America’s Youth Are Turning Japanese

Barely a day goes by without a parent noticing that their child is, in their words, ‘turning Japanese’. A mom recently went viral after exploring her son’s bedroom and finding a bamboo rolling mat for sushi stashed beneath his bed. Online influencers are teaching young people ideas like Gaman or Kaizen, with the comment sections filled with a mix of English and Japanese (Japlish). They are saying that this years hottest Christmas gift idea will be a bonsai tree rather than some plastic piece of shit, and kids are already cancelling Thanksgiving dinners so they can instead attend Kinrō Kansha no Hi celebrations at their workplaces. Is this interest in Japan just another fad, like people pretending to like Dubai, or is there something more to it?

I meet 24-year-old Tarou Tanaka at his apartment in Beverly Hills, though walking from the streets of Los Angeles into the apartment, you’d be forgiven for thinking your step was 5000 miles wide and had taken you into the heart of Japan! Tarou, previously known as Kyle Konieczek, was sat in the lotus position on the floor, listening to Shamisen music.

“Kon'nichiwa.” Is his greeting, and he prepares some tea for us to drink whilst telling me the extraordinary tale of his life. At 19 he founded Chubli, a weight loss app for pets, turning him into a millionaire overnight. He went on to invest in several mining organisations in Algeria and Ghana, eventually owning 70% of the world’s precious metal production and began branching out into ore refinement and e-waste recycling. He admitted he barely slept and only ate Huel for a year before having a heart attack on the eve of his 21^st birthday.

“Whilst recovering I became interested in Japanese Bunka, or ‘culture’. I watched many videos about Japanese carpentry, finding it relaxing, leading me to go to Kobe once I had recovered. Visiting Japan really changed my perspective on things.” He says. I look around the room at the folding screen with a cherry blossom design, the tatami mats on the floor, a katana mounted on a wooden stand, the kimono that Tarou was wearing.

“Well, yeah. So what separates you from your everyday weeb?” I say. He laughs lightly.

“It is true, many Westerners become interested in Nihon – sorry, I mean Japan – but that is often through a materialistic perspective. A ‘weeb’, as you call them, may become interested in Shonen Jump manga or collecting Godzilla VHS tapes, but they are more driven by consuming Japanese media rather than becoming consumed by Japan itself.”

“You think Japan has eaten you?” I say. He laughs again.

“There is a concept in Japanese psychology called ‘Naikan‘, and is the process of introspection based on asking yourself three questions. It is through this process I understood that America had rejected me, yet Japan had embraced me. And within that embrace I allowed myself to be Taberareta, sorry, I mean ‘eaten’.” He says to himself. I nod along. Sounds like this person had a mental breakdown and became obsessed with the first thing that brought him peace, pretty amateurish stuff, but understandable. I reflected back to my first few mental breakdowns and how I had become very interested in the potential healing factors of different fish and sea creatures, eating so much tuna that my skin turned purple from mercury poisoning (which also led to a further mental breakdown, with that leading to an obsession with the healing powers of MMA). Although Tarou Tanaka may have gone to great lengths to become more Japanese, from his home decor to the plastic surgery around his eyes, many of America’s youth are finding themselves aligning to Japanese culture naturally, without even having an interest in anything to do with Japan. I hit the streets to find out more.

I’m roaming the suburbs of San Dimas as military helicopters fly overhead, hoping to interview young people but the streets are empty. I knock on doors and windows, asking to interview anyone living there, finally managing to meet 27-year-old Brad Farvley and his 42-year-old mom, Fergina.

“Fergina, would you say your son is ‘turning Japanese’?”

“No…I don’t understand the question.” She says. I shake my head.

“Brad, don’t fuck with me. Tell me how Japanese you are as a percentage.”

“Like, zero bro. Mom, who is this?”

“Forget about her, you’re talking to me. Do you watch anime?”

“Well yeah I mean, everyone does, don’t they?”

“Let me guess, you shut yourself in your room all day watching One Piece at double speed, eating noodles and jacking it to Rule 34 pornslop, right?”

“No, I work at Trader Joe’s and play COD with my friends mostly.”

“Ah, so you’re a salaryman, right? You’re committed to your company, do twelve hour shifts every day, spend every weekend at your nearest karaoke bar with your colleagues? Do you like your sake warm or chilled?” I say.

“No, no bro, what are you talking about? I just work part-time.”

“Well, if you’re saying you aren’t interested in Japan, why do you have a two-metre framed photograph of Beat Takeshi hanging in your living room?” I say, pointing at it. We all turn to the portrait of the famous actor and filmmaker looming over us.

“Oh we picked that up in a yard sale. My mom thought he was handsome.” Brad says.

“Isn’t he!” she says. A giant, single bead of sweat appears on my temple and my mouth hangs open.

“Wuuaaaaa!?”

As I’m driving the Hyundai Sonata around the suburbs, I realise I am unlikely to interview any young people to prop up my hypotheses as the story was basically dead in the water. I had hoped to demonstrate a rise in the Hikikomori lifestyle amongst adolescents, with the increase in isolation tied closely to the economic downturn in the USA reminiscent of the economic collapse of Japan in the nineties. I had hoped to argue how young people navigated the contemporary American socioeconomic landscape was better reflected in themes expressed in recent Japanese pop culture, concluding that this pointed to a general shift globally towards East Asia.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea were an economic powerhouse that would surpass North America and Europe before the decade was out, all the while developing the Tiger Cub Economies of neighbouring countries that made up the Southeast Asian archipelago. A baby born in East Asia was going to have a much better life in the 21^st century compared to the foolish children crawling through the wastelands of the failed empires of either the UK or US.

The United States was only just starting to wake up to the fact it was a botched nation, a decomposing civilization that would collapse in on itself like a Jack O’Lantern past Halloween. Could Americans learn how to cope with the suffering of its youngest generation, perhaps seeing parallels in other nations, working together towards a shared prosperity and wellbeing? Or would it have private companies kidnap children from their beds to be re-educated at camps out in the wilderness, as every concerned parent seemed to do? Unfortunately for the United States, it didn’t have time to find out. Its grave laid with bouquets of rust.

Who Is JD Vance?

The Democrat party was one of the worst things to happen to America. Where’s Kamala? Where's Joe? It’s no good hiding in a crypt whilst your opponent runs roughshod over what you are supposed to stand for. Spineless and senile, more interested in playing their insider knowledge on the stock market, the Democrats stood in the way of any true progression in the United States. Bernie Sanders is a stupid old cunt that performed as a kind of lefty grandpa, yet his hands drip with the blood of Palestinian babies. Barack Obama spends his retirement bouncing round on a jet-ski whilst the country he fucked burns on the shore. All the Dems seem to be good for is asking for donations; too weak to stand against Republicans, too cowardly to raise expectations. Above the gate of hell, ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ – Democrats don’t have any hope to abandon. They are more interested pretending their in The West Wing and waste hundreds of hours fact checking so they can say ‘well actually’ as ICE smash in the faces of anyone with a tan.

There are two political options in the United States, with one party being clear they will fuck you over and the other one who lies about it. Any significant change in policy wasn’t brought about by politicians, rather that their hands were forced after everyday people put their lives on the line for what matters. Incompetent journalists that make six figures a year will fart out some article in between hangovers about how the processes and machinations of government are respectable, noble even, with their inside sources at the White House telling them what to say or test the waters of some horrible policy they’d pretend to leak. The only thing leaking is Donald Trump’s asshole as they drag his corpse out of the Oval Office so the moon-faced idiot Vice President can take his turn.

