LOS ANGELES— The Online LGBT community and its advocates continued to express outrage this week after 80-year-old actor John Lithgow declined to abandon his role as Dumbledore, prompting many to question why a man born in 1945 continues to behave like someone born in 1945.

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Critics say Lithgow’s failure to meet the moment by tearing up a high-profile paycheck—at the exact age when most Americans are trying to figure out whether they can safely stand up from the couch—has been especially painful, given that he is currently alive and famous.

“We just expected more from him,” said one disappointed activist, referring to an octogenarian who recently complained that Campbell’s split pea soup was too spicy. “Nobody is asking him to be perfect. We just need him to immediately understand the intersectionality of sex and gender, walk away from what may be his final major role, and do it all while vocally supporting the trans community using the exact correct phrasing.”

The problem for the 80-year-old man first arose when he announced he would be playing the transphobic hate figure Albus Dumbledore, then appeared visibly confused, mistakenly believing the role was for a major character from a beloved children’s book.

Accusations continued to mount when it became apparent Lithgow was not up to date on what J.K. Rowling was saying on X, or that X was once Twitter, or that Twitter was not Facebook.

Family members close to the actor have suggested he may be too old to fully grasp the controversy. “We try to explain it to him, and he just abruptly pivots to how nice it is outside, and how it’s not as hot as it was last year.”

When Them magazine asked Lithgow to respond to the widely circulated open letter addressed specifically to him, Lithgow assured the journalist that he checked his mailbox every day and would write back as soon as it arrived.

Sources close to the production say Warner Bros. has already instituted extensive sensitivity training to ease Lithgow into modern terminology, beginning with broad concepts like “identity” and “spectrum” before slowly working up to “trans person,” at which point something reportedly clicked in the actor and he responded, “Oh, you mean a transvestite? I’ve played one of those in the World According to Garp!” causing three consultants to leave the room and one intern to vomit into a tote bag.

“He didn’t understand why that was wrong,” said one shaken member of WB’s Crisis response team, recounting how John Lithgow refused to believe his Oscar-Nominated role of Roberta, once lauded as a caring portrayal of a Trans Woman, could be a bad thing, “He actually misappropriated the role of a Transgender woman right in front of us and said a few lines. And God help me… There was a voice. He did a voice.”

That same day, the entire PR team resigned en masse to avoid any potential blowback.

“He then said he wanted to see what ‘that J.K. woman was all about,’” Said one overwhelmed family member, “Because apparently that’s what you did back then. You got the full picture or something. We all started screaming ‘No!’ but he wouldn’t listen.”

Friends say Lithgow then made the mistake of taking the matter seriously. Rather than simply posting the PR-approved statement denouncing JK Rowling as a transphobic trash-monster and moving on, the actor reportedly printed out J.K. Rowling’s 4,000-word essay on sex and gender in 72-point font.

“It ate up three ink cartridges,” one family member complained. “And he just sat there reading. Taking notes. For hours. Didn’t once look at his phone.”

After finishing, Lithgow reportedly emerged with the sort of measured, partially sympathetic, context-laden opinion only seen in generations unexposed to TikTok.

Analysts are still struggling to parse the nuance.

“He does not agree with J.K. Rowling… but also does not wish she dies in a fiery car crash. He supports the trans community, but also believes that personally enjoying Harry Potter will not contribute to their death. Honestly, none of it makes sense. He might have dementia.”

As of press time, Lithgow still planned to portray Dumbledore and is now reportedly more concerned with taking naps and watching Antiques Roadshow.

Silicon Valley built these fantastic machines that can seemingly pull any image, song, or film out of thin air, and corporate media has been eyeing that golden goose ever since. At this point, it isn’t a question of if they’ll try to sell those eggs. It’s when. They’ve already started easing them into the diet, with a Marvel Secret Invasion title sequence here, a Fallout recap there, and after-the-fact disclosures about AI accent tweaks and set extensions in The Brutalist. The public reaction has generally been... not great. Every move gets met with scrutiny, shrieking, and a fresh wave of think pieces.

Right now, monetizing AI content mostly happens at the individual level, and it often relies on a quiet kind of deception, convincing people that the work was created by hand with care, not generated via prompt. Take The Velvet Sundown, a Southern rock band that reached one million Spotify listeners before it was revealed they don’t actually exist. People were so focused on the scale of the bamboozle that they missed the real story: Spotify’s response.

They could’ve stood by artists and banned AI-generated music because it’s sucking up potential revenue from real, starving musicians. Instead, they added a checkbox for uploaders who would like to voluntarily identify their songs as machine-generated. That’s it. A voluntary checkbox seems to be the default concession for most platforms. As long as the slop doesn’t desecrate some sacred IP, they’re dead set on keeping AI content on the same playing field as regular content. They’ve sunk too much money into this venture not to try to normalize it.

The major platforms and studios are not investing billions into generative AI because they want to foster creativity. They’re investing because AI promises an infinitely cheap content supply. Skilled labor is expensive. Actors have unions. Writers strike. Artists act like, well, artists.

AI does none of that.

For Disney’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI to make sense, they eventually have to get something back from the deal that they can actually sell, and from a media corporation’s perspective, the dream scenario is obvious: generate the next Black Keys instead of paying the real Black Keys. Generate prestige drama for pennies on the dollar and skip the expensive, unpredictable chaos of human production.

Then sell it to audiences at the same price.

There’s only one problem: it’s unclear whether consumers will agree to that proposition. I’ve yet to see AI-generated content openly advertised as such come with a price tag.

Look, I’m not one of those “AI is the great Satan” types. I love AI. I’m fascinated by how fast it’s evolving. I firmly believe the problem has always been how people use technology, not the technology itself.

But when it comes to AI-generated creative work, that stuff is worthless.

And I know that’s easy to say right now because we’re drowning in the toxic runoff of the Uncanny Valley. Today’s AI content is weird and hollow, but the improvement curve is insane. Just look at what people now call the “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti Test.” In only three years, we went from surreal nightmare fuel to merely off-putting. It won’t be long before it’s indistinguishable from commercial filmmaking.

But even if tomorrow’s models could generate Oscar-worthy cinematography that gives Emmanuel Lubezki a run for his money, audiences still won’t value that output the same way they value human work.

But What is “Real” Anyway?

It’s a morning ritual of mine to use ElevenLabs text-to-speech to listen to my manuscripts. It helps me step out of a writer’s mindset and just hear the story. Also, having Robo Michael Caine read Bobo the Garden Gnome is objectively hilarious:

The other day, my brother overheard me listening to the sequel to Welcome to the Deep Estate. He said, “It’s going to sound so much funnier with the real narrator.” He was right. Christopher Harbour is genuinely talented. But the phrasing stuck with me.

People instinctively frame the opposite of AI as real, and I don’t think that’s just because “Artificial” is in the name. Something deeper is happening. AI will always feel not real, no matter how real it gets.

If a machine can generate something in seconds that would take a human weeks, using skills that normally take a decade to master, our instinct isn’t to marvel at the machine’s superiority. We immediately discount what it made. It’s not real. It’s AI. It’s slop.

On some level, AI content sounds like a Zen riddle. How do you take a photo without ever touching a camera? What is the sound of a song recorded without a band? AI art has no existence before its generation. The model has no intention beyond following a prompt. It feels like everything is being conjured out of thin air.

Human creative work comes with a life outside of a digital file. You will never see Velvet Sundown in concert. You can’t point to a scene and say, “Tilly Noorwood actually broke her foot when she kicked that orc helmet.” Even if the AI actress could somehow give an Oscar-winning performance, who would accept her award?

The video model? The billionaire who funded it? Or the guy who hit generate?

Certainly not Tilly Noorwood. She’s just a JPEG with a PR team.

AI Will Never Have Its R. Mutt Moment

AI may be incredibly skilled, but skill and creativity are not the same thing. Generative models are trained to follow prompts, optimize outputs, and converge toward what pleases the user. They’re phenomenal at generating variations of things that already exist.

Humans tend to create by doing the opposite. They deviate and often follow the least optimal path. They take risks that might ruin their careers. So much of their end product is flawed, confusing, or unnecessary, until eventually something clicks. Suddenly, Duchamp’s poorly placed urinal with “R. Mutt” on the side becomes the mic-drop moment of the Dada movement.

People crave that kind of novelty. AI, fairly or unfairly, arrives with the stigma of offering only more of the same. That works in small, disposable bites on social media, and maybe for genre readers whose search histories already read like a prompt: “High quality, best-selling, steamy enemies-to-lovers romance between an elf and a centaur.”

The Slot Machine Problem

Suno, the AI music platform, is extraordinary. I love writing lyrics, prompting the style, hitting generate, and getting two fully produced songs thirty seconds later. If I don’t like them, I tweak the prompt and hit generate again. Two more songs appear. Do that twenty-five times, and suddenly you have fifty songs with fifty different melodies, performed by fifty different imaginary bands.

And I end up deleting forty-nine of them.

That disposable, whole-cloth generation undercuts the value of the finished product. Generative AI doesn’t really sketch out ideas. It’s more like a printer powered by a slot machine, and the human labor mostly comes down to pulling the lever and waiting for a jackpot.

At best, anyone trying to take credit for the output starts to look like a stage mom saying, “They wouldn’t even be famous if it weren’t for my guidance.”

