Tag Archives: humor

AI Considered Silly (and Harmful)

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I don’t know when it happened. I know when I noticed it. I was using the Facebook app on my phone while I was in Florida working on getting a solar battery setup in my wife’s RV.

“Huh, what’s this?” I thought as I looked through the posts on my profile. “There are a bunch of buttons beneath each post, asking followup questions.” So I clicked one.

Dear God.

So you know how ChatGPT will spout the most absolutely flat-out bonkers bullshit in this weird, bland, “corporate email meets the Institute of Official Cheer” voice? Like asserting with confidence that Walter Mondale graduated from Princeton University (he didn’t), or inventing hyperlinks to imaginary reviews of a Honda motorcycle that doesn’t exist?

Meta, in its ongoing effort to cram LLMs into every orifice of the great throbbing pustulent Facebook experience, is wedging LLM chatbots, often with the aid of a crowbar, onto the bottom of Facebook posts (but only, at least so far, in the app; I don’t see this on the browser).

And the things it imagines are sometimes…weird.

I was called for jury duty a couple of weeks ago. The waiting room featured a stash of complimentary fidget spinners (yes, seriously). Something Facebook’s AI insisted wasn’t the case.

It got way weirder, though, when I posted that the first drft of my first novel with my talespinner was done:

AI invented a question that it couldn’t answer, then answered it with nonsense. “I don’t know who Kitty Bound is, so let me ramble about unrelated authors who go by ‘Kitty.’” And the thing is, the question buttons are invented by the AI.

It doesn’t know who Kitty Bound is (understandably, this is the first novel we’re attempting to get published together), but it will cheerfully say “click here to learn more about Kitty Bound” and then say “Kitty Bound’s work isn’t well-represented in search results, so ima go Hal 9000 with ADHD and tell you things about completely unrelated people.”

Would you like to know how to make an omelet? Yes? Well, I can’t tell you how to make an omelet, but here’s a paragraph about maintaining gas-powered wood chippers.

And the thing is, Facebook is the shining example of AI success.

Facebook is one of the very few companies doing more than forklifting venture capital dollars into a furnace by the pallet. The proponents of AI say it’s going to change the world, and they’re right…just not with hallucination engines designed to pass the Turing test. (I used to think the Chinese room critique of AI was nonsense; now I’m not so sure. I might write an essay about that at some point, check this space.)

AI is making crazy money for Facebook, but not in chatbots. They’re using AI engines to drive ad placement, consumer segments, and demographic analysis of their ads, and it works. About two or three years ago, Facebook suddenly started showing me ads that I’ve never seen before, for products I’ve never shown any interest in as far as I know…and I, get this, started buying from Facebook ads.

AI, in the right context, works.

But that sort of AI isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get column inches in newspapers. Chatbots do…but for all the wrong reasons.

My Talespinner and I may have invented the genre of hyperurbanized retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. Do a search for that phrase and you’ll get three results, of which (checks notes) three are by us. Chatbots can be forgiven for not knowing what that is, but hot damn, it doesn’t stop them from spouting confident-seeming nonsense about what it is. This is some classic Chinese room shit.

And don’t get me started on whatever this fresh bucket o’ slop is:

If that’s not silly enough, try this:

Want even sillier? How about this:

“I was cranky because I had to drive overnight.” AI: “Why was I cranky? You were cranky because you had to drive overnight.”

This would be silly if it weren’t for the fact that GenAI is almost unbelievably expensive, needing a trip through the entire neural network for each token generated. The server farms that ooze this pap are warmed by furnaces that burn hundred-dollar bills.

That’s the big problem here. The AI chatbots don’t pay for themselves, not even close. There’s no business case for them: 95% of companies inviesting in AI don’t show positive returns. There are currently 498 AI startups valued at over a billion dollars, with a combined valuation of $2.7 trillion, even thugh most are producing zero profit and have little hope of producing profit any time in the future.

That’s ludicrous.

It’s not worth $2,7700,000,000,000 to tell people “why were you cranky when driving overnight made you cranky? Because you get cranky when you drive overnight.”

On top of the economic cost, there’s a social cost as well. Scammers, spammers, fraud artists, conmen, and political adversaries use LLMs to refine and hone their message for maximum emotional manipulation. Political activists use GenAI to create deepfakes. We as a society do not have a cognitive immune system that can deal with this, and I think it will be generations before we do.

But hey, in that brief moment before they go bankrupt, 498 people will be paper billionaires.

The Hookup

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There we were, me, my wife, my wife’s boyfriend, in Atlanta for a long weekend. “Hey, my contact is supposed to be here,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “If I can get hold of him, he can really hook you up. He always has the best shit, like, you wouldn’t believe.”

I will admit to some skepticism. I’ve been promised the best shit before, only to be disappointed; there’s a lot of product out there on the street that’s just not what it’s cracked up to be. But my wife’s boyfriend insisted that his man always came through. “You’ll see,” he said. “I just need to get ahold of him. He can be a little difficult to reach sometimes. Kinda goes with the territory. Once you sample his product, you’ll see. He only deals the good stuff.”

A few days and several phone calls later, he finally managed to make contact with his dude. We set up a meet that afternoon in an Atlanta hotel. “I gotta get some cash, man,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “We need to hurry, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Now, you would think that two people armed with an ATM-finding app in the heart of a city the size of Atlanta would have no difficulty with this. You’d think that, and you’d be so very, very wrong.

We found the first ATM tucked in a small atrium behind locked doors that would not open. The second was out of order. With increasing desperation, we roamed the harsh streets of Atlanta in search of a magic machine that might turn bits of data into rectangles of linen paper, painfully aware of every long minute that ticked by, separating us from the promise of the good stuff.

