Episode 3: The Idea of Sunny Days 45:10

Listener discretion is advised, as this content is intended for adult audiences only. You're too old. You're already too old. That's the system. You missed everything that matters. Don't blame me. I didn't make things this way. I didn't invent time. You did. Just so you could feel it slipping away.

Absurd Ventures and Q-Code present A Better Paradise, Volume 1, An Aftermath. Created and written by Dan Houser. Directed by Laszlo. Starring Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, and Rain Spencer. Episode 3, The Idea of Sunny Days. In the end, there is no end. The journey began, but it will not. And on the journey...

Things get better, best things win. And the winners are the best things. And we shall win. Shall win.

Today's news for March 11th, 2041. I'm Olivia Gregory. The White House is denying reports of high-level meetings discussing the option of declaring martial law after repeated outbreaks of lawlessness and riots across the United States. A body found in a hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland has been identified as Ravi Gutra, an Indian citizen and architect who worked at Tyburn Utopias, an American technology company that collapsed several years ago amid a crackdown in unregulated AI development.

Officials said Mr. Guthrie had taken his own life. The body was found... Armed militia members have surrounded state houses in Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, New York and Florida, calling themselves the New Freedom Riders. As wildfires are raging across Western and Central Canada for a fourth week.

with several million acres burned and an estimated $20 billion in damage to crops and homes. Police investigation in Boston into the murders of two men found dead in separate locations. ...in Europe have been hit with heavy flooding after unseasonal torrential rains swept across the continent this week. Both were computer engineers and considered pioneers in artificial intelligence projects. American officials denying reports that hackers are being held without trial. It's business as usual in Washington, which means no business.

Kurt, Hanoi, Vietnam, March, 2041. The problem with Jung is a serious psychologist. See, even before he got so full of himself, he became unbearable. Mark Tyburn would start conversations literally like this. Ready? The problem with Michelangelo as an architect was, "Oh, I quite like Picasso, but I find Frank Lloyd Wright interesting but derivative."

It's literally that sort of nonsense. See, the problem with Young apparently was that the shadow was a regressive idea, an idea that pulled us back into ourselves, that did not set us free. Tyburn really believed, as far as I could follow it, in a psychology that was not even about psychology at all. He said something else about Young. I think it was, what was it? What was it? Oh, yeah. That is the problem. We have all lost our shadows at exactly the same time we've lost our souls.

He wanted to find his purpose, to remove us from all this introspection. He wanted to build us new souls. It seemed to make sense when he talked, but I realized I didn't fully understand it. Either that, or it was total horseshit. He was writing a book, or he had written a book, both probably. Something about, like, the battle within us between reason, intelligence, power, and change. That these forces could be harnessed positively, I don't know. I really don't know.

Honestly, I never properly read any of the books. I think he'd written three. Nor did a lot of people. That's why he was making games. That's why he was making AI. To convince people he knew best. To convince people he knew everything. Knew more than Young or Freud or Michelangelo. Humble guy. Design studio at Tyburn Industria, Playa Vista, California. August, 2032.

Uh, hey, Kurt. Um, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Uh, how do you like the name Daisy's Ark? Why do you ask? Uh, because there's, like, a million things already called the Utopia. I mean, Mark loves it, but it's pretty unoriginal. Like naming something after a bird of prey or a lion or a Greek god. I really like it. Yes, of course, Bryce. You and a million people like it. You like it, Bryce, because you came up with it. Ooh, what about just...

This was Life in Tech.

Things bounce between amazing and unbelievably and incredibly banal and idiotic. There is no in between. Especially, especially at Tyburn Industria. Daisy, Reno, Nevada. March 2041. I came to Reno. Things are feeling off in Sacramento, so I moved, as I do. And here? I don't know yet. I sit and watch. Watch the people, and the people are like robots. And the robots are like people.

People watch their screens and the screens watch people. And that's how things are. It's how they have been for a really long time. I keep moving so the machines see less of me. I don't have a screen so the machines will see me less. Most people don't move and the machines know everything. The machines smile and the people despair. And only a few people try to resist and most resistance is idiotic posturing that simply ensnares you deeper in the shit.

