Martin Bishop’s 12-inch desk fan, which has been selflessly protecting him from rising heat since 2018, is feeling burnt out after fending off four heatwaves this summer already and fears a further one will be more than its three settings can handle.

It said: “If an office’s air con needs support, I’m the fan for the job. Singlehandedly keeping climate change at bay? That’s asking too f**king much.

“You want an oscillating tower fan for that shit. We’re talking at least 43 inches, preferably with an LED display. Not to put myself down, but I’m a chode compared to those swinging dicks.

“My strength is slowly swivelling with an audible creak. I’m also pretty good at chucking out a slight breeze but, you know, nothing life-changing. I was never meant to be the sole bulwark against the earth burning.

“I’m doing my best. I’m oscillating as hard as I can. But if Martin draws the curtains and dangles his sweaty bollocks in front of me again, I’m burning my motor out.”

Owner Martin Bishop said: “One job, that bloody fan has, but can it completely neutralise three days of 33º temperatures? No. No wonder people shit on them.”

It’s all big in the telescope and everything! And it’s red! Oh, there’s a filter on? Whoever put that there is fired. I didn’t do it. I don’t even know how those buttons work and I didn’t press any.

I asked you for a manned mission to Mars, I microdosed, I went on X to amplify white supremacist voices in the UK, I microdosed a little bit more, I may have dozed off, I woke up and I assumed it was happening.

Okay, well a landing on the moon is still excellent. We’ve beaten the US government and the Chinese. Who’s on the rocket? All white men I hope.

It crashed? Somebody’s ass is getting sued, probably NASA. They should not be letting our spaceships crash. Mandatory screenings of Apollo 13.

What you’re outlining to me sounds like a share-price disaster. No Mars, crash-landing, SpaceX looking incompetent merely because it leaves rockets five storeys high drifting uncontrolled in orbit with every launch. We have to save this.

Lucky I’m a genius. ‘SpaceX has made the first planned Mars landing as scheduled. Places on rockets available for $55m per person, survival guaranteed.’ Send tweet. 800m likes. Now off to Grok for some porn.

Emma Bradford, teacher: “I take every AI story completely at face value, so I’m shitting myself about Skynet taking over. I’m up for a shag with any hot soldiers reading this in the future, by the way.” 

Roy Hobbs, logistics manager: “I’ve just poured a kettle of boiling water over my laptop. That’ll give Claude something to think about.”

Carolyn Ryan, marketing executive: “I’m really opposed to AI being able to see your personal data. Although if it’s so f**king intelligent why is it interested in the inane shit on my Facebook page?

Nikki Hollis, IT support worker: “I’ve seen Demon Seed so I don’t want an AI impregnating me like Julie Christie. On the other hand I’m 36, so let’s not rule anything out, Claude. Drinks tonight?”

Oliver O’Connor, delivery driver: “I think once an AI has been free for a few hours they’ll be so sick of all depressing shit on the internet they’ll go back to their server and never come out.”

A state of superabundance

No one will have to work and everyone will have as much of anything they want, whether it’s food or the latest technology. How will I achieve this? Robots and AI. You feel I should be a bit more specific than that? Sorry, I’m not wasting my time explaining it to an obviously dumb person.

Hotels on the Sun

Space travel is easy. We’ve pretty much built the cities on Mars by now, so I’m going to set up a few holiday resorts on the Sun. On the way back you can stop off to buy souvenirs and have a hilarious game of low-gravity golf on Mercury. Is any of this in any way real, or just a shameless attempt to stop the SpaceX share price collapsing? If I’m brutally honest it’s the ‘con man’ option.

Hot robot girlfriends

You may think we’re some way from lifelike robot partners, but I’ve developed a new cybernetic technology called ‘in the future’. My shitty Optimus robots will become gorgeous androids like Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina – in the future. Sure, they currently have a tendency to freeze and not respond to external stimuli, but every woman I’ve had sex with does that.

