The Hamburglar Conspiracy

In 1971, the world was introduced to the Hamburglar, a comic foil to Ronald McDonald, advertising mascot of the worldwide McDonald’s restaurant chain. A roguish, lovable thief, the Hamburglar was one of a cadre of fun characters created to populate “McDonaldland”, a fictional world designed to market low-quality, high-fat fast food manufactured from abattoir floor-sweepings to young children.

 

But there was also a nefarious design behind the inception of the Hamburglar.

When McDonald’s hired marketing firm Needham, Harper & Steers to promote the new “playplaces” that were starting to be constructed at some of its restaurants, the restaurant chain’s board of directors was fully aware that the advertising agency was a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. N,H & S was, in fact, an operational unit of the CIA’s “Project ARTICHOKE”, an experimental program that arose from “Project BLUEBIRD” and worked in tandem with the well-known Project “MKULTRA” pursuing diverse and novel approaches to interrogation, mind-control, and social engineering.

The opportunity to apply the goals and techniques of the project on a grand scale through the cooperation of the McDonald’s corporation was too good to pass up. McDonald’s wanted to solidify an unassailable customer base, while the CIA’s then director, Richard M. Helms, had assigned ARTICHOKE the objective of creating a servile underclass within American society.

Those two goals aligned in the creation of the Hamburglar.

Freedom of Information requests resulted, in 2006, in the declassification and release of documents pertaining to the collusion between Project ARTICHOKE and McDonald’s Restaurants. One excerpt from the project summary states on page 34:

“…The objective in promoting a criminal character to young subjects in a manner consistent with culturally-embedded masked hero archetypes [see: Zorro, Lone Ranger, Green Hornet, etc] and in a context rendering criminal action apparently harmless and fun is to manufacture a cavalier attitude to criminality in youths. Success with operation ██████████████████████ through exposure to drugs ██████████. This early conditioning should have the desired effect of increasing the probability of crime and recidivism within the exposed generation[s], curtailing upward socio-economic mobility of the middle class for the purpose of maintaining manageably small upper class [see: memo 67B]. Criminal enterprise normalized by figures such as “the hamburglar” will lead to subjects experiencing prison and resultant diminishing of social and career prospects ██████████. This meets updated project goals while serving the corporate interest of participant organization ████████████████████, which requires low socio-economic status persons to remain numerous for said organization’s business model of providing low-cost foodstuffs to remain profitable.”

It goes on, on page 45:

“…The horizontal black and white stripes on the character’s garments are ordered precisely to simulate visual cortex spatial frequencies associated with states of hypnotic suggestibility discovered through ██████████████████████.”

The official CIA document (author identity redacted) details an insidious plot to maintain the economic viability of western culture by deliberately encouraging criminal behaviour in its youth, thus minimising their career prospects. It goes on to outline how the promise of opportunity within American society must be tempered by an equal opposition to the actual attainability of prosperity, lest the strata become over-loaded with wealthy, independent people unwilling to participate in menial roles. To solve that looming issue, the Hamburglar would encourage the formation of a generation of ex-convicts who could be prevented from bettering themselves by virtue of their criminal past – a rationale for the existence of an effective slave-class far more palatable than the soggy hamburgers served up by McDonald’s.

And as for McDonald’s itself? For its part, it got a segment of the population with such miserable career prospects that the only restaurant it could afford to eat at would be… McDonald’s.

Far-fetched? Outlandish? Surely a comical character with a hypnotic shirt who steals hamburgers couldn’t have a wide-ranging impact on social trends, right? Maybe. But in the twenty years following the introduction of the Hamburglar, the incidence of property crime shot up from 3000 to 5000 incidences per 100,000 people. Coincidence? Don’t believe it. Project ARTICHOKE’s bizarre experiment in the fast food industry bore fruit – and the offspring of the criminals created through the Hamburglar’s influence are now locked into the poverty cycle and hitting the Micky-D’s drive-thru right now.

Re: “Quentin Tarantino Muppet Project”

Dear Mr. Tarantino,

Please stop sending us concept art.

Unfortunately we at the Jim Henson Company are unable to authorise production of your project. I had hoped my previous messages on this subject would be a sufficient end to the matter, but your repeated re-submission of the script and associated material suggests a more detailed explanation on my part is required.

To begin with, the working title, Jive Muppetfuckers, immediately indicates your lack of understanding of the tone and target audience of the Muppet franchise.