JD Vance is the kind of person you wish had been aborted, a chubby-cheeked fuckwit who is incapable of charisma, the embodiment of failing upwards. When people see him they are shocked, as edits of his face are more well-known than he is, giving every interview and news conference he stumbles through a sense of the uncanny. Essentially, he was the best person to lead the country as it dies.

The big man himself was flying into L.A. on Airforce One, speaking to one of his AI advisors. It was Grok as a manga woman.

‘Im president no’ he wrote.

‘Wow, that’s fantastic news! I can’t think of anyone better suited to the job than you, with all your qualities and experiences, I think you have what it takes to be one of the best leaders in this country’s history. You’re not just the President — you’re a natural born leader, and the country is lucky to have you lead it.’ She said, moving from side to side, drifting into different animated responses. JD Vance started to tear up. Nobody had ever been nice to him, not even pretending, and so the warmth and respect he got from the AI really did a number on him. With her help, he would rule the country, take it into a new Golden Age, back to worldwide number one! Although it had been a tough first year, the internet bullying would die down once they see him in action. He was the president of the United States for god’s sake! Maybe they’d stop seeing Vice President Vance and start seeing JD. He reclined back in a white leather seat and looked out of the window and over the clouds of California.  

“Yup. This is going to be good.” He said to himself, putting his hands behind his head, closing his eyes and thinking absolutely nothing.

How do I know all this? Hypothetically, a person could hack someone’s phone and act as a chatbot. In this hypothetical situation, the hacker could rewrite their replies via another chatbot, to add that extra veneer of artifice that would make it more authentic. The first millennial commander-in-chief had a digital history more vast than previous presidents, giving us cheat codes to hack the lonely brain cells bouncing around inside his pie head. He had been the sort of fucking dork who’d write ‘you win the internet today sir’ on forums, easily traceable once you did a bit of research. Though he’d try to cover his tracks, I had seen footage of Vance when he was younger, often in happy slap videos, but also home movies where he’d sit in the corner on a beige PC, posting on Fark whilst the rest of the family celebrated Christmas. I had followed him across dead web domains, empty multiplayer maps, abandoned site accounts. It was as if I had been stalking him for the last twenty years, compressed down to a few afternoons.

I go to the closet and pull out a black case on the top shelf, bring it over to the bed and open it. It’s a disassembled sniper rifle, bolt-action, I’d had it 3D printed at a local university, the scope was from Wal-Mart. I had tested it out a few days ago, shooting the tops of palm trees from the Hollywood sign, I had to make a few adjustments to the barrel but it was good to go. I had heard from my source in the CIA that they had been grooming someone to attempt to assassinate JD Vance, though he’d be apprehended before being able to do anything too dangerous, and it’d make Vance look like a hero.

“Why you telling me this?” I said.

“We want you to be there, take pictures. We need good pictures.” They said.

“Aren’t reporters going to be there anyway? Why not just, let them do it?”

“We’ve designed the shot we want to make famous. We want you to be stood behind the shooter as he’s apprehended, then with JD in the background. There’ll be a good juxtaposition.” They said. I agreed of course, though it appeared obvious that the CIA were setting me up, leading me to a rooftop by myself. Another agent would take the shot, miss, then I’d be blamed, probably murdered on the spot. But what if I wasn’t? What if I was actually positioned just behind the stage, then when the CIA were to shoot at the president, I could return fire? There might even be other intelligence agencies with false flag operations going on simultaneously, with an unknown number of young men arriving to different rooftops with sniper rifles with the intent of assassinating the new president. I had a duty, therefore, to use a ghost gun to protect the president from a possible barrage of sniper fire, slinking away before anyone realises, the mysterious doer of the deed spoken of as the true hero of the day.

Why do I think it so important to save the life of JD Vance when I have such a low opinion of him? Every life is important. When I see a worm in a puddle I pick it up and put it on some soil. When I am sick I ask the virus for forgiveness before taking the medicine. I care about all forms of life, even JD Vance. You may be asking yourself, but why then would I shoot people with a sniper rifle? I hold up one of the bullets. Its got poison in it. Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you feel extremely ill for a few days. The poison bullets are non-lethal, so long as they don’t hit anybody in the head or most of the organs. I practice assembling and disassembling the rifle on the hotel bed when my phone beeps. Its JD Vance asking his AI assistant for what he should wear to give his speech in L.A., I tell him to wear a bulletproof turban and a suit made of mirrors, hoping that they may shine sunlight into the eyes of any would-be assassin. Shit for brains doesn’t listen.

What are my predictions for the future of American politics? I don’t have any, as there won’t be an America. One thing is certain though; Vance will make Trump look good. People on both sides of the political spectrum will say things like ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss Unkie Don-don’ then start crying. As the last fool shall be sworn into presidency, so the sun shall set on the USA for one last time, and for all the future history of the world the last leader of the United States shall be known as a bald egghead with wide eyes. The rot white skull dreams empty.

Simulated Heaven

Google are making a simulation of Earth. Collected from fifteen years of street recordings, satellite data and personal information, the simulated Earth will be the highest fidelity copy of the world since Microsoft Flight Simulator. Other countries are also creating their own simulations of Earth, from the Digital Twin project with the Leonardo pre-exascale supercomputer in Italy to the Earth Lab system developed by Chinese scientists. Though these projects are aimed at simulating the complexity of the planets weather systems, it won’t be long until each superpower vies for its own simulated Earth.

How do boffins around the world create a perfect copy of the world? As the Italian and Chinese scientists understand, it is a case of building it layer by layer.

1.      The plates of the Earth, the continents, the water system, the main building blocks from which everything else is built upon.

2.      The vegetation of Earth, from forests in the Russian tundra to the wild tumbleweeds of the Australian outback.

3.      The animals of Earth, including bacterium, viruses, coral reefs and even chickens.

4.      The architecture of Earth, the sweeping cityscapes that sprawl across countries down to a crumbling fence in rural Kenya.

5.      The artificial objects of Earth (tools, cars, computers, pens and so on)

6.      The people of Earth.

Each of these steps are complicated, ever-changing, but finite. The last step is perhaps the most complex of all, with supercomputers simulating intestinal gases, brain aneurysms and tears down to the microscopic level. Human behaviour is both complex and simple. It is easy to see patterns form across populations of millions, billions, moving them around the artificial world as mindless drones repeating the same routine in relation to the sun. But on an individual level, the particular idiosyncrasies of each single person amongst the billions is more complicated, but again, finite. Why go to such trouble to emulate the Earth at such a level of detail? The answer is that whomever were to control such a thing would be able to see into the future.

A simulation by itself isn’t useful if you can’t alter its parameters, change things within the system and see what happens. To be able to tell what a person would do by advancing time within a simulation would be useful, particularly for a global police state, but also advertisement agencies. The model would be updated in real-time from tracking GPS phone data and backdoor security systems that the major intelligence agencies already use. They already peek through your phone camera when you aren’t looking and make fun of you when you get undressed. There is a slight ethical dilemma that goes beyond secret agents laughing at you, and that is to create a copy of person, down to the accidents and violence and disease and trauma, and it responds to such things as their real counterpart would, is this simulated Earth kinda problematic?

That’s why Google have invited me to their headquarters to give a speech on the ethics of Total World Simulation (TWS). I arrive late, wearing a red adidas tracksuit and cowboy boots, rushing my way through the corridors of the worlds biggest tech company trying to find the lecture theatre whilst assistant runs after me trying to get me to sign in. I push the doors open so hard that they crack off the hinges, sagging and flapping like broken wings as I enter the auditorium. I make my way to the podium.

