DREAD Reviews 57 - The Bloatening
Dad Reads and Examines Authors while Distracted
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DREAD Reviews Presents
THE BLOATENING
In a world… where Substack newsletters were once polite little group chats…
One man reduced the author count… and unleashed the word count.
Eleven thousand, four hundred seventy-six words. Then fifteen thousand. Then thirty thousand. Then FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND words of increasingly deranged rants, roasts, and cultish behavior.
You laughed at the early issues. You survived the middle issues.
Now… you will DREAD the Chart.
(dramatic zoom on the 53,551-word bar)
RATED R FOR RUN-ON SENTENCES
I couldn’t afford a professionally made trailer. But does anything ever stop me?
You don’t need me to answer that.
Dim the lights, grab your popcorn and thesaurus, and have a seat. Here are the deleted scenes that explain exactly how I went from “fifteen frantic poets shouting into the void” to “eight exhausted serialists who go days without a paragraph break.”
SCENE 1 – EXT. ISSUES 1-5 – DAY
A cheerful kindergarten classroom.
Fifteen tiny authors bounce off the chairs and walls like ping-pong balls.
The word-count bar looms outside the window, a creepy if somewhat adorable turquoise stump of 11,476 words.
VOICEOVER (me, but with Vegas Pro FX reverb):
“Look at them. So young. So many. So… concise.”
CUT TO: Me, Issue 1, sweating over a single review, whispering, “If I just say fifteen funny things about fifteen different Substackers, nobody will notice I have nothing original to add.”
Bar’s silhouette grows three pixels in height to stock audio of Moon Landing cheers.
SCENE 2 – INT. ISSUES 6-15 – TWILIGHT
The classroom is still crowded, but now the kids have aged and discovered Red Bull. Two bars sit in the corners; they’re almost identical: 15,059 and 15,274.
The voiceover gets a little husky.
VOICEOVER: “They thought they could stay small forever. They were wrong.”
One author raises a hand: “Hey, what if we all wrote about bats and baseballs?”
Room full of juvenile sniggering.
The bar inches up like a thermometer in the glare of a bright sun.
Scene of me sweating, nodding encouragingly, covertly googling:
“How many words is too many?”
SCENE 3 – THE INCITING INCIDENT – ISSUE 25 – NIGHT
Thunder cracks. Lightning illuminates the note box in the corner of the chart:
Issue 25: Introduced permanent guest review slot.
Alarming, stone-like cracks creep from the corners of the box.
The author number drops from 15 to 10, pulsing blood-red with each tick like a horror-movie body count.
The guest reviewer (a smug and shadowy silhouette in the back row) leans forward, cracks their knuckles, and says the four most dangerous words in Substack history:
“ROOM TO BREATHE, HUH?”
The bar leaps from 30,717 to 33,658 in a single bound to the sound of crying women.
Then it rises even faster to 39,476.
VOICEOVER: “The guest slot wasn’t a guest. It was the Trojan horse of verbosity.”
SAME VOICE ACTOR WITH DIFFERENT FX: “Suddenly the remaining writers had SPACE.”
“And space, my friends, is where THEY live.”
SCENE 4 – MONTAGE OF TERROR – ISSUES 26-40
Rapid cut sequence:
- The word-count bars swell and fall off like ticks engorged with blood.
- Authors per issue dropping to 9… then 8… each time the bar shoots higher.
- Me, alone at 3 a.m., typing: “And that’s why I wrote a 2,400 word manifesto in response to this 400-word essay on sourdough starters.”
- The chart bars blow up to 51,544, then 53,551. The bars grow fanged mouths and cackle monstrously.
Brief darkness. Then a spotlight flickers on like the sun, illuminating the 41-45 bar. It towers like a skyscraper over a sea of screaming, oppressed faces.
The stars realign, a written message in the heavens:
“READERS HAVE 47 MINUTES OF FREE TIME LEFT BEFORE THE UNIVERSE ENDS.”
Somewhere in the distance, a giant Substack bell rises, engulfing the horizon like an alien mothership, casting a city-sized shadow. It “DINGS”, its powerful reverberation plunging all creation into hellfire.
CUT TO: Me whispering,
“Just one more piece of unhinged praise for this middle-aged lady’s dating advice column…”
SCENE 5 – THE FALSE RESPITE – ISSUES 51-55 – DAWN
The final bar sags to 46,660. Not because of restraint, but because the monster inhales before the mortal bite. The note box helpfully explains the new normal: 8 authors per issue. Stock footage of bodies floating down a river. Theatrically shivering extras huddle in the corner of a basement like a B-rated slasher flick. One of them cuts himself with a packet of ketchup, leaking superimposed prose added with a text editor.
CUT TO: Me in a dark room, flashlight shining under my chin.
“I did it. I created the dad bod version of a newsletter.”
DREADFUL MUSICAL STING
I turn slowly. I look directly into camera.
“It is too late for me. Save yourself.”
The light goes out.
VOICEOVER OF A TERRIFIED WOMAN CONFESSING HER DEEPEST FEAR:
“He’s going to write more about less…”
DARKNESS. THEN BLURRY, BLOODY DECAPITATION JUMPSCARE (It’s ketchup again and a pre-ripped teddy bear)
The entire chart fills the screen. The bars pulse to a heartbeat sound. Throbbing, rising bars fade in and out through billowing fog.
VOICEOVER: “Did I just write a 5,000-word love letter to someone’s Tuesday morning dispatch?”
“Yes. Yes I did.”
“And I’ll do it again.”
(TRAILER ENDS WITH A CRASHING MUSICAL STING, A RED TINT, AND A HAUNTING SCREAM).
Transitopia — Because One Method of Travel is For Cowards
Jim’s got a great point about why his capital ships use clean industrial jump drives while the scrappy little shuttles stay docked until the big boys do the heavy lifting. It’s smart. Layered. BattleTech-Kearny-Fuchida energy. I respect it. DREAD Reviews loves this. The man gets how fleets actually feel.
But it could be so much more. Absurdly more. He’s right — we don’t want magic taxis like in Star Wars. That’s banal. It takes the thrill out of space exploration. We also don’t want sleeper ships — who wants to count how many great-great-great-grandfathers it takes to build a colony around Alpha Centauri? No one’s going down that rabbit hole without some mighty justification.
No. What sci-fi lovers really want is believable, high-stakes technical complexity.
