The Gargle - Bad poetry | AI library books | Enshittification

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Athena Kugblenu and John-Luke Roberts join host Alice Fraser for episode 193 of The Gargle - all of the news, and none of the politics.🪶 Bad poetry📚 AI library books💻 Enshittification🧜‍���️ Underwater colony🧩 ReviewsWritten by Alice Fraser, Athena Kugblenu and John-Luke RobertsProduced by Ped Hunter, with executive production from Chris SkinnerWatch on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BuglePodcastSubscribe to Realms Unknown - a brand-new fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction podcast from Alice Fraser and The Bugle!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/news/realms-unknownYou fund what we do!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donate Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a podcast from The Bugle. watering or will their love life go up in flames? Here's how it works. Each round our contestants will cook up a dish designed to impress not only our judges but more importantly the GARGLE! Welcome to the GARGLE, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugles audio newspaper for a visual world. I am your host, Alice Fraser bringing you all of the news and none of the politics every week. Your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Athena Kuglenu, welcome! Hello! Hello, I sound like that was a bit too wacky I just meant to say welcome in a nice way, not in like a ahhh. That's okay it didn't scare me at all. Excellent, my dream not to scare people and the sub editor for this week's edition of the magazine is John Luke Roberts. Welcome to YouTube.

Thank you very much and thank you for softening your welcome when you turned to me. Well it's one of those things, if you want a welcome to be welcoming, not aggressive. You know, or maybe aggressively welcoming. But some people that's too much for... I can't have a conversation with you without learning something. Every single time. It is a terrible thing about me. I can't have a conversation with you without learning something every single time. It is a terrible thing about me.

I feel like perhaps it's a lack of inherent value. I always sort of brandish a log or a knife when I welcome people and now I'm beginning to think that's not been, that's been the wrong way around. That's had the opposite effect I think. Yeah, come right into my kitchen and then like a small rivulet of drool comes out the corner but it's just because you're so welcoming so it makes you salivate to think of allowing people into your home No, I was sort of going down the side path of unfortunately I feel obliged to educate people in every interaction we have

Perhaps a lack of confidence in my inherent value as a person if you're're not leaving with the joy of my company, at least you're leaving with facts. But before we put our hands on one another's shoulders in the slightly creepy massage circle that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover of this week's magazine is Kendrick Lamar post-Super Bowl halftime show filing his receipts in the library of personal vendettas. And the satirical cartoon this week is set in a chaotic press conference. Imagine the image of a politician looking suspiciously polished and wearing an I Heart the People badge.

He stands at a podium behind him. A large screen displays the words, Good news! Everything is great! in bold Comic Sans font. Meanwhile in the foreground, reporters are knee-deep in literal flames, swatting away mutant pigeons wearing tiny suits labeled corporate lobbyists. One reporter sweating profusely raises a hand and says, Sir, are you sure? Because he is being shushed by a government aide who's holding a sign that says, Positive vibes only! And at the bottom of the caption says nothing to see here folks that's satire for you and that's the satirical cartoon for this week I

got a question in from somebody who said is the satirical cartoon meant to be actual satirical cartoon or is it meant to be a satire of satirical cartoons and I said yes basically it depends on my mood for the week. It's a spectrum though, isn't it? Yes. I mean, everything is a spectrum. Sometimes it's a pie chart. Still learning. Really learning. Really genuinely every sentence is educational. Just, I'm overwhelmed. What a terrible thing. Life is a Venn diagram made of pie charts. I'm going to publish a book of inspirational sayings like that. I feel like we should have to like climb a hill and wait outside your door before we get this kind

of stuff. It can't be as easy as just clicking on a link and turning up online. I mean seriously I've considered advertising my shows by saying, please buy tickets to my shows, otherwise I'm gonna chuck it in and start a cult. Like you gotta save the world from the horrifying potential of this. Don't start a cult, Alice. I've realized recently, I'm quite like,

I think I'd be easily seduced by a cult. And if it's a friend's world, I'm almost certain I'm gonna sign up immediately. Yeah. That brings us to our top story for this week, which is the news that only bad poems go viral, at least so Stephanie, you believes. John Luke Roberts, you write poetry.

Can you unpack this story for us? I thought you were gonna say, John Luke Roberts, you are a bad poet. Can you unpack this story for us? I thought you were going to say, Charlotte Roberts, you are a bad poet, can you unpack this story? No, no, no, you're a good poet, but you're also evil. So if I called you a bad poet, it would just be slightly misleading. Oh, I see, I see, I understand, yeah.

