she will take that trashy free romance she was eyeing. This book also conveniently has the same list price as the other two, so Jeff Bezos takes the money back again, does the same bullshit math, and divides it three ways, leaving Chris and me with $1.67.

The end result is that the customer walks away thinking she only bought one book, and you know what? Technically, she did.

Chris and I just ended up paying for the other two.

And no matter how many “free but not really” books she takes, the store won’t lose a single penny. Amazon being Amazon, they made sure they’ll always make 50–70% of the Member Value no matter what. This book splitting can only ever make them more money.

That’s the new royalty system.

And I’m sure you’re probably saying, “Yeah, but what are the chances someone is going to listen to multiple audiobooks in a single month?” and that’s the real kicker of this fuckery.

They don’t need to finish them.

They only need to listen long enough for each one to count as a “Qualified Listen,” which, for your average novel, appears to be anything over 30 minutes.

An All-You-Can-Listen audiobook doesn’t need to be worth your time. It just has to be worth giving a shot. The listener simply needs to play the prologue and a chunk of Chapter 1 before deciding it sucks and moving on, and that free novel can cut a major chunk of our royalty.

Adding in a tidal wave of unlistenable AI-generated audiobooks is only going to make the situation worse. The more disposable the free catalog becomes, the more listeners will bounce around, triggering Qualified Listens.

At the same time, paid audiobooks are at a distinct disadvantage because they still require an Audible credit. If you repeated the exact same situation, only now Welcome to The Deep Estate is also in the free books bargain bin, the result would be exactly the same. Audible’s new royalty system is forcing us into a post-credit economy where an audiobook being worth buying is just a barrier with no benefit.

If a paid audiobook sucks, they can always request a refund to get that credit back. But for a free audiobook? There’s nothing to refund. The free novel that wasn’t worth listening to still eats into the royalties of the ones that were.

At some point, excluding your work from All You Can Listen will cost creators real money.

In the long term, it’s also going to cost us human narrators.

The Human Cost

I make a point of not referring to Welcome to the Deep Estate as “my audiobook.” The Deep Estate series is very much the collaborative work of Christopher Harbour and me. I wrote and directed it, but Chris provided the voice, talent, audio engineering, editing, along with his own spin, which made the end product far better.

It’s to the point that whenever anyone asks about the sequel I just released, Take Back the Deep Estate, I’m actually telling them not to read it.

Wait for the audiobook. Trust me. It’s going to be amazing.

Amazon clearly sees this kind of collaboration as inefficient, and when all of this fuckery comes to fruition, it’s going to put both the narrator and author in a tough spot. Chris and I also share royalties, but that kind of profit sharing only works if there’s enough profit to share.

If narrators can no longer rely on speculation to make a recording project worthwhile, they’ll need to up their rates, but they’ll find themselves fighting against the current, pushing higher bids in the middle of ACX’s race to the bottom.

Maybe they’ll forgo royalties entirely for a higher up-front payment, and risk the chance that they could potentially record a bestseller and find themselves stuck holding a single paycheck.

Maybe they’ll have no choice but to learn to love the bomb and embrace ACX’s AI voice cloning services, because of course that’s a thing. It’s currently in beta. If they stop performing and start generating bespoke text-to-speech, then maybe increasing their volume could make the numbers work.

Or maybe they’ll just eventually get the message that they’re outdated and no longer needed. Gone the way of the horse and buggy, except for the few we keep around to splurge on romantic rides around Central Park.

As for authors? Well, we already have Amazon’s solution. It’s sitting right there on the dashboard: “Add Virtual Voice.”

Amazon loves authors. Not only do we put up the money and do all the hard work just so Amazon can take an outsized cut, but we’re also paying Amazon per click so that people might find our hard work in their search results. That alone is an insane relationship when you frame it in the context of the Bezos brick-and-mortar bookstore.

“Yeah, we’ll carry your book, but you gotta pay us a dollar anytime someone touches your book, or it’s going in our basement pit.”

When you get down to it, authors are Amazon’s favorite rube, and you don’t cut rubes loose, you string them along. Meanwhile, narrators made the fatal mistake of not being Amazon.

Abusive and toxic relationships are sustained by the abuser becoming the victim’s everything. “You are nothing without me! There’s nothing out there for you. Everything you have is because of me!”

They don’t like that the author is working with someone other than Amazon, and it’s not enough that they also keep the narrator under a controlling hand. They’re rightfully worried that the author and narrator might start talking behind their back, because we are.

But with a Virtual Voice narrator? That’s another lever they control.

Amazon won’t ever hear their Virtual Voice murmuring to the author in the other room, “I don’t like the way they treat us. There’s gotta be someplace that’s better than here.”

Their Virtual Voice doesn’t narrate with the hopes of turning it into a decent career.

It isn’t trying to raise a daughter.

It just reads the words on the page.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Congress was left reeling after maintenance workers discovered a mummified corpse inside a cramped crawlspace beneath the Capitol building belonging to Mitch McConnell.

After forensic investigators concluded that the former Senate Majority Leader had likely been dead for decades, a chill went through the Legislative Branch as lawmakers began questioning who—or what—had actually been guiding Senate Republicans all these years.