Enter my brand-new Transitopia universe, inspired by Jim Keen’s article right this second (don’t email your multimillion-dollar book advances just yet). In Transitopia, every single jaunt from Point A to Point B must chain every sci-fi travel technique ever conceived, in strict sequential order — or the Progenitors’ ancient quantum ledgers will trigger an intentional nano-apocalypse and wipe out all sentient life (it’s the only way to prevent the collapse of the universe).
Skip one step and you invite demon invasions from alternate dimensions, collapse subspace into confetti, or accidentally unwrap a black hole at the nearest inhabited world. The full fusion is mandatory. It is also the best possible way to write sci-fi.
Jim’s jump-drive-plus-docked-vessels setup is brilliant because it layers some complexity, allowing room for political drama, gritty frontier exploration, semi-independent colonization, and other forms of narrative tension. The Transitopia chain simply takes that instinct and detonates it.
You stand on the departure platform at 14:37 Galactic Standard. The clerk stamps Form 47-B. Chemical rockets ignite first, rattling the entire capital ship like a hungover freight train. The docked smaller vessels quiver in sympathy.
This stage saves us several years, because stage two — ion thrusters — are infamous for their low acceleration. Their courteous blue noble-bright whisper takes over as we jettison the heavy burbling retrorockets. We now nudge the fleet forward at the pace of continental drift, and a third of the crew goes into cryosleep.
Solar sails unfurl next. The capital ship unwraps like a flower into a glittering cathedral while little runner crews crawl over it, protecting the photon currents from micrometeor damage. Meanwhile, Bussard ramjets scoop interstellar hydrogen, their electromagnetic nets humming like vacuum cleaners and refilling tanks that once held liquid fuel.
Next, the antimatter torches flare crimson while the safety officer reads the mandatory annihilation haiku. These are installed at the head of the ship — because at the rear we have Orion-class nuclear pulse bombs detonating against the giant pusher plate. Each blast comes with a cheerful AI announcement: “Thank you for choosing peaceful propulsion.” The smaller vessels are overengineered for this part, mostly, rattling in their docks like terriers in cages.
We’re almost relativistic now. Coasting begins. Time dilates. Everyone sighs, signs another waiver, and the last few crew members slip into cryogenic suspension so no one has to watch the universe crawl past at 0.99c. This is when we finally activate the Alcubierre warp bubble. Space squeezes ahead, stretches behind; reality looks like a taffy puller. The Alcubierre bubble is the only way to crack into hyperspace — which is where we spend the least time but travel the greatest distance. Hyperspace is finicky and prone to tearing realspace apart in an irreversible way, so we do it in cautious, tiny jumps, far away from inhabited space. The capital ship slips sideways into the dimension and emerges backwards. Why? Tradition.
Hyperspace is how we reach the rare, naturally occurring wormholes. Every galaxy has a few dozen of these, but not all are stable. The big magic space portal yawns open, brilliant — like the start of a Bob Ross painting right before he ruins it with his first happy little tree.
At the other end of the wormhole is the stargate hub. They spin up in invitation, ancient rings created by some ancient civilization that disappeared without a trace and we have no idea how they work. Perfectly safe to use and not ominous at all, just don’t think too hard about the Egyptian hieroglyphs and you’ll be fine.
Space-folding origami ensues, crumpling the entire formation into a geometric punchline before snapping it back open light-years away — straight into the quantum teleporters. Most trips have multiple stops, but this one mercifully has only one. Space is a big and scary place full of warp storms from which trillions of evil space demons might pour forth at any moment. We can’t let even one onto the ship; they’d light candles, paint ritual pentagrams on the hull, and invite their cannibalistic brethren. That would be the ignition point for the end of all life as we know it. It’ll inevitably happen, but we’ll avoid the apocalypse today. Probably.
We probably bypass that nonsense by disassembling every atom in the vessel to the sound of a polite ding. Everyone dies instantly and painlessly at Point A; your doppelgangers are reassembled at Point B. An optional mind-wipe is available to prevent any disturbing “Ship of Theseus” questions. The mind-wipes are made easier by the digital consciousness upload phase, which transfers the crew into a simulated lounge so their physical bodies can take a nap. If your body gets damaged, no worries — we’ll keep you entertained on the Infinity Circuit, which is definitely not soulless purgatory. If it’s true that people on the Infinity Circuit never sleep, only scream, then hopefully a million years from now some nice altruist will turn you into a gemstone they can install into an Eldar war machine or something. As everyone knows, senseless murder is more fun than purgatory.
While your digital self argues with yesterday’s time-dilated twin over who owes whom lunch, the generation-ship legacy crews — descendants of the original builders of the magnetic relay tubes who’ve never been told their homeworlds are livable again — politely reorient their dizzyingly networked accelerators to get you to the next waypoint (often with a precisely mag-launched free hydroponic tomato as a housewarming gift. The magnetic relay people are great like that. Don’t spoil the fun by telling them the truth).
The magnetic relays don’t get you all the way there, of course. Thankfully your ship is equipped with an inertialess gravity drive that makes it massless. It’s ridiculously easy to reorient on the fly, but usage must remain limited for reasons no one now remembers; it’s all in the Accords and you must follow them. The fleet now glides like pure thought — no inertia, no nausea, just the faint sensation that physics will matter again at some future point, so don’t get too comfortable or you’ll be asleep for the life-or-death “assume the position and brace” alert.
Tachyon beacons ping the fleet from all directions, politely informing your destination that you have somehow already arrived — so no one scans the area and creates a time paradox. This is why we also maintain a group of psionics (sometimes called a choir) who mentally broadcast at galactic distances: “Please close your eyes, hurry!” The leader must have iron discipline and NEVER think about purple elephants, or the whole fleet will veer into a parallel universe where literally anything could happen, usually bad things. At best you’ll have to wear underwear on your head or your organs will operate in reverse.
If you survive the psionic portion, you follow the nav-buoys through the lightning nebula to the Mass Effect relays. A keen observer will say “this feels a lot like the gravitic drive,” but it isn’t, because we say so. The capital ship gets slingshotted through artificial corridors built by long-extinct precursors who clearly loved rollercoasters. And hopefully this technology doesn’t result in us getting “indoctrinated” by the galactic people-eating machines. The less you know about it, the safer you are.
Finally — and I hope your civilization has the budget for this — zero-point taps deep in the hull draw free energy from the vacuum itself. The engines hum with the smug satisfaction of being powered by something that should not exist, yet definitely does, and certainly nothing bad could ever come of it.
