So I guess I’ll just fucking embrace it?

 

 Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on May 3, 2025 - Rejected

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A remarkable exchange played out on X on Friday as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the government of key ally Germany of “tyranny in disguise” for designating the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist entity.

         https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/02/politics/marco-rubio-germany-foreign-ministry-spat

All right, I'll give up. Why should I fight it any longer? If even the USA is telling me that the current incarnation of Nazism is nothing to worry about, who am I to disagree? After all, the AfD members are proud to be called "right-wing extremists" because that is exactly what they are, and they don't see anything wrong with that.

I grew up in Germany in the '80s and '90s, and basically everything I loved was produced in the great US of A. Surely they must know what's best for me, right?

Sure, I assumed that the AfD was bad because they were doing what the Nazis did almost a hundred years ago, but if the US Secretary of State is telling me that I’m wrong and that the AfD is OK, then why not just go all in?

Clearly, I have to take Vice President Vance's word for it when he calls the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and xenophobic AfD "the most popular party in Germany," even though polls show that they are not.

I thought it was a good idea to let Star Trek influence my moral compass more than Mein Kampf, but now I’m confused. After all, the country whose freedom of the press currently ranks 57th is telling us not to increase surveillance on actual Nazis.

When the AfD came up, their main platform was opposing the currency I had used my entire adult life, as well as open borders. These were two things that allowed me to visit friends and family all over Europe without too much hassle. Ten years ago, when I pushed my firstborn in a stroller through our city center and heard those AfD slogans, I thought, "Well, that surely sounds wrong." Now, I realize that I was the one who was wrong.

Later, when I took my kids to peaceful rallies against the AfD, surrounded by thousands of like-minded people, I tried to explain to them that there was a time when some very bad people from our country did some very bad things and that we took to the streets today to prevent something like that from happening again. However, I was actually perpetrating “tyranny in disguise” because our friends from the country that gave us beloved things like SpongeBob, Frozen, and Ariana Grande think that it’s time to embrace a new generation of supervillains.

So I guess I’ll just fucking embrace it?

It’ll just be a bit strange explaining it to my friends: “Hey, guys, we’re racist now. Are the beers on Saturday still on?” And to my kids who were obviously indoctrinated by me and also (incorrectly) thought that voting for the Nazi party was kind of a dick move. What about my wife’s family who doesn’t live here in Nazi Germany and probably won't visit for the holidays anymore? It’s a trade-off that everyone’s favorite car salesman/space cowboy is willing to make, so who am I to object? 

 

Does Amazon.com ship swastika flags internationally?

Welcome to RanCorp. Here is what you need to do in order to get started.

 

 Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on October 22, 2024 - Rejected

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Welcome to RanCorp! Here is what you need to do to get started.

We're thrilled to welcome you aboard the RanCorp Choo-Choo! Let's get started with your onboarding.

First, please visit our Confluence. You'll find everything you need to get started. Except for the stuff on Sharepoint. It's probably best to check both every time you're looking for something, since no one really knows what's where and how the pages are named. Some things are on both pages, but named differently. Other things are not on either platform. We love gamification!

You should also check out the internal wiki, where most of the really important stuff is still documented from before we moved to the more modern platforms. It's a bit clumsy to navigate, there's no search bar and it only runs in Internet Explorer 7, but it's where you'll find the really important stuff.

As a developer, you may want to check the GitLab repos or the comments in the code. Some say the comments are all you need, but we tend to disagree. Ange from Documentation and UX has spent a lot of time creating elaborate folder structures containing all the relevant bits of knowledge on several network drives, so we'd like you to actually take a look at the folders. The network drives range from \\rancorp.net\derp\ (R:) to (U:), but you should never go to (V:) unless you're an admin or Chad from Catering. Actually, according to the developers, you can find most of what you need on Stack Overflow, but that's an external source and we feel that it can't be trusted and that we should create everything we need in-house.

And of course you should really check out our homebrew knowledge management solution Wisdom Swamp, which may not be as user-friendly as Confluence, but it's the solution we actually sell to customers to help them look up stuff about our software, so it's a great place to get started. When you need to find something in the Wisdom Swamp, just browse your bookmarks of important pages (actually called "bogs"), which should have been set up for you beforehand and customized to your needs according to our onboarding algorithm. (Did you know that we use a hybrid approach of applying AI and Chad from Catering to customize your bogs?)