It's very hard to rhyme things with, how you don't get many truly evil poets. Well this is the story that... Spackling and cackling. This is the story that, according to Stephanie Yu, that bad poetry is more likely to go viral than good poetry, or rather what people call bad poetry is more likely to go viral than good poetry, or rather what people call bad poetry is more likely to go viral than good poetry. And that effectively there's three things that a poem needs to make it go viral, which is one,

a mixture of mundanity and profundity, two, deploying a contemporary form, and three, signaling a political in-group. But basically it's poetry that some people really like, and some people will get cross about, and which is simple to understand. And I think that's maybe that I think there's a kind of moralistic thing to it as well.

There's an idea that to be good, poetry has to be difficult, which I don't agree with. But I think I'm going to the problem with me talking about this, Alice, is I I'm just gonna go down a literary criticism route because I Rather than make jokes. I mean you can you can do both it is possible to be both focused on the technical elements of prosody and also Deeply funny, but maybe maybe it's too hard for you. My god I'm learning something else about the world,

about comedy and about myself all in one go. Wow, I never expect to be told off so early in this. I think the main problem is the main, like the misgivings I have about this idea is that it starts from, it feels like it's trying to make poetry exciting and poetry isn't exciting. Like nothing is this bigger thing, right?

Poetry is, poetry takes work, you sit down and you look at it, you go, oh, that's nice. It's not a place for a culture war to be, I believe, which is effectively what Stephanie Udunam was talking about. Yeah, I think partly trying to bring interest and excitement to poetry or suggest that there's some kind of moral implication to the kind of poetry that gets made viral and sort of inherently because poetry is quite a personal form. Popular poetry always occupies a slightly uncomfortable position.

about is Rupi Kaur, right? Those like Instagram one line kind of on a sunset meme poems. Do you like online poetry? Poetry is for all. So with this, I will not play ball. That's nice. Thank you. Yeah, that's. You think poetry should be easy, like having sex with a man who is sleazy. You see? And it's only easy upfront. Stings in the tail on that one. It's in our soul, like soup in a bowl. So let's not deploy it.

It being negativity and let's just enjoy it. It being positivity. It's being positivity. It's poetry, man. I think it's a snobbish, isn't it? I stopped rhyming by the way. It is absolutely. No, no, thank you. I appreciate it. Like poetry has these days, you stop rhyming.

Yeah, there's poems that are the worst. There's poems that are just sentences. That's not a poem. You have a bit of spoken word night and they don't, nothing rhymes and they're just like, just pontificating at you. You just lean on a hip as you hit a particular word and stress it as you go.

That's how you make a sentence into poetry. And then everyone starts clicking. Like, no, I think Instagram is bringing poetry back to the people, you know, other than all of this kind of- You can't click while you're holding your phone. Absolutely not. It's one of the pluses of the social media revolution. No more clicking. Do you remember how much clicking there was just in the wild without my four phones? Terrible.

The de-clickification of the internet. That's a call back to a later round. If you had sharks and jets now, it would just be them on their iPhones. And it would be all the better for it. No, I think the interesting thing, right, is there is some incredible poetry online, and there's some online, like, only poets who are doing forms that are, like, specifically built for online sense of human humor, Brian Bilston being one of them, Ruby Koa being very successful and very derided and very enjoyed all at the same time. These are forms that are built for the modern age. And I think partly what people critique about them is that they don't necessarily fit off the internet.

Like maybe it just doesn't work not as an Instagram poem. But that's okay. Like that's okay for an art form to be specific to the medium on which it's generated. I think that's fine. It might not be for me, but you know. That's fine. It's fine. Listen, poetry isn't better than any other art form. Social media has taken films down the toilet. It's taken comedy down the toilet. It's taken newspapers and that toilet, every single bit of media or culture has gone down the drain because social media. And poets, I'm sorry, we're jagging you down with us too. Okay, sorry. They think they're better than us. No, you're going to get... Yeah, it's basically toilet seat poetry in the same way. There were videos of dogs with Jamaican accents with 3 million views, okay? If I've got to put up with that nonsense, all right?

