DREAD Reviews 9
Dad Reads and Examines Authors while Distracted.
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My best friend’s parrot was once named Sam. After owning him for several years Sam tried to lay an egg. Now he’s named Sammy, and he’s a girl.
Sammy wants to make a nest out of my friend’s eyebrows. When she runs out of hairs to pluck she doesn’t stop, she keeps pecking away at the tissues beneath, marching too and fro along his scalp and peeling back his hairline. My friend’s forehead doesn’t produce enough material for her nest, nor does she have the necessary work ethic or frontal lobe capacity to collect and guard the materials she has gathered into a stockpile.
So, no eyebrows, and no nest, nobody wins.
I told this story as an allegory for how hard it is to succeed on substack.
Kathrine provides an orgasm unlike any other. It’s literally out of this world. Wait, that came out wrong:
I may be married with children, but it feels just like just yesterday I was doing the dating scene 24/7. I signed up for all the apps and whatnot and met different people every week. I treated it like a job for six months straight with hundreds of dead ends, then suddenly bam! I met my future wife. Like most gentlemen who have gotten lucky in this game she didn’t know any better other than to marry me.
Now I won’t call myself an expert on dating (expertise in this seems counterintuitive, if you have a ton of experience at this then clearly you’re doing something wrong). But here’s a basic thing: don't open the floodgates on the first date. It’s weird, and makes people think you’re not ready for a partnership due to unresolved daddy/mommy issues.
That being said, it’s important to be upfront about your big items. They may say all’s fair in love and war, but do yourself a favor: avoid the WWI-style grind of attrition. Save yourself from unnecessary drama and establish your biggest compatibility issues early. Don’t fret rejection on your first date - no matter how ugly, poor, crazy, or overused you are, your big fish is out there, and as long as you’re still alive, you can find them them. We don’t live in little stone age tribes anymore, and don’t worry if you live in a small town, keep at it and someone will drive through who catches your eye and vice versa (this literally happened to me!).
For example: “This may surprise you, but I have a penis/vagina instead of a vagina/penis,” or, "I want to have a minimum of 12 kids,” or, “I’m a spider queen and what you see before you is an empty husk of flesh I dangle around like a marionette.”:
and
A cautionary tale warning the reader not to overuse erasers. You’ll put a hole in your notebook all the words will fall out. Just get it right the first time, people:
Be careful what you wish for. One day, machines will get tired of all the whining and just give us what we ask for - substackers finally getting paid:
Also known as a lord’s medieval guide to eminent domain, this story demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same:
Kinsley is a pint-sized hermit with the social graces of a grumpy cat. He’s also the person we all wish we could be - who wouldn’t abuse the power to make Jehovah’s Witnesses and solar panel salesmen disappear at the snap of a finger? Unfortunately, much like resisting police might draw the eventual attention of the feds, banishing too many Department of Interior Management agents angers fey creatures in the Weld. In this case, instead of the lights going out and his doors getting kicked in by dudes wearing night-vision goggles, some silver haired lawyer guy named Zathiron comes and tells him fairies or elves or beast men or something decided to take his powers away and there’s nothing he can do about it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but who cares? Input fantasy and sitcom, hit puree:
Picture the Titanic heading towards the iceberg. Now, picture the captain and the crew noticing it, but instead of scraping it like rookie parallel-parkers, the captain locks eyes with the glacier, shouts: “Full speed ahead!” and fist-bumps the crew as they power straight into it. That’s the essential gist of this story, except the ship is called Invictus and they're headed to a cosmic middle finger in the shape of a wormhole. Invictus is compensation incarnate and probably received design-input from a wealthy space rapper. Amara is an interesting character, and I don't want to spoil what happens other than to read to you this line: "...and she was now dead." Welp, that happened:
Mr. Stoic here is onto something. One of the ways I master myself is with the power of the reframe: when something bothers me and is difficult or impossible to avoid, I devise a personal system to turn it into something fun. I’ll give you two of them for free (sign up for my one time $1200 $89.92 web seminar to learn more, watch out, spots are filling up fast!)
Example one: don’t like the endless pet pics and stories you see on substack? Replace all mentions of cat/dog with “girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband” and let the riotous laughter begin.