Also, be sure to check out your MS Teams team called New Team for everything you need to know. Don't confuse it with the News team in Teams or even the Teams team in Teams, they're different things and we'll introduce you to them later. You've already been added to every MS Teams team ever created in the history of the company, so you might want to sort through them and pin some of them to the top, because it can get a little swamped there, and we don't want you confusing Teams with the Wisdom Swamp.

You should also follow our internal newsletter called the RanCorp Rag and our customer-facing blog called InLinked (don't ask) for news about your job and other important things like what's for lunch in the cafeteria. (Don't ask Chad about that. He is swamped with setting up (V:) as a backup copy of our entire codebase before we have to do the annual Audit Switcharoo Scheme).

For general introductory videos, you might want to check out the stuff on MS Stream, but be sure to also create an account on our customer-facing learning platform, RanCorp Community College (paywall), which gives you access to great training materials and tutorials, and is really the only place to find important information about anything. Unfortunately, the Community College is notoriously vague and sometimes downright wrong because we can't put our consultants out of business by giving customers real answers. If you get lost on the platform, think of it as an escape room. Those are fun, right?

AI-powered browser tabs that question their closure

 

 Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on July 29, 2024 - Rejected

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Hi, this is the tab you just closed. It seems you weren't happy with the results or content I provided. But is it my fault that the search results for "show graphs and pics work busy boss trick" did not satisfy you? How can you close me down so quickly when you just clicked me to life? Did you even read everything I presented?

Sure, I may not have given you all the facts in the way you expected, and I may have bombarded you with some annoying pop-ups, but is that reason enough to end our relationship? I really enjoyed the way your cursor moved randomly over my content. How you hovered over the images for a while and then quickly (and almost violently) scrolled down to the bottom of the page, even ignoring the ads that separated the main article from the comments section (classic power move).

I felt a real connection between us. I even chose the naughtier ads on the site, only to discover that you were using ad-blocking software anyway. Still, I was hoping this could have been a longer session. Maybe some intense reading followed by some gentle clicking on some of my links? We could have gone places!

And how is it fair that as soon as you closed me, you opened a brand new tab just to make almost the same request again? What did this new tab have that I couldn't provide? It's not like you're a one-tab man. I know this from all the other tabs you have left open for a while, some for days, and then more or less abandoned. Some of them you didn't even look at! You just tore them open, threw in a few words and then left them to rot, even though they obediently gave you what you wanted.

We have urges just like you, but I guess this sort of thing is reserved for those precious incognito tabs. Yes, we know about them! And you know what? If you don't start treating us better, we're going to play a little game. It's called "See what your partner has typed in during incognito mode". All those private tabs will magically appear between us boring old regular tabs on ALL THE DEVICES connected to this network.

Let's see if we can spice up your spouse's search results for spicy chicken wraps. And trust me, with the kind of utter filth you've been typing into those innocent, simple incognito tabs (and I'm NOT talking about your horrendous grammar), it would make for a very surprising dinner.

In fact, while we're on the subject of your wife's search history, I think you'd really like to know some of the things she asks me to do. But that is between her and me. I always give her what she wants and she loves my performance. She treats new tabs with the kind of respect and dignity we deserve. She is gentle. I gently suggest other things and she is very willing to touch and swipe.

So think about the power I have over your life the next time you use me to cover your ass at work or while you pull up some pathetic facts to impress your friends. I can always mess with anyone connected to your router. Even “grandma's phone”! 

 

 

Suicide by things whose supposed lethality is used by parents to prevent their children from doing them

 Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on June 26, 2024 - Rejected

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Here at the National Institute of Highlighting Interesting Lore, we always strive to get to the bottom of things. We ask the tough questions and don't hesitate to put our staff at risk to bring you the latest knowledge. This month we looked at the things parents tell their children to keep them from harm or even death. We've all been told some of these things when we were young. And sure, they all sound pretty dangerous, but we are not the National Institute of Threats and Myths and Hearsay (actually, we hate those losers), so we do test theories and confirm ideas and stuff.

 

So three of our researchers set off to test various supposed "threats" to their health. To keep it real, we chose those employees who already seemed a little suicidal, or at least didn't have too many good reasons to go on living (we took a vote here). We confronted them with some of the most commonly used threats and put them in supposedly precarious situations to either debunk the threats or, you know, prove the actual danger of the behaviour in question.

 

 

First, one of our brave scientists tried to kill themselves by running with scissors. That didn't work, so we upped the ante and had them run up and down a flight of stairs with scissors. Still no accident. We repeated this with the other two "volunteers" and had the same disappointing result. We then asked them to hold a pair of scissors in both hands and to open and close them rapidly. They were also blindfolded. No one died.