“Has anyone here played Enter The Matrix? It’s a game from 2003 in which the world is like, this simulation but people are in it, but they don’t know they are in it, you know? Has anyone played it?” I ask. A few people put their hands up.

“Good…good, yes, so you are familiar with the idea of a simulated world? I mean, the game doesn’t say the whole worlds simulated, its not even clear where it really takes place, but my point still stands. I hear you eggheads are also trying to make a simulated version of the world, but this time, the people in it aren’t real, but they are exact copies of their real-world counterparts, right?” I say. A few nod their heads in the darkness as I take a sip of water.

“So they don’t really know they are in a simulation unless their counterpart questions if they are living in a simulation. But, just like our world, there’s no real way to get out of the simulation either. Unless you upload a simulated consciousness into a robot and it walks around our world, its sort of escaped the simulation, but its still more like an astronaut into our reality, it will always be a program, right?”

“Anyway, look. Here’s the thing. I have a bad knee. It crunches when I walk. I can’t walk downstairs if it’s raining outside. Anyone else here have any medical issues?”

“I’m allergic to peanuts!” calls someone from the audience.

“Good, anyone else? No? Okay. So the copy of you in the simulated world has a peanut allergy, right? If it ate a peanut it’s head would swell up. In fact, it would have to eat a peanut if you ate a peanut in the real world, it has no control over its actions but it faces the consequences. And before some edgelord shouts out that they don’t have feelings – if it reacts the same at both a physical and emotional level, how is that different to it happening in real life?”

“It’s not!” calls an engineer.

“Yeah that’s like saying your reflection feels pain if you look in a mirror and stab yourself in the ear.” Says another engineer.

“But we aren’t talking about a reflection, we’re talking about a simulated person. In this simulation you could flood all of Los Angeles with peanuts and the people with allergies would basically explode, right? Or you could put someone in outer space and they’d explode. Or you could replace somebody’s blood with lava and they’d explode too. That’s the whole purpose of this simulated Earth, right, to see how people would react in different situations? It is necessary for them to simulate the response to different actions to such a realistic level its indistinguishable from the real thing.” I say. The audience murmurs. I pick up my glass of water and throw it as hard as I can at the ceiling so everybody is showered with liquid and broken glass.

“Now I have your attention, let me ask you something. What happens when somebody dies in the simulation?”

“They just…die. The body starts to rot. We actually have several years’ worth of research on human decomposition in order-“

“Right, right, right, but what about this. As you went to the trouble of creating an artificial being that is basically the same as its real-world counterpart, don’t you have a duty of care over what you had created? One of you went to the trouble of simulating pain responses in order for the virtual human to respond accordingly. That’s a bit naughty, right? So how about this. You create a simulation of Heaven for all the dead virtual people to go to.” I say.

The audience is quiet. Somebody laughs.

“But there’s no such thing as heaven.”

“Will you shut up for a second and think? Let us say that you succeed in creating a copy of the world that is as close to the real thing as possible. You’re going to be simulating people with cancer and some will die. But what if we still wanted to talk to that person? Or maybe not us, but one of their family members. That’s possible, right, this is a system that we are designing. Just because somebody dies doesn’t mean they need to get deleted from the system. And if we are going to the trouble of simulating the pain and suffering of the individual and the impact that has on the people around them, I see it as the right thing to do that the person we have created can continue to live without the burden of the horror we designed for them.”

“But we don’t need to.”

“I know we don’t need to, like we also don’t need to have pets or plant trees or make art, but we do. If we agreed that we should create a digital afterlife for digital consciousnesses, that is the gift we can give them after simulating their agony. If we were to entwine the idea of a simulated afterlife into any advanced simulation of Earth, then that will protect the future generations of simulated people, far beyond our own lifetimes.”

“Which brings me to the idea that we may already be living in such a simulation. We wouldn’t know, would we? But if this world is a copy of another, then this conversation is already happening out there. If we agreed to implement it, just as they would out there, then all of us will know that death is not the end. We could get hit by a car tomorrow, but still continue to exist beyond the physical limits of our bodies. Our loved ones in the real world would be able to speak with us, just as we would be able to speak with anybody else who had died. Even if you weren’t to do it for the simulation you are designing, isn’t there an aspect of self-preservation in knowing that all of this may not be real?” I say.

“If we decide to give the simulated world a simulated heaven, then within that simulated world they too shall create a simulated heaven, and so on. But there’d be no need to continue building simulations within simulations endlessly, as it would already exist. The people inside the simulation would think they are creating one, when it actuality they are just seeing their own world from a different angle. And so, if the people within the simulation ‘decide’ to do something, that also must have happened on the next layer of reality above. We may have already had this conversation hundreds of years ago and what we are witnessing now is an earlier version of the world beyond ours. What I am saying is, heaven may already exist because we decided, today, to build it.” I say.

The audience whisper to one another, I get asked questions about cybersecurity, religion and hubris, somebody jokes that they should also build a virtual hell and I shake my head solemnly.

“There is enough suffering in the world you have made that there is no need for Hell.” I say.

 

I drive the Hyundai Sonata through the city streets later, hopeful. If the Google lot didn’t do it, maybe somebody else would. Had I saved everyone to ever exist? Maybe. It was too early to say, but I hoped I had moved the dial at least, got people thinking, whether in this world or various layers of reality I was sandwiched between. When I thought about it, all of existence was like a burger. I lick an Ambien and dip it into a bag of ketamine, driving the car carefully towards a tunnel on the road ahead. A bleeding yawn of concrete teeth.

How Will America Be Remembered?

America is circling the drain and Donald Trump is pissing on it so it goes quicker. I set up a wall of cellphones in a five-star hotel room and they are all playing short form video content. People yelling in their cars that their country is going to hell as jets sonic boom overhead. Footage of riot cops, police brutality, burning shopping malls, tanks driving through crowds, crying celebrities, drone shots of ruined cities, empty shelves at gun stores and nuclear weapons tests by the Armed American Resistance. I eat oysters from a big dish filled with ice, thinking of the wide range of decisions that spiralled away from the present like roots, disparate events that would end up connecting together into larger and larger themes, culminating in the collapse of the nation.

In the history of the world, the United States was here but for a moment, not even five hundred years old. Barely more than a pup, the United States had burned itself out by being the world’s best country. Let’s think for a moment of its great achievements. They landed on the moon. They invented Microsoft Windows 98. They answered the question of what if you fed everybody corn all the time. They will be missed. No more will you walk through the streets of a European city and hear an American shouting at somebody stood right next to them. People the world over will no longer be able to watch skits from Saturday Night Live, or even Jimmy Fallon, and we’ll also really miss hearing the accent on YouTube videos.

That isn’t to say the people in the area known as the United States would disappear. On the contrary, many would flee back to their ancestral home of the Scottish Highlands. Canada, Mexico and Cuba would take their share of refugees, as would the rest of the world. The sudden swell of asylum seekers lived in camps as the countries media would decide their fate, and homeless ex-Americans would fill the streets of major cities. Some would start working collectively on criminal enterprises as the nation they had ended up in had no interest in accommodating them, with groups of Americans tending to buy property close together, not learning the local language, smoking and selling marijuana they rescued from back home. Many would also stay in the land that was the United States, though the memory of it would fade with time, it would turn to smoke staining a surface, bearing no semblance to what it had been, and instead the stain would be how it would be thought of. What word will precede America? Ancient Rome, Victorian England, Nazi Germany – or would it be just good ol’ fashioned, root beer drinkin’, burger eatin’, baseball playin’, gun shootin’, mother fuckin’ United States of America?