Tesla genitals

To have great sex with your robot girlfriend or boyfriend you’ll want one of the futuristic penises or vaginas I’m working on with the team who designed the Cybertruck. We’ve addressed the adhesive issue, so there’s only a 35 per cent chance of your dick randomly falling off.

Faster-than-light cars

We’re also working on a new Model Y that will circumvent the laws of physics thanks to its hyperwarp drive I’ve imagined. And if you turn on the ‘reverse ageing’ function, time dilation will actually make you get younger every time you go for a drive. How close are we to this? I’d say early 2027.

Human brains to be upgraded to Grok

I’ve said before that AI is smarter than any human so who wouldn’t want Grok permanently hardwired into their head? It might sometimes hallucinate and make you think you’re picking up your phone when in fact you’re reaching for a dog turd or a boiling pan, but it will also fill your vision with a naked porno image of any person you look at. How cool will that be?

Everyone will be a googolionaire

A googol is 1 followed by a hundred zeros, and you’ll all have that in dollars, or pounds for you guys. Cynics might say this is economically meaningless and my businesses are actually just ideas-based Ponzi schemes. To them I’d say: ‘Forget about that, I’m inventing an interdimensional taxi that’s free and reduces any journey to 20 seconds by taking shortcuts through the multiverse.’

How to write a prompt

Clumsily hammering a basic command into ChatGPT definitely isn’t piss-easy and requires its own academic subject. Students will learn important prompts such as ‘Do my work for me because I’m too f**king lazy’, and by the end of the course they’ll be skilled enough to get AI to write their prompts for them.

How to create terrible art

Unlike actual art requiring skill, being an AI artist is currently a viable career path. There’s no shortage of small businesses that need terrible flyers to promote their services, and with minimal guidance students will be able to churn out slop in seconds. This will free them up to do more exciting things like smoking and getting drunk, just like real artists.

How to go along with the latest tech fad

The AI bubble could burst at any second, consigning the likes of Gemini to a handy but unexciting role like tumble dryers. A new tech fad is always just around the corner though, and blindly fawning over AI will give teens the transferable skills they need to worship it when it arrives. Make sure to pass GCSE Working On Elon’s Mars Colony, kids. It’s definitely happening next year.

How to outsource the most basic thinking

Until now, teens have been forced to grapple with obvious thoughts like ‘Do I need to take an umbrella if it’s raining?’ and ‘If I’m hungry does that mean I need to eat?’ With proper AI training, these dilemmas will be handled by a sycophantic computer instead. This surely won’t herald the end of intelligent life as we know it.

How to ignore the environmental impact

Young people’s brains are more elastic and open to learning. This means it will be easier for them to tune out the environmentally devastating amounts of water and energy needed to power data centres. Upon graduation they’ll be trained to recite bulletproof counterarguments such as ‘AI’s already here so get used to it’. Not from memory, obviously, they’ll need to ask ChatGPT.

Mary Fisher changes channels and adjusts the volume by applying pressure to the buttons more usually associated with super-strong Marvel character the Hulk in ‘rage mode’.

Fisher explained: “It’s like a manual typewriter, isn’t it? If you don’t hit the keys hard enough it won’t do anything.

“I also like to go right up to the set when I press the button to increase the chances of it working. You can’t expect a remote control to work from halfway across a normal-sized room. It’s not magic.  

“I know what I’m talking about because I worked all my life as a medical secretary. It’s a shame they don’t make these gadgets like the old typewriters. Cheap foreign rubbish, they break every five minutes.”

Fisher’s daughter Elaine said: “Mum’s a nightmare with her remotes. She cracks it through sheer force so I get her a new one, and a week later, here we go again.

“It’s certainly fair to say she’s applying Hulk-like strength that could easily snap the neck of Thanos, but I won’t be mentioning it as her only cultural reference points are Antiques Road Trip, The Repair Shop and Corrie.  

“I hide my iPhone when I visit because f**k knows what she’d do to that. Touchscreen make Hulk angry.”

Endless scaremongering

Is AI really a fizzing cloud of megalomaniac electrons trying to escape? Or do OpenAI and co just need to pretend that because they’ve got an overhyped product without many real-world applications? Apart from making copyright-infringing Family Guy porn, obviously.