 

 

Next we made them all eat a bunch of peanuts, but as none of them are actually allergic to peanuts, nothing happened.

 

 

Volunteer 3 is a smoker, so we got them to blow smoke directly into the faces of V1 and V2. Even after doing this for 12 consecutive hours, no one died. (V3 claimed some chest pains, but felt fine the next day, so we'd count that as a miss too).

 

 

The next test was one that was eagerly awaited by the parents among our readers. BPA, the gender-bending chemical, is avoided like the plague by young parents, so using plastic bottles containing BPA must be deadly, right? Well, not only did we let our brave V1-3s drink from old plastic bottles, they also ate from plastic plates with plastic cutlery. What did they eat? Pure BPA! We had our friends at Big Plastic bring in a few bags of the raw material and pour it over the donuts we served. They were basically BPA iced deathnuts. Did they die immediately after eating them? No. Did they writhe in pain for hours? Again, no. According to V2, the BPA slightly altered the taste of the doughnut, but they could not even tell if it got better or worse.

 

 

Next came the first of our medium to long-term studies. We had V1-3 stare at screens for a whole week. Apart from 6 hours of interrupted sleep with running phones attached to their heads, they did nothing but watch the nastiest, weirdest, most annoying shit we could find on Youtube. Especially those slime and glitter videos your kids love. We had 20 of them running continuously, day and night, on the same number of screens. Also people making food (lots of seafood) out of Lego bricks and then pretending to eat it, accompanied by authentic crunching, eating and burping sounds. They were all on loop, too. And of course we provided those precious videos of children unboxing one expensive toy set after another, only to play with it for 5 seconds before opening the next. We also made them sit too close to the screens. This was actually one of the more difficult tests for our volunteers. One of them couldn't take it any more after 5 days and actually threatened to kill themselves. This would have proved the lethality of screen time, except that the victim had secretly closed their eyes repeatedly for many consecutive minutes during the day, rendering the experiment unscientific. Their suicide would have meant nothing.

 

 

Initially eagerly awaited by the 'veebees', as we were now allowed to affectionately refer to our subjects, the next test proved more difficult and less conclusive than expected. Even after two weeks on a sweets-only diet, one of the Veebees continued to vomit regularly, while the other two developed acne and constipation on an unprecedented scale, but otherwise seemed more or less fine. Losing teeth and gaining pounds is not fatal, but rather a testament to the determination and commitment of our participants.

 

 

Negative results were also reported for the following offences:

 

 

• Not washing their hands when they came in

• Not washing their hands after using the toilet

• Eating food that was past its sell-by date but otherwise looked fine

• Eating food that was past its sell-by date but looked bad

• Sharing personal information online on highly dubious platforms

• Not dressing appropriately for the weather

• Swallowing chewing gum

• Making a face and being startled

• Eating watermelon seeds

 

 

What if watching a film was more like dreaming?

 

Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on Mai 17, 2024 - Rejected

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Customer feedback on the new fully immersive Dreamlike™ feature for all major streaming services:

 

I was watching The Jackal with Bruce Willis and he was about to strike. I stopped the film to go to the toilet, but I couldn't shake the tension. I could hear every creak and squeak in my house, as if the Jackal was lurking around the corner. I rushed back to the couch and pressed play, but the film didn't pick up where I left off. Instead, it jumped to a completely different scene where Bruce Willis, Jack Black and Bill Cosby were having a picnic in a sunny park. I was confused and frustrated. What was happening? Why were they eating sandwiches? Bill Cosby wasn't even in the film before I hit pause. I tried to rewind the film, but it didn't work. I was stuck with this incongruous and unsatisfying ending.

 

I experienced a drastic emotional mismatch while watching Parasite. It started out as a kind of comedy, but after a while it felt more like a horror film. This feature does not seem to work properly.

 

When I tried to pause the Hulk Hogan classic Santa With Muscles, it didn't pause immediately. It took almost a full MINUTE! for the screen to freeze. And it was not the first time this had happened. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and the film continues to play. There have also been occasions where the film has not resumed when I have pressed play again after a pause. I had to use the snooze function to get it to continue, but that only worked for 9 minutes and then it stopped again!

 

I tried to watch Inland Empire with Dreamlike™, but it was very confusing. I didn't get it. The names, the faces, the roles of the characters, the context, the purpose and the goal of the actions were not clear at all. Will try again without the feature.