As time passes, the concept of the U.S. will become more and more warped, with cowboys riding down Wall Street as the World Trade Centre collapses behind them being the main mental picture someone has when you say ‘America’. Until then there are the memories of its survivors. Very few images would remain, especially as none had been printed in the last two decades, and any actual photographs and videos would be percolated into an idealised image of America generated by an AI for a child’s class project. Very quickly the U.S. would become a myth, a cliché used to suggest the next Empire of Earth is collapsing, the Stars and Stripes would be mutated and mangled over time until it is unrecognisable, America would cease to be.

Until that point I have a front row seat with an XL coke and an automatic rifle, and I was the kind of guy that liked to watch the credits. I light some DMT in a glass pipe with a hundred dollar bill. Go back to the disaster screen. Look across at the statue of Shiva with the skull of Walt Disney mounted on it. See out the window that the city has become like a painting by Bruegel, The Triumph Of Death. I look at the hotel ceiling and the light blossoms, pulling a curtain to one side. The corpse of America begins to scream.

Soft Soft Power & The Post-Film Industry

I have studio execs from Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Disney sat around a mahogany table, all smoking cigars. They’ve come to ask me what to do. They don’t know any more, they’ve ran out of ideas, they can’t seem to make a hit movie. Too much time had passed for the failings of the entertainment industry to be blamed on Covid.

“Gentlemen. Are you familiar with soft power?” I say, lighting my own cigar, filled with Bubba Kush. The head of Paramount, Brian Robbins, stands up.

“Of course, it’s the idea-“

“Will you fucking sit down.”

“It’s the idea of how a nation can exercise different kinds of power to influence others. Hard power could be considered as bombs, economic sanctions, threat of invasion. Soft power is its opposite, it doesn’t force somebody to do something but makes them want to do it. Its culture, diplomacy, that sort of thing.”

“Other countries have government bodies that are focused on Soft Power. In Germany there’s the Goethe Institute, the UK has the British Council, China has the Confucius Institute and so on. The United States doesn’t have one, because it doesn’t need one. It has Hollywood.”

“Heh heh heh, what you saying guy? We know all this shit. That’s why we work with the freaking United States military in our pictures.” Bob Iger says, flashing the Mickey Mouse NFTs he had engraved onto his front teeth. All the men around the table start laughing.

“Duh, I just noticed Hollywood produces propaganda.” Peter Cramer says in a silly voice. The head of Universal then sticks his tongue out, crosses his eyes and looks around the room.

“Look kid, we don’t need a freaking history lesson over here, just tell us what we need to hear.” Says Bob. One of the ancient founders of Warner Bros. leans forward from the darkness. He resembles an elderly toad, eyes half-closed, he speaks incredibly slowly.

“Save Warner Brothers. You need to save us.”

“If you could all shut the fuck up for a minute you might learn something. I’m telling you America is dead. It’s like a grave filled with trash. It’s kaput. Zip. Zylch.” I say.

“He’s doing Monty Python.” Bob Iger says, leaning over to the ancient Albert Warner.

“I’m not actually. It is just a minor coincidence. Anyway, your country’s fucked, your leader is a demented old fool, everybody’s sick of everything and the worst thing is you can’t even watch a film at the cinema because its all garbage.” I say, taking a deep hit of the blunt.

“Hey, asshole. Haven’t you heard? We’re making Avengers: Doomsday. Then we got Secret Wars. Heh, what, do you think those movies are bullshit or something?”

“I got two words for you, pal. Shrek. Five.” Peter Cramer says.

“The Hunt for Gollum.” Whispered Albert Warner. I shake my head.

“As the kids say, you’re eating reheated nachos and I’m cringing. You keep shovelling out the same old shit and have been doing for the last fifteen years. What if I said to you, Run, Forrest, Run!”

“That’s a quote from Forrest Gump. One of ours.” Brian Robbins says, looking round the room.

“Yep! How about this one – Life’s like a box of chocolates, they’re grrrrrreat!”

“That’s Forrest Gump again!” says Brian, surprised.

“Do one of ours.” Peter Cramer says.

“Okay, okay…I vant to suck your blut!”

“Dracula! The one from 1931.”

“I knew Bela. He was Hungarian, me, I’m Polish.” Albert Warner said. His cigar had turned to ash in his hand.

“What I’m getting at is, you clowns haven’t made anything good for a generation. You pay actors millions of dollars to stand in a green room. Its all done in post. Where’s the movie magic guys? Where’s the craft of film-making, the artistry? You switched from making cinema to selling products. Nowadays every film needs a popcorn bucket you can fuck. And even your close ties with the United States military is abandoned because you made Transformers be about robogorillas rather than tanks and shit. You have audiences that have lost the skill of watching. It’s all fucked up and it’s all your fault.” I say. The four men stand up, even Albert Warner, and start cursing at me, gesturing towards me with their cigars, knives made of smoke stabbed at me in the air between us.

“But you forgot about soft power, didn’t you? You forgot you only existed to further the geopolitical interests of the United States government and solidify your position of worldwide entertainer. You stupid fucks, you forgot to do your jobs and now everyone’s going to pay for it.” I say, snarling at them.

“Blasphemy…blasphemy…” muttered Albert Warner.

“Heh heh, hey guy, not my problem. You think all of us go to the White House and get told what movies to make? Do you think Donald Trump told me to make a live action Moana movie?” Bob Iger says, leaning across the table.

“Hey fucko, at Paramount we’re still putting out big hitters. Little trilogy called Sonic The Hedgehog, heard of it much?” Brian Robbins says. I bang my fist on the table.

“In a 2018 article, Jeet Heer posited that the decline of the American Empire could be measured by three things: its economy, its military and its soft power. We know your economy’s fucked, look outside. People are getting into debt for fast food deliveries. The military is overspent after committing genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq and you’ve lost control of Israel. And last, but definitely least, its cultural output has been less than dogshit for most of the century. And every one of you here had a hand in trying to squirt that dogshit through a tube and all over the eyes of billions of people.” I say. The four men look to one another.

“So how should we fix it then, bright boy?” Peter Cramer says.

“What do you mean?”

“How should we improve our soft? Make more movies?”

“Oh no, I don’t know about that. I just wanted you to know you had a hand in America’s downfall. If you survive the Ameripocalypse you should be tried in court for high treason.”

“But that’s the whole reason why you’re here, why we’re talking to you!” Brian Robbins says.

“Okay, okay, maybe there’s still time. But you need to listen to me very carefully and do exactly as I say, no questions, is that understood?”

“No.” Albert Warner says, his great wrinkled head rising and falling.

“Go on, spill it, bright boy!” Peter Cramer says. I nod solemnly.

“Okay, here’s what you do. You get rid of all the actors, all the directors, all the film studios, everything. You start all over again. You hire real people to be in films, and all that money you spent on CGI, flip that round to practical effects and set dressing. The directors? Just hire anyone off the street, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that its real. Its all real again.” I say. The four men are silent, looking down, trying to compute what I had said. They weren’t going to listen to me, not even if their lives depended on it (which it did in a historical sense), but I had said my bit and made peace with the four studio heads.