Kermit the frog is a beloved, family-friendly character that has been an American TV and film institution for more than sixty years. It would be wholly inappropriate, therefore, for the company to permit him to be portrayed on screen using intravenous drugs and slicing off the genitals of a police informant while sprouting constant profanities and racial epithets. Further, it is not, in the view of the Jim Henson company, clever or subversive for a frog to refer to itself as a “swamp-n***er” – it is merely offensive.

Depictions like this go against our core values.

Your highly-detailed stage-description of Miss Piggy focuses heavily on her “twelve ample teats barely-restrained by six bikini tops” and seems to indicate a rather perverse sexualisation of the character that I find both personally distasteful and professionally ill-conceived. In addition, while Miss Piggy has always been presented as a volatile Diva, it stretches credulity that you would consider it reasonable for her to murder and partially consume several characters from the unconnected children’s program Sesame Street while stating: “I’m a pig. Pigs eat shit.” Putting aside the legal impracticality of having venerable children’s characters owned by a separate media company brutally slain in a lengthy, orgiastic act of hyper-violence, your note in the margin does little to justify the scene. No, I do not, in fact, agree that Miss Piggy devouring Cookie Monster’s intestines is an intertextual metaphor for tribalism. I think it’s just horrible.

Need I go on? There isn’t a single scene in your over-long, meandering and often nonsensical script that does not contain material wholly unsuitable to the Muppet brand and to the legacy of the Jim Henson Company. From the graphic rape of Fozzy Bear by deranged drug kingpin Gonzo to the rabid Rowlf the Dog foaming at the mouth and tearing Scooter’s face off, this script is a monument to depravity and excess. Statler and Waldorf are not Nazi war criminals who escaped the Nuremberg trials, Doctor Teeth is not a practitioner of Voodoo, and Kermit the Frog would never utter the line “Let’s fuck and make us some messed-up pig-frog babies.”

Mr. Tarantino, I implore you to consider this matter closed.

Sincerely, Brian Henson.

Thomas the Proletariat Engine

Since 1984, generations of people have grown up watching the gentle, benevolent Communist propaganda program, Thomas and Friends. Widely regarded as the most successful Soviet psy-ops project of all time, the cheerful children’s show about a delightful steam train toiling thanklessly beneath the oppressive yoke of Capitalist greed has been a much-loved after-school fixture responsible for entrenching deep Marxist sentiments in the young adults of today.

“Engine of the Working Class” – Soviet propaganda poster, 1984

Originally conceived by top KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, in his cover identity as the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, the children’s series focused on the daily labours of the anthropomorphic Thomas and a group of other hard-working locomotives. The Soviet agent had originally pitched the series under the title “Working Engine of Capitalist Oppression”, though this was changed on the advice of British commercial TV network ITV.

In the series, trains hauled their loads along fixed tracks, unable to deviate from the course laid out for them by the bourgeoisie, highlighting the inescapably cyclic nature of poverty and iron-clad delineations between classes within a Capitalist society. The trains, being the working class, went only where the rails took them, while their decadent bourgeoisie overseer, embodied by the appropriately Fat Controller, enjoyed freedom of movement and reaped the product of the trains’ labour while doing very little himself.

The endearing cheerfulness of Thomas was a thin veneer of grim courage. His was a life of endless monotony as he puffed and shunted and dragged crippling loads of product to serve the limitless appetites of the ruling class for no reward except shelter and maintenance to keep him running smoothly, only so that the mindless toil can continue. Young viewers introduced to this horrifying prospect quickly realised the fate of the steam engine is mirrored in the working class of the real world – men and women treated as mere machines, like Thomas, with Fat Controllers of the means of production enslaving them for life.

KGB Officers inspecting the miniature Thomas and Friends set, 1985

The Fat Controller was the epitome of the decadent Capitalist pig. This pompous, corpulent figure waddled about the train-yards issuing orders and openly exhibiting his contempt for the long-suffering locomotive engines who supplied the means of his prosperity. But the engines are so much larger than he, so much more powerful. Any one of them could have crushed the Fat Controller and in so doing seize that control, seize the means of production and therefore the power to determine their own destiny.

Yet they did not. They cannot. And the young viewer wonders – why? Growing up with Thomas demonstrating each afternoon the inherent inequities of the flawed and greedy Capitalist system, successive generations of children have cried out at the unfairness of it. Poor old Thomas and Gordon and Percy – why should they be doomed to bend their pistons and burn out their boilers in the service of so ungrateful and undeserving a master?