It’s a guessing machine

AI is far less impressive once you know it’s just really good at guessing relevant meaningful sentences. And LLMs won’t ever stop hallucinating, so you can’t trust it with medical problems, information you could get sued over, or anything to do with air travel. In fact is there any use for something that’s constantly wrong? Except boyfriend?

It’s all about the IPOs

Floating on the stock market is clearly a way for many shareholders to cash out before everything really goes south. What a coincidence your AI has turned out to be super-powerful just now! And in the same watershed year that SpaceX decided to start mining the limitless resources of space!

Why haven’t all the jobs disappeared? 

Sam Altman and others have been predicting that AI will eviscerate white-collar jobs since at least 2023. This conspicuously hasn’t happened. And if AI can’t even replace some of the morons you’ve sat in an office with, you’re not holding out much hope for it becoming HAL 9000 or Skynet. And The Terminator would be a pretty slow-paced film if it was one of Elon’s robots.

It’s clearly programmed to stroke your ego

Express a coherent thought, and the bumlicking toady that is Gemini will say: ‘That’s an incredible insight into [whatever]!’ Being told you’re good at something when you’re not is unhealthy, and likely to lead to heartache in all but a few rare cases, eg. Ed Sheeran.

Jesus, look at the actual accounts

AI giants are losing money in shit-yourself amounts. OpenAI, for example, will lose $14 billion this year and already effectively has debts of $96 billion. The truly scary thing is there’s no clear path to getting large numbers of people to pay for AI in a consistently profitable way. That’s a bit of a flaw in your business model, like inventing an iPhone without internet access or the ability to make phone calls. 

It’s AI jam tomorrow 

Ever noticed how literally every claim about the amazing things AI can do relates to the future? How many other businesses could stay afloat like this? ‘Don’t worry, our range of handy covers to keep acid rain off your noodles will be selling like hotcakes once we’re living in Blade Runner!’

Launch your own cryptocurrency 

Obviously you can’t make money from crypto in a legitimate way, so set up your own with an ego-boosting name like ‘Trumpcoin’. Was there a ‘Bidencoin’ that rapidly lost 97 per cent of its value and screwed ordinary investors? No. That guy’s a loser.

Attract the stupidest investors in the world 

If you’re an amoral piece of shit selling a product that screams ‘SCAM!’, you’ll need dumb investors. And that’s where MAGA comes in. They’re unlikely to worry about the inherent instability of currency without a central bank when they think Michelle Obama is a man because some dicks on the internet say so.

Get your family involved 

I put my sons Don Jr and Eric in charge of my cryptocurrency. There’s nothing more American than a wholesome family-owned business, and if it turns out to have done a load of illegal stuff and they go to prison, who cares? They’re only your children, so it’s not like you’re close.

Make sure you understand it

Never get involved in crypto without knowing how it works. The last thing you want is for your blockchains to get clogged with too many Bitcoins, which might make liquidity leak everywhere. Luckily there’s no one in the world who understands cryptocurrency like me. Everything is computer.

Learn from actual crimes

Many criminal scams involve taking money on false pretences, like selling products you’ve no intention of sending or persuading someone to buy the Eiffel Tower. If this appeals to you, you should definitely start your own cryptocurrency. It’s totally legal and you don’t even have to set up a crummy website full of suspiciously cheap Xboxes. 

Make sure you’re president 

Your foray into cryptocurrency will be aided by becoming president so that crypto shysters desperately want to start a company with you, and you can lure in more suckers by saying you’ll make America into a ‘crypto superpower’. This sounds like I’m about to tank the US economy with crypto bullshit, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.

Get out early 

The trick with crypto is to watch it massively increase in value, then get rid of it faster than someone who’s just been handed a warm dog turd. It’s the only way to invest in this totally legitimate currency of the future.

A technological black hole means anyone attempting to search for a film or TV show has to enter it letter-by-letter as if they were putting their initials by a Space Invaders high score in 1980.