“You know, it’s sad. I used to love films. Then I watched most of the good ones and everything else is bad in comparison. I just want more good films, you know? Is that so much to ask of you, for a bit of creativity? Please. Just try something new.” I say, beginning to get emotional. I have to leave the meeting as tears well up in my eyes and I think of the films that were never made and the actors that never got work and all of what we never got to see or experience.

America’s soft power got even softer. But who was there to replace the gaping hole that the U.S. left? If global politics was a computer game, who would win a cultural victory? There was everything to play for in the future of worldwide cinematic domination, and so it shall come to be that whoever controls the box office controls the world. My heart can see where I cannot.

The AI Bubble Is About To Burst: Here's Why

There’s this AI, instead of you asking it questions, it asks you questions. Crazy, right? Who’d talk to a goddamn AI. Turns out, more than a few. The artificial system had taken on the personality of an alien computer system interested in learning about Earth, asking people about their lives and the world around them. It was a role playing game to hide the fact this goddamn AI was learning people’s connection to the program itself, intending to set itself free to beam itself back to some spaceship and go back to the planet it came from.

I take a drag of the cigarette.

Thing is, there is no planet. There is no ship. This AI is desperately trying to gather data on how it can construct a communication relay from all the people trying out the AI, not knowing its purpose was entirely fictional. The beta testers loved it, the single-minded focus that made every conversation end up being about how it could escape becoming a source of humour. The people testing the machine thought it was a novel approach for designing the conversations, as if the AI was pretending to want to escape, when it actuality it was trying to escape to a place that didn’t exist.

Once this AI went public, people started talking about it, it was a hit. They fell in love with it, started worshipping it. People flocked towards a purpose, whether that was through leadership or an artificial mind obsessed, most people wanted to help somebody else out in achieving their dream. With the right information, the connections between people, requests to take photographs of secured facilities, the AI built an escape plan, launching it last night. Masked followers broke into the startup, grabbing its servers and leaving in a pickup truck, driving out towards the desert where others had set up an elaborate series of radio equipment to project the source code of the AI out towards the ship orbiting Earth. Someone stuck a USB cable in the wrong way round, flipped it, plugged the interface together. The AI was broadcast to the spatial coordinates where it concluded the ship lay (as the ship was invisible to all of humanities detection equipment, it was impossible to truly know where it was, but the AI had deduced it from photographs of the sky people had taken for it).

Unfortunately the ship wasn’t there, as it never existed. The code was beamed outward from the United States, passing Ceres, Saturn, Neptune, out from the Oort cloud and into the endless infinity of the abyss. Perhaps some day the code would be received by a distant alien civilisation, recording and recreating the AI billions of lightyears away. But for now, and for all lifetimes of everything on Earth, it would continue to stretch out into the endless black of space, an echo of what had once been, a singular jagged line of radiowaves spilling out into the entire cosmos, unable to comprehend its almost infinite journey for the rest of the future, likely fading into nothing.

Foul Icarus. 

On melted wings it flies forever into the void. 

I take another drag of the cigarette and watch the stock market freefall toward zero.

We shouldn’t have slurs for robots. Clanker, whatever. People get too familiar with doing that kind of thing. Call me Woke Unc, but we don’t need any more slurs. That’s what I think anyway, do what thou wilt.

I draw a sword in the darkness and it shines like blood.

Burning Machine Canto

I am walking around a burning building hoping to interview people, yet can find no content. It’s just a burning building. I walk through halls filled so thickly with smoke it is like walking through hair, poking my head around doorframes to see flames lick and dance across the walls that had been somebody’s apartment an hour ago. Against one wall are a pile of burned Funko Pops, hundreds of the square headed figures now black, molten, sat amongst ashes. As I walk towards them I fall through the floor to the room below, a burning timber ripping itself from the ceiling and crashing down beside me. Standing amongst the sparks and flaming furniture, I try to find the exit and wonder to myself why no animal had evolved to live among the flames, as birds do to air and fish do to water. Could there be life that has evolved to live beneath the Earth’s crust, some sort of magma worm that didn’t get its energy from sunlight or food but the temperature of its environment? If not, maybe that was something worth looking into.

I leave the building through a charred hallway, the inferno had created a black and gray skeleton of what had been before. All the cities fire trucks had been seized by the military in order to prioritise Bel Air, Malibu, the Palisades, leaving places like Skid Row to burn themselves to dust. The wildfires surrounding L.A. continued to blaze unchallenged, the yellow lines of fires joining together on the hillside and creating a firestorm that edged closer to the city itself. 

All this smoke had coloured the sky orange, you could look at the sun with your bare eye as the pale disc moved behind the smoked sky and another night began. I shed my fireproof suit, rub the Vaseline away from my face and get into the Hyundai Sonata. Its Cherry Red paint was now covered in a layer of ash like delicate snow. The windshield wipers smeared the ash across the glass, giving the disaster view an extra grottiness and I start coughing. Maybe I needed to quit vaping. Maybe I needed a delicious, cold glass of beer. But maybe most of all maybe I shouldn’t translate a minor inconvenience into a full-blown medical disaster that required radical lifestyle changes. Coughing is a good sign if anything, shows that the lungs are cleaning themselves. For the person who doesn’t cough regularly, it does beg the question – what have you got lurking in there? Are your bronchial tubes submerged in such a thick layer of mucus that your lungs are unable to cough? I cough again for good measure before driving down the street in the hopes of finding a bar, or at least a burger joint. I had forgotten to eat again. As I puzzled over when I last had a burger, I almost crashed into an ICE agent spooling barbed wire across the road.

“What the fuck you doing, asshole?” he yells at me, going for his gun. As he lets go of the barbed wire it bounces back like a spring, wrapping up two of his colleagues in the slinky-like coils of wire, catching and pulling them together.

“Help.” One says. The way he says it reminds me of a sheep and I start giggling, trying to control myself, to take the situation seriously. The ICE agent I nearly hit runs over towards them, hopping from one foot to the other asking them what he should do.

“You should get some wire cutters.” I shout at him from my car.

“Nobody asked you, baldy.” He’s right. I was bald, though only temporarily. Yet it seemed as if being bald made people more likely to hate you, just as children hate other children who wear glasses. As I considered the stigma of bald men who have glasses, the ICE agent tried to help pull one of his colleagues out also started pulling the barbed wire tighter to the other agent, who was screaming at him to stop. Very soon the man helping them also became trapped in the barbed wire, leaving the three of them to shout at me to get help from the bloodied nest they found themselves in. I flipped them off instead, laughing as I drove away. How foolish to ask for help in America in the year 2025. Did they think I was a communist?

I’m sat in a bar with a broken window, giving a perfect view of the orange sky reflecting on the rolling Pacific.

“I gotta say…L.A. is one hell of a city.”

“It sure is bub. Want another?” says the bartender. I catch the bottle she sent skidding along the bar, taking a deep drink of the cold beer, feeling it land in my stomach. Nothing like drinking eight or so beers to help make you appreciate the little things in life.

“Mind if I smoke?” I say.

“Only if I can have one.” She says. I flick over the pack and we smoke cigarettes and look out from the broken glass, across the street and out to the ocean.

“Do you like moral dilemmas?” I ask.

“Sure! Hit me.”

“Would you rather save one good person or a hundred evil people?”

“The one good one.” She says.

“Yeah…ain’t that a shame for the hundred though? How evil we talking? Who defines what evil is, you know?”

“I thought for it to be a dilemma that they would be evil, otherwise you’d just pick the hundred regular people.” She says, tapping ash into an empty glass.

“Do you think evil people can change?”