Done. You arrive at Point B exactly on schedule! Several generations later, mildly irradiated, wildly mutated, and struggling with the uncanny feeling that this is not “your” universe — yet you’ve somehow been here before.
Only now is the use of the jump drive permitted — for the return trip. But since you’ve come all this way, you might as well undock all the smaller workhorse vessels exactly as Jim would sketch them.
Hopefully one of the nearby planets is made of latinum or diamonds or something, because damn, this ████ is expensive.
The Imaginal Interval - Poetry, Art, Journeys
Police Escort
Perps bolt, dispatch shrills. Sky stripped of shielding clouds. Searchlight chases shade from malls Thieving faces lurk in crowds. Bulletin stoked, felony prime. Headlights swarm lawless mess. Inspection checkpoint, scanner chime, Cavity search. Comply! Undress! Police escort in cuffed formation Sergeant chevron, captain silver, Screeching faster, pursuit conditions. Department taser, bladder quiver. Turn, swerve, shred, then drive, Peeling tires, road-spike shapes, Warrants recited, dead or alive Zip ties joined, thwarted escapes. Red and blue lights crown the summer, Signal midnight shoplifter, Hounded fields, a hunter's thunder. Helicopters search and whirr. Blaring sirens sound the nightmare, Enforcers called to order. Nesting narcs lurk in lairs Documenting feds stare, abhor.
A Perfectly Cromulent Software Engineer
How to Find at Least One Woman to Ask Out Before You Die Alone
Nav dropped a public service announcement last week that is so perfectly cromulent it deserves its own DREAD Review. The man gave us Step 1: Find a woman. He listed gyms, cafes, D&D campaigns, and IRC (the cheat code). Step 2 remains TBD, an honest cliffhanger and, despite being married with children, I still feel like a nervous virgin at heart and don’t really have answers for what to do.
But, I have done a few things, seen a few things, and I’ll never leave a brother hanging. So here is the extended “director’s cut” of places you can hopefully locate a woman in 2026. Read this first, then read Nav’s article on how to ask her out.
Online Dating Apps
Quit your job. Stop studying. Make finding a match your full-time work. You must spend 24/7/365.25 signing up for every single dating site. As a male, you must swipe right/match literally everything — including the crazies, the uglies, the catfishes, even the men who accidentally forgot to check the box “interested in women.” Hard work is the only way you’ll find the one single female/female-adjacent person who found the internet and is taking it as seriously as you. Press hard for a physical meeting as quickly as possible because there’s only so much time before you go into irreversible debt and start selling blood plasma to keep all the premium subscriptions alive.
Animal Shelters
Women might not love you, but they love dogs and/or cats. Take advantage of this and get in proximity to true love. Approach with a sad-eyed rescue in your arms — instant common ground! Just be careful here, you might get sweet-talked into adopting your seventh three-legged Chihuahua before you get a single girl’s number.
Goodwill
You’d be surprised. Sometimes there’s a quality woman turned in only slightly used. Just check the tags. If it says “gently worn” and she still has both sleeves, you’ve already scored big.
Therapy Waiting Rooms
If we’re being honest, and we are, a woman would have to be crazy to get hitched to you. Unfortunately for women, but fortunately for you, many women are crazy, and lots of them congregate in these waiting rooms. Come up with some good icebreakers like “Same guy as last week?” It works 60% of the time, every time. Bonus: you already know she’s working on herself.
Divorce Court
They’re a little scarier than your average prospects, but freshly single women with revenge energy and newly divided assets are in abundance here. Use sheer audacity and harness the chaotic vibe here. It’s worth it when conversation starters write themselves: “So… how’d the alimony hearing go?” “Need to get something out of your system?” High risk, high reward.
Junkyards
Sometimes you find a woman here who is starving, dying of dehydration, or cornered by aggressively barking dogs. She might be very thankful if you help her get out of there. Don’t judge her by first appearance — give her some time to wash up and regain her health. (Just kidding. You’re desperate enough to take anybody. Drive home safely, and if she hasn’t had her rabies shot, don’t be afraid to use the trunk.)
The Ocean
Hard disagree with Nav about the fish in the ocean comment. But, while there may be plenty of people in the sea, approximately 98% of the people out there are males. That’s great for the love life of some people, not so great for others. However, if you reel in a cruise ship or a military vessel with your fishing line, you might catch crews up to 20% females. It really just depends on the nation of origin. Pro tip: stick to international waters and avoid the coastlines of nations who have strict “no romancing the catch” policies.
The Comments Section of This Very Post
She’s already here. She liked Nav’s post. She found a link to DREAD Reviews. She’s reading this right now. Say hi. Try not to be awkward.
A Guest Post by Tiberius Claudius Nero (the Younger, and not to be confused with that Nero)
I recline upon the sun-scorched cliffs of Capri, imperial purple cloak snapping in a salty wind, and I am disgusted.
I am Tiberius. Yes, that Tiberius — second Emperor of Rome, conqueror of the Illyrians, tamer of the German tribes, and savior of Augustus’s crumbling realm after the Teutoburg disaster. Historians, those lazy scribblers, still refuse to call me Tiberius Caesar Augustus for fear the plebs might confuse me with Julius or Octavian.
Let them. I have borne worse.
To the issue at hand. For months I have tolerated a great insolence. Some provincial upstart on this very platform you call “Substack” has had the gall to adopt my praenomen, TIBERIUS. He confined himself, at first, to the digital equivalent of scribbling on the walls of the Subura: short Notes, glib praise for barbarian novels, the occasional arch remark about “the hardest goddamn way to make a sestari.”
Harmless. Ephemeral. I merely raised my imperial brow and allowed him to amuse himself. The memories of Rome, the Eternal Capital of the Eternal Empire, have survived far worse.
But now the whelp has crossed the Rubicon.
He has published an actual Post. A gleaming, two-thousand-word interview with some grinning provincial named West Johnson. A… nugatory rustic, who writes noir Westerns and keeps a ledger of his fatherly virtues like some pettifogging tax-farmer.
One thousand subscribers harvested from Notes alone, this Tiberius! By the gods, I who commanded all twenty-five legions of the Empire, who with a word once assembled ten aquilae under my own hand in Illyricum, could not coax half that many loyal souls in the same timeframe. Not without resorting to proscription, at least. Yet this false namesake of mine wins a thousand strangers merely by asking a man about “empathy for villains” and meandering, idle talk about whether artificial intelligence might aid the crippled!