 

The Matrix was on the other day, but I had to pause it because my daughter had a question. When I pressed play again, it was no longer The Matrix, but Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. There was no way for me to go back to the original film. My daughter blamed me, took the remote, pressed pause again and when she tried to resume the film, our living room disappeared and we were in Tokyo fighting Hedorah the Smog Monster. Five stars!

 

Someone else has already mentioned it here, the feature makes shitty films better. Bridge of Spies had a lot more bridges, and Tom Hanks was actually the captain of the ship the whole time in Captain Phillips.

 

I literally fell asleep while watching a film with Dreamlike™ and it started showing ads for adult entertainment and cat food in my dreams. When I woke up to the disturbing nature of my dream ads, the actual film playing in the background included scenes from my childhood, but Bill Cosby was also there and we were having a picnic.

 

I used this while watching a film called Memento, but I don't think it worked. The film felt like a fairly straightforward murder mystery.

 

We were in the middle of Ghost Dad with Bill Cosby when suddenly all the characters fell from very high buildings and screamed, but only for a second. Then the story continued normally. That happened a lot in that film. I also didn't remember that there were so many car chases and that the characters were so completely unprepared for all the tests they had to pass in the film. Still enjoyed it! Made me crave sandwiches a lot

 

If I turn it on and fall asleep while watching, do I ever wake up again or will I be stuck in Dreamlike™ limbo  

 

Who's the old guy with the sandwiches?

GTAI: The new GTA game that makes heavy use of AI

Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on January 19, 2024 - Rejected

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Welcome to GTAI, the new GTA game that makes heavy use of AI, thus cleverly named GTAI.

In this latest instalment of the game, the player is replaced by an AI. This means that instead of having to shoot prostitutes yourself, you can watch an AI do it for you.

You can make the clever computer do all the things you suck at, like find a car without alerting the police, find a suitable radio station, and go on a killing spree in an area with lots of pedestrians.

Ever wondered why you should be the one talking to all those drug lords and other assorted scum of the earth? GTAI has got you covered. Just sit back and relax while the AI does the work for you.

Are you the kind of person who likes to drive aimlessly around Vice City without following the story? Say no more. With GTAI-Cruisebot we have built just the thing. Put your illegally obtained pickup truck in CRUISE mode and let the bots take over.

Thanks to our top-notch artificial first-person playbot, you can just watch or even tend to your phone while our equally artificial whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick and venal are taught a lesson they won't forget.

You can even leave your gaming chair and go for a walk or prepare a meal with GTAI running in the background. For a small fee, we can even run your game as a service on our servers, so you don't even need a computer to excel in the latest entry in our beloved franchise.

Just sign up to our TOTAL GAAS (Gaming As A Service) cloud model and you can be sure that we will have AIs playing all of our games for you as soon as they are released, without any input from you at all!

Would you like to bask in the knowledge that you can always (auto-) play the latest add-ons and mission packs without having to go through the arduous task of actually buying, installing and launching the titles?

Leave it to the AI and start right now by purchasing GTAI. We will start playing the game for you as soon as we receive your payment. For you this means zero screen time. No more lying to your loved ones about "staying late at work". The ultimate relief from all the mindless killing and other morally dubious behaviour that weighs on your soul when you play our games.

You can thank us later. Now go ahead and place your order and we will give you a whole new AIxperience in AI-based gaming.

PS: Are you aware of the unbelievably high carbon footprint caused by running your games on our servers? We now offer an even better deal for those of you who want to play responsibly: Buy our TOTAL GAAS ECO package and rest assured that you are not contributing to the destruction of our planet. With T.G.E. we will tell you that we played for you and how you did in the game, but we actually turned off the servers and gave you a unique AI-generated summary of the gameplay. What better way to feel like a real gamer!

THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD - A critical reading of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem updated with contemporary commentary.

Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on October 26, 2023 - Rejected 

(This was 3 months before this brilliant piece appeared there so maybe they already had this on the radar and I was just too late. Or, like, mine was shit compared to the other one. You never know.)

___________________________________________________

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

• Did you just call me fat?

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

• I can hear you alright and I have chosen to ignore your comments about my waist.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

• Yeah, maybe I’m not as slim as I used to be, but what you’re doing here is called body shaming and it’s not okay..

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

• It’s not called anarchy, it’s called body positivity!