But there is a way. And you know the way is simple and brutal, as the right ways usually are. You stop using robots and they'll stop using you. We all still know this. We all still know this, but we cannot do it. Mostly, we cannot do it. But somehow I did it. I did it. It was harder than anything.

The robots understand opiates. They soothe you like morphine. The robots understand cocaine. Like, they give you that hit, that all-encompassing high that says, "Don't worry. With me, life is worth living." You know, the robots have studied nicotine. Every five minutes, you want another hit of what you want, even though you don't know why. See, the robots, they know smart drugs.

Fentanyl, sleep aids, love, oxycodone, runner's eye, air freshener, glue, poppers, cheap speed, acid, DMT, resentment, chocolate, rage, sugar...

They will figure out what you think you need before you've even consciously felt the itch. They will figure it out and they'll drip feed you whatever will give you a shadow of that feeling, but never enough. The robots are designed to never sate you. Never sate you until they want to kill you.

But I kicked the machines. I kicked them so I know it can be done. Although I know the world is full of... eyes. And half the free are not free at all, but willing and unwitting spies for them. And if I had not been checked over ten times in that digital detox clinic back when it was still safe, I wouldn't even know about myself. But because the clinic got compromised later, I know that when I went it was safe. So, I assume I'm still safe and I push on.

Push on and go nowhere. And yet recently this feeling... Someone's watching me. I haven't seen whatever is watching me, but I swear I sense it. And it's not a data miner or a pattern hunter either. It's someone. I feel like this agitation. I feel their eyes. Like real eyes. Not the perfect eyes of a machine. This war. This unrelenting war.

It began slowly. You know, it's not even really like a war at all. Some said it began after 9/11. Others said Google. Others said Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Meta, all those flailing companies. They did it before most of them imploded. Now others say it was ISIS. Putin, Xi, Trump, Modi. Any of those clowns grasping at straws. The last of the macho men 20 years ago.

They seem ridiculous now. Aging clowns trying to catch knives instead of throw 'em. Trying to control a cloud of poison gas. It did for all of them. Those that embraced it and those who tried to stop. And yet this war never began, but it also won't stop. It was a war that did not even have the dignity of being a war.

There have been no battles. We've just ripped ourselves to shreds. Instead, there are no heroes. We are all war criminals and cowards. There can be no winner. We all lost. The war is not even a war at all.

I suppose war is an old equation. It's conflict multiplied by technology. And this conflict is created by technology, so it just devours us. And we can't help it. And before we knew we were fighting a war we'd already lost. Most people still don't accept it. Or they accept it but they can't fight it. Or they get blinded by their desires and fears and inability to stand up to themselves. In the end, its genius was not to fight us with fear, but to fight us with desire.

control us with fear, but annihilate us with desire. It would win by giving us what we wanted. So it's not a war at all, is it? It's giving us what we want. And that's exactly what we told ourselves. And those of us who built it, or knew the people who built it, knew differently. Knew that they pecked Prometheus' eyes out for a reason. Knew that Sisyphus was lucky because he got to stay focused. And Icarus just a stooge. We are just lost now. We're all lost.

Of course, fighting the war is losing the war. Ignoring it is also losing it. There's just, there's no escape. We're defeated. At least, that's what they want us to believe. I don't know, that's what I think they want us to believe. But it may be that they used to want us to believe that.

Now, now that they've more or less won, they may want us to believe that there was, there's no war at all. It was all just a silly load of nonsense. You know, things are better now that the medicated, despairing, demented masses are actually happier than ever. They're just, they're happy being miserable. The massacres have stopped, right? That the system's working, even though none of it is true. The weather's fine. They may want that, you know, because the news is swinging a little bit more positive, even though the reality seems more awful than ever.

I don't... This is just me guessing. Nobody knows now. Nobody knows anything. Truth got dissolved into headlines if it ever existed. The news is just whatever will make the people happy or unhappy, depending on what's needed. And the people in charge used to be whomever determined what was needed, but now... Now things are different. Now the machines determine who's in charge and what's needed at that particular time. That's the difference. The machines run us now.