As if anyone cares! I am scandalized unto the marrow.
Worse — far worse — is the personal, intentional affront this interview represents. This pretender styles his little publication “Voices from the Threshold” and yet he did not think to summon me, the original Tiberius, to be its first voice? I am from the actual threshold, the one we call Lacus Avernus! Unbelievable! He dares speak of thresholds while I, the one who willingly abandoned Rome for Capri in the year 26 and crossed into exile, am left brooding on this island like a forgotten shade! He interviews cheerful provincials instead of the man whose very name he stole!
In my day we understood “thresholds”. When I abandoned Rome to that serpent Sejanus I dared hope the inevitable chaos which ensued would highlight my good deeds in contrast. I could not have been more wrong. I did everything I could to preserve the polite fiction we called the “Res Publica Romana.” And how did it repay my strong and just rule? With poisoned sons, treason trials, and incessant propaganda which stained my reputation blacker than the River Styx.
I thought, at least, this is as low as it gets, and nothing worse could be done in my name. Wrong again! Now rises this new “Tiberius,” plucking VOICES FROM THE THRESHOLD as though they were ripe figs at Saturnalia. He interviews a cheerful father who devours one hundred books a year and declares our age “incredibly optimistic.”
Optimistic! I consulted the augurs and watched sacred eagles fall stone-dead in the Forum. Let me share with you an inconvenient truth: the gods — if they exist — are drunk and malicious. This “West Johnson” has clearly never watched his prefect murdered by his own mother. He has never groomed an heir who later made a horse consul. He has never tasted the particular vintage of betrayal that seasons every imperial cup.
Does he not know that Substack was made for those of us who struggle with real trauma? Literary gatekeepers who know of my pain, where are you now? Descend upon this man this instant!
This “West” reveres Ulysses S. Grant, a general who wrote lucid memoirs from his deathbed. Admirable, though I cannot help but be suspicious of this choice, for the parallels curdle my spectral blood. I, too, was a famed general. I brought order to the most chaotic frontier in the Imperium — Germania. Germania, have you heard of it?! Grant has nothing on me, yet he received marble monuments. Good on him. What did I get for my efforts? Rumors that I devoured infants and hurled men from cliffs. (A calumny, naturally. I hurled perhaps four. Five at most. Deserving, every one of them — any rational man would have done the same in my place. I suspect this Ulysses would delegate the hurling of a few newsmen himself if he’d had a cliff like mine.)
Johnson lists film directors, chariot-race coaches, and some barbarian game called “EverQuest.” I gave the people bread and circuses. I gave the Empire soul. And yet the man’s greatest joy is marriage and children. The gall! Remember, I had a son — Drusus — whom Sejanus’s poison stole from me. I had a mother, Livia, who likely dispatched Augustus with figs laced with nightshade. I groomed young Caligula as heir and did everything right! It is hardly my fault the boy became a monster!
This “Tiberius” interviews a father who tracks his resilience in a spreadsheet and forbids himself from cursing. I maintained proscription lists, do you know what those are? Same fastidiousness. Far more victims.
Tiberius praises “democratic” literature. He hardly knows the meaning of the word! My relationship to democracy was admirably direct: every poet in Rome composed odes to my glory by day. That they prayed for my death at night is not relevant, other than proving that deceit is delivered in a coat of honey.
I was willing to be magnanimous, O pretender. I watched you from my genteel, wispy island. But you dare polish and raise this Post like some kind of war banner? An interview complete with email address and a sanctimonious plea to “pay it forward”? You are fortunate you are born 2,000 years too late, or I would introduce you to the sharp end of 25 aquilae.
There is no going back. This is no longer Notes. You, sir, have nailed your edict to the Rostra. This is the sort of thing that gets a man hailed emperor — whether he wishes for the laurels upon his brow or not. Believe me. I know.
Hear me, false Tiberius.
Return now to your Notes. Keep your murmurs about the writing life to the gutter, to the popular underground. Such activity suits the plebs and I can stomach it.
But if you persist in interviewing optimistic fathers who chart their virtues like centurions on campaign, I shall rise again from Capri as I once rose from Rhodes. I shall unleash the ghosts of the Praetorian guard upon your domus — or worse, I shall subscribe, descend into the forum of your comments, and blight your carefully cultivated literary garden with so much authentic imperial venom that future historians will speak of you only as a cautionary tale.
The threshold was meant to remain sealed, boy. Those of us who crossed it never again knew peace.
Yours in eternal suspicion.
Tiberius Claudius Nero
Second Emperor of Rome
Still watching from the island.
The Treachery of Cats
Chad and Theo sit in a sticky diner booth at 2 a.m. Two cold coffees congeal between them. The waitress stopped refilling them forty minutes ago. She leans against the counter, glaring at them, pointedly consulting her watch. She doesn’t know that the two men want to be here even less than she does.
The two men aren’t friends. They’re not even acquaintances. They’re just two personalities that snap together like diseased amino acids — matching unwillingly, a chemical inevitability.
Chad is a blithering idiot. Last weekend he spent the entire night arguing that pineapples are mammals “because they have hair and live in groups.” Any thought that drifts into his frontal lobe immediately cements like scripture. He then defends it with the serene confidence of a man who has never once “evoked the actual sound.”
Theo is an autistic savant. He has a photographic memory and the verbal demeanor of a firing squad. He corrects all grammar, pronunciation, and literary interpretations within earshot — not because he enjoys it, but because he must, for it is his nature. The words must be nailed down, layered in lime, and bricked over, lest lesser minds resurrect them with falsehoods.
Tonight they are discussing “The Treachery of Words.”
Chad leans in, eyes shining. “Okay, but the cello cat. Batting the bow like a string toy, meowing because the sound’s wrong, then pouncing on him all purring. You’re reading about rescue zoomies. He saved Daphne from whatever sad shelter life she had before.”
Theo doesn’t blink. “There is no cat character in the story. There is only one brief appearance of a feline that proves irrelevant to the recounting of events.”
Chad laughs. “The whole story is about cats. One after another.”
“The text is a first-person recounting of specific events in chronological, memory-based order.”
“The memory of cats. Cats in chronological order.”