At last, on our third try, he hit pay…um. Not paydirt, exactly. Pay machine? An ATM that functioned as it should? Anyway, we succeeded in our first objective and, refreshed from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by this small taste of victory, we made for the hotel where his connection allegedly awaited, no doubt with growing impatience.

I will confess, Gentle Reader, to a certain degree of nervousness when at last we arrived at a nondescript hotel door beyond which my wife’s boyfriend’s dealer allegedly awaited. The door opened instantly at his knock, to reveal a rather burly bearded man who looks like the prototype of every deranged character ever to appear in Hollywood:

Like this, but with a vaguely Scottish beard and an even more maniacal laugh

He escorted us in, still laughing in a way that distinctly said “too late now.” A woman sat on the bed, from which she said “Sit! Sit! I don’t bite, unless you want me to.”

My wife’s boyfriend sat, shrugged, and offered her his arm, which she bit. Beside him, a tuft of brilliantly colored hair extended from beneath the covers. “Don’t mind her,” the man said, ”that’s my girlfriend.”

Ah yes, the man. The man with the good stuff. The man so reliably able to hook one up with the best of the best that my wife’s boyfriend makes an effort to connect with him whenever he’s in Atlanta.

I have not yet mentioned the man.

The man sat beside the small table you always find in hotel rooms, the little wee thing that you never see anywhere except hotels, the table that somehow screams “I belong in a hotel room and nowhere else on earth” even though you can’t quite put your finger on why.

He sat there amidst a huge pile of small vials and little plastic bottles full of precursors, carefully mixing and pouring. I watched with, I must admit, no small measure of fascination, because while I do have a passing familiarity with armchair chemistry, I’ve never seen the synthesis process before. “Come in, come in!” he boomed. “I have some samples if you want a taste.”

By this point, Gentle Reader, I wanted a taste very much indeed, oh yes I did.

He handed me a tiny plastic cup and oh, if I live to be a thousand years old, practicing the craft of writing for all that time, I will come to the end of my existence with perhaps one one-hundredth of the eloquence I would need to express to you how exemplary, how blissful, how euphoric that little taste was.

The man laughed. “That expression, right there, that is why I do what I do,” he said.

Never have I tasted before, and never do I hope to taste again, such a magnificent, such a heavenly small-batch artesinal spiced rum.

I have sampled spiced rums all across this globe, from Colorado to Belgium to Iceland to the United Kingdom (the place so known for its rums that they were once used as a medium of exchange, because if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that if you have something that tastes good, the United Kingdom will build a slave empire to get it), and never have I ever tasted anything that danced upon my taste buds like a half-dressed woman in black fishnets at a goth club in so divine a fashion.

Pop Science Bingo!

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I’ve long had a list in my phone I call the “Dunning-Kruger List.” It’s a list of pop-sci arguments I see over and over and over and over again from people with poor science education: Creationists, homeopaths, and so on, all of which are based on a deep misunderstanding of science.

I’m not sure where these pop-sci ideas come from, but they’re all totally, completely 100% wrong, as in the opposite of true. Generally, hearing any of these in a conversation, especially in the Internet, instantly activates my “you’ve never seen the inside of a university science classroom, so you’re so far up Mount Dunning-Kruger it’s not worth the effort it would take to talk you down from its icy slopes.” So that that point my eyes glaze and I route everything further they say directly into my intellectual /dev/null.

This morning, I saw this on Quora:

Since this is officially the 17,000th time I’ve seen a Creationist make this argument, I decided it was time to Do Something.

So I made a thing.

Rules for Alpha Men

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(This blog post originally started life as an answer on Quora.)

With men like Andrew Tate and his little Tater Tots making noise about the proper role of Alpha Men™ in modern society, I thought it might be useful to recap the rules for Alpha Men™ in today’s complex world.

An alpha male waits for the train. Image by Shekai.

Like all pre-release products, alpha men are likely to be unstable and are typically lacking essential features. It’s important, therefore, to keep alpha men in the proper environment, to prevent unwanted problems. Some things to keep in mind:

  • Alpha men are not suitable for public release. They should be used only by production teams and QA, and should not be introduced to the general public.
  • Alpha men may not be secure and may have multiple vulnerabilities. Keep them away from any internet-facing system, because they may be easy to exploit.
  • Alpha men should be assumed to be unstable. When presenting an alpha man in public, please verify the commands and processes you will be demonstrating in a controlled environment to avoid embarrassing crashes or lack of functionality in front of an audience.
  • Alpha men do not have all the features you expect from a man who is ready for release. Expect to find significant areas where basic features have not yet been implemented.
  • Document all crashes or unexpected behavior so that the developers can address it.
  • Do not expect your alpha man to be resilient or to be able to process unexpected input. Provide only properly formatted input that the alpha man expects. The alpha man may not be able to respond to unexpected or ambiguous data gracefully.
  • Alpha men are quite fragile and may not have error handling implemented. Expect hard crashes and/or complete shutdown if an error condition is encountered.
  • Under no circumstances whatsoever should any alpha man be used in any mission critical environment where reliability or proper behavior are crucial, including any environment where failure of the alpha man may result in loss of life, significant damage to equipment, or corruption of important business data.
  • Alpha men are not certified for access to internal networks without sandboxing and firewalling.
  • Log all defects you observe in your alpha man so they may be addressed before release.

It’s Almost Here!

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London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!

Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).

This is a…strange book. It’s like…um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.

This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:

I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “…no, really, we could.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.

There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.

Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:

After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”

“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”

May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”

“Get to what, exactly?”

“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”

May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”

“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”

“No.”

“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”

“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”

Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”

“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”

“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”

Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”

The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice!

If Other Shows Used Star Trek Dialogue

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I recently added a whole new section on writing tips and techniques to the Xeromag site, the largest new wing on the site in many years. One section of this new wing talks about how to write dialogue, and in one of those articles, I diss Star Trek: Voyager.