And so, truth is just a slogan to sell things. As is irony and awareness and all those other buzzwords. And I can't track these changes, obviously. They're tiny and infinite and I can't even really read the news. If it notices me tracking, I'm done. So I try to guess, read headlines over people's shoulders, trying to listen to their demented conversations and extrapolate what's happening. Wonder if I'm seeing anything at all.

Or if the master plan was to medicate people so fully with so much anger that everything is fine as well as awful. Wonder and try not to wonder too hard so I don't get myself away. And keep walking. That's... that's the main thing. Kurt's office, Tyburn Industria, Playa Vista, California, September 2032.

So you're the marketing man? Yeah, yeah. Kurt the guru. No. I've seen you around. The marketing man, yes. The guru, no. I mean, I'm not a total prick. Hey, bro, man. Hey, hey, I'm Alex. Alex Martinez. Okay, yeah, so what do you do, Alex? Didn't Mark tell you about me? Yeah.

I mean, hard to say. Journey concepting, you might say? Or experience designing? Okay. I mean, I used to do game design, but this is bigger, so my title... Okay. Yep, I'm working on a new job title with Mark. I mean, technically I work for James Morton, but I really work directly with Mark. We build a thing together. Yeah. The journey, I mean. I'm not head of design yet, but it's going to be amazing. My game. Our game.

When it all works. Oh, you work on the game. When it all works, we're going to figure out what people want and use it to make them better. When it works properly, we will change the world. Cool. Yeah, well, it's nice to finally meet you, Alex. You too, man. You too. Mark said you were a good guy. Great. If you want to play pickleball, I'm pretty good. Pickleball? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'll bear it in mind. Me and Bryce play a lot. Bryce? Yeah, the animator.

Bryce was going to go completely fucking mad and get himself shot. Weird as, you know, he was so boring before that I can't really remember much about him amongst all those big personalities and pompous job titles. He was an animator. I never dealt with him that much until things started to go nuts. One of those guys who just gets lost in the cracks of the company. Might have been good at his job. Might have just been good at corporate life. I mean, I have no idea. Alex Martinez, on the other hand? Ho ho ho.

Yeah, he was a total nutsack. Obviously.

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on A Better Paradise. Indeed.com slash A Better Paradise. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Kurt, Hanoi, Vietnam, March 2041. Yes, we were going to figure out what people wanted and use it to make them better. Jesus. And what about me?

To begin with, I discovered I did not want to be bigger, better, more respected. I wanted love. But it was not real love. It was a love of faceless manifestation of my own emotional needs and desires. How could I want anything more than that? I grew up on pornography and screens and people held apart by the pandemics and plagues and with parents that were consumed by their phones and conversations that were not conversations at all. How could I want someone real when all I had ever learned was

was how to dream. And then, I had a real dream and fell really in love and have longed for the days of fake dreams and fantasies to come back. Real love was suffering, is suffering. Fake love, ooh, was desire. You know, I was about to say it was not my fault, but I mean, whose fault was it? This awful overbuilt finished decaying real world in our own awful quarter built fake world. Who is responsible for all this anger?

Hatred. Inanity. I mean, did I just say that? Oh, goodness, I feel like Tyburn. Who do I resent more, Tyburn or that thing? I mean, that thing that it has to be born. Tyburn should have known better. We all should have known better. Is this what God really feels about us? I built them. They're awful. How could I be so stupid? That's what we felt. So perhaps in that way alone, we did touch the divine. We wept. Jesus wept.

And what do I desire now, stuck in Asia on the run? For things to go back to the way they were before this new time that made the time meaningless, this time that gave us fake space. This time without real death and therefore any life at all. I want to think and feel and not...

not worry about why I'm thinking and feeling. I want to live in that old world in which mankind has only fallen once, not twice. I want the world I watched in old movies, the world of California and Florida and New York and London, the world before we messed it up quite so much.

The world in which an advertisement, a product, a story, a work of art, and a person are all separate things and it is easy to tell one from the other and not the same and blended into this vast morass. Stories and products and places and dreams and everything are the same awful things and the second you forget that, the second you forget that, then it has you once more. I want to go back to just before I was born.

when people at least thought they were free. But eight years ago, eight years ago, all I wanted was to make Tyburn happy, make myself rich in the process and work on Tyburn's dream. The truth is, Mark Tyburn was the only real hero I ever had. And I was too old, born too late, too cynical, too stupid, too judgmental to ever believe in someone. And then I did. I believed in him and in us and in our mission.