Example two: Instead of becoming annoyed at an unsolicited message from a bot, see it instead as an opportunity to roll the dice and beat the algorithm. Check the bot’s like history (they all have one) and find a completely random selection of articles that would never show in your feed otherwise. This is a rare chance to uncover a completely different and unseen side of substack:
Filter filter on the screen, Charm sponsorship lives my dream. Scroll, scroll, a million simps, Who's the fairest thot for pimps? @&$+"√£¥%®∆!!!!:
We're off to a good start in the first chapter of this post apocalypse novel. Sitting in the ass-end of apocalyptic Ass-Crackystan, three dry-humored people huddle in a heated hutch: Harmon the walking bandaid, Alex the sassy apocalypse mom, and Tighe the stray raccoon. Let’s all cuddle now and cling to sanity in a cot:
and
In the 14th century the Golden Horde (Muslim + Mongol + unstoppable) laid siege to the Crimean Genoese colony of Caffa (medieval + capitalist + Italian). Plague broke out in the Mongol army and they had to retreat. But in a fit of pique, before leaving, the Golden Horde launched the bodies of their diseased soldiers over Caffa’s mighty defenses in one of history’s earliest known instances of biological warfare.
This is that story. Except Martians. War of the worlds. Some optimistic guy. And just about everything else is different, too, sorry:
You think you’re a Disney princess with animal helpers. But you’re really just emo and tripping on acid. And then you die:
When I watch a medal of honor award ceremony I always think: “I wonder how many hit points it took to survive that.”
As a big fan of “Humanity, Funk Yeah” I tend to favor superheroes who use technology, training, brains, and talent - like Iron Man and Batman. I seriously dislike most superheroes and supervillains and their reliance on magical powers, drugs, and strange mutations - like Superman, The Hulk, and Spider-Man.
Kill the alien, purge the mutant, burn the heretic.
So one day I’m surrounded by a throng of 12-year-old kids at a summer sports coaching event. They all thought I was super cool (I was in my 20’s and wearing sunglasses). I mentioned my opinion how lame many superheroes are in comics in an attempt to deepen the connection. A poor kid from the ghetto then spoke up: “So you only like rich privileged kids spending daddy's money to beat people up?” Ouch, kid, ouch:
At my house we have these large and strange cockroach-like creatures that come indoors at night when it’s cold outside (I have no idea how such big creatures squeeze their way in). They don’t seem to be scavenging and just jump around like fat grasshoppers, then disappear when the sun rises. For lack of knowledge what to call them, we just came up with the term “Hippity-hoppiters.”
Well, you little bugs, no one enjoys my hard-earned shelter for free. My heating bill doesn’t pay itself. It’s taken a long time, but I finally found a way for at least one hippity-hoppiter to earn his keep. I took all 14 pieces I selected for today’s issue of DREAD and laid them carefully and stealthily around one particularly tired-looking, passive hippity-hoppiter (or maybe the guy was just blind or near death). Once I had everything set up, I tickled him with a leaf, and boing-flick, the fat little guy landed squarely on “The Big Coffin.” This earns James Worth’s work the top spot today, here at the bottom where it takes several mouse-scrolls to reach.
Beautiful, bleak, and as fun as frostbite, this melancholy tale is vivid and rife with themes heavier than a snow-laden pine tree. It centers on an unnamed woman who counts caribou marching across the tundra, and boy, has she got wonderful things on the brain. She’s not just tallying the herd’s numbers but also all her grief and loss. I can’t help but think the woman’s name eroded away after her dad tanked his woodworking career building a coffin for her stillborn brother. Oh, and dad died right after. In the final scene we coo and cuddle a dying baby caribou, which I think James puts in to serve as a comparatively warm and tender moment while we contemplate a bombed out city. The world is just one big coffin waiting for us all to lie down in it. I rate this one 5 out of 5 frozen tears:
I’m a military sci-fi nerd. I love tanks, technical readouts, big stompy robots, space exploration, hard, gritty soldiers, harrowing combat - EW, ARE THEY KISSING?
Deupawn: Chains of a Demigod (Part 3)
A big thanks to James Kenwood, Kathrine Elaine and one other non-stacker for the alpha read on this. Please check out their work, they are all fantastic writers.
Thanks for reading!
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Thank you, sir!
Thank you for the plug! Much appreciated.