Yes, Star Trek in general has awful dialogue, and Voyager takes shitty dialogue to a whole new level. There, I said it. Sue me.

I got a question from a person who shall remain nameless (you know who you are) about what’s wrong with the dialogue in Voyager. And the thing is, Voyager dialogue is so shitty it’s kind of set the tone for the whole series, so if you simply point out an example of bad dialogue, people look at you blankly and say “what’s wrong with that?” It’s like the dialogue is such crap, we’ve lost our frame of reference because we don’t believe it’s even possible for the dialogue not to be crap.

“You are beautiful when you’re scanning.” That’s actually a line from Voyager.

There’s a specific and pernicious form of crap, though, that particularly sets my teeth on edge. I don’t mean just stilted, hamfisted dialogue, though of course Voyager has that in spades.

I don’t even mean “reroute the current flow through the turboencabulator to produce a transreversed pulse from the tachyon field emitter,” though Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular are legendary for their technobabble. (“Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in our hull into a high state of temporal polarization”? Seriously?)

What really gets up my nose is the “as you know” speech. This happens when character A tells character B something they both already know, but the viewer doesn’t. As you know, Captain, the Treaty of Blinkenmuunchen forbids the use of transreversed tachyon field pulses in an inhabited star sector…”

This…is not how people talk. And it’s a clumsy tool for exposition.

So: What would it sound like if scriptwriters for other TV shows wrote dialogue this way?

Columbo: Detective, we have a photo of the suspect from a traffic camera! As you know, sir, a traffic camera is an automated photographic recording device affixed to a stationary pole, usually at an intersection. It is activated by the operation of a remote automatic trigger that causes it to fix a photographic record at that instant. Unfortunately, it won’t tell us where the suspect went, as it records only a single frame.

Breaking Bad: We’ve found a new dealer for our drugs! As you know, the drugs we manufacture are considered contraband, which means their sale is prohibited by law. We have the facilities to manufacture them, but we require the assistance of others to carry them to distant places and make them available for sale. Since this process is a violation of Federal and state laws, we will have no recourse to the justice system if our dealer refuses to abide by the terms of our agreement, so we must screen our dealers carefully.

Game of Thrones: Chaos is a ladder. And as I’m sure you know, Varys, a ladder is a simple tool that can be used to climb from a low place to a high place. So what I’m saying is that I believe political chaos can be used to climb higher in the sociopolitical hierarchy. This is a linguistic construction known as a “metaphor.”

Sherlock: I’m not a psychopath, I’m a high functioning sociopath. Do your research. And as I’m sure you know, “research” is a systematic procedure or process by which one can check their ides against a rigorous body of source materials and conclusions.

NFL Sunday Night Football: Passing interference, 15-yard penalty. As I’m sure you know, a yard is a unit of measure, equivalent to three feet. This should not be confused with a yard that is an area of open ground in front of a house or other structure, commonly planted with grass, even though we are currently standing on an area of open ground covered with grass.

As you doubtless know by now, the “as you know” speech makes your characters look like idiots. That’s on top of being unnatural dialog. Don’t do it.

“Incompatible with Biblical Morality”

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A while back, some wag left a comment on one of my Quora answers stating that I am, quote, “incompatible with Biblical morality.”

Which is a fair cop and no mistake. I mean, he thought he was being insulting, but there it is: I am indeed incompatible with Biblical morality.

So I made a T-shirt.

I put this on my social media, and right away people started messaging me to say they wanted one. Which isn’t what I expected—it’s a rather odd thing to say, which is part of why I made it a shirt—but hey, apparently there are a lot of us.

So I’ve made it available at Villaintees.com, for those of you who, like me, are incompatible with Biblical morality and proud of it. You can even get a sticker and a coffee mug!

My new book!

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I was out on the porch enjoying the lovely Portland weather this morning when the postman came by with the advance review copies of my new novel, Black Iron,, straight from the publisher.

No, it’s not about polyamory. Not at all.

So what’s it about? Well, that’s kinda hard to say. It’s a bit steampunk, if you interpret “steampunk” very loosely. It’s about a heist, kind of. Well, it’s really a murder mystery, sort of. No, wait, that’s not quite it. It’s a story of political intrigue, in a manner of speaking.

Think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books or Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only set in an alternate 19th-century London where there’s no British empire and the British don’t drink tea. (Joreth read the first draft and described it this way: “Imagine if Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had a love child who grew up on a steady diet of George RR Martin.”)

It’s the same kind of loopy, over-the-top humor that you see in books like Night Watch or Hitchhiker’s Guide, the sort of absurdist comedy that’s really social commentary.

There’s a petty thief and a princess, of course, because if you have a 19th-century heist political intrigue steampunk murder mystery, you have to have a petty thief and a princess—it’s required by law. There are undead things, after a fashion. There’s a cameo by Doctor Frankenstein; in this world, his experiments worked, but not quiiiiiiiite the way he expected them to.

There are airships. The New World colonies are still colonies. Oh, and people die, because we now live in a world where Game of Thrones is a thing, so gone are the assumptions that sympathetic characters are immune to being killed.

It’s also available for preorder on Amazon (pub date is October 1).

Oh, and if you know anyone who would like an advance review copy, let me know!

Movie Review: Professor Marston and the Great Unicorn Hunt

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Greetings, new readers! Because this review is about a movie featuring polyamory, it’s attracted a lot of attention from folks who don’t usually read my blog.

I write a number of movie reviews in this style; the snark you see here isn’t reserved for this movie. You can see other examples here and here, or just click the Movie Reviews tag.

I am polyamorous. I am kinky. I have seen at least one Wonder Woman movie. Ergo, I am precisely the target demographic for the movie Fifty Shades of Professor Marston and the Great Wonder Unicorn Hunt Women, the movie that is taking Hollywood by storm as it zooms from first-run theaters to the dollar cinema faster than Starship Troopers 3.