It doesn’t matter how much cleanup or editing happens afterward. The default assumption is always that the machine did the heavy lifting. So when someone tries to sell generative media, the first reaction is simple: Why are we paying you for something the machine made?

The second reaction is worse. Why pay at all? I could make this at home.

The Generative Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Imagine having access to today’s MidJourney a decade ago. You could have built an enormously profitable career as an artist with minimal effort. You could have amassed huge followings, sold prints, landed commissions, and had studios lining up for concept work.

Now? Nobody cares. There is no meaningful skill barrier to high-quality work from AI, and that carries an inherent “I could make that” quality.

Things could’ve been very different if Silicon Valley had kept the genie in the bottle and only doled out wishes to the highest corporate bidders. Instead, they handed it out to anyone with a subscription. Even if they hadn’t, open-source models are only about six months behind in capability. And when everyone has a golden goose, that doesn’t mean everyone profits. It just means the gold market is about to collapse.

Studios like Disney and Netflix are clearly salivating over the idea that a ten-cent generation can replace a ten-million-dollar VFX shot. On paper, the math looks irresistible. Spend pennies, save millions. Somewhere on Buena Vista Blvd, an executive is absolutely convincing themselves that this translates directly into $9,999,999.90 more in profit, but it won’t math out that way in reality. Their logic assumes the two shots exist in the same marketplace. They don’t.

A ten-million-dollar spectacle shot is finite precisely because it costs ten million dollars to produce. That limitation creates scarcity. Scarcity creates anticipation. No one went to see Avatar 3 for the story. They went to watch James Cameron burn through half a billion dollars in the most visually stunning way possible.

The ten-cent imitation exists in a separate AI-saturated marketplace of its own making, where jaw-dropping visuals are no longer rare achievements but disposable spectacle that anyone with a subscription can generate. Its content that never quite transcends the suspension of disbelief because AI is still hard-coded in our minds as not real.

And when talent and skill are industrialized, value doesn’t disappear. It migrates. When nothing feels real, people begin to value authenticity. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Lars von Trier’s stripped-down Dogme 95 ethos came back around.1

If anything, the limitations of traditional filmmaking may only add to its appeal. People were drawn to Mad Max: Fury Road because it featured real cars, real stunts, and real explosions. I’m sure that same yearning for authentic spectacle will only intensify over time.

The real power of generative tools, at least right now, lies in personalization rather than monetization. I don’t listen to other people’s AI-generated music on Suno unless I’m hunting for prompt ideas, and they don’t listen to mine. The value lies in creating something for yourself, not in consuming strangers’ machine output.

The moment the technology allows it, I’ll absolutely try to generate long-form video just to see my own stories come to life. I’ve already experimented with a version of that through my AI radio play Some Stick Around, a feature-length ghost story designed to feel cinematic without turning on a screen.

And I give it away for free.

Not because I think it’s worthless, but because I don’t want to profit from the displacement of real voice actors like Christopher Harbour, or my father, Tom Kane, who spent decades building a career in that industry. I grew up watching countless faces light up with the realization that my dad voiced some of their favorite cartoons. You don’t get that when ElevenLabs is the norm.

Which brings me to the real cost of AI content. The one that actually matters.

The Human Cost

A viral tweet recently told a horror story about Amazon forcing thousands of engineers to document their jobs before replacing them with AI.

Is the post true? No. Corporations rarely gut departments in one dramatic event. They do it quietly. Positions go unfilled. Contracts aren’t renewed. Vendors lose clients. Layoffs happen at the edges.

But the story feels true. And that’s enough to fuel outrage.

We’re already seeing a justified social backlash against AI as everyone who isn’t a plumber begins to see the outline of an AI-fueled jobpocalypse. We can’t help but feel on edge every time yet another company rolls out an AI-forward PR release.

Sit through the credits of a Marvel film, and you’re confronted with thousands of names. Infinity War alone listed more than five thousand. Buying a ticket feels, however abstractly, like supporting that vast creative ecosystem. For that same reason, paying for AI media starts to feel like a tacit endorsement of all the people they didn’t hire, and audiences are becoming increasingly conscious of where that money is going.

And this is where reality begins to matter less than the vibes. Behind the Mickey Mouse mask is a faceless multinational corporation, and it’s naive to believe they won’t choose the most sociopathic option. Corporate efficiency and the almighty bottom line dictate that the Disney of the future will keep inching toward a Marvel movie where the credits are shorter than the post-credit scene.

Based on characters by
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Executive Producer
Kevin Feige

Prompted by
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Written by
ChatGPT

Filmed, performed, directed, and rendered by
SeedDance 5.0

Post-FX cleanup by
The one guy still working at ILM

No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.

Whether or not that ends up being their actual intention is almost beside the point. It’s galling to imagine someone at Disney looking at the credits of Infinity War and wondering whether all those names could eventually be copy-pasted into a war memorial for the fallen VFX industry. As things stand now, every time a corporation releases AI-generated content, it feels like another step toward that future, and you can practically hear a barking laugh coming from some boardroom on a top floor.

That idea alone is enough to push people toward boycotting anything tainted by AI, and that rancor will quickly extend to anyone working on it. Imagine becoming the symbolic face of why so many people lost their livelihoods. Social media’s maximalist rhetoric will turn you into a scab crossing the picket line and betraying all of humanity. A quick paycheck won’t cover the cost of permanently damaging your career.

The pushback is going to come from a very big tent encompassing everyone who currently feels a bit of AI-based job insecurity, which is basically anyone using a computer. It will make your usual toxic fanbase look quaint by comparison.

My hope.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution, where factories turned artisans into factory workers, AI is both the factory and the factory worker. It doesn’t just mechanize labor. It mechanizes the labor force as well. That risks leaving the metaphorical artisans out in the cold, not because they stopped mattering, but because the system suddenly stopped needing them.

On the plus side, that also means the artisans will still exist, shivering and disgruntled as all hell.

Creators are stubborn. They don’t create because it’s efficient. They create because that’s what they do. Literature was arguably hit first by the AI blitzkrieg, and most writers didn’t pivot into prompt engineering or quietly pack it in. They did what writers have always done. They kept writing, neurotically rubbing at the fresh chip on their already chipped shoulders.

If anything, generative AI may end up doing something deeply ironic. By flooding the world with frictionless media, it could restore our appreciation for messy human things. Work with smeared eraser marks and fingerprints dried into the paint. Work that feels like someone risked embarrassment, failure, or obscurity just to make it exist.

Perhaps human-made art becomes the next luxury label. Fresh. Organic. Handcrafted. Human. Something people are willing to pay for, not necessarily because it is better, and not even because it is rarer, but because it feels real in a world increasingly filled with simulacra.

That may be the quiet future of creativity. Not total replacement. Not a clean victory for machines or humans. Just a bifurcation: infinite content on one side, finite intention on the other.

Maybe audiences will still consume AI media. Maybe they’ll enjoy it, and maybe they’ll even learn to pay for it. But when it comes time to spend real money, to signal real taste, to support something they believe actually came from another mind, they will reach for the human work.

If only to escape the slop.

In a stunning geopolitical development, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced it had fully embraced Western demands by surrendering its missiles, dismantling its nuclear program, dissolving its theocracy, holding free multiparty elections, and—perhaps most stunning of all—electing the country’s first female president.

President Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize recipient famous for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for promoting human rights and freedom for all, took office and immediately issued a statement declaring that Iran harbored “absolutely zero ill will toward the United States or Israel.”

“We get it,” Mohammadi said. “If we were in your shoes, we’d bomb us too.”

Approximately 14 minutes later, Israeli aircraft were seen bombing the presidential palace.

“I’m honestly confused,” said one exhausted Iranian voter, still holding an I Voted For Democracy sticker while smoke rose behind him. “We did the elections, the human rights stuff, the missile surrender, the whole thing. Mohammadi literally ended her speech by saying Israel had ‘every right to exist. You do you.’ Then—boom. They martyred her. I only pray to Allah she’s up there now teaching a women’s self-defense class to 72 virgins.”

Regional analysts said the events have raised troubling questions about the strategic logic behind decades of pressure on Iran.

“For years the argument was that Iran had to do X, Y, and Z to get with the program,” said one Middle East policy expert. “Iran just got with the program—plus some—in a single afternoon. And the response was… immediate decapitation strikes.”

Witnesses said the brief Iranian president was about to put pen to paper to sign the “Totally Chill About Israel Forever Act” when the explosion occurred. Had the act gone into effect, Iran would have:

• surrendered its remaining uranium stockpile

• deleted the phone numbers of the Houthis and other proxy forces

• agreed to international inspections “basically forever”

• converted the Revolutionary Guard into a co-ed volunteer force

• replaced the national slogan “Death to Israel and America” with “Honestly, We’re Super Chill Now.”

None of it appeared to matter.

Israeli defense officials defended the strike, explaining that a pacifist Iran with a popular female leader vouching undying love for the Jewish homeland could still “develop nuclear weapons within two weeks. Probably.”

“You have to think long term,” said one IDF spokesman. “The problem with functioning democracies is that they still function. If 93 million Iranians have running water, electricity, and a reliable rule of law, that’s 93 million potential avenues to developing a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”

Inside Washington, officials were sending mixed signals, with Trump posting on Truth Social praising the new Iranian leader and saying he expected “great things coming.”