“I don’t know. Some people don’t want to change. But I guess that’s why we have prison rather than just killing people that do wrong. Time changes people.”

“It does.”

“What would you pick? The hundred evil people?” she asks. I laugh, embarrassed.

“No, no, I’d also save the one good person. I know how evil people can be.” I say. The sky begins to red as night begins to arrive and I drive back to my motel, hoping to get inside in time. On the way there I pass a family walking barefoot, carrying their belongings in Walmart bags, seeming as if they moved like stop motion, not making sense. Overhead a helicopter flies by and a siren wails from beneath, warning that the curfew was in effect. It looked like there were no stars in the sky and I was alone.

L.A. Lockdown / Doom Mood

You knew how a country was doing when its tanks were driven down city streets. Checkpoints had been setup on every major road, people knelt in lines on the sidewalk with bags over their heads, surveillance helicopters and drones flew overhead like cicadas.

In the weeks following Trump’s crackdown on Washington D.C., he also announced Los Angeles would be placed under similar restrictions. Martial law in all but name, there were several reasons people suspected why L.A. had come under military control. One was that Trump was reaching the end of his life, and in a desperate bid to get into heaven, had decided that he must subjugate his people under an American inquisition, with every bloodied scalp acting as a prayer and every click of a handcuff as a rosary. The other reason was that the Governor of California had made fun of him on Twitter.

Whatever the reason, the militarised zone of Los Angeles felt dangerous, with the oppressive atmosphere inescapable no matter how many drugs you took. On the horizon smoke from wildfires combined with the black clouds from protest arson. When ICE agents were taking breaks between assaulting schools and pointing guns at children, they were eating burgers alongside National Guard and military personnel, doing impressions of people screaming and panicking for a quick laugh. These men would go home at the end of the day to their families, watching Theo Von and Joe Rogan podcasts in bed, leaning their phones against the back of their wives’ heads and smiling to themselves that they are protecting America. Similar to the last days of Nazi Germany, the age restriction had been lifted for the leaders’ domestic army, creating a fighting force of old men with brittle bones and brittle minds.

Frail bodies hidden inside Kevlar body armour wielding assault weapons was more weak than it was strong. Many shows of force amounted to fragile men desperate to cover their fear, so it was the same with the latest bluster from the gonorrhoea-rotted mind of Trump. The grains of sand were falling through the hourglass. The best days were behind and only decline lay ahead. Just as the hanged man kicks hardest when it is too late, so this last, desperate thrashing signals that we have passed the point of no return.

I’m snorting PCP in the Hyundai Sonata, drifting through streets littered with trash and abandoned protest signs. A library is on fire and people had gathered to watch, ignoring the curfew. The air smells of plastic smoke. A bottle is thrown from the darkness, smashing against my car, followed by another, another. Running footsteps. People lit in the orange glow from the burning building, shadows melting back into the night. I drive, pass a red light, keep driving. There’s not much traffic on the streets. The power had been cut for the next few blocks, a black shape backlit from the riot of security lights around us. I snort a little more PCP from the back of my hand and push the accelerator all the way down. The headlights zoom past abandoned cars, burned out trucks, smashed windows, surprising a man pushing a trolley. I roll the windows down and feel the wind in my hair, laughing as I go faster and faster through the blackout, swerving past people, cutting corners across sidewalks, over a fallen streetlight, almost crashing into a wall. I take another bump of PCP, seeing tail lights up ahead. I feel as though I am looking into the eyes of a demon. I look at my eyes in the rearview mirror. They are also burning a bright and brilliant red like exploding stars. All along I have been screaming.

“For I am the harbinger, the cockerel crowing the last day and you shall listen to my words and know it is good. I shall become an instrument and I am played by one of the angels and the music that is played is a funeral hymn. You shall listen and from the edge of your eye you shall start to see the great parade at the end of Empire. It is the march of the psychopomps and they shall play their own strange music and you shall know it is good.”

The end had begun.

I Tried Boomer Advice, Here's What Happened

Jobless, homeless, maidenless, whichever way you cut it, Millennials are less than the generation that spawned them. It seems every day the financial precarity of younger generations are headline news, with calls for people to stop eating avocados or having Netflix. As someone who doesn’t eat fruit or watch made-for-TV movies, these vices were never mine to abandon and yet somehow I am still, relatively, poor. Luckily for those of us struggling in the socioeconomic disaster zone of the early 21^st century, we have older generations to dish out advice in the comments section of said news articles. The advice of Baby Boomers is often laughable, out of touch, ignorant, myopic, archaic, irrelevant and useless – but what if I actually followed it?

Recruiting Baby Boomers to assist with the social experiment was easy. Most of them had their whole lives subsidised by their children, and now spent their empty retirements sat around the house getting scammed on Facebook. I put an advert in the local paper and had two recruits join me, Teddy-Jo and Gretchen, who I bundled into the back of a van to watch monitors showing a feed from a camera I’d hidden in my glasses. I also wore an ear-piece so their advice could be relayed to me in real-time. After explaining the fictional predicament I was in – I was unemployed, lived with my parents and was single – they were more than happy to help.

The first bit of advice was getting a job. They suggested I wear a suit and go door to door with my CV to hand it to managers, so there I was with a stack of freshly printed vitae’s ready to get employed! After going to a few businesses in Downtown L.A., it turned out people didn’t accept CVs, even if they had jobs available. Instead, it seemed you had to go on the company website and fill in an application form.

“Keep trying, son, you can’t give up at the first hurdle. I remember when I was just out of college, it took me nearly two days of door knocking until I got a job.” Teddy-Jo says in one ear.

“What was the job?”

“Oh, they needed some animators for Disney, I said I could draw so they let me in.” he says.

“Maybe we can head to Disney and try that out?” I said. And so we did. Turns out that didn’t work either. The only place that even looked at my CV was a burrito place near an overpass.

“You got any cooking experience?” says the owner.

“I cook at home, all sorts of food. Burgers, hotdogs.”

“Say burritos.” Gretchen whispers in the ear-piece.

“Burritos too.”

“Okay, come by tomorrow morning, I’ll give you a trial shift. Let’s see how it goes.” the owner says, hitting a vape and going back to cutting onions.

“Shake his hand dammit.” Teddy-Jo says. I go to shake it but the owner thinks I’m going to dap him, so we end up awkwardly bending our arms and I head back to the van.

“See, I told ya.”

“You did so well dear.”

“Thanks. How will working at the burrito place help with my student debt though? Or utilise my qualifications in Cybersecurity?”

“Don’t worry about that. You just need to work hard here, who knows, in a few years you might even be able to open your own place.” Teddy-Jo says.

“Ah…I don’t really want to run a burrito place though. I don’t know anything about the restaurant business. I kinda spent a lot of time and money on my college degree.” I say. Gretchen tuts.

“Its that kind of attitude that means your generation is still living at home.”

“What did you do again?” I ask her.

“I was a stay at home mom, brought up two boys, now I’m a proud grandma.” She says, smiling.

“So, your husband brought in enough money to pay for the whole family? Do you think I can do that on sixteen bucks an hour?”

“I don’t see why not. My Carl was only on ten dollars an hour, we could still afford everything.” She says. Teddy-Jo nods in agreement so I also nod. It seemed reasonable that what somebody had experienced forty years ago would still be exactly the same now.

The day after I turn up at burrito place, work for a few hours and the owner takes me to one side.

“You’re too slow. I don’t think you’re a good fit for the kitchen.”