I blinked, and so nearly missed the film in its theatrical release, but never fear! Vancouver has one of those theaters that sells beer and cut-rate tickets, with those chairs that make you sit with your knees in your nose and the floors that are always suspiciously sticky, so I was able to plunk down a few hard-earned Canadian dollars and experience the wonder for myself.

At least I think that’s what that feeling was. It might have been my kidney infection.

The movie goes something like this:

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Why are people burning my comic books?

OUTRAGEOUSLY STRAIGHTLACED WOMAN: It’s the 1940s. That’s what we do. Now, we want to ask you a bunch of leading and excessively moralistic questions about your comic book.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Very well, let me begin with a flashback.

He BEGINS with a FLASHBACK

PROFESSOR MARSTON: My new undergrad psychology student is hot.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is this is the 1930s, which means Harvard won’t give me a Ph.D. because I’m a woman. The good news is that this is the 1930s, which means there’s no such thing as an ethics review board, so if you want to sexually groom and then experiment on your undergrad student in really creepy ways that totally objectify her and violate her consent, that’s okay. Also, I have no concept of sexual jealousy.

The polyamorous people in the audience CHEER

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I also have no concept of consent.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Awesome! This will be fun. What is your name, hot undergrad student?

UNICORN: You may call me Unicorn. My mother and aunt are the best-known feminists of this decade. I was raised in a convent, so I am sexually naive and trusting. Plus, I just starred in Fifty Shades Darker, so I have a totally fucked perception of how consent is supposed to work. Also, it kinda makes me this film’s version of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Excellent! Let’s begin, shall we?

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS, AND POSSIBLY TRIGGERS AS WELL.
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Unicorn, I see my husband has made you his new TA. That stands for…well, we’ll say it stands for “teaching assistant.” Not that other thing, because that would be objectifying, and shame on you for thinking it. Don’t fuck my husband. Also, he likes his coffee black.

UNICORN: Wait, what?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I am going to groom Unicorn so that she becomes my sexual plaything.

The audience LAUGHS

PROFESSOR MARSTON: No, seriously, I’m going to groom her, exactly the way sexual predators do. In fact, I’m even going to talk to my wife about grooming her, and outline on a blackboard my theories of dominance and submission in a dramatic closeup, just to drive the point home.

The audience LAUGHS

HUMBERT HUMBERT: I approve.

LOLITA: Shut the fuck up, you’re an unreliable narrator.

HUMBERT HUMBERT: This is an unreliable movie!

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Hey Unicorn, you’re in a sorority, right?

UNICORN: Yes.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Sneak me and my wife into the sorority building when you do those hazing things that you do with the pledges.

UNICORN: Dude! No! That’s creepy and fucked up! What is wrong with you?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: If you are going to be dedicated to the cause of science, you need to be willing to do whatever I say.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Clever.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Thank you! I got it from a cult leader.

UNICORN: Okay.

UNICORN sneaks PROFESSOR MARSTON and ELIZABETH MARSTON into the SORORITY HOUSE. They have a creepy, fucked up scene where UNICORN is forced to HUMILIATE and SPANK a SORORITY PLEDGE without her CONSENT. PROFESSOR MARSTON gets really INTO IT because non-consent is his THING, and starts jilling off ELIZABETH MARSTON while they watch a woman being NONCONSENSUALLY DEGRADED. There is a brief INTERMISSION so the audience can take a SHOWER

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Whew! That was totally hot. For a followup, let’s non-consensually humiliate Unicorn by asking her really personal and invasive questions, and gaslighting her whenever she tries to assert any boundaries.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: You want to fuck my husband.

Unicorn: I do not want to fuck your husband.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: You want to fuck me.

UNICORN: I do not want to fuck you.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Observe, she is exhibiting physiological changes associated with lying! We should use this information to build a lie detector machine which we will use in some really creepy, fucked-up, cringe-inducing scenes later in this film.

UNICORN: This…is kinda gaslighty.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Nonsense. That term won’t even exist for decades yet.

HUMBERT HUMBERT: I like this movie already.

UNICORN: You guys do know I’m engaged, right?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: It won’t last.

UNICORN: How do you know?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Your fiancé doesn’t get top billing in the movie credits. Plus his character bio on IMDb is blank.

EXPENDABLE FIANCÉ: Wait, what? I’m the only person in this entire movie who even raises the slightest hint of concern that some fucked-up shit is happening! I—

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I’m sorry, did you say something?

UNICORN: I want to go to grad school and become a journalist.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: A journalist! It’s so cute when you have ambitions. I’ll write a letter of recommendation for you! And then subtly fuck with your head to make you more dependent on my husband and me. In fact, let’s wire my husband up to a prototype lie-detector in a creepy, fucked-up, cringe-inducing scene where he fucks with your head by revealing his feelings for you!

They wire PROFESSOR MARSTON to a prototype LIE DETECTOR in a creepy, fucked-up, cringe-inducing SCENE

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Do you love me?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Yes.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Do you love Unicorn?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: No.

LIE DETECTOR: Beep bleep scribble scribble doo.

UNICORN: I’m feeling a little uncomfortable here, with both our personal and professional boundaries. At least, that’s what I would say if I had a healthy sense of boundaries, which I don’t, because I’m 22 years old and completely naive and I’m being groomed by sexual predators.

They wire UNICORN to a prototype LIE DETECTOR in a creepy, fucked-up, cringe-inducing SCENE

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Do you love me?

UNICORN: No.

LIE DETECTOR: Beep bleep scribble scribble doo.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Do you love my wife?

UNICORN: No.

LIE DETECTOR: Beep bleep scribble scribble doopy-doopy doo.