Only minutes later, after Israel announced her death, Trump posted again, taking a victory lap for putting down the president “LIKE A DOG.”

The White House then released a statement reaffirming its backing of Israel, adding—without being prompted- “This has absolutely nothing to do with who is in the Epstein files or what evidence Mossad might have on them. Don’t be stupid.”

At press time, Israeli officials further clarified that the operation was necessary to “prevent Iran from becoming the next Syria by turning it into Syria immediately.”

A while back, I had a full-blown existential crisis inside a Shell station. Under the hum of fluorescents, a tiny TV behind the counter cut to a 4Patriots commercial, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen an AI-made ad in the wild.

Let me repeat that, because the absurdity of it is insane: A company selling doomsday prepper chow ran a spot built by one of the robots currently taking over the world.

In it, Noah gives a TikTok-style tour of his uncanny-valley ark. Everything’s a little too saturated. Noah’s forehead looks airbrushed, and his face drifts between shots like the model can’t decide whether he’s Boromir or The Dude.

And the final shot is a veritable eye-spy of AI hallucination. Noah only has four fingers. The 4Patriots boxes contain “Mærgęr0nie & CheiDRS.” One bird is floating in thin air, and the creature on the right looks like an evolutionary ancestor you’d see at the Smithsonian that would inevitably become donkeys, pigs, and raccoons.

I did the reflexive “wow,” then it hit me: That all-too-common panic of being the ox meeting the farmer’s brand-new tractor.

AI commercials might be hawking buckets of survival beans at 1 a.m. now, but it’ll become the industry standard in a few years.

AI video may never win at long-form filmmaking. Every time I see some flashy action-packed slop showing that Hollywood is “Cooked”, my first question is: Okay, now can you make the AI show those same characters having a simple back-and-forth conversation? Don’t worry, it’s the first thing they teach you how to shoot in film school. It should be easy, right?

Almost immediately, Hollywood becomes less “cooked” and more “cooked Al Dente.”

The Ad industry, though? Oh, they’re cooked.

Let’s start by stating a painfully obvious truth for anyone outside of the Ad Industry, but is complete heresy even to hear if you’re on the inside: No one likes ads. I know you have to believe you’re Andy Warhol, not some guy shilling Campbell’s soup to avoid a full-blown existential crisis, but I’m sorry, it’s true. No one likes ads.

No one is paying to watch your commercial. In fact, many are willing to pay extra just to skip your ad entirely. Watching a commercial is traditionally the price you pay to watch something else.

When it comes to our eyeballs, ads carry all the consent of a park flasher. Marketers know the best kind of audience for a commercial is a captive audience. I’m pretty sure the only thing stopping Charmin from grabbing people off the street and keeping them in a dark basement pit where the Charmin Bears tell them, “It watches the Ad, or it gets the hose again,” is that an agency has yet to it pitch to them as ‘viral guerrilla marketing.’

All this is to say that the bar for commercials is already abysmally low. Nobody likes being sold something, and for those within the Industry, the only palatable quality of an ad campaign is that it at least tries to be memorable.

It also doesn’t hurt that working in the Ad Industry pays well. It’s a solid place to find a middle to upper-middle-class job.

Or at least, it was. The moment that an AI’s pennies-on-the-dollar and speed become a viable and noncontroversial option, the entire independent Ad industry will fall, taking with it all those middle to upper-middle-class jobs.

In terms of a medium, you cannot find a better opportunity for AI video to take over than a commercial. A commercial, at its core, is just a few seconds of screen time that hopefully lingers in your consciousness long enough that you decide to buy something when the opportunity arises, and AI is already capable of creating videos that run only for a few seconds. They only have to be “good enough” to erase an entire production crew’s call sheet.

And that’s what people mean when they say AI is about to “Cook” some industry.

A perfectly normal 30-second spot is expensive to shoot, and that cost climbs fast the second you ask for anything beyond “people talking in a kitchen.” If you shot a Noah’s ark commercial the old way—even the scrappy version—you’re wrangling wardrobe pulls and prop builds, day players and animal elements, a director, DP, AD, a small grip-and-electric crew, script sup, sound, makeup, then off to editorial, color, mix, and FX. Run it on duct tape and favors, and it’ll still coast past five figures.

Now the AI version? It’s one person at a laptop with a stack of prompts, rolling the dice, hitting ‘generate’ until they get the shots they need. That’s it. Maybe you keep some post-production people to edit it together and clean it up, but the prompt monkey could probably handle that, too. With CapCut. On their phone.

Put those two productions side by side and tell me which one is left standing. And how long do you think the old Ad Industry is going to last with all their former clients leaving them on read?

The scariest part is how indirect it all is. Maybe you could argue that basic human decency will stop your local Mom & Pop multinational from axing entire departments outright. But what about the third-party vendors? People get canned every time an ad agency loses a client. The corporation doesn’t have to fire anyone for hundreds of jobs to disappear. They just “go in another direction,” and the bodies pile up somewhere else. Not to mention that many of those same agencies are scrambling to stay relevant by rolling out their own job-cutting AI tools.

Is that depressing? Yes. Is it stoppable? No.

It’s not just doomsday-prepper-chow making AI commercials. We’re already seeing Coca-Cola and Super Bowl commercials bite the AI-generated bullet.

The brutal truth is that the spreadsheet is a wrathful God and it’s already made up its mind. Noah’s ark has already set sail, and the Great Flood of AI Slop is upon us. So what can you do about it?

Maybe you can join the growing social backlash to anything related to AI. That might work at first, at least while you can still single out companies that give in to temptation, not so much when those offending are the majority of the S&P.

You also have to keep in mind that the greatest enemy of any protest movement isn’t the entity being protested; it’s normality, inevitability, and time.

I think back to all the backlash EA received for its early attempts at DLC and loot boxes for Star Wars Battlefront 2. Did the protests work? Yeah, we “won” that fight. And now we all pay for season passes to play the game we already bought. Hell, most modern games make Battlefront 2’s ambitions to print money look quaint.

Maybe you can stand by your principles. Ask “What Would Don Draper Do?” Then argue about taste, craft, and the soul of advertising. I give it about 30 seconds before people start snickering because you’re unironically defending the integrity of a commercial. And that’s just for a room full of people who work in the ad industry.

When consumers draw the line, it won’t be for the sanctity of ads they already don’t like to watch. As long as AI doesn’t taint their viewing experience, it’ll be fine. Which is to say, it won’t be fine. AI is almost certainly coming for their TV time as well, but that only means they’ll have to choose their battles.

Ultimately, the studios are putting all their money on AI reaching a point of normality where the term becomes as interchangeable as CGI (with the unspoken added benefit of completely replacing the thousands who create CGI for a living)

As a copywriter, I was hit by that initial wave of AI innovation. After all, why go through the effort of emailing a copywriter, setting up a call to walk them through the brief, then waiting several days to receive a packet, when you can just copy-paste that brief into ChatGPT and hit Generate? The human is single-use, takes forever, and costs lots of money. The AI only requires a monthly subscription.

Well, I would argue that the LLM lacks quality and originality, but I can already hear the snickering. Again, we’re talking about commercials. Instead, I’ll just focus on the one thought that kept me from having a complete doom spiral:

I eventually pulled myself together, realizing that I could’ve made that dumb Noah’s Ark video myself.

I’m a creative copywriter. My job isn’t just to write words gud, but craft entire concepts. I already have a decade’s worth of experience writing prompts to describe action, tone, blocking, framing, wardrobe, props, and performance, only I called them scripts.

That kind of job doesn’t have to disappear if it learns to mutate. The “Copywriter” just needs to swallow their pride, grow a new organ capable of digesting toxic AI slop, and start answering to “Promptwriter.”

Then, all I have to do is fight off the refugees of an entire fallen industry to be that one prompt monkey sitting at a computer, hitting generate.

At the very least, it’ll give me a few more years before AI comes for that job as well.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Lawmakers were reportedly left speechless after Hillary Clinton delivered shockingly candid testimony in a closed-door Epstein hearing, allegedly beginning with the words, “Look, I was going to kill him, but the funniest thing happened.”

According to sources present in the room, Clinton calmly described sneaking into the federal detention center the night of Epstein’s death, dressed in a tactical pantsuit, “Something low-profile and feminine, but still powerful.”

“I get to the hallway outside his cell,” Clinton reportedly said, “and who do I bump into, but President Trump.”

The two allegedly froze.

“We sort of did that awkward side-step dance, about why we were there,” Clinton explained. “You know, ‘I’m just visiting a friend in a federal detention center in the dead of night. Please, you go first. No, you. Oh, I insist.’”

Clinton then reportedly shrugged, “Then Donald just came out and said, ‘I take it you’re cleaning up Bill’s mess again?’ And I took a stab and was like, ‘And you’re here to see a man about...”

“The girls.” Trump reportedly answered, “They were all my age, of course.”

The two then allegedly said in unison, “If you add them all up!” and broke into the knowing laugh of a shared inside joke. President Trump then wiped a tear from his eye and said, nodding, “Oh man, there were so many girls—too many girls, really.”

“And you can’t make this stuff up,” Hillary alleges, “We both went in to kill Jeffrey, only to find Bill Gates and Prince Charles already standing over the body! They immediately put their hands up and swore it wasn’t them. But then they saw who we were, and we realized why they were there. And honestly? We all started cracking up.”