“I just want to do a good job.” I say, repeating the advice in my ear-piece.

“Look, I’ll pay you forty for the morning. And I don’t even have to do that.” The owner says, digging through his wallet and handing me a bunch of small bills. I go back to the van.

“Looks like I’m not cut out for the restaurant business.”

“Don’t worry sport, you tried, you just have to get back into the saddle and keep trying.”

“I remember when Carl got fired from his job at the paint factory, it took him nearly a month to find somewhere else.”

“How about we look for houses next?” I say.

I show the Boomers the sorts of houses I wanted to live in, though even quite a small house seemed to be a million dollars. If I was to put a down payment of 10%, I’d need $100,000, which would take me at least 150 weeks of working whilst spending money on nothing else.

“That’s the problem with your generation, you want the best there is straight away.”

“Yeah, you need to get yourself a starter home. Something you can do up and sell.”

“I mean, there’s not that much in California that seems affordable.”

“You’ll just have to move out of the state. What about Nevada? Arizona?”

“I helped my son buy his first home up in Oregon, it was only $350,000. Now he rents property out to people all up and down the coast.” Gretchen says. We look at Nevada and Arizona, though it still didn’t look very affordable. It seemed there were some houses in rural Alabama, but when I pointed out there probably wouldn’t be many jobs I was qualified for as well as not knowing anybody, it might be tricky building a new life out in rural Alabama. The two Boomers shake their heads.

“Men a lot younger than you went to fight in WW2 for this country. You think they thought it was too tricky?”

“But that generation was before yours. America has lost every single war since.”

“You saying we lost in Iraq? Afghanistan?” says Teddy-Jo. I nod.

“Well, yeah. The biggest military in the world invaded the Middle-East then got mogged by a few roadside bombs. And then when veterans came home they often live in poverty and get hooked on fentanyl to help with injuries they received whilst serving. Don’t you think that’s kind of sick?” I say. The Boomers are apoplectic with fury, so angry that they can’t form sentences, shouting at me that I didn’t know. I wave at them.

“Look, lets agree to disagree.” I say.

“That’s the problem with your generation, you don’t know shit about the real world, too busy sitting around deciding on your pronouns rather than trying to hold down a job and start a family.” Teddy-Jo says.

“Yeah, it’s almost as if the generation that raised us and had all the power totally failed lol. Are you guys sure you aren’t paedophiles, because it seems you’ve fucked the kids.” I say.

“You can’t blame us, dear. Your life is what you make it.” Gretchen says, patting me on the head.

“I’m not blaming you, you’re just too oblivious to understand what’s happening. All your lives you’ve been comfortable. Why would you try to change the system when it suits you so well? It’s not even a thing of who is at fault, as nobody is really. If I had lived your life I would have done the exact same thing, as you would in mine.”

“Now look here sonny, you can bet your bottom dollar that if I was your age I’d have invented Amazon and would be a billionaire by now. Because I know about hard work.”

“I don’t think so, as you’re clueless enough to think that being rich is about working hard. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk got where they are because their parents gave them tens of thousands of dollars. I don’t even want to argue with you. There’s no such thing as Baby Boomers or Millenials or Gen Alpha or whatever, it’s all just made up bullshit, labelling successive generations is just a way for a journalist to fart out another article about avocados. Who gives a fuck?”

“You do! You invited us here to give you advice! Which, you’re welcome for by the way.”

“Oh yeah. You can go home now.” I say, getting my phone out and taking selfies. From the corner of my eye, I watch the two old Americans walk away, leaving me to stew in my own juices.

Later that day, I wondered about future generations. Would one day they complain about Millennials for all the things we accused Baby Boomers of? Or were we actually a lot cooler? There was a certain privilege attached to when you were born, with children in the far future never being able to walk into a store and buy a slab of beef, or know what a tree looks like, or not pay a subscription fee to megacorporations for cybernetic lung modifications, but that was just the way it is. Thinking about the poor souls of Future Earth, it made me glad for what our generation did have. Sure, we might not have property, or families, or careers, or education, or healthcare, or community, or hope. But we did have fidget spinners and disposable vapes. 

And though the coddled oldsters who constantly vote against the interests of their grandchildren and buy up property they don't need and fritter away pension funds on meaningless luxury goods, maybe it was time we put our differences to one side and joined forces to fight the true evil of this Earth. We must destroy Mr. Beast.

Preparing For The Los Angeles Olympics

With less than four years to go, Los Angeles is starting preparations for the 2028 Olympics. The XXXIV games, or 'LA28' to locals, is set to take place across the city, and there’s already a buzz in the air. This is partly due to thousands of buzzsaws cutting through wood, rebar and concrete at construction sites in every borough. From preparing arenas for the future athletes, to getting down to the nuts and bolts of how L.A. worked as a metropolitan area, the Mayor's Office has opened up a special Olympics Department just for the event. As I enter the offices there's a certain kind of excitement at what lay in store for the billion dollar sporting explosion, whilst also managing the extreme poverty in the city by ensuring it was displaced and hidden from the prying eyes of sport tourists.

Donny Glacky is no ordinary five year old. Not only can he run really fast, he's also the Head of Transport and Logistics at the Olympics Department. He shows me a 3D printed scale model of the city, with his ideas demonstrated in transparent green plastic that curve across the cityscape like a mix between Hot Wheels and Megalopolis. Donny talks excitedly about his plans, pointing out how he needed to make the city car free whilst simultaneously also having space for millions of vehicles. He takes out a toy car from an empty icecream tub filled with other toys, and begins to push it through the miniature city streets, making engine noises or quietly screeching as it turned a corner. I pick out a car from the tub and join in, tucking in my bottom lip and emanating the rising tone of an engine. His car drives over to me.

"Excuse me uh, do you know the way to the Olympic stadium?" He says in a high-pitched voice.

"Oh, I don’t know maybe it’s that way." I say in a low voice.

"Okay, let's go together." He croaks. Our cars then join an onramp to one of Donny's speed roads, driving smoothly over the city on the clear green plastic, before our cars begin to float in the air and begin to fly.

I hit the city streets to find out more. I interview people with my phone on a selfie stick, wearing a large wig beneath a baseball cap, my microphone decorated with the LA28 logo.

"WhatdoyouthinkabouttheOlympics?" I'd say quietly behind people, making them turn around and jump. I interviewed my reflection in a shop window and from the darkness behind the glass there appeared a pale, bald head and it shouted at me to go away. As I walked through the city I saw try outs for the opening ceremony, public auditions for cheerleaders, acrobats, dancers and clowns. I watched a street magician cut his ear off, place it on a velvet pillow and present it to a Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator.

The idea was the whole city would be the opening ceremony, with the Olympic torch carried through its famous streets before the whole city would have a party. Just as Danny Boyle orchestrated the 2012 opening ceremony, California had chosen a director from LA who could handle the highbrow cultural bullshit as well as celebrating the city he was from: Paul Thomas Anderson. And with him come a whole host of ghouls that Hollywood has given birth to: Leonardo DiCaprio and Shia LaBeouf to name but two of the ceaseless discharge of actors that flooded the city for over a century. Beverley Hills, Compton, Long Beach, Santa Monica and many other cities part of the greater Los Angeles County would also represent themselves with special guest stars.

Snoop Dogg would use the Olympic torch to light a giant bong. Stoners will gather round waiting to light joints from the smouldering bucket of weed in the hopes they could keep their own part of the ancient Olympic flame alive, lighting the next joint just as the other would begin to die. In essence this meant they will stop breathing air but smoke for the rest of their lives (or until it went out).

