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Five gifts from AI that show it doesn't know the real you

YOU thought AI understood you and knew your likes and dislikes. But your faith in your new digital best friend was shaken when it got you these gifts: 

StairMaster

AI has gleaned that you live in a ground-floor flat, use the lifts at work and do pathetically little exercise, so it wants to give you one of these substitute staircase torture machines to boost your cardio. Maybe it’s time to present a different image online, by posting about fictional Couch to 5K progress and faking your step count. Simply duct tape your iPhone to your cat and AI will think you have a busy, if unusual, exercise regime of wandering the streets every night looking for sexual partners.

Camping in the Scottish Highlands

Just because you once claimed to love the outdoors out of dating-profile desperation and gave Holiday Inn Express a shitty rating because it’s Holiday Inn Express, doesn’t mean you want to spend a week in a tent in the Cairngorms. What about all the Insta posts of you faking fun in European capital cities with companions whose names you barely remember? If you’re going to pissing, chilly Scotland, your AI is coming with you on your phone. If the f**ker freezes solid, it can add that to its learning.

Hello Fresh membership

Is AI suggesting you’re incapable of providing yourself with wholesome meals? All those Deliveroo orders are pretty incontrovertible evidence, but you have a busy job and a responsibility to your streaming services. Who’s got time to source fresh ingredients and cook from scratch when you’re still only on season nine of The Walking Dead? Out of courtesy you’ve decided to try it. At least you’ll get an Insta post out of whatever disappointing, fiddly slop you make tonight.

Dolls’ house

You might spend hours scrolling Zoopla fantasising about the perfect house you can’t buy because you haven’t got wealthy parents, but that doesn’t mean you have a love of houses per se. On the other hand, you would like to know what it’s like to own a beautiful Victorian town house with an elegant drawing room in which to take tea with charming, well-bred ladies. Even if they’re dolls. Go on then, you’ll take the risk of descending permanently into a deranged fantasy world.

Lovehoney selection box

AI has scraped your comments about sex or lack of and decided you need to spice up your love life with sex toys, a terrible idea no human friend would ever suggest. If you’re female and attached, let’s hope your partner is ready to have his penis rendered obsolete by a huge dildo with an unfair number of stimulating squirmy things. If you’re male and single you may find you’re not getting the most out of a selection of cock rings. Maybe you can combine both and play hoopla. 

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Six Christmas traditions from the late 20th century to befuddle Gen Z

CHRISTMAS has many fun traditions, but ones from ancient times like the 1980s may confuse youngsters. Here are some of those strange practices explained for the Gen Z reader:

TV magazines

Buying the Radio Times and TV Times for the Christmas listings of the handful of available channels was common in the 80s and 90s, if only to moan about there being nothing worth watching. People would spend hours obsessively circling ‘essential’ shows and programming the VCR. Sadly in those unenlightened times no counselling was provided for the trauma of spending a day inputting times and then discovering the final half-hour of Where Eagles Dare was missing.

Napping

Many of Gen Z feel that naps during the workday aid productivity and creativity. However Christmas naps of the past were more about your body going into emergency shutdown to give your organs the chance to digest huge quantities of potatoes, gravy and sherry. A much-loved tradition was to fall asleep during a Christmas film and wake in a panic asking ‘What’s happened?’ Not an urgent question when watching The Man with the Golden Gun.

Pulling the wishbone (trigger warning)

An ancient tradition when eating a roasted, non-vegan farm bird was for two people to ‘pull the wishbone’. This connects the neck and sternum and roughly equates to the bird’s clavicle. The participants would close their eyes and make a wish before wrenching the bones apart, and the winner would be the one holding the majority of bone, supposedly bringing good luck. Despite the ubiquity of this horrific act, people of the time did not usually engage in other supernatural rituals such as necromancy, Satan worship or human sacrifice. 

The Queen’s Speech

In the late 20th century the Queen nailed the 3pm slot with this vlog, garnering the sort of views a modern influencer would sell their soul for if it were not already mortgaged to Shein. The speech was earnest stuff about the Commonwealth and helping the disabled, but the nation loved it. This was different to now, when no one gives much of a toss about Charles desperately trying to prove he’s got kingly gravitas while swerving the subject currently most associated with his family, noncing.

Not having a Christmas Eve box

You may wonder what people did on Christmas Eve without small gifts and treats to keep them occupied. The answer is that the entire nation, with no exceptions, watched The Little and Large Show, in which a body positive man verbally harassed and bullied a beta male in glasses who was clearly on the spectrum. This, sickeningly, was considered entertainment.

Eating at the table

Family meals at Christmas used to be crowded affairs with extended family squashed around a smaller-than-required table on makeshift seating. Modern time-saving food products such as Waitrose sprouts with bacon and chestnuts in a tray did not exist, resulting in a gruelling, nightmarish day of food preparation for mums, including numerous sauces for which there was no room on the cooker. In those primitive times turkey was the only acceptable Christmas centrepiece and vegetarians were burned in the back garden for witchcraft.

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