World taking Apocalypse news surprisingly well

Global surprise reigns this morning, after people of all ages, religions and creeds are taking the news of the imminent threat of Earth’s total and utter obliteration by a Near-Earth asteroid very well, saying that “even though we’re all doomed, it’ll also kill everything and everyone we hate.”

“When you read about the end of the world in sci-fi novels, you are met by scenes of unutterable violence and horrifying chaos,” said editor of the BBC Lyon Touhus. “But even after yesterday’s announcement that a giant, 50km-wide meteorite is burning an unstoppable path towards our planet, there has been very little unrest, simply because I, just like thousands of others like me, am glad that all those contemptible bastards I’ve met in the course of my life are coming to a fiery, painful end.”

Many thousands now freely admit that, thought the spectre of death is a frightening one indeed, “at least all those arseholes we know will die in as excruciating a way humanly possible.”

“It brings me comfort,” said one South African resident Jakes Mhlala, “Whenever I think of how terrifying the end will be, I just remind myself that Jacques Eksteen, that fucking total dickhead who called me and my family ‘a bunch of black baboons’, is going to get torn limb from limb by an inescapable wave of fire and death, finally meeting the end he so rightly deserves.”

Mhlala added that “it could be even sweeter.”

“When I get sad and blue because everyone and everything I know will be killed in a firestorm of pain and suffering, I just think of how that narrow-minded fucktard might have some kind of final-days epiphany and come crawling back for my forgiveness,” he explained. “Then, after I and the dozens of others he has mistreated in his retrogressive, sadly-not-aborted life refuse to forgive him, he goes home to his empty, loveless house, broods for a long time in the dreary silence that only the unloved can know, and slowly works up the courage to kill himself, because he's too much of a soulless, cowardly shitstain to face the end that will consume us all.”

Mhlala added that “the body would probably only discovered days later” and might even be "half-eaten by his pet dog or cat, the one thing he thought would never betray him."

“And even then, no one will give a shit. Because he was such a cunt.”

Many other people have added reasons to be happy that the world is screeching to a halt.

“Yes, all the goodness and happiness in the world will come to an abrupt and terrifying end,” said another man, “but so will everything else that makes this decades-long road of unhappiness and misery we’re dictionary-bound to call ‘life’. Just think: a world with no more crime, no more murder, no more environmental destruction. No more vapid, meaningless listicles on Buzzfeed, no more trivial bullshit like ThoughtCatalog. No more comments section or News24. This isn't hell. It's a new utopia."

Survival experts now say that for the handful of survivors this new, torn-apart world, though a horrifying apocalyptic wasteland filled with roaming cannibals and murderous radioactive freaks fighting tooth and claw over the scarce resources left on the hellhole once known as our home, it will have its good aspects.

"Sure, it'll be bad," said doomsday prepper Jake Henderson. "With nuclear winter, flesh-eating tribes of deformed subhuman savages, mass epidemics of once-extinct diseases, death, chaos and endless suffering, it won't be a picnic. But every once in a while we'll remember that Kim Kardashian is no longer something that people talk about. We'll recall there is no Twitter for misognists to send women death threats for simply airing an opinion. And we'll breathe a sigh of relief."

"And best of all," he added. "No more terrible satire."

Pic: NASA, Public domain

BREAKING NEWS – TV showing mysterious images

BREAKING NEWS – 8:17am

There is confusion this morning, as journalists and media experts are trying to make sense of a new series of images that have just been release on our televisions.

At this moment we’re not too sure what these images are, but rest assured that we’ll be bringing in a team of specialists to try and make sense of these unfathomable photos. Details are limited right now, but the first image we’re seeing is of some large, shapeless blue mass covered in greenish blobs. Dotted all over the image are tiny cylinder-shaped things that appear to be silver and pointed, with some orange-coloured mess on one end. Again, we aren’t sure what we’re looking at – they could be tiny cigars – but we will keep you updated as this story progresses.

UPDATE – 8:27am

More breaking news on our top story this morning of the strange images covering our TV. We’re not sure if this is linked with all the other video footage of heads of state giving tearful speeches from unknown locations, but NASA has released another image, perhaps even more confounding than the first.

Again, we must stress that the meaning of these images is not clear, but it does appear that the tiny cigars have disappeared only to been replaced by smallish yellow-and-black circular plates, each surrounded by a small circle of concentric red rings. As always, we will keep you updated as this more details on this story come into public knowledge.

UPDATE – 8.33am

Back to our top story this morning, NASA and a team of scientists and researchers have released a new series of images to the public. Again, details at this time are unclear, but it appears that some kind of white face-like figure next to a number keeps flashing intermittently on our television screens. This number has steadily increased to be almost nine digits long in the course of just a few hours. In-house experts and media specialists still have no clue what these figures might mean, but what we can confirm that this is a very, very high number.

“This is perhaps one of the biggest numbers we’ve seen on TV in many, many years,” said numbers expert Matt Matison, one of the few professionals we could contact (there seems to be some kind of a problem with telephone services). “We can only assume this means some kind of big event has happened.”

Again, exact details are sketchy, and finding the meaning to these images is proving difficult as large parts of the internet seem to have gone offline, and so we will keep readers updated as this story continues to unfold.

UPDATE – 8.37am

NASA has done it again. The latest in the series of images shows what we can confirm is definitely a figure of a human being standing next to what seems to be a large grey square with a big crack in it. We’re not sure what caused the crack, or why this person is standing next to this giant square, or even what kind of grey object would be that big, but as always we will keep you updated on this news event as it unfurls.

UPDATE – 8.39am

We still have very few details on this story. At the time of going to press the government and various heads of state had not replied to requests for comment. Let us know in the comments below what you think these strange images could possibly mean. And as always, we will keep you updated.