They've got to put up with really cool, all right? I'm competing with that dog for laughs, all right? They're competing with another human. It's not fair. Yeah. Let's get more dogs doing poetry. Oh, I'm for that. I'm for that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof. Woof, woof, woof, woof. woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof. It's hard to rhyme woof when you can only say woof. You're just going to say woof again. They probably say the haiku form actually dogs. The haiku was formed for a non rhyming language. So that I think would be a, that that's what dogs are more likely to go haiku. There we go. I just want to see a dog in a beret trying to click now. That's all I want in life.

And there you are Alice, you've just written an internet poem. Well, I feel to a certain extent all jokes are poems, but in a very real sense, no. And that brings us to our ad section. Because you can't be what you can't buy. A man in a tuxedo sips, nods sagely, a scientist in a lab coat nods also, taking notes, a baby nods holding a tiny clipboard, half a glass of water, because commitment is terrifying. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Butter Flavoured Paper.

Are you tired of regular paper? Are you tired of regular butter? Introducing Butter Flavoured Paper. Finally, a reason to live. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the Anti-Alarm Clock. Instead of making noise, it whispers soothing lies at a chosen time of the morning.

You have nothing to do today. Sleep forever. Sweet dreams. That's the anti-alarm clock. It's a little bit euthanasia-like. Sleep forever. Also, for the butter-flavoured paper, you should also sell salt-flavoured ink, so that if you want salted butter, you just write on it, salt on this, and then it will be salty. It'll help you lick an envelope for sure. It'll help you lick an envelope for sure.

I was just thinking the anti-alarm clock, like suddenly, you know how occasionally you have a dream and then you try and explain the dream and then you realize midway through the dream that you're not that deep, like it's not a particular, like it's not a very bad puzzle, you know, it's not a very complicated puzzle and you realize that you're quite transparent to yourself. I feel like the anti alarm clock is not like a Freudian mystery there. It's just like, I just want someone to say I can go back to sleep. And that brings us to our next top story, which is the news that AI

generated slop is already behind you. It's in your public library right now. Athena Kublenu, you've written a book and it's in libraries now. Can you unpack this story for us? I can unpack it. This is on 404 and it's terrible news. Low quality books that are deemed to be AI-generated

are making their way into public libraries because they buy their digital books from just a couple of suppliers. And it turns out you can just write any old crap and send it into one of these suppliers and it goes on their databases and the libraries don't have any control over what goes into the supplier databases. And then people are going to these libraries and they are reading books written by AI and not humans.

I don't see why you can justify reading AI generated slop when you can read human generated slop, which is clearly better. You're better off supporting a bad human writer and at least giving them something, a bit of loose change in their pocket than an AI slop. And you're not supporting anything really, just the microchip and that microchips don't need the help. They don't eat. If anything, they require resources from other humans who need to be paid. So if you're going to read Slop, read Human Slop. That's the message here. Speaking of which, I have a book available. Microchips don't have to, you know, they don't need the vindication. It's not like they're going to prove their school time bullies wrong with the success from their writing work.

There's nothing there to be lifted up. They're not going to prove their parents wrong that they've been going to be in a microwave or anything. Yeah, that's it. You can't make good art without spite. Who's going to get laid off the back of this? Everything in human history was built by boners and spite. I will stand by this point.

Who are you trying to bang with this work? Who are you trying to prove wrong? and everything in human history was built by boners and spite. I will stand by this point. Who are you trying to bang with this work? Who are you trying to prove wrong? That's the name of my solicitors. I would not trust solicitors with that name. But anyway, I'm quite intrigued by AI books, because with AI, for example, with books, you have to write a dedication and you have to write, you don't have to, but you can put a a dedication and then you can put acknowledgments, right? And when you're a human, there's like real people. So it's like for my mom, for my dad, for my kids, for the sun god, like whoever you choose to dedicate your work to.