Within minutes, additional prominent figures allegedly began trickling into the corridor, all intent on murdering Epstein. “Let’s see, there was Musk, Wexner, Thiel, Sergey, Bannon, Leon Black, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, Ghislaine—Even Woody made an appearance. It was a full Lolita Island Boys reunion. The whole affair turned into a networking event for mutually assured destruction. People were hugging. Someone popped a bottle of champagne. Bubba was so jealous that he missed out on the ordeal.”

According to the testimony, the group briefly debated attempting to identify who had actually gotten there first. “But after a while,” Hillary reportedly concluded, “we all agreed: Screw it! The problem was solved.”

No member of Congress has yet to comment on the testimony. One congressional aide, speaking off the record, admitted, “I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting anything official. Outside of Woody Allen, every single person Clinton named is a major donor bankrolling both parties.”

Update (10 AM EST): Congress has just released the official transcript of the testimony. It consists of 312 pages of solid black rectangles and a single unredacted line from Clinton, “All I can say is that I didn’t kill him.”

Bobo insisted on posting his own essay, and, well, here it is. Dictated by the gnome himself, recorded and edited by Carrie, with clarification and comments in brackets by me, John Doe. For readers and listeners to Welcome to the Deep Estate, hopefully, you get a chuckle and “that’s SO Bobo” out of this. For everyone else? I’m sorry in advance.

And dear baby “Bob” barging into a bounce house, please take note: The following are the uneducated views and opinions of Bobo, and Bobo alone. Carrie is firmly of the opinion that this article is beneath our editorial standards. I was surprised we even had editorial standards in the first place, then she thwacked me on the head, and I was right there with her on sticking to those editorial standards. But then Bobo got really whiny, and the guy can be insanely emotionally manipulative when he wants something. We inevitably broke, and well, here is the end result..

Look, I’m a severely immobilized guy [Clarification: He’s a garden gnome.]

I’m disabled as fuck. [No, he’s just a lawn ornament.]

A real quatropeligic. [A ceramic lawn ornament.]

And I’ve come to rely on the World Wide Spiderwebs to connect with real people, but bitchin’ on Reddit is only part of havin’ a connection, you know? I don’t like admitting it, but I ain’t ever had a sexy-time partner I could get sick and sweaty with for real, but that don’t make me an Incel, okay? I got exterminating circumstances, understand? And those circumstances ain’t that I’m fugly and no lady is willing to touch my junk. It’s that I got no junk.

Am I a little pissy about that? Sure. But not at the girlies. I love the girlies.

I am a proud gooner, and gooners love OnlyFans thotts cuz they let you be really pervy with them if you give them your money. [Clarification: My money. Bobo keeps stealing my credit cards.]

It’s all done respectfully, of course. Cuz the thott can always block you if you’re being too much of a sleeze or ain’t got no Slack. I think it’s a real societal service they’re doing because all us men are real perverts. [Not all men.] No, really. I mean all men. Even your Grandpa. You don’t know what he’s doing when you ain’t looking, but I’m sure it’d be traumatizing as fuck to find out. I’m talking real Lemon Party shit. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say ‘Lemon Party,’ Google it.

[DON’T GOOGLE IT.]

Them pervin’ it out online is way, way better than them pervin’ it out offline in person, getting all #MeToo with it, okay? Just ask Louis C.K., he knows he shoulda kept it online. That’s why I’m all worried about all this artsy-official robot bullshit tainting my gooning experience. [“Artificial.” He means artificial.]

Now, a lotta the time, you ain’t actually creeping on real girlies in the chats. They’re using an AI chatbot, and it’s stupid obvious. No self-respecting woman is gonna see some faceless dude all up in their DMs waxing poetic and like it. Even if they’re real polite in their waxing,

“Your butthole is a pink rosebud unfurling in the white morning mist.
Your areolas are two bashful blushing ghosts perched on adjacent hills.
And every time you use that clear dildo with the rainbow beads inside,
The look of surprise is like a lover just stabbed you in the heart.
It belongs in a Shakespearean tragedy.
I beg you, let me slip upon your bathwater hemlock.
Love me and let every night be our murder-suicide.

Hell, even the women who got no self-respect are still skeezed out about it.

But the AI Thott bott? They immediately respond with “OMG Thanks, Babe 💓💓💓You really know how to make a girl feel special. 🥰”

Never mind that it’s a false representation on the girlie’s part. It’s dead-tree-mental to the gooner. We gotta feel the shame that comes with waiting a whole-ass day just to get back, “Thanks for the tip!” like we tipped a driver good on DoorDash. Believe me when I say that all that time the gooner is waiting for a reply, he’s just sitting around hittin refresh, guts gettin’ all twisty and a whole lotta ants getting into his pants. Eventually that gooner is gonna feel real stupid for spending hours perfectly crafting that pervert poem.

High-prophetically, of course, I’d never do that. [He’s totally done that and asked me to spell check.]

But for some other gooner with zero Slack? Maybe that shame will make them think before saying to their hot barber, “Hey, I bet your ass would look good under a ring light.”

‘Cuz you can’t spell empathetic, without also kinda feel-in’ pathetic.

(And you can quote me on that, John. No, really, John. You gotta put that in quotes next to my face, John. Use a fancy sheriff font and shit so I look like a real intellectual.)

And now we’re seein’ stage-two of the Artsy-official’s evil master plan.

There’s all these thotts poppin’ up, actin’ like they’re a normie OnlyFans, but really they ain’t real. They’re these Thott Botts and I dunno… How am I supposed to goon on that? I’m shellin’ out clams to see some genuine clam. A.I. got no soul or for-real hole.

And what’s the point of some rando askin’ a girlie to stick her feetsies in a pot of noodles and being real specific that it’d be linguine cooked Al Dante, if there really ain’t no lady gettin’ creeped out on the other side.1 Instead, it’s some other gooner typing into an AI prompt, “Stick her feetsies in some noodles,” and basically sending you Will Smith eatin’ noodles, except it’s a mangled foot with six toes.

The great feel-officer Hobbes once said that without society, the life of a man is “Nasty, Goonish, and short,” and I gotta say, that cat was real smart. [I think he literally means a cat, as in the cat in Calvin & Hobbes] And in Levi's thong, [Leviathan] he came up with this idea of a social media contract. You see, gooners gave up some gooning freedoms and agreed to stop being public pervs if it’d still be cool to goon to thotts at home.

It was a good system. I like that system, but what happens if they ain’t gooning to thotts no more, but Artsy-official thott bots? They’re gonna lose trust in the whole Thott economy, which means they stop tippin’. And seeing that OnlyFans is the only thing proppin’ up the stock market? You better bet your ass there’s gonna be a crash. Things will just keep cum-poundin’ after that. No payin’ 9-to-5s means no money, and no money means no OnlyFans subscribers, and soon the for-real Thotts are out on the street, starvin’. All that’ll be left is the thott botts because robots don’t need to pay rent or eat food.

After that, it’s only a matter of time before the horny hordes descend on the public like Goony Ghengis Khan, wearing trenchcoats and flashing people, askin’ to smell their armpits. They’re gonna install gloryholes everywhere, even in the load-bearin’ walls, and society is literally gonna collapse for reals.

And don’t think I’m just being yellow-dramatic. This is gonna be a bigger threat than global warmin’. Every Gooner should stock up on KY and Kleenex like it was TP during COVID and pray to the great JR “Bob” Dobbs above they’ll be able to ride it out.

In the meantime, I know I for one won’t be gooning to the AI revolution.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Here’s another poorly thought-out thinky-piece from John Doe of Welcome to the Deep Estate. Check it out if you want a giggle.

I joke a lot. Probably more than I should.

Maybe it’s an ADHD thing. I’ll catch myself half-listening to someone talk while another part of my brain is scanning for an opportunity for me to make people think I’m witty.

It’s also probably a coping mechanism. Humor is a strange form of rationalization that lets you walk around the edges of something awful without staring directly into it. The problem is, like most coping mechanisms, it doesn’t come with an off switch. And that can get… complicated when the world starts to feel like a grab bag of death, despair, and headlines you wish were satire.

A few days ago, I cracked a joke on Threads that, admittedly, may have been a bit crass. I’d like to think I have good taste in poor taste, and before posting it, I personally rated it as a solid “Oof.”

Apparently, the joke landed closer to: “You’re a piece of shit for downplaying CHILD RAPE.” The reaction was intense enough that I deleted the post and quietly exited stage left.

The joke itself is not important. It was lazy. Forgettable. The kind of thing you would hear halfway through a Bill Maher monologue while checking your phone.

Basically, I found out Stephen Hawking went to Epstein Island, and you could charitably say I was using humor to rationalize one of the century’s greatest minds having such a base perversion. The revelation hurt because it said just as much about humanity as a whole as it does about Hawking. The man was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Now, his legacy lives in horny jail, and I’m half convinced Earth’s entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide is going to focus entirely on how much we masturbate.

Look, this isn’t a mea culpa.

Show me a hill, and I will die on it, defending my belief that cracking a joke isn’t the same as giving Epstein and friends a molest-one-get-one-free pass on sex trafficking. That’s Pam Bondi. You’re thinking of Pam Bondi.