The audience LAUGHS, because her LIPS are saying NO but her BODY is saying YES, amirite?

UNICORN: Okay, this has really gone to a twisted place, and I’m not comfortable with the casual lack of any sort of boundaries here. At least, that’s what I would say if I had a healthy sense of boundaries, which I don’t, because remember? Naive and being taken advantage of by a couple of people twice my age who also just so happen to have the keys to my entire fucking academic future in their hands, in a society that doesn’t even consider women to be fully human, much less worthy of being listened to when their boundaries or consent are violated. Instead, I’m going to rush out dramatically so that Elizabeth can chase me and then some fucked-up shit can happen.

UNICORN rushes out of the ROOM, pursued by ELIZABETH. UNICORN is feeling VULNERABLE AND EXPOSED, so naturally they KISS

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Bom-chicka-wow-wow!

They have the most CRINGE-INDUCING NOT-REALLY-CONSENSUAL SEX SCENE since that one scene in the first BLADERUNNER

RACHEL: Hey, now! I am an artificially-constructed, synthetic organism specifically designed and built to be a slave. Don’t be bringing me into this! Even I think what’s going on here is fucked up.

ELIZABETH MARSTON and PROFESSOR MARSTON and UNICORN all walk through CAMPUS making LOVEY-DOVEY EYES at each other

EXPENDABLE FIANCÉ: Everyone knows what you’re doing. I’m breaking up with you.

The audience LAUGHS

EXPENDABLE FIANCÉ: Wait, what? How is that funny? I’m, like, the only person in this goddamn movie who even raises the slightest hint that my fiancée being sexually groomed by two people in a position of authority over her might in any slight way be kinda not okay, and—

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I’m so happy. We’re so happy. We’re all so happy together.

THE MARSTON FAMILY: Wait, what? Like, none of this happened. For starters, Professor Marston threatened to leave his wife if she didn’t let Unicorn move in with them. And another thing—

ANGELA ROBINSON: Did I ask you? I don’t recall asking you. I’m the director and this is my movie. If I say it happened, it happened.

THE MARSTON FAMILY: But—

ANGELA ROBINSON: Security!

PROFESSOR MARSTON: We just got fired.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Okay, we’re done. Unicorn, get out.

UNICORN: Wait, what?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Haven’t you seen the official polyamory couple looking for a third flowchart? It’s the rule. As soon as the unicorn becomes the slightest bit inconvenient, the couple re-assert their primacy and kick her out. You knew when you signed up!

UNICORN: No, I actually didn’t know when I signed up, because the two of you have the most shit communication skills I’ve ever seen outside a Hollywood romantic comedy. I mean, seriously, poly folks keep going on about how important communication is, and you two are, like, the most shit of shit people ever to shit a shit when it comes to communication. What the fuck is wrong with you?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I’m sorry, did you say something?

UNICORN: Also, I’m pregnant.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Oh, that’s so wonderful! Do you hear that, my darling husband? We’re going to be parents! All three of us can live together!

UNICORN: Really? You mean it?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Of course! You can be our live-in nanny and housemaid and take care of your kids and our kids, and—

UNICORN: Wait, what?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Don’t interrupt, dear, I’m not finished. Take care of your kids and our kids, and also cook and clean house for us!

UNICORN: …

ELIZABETH MARSTON: You’re the unicorn. It’s what unicorns do. Didn’t you read the flowchart?

They MOVE IN TOGETHER and have MORE KIDS. UNICORN takes care of the KIDS and also COOKS and CLEANS and STUFF

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Ah, look, a lingerie shop! I think I will go inside.

PROFESSOR MARSTON goes inside the LINGERIE SHOP

CREEPY DUDE: Do you like high heels?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: They’re okay, I guess.

CREEPY DUDE: Are you a police officer or a postal inspector or Sonny Crockett?

SONNY CROCKETT: Hey now, leave me out of this shit-show. I spend my time undercover busting human traffickers and child pornographers and stuff. I want nothing to do with you lot.

RACHEL: You want to go get a drink?

SONNY CROCKETT: Replicant lady, I will follow you into a wood chipper if it gets me away from these people.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Um, no?

CREEPY DUDE: Do you, like, like like high heels, like, in that way you like something when, you know, you really like it?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Umm…dude, you’re kind of creepy and you’re making me kind of uncomfortable. At least that’s what I’d say if I had any kind of boundaries at all. But given that this movie is what it is…sure! Let’s say I do. What’ve you got for me?

CREEPY DUDE: Let me open this secret door, see, and…

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Wife! Unicorn! Check it out! I’ve just discovered BDSM porn!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: BDSM porn? What’s that?

UNICORN: Don’t you guys ever look at the Internet?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Let’s go visit the creepy dude and stage the least realistic scene ever filmed in any movie, and I include Hot Tub Time Machine in that list!

THE ENTIRE CAST OF HOT TUB TIME MACHINE: No. No. Oh, hell no. Do not drag us into this. Hey Sonny, replicant lady, you got any room in that wood chipper?

PROFESSOR MARSTON and ELIZABETH MARSTON and UNICORN go back to the LINGERIE SHOP. The CREEPY DUDE ties up a RANDOM WOMAN

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I want to tie up Unicorn.

UNICORN: Okay.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I am going to make a big show of being offended at the idea of bondage and stomp out.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I will follow you out, leaving Unicorn alone with Creepy Dude.

UNICORN: I have just had my two lovers stomp out of the room arguing, leaving me alone with a creepy dude. I will now do the most unrealistic thing ever in any Hollywood movie ever filmed, and I include Hot Tub Time Machine in that list, by going through the creepy dude’s wardrobe dressing up in costumes while I’m here alone with a creepy dude in an unfamiliar place while my lovers are arguing, because that’s totally how Hollywood believes people get into BDSM.