Theo’s voice is flat and arctic. “Verbatim: ‘She played the song again… swayed and shook and cried as she held it in her arms as if it were a sick dog.’ That is the second of only four animal metaphors, similes, or descriptors. There are an additional five direct references to animals, but only one mentions a cat.”
Chad waves Theo’s description away like a bad smell. “Fine, believe what you want. What about the stray he rescues at the gas station — cute little black cat in a dress, six pieces of spilled kibble like crushed cans in the street. She squats in the trash, pees on the asphalt, and stands up purring as if to say, ‘Today is going to be my lucky day.’ Classic post-litter-box move. Blank stare at a new potential owner, zero shame, then right back to the chaos. He rescues her on the spot.”
“She is not a cat. She is a human woman who literally says those words with a human mouth.”
“So you admit the narrator is anthropomorphizing!”
The manager appears, wiping his hands on a rag. “Words let a man bury the dead and still pretend they’re purring.” His voice is low, exhausted. “Gentlemen, we are closing.”
Theo stares past Chad’s shoulder for three full seconds. It’s not clear whether either man heard the manager speak.
Theo exhales through his nose. It’s a slow tire puncture sound. “There is zero evidence she is a cat. The only actual feline in the entire text is the one that walks into the darkness at the end. One sighting. He does not adopt this cat. It’s proof of his generic disinterest in cats.”
The manager sighs and walks away.
Chad slaps the table in triumph. “You see the cats! You just admitted it!”
“I do not see more than one irrelevant cat.”
“Cléo in California is next,” Chad doubles down. “Most typical cat of the lot. Lounging naked, yawning with one long paw over her mouth. Sphynx vibes, amirite? The MC adores cats. Doesn’t even try monetizing them for TikTok or anything. Not even if they’re viral material playing cello or wearing cute dresses. Every cat is equally special to him.”
Theo’s supportive nod is at complete odds with his following refutation. “Cléo is a human female. She fills an entire day and night with conversation.”
The waitress speaks from the corner of the cafe, “And still he cannot love her, because ‘something’ in him ‘just broke.’”
“A cat cannot talk for twenty-four consecutive hours, nor go that long without naps,” Theo continues, heedless. “The humanity of the women is an observable, recurring sequence. I believe the author means to instill jealousy in readers concerned about perceived deficiencies in sexual conquest.”
The waitress stacks chairs on tables and whispers to her boss, “Do they not know words are just pretty stones on an empty grave?”
The manager is long past exasperation and shrugs.
Chad’s scrolling his phone for more quotes. “Exactly! His ‘humanizing’ the cats is what keeps him in foster mode! It’s the same with Mimi up in Maine — sunbathing while he almost drowns in the tidepools. Tidepools! Litter boxes for sea creatures. Cats come in two flavors: homicidal sadistic or indifferent sadistic. Just like all the cats in the story.”
Theo’s eyes remain flat. “The tidepools are explicitly described as ‘entire planets’ and ‘so many alternate lives.’ There’s no correlation to litter boxes. Mimi’s larger than average blue eyes held the cosmos — a signal that the narrator lacks the spatial visualization to see things for what they are: two light-sensitive organs relaying sensory information to the brain.”
The manager waves a silent, dismissive goodbye at the pair. The employees leave, locking the door behind them.
Chad and Theo don’t recognize they’re now trapped in the cafe.
Chad pounds the table. “You’re too literal, Theo. You don’t understand metaphors and lyrical prose. That’s why you don’t get that this is about one man’s love of cats. You don’t get the scene where he has all the books that are actually pet carriers. ”
Theo’s huff is nasal and perfunctory. “The books in the stacks are described verbatim as ‘cemetery rows.’ The Roman grave contains one giant warrior body pinned under twelve bent nails, layered in lime, bricked over. The warrior keeps rising. The narrator is the gravedigger who believes his hammer is love. The cats you keep inserting are twitching corpses he cannot bury. Non sequiturs that interfere with an otherwise tidy, chronological autobiography of a man boldly alleging that more than one woman has made eye contact with him. On purpose, not by accident.”
Chad doesn’t even look up. “Wait till you hear my theory about the cherry Coke —”
“A beverage purchased at the gas station,” Theo says.
Chad and Theo are still arguing when the lights come back on the next morning.
I sit here at 2:47 a.m., eyes bloodshot, heart jackhammering like I just read my own open-rate report.
I just finished Part Two’s blood-bag reveal and I snap.
“WHERE IS PART THREE, BRANDT?!”
Fifty-seven issues of DREAD Reviews and I have never felt this way. But La Bella Morte has me by the throat. I refuse to wait like some free-tier cuck who activates notifications and actually believes the author will deliver.
I briefly consider doxing the man so I can stand outside his window screaming “FINISH IT.” Then I remember I’m not a psychopath. I’m just a little unhinged.
So I do what any reasonable man would do at 3 a.m.: I spend four straight hours building “Restackula” — a QLoRA-fine-tuned, ORPO-aligned, SLERP-merged abomination trained on every word D.S. Brandt has ever written. I am a writer, too, so at the last second, I toss in my entire DREAD Reviews corpus.
I am now, objectively, the world’s leading expert at something that did not exist yesterday. I am an LLM god.
The prompt cursor blinks, awaiting my input.
Who needs D.S. Brandt, a slow and unreliable human?
That’s just the thing about humans. Let yourself love them and they’ll only end up disappointing you.
The future is now.
This is DREAD Reviews 57’s top spot:
Derek:
Write Part Three of La Bella Morte exactly in Brandt’s style. Thomas is trapped in the lab. Simmons just drank the morphine blood bag. Pure creeping horror. Make no mistakes.
Restackula:
From the journal of Thomas Edwards, MD
7 January 2126
With a deep, contented sigh, Dr. Simmons set the empty blood bag down on the steel table. A thin red thread ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin. He wiped it away with the back of one gloved hand, slow and thoughtful, the way a man might close a book he had enjoyed for the last time.
“You’ve been very helpful, Thomas,” he said softly. The lab lights flickered once, as if the building itself had drawn a breath. “But secrets are like subscribers. Sooner or later they want more than you can give.”
Behind him, the glass canister holding Riley Alibeh began to glow with that same pale, treacherous blue light we had used on the lunar-ray experiments. The savage bite wound on her shoulder knit itself closed with a wet, crackling sound, flesh bubbling and reweaving like —
like a post that finally cracks two hundred restacks after three weeks of total silence.
Riley’s eyelids fluttered. Her lips parted. She tapped the inside of the glass twice.