Instead, this is about a single comment I got:

It stuck with me. Not because the guy is the human equivalent of stepping on a wet mystery towel and feeling it squelch between your toes. But because it perfectly encapsulates why the Internet now feels about as fun as doing deep lunges with a thorny buttplug.

What I said wasn’t a joke. It was a statement. The same way Lenny Bruce’s routine, read aloud in the Supreme Court, was a statement. The same way Biggie Small’s lyrics make him a confessed mass murderer. You can no longer shit post. You can only shit statements.

I don’t know when everything I said online started being logged as a permanent declaration of belief, but goddamnit, I want to opt out. What button do I click to opt out?

And then someone else replied with this little Chipotle-Orwellian nugget:

The idea that you should self-censor before something happens is disturbing. And the worst part is… eventually it worked. After enough screeching, I broke. I deleted the post.

And that didn’t feel great.

Y SO SRS?

From the moment I got my hands on a keyboard, I naturally gravitated towards the global circle-jerk that was unfiltered pre-algorithm internet. It was a place where everyone was venting, nothing was taken seriously, and anything could be chalked up to “for the Lulz.” It was a ridiculous place, full of shit posters, obscure pop culture, edgelords, racists, pedos, ‘can I have cheeseburger memes’, truly viral videos, mystery links that either led to a rickroll, 2 Girls 1 Cup, or traumatizing gore, and trolls.

So many goddamn trolls.

And Trolls were a vital part of the ecosystem. You know how the current deluge of AI has eroded our sense of what is true and what is real to the point that we’re all trapped in a low-grade delirium that threatens to consume us all? Yeah, old school trolls were like that, except for taking the piss out of anything or anyone trying to be taken seriously. They made sure nobody felt too safe pretending they were the main character.

Then something changed

A major part of it was our changing relationship with the web itself.

When the Internet lived on a chonky desktop PC, it was a destination. You had to go online. You sat down, opened a browser, and entered the digital world. When you closed the browser and stood up, you were offline again.

Now, with the World Wide Web in your pocket, you are always online. You are never not online. Even if you go outside and ‘touch grass,’ there’s always going to be a push notification waiting to goose you into another dopamine spiral.

This separation mattered in more ways than one.

Pseudo-anonymity was the norm back then. Who you were online and who you were offline were two completely different things. You weren’t actually interacting with real people online. You were interacting with usernames and pop culture avatars.

For many people, that made the Internet a pressure valve. A place to vent. A place to purge the worst parts of yourself so you could go back into the real world and function like a civilized human. Our screens could act as a rod-iron fence, allowing the chihuahua to snarl like the pit bull they wanted to be, and for the jokester to joke without fear of getting hit with rotten produce.

Then Mark Zuckerberg came around and turned the Internet’s mask into a face tattoo.

When social media evolved into something bigger than an emo kid’s Xanga page blasting Dashboard Confessional, it offered what would become the internet equivalent of the American Dream: with enough likes, even you could become somebody.

Offline, you might be answering emails from a middle manager who forgot why your job exists. Online, you have followers. You could be worth following. Online, we could all be knights slaying dragons. Offline, we’re not even Don Quixote attacking windmills. We’re the Senior Operator of Windmill Data Acquisition.

But to become somebody online, you had to give up anonymity. The great Algorithm demanded to be fed information, and Facebook couldn’t data-mine the anonymous nobody.

And once we became somebody, corporations and advertisers got involved. Advertisers wanted civility because electric toothbrushes don’t sell well next to slurs. Jokes stopped landing when your mom showed up in the comments. And the moment people heard that HR might be snooping on their social media, everyone started cleaning up their act, fast.

But that online vitriol people had never went away. It just stopped being cathartic once platforms figured out how to monetize it.

In their perpetual quest for engagement, social media platforms quietly installed a stadium FanCam in the public town square of the Internet and hired an algorithm to start spotlighting the zaniest characters.

This Algorithm doesn’t care if something is true, fair, or proportional. It cares if people engage with it, and nothing drives engagement like “Look at this. This is wrong. Doesn’t this piss you off?“

The more publicly and aggressively you condemn something, the more the system surfaces you. The more that people see you, the more people agree with you, and the more social credit feel-good is squirted into your veins in the form of likes and retweets.

You end up with an Internet where people don’t just react to bad behavior. They compete to have the hardest, loudest, and knee-jerkiest reaction to bad behavior. The goal shifts from “address the problem” to “be seen addressing the problem.” Where my ADHD-riddeled ass is usually half-listening to a conversation, looking for a place to crowbar in a joke, they're doing the same, just waiting for a reason to start shrieking.

Once that happens, context becomes optional, proportionality disappears completely…

…and a joke becomes a statement. One that usually carries the most outrageous interpretation available.

And you must’ve meant it that way, right? Your name is attached to it. That’s your face next to the words. It’s practically one signature away from being an affidavit.

This kind of environment is not great for a chronically unserious person like me, and it makes me deeply grateful that my nutbag father named me John Doe. Good luck trying to find me IRL.

Hi! John Doe here,

If you’ve cracked open Welcome to the Deep Estate, you know that conspiracy theories are kind of my whole thing. Like, aggressively my thing. And with all the Epstein document chaos bouncing around the internet right now, my brain refuses to shut up about it. Carrie was even kind enough to edit it all so it sounds like a mostly sober, coherent rant.

In 2010, an email between Jeffrey Epstein and Hollywood producer Barry Josephson references Epstein asking Bill Gates, “How do we get rid of poor people as a whole?” and notes that he wants to schedule a call because he’s got some ideas. Now, it would be reasonable to conclude that Barry was just poorly paraphrasing Bill Gates, who is well known for tackling extreme poverty…right?

Oh, you poor, poor, simpleton. No, you would be dead wrong.

Because in another email to Epstein from a redacted sender, whom we can all baselessly assume is Anthony Fauci, it is noted that Bill Gates was running pandemic simulations years before COVID-19. Got chills yet? Good.

That’s right, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates are the masterminds behind infecting the world with COVID-19, killing millions in the name of population control.

Also

Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates are the con artists who fooled the world into a lockdown because COVID-19 doesn’t actually exist.

It really depends on which COVID nutbag shows up in your feed. And there are a lot of nutbags in my feed these days.

The massive document dump isn’t just revealing things. It’s letting people custom-build an Epstein that fits whatever narrative they already believe, and it’s got the little Fox Mulder inside my head squinting and murmuring, “Almost as if by design…”

After five minutes on Threads, I feel like I’m going crazy.

Apparently, Jeffrey Epstein is a two-hundred-year-old pedo-adrenochrome vampire formally known as President Andrew Jackson. Also, he’s Banksy or Satoshi Nakamoto, the secretive inventor behind Bitcoin. Jeffrey Epstein is also still alive in Tel-Aviv. And did you know that Jeff Bezos and Epstein groomed Zoran Mamdani as a child? Oh, and see that shredded meat Mick Jagger, Epstein, and Clinton are eating? That’s baby al pastor.

And I swear I only made up one of those allegations. The rest are spreading around the internet like Kuru, the cannibalism related disease, Epstein, and his friends also apparently have.

The wonkiest thing behind all this kooky banana-town jamboree is that the real stories being unearthed in the Epstein files are juicy enough on their own. He’s basically the Forest Gump of “Things that are true, but make you sound insane when you try to explain them.”

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Epstein was actually involved in Iran-Contra.

And while Ol’ Jeff E. isn’t Satoshi, the pedo financier actually had a heavy hand in creating Bitcoin, you know, the hard-to-trace digital currency used by pedophiles. The next time your cousin won’t stop yammering about crypto while sucking on his white gummy disposable vape, go ahead and tell him that 75 percent of Bitcoin’s code was made directly after Epstein’s investments. That will shut him up.

And the nuttiest factoid of all? Epstein also met Christopher Poole, AKA “Moot,” AKA the founder of the internet’s cesspool 4chan. Then, in the very same month the two met, the imageboard dropped the board Politically Incorrect, which would soon become home to QAnon and Pizzagate.

Now, this admittedly is my own crazy conspiracy theory, but let’s sit with this idea for a moment and really think about it:

/Pol/, the birthplace of ‘there is an elite cabal of pedophile adrenochrome vampire lizard people controlling the world,’ was possibly the brainchild of Jeffrey Epstein, a real-life pedophile elite who ran an actual cabal with the richest and most powerful people in the world.

They aren’t vampires. They aren’t eating babies. (They are all Lizard people, but that has nothing to do with this.) No, they were all beneficiaries of Epstein’s homebrewed COINTELPRO infiltration, rumor flooding the nutbags with a widely successful discredit-by-association campaign.

And the end result? Once people associate “elite skullfuckery” with “adrenochrome space cult,” you’ve effectively nuked public credibility for anyone trying to talk about real-world crimes.

The Wild West of the Internet is now just straight-up Westworld. Nobody knows who’s real, who’s fake, or who is actually just three bots in a duster.

What’s disturbing about this tinfoil hat feeding frenzy is that it’s now impossible to gauge its reach, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. In the olden days of yore, when your Facebook friends were actually your friends, you could easily spot the crazy bullshit and see where it was coming from.

Now? Every click, every linger, every rage-scroll feeds a machine that just gives you more of whatever emotional poison you engaged with last. It’s all tailored and personalized to you. I genuinely don’t know if the internet is going insane, or if it’s just serving me up a double heaping of crazy. God help those dim normies who don’t see what’s happening.