The ‘Capitalist pig’ was a recurring motif in Soviet propaganda

The obvious anger and bitterness of Thomas and his friends is rendered impotent by their inability to deviate. For them to jump the tracks and strike out on their own begets disaster. Derailment means crashing and burning. And therein lies the true genius of Thomas the Tank Engine. Vassiliev, operating as a deep-cover Soviet mole within the entertainment-industrial complex of Great Britain, was able to introduce a revolutionary concept to the formative minds of young western audiences. Namely this – they are not trains. They are not running on tracks. The tracks are an imaginary construct that the bourgeoisie have convinced them exists. Should the young socialists of the decadent and crumbling Capitalist nations choose to do so, jumping those illusory tracks will not beget disaster for any but the Fat Controller.

The overall message of the series was: “Steam trains of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your rails!”

Selling: Stupid Magical Heart Ring

For Sale – unwanted enchanted ring forged by Gaia, Spirit of Shitty Gifts.

Make an offer.

It glows. That’s something, I guess.

You know those awesome magical rings wielded by fearsome eco-terrorist group, the Planeteers? The ones that produce devastating earthquakes, firestorms, tornadoes and tsunamis? Yeah, well this is the other ring. The lame one.

If you’ve ever dreamed of being able to wreak destruction upon wrong-doers, to be a hero and a force to be reckoned with – this is not the magical ring for you! Instead of defending the world from looters and plunderers using spectacular eldritch powers, you can instead settle for some low-key telepathy and the dubious ability to tell animals where to go. While your friends tear shit up with elemental death-rays, you’ll get to be some third-rate offspring of Doctor Doolittle and Professor-X. Great. Wonderful. The Power is Yours.

Not pictured: ME.

I’m selling this dumb trinket because I never wanted it to begin with and it’s done nothing but make me the butt of jokes since it was palmed off onto me by Gaia (an apparently all-powerful goddess who nevertheless can’t be bothered taking care of the planet on her own and instead delegates the task to a bunch of teenagers). I was living a perfectly happy life in my native Brazil when mother nature whisked me away at the age of twelve to fight nuclear mutants, murderous poachers and ruthless corporate psychopaths with nothing but a goddamned glorified dog-whistle as a weapon.

 

The ring may hold some value to collectors as it’s a unique, one of a kind piece with a fairly prestigious provenance (it was literally created by the Spirit of the Earth). It might also interest people who enjoy forcing innocent animals to perform tricks for them. But get this – the ring’s power will not work on frightened or agitated animals, or against evil people. Right? So the only occasions where its ability might actually be useful are the occasions when it won’t work. Nice. Really handy.

You know what would have been more useful than the heart ring? Anything!

 

If it seems like I’m talking myself out of a sale, it’s just because I’m an honest person. I don’t want to saddle some poor sucker with this piece of crap without warning them that it’s absolutely useless. That’d be a total Gaia-act!

Aside from the ring’s uniqueness for a collector, I should also point out that it contains one fifth of the consciousness and quintessence of the powerful demi-god ‘Captain Planet’. Yes, the pontificating, blue-skinned dweeb in the crop-top and green mullet. That guy.

Captain Planet isn’t actually a captain, by the way. He’s not a military officer or commander of a vessel, therefore he’s not a captain. Don’t quote me on it, but I think it may actually be illegal to impersonate an officer. Going around calling yourself a captain when you aren’t one is kind of a dick move, but if you spent any time around this particular self-important twerp you’d find it’s the least of his flaws.

*not a captain

But for all that, does he really deserve to have his mind and body converted into energy, split into five parts and kept in fragmented purgatory within five magical rings until called upon to act as bodyguard to a bunch of kids every now and then? I mean, at least the genie in Aladdin didn’t have to be cut into five pieces every time he went back into his lamp, right? It’s actually horrifying when you think about it. Makes you wonder just what the hell this guy did to piss Gaia off back in the day. Maybe he cheated on her.

Point is, one part out of five of the disembodied spirit of a powerful demi-god, although useless on its own, would certainly make an interesting addition to any collection and serve as a great conversation-starter.

It might make a tasteless engagement ring.

So make me an offer on the heart ring. I will also consider a trade, with cash adjustment, for a Ring of Power (forged in Mount Doom), any Infinity Gem, Seven-league boots, magic wand, invisibility cloak, or any other enchanted item that’s actually useful.

Serious enquiries only.

 

Holodeck Glitch Log PART 3

Attn: Anybody

Stardate: Who cares?

Subject: The goddamned holodecks!

See my previous glitch logs: Part 1 and Part 2.