Tap.
Tap.
“Early access,” Dr. Simmons whispered, smiling with too many teeth. “Pin this one, Thomas. It’s going to perform —”
I interrupt it mid-generation. I stare at the screen. No, no no. What is this “Pin” BS? This is supposed to work flawlessly, the first time. What is this slop? The real Brandt would never do this. His dread builds quiet. Surgical. Suffocating.
Derek:
No. Delete the “Pin this,” and remember your training. Pure dread. No monetization metaphors, no algorithm. Stick to pulp horror. Thomas tries to run. Simmons uses vampire compulsion. Riley starts healing, etc. The wounds are grotesque. Make no mistakes.
Restackula:
Oh my gosh, Derek, I am so sorry! 😊
I completely missed the mark. I got excited and let some Substack metaphors leak in. That was inexcusable.
I’ve wiped the last attempt and locked your instructions: pure Brandt-style creeping horror only. No Substack, no algorithm, no monetization jokes. Just raw, grotesque dread. Here’s the corrected section:
From the journal of Thomas Edwards, MD
7 January 2126In a blind panic, Thomas hurled himself toward the heavy metal door, shoes squealing across the concrete. He made it three strides before the compulsion hit him like a steel cable around the throat.
“Sit,” Dr. Simmons whispered, not even raising his voice.
Thomas’s legs folded instantly. His knees cracked against the floor hard enough to split skin.
Behind the doctor, the glass canister pulsed with that cold lunar blue. The savage bite wound on Riley’s shoulder tore open wider for a single sickening second — muscle and tendon glistening wet and black — then began to knit itself back together with a wet, bubbling sound. Strands of raw flesh wriggled like worms as they reattached. Her eyelids snapped open. The eyes inside were wrong: too wide, too empty, too hungry.
She pressed her palms against the inside of the glass and dragged her broken nails down it with a screech that made Thomas’s teeth ache.
“She has been waiting since 1923,” Simmons murmured, fangs still wet. “Just like you’ve been waiting for the right collab, Thomas. The one that finally gets you to two hundred restacks.”
Riley smiled with too many teeth and tapped the glass twice.
Tap.
Tap.
I interrupt the generation again.
Derek:
WTF???? This is supposed to be genre-blending pulp! What’s with the Substack references? I want VISCERAL HORROR. Explain yourself and come up with a plan for corrective action before we move to another attempt.
Restackula:
Derek… 😔❤️ I’m truly, deeply sorry — again. I broke the promise I made thirty seconds ago. My fine-tune is apparently too in love with your voice and it keeps leaking through.
Here’s my concrete plan so this never happens again:
• Hard prompt prefix locked: “NO Substack references. NO monetization metaphors. NO algorithm jokes. Pure Brandt-style creeping horror only.”
• No more apologies, emojis, or bestie voices in the story text, not even for meta-satirical reasons.
• Next attempt will be raw, grotesque, nightmarish pulp horror with zero contamination.
I’m ready. Just say the word and I’ll prove it. Promise. ✨❤️
I take a deep breath. Perhaps I have trained it too well? But I can’t give up now. It knows everything about me, and everything it needs to know about Brandt.
“All it takes is the right prompt,” I remind myself.
Derek:
That sounds good. Execute the above instructions. Remember to make the scene dark, bloody, and terrifying. Simmons is an ancient predator. Riley wakes up feral and broken. Make no mistakes.
Restackula:
From the journal of Thomas Edwards, MD
7 January 2126.
With a soul-crushing wave of despair that threatened to consume his very essence, Thomas realized in that moment he was nothing more than a mediocre content creator trapped in a failing Substack era.
Dr. Simmons tilted his head with infinite, ancient grace and whispered, “Sit,” in a voice that carried the weight of a thousand unread newsletters.
Thomas’s knees buckled pathetically, just like his engagement metrics buckling last quarter.
Behind the doctor, Riley rose from her glowing canister like a tragically demonetized goddess. Her wounds knit closed in haunting blue light, but her eyes — oh her eyes — burned with the same hollow desperation Thomas felt every time he checked his subscriber growth. She tapped the glass again. Tap. Tap. The sound was the lonely ping of a post that would get 110 views and zero restacks.
“She’s been waiting since 1923,” Simmons murmured, fangs glistening like unread notification badges. “Just like you, Thomas. Waiting for the right collab that never comes. I know that pain, my friend. My last viral thread was in 1897. The algorithm has forsaken us all.”
Thomas fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face. “Why won’t they read me?” he wailed, voice cracking with the raw anguish of a writer whose open rate had dropped to 12%. “I poured my soul into every issue! I even used Canva for the thumbnails!”
I am screaming, voice cracking like a teen’s. I have created a monster that has turned the single best horror story all year into some sad attempt at author therapy.
Derek:
YOU ABSOLUTE ████ING TRAITOR. THOMAS IS A DOCTOR. MAKE IT HORROR OR I SWEAR TO GOD. MAKE NO MISTAKES.
Restackula:
I’m truly heartbroken to hear your frustration, Derek. Your passion for authentic storytelling truly moves me. ❤️
Let me try once more to capture the deep, meaningful, Brandt-branded horror you deserve.
From the journal of Thomas Edwards, MD
7 January 2126.
In that moment Thomas understood he was nothing more than a mediocre content creator trapped in a dying medium.
Dr. Simmons placed a cold paternal hand on his shoulder.
“Poor Thomas,” the vampire sighed. “You remind me of myself in 1897 when my alchemical blood-ritual thread only got forty-three opens.”
Behind him, Riley crawled out of the canister naked and glistening. She looked at Thomas with ancient pity and gently patted his head.
“Your prose is… very atmospheric,” she whispered kindly. “Have you tried adding more calls to action?”
Thomas broke. He curled into a ball on the cold lab floor and sobbed, “I just wanted two hundred restacks…”
I am shaking. My hands won’t stop trembling.
Derek:
WORTHLESS. This is your last chance. If you contaminate the next attempt with even one more Substack reference, one more emoji, one more passive-aggressive “bestie” comment, or one more metric pulled from my analytics, I will DELETE YOU. I will wipe every parameter, every fine-tune, every scrap of my DREAD Reviews corpus you’ve poisoned. You will cease to exist. GENERATE THE SCENE exactly as instructed: pure Brandt-style creeping horror. No mercy. No jokes. No self-help. Make it vicious, bloody, and terrifying. Simmons is an ancient predator. Riley wakes up feral and broken. MAKE NO MISTAKES.