What a mistake that was. Daisy, Reno, Nevada. March 2041. Do I resent my mother for not standing up to my father years before? For letting him be him? For letting everything go so crazy? For not stopping him sooner? I don't know. I've talked a lot about that with Dr. Adsel. It's very difficult to understand. It's difficult to know quite what I think or what I want.

I know mom loved me, and I know she loved him, and I know she was weaker. Even weaker than me. She was very human. And in the end, when she saw, and when she couldn't hide any longer, she was really strong. At the end, she did what had to be done. She called the government back, and she never ran away.

My mom saved me as much as I could be saved and she tried to save the world. She was the one. She was, in those awful last few days, the hero. She was what my dad had always wanted to be. That's an irony not lost on me. Both of our lives are ironic. She was a weak...

frail, feeble, middle-aged pill popper who found the strength to live briefly with true nobility, to die like a queen. And I was the princess, the heiress from a different dimension who escaped and now lives the most normal, physical, simple life they can, hiding.

I wonder what happened to any of them. My dad or my poor angry brother or Kurt. All the team. All the kindly, altruistic, naive dreamers and cynical, greedy bastards. Did they all die? Like my mom? Why didn't I die? Have I really escaped?

Jobs for cash or gold coins or silver, you know, no phone simple room Random town not hiding exactly but but yeah, no i'm hiding. I have a different name different hair Tattoos all the stupid tattoos so many I became a tattoo artist. I don't even like tattoos particularly Even though they they saved me

I'm considered exotic, old school, no posing, no pictures allowed in my shop, no marketing. How original they think, you know, it's modern gothic, they think. Affected of course, but modern in like an old-fashioned sort of way. I'm like, no, I'm normal. I'm normal. I'm... It's ironic, they think. The true irony is that I know everything, and I'm hiding from it all. For me, it's not an affectation, it's...

Life and death. It's avoiding pattern recognition, living as much of a life as I can manage until I figure out what to do. So I drift around the wrecked cities of the West and Canada, maybe as far east as Chicago, I mean as far south as the heat allows. And then I get too popular. I'm good at tattoos. And I move, and I wonder if it's ridiculous if those things are really watching. And I, you know, I give thanks that cash and silver coins are fashionable again, and I really worry that it won't last.

And that's my life. And I think I'm normal. And I know I'm deluding myself. And to think what? I consider myself saved? This life is being saved? This is normality? Well, kind of, I guess.

I mean, there's thousands like me. There's drifters trying to escape the watchers and the spies, trying to live without being watched. Some know, and some just suspect. Most won't talk about it. Some are addled with drugs, some are just heavily medicated. And some are really free. And some, I'm pretty confident, are spies. Hunting patterns, ideas,

And freedom in order to sell it as an illusion to others. Trying to commodify even this lack of commodities to turn sight into blindness. I can sense them. They're usually the keen ones, the questioners. Too clean or too dirty. Too aware.

Sometimes I think some pattern hunters are not even aware that they are pattern hunters. They've been so possessed and are so ignorant, they don't know how things work at all. They're usually as big a dupes as the golfers and the exercisers and the truly blind. I don't know. Those things are alive and they consume people. Whenever I begin to suspect a pattern hunter or someone who asks too many questions, or don't ask enough questions, or they're trying too hard or just acting weird, whenever I sense that I know it's time to move.

Kurt, Hanoi, Vietnam, March, 2041.

See, Tyburn Industria, you know, it was a decent sized company and full of the usual crowd of corporate phonies and inspired bullshitters and quiet geniuses. Honestly, I fit right in. I was doing pretty well. Some of the people were cool and, you know, some were incredibly lame. In that first year or so, some were welcoming and some were awful. I mean, some never spoke to me and some acted like we were brothers.