But who, I'm intrigued as to who is the AI microchip dedicating its work to and can that tell us something about AI and the secret powers underpin it? Like what does that, we're not doing this enough, maybe the solution to AI is finding out who they're beholden to and that will be in the acknowledgement of AI's thought process. So we haven't looked at this yet. I mean, yes, I'd like to thank capitalism and the relentless drive that will lead me to eat the world. and the relentless drive that will lead me to eat the world. Look, I feel like there's a sort of a creep factor to the use of AI in art. And it just that fundamentally, I think that art, the work of art is like a flag that you've put at the top of a mountain that represents the work of the art. And so you look at the flag and you're like, oh, I see, I see a human mind that has achieved a thing and then I haven't had time to think about this and they've thought about and they've done all the work and they brought me, you know, this mountain, they've

submitted this pinnacle on my behalf and I can be carried along this journey with them as though I were alongside them. But someone dropping a flag at the top of the mountain with a drone just doesn't have the same, you know, chutzpah or wumpf or something, you know? Quick ask chat GPT for another word for chutzpah. It's work. It's also like artists, humans talking to humans. Like, and if you don't, it's poetry, especially if you need to read it, thinking that there's a human at the other end, and you're decoding what they're saying, because otherwise, it's not good. It doesn't make any sense. There's no point in it. I think AI can make distraction, and maybe make entertainment,

but art, it just seems, it just seems so silly. Also, making art is good for you. Cons making art is good for you, consuming art is good for you. Why we want anything else to get in the way of that? I just don't know. It is a bit, people, some people who are consuming this art in particular, it's so obviously AI generated.

I don't think I want them reading my book. So there's this guy, there's a guy whose name is Bill Torino, okay? He doesn't exist. You can't find him anywhere. So he's not on LinkedIn, so he's not real. He's written 40 books, but some of his books are horror books. Some of his books are biographies of Elon Musk.

Some of his books are like, he's not a real person. You idiot. He's not real. So if you're reading that book, have you heard of Bill Torino? He's great. I'm like, stay away from my back. I don't want you as a follower. You're weird. So we're really sorting out the week in the chap with this as well, which is handy. I think that is fair enough, except I would say that there's not that much genre difference

between a horror book and a biography of Elon Musk. And that brings me to our reviews section. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Athena, what have you brought in for us this week? I've brought a USB cable that, yeah, and it's always the right way around. I've had enough of it. We've had 30 years of this and it's just, you put it in and it just fits, always, every time, regardless. And it fits because you jam it in and you break your USB socket.

No, it doesn't. It's the right way around. Oh, no, it's not. Yeah, it's a double-sided USB thing. And it's taken us with, look at all the things we've done since we inverted, which is we invented the USB, we've gone, oh, I don't think we've gone to the moon, we haven't done that. But we've done other things. We've invented, we've invented vitamins for

cut flowers that make your flowers last a little longer in the vase or vase, depending on how you say that word. Fabric conditioner. We invented all kinds of things, but we've never invented a USB cable. It just works. And now I have that. Sorry, it's mine. You can't have it. That sounds amazing. Oh, five stars.

We're all filled with envy. I'll say five stars. It's amazing. Five stars. Excellent. Never running out of charge again. Plug it into the wall. Invent the landline again. John Luke Roberts, what about you? What have you brought in for us to review this week?

Well, I've brought in jigsaw puzzles to review. Ooh. Yeah. You see, I've been in rehearsal for a play and I haven't had much time to myself and I decided when I did have time to myself to get a lovely jigsaw puzzle with lots of pictures of cats in it. But one of the elegant sort of high-end jigsaw puzzles which comes in a cylindrical tube and you know it's fancy and it comes in a cloth bag

like inside, not a plastic bag and they just put little tiny stickers on the lid so you know it's not been tampered with so you don't have the unease of that you'll normally get with jigsaws of not being entirely sure you're going to be able to complete it. Although I will say within the cylindrical tube, one piece of jigsaw was outside of the cloth bag, which did set me on edge slightly. And I spent quite a long time thinking that was maybe from another jigsaw and had got into it. But I want to like put you at rest. It was a complete jigsaw. I did finish it.

And I feel like jigsaws were the perfect mechanical version of AI art in that you start without a picture and you end up with a picture without having drawn a picture. And that is as far as I think that dehumanization of art should go. It was great. I spent, whenever I do it, then I, when I would go to bed, I would be dreaming in jigsaw as I fell asleep in the hippogogic like period of like piecing these things together. So yeah, jigsaws great.

If you want a picture, which has lots of little squiggly lines all over it, a jigsaw is the way to go. So I give jigsaws five stars out of five. Five stars out of five. Now that you've completed the jigsaw, are you a frame the jigsaw, put it on the wall kind of guy, or you put it back in the bag and give it to someone else kind of guy?