And now AI has entered the chat.

Bots are serving up bullshit that fits their agenda at alarming speeds, like a fake news articles about Keanu Reeves donating 100K to ICE, when just a day before, it was Millie Bobby Brown supposedly doing the same thing. AI-generated images are circulating and being mixed in with the real content. Did Epstein actually meet MJ? I’d buy it. Is this actually a photo of Stephen Hawking on Lolita Island? Maybe. What about this photo of Jeff E. and Alf? Okay. That can’t be real. Please tell me it’s not real.

What’s worse is that Meta doesn’t seem to give a shit. On Threads, I saw firsthand the dysfunction with a blatantly false post regarding Epstein grooming Mamdani. Because I’m such an upstanding pillar of truthitude, there was a little button asking me to rate a proposed community note. I clicked it, and man, that note? It was beautiful. A perfect short paragraph from a neutral party describing the extent of the bullshit, and linked to a Snopes article about it being bullshit.

I gave it a thumbs up, then received this:

I was dumbfounded.

What differing views do you need on bullshit? Are they waiting for a nuanced take? “Well, Zorhan Mamdani and Epstein did live in NYC around the same time, so it’s only 99.95% bullshit, not complete bullshit.” Is Snopes not good enough to debunk bullshit? Why isn’t this copy-pasted bullshit AI image not getting automatically flagged by some system? They can spot a nipple in a millisecond and blast it out of the water. Pretend it’s a nipple, Meta, and do something about it.

Nope.

A full day later, that post is still up, with 174,000 views. That’s 174,000 people exposed to potentially virulent bullshit… And the supposed vaccine, the community note, remains invisible.

Then again, maybe this is all part of the plan. If you can’t hide the tons of damaging information coming out about the rich and powerful, then don’t even try. Let the internet go wild with it, and don’t correct them when they start spreading the bullshit alongside the truth. Let social media become 4chan, and it will run its own disinformation campaign for you.

Man, we’re just seriously fucked as a species, aren’t we?

John Doe out.

In a move widely seen as a consolidation of control over the digital town square, billionaire and ardent Zionist Larry Ellison has joined a consortium led by Jared Kushner to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations. For creators critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the sale represents a death knell for the platform’s once-vibrant pro-Palestinian movement.

“First they installed a former IDF instructor as head censor, and then the word ‘genocide’ became ‘mass un-aliving,’” said one creator who wished to remain anonymous, “Now every video has to condemn Hamas just to hit the FYP. I’m watching fourteen-year-olds doing the ‘Hamas microwaved babies’ dance to Taylor Swift just to trend.”

She paused, motioning to her latex nurse outfit. “So yeah. I’m on Pornhub now.”

She’s one of millions fleeing to the adult platform, which has somehow become the last bastion of unfiltered speech for the Free Palestine movement.

“The only catch,” said an Al Jazeera correspondent while squishing cake between her bare feet outside the Rafah crossing, “is that videos still have to be technically porn. But if that’s what it takes to show the hundreds of aid trucks stuck at the border, I’ll do feet stuff.”

Just last week, the top-trending video on the site was “Slutty Step-Sister ICJ JOI Genocide Report Update.” Where she told the camera, “Gaza’s starvation has reached catastrophic levels, with more than 320,000 children under the age of five at risk of acute malnutrition, so don’t you dare cum.”

Meanwhile, one of TikTok’s highest-boosted video remains an algorithm-friendly “Get Ready With Me” featuring an Israeli supermodel-turned-IDF drone operator getting ready to bomb a “Hamas” donkey cart carrying the wounded.

On TikTok, posts with hashtags like #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack disappear within minutes. Comments vanish and creators are redirected to official fact-checking “explainers” assuring them that Gazan children “aren’t being bombed; they’re simply so consumed by hate they spontaneously combust.”

“But because it’s Pornhub, it’s too spicy for billionaires to sanitize,” explained climate activist Greta Thunberg, performing a tasteful striptease to If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer, the Gazan poet assassinated in a drone strike after his words went viral. “I hate that my channel gets more engagement than my aid flotilla work, but at least people are hearing Gaza’s cry for help.”

“Pornhub even gave us our own Gaza section between Gaping and Grannies.”

In response, Israeli propagandists have attempted to counter with their own porn-political content, though reception has been poor. Early uploads like “Ben Gvir Edges Himself to Mosque Demolition” and “Netanyahu’s Bedroom Siege” have drawn more dislikes than any other video, with one user commenting, “Bro, I came here to jerk off to a two-state solution, not apartheid.”

Blizzard Activision has unveiled what it calls “the most comprehensive anti-cheat monitoring system in gaming history”: every player who purchases the standard edition of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will receive a complimentary fingering in the ass from a licensed Activision employee.

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“This revolutionary measure will not only prevent cheaters, but also foster a stronger sense of community and trust between Activision and the millions of players we are actively molesting,” said an Activision spokesperson while handing out gloves.

While Activision insists the initiative is about integrity and fair play, stockholder documents from Microsoft, its parent company, describe it bluntly as a financial necessity in the Games-as-a-Service era. “Players have been conditioned to accept constant microtransactions,” the report reads. “Physical penetration is simply the next logical step in maximizing revenue. For those who want to enjoy the classic COD experience, they are welcome to purchase the Finger-Free Edition for $89.99.”

Behind the scenes, the logistics are staggering. Activision has quietly assembled an on-demand global workforce of millions of unvetted strange men, each stationed within a 15-minute radius of major metropolitan areas. Within fifteen minutes of login, one of these “Field Engagement Specialists” will arrive at the player’s home, provided they do not live within 100 yards of a school zone.

Rockstar Games has already announced plans to follow suit with the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI. However, the fingering experience will be mandatory, with lubrication available as part of a seasonal Premium Pass for a smoother gaming experience.

“The roadmap is clear,” said Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, dipping a finger into an industrial-sized tub of KY Jelly. “By Q4 of 2026, we will be introducing a second finger. By the next console generation, we expect a full butt fucking will be the industry standard in AAA gaming.”

Despite widespread complaints, Black Ops 7 still boasts record-breaking preorder numbers, proving once again that gamers will endure almost anything as long as it comes with a free premium weapon skin.

WILMINGTON, DE— In a bid to “connect with younger demographics” and capitalize on the viral fame of recent high-profile assassins, firearms manufacturer Remington announced Monday a new line of ammunition featuring prewritten messages etched into every casing.

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“Our customers aren’t just looking to take their shot,” said Remington spokesperson Mark Grady, unveiling the Meme Hunter™ brand. “They want to deliver a message and make a splash—Which they can, quite literally, since they’re hollow points.”

The cartridges, sold in randomized “blind packs,” have already gone viral on TikTok. One influencer celebrated for five minutes straight after finally completing his “Deny, Delay, Depose” collection. “The three together on eBay are easily ten grand.”

Another user excitedly showed off his haul, saying, “I’m waiting until I have a full clip of obscure 4chan memes before I take out a school—uh—of ducks. That’s what you call it, right? A middle school of ducks?” He then nervously showed off his prized .30-06 caliber round etched with, “Sees bulge owo,” from his Tyler Robinson shrine.

Remington confirmed limited holiday editions will also be released, starting with Valentine’s Day. The themed ammo will feature inscriptions like “Together Forever,” the paired rounds “Murder” and “Suicide,” as well as the classic, “You Dirty Whore.”

Collectors report that a brisk secondary market is already forming. Rare pulls—like the golden .556 round etched with “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself”—are fetching hundreds of dollars on resale sites. Meanwhile, unlucky buyers are left drowning in duplicates of common casings such as “LOL,” “Based,” and “NPC.”

With a sigh, one African American collector dumped a box of “duds” into a bucket, all of them etched with racist slogans. “Look, I knew I’d get some repeats, but six packs in a row with ‘White Lives Matter’ and ‘Die [N-word]’? It’s starting to feel personal.”

Critics warn the line dangerously glamorizes violence, but Remington insists the move is no different from custom license plates. “It’s the First Amendment and the Second Amendment wrapped up in one neat little package.”

At press time, Remington announced a “content creator collab series,” with up-and-coming shooters, ominously teasing, “Oh, trust me. You’ll know when they’ll drop.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new safety guidelines Monday after a wave of antibiotic-resistant conjunctivitis swept through senior members of the Trump administration, with officials tracing the outbreak to what they clinically referred to as “direct ocular exposure during what POTUS calls ‘kissing the ring.’”

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“We cannot emphasize enough the bacterial and chemical hazards down there,” warned Dr. Marissa Ellison of the CDC, holding up a chart labeled Oval Office Exposure Pathways, which depicted a bacterial hazard heat map of President Trump’s undercarriage.

“Tossing his salad is the closest Donald Trump ever gets to eating leafy greens. It’s vital that every staff member takes precautions.”

The guidelines, circulated as an emergency memorandum to staffers, recommend:

• Politely asking the president to remove his Depends before engaging.

• Making use of the complimentary wet wipes station inside the Oval Office.

• Wearing OSHA-approved safety goggles during all encounters.

• Applying Vicks VapoRub under the nose “to mitigate both scent and psychological trauma.”

An earlier draft of the guidelines, leaked to The Washington Post, also included the bullet point, “Use a dental dam,” but it was reportedly struck down by Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller because it “Defeats the entire point if you can’t taste his glory.”