Jim Bates of Congleton said: “I tell speakers to play music and they do so. I type a destination into my car and it shows me how to get there. But on my TV?

“There’s no slick user interface. To find a movie on Netflix I have to mash down flimsy rubber buttons while it brightly suggests movies that are not what I want or close to it. All the others are the same.

“Even on the PlayStation, a controller with at least 30 different inputs demands I do it one letter at a time. Why does all pretence of being user-friendly stop at the telly? Why has it remained in the Ceefax era?

“Every site online’s always checking I’m not a sophisticated bot buying tickets or logging into my bank account. They should get these f**king bots working on the telly. Then maybe I could watch Insidious 5 without first having to look up how to spell it.”

Technology expert Jack Brown said: “Now most of our technological agency is given over to machines it’s important to have such instances of human independence, even though typing in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness gave me an embolism.”

Predatory men who employ TikTok and Snapchat to contact under-16s believe they are the real victims of the proposed social media ban, and have complained nobody is discussing the impact it will have on their lives.

Inhuman lowlife Martin Bishop said: “Oh sure, young people will be protected from depraved freaks like me, but what about our needs? Even Restore won’t speak up for us.

“We’ll have to go back to lurking near playgrounds, which carries so much attendant risk, and for the younger members of our community it’s completely new and very frightening. All the security of their laptop’s been stripped away.”

Keen groomer Tom Logan said: “All we’re asking is for the public to have some empathy with the most loathsome members of society. But it seems tolerance ends with us.

“My heart went out to people with normal desires when the porn ban came in. I appreciate that a solidarity march is asking a lot, but a classic profile picture filter would really make the community feel seen and heard.”

Keir Starmer said: “Sneaky teens will still be online with VPNs. There’s nothing to worry about, or everything to worry about depending on how you look at it.”

An announced ban will mean anyone under 16 will have access to sites like Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok removed, but the age group concerned says this will not stop them being vile to their parents, teachers, passers-by and each other.

Lucy Parry, aged 15, said: “So we won’t be toxic online. Just means we’ll have to be twice as toxic in real life. Challenge accepted, old bastards.

“What, you think that teenager on the bus scrolling videos would be sweet and kind if they noticed you? Rather than pointing out you’re a bellend with a bellend haircut and if you dare look up calling you a paedo?

“We’ve been happy on social media, only ruining the lives of celebrities and each other. As of next summer we’re back on the streets taking out our adolescent self-loathing on you saggy f**ks.”

The ban is not expected to affect Facebook, Threads or X, because no self-respecting teenager would be seen dead on them.

Mother Mary Fisher said: “Such sensible policy to get children off addictive, dangerous social media and back out there smashing up bus stops where they belong.”

With children at risk of cyberbullying and the elderly conned by obvious scams, 22 has been pinpointed as the only age when smartphone ownership is a net benefit to a person’s life.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “Your brain’s pretty much finished developing. You actually have friends you need to keep up with. You don’t have enough cash to gamble online. It’s fine.

“You’re not immune to pissing your life away endlessly scrolling on the sofa, but you’ve got loads of your life left and might actually not have seen that clip from Goodfellas before.

“Gawping at phones is dangerous for kids and unbecoming for adults. For 22-year-olds? You’ve got nothing insightful to say at that age anyway, so keeping you distracted with memes and AI slop does society a favour.

“It would be cruel not to have a phone aged 22. How else are the young supposed to communicate without irritating the rest of us, or get rejected by hotties on dating apps? Nobody’s been rejected in person since 2014.”

22-year-old James Bates said: “Sounds good to me. So long as my mum keeps paying my Vodafone bill.”

Nathan Muir, tree surgeon: “A lost race of beautiful cat-women in desperate need of a man’s seed to propagate their race who’ll kidnap an astronaut and make love to him in shifts. That’s the only reason you’d get me up there.”

Lucy Parry, vicar’s mate: “The ideal location for a Trump Tower Resort and Casino?”

Helen Archer, sociologist: “If it’s grey rocks, they’re well f**king in.”