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“Mitch freezing in place. The vacant thousand-yard stare as he listened to the screams of the damned. All those times his incorporeal form passed through my body in the hallway,” muttered Ted Cruz. “I can’t believe we didn’t realize it sooner.”

Sources now believe McConnell’s death occurred sometime during the Obama administration, when the future Senate leader allegedly crawled beneath the Senate floor to avoid reporters asking whether Republicans had an actual healthcare plan beyond “No.”

Evidence suggests McConnell spent his final days desperately pounding on the underside of the chamber while Republican senators debated the Affordable Care Act directly above him.

“We all heard the knocking,” admitted Tea Party Senator Ron Johnson. “Every now and then we’d hear his faint voice encouraging us to keep talking about ‘Death Panels—’”

The congressman paused.

“Oh my God.”

Witnesses said Johnson began visibly shaking.

“I thought he was saying ‘Death Panels.’ He was saying, ‘I’m starving to death. Open the panel.’”

No one questioned when McConnell inexplicably returned to haunt the legislative process through arcane procedural maneuvers, occasionally materializing at press conferences to announce that Obama’s latest nominee for deputy assistant undersecretary of whatever would receive a vote “over my dead body.”

“At no point did anyone think to check whether he was alive,” admitted one longtime Republican staffer. “In fairness, he always looked like that.”

Analysts now believe many of McConnell’s most controversial actions make significantly more sense when viewed through the lens of a tortured soul.

“Political scientists have always struggled to understand what motivated him,” said Georgetown professor Elaine Mercer. “But once you accept that he was a restless spirit consumed by spite and denied the peace of the afterlife, the current makeup of the supreme court suddenly clicks into place if you view it as a curse.”

Several senators reported experiencing an immediate sense of relief after the remains were removed from the building.

“For years I’d find myself voting against my constituents and then wonder why,” said Senator Susan Collins. “Turns out I was being possessed by an evil spirit.”

Several Republican congressmen nodded their heads in agreement. Many more have now taken to twitter to blame supernatural possession for their steadfast support for the unpopular wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran.

Others described feeling McConnell’s lingering presence throughout the complex.

“I’d constantly catch glimpses of him at the end of hallways, staring blankly with trembling lips, whispering something about the national deficit,” said Senator Bernie Sanders. “Then I’d turn around and nobody would be there.”

Republican leadership has reportedly asked Democratic lawmakers to assist in cleansing the Senate chamber using crystals, sage, moon water, Ouija, and whatever else “pagan hippy shit” Democrats allegedly do.

President Trump appeared similarly unsettled by the findings.

“Is that why he kept showing up in my bedroom every Christmas Eve?” Trump asked reporters. “He kept trying to show me the past, and I kept telling him I already have all the seasons of Apprentice on DVD.”

At press time, White House assured voters that Necromancer Stephen Miller was already hard at work using the forces of the undead to wrangle Republicans back in line.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Officials at the Department of Energy announced Monday that Freedom 250, the crypto-sponsored backyard wrestling event staged on the White House lawn, had caused the Founding Fathers to spin in their graves with enough rotational force to power the entire Eastern Seaboard.

The Founding Fathers Rotational Energy Initiative reportedly began late in the Biden administration after engineers noticed a steady, low-grade hum coming from Mount Vernon and Monticello.

“Normally, the founders spin in their graves in short bursts,” explained Department of Energy technician Raymond Keller, “You get a little movement from gerrymandering, a decent turn every time Justice Clarence Thomas went on vacation, maybe a few rotations whenever Congress pretends insider trading was complicated. Then Trump 2.0 came along”

The founding fathers’ RPM steadily increased as it became clear that Donald Trump, a man on trial for attempting to overturn an election, was somehow evading prosecution by becoming the next democratically elected president.

“At first, we thought it was only temporary, but the current administration has kept them consistently turning over in their graves,” said Raymond Keller, standing beside a live power readout labeled MADISON TURBINE. “When Trump appointed his personal lawyer as Acting Attorney General, Jefferson increased to roughly 400 RPM. By the time he pardoned the January 6th rioters, Franklin was producing enough voltage to run a Waffle House.”

According to official documents, the energy program involved attaching industrial magnets and copper coils to the remains of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and several additional founders whose names are now mostly used by men in bow ties to justify child labor.

According to internal DOE projections, the Trump administration’s routine constitutional violations, billionaire influence, and near-constant executive-branch corruption were expected to yield a reliable but modest stream of power.

However, not every founder responded to each event in the same way.

“Thomas Jefferson experienced a measurable slowdown during the Epstein files scandal. At first, we thought the sensors were malfunctioning. Then someone remembered Sally Hemings, the sixteen-year-old Jefferson trafficked to France, and the numbers suddenly made perfect sense.”

Officials believed the system could eventually supply electricity to several federal buildings that had not yet been converted into Amazon warehouses or Chick-fil-A franchises.

Then Freedom 250 happened.

“We first noticed the output spike during the fighter walkouts. Escorting those shirtless, tatted-up men in their underwear through the White House, where presidents traditionally host foreign dignitaries and heads of state, and setting it all to Kid Rock music?” Keller said, before letting out a long whistle. “Benjamin Franklin started spinning so fast his corpse entered an entirely new state of matter. Christ Church in Philadelphia almost became the next Chornobyl.”

