ISIS launches “most successful recruitment videos yet”

Following on from previous successful recruitment strategies and PR tactics, fundamentalist Jihadist group ISIS has today announced the launch of their most successful series of calls to anti-West, anti-Imperialist arms yet.

“All those scary bomb videos and grunts training with ak47s and rolling in the dust, leopard-crawling under barbed wire and past burning tyres, these only go so far,” said head of the pro-Islamic-caliphate movement Thea Rorrist. “If you really want to instil a burning, irrevocable hatred for all things American and its deluded, privileged, detestable citizens, then you have to go that extra mile.”

As such, ISIS is delighted to announce the release of American Idol Season 426 and America’s Got Talent Season 283. It has reportedly been a resounding victory.

“I was watching TV the other day when [the ISIS recruitment videos] came on,” said one American man. “After just four minutes of that pretentious, exploitative ‘it’s my dream’ crap, and all that shallow, deluded narcissism guided by a desire to be worshiped by thousands for being what is actually a talentless shmuck, even I, a God-fearing, rootin’, tootin’ Texan, was denouncing the hedonism of my culture and calling for the death of all American men and women.”

Media analysts agree.

“If we look closely at the hateful, pro-extremist-Islam propaganda, we see tropes designed for maximum effect,” said Television studies lecturer Harold Cress.

“Every four seconds, we are battered with stirring, nationalistic music and endless images of waving American flags. You know, scenes more patriotic than an exploding, bible-clawing, red-white-and-blue Bald Eagle shooting laser beams out of its eyes and ejaculating furiously on a pile of nukes and Chevy trucks emblazoned with the words ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’.”

These images were enhanced by other hate-mongering tactics.

“Then they add little inserts, like the glaringly knee-jerk emotional shallowness of having an obviously-ineligible four-year-old child singing Home of the Free for the AW-factor, and the talentless douche judges who have even less singing or acting ability than those they scorn and deride, not to mention the sickening product-placement. Really, it makes my machete-hand very twitchy indeed.”

In spite of some controversy over the images, ISIS remains steadfast that these depictions of American culture are far less horrific than than they how the West portrays their particular ideologies.

“Hell, the media might give us a bad rep, but at least we don’t belittle people and destroy their hopes and dreams before we behead them," said Rorrsit. “We like to think we’re a little more respectful than that.”

ISIS would like to thank CNN, BBC and Sky News for giving them an audience of millions of readers, listeners, and viewers on dozens of different channels, formats and social media platforms to spread their messages and videos across the globe.

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."