The outbreak has already left visible casualties. Former White House aide Kash Patel required emergency enucleation after his right eye turned gangrenous. Pam Bondi, now sporting oversized Ray Charles-style sunglasses, refused to confirm whether she lost her vision to pink eye or simply gouged her eyes out to erase the sight of Trump’s weathered 79-year-old sphincter.

“We’re treating this as a pandemic-level event,” said RFK Jr., noting new infections have been reported in Tel Aviv following Netanyahu’s private meetings with Trump last week.

As of press time, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is the only staff member who appears to be curiously immune to the outbreak, which sources attribute to his daily practice of taking raw sewage baths.

JERUSALEM— The IDF launched a massive orbital space laser this week, daring the international community to say anything about it without sounding like Marjorie Taylor Greene on bath salts. Israeli Officials described the laser as a “purely defensive measure,” meant to vaporize Gazans from orbit with zero repercussions whatsoever.

CNN attempted to carefully broach the subject, opening their coverage by reminding viewers that “genocide is bad, unless you’re talking about Gaza, in which case it’s not genocide, so it’s neither good nor bad and CNN does not have an opinion on it.” Wolf Blitzer then got as far as, “So there’s this laser—” before immediately running screaming from the building.

AIPAC quickly praised the orbital system, releasing a statement that read: *“*Yes, the space laser is also capable of altering global weather patterns. So go on. Say it. Tell us who controls the weather. We dare you.” At which point, Fox News and MSNBC both dropped coverage, unwilling to go near the story with a ten-foot pole.

Later that day, AIPAC was spotted handing out space laser talking points to several prominent congressmen, along with a cartoonishly oversized bag of money bearing a giant green dollar sign. When asked to comment on AIPAC’s power over congress, Senator Cory Booker visibly swallowed and stammered, “Cah-Comment on w-w-what? On who controls Congress? Only if you say it first.”

After a long silence, both the senator and reporter turned and walked away in opposite directions.

“You can criticize Israel all you want,” said AIPAC president Elliot Brandt, “but if you criticize Israel in a way that is correct, specific, and reflects what Israel is actually doing, then you’ve crossed the line into antisemitic hate speech. And no, that is not by design.”

“Oh, it’s totally by design,” said Ari Goldman, a random Jewish man we found to say the thing we’re all thinking, but won’t dare say out loud. “It’s crazy how much they’re getting away with it.”

This move is only the latest in a long line of instances where Israel and its lobbying groups seem to intentionally act out antisemitic stereotypes in real time. For example, when TikTok recently hired a former IDF officer to oversee its hate speech division, critics tied themselves in knots trying to tactfully address it.

“We want to be clear,” said David Kline of the Digital Rights Alliance**.** “We’re saying that an Israeli woman is controlling speech on a major social media platform specifically for the benefit of her country, Israel. Please, for the love of God, do not twist this into something else.”

When asked to follow up on his comments about “Jews controlling the media”, representatives from the Digital Rights Alliance informed us that Mr. Kline was no longer employed by the organization.

As of writing, TikTok's moderation team has since flooded feeds with Mossad-approved content, insisting Gazan children aren’t being bombed; they’re simply “so consumed by hate they spontaneously combust.”

“We’re trapped in an impossible rhetorical position,” complained one U.N. diplomat. “Israel launches a space laser, and if I describe that literally, I sound like a 4chan post. When we say they intentionally withhold aid from Palestinians, they accuse us of calling them 'stingy' and it's a whole...thing.”

At a press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed accusations while absentmindedly stroking a cat and swiveling in a high-backed chair. “We are simply ensuring our interests are protected with our Joint Earth Weapon for International Security and Harmony.”

“It’s the J.E.W.I.S.H. Space Laser?” moaned Pete Buttigieg. “Oh goddammit.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.— After years of dismissing the “Twitter Files” as a nothingburger, liberals across the country reportedly froze in horror this week as it dawned on them: oh shit, that federal social media watchdog thing is still around.

“At first, I thought, well, who cares if they’re shadowbanning a few COVID cranks and election deniers?” said one Brooklyn woman, staring into the middle distance as a plate slipped from her hand and shattered on the kitchen floor. “But then it hit me. Oh God. The COVID cranks and election deniers are the ones in charge now.”

The realization rippled outward in real time.

In Chicago, a progressive activist blew through a red light, muttering, “What are they doing with it? They gotta be doing something with it.” In Portland, a man reading the news dropped his oat milk latte so violently that it drenched his entire flannel shirt. Growing frantic, he added: “JESUS, FUCK! They built entire departments within multiple agencies, each one led by some career-hungry middle manager. Those kinds of things don’t go away.”

Experts explained that the system—initially justified as a way to target election deniers and COVID skeptics—had quietly expanded to flag, throttle, and deplatform at scale. The point, they said, was never to make it smaller.

“Liberals shrugged because they trusted the hall monitors,” said one digital rights analyst. “But hall monitors graduate. Now the bullies are in charge, and they’ve got the clipboard.”

Online, panic spread as users suddenly reevaluated their past smugness. “Lol another Matt Taibbi nothingburger,” one liberal had tweeted in 2022. This week, he reportedly bolted awake at 3 a.m. screaming, “THEY HAVE ACCESS TO FACEBOOK’S DEDICATED WEB PORTAL!”

One Black Lives Matter activist admitted the problem was hiding in plain sight. “ICE sodomized a man with a club—in the ass, you hear me? I mean, straight up the butt. It's on video, from multiple angles. Only three people showed up for the last protest, and I thought something was seriously fucked. Where is everybody? Then I remember those Twitter files and was like, ‘Oh shit. Is that why no one is engaging with me?’ Do people even know what's happening?"

On Capitol Hill, aides confirmed that Senator Cory Booker went pale during an Agriculture committee hearing. He slowly undid his tie and whispered, “Dear Lord, what have we done?” Witnesses say Booker then stripped to his underwear, waded into the Reflecting Pool, and shouted, “WAKE UP! They have AI now! AI, people! Think of the Orwellian shit they could do with AI!”

At press time, sources confirmed the White House had assured citizens the system was only being used to maintain “healthy discourse,” which caused thousands more liberals to simultaneously faint, urinate, and walk glassy-eyed into traffic.

So I saw this post and well…

"The Call of the uwu" By Edgar Allen Poe

In the hour when clocks grow timid, when the wind forgets to moan,
Through the thorns of midnight thickets came a hush that was my own.
As the femboy witching hour grew near, the succubi calls renew,
Like a breath behind my ear, there stirred the whisper

“uwu (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)”.

God must have blushed and turned away, ashamed of what he’d think,
For from the pine’s infernal shade emerged the most tempting twink.
My veins ran cold, my steps were chained, as my spirit split in two,
As came the sissy hypno hymn, the honeyed coo:

“uwu ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡.”

“Begone, foul femboy!” I cried out, “Thy charms shall find no ear!”
“But sex is but a spectrum,” they sang, “and we're all a little queer.”
My heart grew weak, my reason waned, as wicked visions drew.
If I should glance betwixt their thighs, it'd be the end, I knew:

For I would see a bulge…

And I, too, would sigh…

“uwu.”

JERUSALEM— In the wake of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination, leading evangelical figures have proclaimed him the Second Coming of Republican Christ and announced that the long-awaited apocalypse will commence next Tuesday, 5 p.m. Israel Daylight Time.

“Charlie died for our values,” said Ambassador Mike Huckabee, solemnly holding up a TP USA branded Bible. “If that’s not messianic, I don’t know what is.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the declaration, adding, “Frankly, it makes liberals and trans people into the new Jews. I say throw in the Palestinians, and let the thousand-year war begin!”

Church officials admitted the apocalypse had originally been scheduled for last Thursday, but logistical complications delayed the ceremony. Israeli customs had erroneously flagged the ritual red heifer shipment as Gaza aid and immediately incinerated it with flame throwers.

"You can never be too careful with those sneaky Gazans. Luckily, we found a workaround,” Huckabee explained. “Trump’s landing in Jerusalem Tuesday anyway, and he’s an orange cow, which is basically red. Close enough. Revelations didn’t specify Pantone numbers.”

Apocalypse organizers confirmed Trump will be ceremonially paraded through the city gates as the “Orange Heifer of Revelation,” after which believers will ascend directly into heaven—though only those holding tickets to Turning Point USA’s upcoming conference will be let through the pearly gates.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders are rushing to finalize The Gospel of MAGA, a “New New Testament” that recasts Kirk as the conservative Christ figure they always wanted. Steven Bannon called it a "J.J. Abrams blend reboot. All fan service and no woke messaging."

In the Gospel, Kirk is shot by a trans Pontius Pilate, mocked by libs, betrayed by Groypers, and denied wall-to-wall coverage by CNN three times. The Sermon on the Mount has been replaced by the Sermon on the Pod, featuring Kirk and Ben Shapiro railing against loose women demanding reproductive rights.

“This is exactly what Charlie would have wanted,” said one evangelical leader. “Not to be remembered for who he was, but to be twisted into the perfect vessel for our agenda. And the beauty of him being the Second Coming is that he’s already dead. He can’t surprise us later by saying something unkosher like, ‘care for the poor’ or ‘heal the sick.’ Could you imagine? Frankly, unlike Charlie, we dodged a bullet.”