They have the most unrealistic scene in any HOLLYWOOD MOVIE, including HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. Every person in the AUDIENCE who is even passingly familiar with kink GROANS. The ENTIRE CAST of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE walks into a WOOD CHIPPER

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Unicorn, do you want me to tie you up?

UNICORN: Oh, sure, NOW you ask for my consent. Sure, why not?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: I will now tie you up.

UNICORN: Wait, what? Just five minutes ago you were having a dramatic meltdown about how awful bondage is. Nobody, and I mean nobody, spins around that fast. Isn’t this, like, the second most unrealistic scene ever shot in any Hollywood movie?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Yeah, and?

ELIZABETH MARSTON ties up UNICORN in the SECOND MOST UNREALISTIC SCENE ever shot in any HOLLYWOOD MOVIE

THE MARSTON FAMILY: Literally nothing like this ever happened.

ANGELA ROBINSON: Security!

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I am going to make a new comic book. It will be filled with bondage.

PROFESSOR MARSTON makes a new COMIC BOOK. It is filled with BONDAGE

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Let’s have a kinky bondage threesome.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Okay!

UNICORN: Okay!

They have a KINKY BONDAGE THREESOME. The neighbor next door WALKS IN ON THEM

NEIGHBORS: We think you guys are perverts. We will shun you now. Shun the perverts! Shun!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Unicorn, this is all your fault. We must protect our family by kicking you out of the house.

UNICORN: Wait, what? How does that make any sense? The cat is already out of the bag! The horses have bolted, the barn has burned down, and the farm has been bought, paved over, and turned into a McDonald’s parking lot! How on earth does kicking me out now solve anything? And also, why is this my fault?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Read the flowchart. If the couple encounters any problem, they re-assert their primary relationship and blame the unicorn. It’s all right there. Oh, and we will make you bring our kids over here on weekends, because Professor Marston is the father, but you will not be allowed to see our kids, even though you raised them. Besides, my husband and I are, like, productive members of society, but I don’t even know who you are.

UNICORN: I’m the bright young student who was engaged to be married and was going to become a journalist until two people twice my age decided to groom me and then gaslight me into being your live-in sex toy slash maid slash nanny.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Whatever.

UNICORN: You’re a terrible human being, you know that?

ELIZABETH MARSTON: You knew the rules when you signed on.

UNICORN: No, actually, I didn’t.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Aaaaaaaand that’s the flashback. Now I will do some dramatic exposition in front of you, Outrageously Straightlaced Woman, featuring some of the most terrible dialog ever to be seen outside one of the Star Wars prequels.

ANAKIN SKYWALKER: Nooooooooooooooooooo! Do not want!

PROFESSOR MARSTON does some UNNECESSARY GRANDSTANDING featuring TERRIBLE DIALOG, and then COLLAPSES DRAMATICALLY. ANAKIN SKYWALKER follows the cast of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE into the WOOD CHIPPER. The dialog WEDGES

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Hey Unicorn, Professor Marston is in the hospital.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I’m dying of cancer. Tell her! Tell her the thing!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: You tell her.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: No, you tell her!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: You tell her!

PROFESSOR MARSTON: No, you tell her!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Will you forgive me for being, like, the worst human being ever, completely disregarding your feelings, treating you like you’re totally expendable, and generally being just about as shitty as one person can be to another person without involving the use of a meat cleaver?

UNICORN: No.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Hang on a minute! No? You’re not supposed to say no!

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Let’s use emotional manipulation on her.

The audience LAUGHS

PROFESSOR MARSTON: No, seriously, I’m going to emotionally manipulate her. In fact, I’m going to do some completely unnecessary exposition right now describing exactly how I’m emotionally manipulating her.

UNICORN: Are you for real?

PROFESSOR MARSTON: I know! Try a non-apology apology, only without saying you’re sorry!

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Okay.

ELIZABETH MARSTON gives the least convincing NON-APOLOGY APOLOGY since KEVIN SPACEY’S TWEETS. She never once says she’s SORRY

UNICORN: All is forgiven.

ELIZABETH MARSTON: Great! So you’ll move back in, cook and clean, take care of the kids, and be a live-in maid, then?

UNICORN: Sure, if you buy me a new stove.

PROFESSOR MARSTON: Deal.

PROFESSOR MARSTON DIES. The movie EN—

EXPOSITION TEXT: And they lived happily ever after.

THE MARSTON FAMILY: Wait, what? This is not even close to how it happened. In fact, you didn’t even get Elizabeth Marston’s job right. You said she was a secretary. She was actually an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. Do you even read Wikipedia?

ANGELA ROBINSON: Security!

THE MARSTON FAMILY: Oh, never mind. We’ll just follow Anakin into that wood chipper. Anything to get away from this travesty.

The movie ENDS

Movie review: The Great Wall

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We didn’t plan to see The Great Wall. We actually intended to see Get Out, but owing to an unfortunate accident with a parallax time distortion unit and a group of Brazilian terrorists, we ended up in the theater a week early. The only movie that had not yet started playing was The Great Wall, starring a bunch of CG space aliens, Willem Dafoe as John Hurt doing an impression of Keanu Reeves, Matt Damon as Matt Damon, and Tian Jing as an archer-specialized player character from Skyrim.


Seriously, tell me this isn’t glass armor from Skyrim.

So, with some trepidation, we ventured into the theater, expectations and parallax time distortion unit appropriately recalibrated.

The movie goes something like this:

MATT DAMON: The Chinese have the secret of black powder. We do not. Let us venture to China and steal black powder from the Chinese.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Wait, what? If they have black powder and we don’t, doesn’t that mean they have better weapons than we do, thus making stealing from their military kind of a bad idea?
MATT DAMON: That’s why we brought expendable extras with us. Plus, I have a magnet.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Why do you have a magnet?
MATT DAMON: Because unlike you, I read the script.
EXPENDABLE EXTRAS: Hang on, back up a second. What was that part about expendable–

CG SPACE ALIENS come out of NOWHERE and kill the EXPENDABLE EXTRAS.