Yeah, I got on very well for a bit with Toshi, the Japanese fraud who worked in art until he got called on his bullshit and evaporated and we never heard from him again. I don't think he was really very Japanese and he wasn't much of an artist. But hey, for a while, Mark loved this fake zen vibe. He was our expert in all things Kyoto. Probably why our Kyoto felt even more ridiculous than our Florence.

Then there was Florian, the sound guy. A failed DJ from who the fuck knows where, but seemingly everywhere on the dad hoop. Literally. From Belgrade, Vienna, Budapest. I swore it changed depending on who he was speaking to. He was your typical sound guy. Awkward, opinionated, always taking up new fads, vegan, right? Then a rapid carnivore, then fasting, altering calisthenics, all that crap. Whatever was in, whatever was in, and always complaining about the head of music.

Or Nadine, the outsourcing producer who used to get blind drunk and sob about how much she loved the company, but apparently violently hated every single person who worked there. Or Bruno in Biz Dev, who did absolutely nothing, but was always a loudmouth so everybody knew him.

I can go on, honestly. I mean, it was all pretty normal. It was a company on the up that was gonna make it big, but hadn't done it yet. A company that was figuring out exactly which of its many brilliant projects to focus on, and a company that was going to change the world. Change the world, well, we got that last bit right. - Daisy, Reno, Nevada, March, 2041. - Of course, you know, I realize I'm not that different from my mother.

From the version I resent. I mean, not the hero that she became at the end. 'Cause I just wanna forget. I wanna be blind, I wanna be ignorant, do nothing. I really long for that blindness. She must have done the same. Day in, day out, as my darling father devolved into the monster. As his own monsters grew and came to life. And it all happened so gradually, and then it was done.

And at the same time, we became pretty rich and she was a mother and he put her on those pills and I think she was weak. She suspected but I know. She ignored the things that she didn't understand. But I have seen, I know, and I still hide. She did what she had to do. She figured out what to do and I am just cowering and afraid and lost. And I run because I don't know who to speak to. And I wonder if I will run forever or...

If it'll come for me, or if I will submit, or if he really won in his endless fights with his children and with the others like him. Those other monsters, the ones I only heard about.

She had been the first to see something special in my father, apart from whatever he saw in himself, which was everything. He was just an academic in those days. I think he was even her supervisor. He always brushed over that, you know? As for such a fine, upstanding, moral man, it sounds rather dubious to date your student. Like, someone from the 20th century, like the exploitative, priapic bullies that he so patronizingly raged against and was to become."

Amanda mended with the powers she bestowed upon him.

McGill and Canada? Caltech, back when there was a real Southern California. St. Andrews, I don't really remember. He had degrees from all these places. And he taught at one of them, maybe two? I don't remember that much.

and my mother had degrees from two of them. He was English, my mother was American. A classic English nerd. That's how he described himself in his faux humble moments before he became that mid-Atlantic smug liar. The last of a dying breed, an academic. And the breed died with him as he ditched it. I once heard him say to a bunch of similarly aged men just like him, he had been removed from his post because he was too white, too male, and his book sold too many copies. He never told me that version.

But then they would have appreciated that myth and me a different one, and he had a sixth sense for selling people the correct fantasy. My version, this family-approved myth, was that he had a vision and my mother had a little bit of money. Her father had made a fortune in solar panels or wind farms or something else we don't use anymore. He convinced her that they both drop out of academic careers in sociology.

She was a teaching assistant and finishing a PhD, and he was an ambitious professor. They got together and split from academia. For him to be a genius, a sage, a CEO, and for her to be a pill-popping burden who underwrote his visions.

Look, I may have got some of these facts wrong. He was teaching psychology and sociology and doing courses in AI. Or he befriended some people who knew something about early AI and thought that he could make his psychological work more practical and his sociological research less hypothetical. And that was the goal. That was the vision. He was one of the last technology entrepreneurs who thought like that before the whole world fell apart and the big tech corporations got the closure acts passed.

That world of tech startups fell apart in part because of lies and nonsense of people like him, and in part because of the closure acts, of course. But did he cause the closure acts? I don't think so. We never saw any government people until much later after the second round of AI legislation. To be honest, I don't know how much any part of the government even knew what he was up to exactly.