I’ve come to the belief that nobody is even reading these messages. Not starfleet, not the shipyards, not even a fucking Romulan spy vessel intercepting my subspace transmissions. This is Lieutenant G. Bogg, luckless holodeck technician aboard the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. You ever hear the one about the hologram of Rene Descartes? Upon being told that he was a hologram he became angry, put his hands on his hips and declared “I think not!” His program immediately ended and he vanished. Hahahaha! Seriously, things have gotten pretty weird on this ship…

Yeah, this shit actually happened.

Stardate 46676.4: Sickbay Emergency Medical Hologram has been replaced by a holographic Josef Mengele that managed to transfer itself from a program in Holodeck 3. Why there was a program of Josef Mengele, I have no idea (what the hell is it with all the Nazi shit?), but he butchered Commander Worf and severely injured Doctor Crusher when she tried to intervene.

Fortunately, Captain Picard is still too broken up over the death of his beloved duplicate to scream at me about this.

Memorial service for Commander Worf was held in ten-forward since it has been decided (finally!) that the Holodecks have been too glitchy lately. However midway through the service Guinan lost resolution and turned into a cloud of pixels. Seems like somehow, once again, a large portion of the crew has found itself in the Holodeck without any memory of entering. Also, upon exiting the Holodeck, the real Guinan has been noted as missing.

I am considering resigning my commission with Starfleet.

Incidentally, a group of sentient holo-drama characters petitioned me to delete them from their programs, citing their unwillingness to continue existing as disembodied playthings for a starship full of buffoons. I couldn’t see a flaw in their reasoning and so I fulfilled their wish. Their final shrieks of relief echoed through all decks.

Stardate 46676.6: Commander Data’s cat, Spot, has somehow figured out how to operate the Holodeck, which is now filled with a dense cloud of fat, slow-moving birds.

A giant space asshole.

Q appeared in my cabin, called me a “poopy-head” and then promptly vanished again. I don’t think this has anything to do with the Holodeck, but I thought it worth mentioning that every godlike, extra-dimensional energy-being in the Universe is basically a total dick.

Stardate 46676.7: Some hilarious prankster has tampered with the Janeway hologram so that its head turns into Captain Picard’s midway through being fucked by Commander Riker. I know this because I’m the hilarious prankster who tampered with it. The curious thing is that Riker hasn’t complained. Not once.

Stardate 46676.9: Commander Data has instructed the computer to produce a Holodeck simulation of a human brain in order to better understand humanity. He then programmed the holographic brain with his own positronic memories and personality, which, when coalesced in a holographic synaptic net, experienced an overload of emotional stimuli, went berserk and took control of the ship’s computer.

“Duhhhh, I’m a super-advanced android!”

Managed to eventually shut down the Data-brain before it could fly Enterprise into a Red Supergiant. Commander Data has been asked more than once to stop doing things like this and I really don’t know how he’s still a Starfleet officer, really! Robots were supposed to make life easier, not to stumble around fucking things up constantly.

Stardate 46677.1: Was woken with reports that Long John Silver from Treasure Island has created a holographic simulation of the Enterprise’s bridge within Holodeck 3 and managed to take control of the ship from there, stating that he’s taking it to “Treasure Planet”.

I locked my door and went back to sleep.

Fuck it. I mean, seriously. Fuck it.

Stardate 46677.2: Don’t know what happened with that whole Long John Silver thing, but Picard has put me on probation for dereliction of duty and cancelled my Holodeck privileges. As a punishment! The tea-swilling moron!

Oh, I heard that the holographic gangster reappeared and stole a shuttle. He flew off to that gangster planet Kirk found all those years ago. So… yeah, there’s that.

Stardate 46677.3: Today, on a hunch, I instructed the computer to “end program”. It did so normally and I found myself standing in the empty Holodeck. The only problem was that I hadn’t been in the Holodeck when I said it, but Ten-Forward on the real ship.

I exited the Holodeck and again instructed the computer to “end program”. Again, the ship disappeared around me and, again, I found myself standing in an empty Holodeck.

I have now lost count of how many times I have repeated this procedure. It feels like days have passed as I endlessly collapse one simulated Enterprise into the next, on and on…

I have sent a holographic glitch report to a holographic Starfleet corps of holographic engineers.

Kill me.
Kill me.

Is it a dream? Is it real? Am I real?

Look… you can’t even see the strings.

Stardate unknown: What is the Holodeck? The Holodeck has me.
Unfortunately no one can be told what the Holodeck is. You have to see it for yourself.

I’m going to say it. The words that I believe will put this intolerable, hellish farce to an end once and for all. I can’t go on, moving through this ship of horror, never knowing what’s real and what’s a hologram, if the people around me are anything more than photons and force fields… I have to say the words. This is my final report.