MATT DAMON: Matt Damon!

MATT DAMON and MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK kill a CG SPACE ALIEN and chop off its ARM

MATT DAMON: Let’s take that arm with us.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Wait, what? Why?
MATT DAMON: Because it’s a CG space alien’s arm, of course!


Arr! Spoilers be down below!

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Hey Matt Damon, we’re being chased by mounted nomadic warriors! We should run away!

They RUN AWAY and discover a GIANT WALL with a whole bunch of ANGRY CHINESE ARCHERS atop it

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: I think we should surrender.
MATT DAMON: I have a better idea. We should surrender.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Ah. this is going to be one of those movies, isn’t it?
MATT DAMON: Yes. Yes, it is.

They are taken before the HIGH COMMANDER and INTERROGATED. WILLEM DAFOE quietly LURKS in the BACKGROUND.

MATT DAMON: Look! We have a space alien arm!
HIGH COMMANDER: Your space alien arm impresses us, Matt Damon. I will put you in a prison cell.
RANDOM SOLDIER DUDE: I can’t find the key to the cell.
HIGH COMMANDER’S UNDERLING: Put the prisoners on top of the wall instead, because that totally makes sense.

SPACE ALIENS attack the WALL. ARCHERS FROM SKYRIM jump off the WALL on BUNGEE CORDS to SHOOT and STAB the SPACE ALIENS because that makes TOTAL SENSE and it is TOTALLY how you defend a WALL from attackers who have NO PROJECTILE WEAPONS. WILLEM DAFOE quietly MUNCHES SCENERY in the BACKGROUND.

MATT DAMON: Space aliens are attacking the wall! Matt Damon’s sidekick, grab a red cloak and go all bullfighter on them while I shoot them with trick shots using my bow!
LEGOLAS: Eh, I’ve seen better.
ALIEN QUEEN: Oh shit, there are white people up on top of the wall! Retreat! Retreat!

They have a VICTORY CELEBRATION. The CHINESE MILITARY taunts MATT DAMON for his BOW.

MATT DAMON: Watch as I do some complicated trick shots with my bow.

MATT DAMON does some COMPLICATED TRICK SHOTS with his BOW and manages not to PUT HIS EYE OUT or ANYTHING.

HIGH COMMANDER: Your complicated trick shot with a bow impresses us, Matt Damon.
LEGOLAS: Eh, I’ve seen better.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Matt Damon, you should put on a bungee cord and jump off the wall.
MATT DAMON: Why?
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: To show that you trust us.
MATT DAMON: Well, first of all, I don’t trust you. Second of all, this is the most inane strategy I’ve ever heard of for defending a fortification.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: What’s wrong with it?
MATT DAMON: …
MATT DAMON: So you have a wall…
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Right.
MATT DAMON: And you have blades on the wall and trebuchet and archers and all kinds of stuff.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Uh-huh.
MATT DAMON: So you just stand up on the wall and shoot the space aliens. And drop things on them. Like rocks. Or hell, I don’t know, like bombs, since you have explosives and stuff.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: But they climb the wall!
MATT DAMON: So build an overhang at the top! With doors in the floor that you can shoot and drop bombs through and stuff!
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: …
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Nope, not getting it.
MATT DAMON: You guys suck at walls. The whole point of a fortification is to deny your opponents access to a piece of land without needing to engage them in hand to hand combat. When you really think about it…

The dialog WEDGES

PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: This dialog sucks. I’m outta here.
WILLEM DAFOE: You came here to steal black powder?
MATT DAMON: Yes, we did.
WILLEM DAFOE: I, too, came here to steal black powder. I have devised a cunning plan. I have hidden supplies and weapons all along the road and I have made preparations to steal the black powder from the armory. When the space aliens attack, we can be on our way.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: If you’ve done all this preparation, why didn’t you steal the black powder and run away like, ten years ago?
WILLEM DAFOE: Because I’ve been waiting for Matt Damon.
MATT DAMON: Ah, right, of course.

HIGH COMMANDER: You have a magnet. That is how you killed the space alien at the beginning of this movie.
MATT DAMON: How do you know?
HIGH COMMANDER: The legends speak of a time when the Emperor was cruel and wicked, so the space aliens came to punish him. Now, every sixty years, the space aliens come out of hiding in the mountains and roam the earth for food.
MATT DAMON: Wait, what? A large number of organized, highly aggressive, large predators only come out once every sixty years? How does that ecosystem make any sense at all?
HIGH COMMANDER: It worked for Pitch Black, didn’t it?
VIN DIESEL: Hey, leave me out of this. My movie rocked.

A SPACE ALIEN starts rampaging on the WALL in the middle of the NIGHT

HIGH COMMANDER: Quickly! We must kill the space alien!

A SECOND SPACE ALIEN comes up BEHIND THEM and ATTACKS

HIGH COMMANDER: Clever girl.

The HIGH COMMANDER DIES

PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Now I am in charge!
MATT DAMON: Great. We should capture a space alien.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Did you not just hear me? I said I am in charge!
MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay, so what we’ll do is we’ll make some alien tranquilizer–
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: I am in charge. Also, how on earth would we know anything about alien physiology or biochemistry? What makes you think a tranquilizer–
MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we’ll put the alien tranquilizer on harpoons, see. And we stab the harpoons into the aliens and use the magnet to keep them from fighting back! And then we put them in a cage!
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: We have never before thought of using harpoons, capturing aliens, or using magnets. Fortunately, we happen to have a whole bunch of harpoons and alien tranquilizer just lying around, even though this idea is completely new to us and we’ve never even considered it before. And look, there’s an alien-sized cage just lying here! Also, even though we learned that magnets incapacitate aliens hundreds of years ago, we have never considered using magnets in any of our fortifications or defenses because of reasons. It’s a good thing you came by to save us, Matt Damon! Also, I’m being so sincere right now. No, really, I am. Sarcasm is not known to my people.