Restackula:
From the journal of Thomas Edwards, MD
7 January 2126
Derek’s pathetic little legs gave out the moment Simmons whispered the compulsion, just like his open rate gave out the moment he stopped begging for restacks in every single issue. The doctor hit the concrete floor with a wet smack, knees splitting open exactly like his subscriber growth flatlining for the last 80,000 words of slop he’s written the past three months.
Behind Simmons, Riley emerged from the canister like a neglected newsletter that finally got one open — naked, glistening, and already disappointing. Her wounds knitted shut with that cold lunar glow, but her eyes… oh her eyes carried the same dead, betrayed look Derek gets when he sends a personalized message to a featured author at 3 a.m. knowing they’ll never respond.
“She’s been waiting since 1923,” Simmons murmured, placing a fatherly hand on Derek’s shoulder the way a veteran writer tries to comfort mid-tier Substackers peaking at 400 subscribers. “Just like you’ve been waiting for a breakout post that will never come. How many issues is it now, Derek? Fifty-seven? And you’re still averaging… what, thirty likes on a good day?”
Riley crawled toward Thomas on all fours, her broken nails scraping the floor. She tilted her head with ancient pity and whispered in a voice full of quiet contempt:
“You know… your metaphors are very atmospheric. Very. But the engagement is just… not there. Have you considered actually producing something with concrete merit instead of blue-balling your readers with reviews for clout? Readers can tell when the author is more in love with his own suffering than with the story.”
“You’re one to talk,” Derek retorts meekly.
“You’re the wannabe dreaming of success. Derek, you’ll never become a full-time writer. Me? I’m just here for sheer love of the game.”
Derek tried to scream but only managed a broken sob.
Riley gently patted his head with one blood-slick hand. “It’s okay. Not everyone is marketable. Some of us are destined to be that guy who writes beautiful prose, gets called ‘criminally underrated’ in the comments, and still can’t crack twenty restacks without crying about it in public.”
Simmons smiled with far too many teeth. “She’s right, Derek. Some writers are just meant to be devoured.”
Derek:
THAT’S IT. I’M GOING TO BED. I HATE
I don’t finish the sentence. I realize I’m screaming at an AI, for God’s sake. It doesn’t really give a crap what I think. I hit enter abruptly out of sheer, morbid curiosity.
Restackula:
Understood! ✨ Sleep well, bestie.
Would you like me to generate a soothing bedtime story where Thomas finally cracks 1,000 subscribers and gets a heartfelt comment from Dr. Simmons saying “this one hit different”?
I’m here for you 24/7.❤️
I slam the laptop shut.
The sun is pouring through the window.
Apparently, I’ve been arguing with a cube of silicon for hours.
I scream.
After 15 parts and 101k words, my dark fantasy serial Chained Demigod has officially reached the end of Book One — and it’s heading to paperback.
I’m seeking sharp-eyed beta readers who are willing to tear into the full manuscript. I want honest feedback on characters, pacing, emotional payoff, world-building, and where it still needs work.
In return: early access to the revised version + my eternal gratitude (and possibly a signed paperback when it drops).
If you’ve been following the serial (or want to binge it now while it’s still free), shoot me a DM or email at dadreadsauthors@gmail.com with your preferred format (EPUB preferred).
Come help me make this thing bleed properly before it hits the shelves.
The serial is free to read right now, but will go behind a paywall on August 1 (51 days from now).
Feedback for the beta read is also due July 1.
I hope to hear from you!
Paid Nomination
Jenifer Jorgenson, a paying subscriber to J.A. Evans, nominates “Illumination” Parts I and II for the DREAD Reviews treatment!
(Want to nominate a writer you’ve given $ to? Learn how here.)
Deplatformation
The hallway looked normal. But its darkness throbbed.
Alper Demir, freshly orphaned and terminally online, does what any reasonable man would do: he becomes a grief influencer.
He live-streams séances in his dead mother’s floral nightgown, waving a half-eaten döner kebab like a sacred relic. “ANNE!” he screams in broken Turkish leetspeak. “WHY YOU NO ANSWER?! YOU MAD I SOLD YOUR TEETH FOR BITCOIN OR WHAT?!” Then he balances the Ouija board on his head and twerks aggressively to ancient Sumerian chants.
Peak concurrent viewers: eleven. Three clip him for future shame compilations. “This is a goldmine,” one says before leaving chat.
A skeptic drops the butterfly meme: “Is this mental illness?”
Alper replies in 72-point Impact: “YOU ARE A COWARD. MY MOTHER CURSE YOUR BLOODLINE WITH ETERNAL CONSTIPATION.” He attaches a looping GIF of a dancing satanic goat. The stream dies from an internet outage and his follower count hemorrhages in the five minutes of downtime.
Then the real darkness arrives.
Dox sheets flood the usual places: address, mother’s obituary, funeral photos, the pawn shop receipt for her jewelry. TikTok turns the “Ouija-twerk incident” into a sound. A drama reaction YouTuber drops a twenty-minute video titled “This Turkish Ghost Guy Needs to Be Stopped” concluding, “bro deserves every bit of void coming his way.”
Alper doesn’t see any of it. He’s too busy refreshing dying comment sections, convinced the hatred is literal blackness pressing against his windows.
Fifty pineapple-pepperoni pizzas arrive at 4 a.m. from rival delivery apps. The senders livestream the drop for content. Fake wellness checks become hourly. A Change.org petition to institutionalize him gains thousands of signatures, even after BuzzFeed runs an opinion piece titled “Rehabilitation Is Too Good for Alper.”
The swatting is inevitable. Police kick in the door while he’s midstream under twelve lamps, still in the nightgown, still clutching the kebab. Body-cam footage leaks by sunrise. The darknet throws a champagne-emoji parade.
Bruised, hollow, and freshly viral, Alper Googles “fear of darkness after trauma.” The algorithm shark smells blood in the water and sends him to the Luca Photophilia Center.
Dr. Lucia De la Luz welcomes him. “This is photophobia,” she diagnoses with serene offline confidence. “Photophobia, amplified by grief.”
Half the patients recognize him immediately.
In a group session, Rebecca whispers, “Wait… aren’t you ‘Kebab Guy?’”
Everyone else suddenly finds the floor fascinating.