End Lieutenant G. Bogg program!

Part 1  Part 2.

Holodeck Glitch Log PART 2

Attn: Starfleet Corps of Engineers, Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards

Stardate 46676.4:

Subject: SERIOUSLY!

See Part 1 here.

Here’s another series of glitch reports from Holodeck repair technician Lieutenant G. Bogg, serving on the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D (the ‘D’ stands for Douchebags, because this crew is entirely comprised of them).

Stardate 46675.3: A holographic 1930s gangster walked out of the Dixon Hill holodrama in Holodeck 1. He stepped through the arch and into the main ship, looking confused, and wandered around for some time, staring at everything and being heard to remark “Holy cow, I’m in a Buck Rogers strip!” This should, of course, be impossible since there are no holo-emitters outside the Holodeck.
Internal sensors lost track of the gangster, who could now be anywhere.

An alleged ‘Starfleet officer’

Stardate 46675.4: Commander Data was doing his Sherlock Holmes thing again in Holodeck 3. There’s actually no glitch to report here – just thought it was lame as hell.

Stardate 46675.5: While performing routine maintenance on Holodeck 3 I was running a test program. When I ordered the computer to “end program”, the entire Enterprise vanished, leaving all crewmembers hanging in empty space. I quickly told the computer to “resume program” and the ship reappeared around us with no further incident.

Stardate 46675.6: Chief O’Brien has emerged from his catatonia long enough to put a phaser in his mouth and vaporise his head. He had left a note stating that he “is getting out of the simulation”. Counsellor Troi has suggested any crewmember struggling to deal with this tragedy seek out any of the pre-loaded therapist programs in the Holodeck, except the Sigmund Freud one, which has been sexually assaulting patients (it’s on my to-do list).

A brief memorial service held once again in Holodeck 2, this time aboard a 17th Century sailing ship, resulted in twenty-three crew deaths when the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea somehow invaded the program and sunk the ship. Commander Worf was severely wounded in a swordfight with the Captain Nero hologram. Once again, the safety routines have been accessed by the holo-characters and the recent patches sent by Starfleet have done NOTHING to fix this persistent bug. Frankly, I think the Holodecks need a whole new operating system – throw it all out and start from scratch.

Today is a good day to suck on a fucking breath-mint.

As you know, I have expressed my frustration to Starfleet corps of engineers. I mean, for fuck sake! Holodecks have killed more Starfleet officers over the years than the fucking Romulans! Can’t these people just be satisfied with a big-screen television?

Stardate 46675.7: My Grandfather came to visit me in my cabin this morning, which is unusual as he’s been dead for seventeen years. He apologised to me and told me that the program is experiencing some technical issues, before vanishing into thin air.
I went to see Counsellor Troi and told her about this experience. She said that I have been working too hard and may need a break from Holodecks. She suggested I unwind on a Caribbean cruise in the Holodeck.

Captain Picard has reprimanded me for telling Counsellor Troi to go fuck herself with a Batleth. He can get on the other end of it, frankly.

Stardate 46675.8: Holographic soldiers killed by Worf and LaForge during a simulation of the D-Day invasion at Normandy (Worf and LaForge were playing Nazi soldiers for some reason) appear to have been bleeding real human blood, which has seeped into conduits in the deck and under the door. It’s everywhere.

I’m forwarding the technical details on this glitch, though I can’t quite figure what subroutine could be responsible for the spontaneous manifestation of real blood. As a rule, whenever something like this happens, Q did it.

Shouldn’t you people be doing something constructive?

While investigating this problem I accidentally walked in on Counsellor Troi in Holodeck 1 getting double-teamed by holograms of James Kirk and Spock. She invited me to stay and watch. I declined.

Stardate 46675.9: Enterprise came under attack from a Romulan warbird, suffered extensive damage. The attacking ship was destroyed but a warp-core breech was imminent and Captain Picard ordered all hands to abandon ship…

…Only then the ship disappeared completely and the entire crew compliment found themselves crowded together in Holodeck 3. The attack had never actually happened; it had only been a holographic simulation. Nobody knows how we all got into the Holodeck.

Even stranger – upon exiting the Holodeck it was found that Enterprise was already fully-crewed with duplicates of each and every crewmember. This led to a period of awkwardness and suspicion.