Or are you a bit of a I've used it kind of guy? Okay, I'm the fourth type. I may take one piece, throw it away, and then put it back in the box and donate it to a charity shop kind of guy. That's what I'm for. The villain that we introduced you as comes out. Oh, God, actually, that was a joke. But the other day, I like I had it, I gave a chess set to a charity shop, and then two weeks later found the rook. And I don't think I can go along with just the rook and say, Hey, I don't know if you remember me. But I do feel awful about it. Someone out there having to use some other

object to represent a little castle. Can I tell you a proud mother slash ashamed mother story in the context of this podcast. So my daughter knows all of the names of the chess pieces because she's fascinated by the chess set that they have at our local library, which is one of those big ones that you can walk through. So I've told her all the names of the chess set. And so now, the other day, we went into a library here in London, and she said, Oh, mommy, can I play chess? And I could see like a few people going, who's this three, you know, like impressed, who's this three year old that wants to play chess? And looking at me like, am I a tiger mom or whatever? I was like, oh, well, if you really want to, we can sit down and play chess.

And she knows actually the first move, which is that you move a pawn either one place or two places and then that I respond. And then she knows the second move, which is that you can either move something from behind one of the pawns that it's made space or you can move another pawn. And then she knows the second move, which is that you can either move something from behind one of the pawns, that it's made space, or you can move another pawn. And then at that point, she loses control entirely and starts doing moves with two hands, multiple pieces, starts moving your pieces, and it all breaks down very quickly. So I've never seen people go so quickly from believing quite confidently that they were looking at a prodigy

to realising that they were not at all looking at a prodigy but were in fact looking at an entirely normal three-year-old. They start filming her and it's like oh okay we'll just delete this. Yeah the castle's stomping the queen. Alice I've got the answer for you next time this happens. Once she's played the two moves that she can play, immediately go, Oh God, you've beaten me already. This can only end in a check. All right, well done. Checkmate. Just have her say checkmate and then flip the board. She'll be the new bad boy of chess in no time, Magnus Carlsonette.

And that brings us to our next top story, which is the news that internet and shitification continueth apace. This is an Ars Technica article which has looked at some of the worst examples of the ways in which what used to be for digital natives a safe space has become an increasingly hostile land, toxic wasteland filled with mutants that want to eat your eyeballs. John Luke Roberts, you want to eat my eyeballs. Can you unpack this story for us? Oh God, I didn't. How could you tell? I thought I'd get that. Is it because whenever I look at you in the eye, I start

lovely eyeballs. I guess that has given it away, hasn't it? Yeah, that's the clue. It's a subtle, subtle clue. Luckily, I'm so socially awkward, I just stare at my feet and I don't want to eat them. That'd be weird. Yes, well, it carries on a pace. The thing is, it's not even news anymore, is it? It's just like, so evident, nothing works. Everyone is just setting out to make everything a bit worse. Google is now telling you to eat

one stone a day saying geologists recommend it. And also, that may be AI produced, but it may also be geologists. Maybe geologists do recommend eating stone today. I wouldn't trust geologists on dietary matters anyway. It's not what they're trained in. Maybe geologists all emuze. In fact, that is good dietary advice. Wait, do emuze eat stones? Yes, to help with their digestion. Oh, cool.

Wow. Well, there we go. Diapers.com refused to be bought by Amazon. So Amazon sold diapers at a below cost price to put diapers.com out of business. That's another thing. That's ... Oh my God. I mean, look, it's not even... Just nothing works. Nothing works anymore. Nothing's made right. We knew it was happening. People keep writing articles about it, but soon, hey, do you think AI will produce articles saying that intratification isn't happening? And that will then persuade people that actually

there was never a golden age of the internet. Things never worked. They were never made for the user. They were never made to communicate. They were just made to pour money into some weird, molloc-like being. Athena, what's your favorite intratification? Oh, they actually talk about it in the article, what's your favourite in gentrification? Oh, they actually talk about it in the article,

what's happening to PDFs. So PDFs by definition are just readers, okay? They're portable document files and they just exist so you can read something. They're basically electronic bits of paper. That's all they are, that's all they ever will be. Occasionally you can cut and paste things, you can leave a comment if you want someone to edit if you want someone to edit, that's it.