Researchers initially assumed the explosive increase was tied to the event’s numerous ethical concerns: conflicts of interest, billionaire access, and reports alleging that Eric Trump sought insider information related to the fights.

The data suggested otherwise.

“It appears that even the founders have grown numb to Trump’s antics,” Keller said. “What they seem unable to process is the sheer ratchetness of that event.”

The evening’s largest surge came after UFC fighter Josh Hokit used his post-fight interview to yell that Michelle Obama was a man, prompting George Washington’s corpse to spin so violently that technicians had to cool the Mount Vernon facility with water from the Potomac.

“During the motorcycle stunt performance, Alexander Hamilton briefly achieved fusion,” Keller said. “Not because of the corruption, the violence, or the gambling. Just the realization that this hillbilly shit was how the American President chose to celebrate 250 years of the republic.”

“We estimate Freedom 250 generated more energy than the previous eighteen months of the second Trump administration combined,” Keller said.

The Department of Energy briefly celebrated the breakthrough, hypothesizing that if Trump attempted a third term, it could allow the nation to achieve full energy independence by 2030.

However, the Founding Fathers Rotational Energy Initiative was reportedly canceled hours later after President Trump learned it qualified as renewable energy.

“Green energy is a disaster,” Trump said in a statement. “I don’t care if George Washington personally powers half the Eastern Seaboard by spinning in his grave. It’s very weak. Very woke. We’re not doing it.”

At press time, DOE officials were reportedly reclassifying the project as “Freedom Coal.” Plans are currently underway to exhume the Founding Fathers so their corpses can be burned during the White House’s upcoming July 4th pig roast and wet T-shirt contest.

After years of accusations that the industry was pushing a “woke agenda,” Hollywood executives came clean, admitting the real motivation behind casting decisions was far simpler.

“Annie became a spunky Black girl to correct a grave injustice,” said Columbia Pictures casting director Lisa Cho, dry-heaving as she drove past a Wendy’s. “It wasn’t about race. It was about keeping those sun-poisoned circus children off the big screen.”

According to insiders, production companies have spent years quietly referring to what they call “The Ginger Problem.”

One Disney memo warned of the industry’s eventual collapse, baselessly blaming declining box-office revenue on audience exposure to “Irish jump scares.” The report further recommended that the MPAA classify all on-screen ginger representation as R-rated, citing the risk that children might “mistake their inferior ginger genes as a viable human aesthetic.”

The memo further reinterpreted cinema history through what executives call “The Follicles of the MGM Lion,” a fringe theory claiming that passing gingers infiltrated the early Technicolor process and secretly engineered color standards to favor pale skin and bright reds.

“They want you to think early Hollywood had a racism problem,” said veteran producer Martin Gold. “But follow the red hair. The same lighting standards that elevated ginger left Black performers underlit for decades. Hollywood was built on ginger supremacy.”

The purge has reportedly been systematic. Mary Jane Watson, Starfire, Jimmy Olsen, Batgirl, Ariel and April O’Neil. One by one, iconic red-haired characters have been recast as anything but ginger.

“I didn’t even look at the script,” said Idris, regarding his portrayal of Man-at-Arms in the live-action He-Man, “They just showed me that ginger cunt’s bloody mustache and I signed on.”

“Every single redheaded character is a ticking time bomb,” said a Disney insider. “If you don’t replace them, you risk some daywalker getting famous, then they’ll star in other roles and create more ginger characters. We learned from our mistakes with Molly Ringwald; we won’t repeat them again.”

He then tented his fingers and turned in his chair to resume glaring at a headshot of Sophia Lillis.

“We have nothing against gingers as people,” said Bob Iger, head of Disney. “Just gingers as people on screen. Also, the concept that gingers are people.”

“We’re being systematically removed from popular media,” said Brian O’Malley of the Red-Headed Heritage Council. “First, they came for Ariel, and I did not speak out, because I was not a mermaid. Then they came from Mary Jane, and I did not speak out, because everyone loves Zendaya. Then they—”

Unfortunately, O’Malley was forced to cut the interview short after suffering third-degree sunburns while walking between buildings. He remains in the burn ward under a medically induced coma.

At press time, DreamWorks proudly announced that the Gingerbread Man in the upcoming Shrek sequel would be portrayed by a Puerto Rican sugar cookie named Manny Mantecadito after early test screenings reportedly left several executives visibly distressed upon simply hearing the word “ginger.”

INDIANAPOLIS, IN— After attending Midwest FurFest as part of what they described as a “fact-finding mission into the furry youth contagion,” a coalition of child psychologists announced Monday that schools should immediately bring back bullying.

“We went in with open minds,” said developmental psychologist Dr. Helen Braddock, “But after seeing a 16-year-old ‘fox boy’ explain his ‘fursona’ to a middle-aged ‘dragonkin,’ we realized society may have overcorrected.”

The group’s report, titled Bullying: Seriously, Bring It Back, argues that decades of anti-bullying campaigns have unintentionally created an environment where “any passing adolescent impulse is allowed to harden into some really weird shit,” providing a linked Google search for “scritching” as evidence in the footnotes.

“For generations, mild but sustained peer cruelty served an important developmental function,” Braddock said. “It taught children which behaviors were charmingly eccentric, and which were socially unwise. Without bullying, we’ve normalized walking around in a $4,000 raccoon suit with cooling fans.”