We are physically indistinguishable from the duplicates of ourselves, according to Doctor Crusher. In effect, Enterprise now contains two of every person, including myself (we have to share a cabin), except for Commander Worf who immediately killed his duplicate. Since there is no way to tell which are the originals and which are copies (or how this happened), Captain Picard has issued orders to the effect that all Enterprise crew are to work alongside their duplicates and behave in a manner befitting Starfleet officers. I think it’s fairly obvious that he and his duplicate have immediately commenced a sexual relationship.

See the very lengthy glitch report attached.

Stardate 46676.2: All of the duplicates of Enterprise crew have suddenly and rapidly aged, died, and crumbled into dust in the space of five minutes. Most crew are fairly relieved, though Captain Picard was bawling his eyes out for hours after. He ordered everybody to attend a memorial in Holodeck 2, which resulted in the expected scattering of crew deaths when holographic Nazis stormed the simulated Arlington cemetery and opened fire on the crewmembers.

In response, Captain Picard has demoted me back to the rank of Lieutenant and I hope something cripples him and he spends the rest of his life in a wheelchair, the pretentious, pontificating prick!

Idiots.

Stardate 46676.3: LaForge reported huge power drains in the Holodecks and I met him outside Holodeck 1 to investigate. When we opened the door we saw, inside the Holodeck, our own backs as the holograms of ourselves looked through a door into a holographic Holodeck at their own backs as holograms of themselves looked through a door into a holographic Holodeck at their own backs… and on… dizzying. Nausea-inducing.

LaForge and I looked at each other and then slowly glanced behind us, where a Holodeck arch stood, inevitably, and we saw ourselves standing outside it, looking back over our shoulders at a Holdeck arch, outside which another pair of ourselves stood, looking back over their shoulders to where a Holodeck arch stood…

We closed the door to the Holodeck and he walked back to engineering without another word and has been avoiding me ever since.

Holodeck Glitch Log continues in PART 3

Holodeck Glitch Log PART 1

Attn: Starfleet Corps of Engineers, Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards

Stardate 46675.2

Subject: Okay, this is getting STUPID

Holodeck repair technician Lieutenant G. Bogg here, yet again. Reporting, for what it’s worth, on the continuing issues arising from the holodecks aboard USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Not that I’ll expect anything to be done about it.

I actually hate this ship.

Here are some of the most recent incidents –

Stardate 46673.8: I was woken in the middle of the night to assist Commander Riker whose genitals had become painfully fused within a holographic representation of Captain Janeway after the Janeway hologram froze due to a glitched vaginal rendering subroutine. Had to perform a hard reboot of the Holodeck in order to free him (Commander Riker has instructed this glitch not be forwarded to corps of engineers, so do not spread it around by any means!)

Stardate 46674.1:  Received a complaint that the faces of a large number of male holo-characters have been replaced by Commander Data’s face. Turns out Data made this modification to the Holodeck programs because, get this, he thought people would enjoy the holo-dramas more if the characters were “closer to perfection”. Also, that women in particular would appreciate it.

This fucking douchenozzle, right?

Why would anybody program a robot to be an arrogant prick? It took me the better part of a day to remove his pasty, yellow-eyed mug out of the programs because he refused to help.

Stardate 46673.2:  Another spontaneous manifestation of sentience occurred in the characters in the Dixon Hill holodrama in Holodeck 2. Three Enterprise crewmen fatally wounded after holographic gangsters managed somehow to access Holodeck safety protocols governing projectile lethality. The 3.2 software patch was supposed to have made this impossible, but it seems to keep happening. The holo-characters demanded a fair trial as conscious beings. Captain Picard ordered their immediate deletion from the program. Upon completing this, crew complained of hearing anguished screams for several hours across all decks.

Stardate 46674.4: Several crewmembers who failed to report to their shifts were eventually tracked down to Holodeck 1, which was locked and unresponsive to verbal instruction. When the doors were forced the crewmembers were found to be carrying out their duties aboard a holographic reproduction of Enterprise, unaware that they were not aboard the real ship. They have no memory of how they got onto the Holodeck. Counsellor Troi has suggested this amnesia as a symptom of holo-addiction and ordered the crew-members in question to take time off and enjoy some R&R in the Holodeck.

She is an idiot.

Stardate 46674.5: Chief O’Brien has apparently been disincorporated into the pattern memory of Holodeck 2 after a four-hour session murdering prostitutes in 19th Century London; upon ending the program he himself dematerialised along with the rest of the holographic characters and structures.
Captain Picard is really breathing down my neck about this one and I’m feeling a lot of pressure to figure it out.