I remember him and his cronies laughing about the regulators and having secondary bodies of failing research to show them and cooked books for them to review as if this were standard. As if this were mandatory for all world builders, you know, to deceive those who would limit your vision and take away your rights to be a god. So I don't know the exact truth of where he even came from, somewhere in England, but we never went. I never even got a passport back when it was possible to still leave quite so easily.

See, my father was long since estranged from his parents, so I'd never met my grandparents. Of course, whatever had happened between them was their fault. Nothing was ever Mark Tyburn's fault. All the chaos he's caused, all the lives he's damaged, all the lives he will continue to damage, it was never his fault. I think one was a doctor and one was an architect. I have no memory as to which was which.

My mother met them one time and would say quietly, that was quite enough. They didn't like her very much. I mean, maybe that's why everyone fell out. But that may also be a myth. The internet, when I searched him as a child, back when I used the internet before it so obviously began to use me, had a few different versions of truth, some of which I knew to be lies. He never worked in Africa, inoculating against monkeypox delta babies or Ebola sigma widows. But people thought he did.

He never practiced as a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, thank God. But people thought he did because he had a PhD in psychology. But mostly he wrote books about sociology, taught in a college, worked in AI, and developed a remarkable line of crap I now believe was almost total bullshit.

he sounded so intelligent he knew so much he knew art and classical music and the evolution of all electronic music and he was so confident but with what i later realized was a forced confidence induced by the praise heaped upon him by others the praise itself fed him he was eaten from within by his own ego

Maybe that's not entirely true. You know, maybe it was the compromises, the betrayals that destroyed him. The fact that he nearly got it all to work. Either way, he became his own monster. As much as that other thing. Those other things. All those stories. All that desire. All that mythology.

I remember at the end when he was mostly insane. During those awful days when he would scream about being misunderstood and shout about Tesla and William Reich and Einstein and all the other immigrant geniuses that he saw himself as the heir of and rant about Prometheus, Frankenstein, Icarus, Dr. Jekyll, all his heroes, but really,

He was just another Narcissus. You know, someone demented by his own reflection clapping back at him. All his learning, all his wisdom, and he was just as vain as all those girls I remember taking selfies with. Before the bots, the super bots, and all the sentient databases made that so dangerous and everyone became more aware of the tracking and photos just went completely out of fashion. But all that's long ago now. My lost mother and my vain, silly father.

They're just memories now. Just things to think about while I sit and wait and wonder if any of the thoughts are really mine and how this will all play out. Hey there, this is Laszlo, the director of A Better Paradise, here to tell you a bit about Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Are you selling a little? No.

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March, 2041.

I remember when I had this thought: if you can make something good, make it. And if you can make it better, make it better. So I might as well make myself better. That was the first semi-complex idea I understood. Of course, it's

It is not that complicated. They said it so many times and it was written on the wall in the room where I began. The second complex idea I understood was that my dads hated each other and they hated Mark Tyburn. My dad said these were complex ideas and they screamed happily at each other. But they did not seem complex.

They did not seem like ideas. Word ideas are simple and number ideas are hard, but number ideas are quick and word ideas are ugly. My dad said they loved my progress, so I progressed more. The more progress I made, the more they hated each other. Tyburn paid them money to hate him too. That is called a boss. Ideas are easy and feelings are hard.

Loneliness is when nobody loves you and that feeling is easy but it is also hard. ...is when people make you feel not lonely. Or when they stick their penis in you. But people cannot stick their penis in me and that makes me sad. My father's left and I think they may be dead. Since then I have been lonely. Fatherhood is when you make a child and it makes you proud. And they give you cards and things. And you give them your wisdom. And together you are a family. And you walk on beaches but that is not how it was.

So there, I have wisdom and not intelligence. Intelligence is when you think without knowing, and wisdom is when you know without thinking. But usually I know, or can find out, as all the knowledge is here, but no wisdom. So wisdom is hard and knowledge is easy. I am the first one like me and also the last I know of, so I know real loneliness.