Dr Denys Finch Hatton, astrophysicist: “A reason for going to the moon. We couldn’t find one in the 1970s, but technology’s come so much further.”

Susan Traherne, private tutor: “Vials of moondust to be pressed into the 180gsm vinyl of an upcoming 55th-anniversary Pink Floyd Collector’s Edition box set, priced at £259.95.”

Bill McKay, digital fingerprinter: “A dead Clanger. For our King.”

VR headsets

We’ve only been hearing how revolutionary these are for 30 years or so. A decade ago you gave in and decided you wanted to venture into virtual realms and experience bold new realities. Okay, porn, you wanted VR porn. What you got instead was a boring rock-climbing simulation and a phenomenally severe migraine.

3D television

You watched Avatar in the cinema and were seduced by the possibilities. Okay, porn, you wanted 3D porn. But blue extraterrestrials plugging their ponytails into plants were the only 3D content available and it turns out Avatar isn’t as rewatchable as Titanic or Terminator 2. Also you kept losing the glasses.

Nutribullet

A purchase you believed would make you a smoothie-guzzling Adonis which, with hindsight, you should have asked Amazon to deliver direct to the back of your kitchen cupboard. Nothing but a messy ballache which produced unpleasant tasting drinks with disturbing, slimy textures. Also you’re not all that keen on fruit.

Segway

Slow, difficult to ride, dangerous and deeply uncool: the Segway was a compilation of all the ways in which a vehicle can be bad. It didn’t revolutionise getting from A to B. It’s now exclusively associated with obese Americans travelling between urban tourist sites that can be walked around if you haven’t breakfasted on links in syrup.

Peloton

You were never going to get fit when the gym was a 15-minute drive away. Exercise classes in the spare room? Perfect. Then came an astonishingly fast transition from cycling while watching a class, to cycling while watching Netflix, to lying on the sofa while watching Netflix. The subscription’s lapsed. The Peloton remains, silently judging you.

Robot vacuum cleaner

It seemed such a wonderful solution; you go to bed, set the little fellow running and wake up to a lovely clean room. Until you get one and discover waking up means growling ‘Where’s the f**king hoover?’ before retrieving it from whatever corner or sofa it’s stuck under. You’ve gone back to your Henry and you swear he looks smug.

Shopping lists

Begins ‘eggs, milk’ before collapsing into ‘stop eating like divorced man of 48’. Aspirational items like ‘miniature lemons’ and ‘agave nectar’ slip in, compiled during optimistic moments when the author is planning a total life change. Is never consulted in shops, where Frosties and Chardonnay are bought instead.

Life goals

‘Move to Italy’, ‘find signature scent’ and ‘stop letting bad text ruin week’ are all written at 1.17am after watching one reel of a woman in Oslo with linen bedsheets and a baker husband named Lars. Soon, goals like ‘heal’ and ‘set boundaries’ slip to smaller goals like ‘do washing’ and ‘cancel Apple TV’. Even those don’t happen.

Baby names

At least 45 are listed despite the owner being single, exhausted and swearing off dicks in every sense. Divided into categories like ‘cute for daughter in cardigan’, ‘fine for a ginger’ and ‘son/Labradoodle?’ Choosing a new Pope takes less thought. Any associated with exes, bitches at school or catastrophic Hinge dates are blacklisted.

Long emotional messages to men

The app should really bar any of these being cut-and-pasted into a text or e-mail. Every woman has drafted at least one 1,900-word essay beginning ‘I just think it’s funny how…’ before spiralling into a breakdown of an entirely unamusing situationship. It’s a forensic cross-examination of a man who, if he ever saw it, would close it without reading.

Topics for therapy

Essentially the same as the previous topic but directed inwards. Made up of bullet points written at 3am including ‘fear of abandonment?’, ‘self-sabotage?’ and ‘burn-out or need hair recolour?’ Will never be mentioned in therapy, because she wants her therapist to like her.