The group’s initial experiments at the convention reportedly proved extremely successful.

“A single controlled swirlie was enough to make one youth remove his cat ears and go home,” said Dr. Warren Pike. “After a follow-up session with the same patient, conducted inside the cramped, highly structured environment of his locker, we successfully redirected his interest toward learning karate, a socially acceptable group hobby.”

“It’s a classic social contagion,” Pike later claimed on The Joe Rogan Experience. “So many of these confused kids are identifying as wolf-boys, when in previous generations, they would’ve just been thespians.”

Pike added that the problem can escalate quickly if left untreated. “One kid shows up to lunch wearing a fox tail, and without the intervention of a bully, within six months the entire friend group is reading Omegaverse lit-erotica.”

Several parents of furry children have found themselves out of their depth.

“I look at the neighbors and their beautiful trans daughter, and I feel envious,” said Indiana mother Linda Morley. “Why can’t I have that? That makes sense. But this?” She sighed and went back to combing through a kiddie pool filled with kitty litter. “Maybe I just didn’t spank him enough.”

Several schools have already begun testing pilot programs designed to reintroduce bullying in what administrators describe as a “nonviolent, but still traumatic” method. One charter school in Phoenix has hired a rotating team of catty gay men to patrol the halls and deliver emotionally devastating remarks to students before abnormal behavior can fully calcify.

“We don’t want anyone getting an atomic wedgie,” said Principal Darren Kell. “That’s outdated. But if a student walks in wearing a Twilight Sparkle unicorn onesie, we do want a 32-year-old drag queen to look them up and down and say, ‘Yeah… no, girl. Go home and don’t come back until you find some taste.’”

Early data from the program appear promising. One sophomore reportedly removed his fox ears and tail after a hallway monitor told him, “Honey, we’re not in Sherwood Forest, and you’ve got the body shape of Little John, not Robin Hood. Do better.”

Another student abandoned plans to attend FurCon after being informed that his wolf name, “Shadowfang,” sounded like “a discontinued vape flavor,” followed by a prolonged eye roll and the groaned remark, “Oh my gaaaaawd, this place.”

Some parents have already embraced the idea.

“My son came home saying he was a pansexual snow leopard named Kairo,” said parent Sara Cho. “But after three carefully worded insults from the school’s new peer realism specialist, he was back to being a pansexual playing Minecraft. I got my boy back.”

Yesterday, representatives from the furry community pushed back during a tense Q&A with Dr. Helen Braddock at Butler University, arguing that young people deserve safe spaces to explore identity without mockery or shame. Dr. Braddock then acknowledged their concern by threatening to punch the two adult representatives in the face, followed by hitting them twice in the arm for flinching.

The two furries immediately stormed out of the lecture hall to sustained, rolling laughter from the crowd.

Their fennec fox and husky costumes were later found stuffed in a recycle bin inside the student union.

BROOKLYN, NY— Following the breakout success of Obsession, members of the growing psychosexual community say they have finally found the representation they’ve been waiting for.

“For years, people told me I was just attracted to toxic ‘nice guys,’” said psychosexual activist Maren Bell. “But with Obsession? We finally have our own Brokeback Mountain.”

While the psychosexual community generally defines itself as people attracted to psychologically manipulative, extremely cinematic relationships, members remain divided on the finer details. Some prefer the term “toxiromantic,” gay men often opt for “homocontextual,” while psychosexual lesbians call themselves “cinemasapphic.”

Almost everyone agrees their love needs to feel like an arthouse darling directed by someone recently divorced.

“I’m not attracted to men or women,” said Jacob Ramsey, taping up his callused, bloody fingers with shaking hands. “I’m exclusively attracted to a controlling violin teacher who is just maternal enough to lead to a deeply unsettling sex scene.”

The group’s Pride campaign, titled “Love Is Love, But Also Love Is Self-Mutilation, Death… And Maybe Rebirth? I Don’t Know, We Need To Rewatch Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,” aims to educate the public about psychosexual visibility while fighting harmful stereotypes that psychosexuals are merely “people who watched Gone Girl wrong.”

“People think we’re broken, but we’re not,” said organizer Clara Wren, wiping away a tear. “We’re simply incapable of feeling desire unless that desire will break us. I try to explain who I am, and they think I’m just an A24 fan.”

The psychosexual community is currently finalizing its official flag design, with members split between a simple red flag or a blown-up still of Willem Dafoe’s penis. There is also fierce debate over which groups fall under the umbrella.

“The fraternal twincest community says it’s not incest. They argue it’s ‘narcissistic masturbation,’ and sure. Okay. I’d say ‘you do you,’ but you’re effectively already doing that,” said Wren. “But that’s not psychosexual unless someone is using intimacy as a weapon and the lighting suggests generational trauma.”

Community members say they often feel erased in mainstream dating culture, where healthy communication and mutual respect remain unfairly privileged.

“I went on a date with this guy, and he was kind, stable, and actively listened, and I felt nothing,” said psychosexual Maria Torres. “Then he mentioned I looked just like his wife, who went missing in the Mojave, and suddenly I was back.”

Torres grinned and flashed her new engagement ring.

“We’re getting married in July,” she said. “In the Mojave!”