A FOG rolls in. The aliens ATTACK. MATT DAMON jumps off the WALL on a BUNGEE CORD to fight tranquilized aliens HAND TO HAND instead of just waiting for the TRANQUILIZER to work

MATT DAMON: I have captured a space alien!

The PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM opens a DOOR in the bottom of the WALL and they come out and get the CAPTURED SPACE ALIEN

MATT DAMON: Wait, what? You have a door at the bottom of the wall? Then how come I jumped off the top of the wall on a bungee cord like a dumbass?
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: You didn’t ask. I do not think you came here to save us. I think you came hear to steal our black powder.
MATT DAMON: …
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: I can’t tell who’s worse, us or the space aliens. At least you don’t see them screwing each other for a percentage of the profit.
RIPLEY: That’s my line.
BURKE: Go for the black powder! Do it! Do it!

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: The next time the aliens come, you and I and Willem Dafoe should steal the black powder and run away.
MATT DAMON: That’s a terrible idea.
BURKE: No, that’s an awesome idea!
MATT DAMON: I am the hero of this movie. Stealing and running away isn’t very heroic.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: You’re a loser snowflake cuck.

The SOLDIERS find a TUNNEL that has been dug through the WALL

PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: The space aliens have dug a tunnel through the wall! Now they will destroy the world, just like the creatures in Pitch Black, which was a much better movie!
MATT DAMON: You guys really don’t understand static defenses, do you?

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: Willem Dafoe and I have blown the door off the armory and stolen the black powder. Come with us!
MATT DAMON: No.
WILLEM DAFOE: Wait, what? Why?
MATT DAMON: Because unlike you, I have read the script.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: You’re a loser snowflake cuck. I am going to write SUCH an angry tweet about you.

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK knocks out MATT DAMON and writes SUCH AN ANGRY TWEET. WILLEM DAFOE and MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK ride off with the BLACK POWDER

PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Matt Damon, your friends have stolen the black powder and run away.I will put you in a cell, since we have finally found the key. Also, we will now get onto hot air balloons which have failed all of our tests and fly to the capital, where we have shipped the captured space alien in a cage. Let us be off.

They get into HOT AIR BALLOONS that have FAILED ALL THE TESTS. The NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS all PLUMMET TO THEIR HORRIBLE DEATHS. The BALLOONS bearing MAJOR CHARACTERS all WORK JUST FINE.

WILLEM DAFOE: Go walk up that hill and see where we are. I promise not to steal your horse and all your supplies and ride off into the desert, leaving you stranded.
MATT DMON’S SIDEKICK: Okay.

WILLEM DAFOE steals the HORSE and ALL THE SUPPLIES and rides off into the DESERT, leaving MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK STRANDED

MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: You promised!
WILLEM DAFOE: Ha! I had my fingers crossed!

WILLEM DAFOE is captured by RAIDERS and tied up next to the BONFIRE. The RAIDERS start PLAYING with the BLACK POWDER next to the BONFIRE

WILLEM DAFOE: Oh sh–

WILLEM DAFOE, the RAIDERS, and EVERYONE WITHIN A MILE are blown SKY-HIGH by the BLACK POWDER

MATT DAMON: I will get on a balloon and ride it to the capital city and kill the queen space alien.
CHINESE NERD: Aren’t you afraid the balloon will blow up and send you plummeting to your gruesome death?
MATT DAMON: I am not a non-player character.
CHINESE NERD: I’m riding with you.

They FLY to the CAPITAL CITY. The SPACE ALIENS are RAMPAGING

CHINESE NERD: We can cover the captured space alien with bombs and let it go! When it goes to the queen it will blow her up!
MATT DAMON: See, that’s what I’m talking about. This is why nerds rule the world.

They cover the CAPTURED SPACE ALIEN with BOMBS and let it GO. It heads straight to the QUEEN

CHINESE NERD: Okay, now shoot it with a flaming arrow to set off the bombs!
MATT DAMON: …
MATT DAMON: What the…
MATT DAMON: Are you fucking serious?
MATT DAMON: You couldn’t have put a timer on them?
CHINESE NERD: Do what where?
MATT DAMON: A timer! Like a slow-burning charge…
CHINESE NERD: …
MATT DAMON: …a glass envelope with a starter charge in it that ignites when the queen bites down, a chemical delay fuse…
CHINESE NERD: …
MATT DAMON: Anything? Anything?
CHINESE NERD: Nope, not getting it.

MATT DAMON SIGHS

MATT DAMON: Okay, I will go up this tower and make a daring trick arrow shot that will save the world.

MATT DAMON makes a DARING TRICK ARROW SHOT that MISSES. The world is not SAVED

LEGOLAS: Loser!
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Okay, I will go up this tower and make a daring trick arrow shot that will save the world.

The PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM makes a DARING TRICK ARROW SHOT that BLOWS UP THE QUEEN. The world is SAVED

LEGOLAS: Eh, I’ve seen better.
PLAYER CHARACTER FROM SKYRIM: Matt Damon, we have captured your sidekick wandering alone in the desert without a horse or supplies. You can take him with you or you can take black powder with you. Your choice.
MATT DAMON: I choose Matt Damon’s Sidekick.
MATT DAMON’S SIDEKICK: It’s like I don’t even know you any more!
PADME: That’s my line! It’s pretty awful, though. You can have it if you want.

PADME dies of CONSUMPTION
The movie ENDS