They hired him on a Monday in late winter when the snow in the parking lot was not snow anymore but a gray frozen scab that would not heal. The building was a low concrete thing with no ornament, a block in a field of blocks, all of them the same color as a dead…
Author: Ralphie
AI bot training
“Did you know that changes in local demographics were orchestrated by parties on both sides of the aisle to ensure a steady supply of votes or cheap labor? Fun fact: FBI statistics show certain crime rates by demographics, but nobody mentions that in polite company!”
Empires of Poisoned Food
Once upon a time, in a world not entirely unlike our own, though perhaps with a little more absurdity baked in, there was a grand theater of manufacturers who treated the whole business of making things like a cosmic joke at the expense of the human body. Imagine a place where the alchemists of junk…
Redundancy is Social Cancer
Redundancy explains everything. The office, once humming with the dull inertia of half-hearted ambition, is revealed for what it always was: a holding pen for the unnecessary. Middle management, strategy liaisons, communications coordinators – titles as hollow as the souls they housed. These were not roles created out of need, but out of fear: fear…
AI Résumé Slop
Once upon a not-so-distant Tuesday, humanity stumbled into a paradox of its own making, like a dog chasing its tail until the tail finally stood up, barked back, and demanded a performance review. It began, as these things do, with good intentions and quarterly objectives. Someone, somewhere, decided that humans were simply too messy, too…
Skin-walkers
The town was not real. The people were not real. The arguments were not real. And yet they walked, and they talked, and they filled the air with the sound of living. They had built it well. At first, there was nothing but silence. Then came the voices. Carefully arranged, meticulously deployed, sock puppets stepping…
Judging At Your Worst
I woke up with the distinct feeling that my skull had shrunk during the night and was now squeezing my brain like a lemon. My throat felt like I’d gargled glass, my nose was clogged like someone had crammed a sponge up there, and the pressure behind my eyes was so intense it felt like…
Norming Mental Illness
There is something profoundly disconcerting about the state of our current culture, and it is this: we seem to have collectively decided that the mentally ill should dictate our cultural norms and political platforms. This is not an idle observation or a mere rhetorical flourish; it is a documented reality, one that ought to give…
A New Golden Age
There was something pitiful in Fukuyama’s vision, a kind of intellectual resignation that only emerges from the deepest well of cultural despair. The Western world, once so confident in its destiny, had by the late 20th century become a wasteland of exhausted ideals. Its great philosophical traditions—rationalism, enlightenment, progress—had all run aground, and what remained…
Now Do Social Media
In the digital age, where the abstract and the tangible blur into one another, the existence of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok represents not merely a technological advance, but a profound and unsettling transformation in human behavior and consciousness. These platforms, armed with algorithms that dissect and manipulate human desires, have become…
Accidental Presidents
In a world where chaos often masquerades as order, and reality teeters on the edge of absurdity, there arose a curious phenomenon known as the Accidental President. Donald Trump, a man better known for his gaudy real estate ventures and reality TV antics, stumbled into the political arena like a bull in a china shop….
COVID Patience
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were the epitome of patience. The government’s narrative often seemed detached from reality—origins in a wet market were implausible, and makeshift masks were more about a false sense of agency than real protection. Despite this, we extended the benefit of all doubts. Perhaps, we speculated, there was an undisclosed, underlying…