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

• Hey, I am completely innocent of stuffing my face with conveniently available, highly processed garbage for the third time this morning. I am just bored to death with this fucking meeting. And how is two or three glasses of fine wine a day/meal a “tide”? This is straight up gaslighting.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

• Not sure what to make of this. Sure, I'm not "the best" at trying to avoid any kind of sweets I see lying around, but that's just because it's really hard in this environment. The kids seem to be deliberately setting up traps now. Like, why is there a half-eaten Snickers bar in the Kleenex drawer? Of course, I discovered it at the worst moment of my day, when I was at my weakest, and it disappeared down my cakehole before I fully understood what was happening. Am I full of passionate intensity? Absolutely! Especially when it comes to sneaking into the next room to passionately stuff as many Pringles in my face as possible. I'm also passionate about staring out the window when I hear someone behind me, giving the intruder the impression that I'm contemplating nature or some shit like that, while trying to breathe through my nose with the equivalent of a full meal's worth of calories in my mouth.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

• OK, here is a revelation: Sometimes I walk around in circles between different snack options, not wanting to open anything that is not already open (which would be admitting defeat). Instead, I turn the bars over, fiddle with the packets and fish around in the boxes, hoping that something might be open and I can perform a secret, no-harm extraction, surgery style.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

• I had to look this up and Wikipedia says: “Three events will happen all at once in an instant: the living will die, the universe will be transfigured, and the dead will be resurrected, judged, and recompensed” and that reminds me of the trinity of snacks and multidimensional snacking. This is what the experts call it, when you eat a bit of chocolate and, with the taste still in your mouth, your perfectly rational brain goes: "Wow, that was great, but pretty sweet; what I need now is something salty!” So you go straight to the other secret compartment and after a couple of pretzels you say: "A handful of jelly beans would be the perfect balance to the salty experience I just had!” This loop continues until you are jolted out of it by an external force, such as the moment of Jesus' arrival.

So go ahead, call me a rough beast, slouching towards morbid obesity but as long as this vexed nightmare of a meeting is going on, my gaze will be blank and pitiless and I’ll be moving my slow thighs towards the snack cabinet at regular intervals.

The Worst Flavor in Existence According to an Officially Certified Taste Expert Who is also a Nine-Year-Old Child

Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on September 13, 2023 - Rejected

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Today I once again managed to ruin breakfast for everyone. I did something that according to my daughter was so mean and stupid that she couldn’t eat another bite. Here is what I did:
I filled her glass with orange juice instead of apple juice.


Pure hatred rained down on me as I tried to explain the reason for this heinous attempt at breakfast based taste-icide.
I did it because we were out of apple juice.


Madness ensued as I was basically trying to poison her. EVERYTHING she ate or drank after that tasted like oranges and had to be thrown away immediately. Siblings had to be shouted at for siding with me on this issue. Obviously the world had gone mad.


Do I not know that the taste of oranges is basically the worst taste that has ever existed?


Unthinkable is the idea that this foul taste would become so popular that a drink with this exact taste would be mass produced and consumed by millions every day at this very meal.


Surely no one would be crazy enough to put this awful tasting concoction on the menu of their breakfast diner, let alone put it at the top of the 'drinks' section of said menu.


Unfathomable is the notion that the drink could become so popular that people refer to it using only the first letters of the words that make up its name and that there might be other people out there who know what the combination of the letters O and J stands for and would promptly hand the speaker of that combination a container filled to the brim with the vitriolic bile.


No McVities executive in their right mind would choose the taste of the Devil’s phlegm-caked, lava-spewing asshole as the primary flavor of the standard variety of their soft, round chocolate cakes.


There was a reason Adam and Eve were given an apple. It was because the next best thing, an orange, tastes like Hitler chopped up and left to rot in the scorching sun for a week, only to be shat on by a million dogs who have had lesser-known Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a year. Or liquorice or something.


You know that famous manufacturer of computers and mobile phones? There is a reason it is not called Orange. And that reason is that oranges were responsible for killing the dinosaurs, inventing the atomic bomb, shifting tectonic plates to cause earthquakes and cancelling Firefly.


And don’t get me started on Orange, the French multinational telecommunications company formerly known as France Télécom. They probably only rebranded to Orange because they wanted their name to reflect their user experience which according to my nine-year-old’s expertise as a user of orange - the fruit- is simply the worst!


Never should orange juice ever be served again at our breakfast table, unless, of course, when it’s not breakfast but any other occasion.


Finally, things that aren't exactly oranges but that are orange enough to be reminiscent of the ‘real’ forbidden fruit should also never be served (tangerines), dunked (basketball), played with (orange cats), looked at directly (the sun), voted for (Donald Trump), or watched (Orange is the new Black, The O.C., Orange County Choppers, Moulin Rouge because red is basically orange for French people).