New children’s book series take on nihilism, ennui

It’s a great day for education and philosophy, after publishing giant McMillin Publishing announced long-awaited plans to adapt several world-renowned books on nihilism and fatalism into kid-friendly books for children of all ages.

Saying that the current climate of children’s literature does nothing to prepare them for the crushing loneliness, chaos and bitter meaninglessness of life, McMillin CEO Sue Wisside said that the books would finally correct the widespread and erroneous childhood notion that the world is a place of love and fairness.

“I think we can all agree that growing up was a fantastic experience,” she said to gathered reporters at a press conference this morning. “Love, friendship, unity, justice, fun – these are just a few of the cherished lies that we all remember so fondly from our formative years. And if you’re looking for books to fool your children into thinking there’s some kind of meaning or purpose or reason to this short, ugly existence of hatred and suffering, you have literally thousands to choose from.”

However, said Wiside, when it comes to cultivating a curiosity and interest in the emptiness and howling despair that awaits us all, or even just getting the littl'uns thinking about the uncertainty of existence and being instead of frolicking puppies and candy trees in far-off magical kingdoms, there just isn’t anything kid-friendly.

“The only books we have on these fascinating, life-altering, addiction-causing subjects are filled with hopelessly long words that our young tykes would never be able to understand,” she explained, drawing on the collected works of Nietzsche, Sartre, and other existentialist philosophers. “And to be honest, they also all lack the colourful, wide-eyed and naïve animal heroes that our youngest seem to crave so much.”

And parents of children involved in the early focus group testing say the books are amazing.

“I’m blown away,” said one parent. “Just yesterday I went into little Johnny’s room and found him drinking whiskey out the bottle and smoking an unending chain of cigarettes. When I asked him what he was doing, he just shrugged and said ‘muting the unbearable scream that is silence' and then went back to writing his terrible, self-pitying poetry.”

McMillin says that the books will go on sale in bookstores across the globe as early as next Spring, and children will be able to choose between wonderful titles like See Spot Contemplate the Meaninglessness Of It All, The Secret Seven and the Mystery of The Benevolent God Who Allows Children To Die Of Easily-Treated Illnesses and Fun With Dick And Jane (also titled “The Virtues of Reckless Hedonism”).

Company to make suicide “less painful, less scary”

Ever wanted to end it all, but have been too scared to even try? Well, fear no more, after Endit, Hall and Co. announced their latest plans dead set on making suicide, or the act of killing yourself, “fun and new, exciting and innovative.”

“A lot of people have this very negative, very dark and depressing misconception that suicide is a scary, lonely and painful thing,” said CEO of Suicide Inc, Cardin Allsin, “but with our new line of products, it doesn’t have to be.”

Allsin added that their line of products are aimed at introducing fun and variety into the act of taking your own life, and that many of their new creations are “ideally suited” to those “spineless shitbags who don’t have the guts to just pull the trigger after trying to work up the courage for three hours in a lonely motel bedroom.”

He showed reporters some of their most popular items.

“Many people don’t like the taste of cold steel – well, don’t fret, because at just $250 we have just the thing for you: a chocolate-dipped gun. There’s a switch on the side to warm up the metal, and you just let the taste of Belgian dark chocolate fill your mouth before twitching your finger.”

“But what if you don’t like guns? Well, we have these lovely matching his-and-hers fluffy cotton-and-silk nooses, just $29.99 a pop, with pre-made professional grade knot. It comes in a variety of colours and designs – you can customise your last moments to suffocate in true style.”

According to Allsin, there is something for everyone, from scented gas to chewy, flavoured sleeping pills.

“Many of us don’t like the harsh, cloying smell of gas when we put our head in the oven, so we introduced a brand new line of gas with a variety of scents you’ll recognise and adore. Why not reminisce in your last moments with home-baked apple pie, or work up an appetite for the afterlife with some fresh roasted chicken? Our sleeping pills – for those who don’t like the gas option – come in a wide range of flavours and have an easy-to-swallow design that has been specially crafted and optimised to slide down your throat with ease and comfort, no choking.”

“If you want to go out with a bang and not a whimper, we also have our own Johnson’s No More Tears Petrol, so that when you douse yourself before flicking the match it doesn’t burn your eyes. We’ve also soaked a light anaesthetic into it, so that your last pyrotic moments can be as peaceful as a campfire.”