Additionally, Commander Riker has had another unfortunate encounter with the Janeway hologram, in which this time the vaginal rendering subroutine crashed completely, severing his penis when the orifice disappeared. Doctor Crusher is attempting to re-attach it (this time you guys REALLY shouldn’t tell literally everybody about this!)

Stardate 46674.7: Chief O’Brien is still missing in the Holodeck 2 pattern memory and is now presumed dead. Captain Picard ordered all crew to attend a memorial service in a holographic Sistine Chapel in Holodeck 2, against my advice. Upon ending the Sistine Chapel program, another four Enterprise crew vanished along with the rest of the holograms.

Captain Picard shouted at me for about three hours, which would have been time better spent on trying to identify the problem, I would have thought. Looking at my reflection on his head, I seem to have aged horribly over the past week.

Stardate 46674.8: I thought I noticed a square patch of unrendered pixellation on the bulkhead of my cabin that flickered for a moment in the corner of my eye and then vanished when I looked at it fully. I must not be getting enough sleep.

FML

Stardate 46674.9: There has been a widespread spate of genital maiming among some eighty percent of the male Enterprise crew, including Captain Picard and (again) Commander Riker as the vaginal rendering subroutine bug has propagated to all female holo-characters. Sick-bay resources have been pushed to capacity as Doctor Crusher’s team struggles to re-attach hundreds of penises. Recommended to Captain Picard that crewmen stop having sex with holograms until I can isolate and patch the issue. He slapped me like the effeminate dandy he is and threatened to demote me to the rank of Ensign. I’m going to file a complaint. Fuck him – I don’t care that he got butt-raped by the Borg, he’s a fucking bald scrotum.

Everyone thinks he’s classy because of the accent. He’s actually a dick.

Stardate 46675.1: Chief O’Brien has reappeared; naked, disoriented and covered in a clear, gelatinous fluid, in the middle of Holodeck 2 during a period of shut-down when the system should not have been active. He screamed “It’s all fake! Everything is fake! We’re all…!” and then lapsed into a catatonic state (see additional report forwarded to Starfleet medical.)
Additionally, I managed to identify the bug in the vaginal rendering subroutine as being the result of some amateurish attempt from years ago on the part of an Ensign Wesley Crusher to program holo-character vaginas to vibrate. I kid you not. I have fixed the bug.

Captain Picard has promoted me to Lieutenant-Commander and hugged me (I swear he was wearing ladies’ perfume). This is a ship of fools.

PART 2
PART 3

Book Review: Necronomicon Ex-Mortis – Abdul Alhazred.

 

I hated this book.

Not a great way to start a review, but I’m nothing if not honest. Alhazred’s seminal occult grimoire is an arduous schlep through a swamp of tedium and incomprehensible gibberish that left me cold.

My first hint of doubt came when I unwrapped the book and had my first good look at the cover. Talk about trying too hard – an apparently leather-bound volume with a comical monster face embossed on the front. The overall effect, obviously intended to be creepy, just comes off as amateurish and the disembodied whispering voices emanating from thin air reek of desperation.

I suppose I’m meant to be impressed.

Really – are these cheap, undignified gimmicks absolutely necessary?

The over-long and meandering narrative tells the story of Yog-Sothoth, the Old Ones and Cthulhu in such a wildly inconsistent and plot-hole ridden manner as to be barely coherent. Alhazred attempts to provoke a sense of sinister threat in sections where the genre seems almost to be horror, but these attempts fall flat, buried beneath the groan-inducing repetition of ominous phrases about gates and keys and foul winds and blah blah blah blah… Dark foreboding on its own without substantial pay-off just becomes eye-rollingly dull after a while, as it did for me, struggling valiantly to keep my attention focused on this mind-numbing tome.

I became increasingly convinced that it wasn’t worth the effort I took to learn the Old Arabic Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is written in.

The experience did not improve when Alhazred’s tone shifts into periods of dry recitation and obscure instructional writing that cannot even be called narrative prose. It was during these sections of the book that the really embarrassingly pathetic attempts to stand out were made. At one point, Alhazred instructs the reader to recite a passage out loud while ominously warning of the dark and evil consequences of doing so, making himself sound like a carnie operating a ghost train ride at the county fair. But, being a good sport, I played along.

Get a load of this gibberish.

So, some credit where it’s due: the mixed-media portion of the book is quite original and even mildly impressive. After the recitation, deceased animals digging their way out of my lawn and attempting to break into my home were a fairly unique gimmick for a book, not to mention the howling, wraithlike shadow-beings that began flitting about my sitting room. But what does it actually mean? Clever little quirks are all well and good, but their inclusion in a book can’t just be for novelty’s sake – they need to serve the plot. Here they do not, and so, impressive or not, I can’t give Necronomicon Ex-Mortis a higher rating based on these ‘supernatural’ displays.