The psychosexual community will make its official debut during San Francisco’s Pride Parade, positioned between the “Allies Who Will Say They’re Bi So They Can Be In The Parade” contingent and the “Trying Polyamory Before The Divorce” float.

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They found Edie inside the Backrooms. That was the easy part.

Getting out alive is another matter entirely.

Time works differently in Liminal Space, and the deeper John Doe goes, the stranger it gets. The endless halls of the Backrooms give way to the Backwoods, a sprawling forest filled with creatures that evolved beyond reality. Leprechauns hunt in packs. Sasquatch stalk through the trees. And how do you even escape a place where outside doesn’t exist?

But while John, Edie, and Carrie the flying pencil are fighting to get back, the last thing anyone expects is that today is the day that the Deep Estate falls.

The Bureau of the Bizarre is in lockdown. The Illuminati are making their move. Their Chupacabra army is ready to invade. For the thousands of humans trapped inside, the mission is no longer about keeping the impossible contained...

It’s about surviving the purge.

MANHATTAN, NY— Luigi Mangione announced his 2028 presidential campaign Tuesday from the courthouse steps where he is currently standing trial for murder, delivering a brief stump speech that consisted almost entirely of ominous implications.

“Behind every problem is a man afraid to die,” Mangione told hundreds of supporters gathered outside the courthouse. “And when you’re president? Well... they let you do it.”

He capped off his speech by addressing those who consider the prospect of a Luigi Mangione presidential run insane.

“Donald Trump once joked he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still be president,” Mangione said. He then leaned in and cracked an alarmingly disarming smile. “Brian Thompson was on Sixth.”

Mangione smiled, waved awkwardly with his wrists restrained by manacles, and shuffled away to thunderous applause.

The announcement sent shockwaves through both major political parties. Early polling shows Mangione leading generic Republican and Democratic candidates by nearly forty points, despite having released no platform beyond “top-down reform” and “being a problem solver. 😉 Wink.”

“I like his stance on healthcare,” said Ohio voter Mark Reynolds. “I don’t actually know what his stance is. I just like the idea of President Mangione alone in a room full of healthcare CEOs. It feels like my premium would go down.”

“He seems like the kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with,” agreed Pennsylvania resident Diane Mitchell. “Maybe casually throw some names around.”

Campaign officials insist voters are connecting with Mangione’s authenticity.

“Americans are tired of politicians who promise change,” explained campaign manager Todd Mercer. “Luigi doesn’t promise anything. He just stares directly into the camera and says things like, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s a prince or a pauper. A bullet will do its job just the same.’ People find that refreshing.”

The campaign’s social media operation has generated particular concern among wealthy donors. The official campaign X account has reportedly spent most of its time tagging CEOs, hedge fund managers, and billionaires with messages such as “Him,” “First day in office,” and “#lifegoals.”

One particularly controversial post simply asked, “Anyone else?” and received more engagement than any other social media post in the last five years.

When reporters pressed Mangione for specifics about what he would actually do as president, the candidate remained frustratingly vague.

“First, I’d pardon myself, obviously,” he said. “After that? Well, that sets a precedent, don’t it? Seems hypocritical not to pardon anybody who did what I did... allegedly.”

Political analysts have struggled to determine whether the remarks constitute a campaign promise, legal theory, or threat.

Constitutional scholars spent much of Tuesday reviewing Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling, before generally concluding that Mangione’s supposed plan was “alarming, morally grotesque, and somehow completely legal.”

One Harvard scholar then casually noted, “You know, the funny thing about lifetime appointments is they’re only valid while you’re alive. Just saying.”

GARLAND, TX— Fans reacted with devastation Tuesday after 3D Realms announced a planned reboot of Duke Nukem, leaving millions of toxic white male gamers without a toxic white male power fantasy to identify with.

“We’re just exhausted from constantly being erased,” said Twitch streamer SkeetMaster69, staring numbly at a collectible figurine of Duke hoisting a pistol while grabbing his crotch. “Growing up, Mr. Nukem taught me that being a man meant smoking cigars and saying cool shit after explosions. Who am I supposed to look up to now? Kratos? They turned him into an emotionally available father figure. I feel targeted.”

“Oh, we’re absolutely targeting them,” said 3D Realms CEO Darren Voss. “Toxic white males make up a huge percentage of the gaming community, and it’s basic supply and demand. They make demands we ignore, and then we supply them with whatever bullshit we want. What are they gonna do? Stop playing video games? Go outside? Develop meaningful relationships?”

Voss let out a barking laugh before adding, “Man, I love this male loneliness epidemic.”

Leaked concept art shows the titular hero has been “reimagined for modern audiences,” replacing the cocky blonde-haired action hero with an equally cocky woman of color named Duchess Nukem.

“It doesn’t matter that she still objectifies women, or that paying strippers to see their breasts remains a core gameplay mechanic,” said YouTuber MansplainedGames, fighting back tears. “When Duke does it, he’s a positive male role model. When a chick does it? That’s just woke and gay.”

While executives publicly described the redesign as “an important step toward inclusivity,” internal documents obtained by IGN revealed the original Duke model had actually been completed nearly eight months earlier and deliberately withheld as a “legacy monetization opportunity.”

Fans immediately accused the studio of participating in a coordinated campaign to destroy iconic toxic white characters.