Allsin says his company is also set to tackle the preparation work to suicide.

“A lot of people think their final note is dark, brooding and melancholic, but really it’s just a naïve and short-sighted bunch of miserable and badly written prose,” he said. “With our new How-to guide for writing your suicide note (just $150, it comes with complementary pink, heart-covered paper with kittens on it) your last paragraphs to this uncaring and cruel world will be Pulitzer material.”

Many thousands around the globe have reacted very positively to the news.

"My job is fucking depressing, and the only thing apart from my loving family that is keeping me from shuffling off this mortal coil is how scary suicide is and how painful it might be. With these new products, I know I don’t have to be worried.”

Many more, however, have condemned the news as “exploitative and disgusting” and “really morbid and stuff”, asking if there was nothing sacred at all in this world that would ever remain unmolested by the diseased touch of capitalist greed – but Allsin and his colleagues are unfazed.

“Some might argue that we're only doing this for money, that it's morbid and grotesque and exploitative, yada yada yada," said the PR department for the company, "but we truly care about our customers."

"If anyone is unhappy with what we’re doing, it’s only because they don’t know what high quality items our goods are,” they said. “We warmly invite anyone who has a problem with what we’re doing to try a sample of any one of our products, completely free of charge.”

pics (my editing): Toblerone from Westport Wiki, gasoline from WhisperToMe and gun from Sirimiri

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."

American anti-terrorism measures stop terrorist

After years of systematic discrimination scrutiny, the United States Department of Counter-Terrorism has finally caught a terrorist.

John McCorrin, whom the media have dubbed Mohammed Al Shazir Al-Habar Muhammed Mahalamoud, was caught trying to enter the country yesterday afternoon with almost 1 kilogram of explosives. 

"The man was apprehended at Los Angeles airport with a bag of explosives in his luggage," said DCT spokesperson Miss Repree Zentation. "We can neither confirm nor deny yet whether or not the material was nuclear, but we can tell you that they all came in packages with frightening codenames."

Among the explosives found were small bombs codenamed "Roman Candles".
 
"We also found a small amount of projectname 'Tom Thumbs' and a few insidious-sounding 'Birthday Sparklers'. While we're not sure of the significance of these names, we can only assume they have something to do with rampant Islamic militant violence and democracy-hating right-wing religious facism,"  said Zentation.

Their suspicions were first raised when an alert came through on their global telecommunications monitoring network. According to senior analysts, the message sent between Mahalamoud and an as-yet unnamed accomplice was spine-tinglingly chilling. 

"I've got everything we need to finish off tomorrow night with a bang," the message read. "We're going to drop a lot of jaws with our little show. I'll see you soon, brother. Allah hu Akbar."

The system, which has been coded to pick up keywords like "bomb", "terrorist", "nuclear" and "muslim", been illegally monitoring calls, smses, and emails since before 2001. According to head of the project, Ian Ternet, this is the first time the system has picked up a media-branded confirmed terrorist.

"We usually a lot of false pings, like from any message talking about basically any video, internet post, movie or television show that has a muslim in it. We also get a lot of false hits from Star Wars," said Ternet.
 

Admiral Ackbar's name is often confused with praise to Allah, says Ternet

"You know, movies show us that terrorist carry around AK-47s, have turbans and scowling dark faces and inevitably scream "allah who allackbar" in crowded airports. It turns out that this isn't really the case all the time," said LAX arresting officer Ray Sist.

According to Sist, Mahalamoud almost snuck by airport staff by using an extremely cunning disguise. "To the untrained eye, he almost looked like an innocent, law-abiding citizen: no giant beard, no burkha, nothing. He almost got away," said Sist.

It was only after frisking twenty men who didn't have names like "Brett", "Kyle" and "Dylan" that their suspicions were aroused. "He had a very funny accent," said Sist. According to current security policy, funny accents are ground enough for a full cavity search.

However, Mahalamoud has been quick to defend himself. 

"I'm not a terrorist, for pete's sakes! I'm an architect living in Florida!" he said in an interview with those bastards from the loose, bleeding-heart, America-hating liberal leftist press.

Mahalamoud is expected to go on trial next month, with movie production for the series of events already underway. The movie, entitled "America fucks up another terrorist, booya" and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone, will hit god-fearing, gun-loving cinemas in early May.

Admiral Ackbar's name is often confused with praise to Allah, says Ternet