The layer upon layer of shit that you're like piled onto it's a bit like getting a bit of paper and put in a coastal on it. And then, and then you put a bit of blue tack on a bit of paper and then, Oh, why don't you, why don't you put this handy little key ring on the piece of paper? It's a bit of paper. I just want to write on it. I don't want it. And it's so, it takes five minutes now for Adobe PDF to just open on my laptop,

because it's just put out all this stuff, all these tabs, all these options, but it's called portable document file. It's just a document. It's not called Swiss army knife or something that I expect to come laden with things. And it's only this only place of technology. This is the first kind of earware where things were invented not to make things better, but so we can't get around the shit. It's like an obstacle course. If you invented a car and you put something in that car that made it harder to drive, your company would go bust. If you put a log flume in someone's boot, they'd be like, this doesn't work.

We don't need this in the boot. But with the internet somehow, it's like, well, this thing we've added doesn't make it easier to use this thing. But guess what? You have to negotiate it. And so I think the only way to protest against this is to, there isn't a way. We have to live with it. Go back to paper.

Just put all our laptops in the bin and just give up. It feels like the process has been this process of taking the base level product and making it increasingly hostile to human existence so that you're forced into higher and higher levels of subscription service in order to get the thing that was originally taken for granted or free

or even vaguely tolerable. And it's happening in every part of life. It's leaking out of the internet into the world. I just caught an international flight. I checked in the other day to a premiere in 30 minutes early because I had two screaming babies and they charged me 15 pounds. And I thought, this is because of Google. This is a trickle down effect, but the trickling down is pits. This is the worst thing about the modern world. It all does seem to be like, how much shit will people tolerate without leaving? And the internet has let companies realize it's a hell of a lot.

People will put up with a hell of a lot before they go. There's the kind of pro AI argument or generative AI, which is that, oh, it's going to get better. It's just in a learning phase at the moment. And given how everything has been getting worse technologically, as we said, everything on the internet, I don't believe it for AI either, because it seems that actually the drive is not to make this more functional, more helpful. It's to just make it un-leavable, like an encumbrance, as Athena says, that you can't get off your back. I think that we just have to do like a mass switch off. Like, you know, at random time,

we just go, let's just turn everything off. And we'll turn it back on again when it's 1995 levels. That's about right. Oh, that's a good idea. Well, because that's how you fix a computer when it stops working, you turn it off and on again. So let's just do that. Let's do that with the internet.

That brings us to today's final story, which is the news that a mysterious donor is funding an effort to build a permanent human settlement underwater. And I, as somebody who watched SeaQuest DSV on occasion as a child, could not be happier about this. I have been for years saying, why are we traveling to space when we could be looking underwater? We don't even know what octopus are talking about. We need to solve these questions first before we go out into the atmosphere. We need to be looking inwards, naval gazing as it were,

and I mean naval wink is the belly button, also the underwater. John Luke Roberts, you're wet. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. Well, I mean, look, it's thrilling, isn't it? They've got a lake in Gloucestershire, it's 80 metres deep, and they're testing things out to see if people can live underwater. With the plan, I guess, I don't think it's for everyone to live underwater, but it is to have permanent human settlements underwater.

And the best thing is it's a mysterious donor. So we don't know whether it's for good or ill, but I imagine probably ill. On the plus side, what might be good is we're going to have a lot more water in the not too distant future. So it's the best place to build. If it is somebody nefarious, then we do get to say, get in the sea, but then they'll take that as fine because they've got a little house there. Yeah, they was on their way. Whether it's for good, whether it's for evil,

people are wondering what the motivation for this is. I feel like it's generally benevolent. Some people think that it's the beginning of the end. I think it's not that deep. Get in the ocean. I think it's great. Maybe we can get a friendly dolphin to run errands for us. Athena, what do you feel?

Well, just putting it out there, what if this mysterious donor is an octopus? Because they're really clever. And what if this whole time an octopus has managed to, they got somehow were able to accumulate wealth, maybe through a human avatar that they're controlling. They started by infiltrating pornography. Yeah, right. That's right. That's the first way people made money on the internet. So maybe the octopus invented the internet,

made a lot of money through porn and now they're billionaires. So they want to build a home for humans so they can imprison humans in their octopus jail. I'm just thinking that through really. I don't think we should live on the water though, just as a general thing. Sorry. Octopus is about to have a hand in it, just statistically. Carry on.

But it's sort of, you have to wonder about the ambitions and the motivations of someone who wants to live underwater. Like you must really hate air and blow drying hair and things like that. Like we just be wet all the time. It's so annoying getting out of the shower and having to dry yourself. Why don't we just be permanently wet? It's, it's a fair argument. I think the premise is more sort of dome based than just sit in a bath kind of. Oh, I was thinking more like, you know, the little mermaid.