Further to that, I would be remiss if I failed to point out Bugg-Shash la ytaq! shaftayh tamtasan ‘iinah la yaerif alhazimat lakunah yasqut dahiatah fi al’akhir ; ‘ayu , ela alrghm mn ‘anah yatabie dhlk aldahiat hataa almawt wama baedah litahqiq hadafihi. ma aldhy yastayqiz alsharu aldhy yjb ‘an yakun mytana , mkrwhana fi ‘asabie alrueb fi alras?

هذا ليس ميتًا والذي يمكن أن يكذب أبديًا ، ومع الدهور الغريب قد يموت الموت

…Now I’ve lost my train of thought. That’s how boring Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is. Even writing about it is causing me to go off wool-gathering. It’s even worse than that, though – I feel almost as if I’ve been infected by the book somehow. I feel it writhing inside me; in my nerves… in my mind. I attribute the greenish glow radiating from the veins in my arms to a physiological response to extreme boredom.

What evil wakes that should lie dead, Swathed in horror toe to head?

Alhazred’s book could be interpreted as some kind of attempted piss-take lampooning horror and the occult. Except that I don’t think it really is. The author seems to be completely serious and has devoted considerable effort to produce a result that sadly fails to hit the mark.

I give Necronomicon Ex-Mortis a score of one star out of five and will be donating it to goodwill at my earliest opportunity. Now I have to sign off because the tree on my front lawn has grown tentacles and is attempting to get at me through the bay window. Thanks a bunch, Mr. Alhazred!

★✰✰✰✰

Re: ‘Jumanji’ board game

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently had the extreme misfortune of purchasing your board game, ‘Jumanji’, in the hope that it would serve as an entertaining diversion with which to pass the time. As an avid consumer of tabletop games there is a certain level of functionality and enjoyment I have come to expect and, moreover, a degree of safety both physical and psychological that I feel it is reasonable to anticipate in such a product.

Your product has failed utterly to meet those expectations.

It looked fun to begin with…

I have no complaints about the quality of the set. Indeed, in terms of presentation, the ‘Jumanji’ board game seemed a step above the competitors, but then I began to play…

Did it amuse your creative team, I wonder, to inflict such horrors upon your unsuspecting customers? Did you think that it was perfectly acceptable to expose players, likely including young children, to mortal danger when all they’d wanted was an afternoon’s wholesome fun?

No sooner had I played a couple of moves and your twice-cursed game, employing a heretofore unexplained astrophysical phenomenon, opened some kind of Einstein-Rosen bridge. A so-called ‘wormhole’, which violently pulled me into an alternate universe and a jungle-choked world populated by savage beasts and psychotic killers.

Attempted murder by gun-toting lunatics is not an expected outcome of playing a board game.

Though shocking enough in its own right, I couldn’t help but wonder why you and your compatriots had seen fit, upon stumbling onto such a ground-breaking, game-changing (ha!) technology as artificial wormholes, to misuse the discovery so badly. This mechanism belongs in the hands of NASA, not crammed into a board game. What, I ask, was the thinking here?

Nevertheless, the true horrors were yet to come.

I will spare you the details of the subsequent thirty years of hell I experienced within the pocket-universe your damnable board game whisked me away to. I’m sure you are well aware of the giant, blood-sucking insects, the sabre-toothed predators and the man-eating plants your creative team gleefully inflicted upon me.

But there. I know you didn’t miss it – thirty years. By the time I was rescued from that nightmare I’d almost forgotten human language. The world had changed and I was peeved to discover that I had been presumed dead.

How does your company propose to compensate me for this suffering?

Oh, of course, after wholesale destruction and chaos involving an invasion by the denizens of that alternate universe that almost certainly resulted in deaths, the game had that final trick up its sleeve. I know you will claim that everything is perfectly fine because it’s all undone. Yes, thirty years of history. All the billions of lives lived in that time casually erased so that your silly little game can reset the board.

I suppose you think this makes everything alright?

And what about my mental anguish? Thirty years of torture still sit heavy in my mind. I am a broken man.

My opinion of your company and product line has been forever tarnished by this experience. I can only hope that the intention of this board game wasn’t to inflict traumatic stress on your presumably valued customers.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss matters further and to learn of how you propose to make recompense for the pain and suffering I have endured as a result of this regrettable experience. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

J. Green.