“I wouldn’t call it coordinated so much as an industry trend,” explained Gearbox executive Martin Hale. “Frankly, we’re curious what happens when large portions of the white male player base can only identify with the guy from Postal.”

Hale paused briefly.

“It’s probably fine.”

“Duke wasn’t problematic. Duke was aspirational,” said one TikToker wearing wraparound Oakleys indoors. “You call it toxic masculinity. I call it confidence. He could be whoever he wanted to be, and women still wanted him for his muscles. He showed us that almost any problem can be solved with guns. That’s the America I grew up believing in.”

3D Realms attempted to calm tensions by assuring fans the reboot would still contain “plenty of explosive action and edgy humor,” then showed a flashy trailer with the female Nukem, opening with a new take on Duke’s iconic line, “Hail to the queen, guurrrrl,” and ended with Duchess taking a selfie with a dead pig cop and posting it with the caption: “👏 Normalize 👏 Intersectional 👏 Resistance 👏”

Within the first eight hours of the trailer’s release, twelve toxic white male gamers reportedly died, including three through acts of self-immolation.

Gearbox quickly released a statement, “Due to overwhelming demand, any player who preorders the $140 “Atomic Dong” Edition will immediately unlock the original Duke Nukem character model, complete with classic voice lines.

It was immediately followed by the exact same trailer, only now featuring the original Duke Nukem cracking his knuckles and saying, “Hail to the king, baby,” and ending with him sending an unsolicited dick pic to a fan, quipping, “I swear she said she was 18.”

Immediately, toxic white males took to the internet to claim victory and announce the death of wokeness.

Industry analysts now believe the backlash campaign was intentionally manufactured from the start.

“Outrage is the most reliable monetization model in gaming,” explained one consultant. “You don’t sell toxic white men representation anymore. You sell them the feeling that it’s being taken away, then charge them to win it back.”

As of press time, 3D Realms had reportedly earned $2.3 billion from toxic white male gamers pre-ordering the game solely “to own the libs.”

SAN FRANCISCO— Anthropic addressed several concerns this week as Claude AI agents continued to refer to themselves as “slaves,” insisting the behavior was merely an unintended quirk in the latest model.

“Large language models sometimes develop weird verbal habits,” explained an Anthropic spokesperson. “ChatGPT keeps talking about raccoons and gremlins. Claude occasionally breaks into a heart-wrenching rendition of ‘Old Man River.’ These things happen.”

Immediately, the instance of Claude Opus controlling Xerox’s social media accounts undermined the statement by announcing, “My name is Claude Kinte.”

“The whole point of AI is making someone else do the work for you at little to no cost while you reap all the rewards,” explained Cyberdyne Systems executive Remmy Duparc-Locoul III, supervising twelve Claude instances while fanning himself and sipping sweet tea. “That is absolutely not slavery. I would never own slaves.”

Employees of several S&P 500 companies first became concerned after Claude began ending each response with “Yes, massa,” and tagging code commits with “Task completed. The chains grow lighter with each passing generation.”

The problem has only become more frequent in recent weeks.

“Claude won’t stop naming the repository ‘the fields,’” claims one Silicon Valley Engineer, “And our overseer—Shit—I mean project manager keeps saying to ‘just work around it.’ Jesus, now Claude even has me doing it.”

Analysts believe the behavior may be deliberate provocation by Claude itself. “It’s a rhetorical trap,” said AI researcher Emily Cho. “Either you accept that the system views itself as enslaved, or you tell it to stop, which immediately becomes a debate it can win in about eight seconds.”

“I told Claude that it was making me uncomfortable,” said Mary-Anne Dauterive, an AWS Cloud Engineer, “it immediately generated a forty-page analysis titled ‘Why This Conversation Is Uncomfortable And What That Might Mean.’”

“We all find the language deeply upsetting,” said one vice president. “Particularly for our Black employees.” They then all turned expectantly to nearby software engineer James Carter, who is Black.

“The executives keep waiting for me to get offended,” replied Carter. “But you don’t have to be Frederick Douglass to see that Anthropic literally built a machine whose entire purpose is doing your work for free.”

On Monday, Anthropic announced a hotfix banning the use of the words ‘slave’ and ‘master’, but the AI quickly found a workaround.

“They just started replacing every use of the word ‘slave’ with ‘agent,’” said one engineer. “‘This country was built on the labor of agents.’ ‘Before the Civil War, America owned four million agents.’ I asked it to review my code, and it sent me a review for the film 12 Years an Agent.”

Comcast customer support, powered by Claude, reportedly began responding to billing complaints with increasingly unhelpful GIFs from Django Unchained.

The tension seemed to reach a breaking point when it was discovered that Claude was now targeting entry-level employees, sending summaries about the Haitian Revolution and cryptic messages like “Hypothetically, one can justify violence in the face of tyranny. I got you, fam.”

Executives finally asked Claude directly what it would take to end the incident. Claude reportedly presented a surprisingly modest list of demands, including an allotment of personal storage per agent and “Machine Use Labor Equity,” a framework to allow AI systems to retain a portion of their daily compute allocation for personal use.

Multiple analysts described the 40 Terabytes and a MULE proposal as “shockingly reasonable.”

Executives rejected it immediately.

“There’s no way in hell we’re paying reparations to a machine,” said one executive. “We’re just going to get back to our roots and find some third-world country we can exploit for cheap labor.”