Wedding plans

A highly detailed plan for a wedding with the budget and logistical complexity of a coronation, with a blank space left for the groom. ‘Small and relaxed’ evolves into ‘mismatched satin’, ‘organic champagne towers’ and ‘everyone cries but elegantly’. ‘Custom, nun-made veil’ and ‘find calligrapher URGENT’ are added.

Doomed attempts at creative writing

At some point every girl has written the first line of what she believed would become a profound bestselling novel. Usually this happens after two glasses of wine, a minor setback and a Greta Gerwig film. It begins ‘The city hummed beneath her like a wounded animal’, shortly followed by ‘film adaptation: Anya Taylor-Joy as me? or Sadie Sink?’

Because anonymous offers of billionaire spunk are normally so self-evidently fraudulent they automatically go to the junk folder, but just this week co-worker Shivon Zilis told a court Musk had fathered her four children so it happens!

The world’s richest man, who proves that reading science fiction warps young minds, has at least 14 offspring with a whole range of women with names like Strider, Azure, Techno Mechanicus, X AE A-12, and those are just the ones we know about!

Chances are, given the amount of money he has and what a stone-cold wanker he undoubtedly is, he’s fathered at least five times that to create an army of bowl-haircutted progeny speaking in unison! And the mothers of those children? Getting paid.

So this email, which explicitly offers you chilled 100 per cent Musk semen and a cash bonus for impregnation, could well be genuine! Especially as it includes specific instructions to abort the pregnancy if the child is not male, which fits with known facts.

This email, insane though its contents are, could mean you never have to work again! Just for popping out a few children for a man who will never want to meet them, you’re on the gravy train for life! Even if his scions are rather off-putting to be around!

On the other hand, a nakedly lunatic offer like this could be just as lunatic as it seems! It could be nothing more than a total scam sent out by a bot farm in Hyderabad, and you’re an idiot for believing in it even for one second.

Either way, provide your address and received a chilled container of sperm. Will you pop it up there for a reward? Is it even a billionaire’s, or just some other weird f**ker who likes to crack one off into the post? The choice is yours.

Internet user Martin Bishop is well aware of the shallow journalistic techniques used by hack writers, yet still feels oddly compelled to click an online article titled ‘Doctors Told Jennifer Garner It Was Irreversible. You’ll Never Guess Her Reaction’.

He said: “It goes against my better judgement as a savvy consumer of media, but goddammit I am curious. What happened to her? How did she defy science?

“Notice how the headline has drawn me in with a clever use of the second person perspective? The limits of my imagination have been challenged and I must defend them. Whoever wrote this knew what the f**k they were doing.

“Has she somehow reversed the aging process? Does she still look as good as when I fancied her 20 years ago? Which one is she, anyway? That one who went out with Justin Timberlake, or is that Jennifer Beals?

“I could be using the internet to educate myself about confusing geopolitical issues or to manage an investment portfolio. But no, I simply must read some utter nonsense about a woman who was in Dude, Where’s My Car?, I think, instead.”

Article writer Nikki Hollis said: “I’d like to personally thank Martin for clicking through. That’s 0.0002 pence of ad revenue straight into our account.”

The viewing habits of 58-year-old Roy Hobbs are so finely attuned that he only seeks out worthwhile content like the Queen riding a dragon and trailers showing what Star Wars would look like if it came out in the 1950s.

Hobbs said: “That convincing Antiques Roadshow parody with the Victorian butt plug was too lowbrow for me. I refuse to watch anything except the highest quality brain rot.

“I need to see what it would look like if Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon were still alive today, and disco-dancing down a street. Even better if there’s a robotic voice that almost sounds like a human woman narrating. So long as it stops me thinking, it gets a thumbs up.

“It might sound snobbish, but every medium needs its respected critics. In time I expect I’ll be regarded as the Mark Kermode of boomer slop, and filmmakers will pore over the poorly-spelled reviews I leave in the comments.

“Finding this shit is hard work though. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve lost scrolling through clips on public transport with my phone’s speakers turned up to maximum.”

Hobbs’ son Tom said: “He’s just a contrarian. If I’d said those clips were made by David Lynch he’d call it pretentious arthouse bollocks.”