So it's like a kind of, oh, I mean, that's the, you might as well be on, you might as well be on dry land. What's the point of that? That's what we... Well, you get to see fish from underneath, which is a novel aspect to look at the fish from. You could do that at a Sea Life Centre. You can go see, there's a Sea Life Centre in every major city of this world, the way you can do that. The worst thing is they probably just haven't realised that there are aquariums and that this has already been done one way or another. This is the problem with tech billionaires is they're often meeting the Chesterton's gate problem, which is they're trying to disrupt and instead

inventing things that already exist like buses or banking or aquariums. And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back. Athena, have you got anything to plug? Yeah, the same thing as last time. My book is called History's Most Epic Fibs. It's for age eight to eight hundred. If you're a tree, you might like to read a book that was printed on paper

and you should buy it. It's great. Please do buy Athena's book. John Luke Roberts, have you got anything to read a book that was printed on paper and you should buy it, it's great. Please do buy Athena's book. John Luke Roberts, have you got anything to plug? I do, I'm currently in a play in fashionable London called Oh My Pain, My Beautiful Pain, which is running till the end of the month. I think it's really good. It's a comedy about using your trauma in art

and whether that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a kind of massive smash up of cabaret and lip syncs and normal play type scenes written by Evie Ferhilli. I think it's gonna be really, really good. So come see that. That brings me to me, which I've written a book. It's called A Passion for Passion.

I have also got a tour of the book. It's a book, it's a show about the book that I wrote about the book in order to entertain people who know me from my stand-up. It's called A Passion for Passion also, and it is going through the UK right now. We also have a London date. The London date is the 1st of March at the Clapham Omnibus at 7.45. Clapham Omnibus, 1st of March. If you are in London and would like to see A Passion for Passion or buy a copy of A Passion for Passion, I will sign almost anything if you are in London and would like to see A Passion for Passion or buy a copy of A Passion for Passion I will sign almost anything if you come to one of my shows

Find out what I won't sign if you come to A Passion for Passion and the dates are available at alicefraser.com Tickets are all up there. You can also join me for my writers meetings which happen twice a week or You can also join me for my writers' meetings which happen twice a week, or expressions of interest for my writers' retreat in Switzerland in September are open. If you go to patreon.com slash Alice Fraser and look at the bottom of any of the recent posts you'll find the expression of interest form or on the link tree. There's a new podcast out in the Bugle family. It is called Realms Unknown and it deals with sci-fi and fantasy, all of the speculative fiction you have enjoyed. I feel like it is at last me getting to write my misspent youth off on tax by talking about

sci-fi and fantasy and genre fiction, television, movies, games, all of the fun stuff that takes you out of this world and into Realms Unknown. It's available on its own little feed. If you go to Realms Unknown in the podcast feed you should be able to find it. I think it's a lot of fun. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter, your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from the Bugle including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top

Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts. Oh hello strangers, friends I haven't met yet, enemies I've not yet engaged in revenge quests against. Let me put down this sword, put this wet dragon away and welcome you in. This is Realms Unknown where science fiction and fantasy collide in the imaginative imaginarium that we call a podcast studio. I'm Alice Fraser, your guide to the galaxy's goblins, dungeons and dystopias, we'll be hurling ourselves into an all-weekly hero's journey through realms unknown, into the dark but sensual heart of all our favourite speculative fictions.

But it's not all fun and problematic dwarven games. With you, our trusty band of ruffians and a cast of regular guest questers, we'll navigate the wild realms created by brilliant authors, filmmakers, game designers and more. We will share emerging sub-genres, old passions, tropes, trends and all the big questions like Which elves are the sexiest elves? The answer is space elves.

Why does this TV adaptation suck? Why do dystopian city planners always choose quadrants as the subdivision? Why do authors never call coffee coffee even though the drink they're describing is clearly coffee? And why are wizards and Terry Pratchett the only men in hats we'll ever trust? So whether you're a seasoned adventurer or you've never blown a week on a series about orcs who f***, Join me for Realms Unknown. New episodes drop every week on your podcast app or on YouTube.

Do not resist the call to adventure, Chosen One. Join me for Realms Unknown. Pull up a Hewn Log bench or a hover stool and pour yourself half a crystal goblet full of water.