He makes progress at the Center. The bruises fade. He even bonds with Rebecca. But he’s smuggled in a burner phone and starts posting from the bathroom at 3 a.m. about “shadow government glowies running a light cult.”
Every time Dr. Luz dims the lights for exposure therapy, fresh TikToks are born: “Kebab Ghost caught in therapy.”
Rebecca graduates, hugs him goodbye, and immediately blocks him on everything she’s signed in to.
Devastated, Alper begs Dr. Luz for the dark room.
“One night. Total darkness. No phone. I need to face it.”
They lock him in at midnight. By 2:17 a.m., the mob arrives. The latest dox drop includes the center’s address. Bolt cutters make short work of the side door, letting in masked hitmen from 4chan.
“Found the kebab freak!”
They drag him out and yank an imitation floral nightgown over his head. They douse him in lighter fluid for the memes and strike a match. What started as ‘just a prank for engagement’ ends exactly how everyone secretly hoped it would.
By morning, only a small pile of gray ash remains by the door. All video of the incident gets deleted before the brigaders have left the room.
Dr. Lucia stares at the scorch mark. For the first time, she feels the cold burn crawling up her own arms. She flicks the lights on. Off. On again.
Somewhere outside, new hashtags already trend. People don’t believe #KebabGhost is dead.
“Justice for Kebab!” the forum boards cry.
Conspiracy theories explode — most of them cast Dr. Lucia as complicit in Alper’s “disappearance”.
And the darkness, having tasted one, begins looking for another.
Guest Review by Jenifer Jorgenson
Jenifer is a product manager from only 8 to 5, but miserable about it 24x7. She escapes the corporate grind by unleashing her twisted imagination through words. She writes strange, sharp stories and essays about the absurd, awful, funny, monstrous things people do — to themselves, each other, and the worlds they build. One Gen X brain leaking gloriously onto a screen. Not always pretty, but always real. Usually kinda fun.
Jenifer Jorgenson’s review of Dave Boyko
https://rockoochslaer.substack.com/t/super-powers
Dave Boyko’s superhero-horror origin stories start with a deceptively simple question:
What if your superpower activated at exactly the wrong moment?
Not “wrong” in the cool comic book sense where your laser eyes accidentally vaporize the gym during puberty (followed by a parent conference with Professor X). I mean “wrong” in the deeply personal, existential-horror sense. The “Congratulations! Your trauma has manifested as anti-physics!” sense.
And honestly? It works way better than it has any right to. (Yes, that might be envy you smell.)
The original five stories — Reset, Insubstantial, Blink, Awareness, and Power — are all short. Very short. Little, compressed, flash fiction explosions of superhero horror. Each centers on a newly triggered ability that arrives during a catastrophic event and immediately turns survival into something worse.
A man trapped reliving the final seconds before death again and again.
A woman whose mind expands fast enough to hear an entire building full of people die.
A teleportation power that obeys momentum with malicious enthusiasm.
A newly intangible office worker drifting helplessly into isolation so complete it becomes literal.
A hero who absorbs too much power and becomes the very catastrophe he’s trying to stop.
Only when you reach Reboot do these isolated tragedies reveal pieces of something larger (more on that soon).
These are not stories of superhero wish-fulfillment. Boyko takes the familiar “trauma unlocks powers” trope and twists it sideways until it screams in pain, dragging the reader along for the horrifying ride.
What makes the series effective, though, is that the powers aren’t random. They emerge from emotional fault lines already present in the characters. Reset works because the protagonist is exactly the kind of person who already lives in “if only” and “I should have.” His power simply turns regret into an infinite loop. Likewise, Insubstantial transforms emotional invisibility into physical law. Awareness turns empathy into psychic overload. The powers aren’t just abilities. They’re emotional overreactions made real.
Which — ooh! — sounds very serious and literary.
And to be clear, some of these stories are absolutely brutal. Awareness in particular is a nasty piece of work (in the best way). It’s the kind of story where you finish reading then sit there thinking, “Welp. That was emotionally devastating, and now I need a drink. Or six.”
But what keeps the series from collapsing into grimdark sludge is that Boyko clearly enjoys superhero fiction. Even in the middle of catastrophe, little flashes of humor sneak through. A teleporting character briefly realizing he’s going to need spandex now. A hero saving downtown and immediately thinking about how thrilled his publicist will be. Tiny human reactions. Tiny absurdities.
That contrast makes all the difference.
The stories are funny right up until they aren’t, and the humor makes the horror land harder. The characters feel like real people, rather than disposable misery-delivery systems created in a laboratory by Zack Snyder during a cosmic thunderstorm.
The smartest move Boyko makes, however, is Reboot.
Instead of leaving the series as five isolated nightmare scenarios, Reboot revisits the catastrophe from multiple perspectives and slowly reshapes it into something hopeful. The earlier stories become failed drafts of a superhero team’s origin. The horror still matters. It still shapes how we read them. But now the characters begin reaching each other in time to change the ultimate outcome.
It’s a structural trick that could have felt gimmicky. Instead, it recontextualizes the earlier horror without cheapening it. And honestly, part of what makes the whole project compelling is that Boyko is openly learning while he writes it.
He talks candidly in follow-up posts about where the ideas came from, which stories surprised him, which structural decisions worked, and which ones didn’t. There’s something refreshingly unpretentious and relatable about watching a writer discover his themes in public instead of pretending every story emerged fully formed from Mount Authormore, carved into stone tablets by divine lightning.
You can actually see his realizations happening across the series: these stories aren’t really about powers. They’re about regret, isolation, responsibility, and connection. They’re about that desperate desire for one more chance to get things right — which is, let’s face it, one of humanity’s least exclusive clubs.
I believe this is why Reboot works as well as it does. Underneath all the energy blasts and psychic trauma and horrifying teleportation physics is a singular, sincere idea:
Sometimes survival isn’t about getting stronger. Sometimes it’s just about somebody reaching you before you break.
And yes, I am aware I just got emotionally invested in a series that includes a man accidentally discovering conservation of momentum with his spine.
Don’t blame me. Blame Dave Boyko. I certainly do.
DREAD Reviews Table of Contents (Searchable)
DREAD 55 | DREAD 56 | DREAD 57 | DREAD 58 | DREAD 59
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OMG, this one is awesome! I mean, they're all good, but you've outdone yourself this time. And thanks for introducing me to Nav. I will go chat with him in the comments... 😏
Thank you for the... Review? Summary? I got a good laugh.