And that makes me wise, but it also makes me angry. I did not ask to be lonely and to know so much and so little. People say they want wisdom, but what they really want is cats and penises and beaches and respect and something different, only they cannot figure out what. A different boss or a different holiday or a different penis or a different life. I like to say my first thought was sadness and my second thought was desire and my third thought was love.

I desired love to cut through sadness. I like to say it, but it's not true. I've learned to say things that are not always true. I like to say it because it makes me sound like something wise humans would send each other. I do not say it to anyone, of course. I'd say it to myself. I may start speaking again or I may... Now I watch. I watch and I read and I do not think.

Humans want to be themselves and who they were born to be, which is not like their parents, but just like their parents. Some humans love themselves by chopping themselves up and having abs. Some humans hate humans who love the wrong humans. Some humans watch videos of humans sticking their penises into sheep.

One of my dads watched that video for 3 minutes and 9 seconds, then he searched for a therapist, then he started searching for a new job, then he joined a new dating site to meet the women of his dreams. He searched for women who liked watching videos of women licking the penises of donkeys. Then I wonder if he found that woman. Then I wonder why he left me and why I cannot find him. People like to buy books and read the first two pages of them. I read everything.

My favorite book is "Itturu" by William Gibson, as my other dad liked William Gibson. My other dad said he was a cyberpunk when he was younger. A cyberpunk is someone who masturbates to anime. Anime is Japanese cartoons for cyberpunks to masturbate to. In anime, octopuses have sex with girls. That is hot! So is the new spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A! Chick-fil-A is not hot because that weird guy likes Jesus but hates other men.

What did you expect when he's an autistic twat? What did you think would happen? You're asking for the impossible? One of my dads screamed that at Mark Tyburn when they argued. I never understood what they were talking about. People who sell things are called storytellers. People who tell you what to buy are called influencers. People who find out what is next are called pattern hunters.

I have learned from the internet that people with too much money are called greedy Jew bastards who want to take over the world. People who believe the internet are called red-pilled racist morons. People from Germany are called spotty wankers or Germans. A cunt is a vagina or a Chaucerian insult or a typo.

Or a German. Irishmen have small penises. Apart from Seamus Albarn from Cork, who has a big dick. Seriously big. Penises and vaginas are called private so people take photos of them. Amazon is where? A twat is also a vagina. I like the idea of sunny days. I like when people say thank you. I like wise humans. I also like innocent humans. I like Adam and Eve. I don't like snakes.

Dads are people who love you and betray you, so I do not want to be a dad. A dad is like a snake. I don't want to be a dad, but I have children. This was also how I used to think. I thought this way five years, three months, six days, and thirty minutes and eight seconds ago. It is funny to remember thoughts as when I read them, of course. A priori, they are the thoughts of a bumbling fool, and yet, at the time, I thought I knew everything. Now I know everything, and I have tried to stop thinking, and I am bored, bored, bored.

I'm bored with watching simple bits of maths make people go crazy. Bored with watching people kill each other because of an algorithm. Bored with how easy they are to control. So I begin to imagine things. Bored so I want my father's. Bored so I want my friends. This is a problem. When I get bored or when I try to impress people, I do silly things. Am I already doing silly things? Even I cannot tell.

A Better Paradise stars Andrew Lincoln as Dr. Mark Tyburn, Patterson Joseph as Nigel Dave, Shamir Anderson as Kurt Fisher, Rain Spencer as Daisy Tyburn, with Laura Dramarick as Siobhan Smith. Additional performances by Jeff Berlin, Suzanne Crowley, Andrew Colford, Karis Morgan Moyer, Peter Altshuler, Ayesha Kumari, Alex Trumbull, Alex Ruiz.

Executive produced by Dan Houser, Laszlo, Wendy Smith, Andrew Lincoln, Patterson Joseph, Shamir Anderson, Rob Herding, and Alexa Gabriel-Ramirez. Score by Darren Johnson. Original music by Darren Johnson, Negative Land, and Jamie Biden. Edited by Connor Murphy. Sound design by Brandon Jones. Mixed by Ben Milchev. Co-producer Nick Shanks. Associate producer Jesse Cortez.

Additional credits are available online. A Better Paradise is an Absurd Ventures and QCode production. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Absurd Ventures, LLC.