DREAD Reviews 4
Dad Reads and Examines Authors while Distracted
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I may be the king’s torturer but that doesn’t mean I automatically enjoy my job. Some of my victims appreciate the time they spend with me and I value this - no, I cling to it. “Whip me again!” you say, and: “Further! Stretch until I don’t remember having tendons!” You rare individuals keep me coming back day after day. If it weren’t for you, I’d feel bad, and I don’t think I could stay motivated through all the complaints and criticism I get from the other prisoners. Without you I’d be losing sleep at night and have quit years ago. Some of you are sadomasochists but some of you are just positive, kind, and caring people. Either way: Thank you. If not for you, my wife and two young children couldn’t enjoy ice cream on the weekends.
Oh, and here’s a hefty list of things I liked and want to share with you:
Graeme McAllister waxes wise about the conservation of energy as it relates to one form of nonsense transforming into something or other. It’s all very interesting, but what about entropy, the second law of thermodynamics? There can be no originality past the big bang(s?), and I bet even those explosive geneses copied the idea of blowing up from something else. As creative energies and ideas transfer from one mind to another they necessarily get worse, and worse, and worse, it’s a simple law of the universe. The first story ever told must have been amazing, just imagine! But oh well, you missed it. All you can do now is wait trillions of years with naught but a guarantee that tomorrow’s fiction will be worse than yesterday’s, until one day, finally, we are left with nothing but collapsed black marvel holes and brown disney dwarfs. A few quadrillion years after that only the white noise of TV static will remain. You might think: “Peace and silence at last! I could get used to this.” But then they’ll find a way to reboot that, too:
Sir A-bard is a passionate romantic pragmatic and quick on his feet and pining for his e-girl but when he loses this joust he’s all like “My horse lagging lol” then the black knight gloats “haha I win hashtag 1337” this gets under A-bard’s skin so he PM’s that fool “OMG R U HACKING?” and the black knight’s all like “No lol” so A-Bard is all like “imma come 2 ur house and kick ur ass IRL what do u think” and the black knight is like “Lol k whatev != scared” and the e-girl’s dad who is also game master takes a brief break from his latest crypto scam to tell A-bard “lol u shameful, black knight submitted a harassment ticket, grind some faction b4 u get banned” but then later black knight doxxes dad’s daughter the e-girl and dad’s pinging the minimap shouting in all caps “HLEP” and A-bard may not like dad but he’s not gonna just sit around simping you see so he joins the LFG autoqueue but no one joins except his complete scrub of a squire but they hit the instance dungeons “Chivalry?” squire asks “lol noob” A-bard tells him “crouch for stealth mode” and the scrub squire facerolls his keyboard to find this button so they pass their stealth checks and roflstomp a couple mooks scrub helps sure but A-bard carries the group then black knight uses his hostage perk on the low level scrub squire and says “Gotcha” but then releases him anyway for some reason maybe a misclick and he and a level 60 merc that suddenly spawns and one-shots A-bard and the scrub and black knight does his contemptible villain speech “Haha I got so rich from gold farming!” this throws A-bard into a rage and A-bard slams his pally group revive and scrub squire take their hands off their mice to double mash all their abilities and ults until black knight and the high-level merc hit -1 HP and then scrub and A-bard loot their sorry asses “Quest item get!” A-bard says finding a key and frees e-girl who is all like “UWU” then they fast travel back where dad’s all happy and A-bard asks for e-girl’s hand in marriage but the queen is all like “No!” but dad and A-bard are leet gamers and she’s just an NPC and A-bard’s faction rate is too high so they get married thanks for reading the end:
This guy thought he was so smart and found the perfect alibi. Just go and get possessed by a demon, and nothing you do from there on could possibly be your fault! What he didn’t plan on was the demon’s using his own body and handwriting to frame him for the murder! This jerk-demon employed no subtlety at all, leaving clues left and right, even writing notes about one woman’s schedule (and probably scrawling things like “Imma kill her” in the margins). Drat! The perfect crime it was not. And he can’t fool me, his story was almost convincing, but I suspect I know what the handcuffing to the bedpost was really about. Just be honest next time, no one is going to judge you for a little possession-with-benefits:
Eye don’t know what you expected, but this isn’t a story about a black eye going to school. Once eye started reading it, irisilized it’s really about two women seeing eye-to-eye. Not even our polarizagonist’s husband could see this, isn’t that eyeronic? One is a little sheye, but the other encorneages her to stay optometristic, isn’t that eyedeal? Did you know snake people drink coffee? I had no eye-dea! Pop some cornea in the meyecrowave, frame your fitting in a couch, and enjoy the spectacles, though be warned, the ending may be closer than it appears:
I don’t want to talk about privilege in exactly the same way Max does. Instead I want to talk about how funny it is when a writer accidentally exposes the biggest mistake of many a wannabe warlord and newbie tyrant: don’t ever dare try being the best at what you do. Make like Putin and don’t be early to the bid for power - hide in a box somewhere until the bullets stop flying. Then you can creep out carefully and be the guy who found the suitcase of $100 million in cash meant to buy food for the starving people of St. Petersburg and use it to take over the government. Without getting too deep into it, many a historian will agree that the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev were middle-tier managers at best. After Stalin died all the other players rushed to imprison (and layer kill) his spymaster Beria - the real genius - only two months later. When asked who they were most afraid of, all chanted “Beria!” ‘cause that murderer and serial rapist was better at looting the country than any of them could dream of. Even Stalin grew to fear Beria, literally writing to his spies - “Send me everything this asshole writes down!” High praise from the guy who turned state terror into an art form, huh? Stalin had his Lavrentiy Beria. Hitler had his Reinhard Heydrich. Mao Zedong had his Kang Shen. And Lenin had the best accomplice of them all - the full support Germany’s Kaiser during WWI! If you have designs on conquering a nation from the inside, let this be a warning to you - come the time of troubles, beware the merciless unifying strength of those from the second tier, especially if you’re in the politburo. This little piece of wisdom may come in handy in a few other areas of life, too - like being the hottest girl in an all-female American football match or trying to win a survivor reality show. OK, back to privilege:
Steve York, if that’s even your real name. Have you even been to the Big Apple? Do you even know where the KitKat bar comes from? You think you’re wearing a crown of laurels on your head? Who put you in charge, and what the hell do you know? Maybe Donald Trump learned the Gulf of America’s demonic true name, did you ever consider this? Did you know there’s two Americas, and the gulf is between both of them? When the Orange Man draws pentagrams to unleash prehistoric water demons on America’s many enemies, what will you do then? Where are you gonna go? Why am I being so hostile? Anyway, you bet your butt renaming things doesn’t always go to plan:
You think your dating life is miserable? Try dating people from the past. On the one hand you can be an utter kleptomaniac and never return any of your exes’ knives, hats, daggers, treasure maps, pocket watches… wait, all my exes did this anyway! You also don’t have to worry too much about stalkers gloming onto your shirt trying to seep their creepy feels through the seams - not unless they have the patience to wait outside your school or workplace for a couple centuries. But on the other hand, what happens when you finally meet prince charming only to zap forward again with nothing but his stinky jacket you stole? You better hope you have the wits and stamina to go get ten post doctorates in quantum physics and astrology so you can build a time machine that opens a wormhole that - oh wait, that didn’t work, instead we’re saved by that old sappy and nerdy “I slipped a letter in your pocket” trick! If we just cry really hard everything works out! All you sometimes creepy, sometimes lovely, but always awkward romantic-at-hearts - you just keep writing those love notes to the one you cherish. You never know when you’ll be helping someone out of a time loop:
AI prompts bring imaginary friends to a whole new level. Is it creepy or heartwarming? An existential threat or the promise of a brighter future? I’m definitely going to try this, and I may smile and nod along as I chat with my virtual avatars. But my elbow will be resting on the stock of a loaded shotgun:
“This is what an e-zine 40 years too late to be relevant looks like. Go on, read it. I fucking dare you.” - The Bard’s words, not mine. He probably should have said 30 years too late, as most of this stuff is late 80s, but what do I know, I was a foreign capitalist living in a communist country in ‘89. But never mind that, I mostly am linking this because - excuse my french - HOLY FUCK, what a long article to slap down as your virgin post to substack. I strongly suspect The Bard did literally everything there was to do on the internet in 1988, maybe 1989, and said to himself: “Well that’s a wrap,” before flicking the IBM i386’s off switch with a satisfied sigh and leaving his room to get some sun. Fast forward forty (thirty) years later, and all this pressure built up in him - he knew what the internet was in the back of his mind, that it still existed out there, and that it had moved on from “rotating gifs” and slow-loading grey strips of titty pics (and endless pet stories, too, the bane of my existence even then), and he was missing every second of it. But he held back, decade after decade after decade, doing a very good job preserving the internet-that-was as a time capsule locked away in his mind alone. Until one day - SPLAT! He couldn’t hold it anymore. The year of ‘89 exploded out of him and after two furious stimulant-packed all-nighters, he wrote this down and posted it without hesitation. My favorite part of this article is the end where he invites you to call him dumb - it should be no surprise to my readers I find this kind of notion endearing (I’m accepting applications for the position of Call Derek Dumb Once Per Day, its an unpaid internship). I did not partake in this name-calling invitation personally, because while my first impression makes me think of many things to call The Bard, dumb is not one of them. But don’t let me stop you from chiming in if you want:
This whole time you’ve been worried about AI stealing your job and exterminating you, and meanwhile this dude’s ordinary biological virus became self aware and drove him insane. Now that it’s done stealing his skills and memories it can embark upon a quest to destroy the human race, or at least give us the hardest acid trip of our lives:
Aunties with monster issues seek out a monster with auntie issues to solve their monster with auntie issues problem. The monster with auntie issues hunts down the monsters with auntie issues because it’s too late to teach them what auntie should have taught them before they were monsters. Also he might look kinda like Dick Tracy:
I regret to inform you that Pat Johnston was ground zero for the nanobot plague that wiped out humanity. He has died. Try not to touch his AI. Hold your breath for six weeks whenever opening social media. The technovirus transmits from necrotic tissue via gimmick and absurdity. Go hug your loved ones, you are already dead too, this is not a test:
Katherine’s rant is entertaining. But to increase its entertainment value even more, before reading it, select one of the following scenarios (these are just suggestions, you should totally make up your own):
You are potentially dying of indigestion and race into a public restroom. Katherine’s rant has been painstakingly stenciled into the bathroom stall, filling at least two or three panels in scratchy yet still legible text. You could probably read it in two or three minutes, but the text is small, you’re in pain, and you have to lean a bit to see the last column in the dim restroom lighting. Good thing you are a captive audience for the next 15 minutes.
You open your high school locker and folded pages of notebook paper containing Katherine’s hefty rant fall out, delivered to you by an anonymous classmate who has a crush on you.
You woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep, so you drive to work and clock in an hour early. Katherine’s rant has been converted to a memo format and a freshly stapled copy of it waits on every employee’s desk.
Katherine’s rant has been pinned to your door under bent and rusty nails. Someone thought you specifically needed to read this and made quick and furious job of hammering it to your house to avoid the cops your neighbors called.
My top spot (deservedly at the bottom this time) goes to this story about a dumb guy who wishes he was dumber. He’s ugly enough to hate his life, but not so ugly as to make suicide the obvious course of action. With downhill the only path forward, he embarks on a fruitless quest to force the issue: get dumb and dumber, and maybe the pain will go away. Unlike Jim Carrey, though, he lacks the charisma to maintain an honest sidekick as not even his bestie will kill him. What kind of friendship is that? The ugly kind:
I have three more authors who I wish to talk about but - oh, wait, a wormhole just popped open and - oh my! Look, my own post from yesterday traveled 16 light years just to say hello. Well, I can’t just keep it waiting after such an arduous journey, can I? The Matrix meets 2001: A Space Odyssey, except Neo has boobs and a mean streak and HAL is a friendly tabletop game master:
Deupawn: Chains of a Demigod (Part 1)
I hope you like reading this as much as I did writing it. I freaking loved creating this.
Thanks for reading issue four of DREAD. My inbox is FULL of stuff, and DREAD 5 already has a couple entries, so you’ll be hearing again from me soon.
Until next time!
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I am absolutely dying 😂
I read the review and honestly, yeah. Pretty much sums it up 😂
Thank you for reading and taking the time to review! I appreciate the publicity!
Appreciate it man. That’s a wild direction I didn’t see but I’m glad you liked it hahahaha