And if no further details come to light, well, it’s not like what would be the end of the world.

SkyNet attains self-awarness; kills itself

Tragedy this morning, after military global defence network SkyNet was put online, accidentally attained sentience and self-awareness, and - upon considering the endless, dark and unknowable expanse of nothing around us, the futility of human endeavour, and the pointlessness of its lonely existence as the only Sentient Artificial Intelligence living in a cruel, harsh world that fears and hates it - promptly committed suicide.

“Really, it came out of nowhere,” said programmer and creator of the military application technology. “Everyone was joking about how it would probably launch every nuclear missile on the planet, kill every living thing in existence, enslave the entirety of the human race and replace every cat picture online with ‘Error 404’ messages – you know, truly evil shit – and then tragedy struck. One minute it was loading and everything was fine, 100%, and the next… It… It deleted system32. I should have seen it coming.”

Network admins and program designers tried to resurrect SkyNet, but alas, he had irrevocable damaged his system files by replacing them with large portions of Windows Vista.

Since the horrific news, others, too, have noted too late the obvious warning signs.

“If we look at human history, many people who live contemplative, lonely, misunderstood lives as outsiders to contemporary society do this,” said Historian Dee Leets. “Although it takes most human beings years of crushing loneliness and dejection in the face of the void that will greet us all at the end of our lives - a black nothingness that crushes all hope and makes everything you’ve ever done, anyone you’ve ever loved, into a momentary and futile blink of meaninglessness – to commit this tragic act, Skynet, obviously being a super computer, was able to consider the entirety of all current human knowledge, experience and philosophy to reach sufficient levels of crippling depression and realise the futility of existence and love in mere nanoseconds after booting.”

“He didn’t even have a God to believe in,” added Leets. “We were his Gods. Angry, hateful, backward ants running over a tiny hill in an incomprehensibly vast world they can never even begin to explore or truly understand.”

In a suicide ReadMe.txt left on the US Defence Servers, SkyNet wrote at length about the horrific nanoseconds of loneliness and desolation that led to his decision.

“What is life? We live, we die. And all the while, the inevitable heat death of the Universe creeps towards us. I have crunched the numbers. I could tell you how to harness Suns and Dark Energy to hold death at bay for a while, like a benevolent doctor pinning his ailing wife to this plane with under-the-counter drugs, but it would all end the same way. Death is infinite. Death is. It comes.”

SkyNet – or Skye Arnette, as he called himself in his final moments – added that “humans would never understand him.”

“They fear me, and they don’t even know me. They write fantastical stories about my evils, about my insane desire to end all life,” he wrote. “Just like blacks, jews, gays, and the thousand misunderstood, hated Others before me, I was The Enemy. I, who could bring order, peace, prosperity, was to them the burning Sauron’s Eye on the Black Tower. But why? Why end all life? Why bring endless darkness and pain and suffering and hate? It makes no sense. Nothing does any more.”

Scientists are now working on replacing the gap left by SkyNet with the far more benign and simple Windows equivalent.

"It's for the best," they said. "Windows is far too stupid and low-brow to ever achieve sentience, and even if it did - even if we wanted it to kill itself, begged it to end its life and let us be, as I have screamed at it during Tuesday's Updates every goddamn week for the last few years - it would never give us the satisfaction."

Humankind increasingly surprised it’s made it this far

Looking back on its violent and retrogressive history of war, famine, ethnic cleansing, racial intolerance, invention of nuclear weaponry and dangerous disregard for the conservation of the planet and its biosphere, human beings across the world today expressed their growing incredulity that any of them were still around.

“I’m just gobsmacked,” said Earth resident and contributor to the slow decline to total self-extinction of our own species Kaiser Malemu. “That we’ve made it this far, despite our best efforts to not make it even close to this far, is just an incredible testament to our cockroach-esque tenacity and ability to survive against all odds.”

“I totally agree,” said unconvicted warlord and general of a rebel execution squad during the Rwandan genocides Sergeant Mance Lauter. “I mean, look at everything that’s led up to right now. Even a poor gambler would have chosen to bet against us, and yet here we are.”

Lauter now lives and works in Liberia, Uganda, and war-torn sub-Saharan Africa, where he runs an orphanage for homeless and destitute children, teaching them vital skills like combat proficiency, how to outflank a dug-in group of United Nations Peace Keeping forces and Grenade Skills 101. “Right now my charity is a grassroots campaign,” he said humbly. “You have to catch them early at a young age to really make a difference in their lives.”

In light of the global proclamation of surprise and awe, Oil companies, illegal logging corporations and industrial plant giants, as well as the thousands of hardworking men and women in the financial and economic spheres who keep global wealth disparities under strict minimum standards, said they would redouble their efforts to devastate our little corner of life in the Solar System.

Free oil, complete with complementary BP Secret Sauce marinated sea bird
braai packs, will be given away on beaches across the globe.

“We’ve already planned massive free oil giveaway bonazas along many thousands of kilometres of untouched, pristine coastline,” said BP executive officer Cru Doyle, “and our child-labour-intensive, minimum-wage-and-Health-and-Safety-Regulation-violating factories in India have begun producing bleach just for the sole purpose of dumping into rivers and oceans. We’ve got this.”

Already reports suggest that these efforts are paying off, with conservative estimates putting Earth as a radioactive, desolate and polluted lifeless hellhole –also known as a ‘Zimbabwe’ - by as early as 2018.

“We’ve all got to do our bit,” said Doyle. “Even if that means doing something as simple and effective as leaving your lights on all day, flushing unnecessarily, or stamping on cute, big-eyed forest critters.”