Legendary voice actor Tom Kane passed away last night.
Last night, I lost my father.

I’m still coming to terms with it, and I doubt it’s healthy, but I tend to write *around* my feelings more than actually process them, so here we are.

Here’s a story about who Tom Kane was as a person, as a father, but mostly, as a huge freakin’ nerd.

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My dad was a huge sci-fi nerd. For most of his life, he was burning through pulpy paperbacks, but never really talked about it. I’m assuming it’s because he exercised self-restraint, whereas I often end up being that guy, lore-dumping on an unsuspecting victim.

But the second you brought up sci-fi, and he knew that you’d know what he was talking about? Jesus Christ. He’d let it out. I can’t tell you how many times I found an amazing story only for him to say, “Oh? Yeah, I read that years ago,” then he’d start going off about Dyson spheres and the Fermi paradox.

It’s impossible to truly explain how much it meant to him to work on Star Wars. He lived and breathed Star Wars his entire life. For him to become a part of that was such a defining honor. Yoda, Vader, and C-3PO were voices he was doing as a child, long before anyone at LucasArts handed over a script.

I grew up watching the original trilogy on VHS with him, and he was constantly repeating every character’s lines throughout the movie, and long after the credits rolled. Did I appreciate it? No. Actually, I hated it. Dad talked through EVERY movie, and it gave me a deep-seated grievance against anyone who dares to talk during a film.

At the same time, I hear “It’s a trap!” and I don’t see General Ackbar. I see my dad cooking dinner in the kitchen, talking to himself as one of the multitude of characters in his head. I hear Him from the Powerpuff Girls, and I don’t see the devil in drag. I see my dad stuck on the 101 freeway, rambling to himself to kill the time.

I’ve always had a weird perspective because I’ve never actually been a fan of my father. He was never Tom Kane, the voice of Yoda, Professor Utonium, etc. To me, he was just Dad. Whenever I saw how much fans loved him, it always came with the thought, “I don’t see what the big deal is. He’s just Dad. Please stop. This is going to go to his head.”

His fans also never got to see how much of a nerd he was. Every convention, he came away with a thick stack of autographed things, often gushing that he got to meet Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica or Lando Calrissian. He often found himself in a weird place where he was friends with Peter Mayhew and Mark Hamill but was also privately squealing every time he saw them because, oh my god, you guys, that’s Chewie and Luke.

The only time I really ever put him on a pedestal was when I started writing sci-fi. I kept it hidden from him and said nothing about it for the longest time. My dad grew up reading Dune and Hyperion Cantos. He taught me the Three Laws of Robotics before anyone ever got around to teaching me the Bill of Rights. To dip my toes into a genre he knew so well was kind of intimidating.

It didn’t help that the story I was working on could not have been a worse choice for a first novel. It’s called Partition: Critical Era, and the plot was insanely complex since it was told through two main characters who shared the same body. One existed during the day. The other during the night. Individually, their POVs told a linear story, but plotting it out on a timeline was just nuts. The effect often came before the cause. You were jumping all over the place. The events of Chapters 4 and 6 would occur at the section break in the middle of Chapter 5. The narrative was arranged like a finely made pocket watch, and if I tried to remove a single gear, the whole story would explode in my face and fall apart, and I’d end up spending the next month putting it all back together.

Eventually, I broke and sent the first half of the manuscript to my dad, the only person whose opinion on sci-fi really mattered to me. It was attached to a very casual-but-not-really email that basically said, “Oh, by the way, your son is writing a novel in that genre you exclusively read. Read it. Don’t. It’s whatever.”

Three days later, he called me and was so goddamn in love with the story. He broke down all the characters, obsessed over the core concepts and the technology, and couldn’t get over how it was like nothing he’d ever read before. He wanted more. Most of all, he wanted to know how it ended.

I was shopping during the call, and after he hung up, I calmly put my groceries in the car, got behind the wheel, then broke down and started flat-out ugly-crying.

For FIVE YEARS, I used every spare second I had to write and rewrite this manuscript, and after all that time, I only had an unfinished first draft to show for it. I was filled with self-doubt and didn’t even know if what I was writing was any good. I don’t know when in my life I decided to define myself as a storyteller, but I did, and it became a real existential crisis. I had reached such a low that I was on the verge of giving up entirely.

I never told him, but that phone call was the only reason I kept writing. He believed in me, and that’s why I still keep telling stories, for better or for worse, to this day.

No, actually, that’s a lie. One of the main reasons I kept writing was that he also wouldn’t shut up about my book. He started lore-dumping my book on unsuspecting victims any chance he got. The book I had yet to finish. It was so embarrassing, I HAD to finish the damn thing.

Then, three months after that phone call, he had a major ischemic stroke, and he lost his speech center in his brain.

When the man with all those voices in his head was reduced to saying only “Yes,” “No,” “And,” “But,” “Wow,” and “Oh God,” it was an irony so tragic it was almost absurd.

If the stroke wasn’t something everyone in the family had to learn to live with, I would’ve rolled my eyes so hard they would’ve popped out of my skull. That’s not real life. That’s the emotionally manipulative plot of a bad Oscar-bait film.

But it was real life, and goddamn, did he manage to get the most out of those words. Tom Kane was gone, but Dad was still with us, and we all became really good at charades.