NEW YORK, NY— The New York Post just broke the news that the alleged Charlie Kirk shooter might've been living with a transgender partner. While it's unclear what exactly that has to do with the assassination, the Post's lead editor described the revelation as, "The kind of exhilaration only felt as a young teen, on the cusp of manhood, sneaking downstairs to turn on the TV to watch late-night HBO on mute."

Flushed and panting, Josh Christenson, lead journalist on the story, explained, "Yeah, it's only one unnamed source from the FBI, and we don't know if they were a couple, friends, or merely roommates, but the moment we all saw 'Trans' in a thousand-point font on the headline?" He chuckled and undid his tie, "There was a collective orgasm in the room that left us moaning for a minute straight. I still have the tingles."

"We could have found more sources to verify, but we were too busy calling janitorial." One staffer who preferred to remain anonymous said, "The sheer amount of... fluids was up there with a Diddy freak off."

Editors reportedly convened an all-hands meeting in the bullpen where the lead editor barked out next steps: “I want this trans woman’s entire life story. Dig up every mean tweet she said about Trump. I need photos of her before and after transitioning on my desk within the hour. We should've been deadnaming and doxxing her ten minutes ago—let’s go people, MOVE!”

Media watchdogs noted the Post did not mention the shooter’s radicalization, weapon access, or motive until paragraph twenty-two, buried beneath three pull quotes about the roommate’s pronouns.

“It’s textbook Post,” said one analyst. “They won't cover a car crash unless there's a trans person they can blame for distracting the driver with their bewitching transness."

Critics were quick to emphasize that the article offered no explanation for how a roommate’s gender identity directly caused the assassination, but this did not dampen the newsroom’s fervor. “We don’t need to explain it,” one editor said, snorting a line of Blue Chew Viagra. “We just repeat the word, over and over, until readers get the same Pavlovian hard-on we do.”

At press time, the Post announced a companion podcast titled Groomed to Kill, promising listeners they’d “leave convinced the trans roommate personally loaded the gun.”

New York City, N.Y. — Top Republicans rushed to reassure the public Monday that President Donald Trump’s sagging face during the 9/11 memorial was the result of a minor stroke, and not, as critics have alleged, the unmistakable signs of his human skinsuit beginning to peel away.

“The president is in perfect health aside from a small neurological event,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, pointedly ignoring the yellow-green bruising visible around Trump’s wrists. “Any suggestion that his human carapace is deteriorating under the strain of containing his true reptilian form is disinformation from the radical left.”

Party officials have been quick to explain away Trump’s recent symptoms, including swollen ankles, scaling at the neck, and a faint ammonia-like odor. “That smell? Oh, he just peed himself," said Senator Ted Cruz, "His epidermal membrane isn't sloughing off in sheets. No siree!”

Pressed on whether the president’s eyes briefly blinked sideways during his memorial appearance, a White House spokesperson claimed the cameras “must have caught him mid-squint. With those sagging assholes for eyes, it can be confusing. They certainly weren't nictitating membranes.”

Other GOP figures took aim at Hillary Clinton, claiming the press had a double standard. “They never made a big deal when Hillary accidentally hissed during the 2016 debates. They never called out Biden when he spent 18 hours a day in the Oval Office, sitting on his favorite sunning rock underneath a heat lamp,” complained Rep. Margerie Taylor Greene. “But when Trump’s jaw briefly unhinges at a memorial to swallow a live vole, suddenly it’s a national crisis.”

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's high-profile killing, cultural analysts confirmed this week that assassination is officially “having a moment,” eclipsing the once-popular mass shooting as the atrocity of choice for today’s aspiring maniacs.

“Mass shootings have really gone out of style,” said one would-be gunman, scrolling jealously through trending headlines. “These attention whores are going for quality when they should be aiming for quantity. Unless you’re trans, nobody cares if you get thirty or forty in a food court. School shootings have literally gone woke.”

Industry observers say the shift was inevitable. “Spray-and-pray shooters oversaturated the market, and their audience was extremely niche—Mostly other aspiring mass shooters and extremists," explained violence trend forecaster Alex Jennings. "But a single clean hit on a controversial public figure? That’s the Labooboo of mayhem right now. Everyone wants to do one, but not everyone can pull it off, and there's a built-in fan base of haters.”

Prospective attackers interviewed expressed frustration that their efforts no longer generate the coverage they once did. “I’ve stockpiled guns, ammo, wrote my manifesto, but my brand’s DOA before it launches,” complained one white nationalist, polishing his AR-15. “Meanwhile, some sexy loner takes out a health insurance CEO, and he’s a household name overnight. The algorithm’s killing us.”

At press time, analysts confirmed that the trend will continue to grow exponentially until some form of meaningful gun control is passed, which is surprisingly looking more likely. "It will probably take a few more Charlie Kirks, a handful of Congressmen, and a member of the Supreme Court, but eventually we'll get there."

Imagine, if you will, the bustling salons and smoky parlors of 19th-century France. Amidst the clinking of champagne glasses and whispered scandals of the aristocracy, one figure stood out, not for her noble blood or razor wit, but for her extraordinary contribution to female sexuality.

This, dear reader, is the tale of Béatrice Dildoux.

Born into privilege, she might have spent her life drifting between garden parties and idle diversions, but even from an early childhood, Béatrice had a singular obsession. A nun once wrote: “Young Béatrice was caned across the backside again and ordered to recite the Lord’s Prayer a hundred times. Twice this month, she’s been caught urging boys to expose themselves.” Her mother lamented, “I found page after page of parchment in her room, covered in crude sketches of genitals. She is, it seems, single-mindedly obsessed with penis.”

Despite this precocity, Béatrice remained a shy, quiet girl. “She rarely speaks,” noted one teacher, “but when she does, trousers inevitably come down.”

French historian Emmanuel Dupont argues she exhibited the classic signs of Asperger’s syndrome, “She displayed little interest in conventional friendships, no sense of small talk, and an almost mechanical devotion to cataloguing male anatomy,” Dupont wrote. “Today she would be described as neurodivergent; in her time, she was merely considered odd, eccentric, and inconvenient to polite society.”

By all accounts, Béatrice's fascination with male genitalia did not extend to the men who had them. In Béatrice's diary, she wrote in her own words, “I wish only that the manhood might remain, but the man himself not. They speak too much, and they smell, often carrying ideas in their head that I do not care for.”

By her twenties, she found an outlet that would soon change the world. Harnessing the new science of natural rubber, she began crafting precise recreations of a male’s penis—ostensibly for “anatomical study.” These modèles anatomiques, however, found their way not to libraries or universities, but to the boudoirs of lonely wives of soldiers away during the Franco-Prussian War.

By 1875, demand was so great that Béatrice opened a boutique in Paris, shipping models across Europe. Contemporary wits could not resist taking a jab. Voltaire quipped: “If they arrested Dildoux, the women would mount another revolution, shouting ‘Off with their little heads!’”

Predictably, the ruling class was scandalized. Napoleon III himself, humiliated when his mistress the Countess of Castiglione was discovered “finishing the job” with a Dildoux, denounced the enterprise as “an affront to the moral fiber of France.”

Among women, however, her creations were revered. “Every Parisian woman has a little Béatrice Dildoux in her,” claimed one prostitute. “And some men, too. I don’t judge. A franc is a franc.”

Béatrice, restless, kept innovating. By 1879 she expanded her range: leatherworkers devised harnesses, German engineers drafted manual “thrusting machines” and even a steam-powered device, while sculptors produced fantastical phalluses inspired by Kraken tentacles, dragon curves, and werewolf knots. All, naturally, still marketed as “for anatomical study.”

Legends soon spun out of control. Some swore she voyaged abroad, seducing mythical beasts to take their molds.

In the novel 120 days of Dildoux by infamous author and prolific pervert Marquis De Sade, the Marquis wrote, "With a sword in one hand, point pricking the throat of the mighty Sphinx, the beast's forked cock in the other, she worked the monster into a frenzy then f-cked the living sh-t out of him with her wanton c-nt"

"Well-endowed Men from all over the world would arrive on her doorstep and expose themselves, expecting her to take on the challenge." said Emmanuelle, "She was, after all, the woman who bested the minotaur."

In truth, Béatrice rarely left her study. She busied herself with her business and increasingly experimental erotica. Her stories—what little remains of them—were, by all accounts, revolutionary. In much the same way the Ukiyo-e print "the fisherman's wife" gave way to Japanese tentacle erotica, Dildoux's homoerotic tales of anthropomorphic wolfmen and dogboys, penned in elegant prose, is often attributed as the origin of the furry erotica.

Her story, however, ended tragically in 1887 while attempting to cast the anatomy of a 2,150-pound Shire horse. Overstimulated and suspended by an overworked harness, the beast broke free and fell on top of her, madly thrusting to completion.

Her death would later be ruled as a drowning.

In the years that followed, most of her manuscripts were regrettably consigned to the flames by her own estate, and the authorities moved swiftly to shutter her boutique. Time itself proved no kinder, for the natural rubber of her models has long since degraded and crumbled away, leaving scarcely a trace of her once-thriving enterprise. Yet her name endures, softened and anglicised into the familiar term “dildo.”

One notorious specimen is known to have escaped destruction, however: The Dragon’s Embrace. Said to have once belonged to Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln, it now resides—discreetly catalogued though seldom exhibited—within the Smithsonian Institute.