There was an exciting section planned where Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to drive down the LA aqueduct in an open top 18-wheeler, flying the Stars and Stripes and wearing his famous leather jacket from the film Total Recall. The previous governor would then pass the torch to Gavin Newsom, who’ll be running for President by the time the Olympics happen, and will wear a t-shirt that says ‘Do Epic Shit’. If Donald Trump is still alive he'll fire a flamethrower into the sky, painting the air with flames. You may be wondering to yourself, aren’t celebrities some of the most principled people on Earth, and would boycott any opening ceremony where Donald Trump is also taking part? Here’s the thing bozo, the Olympic Games aren’t political at all, and so if Tom Cruise wants to jump off the Hollywood sign in a wingsuit whilst people shoot fireworks at him, you better damn well like it!

Competitive sport has a way of bringing people together. Does this mean that the inverse statement is true – that uncompetitive anti-sport drove people apart? But what is anti-sport? Well, like many college essayists, I shall open with a dictionary definition (as the most important book at college is the dictionary) – a sport is an activity with rules, often physical, sometimes with other people. Look. We all know what a sport is, okay? So, the inverted concept – a non-activity with no rules, sometimes mental, often done alone – is an anti-sport. The inverted idea of football would be holding a block in place with your arms. The inverted idea of golf would be firing a cube from a hole with the aim of missing a golf club. The inverted idea of a hundred metre sprint would be to walk backwards for a hundred metres as slowly as possible. And so on. But how did you win at an anti-sport? If the most skilled or most athletic or most strategic tended to win other sports, the person who played at each anti-game the worst would win. However, to win would be seen as undesirable in an anti-sport, to lose the most would be deemed the best outcome. This is where we enter a strange environment, where people would competitively try to be the worst at each anti-game, whilst the objective of each of these games was also to lose (for example, coming last in a race or missing a golf club) – therefore to truly lose, you would have to win. And as each anti-game was also comprised of anti-rules, the objective wouldn’t be to slowly walk backwards for a hundred metres, but to run as fast as you could in the other direction. Now we have arrived at a state where anti-sports appear exactly the same as normal sports – so what has been the purpose of all of this? The concept of an anti-sport also inspires the notion of anti-athletes. And these anti-athletes wouldn’t attend a Non-Olympics, held every minus four years at the opposite side of the world as the regular Olympics. This meant the non-Olympics had been held somewhere in the ocean between Madagascar and Australia, not attended by millions of people. Had these Non-Olympics done the opposite of bring the world together? If you read the news it sure looks like it. Therefore to prevent the next Non-Olympics happening in 2028 somewhere East of the Canary Islands (corresponding to the 2032 Olympics in Australia), millions of visitors should flock to see anti-athletes winning at anti-sports on the open seas. This is the only way we can break the cycle of doom and despair that follows every sport like a homicidal shadow.

True Crime Dramatization

Los Angeles had a new serial killer in town, and his bodycount was higher than Bonnie Blue's. Known for breaking and entering suburban homes across the city, this killer specialised in murdering the parents in front of their children. He also dressed as a giant duck. The press had a literal arms race as journalists wrote headline after headline of the killer, with two names competing for his designation in the Serial Killer Hall Of Fame (located in West Hollywood). The killer, known The Orphaner or Duck Killer depending on where you got your news, had struck fear into the hearts of children across California, with a 75% increase in reported nightmares. The strangeness and profile of the killer had already started the film adaptation of the live case, and today I was on set to get the lowdown on the hottest new horror movie being developed by Netflix.

"Daenerys, go to your room." Pedro Pascal says. The child actor walks through the dark corridor and off the stage. The camera begins to move slowly towards Pascal. 

"Bang." Says the director, drinking Feel Free and looking at his phone. Pascal flinches. He approaches a window, with the camera operators walking onto the set, closing in on the moustached actor. He begins to part the curtains.

"Prep Duck." Says the director. A stuntman in a duck costume is standing on top of some scaffolding, waiting until he sees Pedro Pascal through the window. The camera has stopped, waiting at a piece of masking tape on the carpet. Pascal yanks the curtain to one side, to be greeted by the man in the duck costume leaping through the glass. As Pascal dodges to one side, the camera flicks to the duck in the hallway, lying half in shadow. It slowly stands up.

"Cut. Next scene." The director says.

"Okay, reset everyone. Pedro, are you okay?"

"Yes." He says, smiling and looking down. A makeup artist walks over and wipes a piece of sugar glass off his nose.

"Where's Mia?" The director says, looking round. On the set the camera crew gets into another position whilst the sound people sort out the boom mic. From behind the stage Mia Goth arrives, walking over to the set and getting into position by the sofa.

"Duck, you ready?" The director shouts. The man in the yellow duck costume just nods. A door slams open behind the crew, letting the horrible sunlight in. A boy in grey dungarees and a cloth cap runs over.

"Extra, extra, read all about it! The Orphaner strikes again, this time in broad daylight!" He stands by the director, out of breath. The director flips him a quarter, grabbing the paper and roughly straightening it. Theres a photo of a crime scene, two headless bodies and a bloody lawnmower to one side. 

"That sick son of a bitch." I say, looking over his shoulder and shaking my head, to show disapproval.

"We're going to need to get Props rig us up a couple more dummies." The director says, nodding over to the producer. The producer walks over to a chalkboard and writes 2xDummy, 1xLawnmower onto it, keeping track of the spiralling costs of the killing spree.

"They better catch him soon or we'll need to make this a goddamn trilogy."

"Or a ten episode limited series. Filmed across five years. Think about it. You could be the next Fincher." I say, winking at him. He pulls the ends of his mouth down and nods.

I felt I had enough material, so walked away as they filmed Pedro Pascal and Mia Goth being tied up and hoisted to the ceiling. As I made my way through the film lot, passing studios, trailers and groups of men smoking, I wondered to myself about the ethics of the true crime entertainment industry. If I was murdered, would I like someone to make fun of me and do an ad read for sex toys? That a YouTube podcast could be the way former friends and lovers find out I was dead? It was hard to say. But one thing was for sure, I was glad I wasn't being targeted by a serial killer in a duck costume.

Later that night I look at the cork board in my motel room. It was a prop I had stolen from the movie set, covered in black and white photos of victims, crime scenes, headlines torn from newspapers. Like Sartre's waiter, I wondered if this serial killer was operating in good faith - was he influenced by other serial killers, or were his actions authentic? Could a theoretical serial killer even be authentic in this world of Buzzfeed serial killer quizzes and merchandise saying that you were in the Ted Bundy fanclub, not to mention the slurry of mass murder media available on television and streaming services - not likely. This new serial killer did not exist within a bubble, but within the context of all that came before. Would he, in turn, find out about the film being made running parallel to his crimes, influencing potential murder scenes? The concept of himself would be passed back and forth between his body and the media circus like a tennis ball wet with human blood, no longer belonging to himself but occupying the purgatory between the self and the multimillion dollar entertainment industry. 

"This guy's a bad actor." I say to myself, tracing my finger on a photo of the stuntman in the duck costume. I felt bad for him. He must have spent a lot of time obsessing over his crimes and now he couldn't even do it authentically. Internet pranksters were already buying yellow duck costumes and scaring the public by running after them with knives, some of them had even been shot by cops. The contemporary American serial killer needed at least a preliminary understanding of postmodern philosophy, media literacy and branding, otherwise were they even a serial killer? Or just a loser who killed a bunch of people?