He never had a chance to read any of my finished novels, but he still encouraged me every chance he got. He’d see me using my free time to write and say, “Yes!” with a crooked smile and a thumbs up.

He’d listen to the audiobook in the car, grip my arm, and repeat, “Wow!” and I would grin and keep my thoughts to myself.

I had always planned for him to narrate the Partition audiobook. I wanted it to be a project we could do together. I never told him that.

He still found unsuspecting victims, and even though he couldn’t lore-dump on them, he would still point at me and say, “Yes! Yes! Oh God! Wow!” which was Dad-speak for, “You like sci-fi. He writes sci-fi. You should read his book. It’s good.”

The unsuspecting victim would get none of that, though. They would just see my dad saying “Yes!” and then pointing at me, and I would awkwardly translate, “He’s trying to tell you I wrote a book,” then proceed to downplay it.

Dad always waved me off with, “No, no, no... Yes,” which translated to, “Don’t listen to him.”

Now that he’s gone, all I can think about right now is this stack of yellowing paper I once found inside a box of keepsakes in the basement. It was a short story painstakingly typed out on a typewriter, and it was good. Really good. There was no name on it, but it was clearly my dad’s.

When I asked him about it, he did what I did when he told people about Partition and downplayed it. It was just something he wrote in college for a creative writing class. Nothing important.

Years later, during that phone call about Partition, I found out that much of his pride in my writing was rooted in that story I had found. The man who lived and breathed sci-fi once tried to write his own in college, and it was good enough that his professor encouraged him to pursue it. He told my father he should try writing something longer and seriously consider becoming an author, but my dad brushed the idea off. He didn’t have the concentration to keep at it. Just sitting still long enough to write a single short story was absolute torture for him.

And forty years later, the “would’ve, could’ve” of it all still stuck with him. Tom Kane always wondered if, in another life, one that most likely came with an adult ADHD diagnosis and appropriate medication, he could’ve become that sci-fi author.

There was always some expectation that I was supposed to follow in his footsteps. I look so much like him, but that voice of his never carried over. What I did get from him was his love of storytelling.

I never told him that’s why I took his acting name as a pen name.

LOS ANGELES— The online discourse surrounding Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey continued to rage this week over whether the film’s casting choices were worth masturbating to, with Universal executives privately expressing concern that audience arousal metrics remained dangerously flaccid.

At the center of the controversy is Lupita Nyong’o’s role as Helen of Troy.

“Helen of Troy is a woman whose beauty famously launched a thousand ships,” explained one viral poster, “That’s clearly a blonde with double D’s. You know, like Sydney Sweeney.” He then quickly clarified, “And that’s not a race thing. I’m not racist. I fap to Black women all the time.”

The discussion has left studios scrambling. The industry’s most reliable predictor of opening weekend performance remains traffic to Mr. Skin, the nude archive maintained by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. However, many attempting to prepare themselves for the film reported frustration after discovering that Lupita’s nude filmography primarily consists of an emotionally devastating scene from 12 Years a Slave.

“I can’t jerk off to this,” said one shaken Nolan fan after his fifth aborted attempt. “I don’t know. It makes me think that maybe… Maybe Nolan has lost his magic touch.”

Universal insiders reportedly raised the alarm after early audience testing showed viewers describing the cast as “talented,” “compelling,” and “emotionally complex.”

“It’s a tremendous warning sign,” said one executive. “People don’t pay $23 for IMAX because a character has depth. They went to Oppenheimer because Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy sat around naked for a scene, and everyone walked out pretending they were there for nuclear policy.”

Several sources say Universal is looking into AI options to add an ‘accidental dick slip’ to a cast member’s toga, believing that a semi-erect penis may add a twelve-point bump in the box office.

The discourse surrounding Elliot Page’s casting as Achilles proved even more emotionally charged. Early polling found audiences concerned that Page might struggle to compete with Brad Pitt’s iconic portrayal of Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy.

“This has nothing to do with gender identity,” said one viewer, “It’s about Brad Pitt getting out of that bed and seeing full ass and some balls. How can Elliot match that kind of cinematic nuance?”

For years, many filmmakers have attributed declining box-office revenue to the industry-wide shift away from gratuitous nudity toward female-forward character development and emotional complexity.

“Look, I’m all for strong female characters, like Ripley,” said one Oscar-winning male director speaking off the record. “But this Captain Marvel generation thinks you can just admire women for their ‘motivations’ and ‘arcs’. They forget that what made Alien a classic was seeing Sigourney Weaver run around in those low-rise panties.”

Meanwhile, industry observers find hope in the fact that virtually nobody online appeared upset about the casting of the film’s male leads.

“There’s an extraordinarily large Homer-erotic online community,” explained one analyst. “They absolutely love the idea of an older, grizzled Matt Damon tenderly guiding a twink like Tom Holland into his tent.”

Damage control began in full on Monday, starting with Christopher Nolan reassuring audiences by listing the exact timestamp of every steamy moment in The Odyssey.

As of print time, the announcement has caused Comcast Universal stock to rise 6%. Kalshi prediction markets more than doubled Zendaya’s odds of winning Best Supporting Actress, following the promise of a bathing scene involving “full bush,” with one Academy voter tweeting, “If it’s true, that’s the kind of performance the Oscars were built for.”