Unsqualified Preservations

By Mencius Moldbugman

"The ultimate heat death of a cold and infinite universe, where all love perishes and nobody would ever, ever love me, opened its mouth and swallowed me whole."

A morbidly obese YouTuber and his anonymous Twitter nemesis. A young woman's desperate attempt to find an apartment in London. A Chinese dumpling shop with a disturbing secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951897741

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Praise for Unsqualified Preservations

Keen insight. Sharp wit. Honestly the greatest poster of our time. Simple as. — I, Hypocrite

Mencius Moldbugman’s new collection is his most brilliant writing to date: a thrilling and hilarious anthology of short stories encapsulating themes and worlds as diverse as modern Britain in its simultaneous banality and horror, our online communities, those realer then real life simulacrums, and today’s China, that oft-admired soulless bureaucratic dystopia. Sometimes I wonder if he is diseased or unwell in the head, so accomplished is he in telling these stories. If he is, then I’m glad he manages to push through that mental agony to the extent that we can get this, the end result which is this wonderful compilation. — Drukpa Kunley

Here, in your hands, you have a tome that captures the true horror of the modern world in a way that only a writer whose pen name is a union of Moldbug and Bugman could, for the author is both analyst and patient, at once high up in the clouds and down in the dirt with the worms. In these unnerving, hilarious short stories, you’ll learn more about corporate hell, childhood addiction, and mukbang videos than you could ever possibly want to know. Dark, disturbing, depraved: the world of the Moldbugman is your world—you just didn’t know it. — Raw Egg Nationalist, author of Raw Egg Nationalism

Copyright © 2022 Terror House Press, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-951897-74-1

EDITOR

Matt Forney (mattforney.com)

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN

Matt Lawrence (mattlawrence.net)

Excerpts of this book were published, in somewhat different form, by the following magazines and websites: American Greatness and The American Sun. The author would like to thank each publication for their support.

TERROR HOUSE PRESS, LLC

terrorhousepress.com

Table of Contents

A Gentle Introduction

Rickadoodle Applestrudel

President N-Word

More Than Just a Housemate

For the Children

Shadowmen

Safe Space

Left in the Dark

The Great Grumble

Human Capital

Dinner Party

Dumplings

Leftover Women

The Tourists

Nadir

HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA

A Gentle Introduction

The element of surprise is sadly extinct across all forms of modern media. Whenever we sit down to a new book or film, unless we don the hermit’s cloak and seal ourselves off from the outside world, then we already know with a high probability of accuracy what awaits us. It is rare, if it exists at all, that a film is released nowadays sans an abundance of accompanying trailers, leaked spoilers for the fanboys to ponder over like the entrails of a sacrificial victim, and the inevitable reviews where every aspect of the upcoming production is dissected and analysed. Books also suffer from this modern curse. It is a necessary evil when marketing a book to forward the work to others in an attempt to generate publicity or solicit reviews, the act of which reveals both what kind of book the published piece is and provides a measure on the quality of the content. Any consumer of media today is a contemporary Cassandra, doomed to know in advance the subject matter of any book or film they choose to consume and powerless to prevent the outcome.

Unless we walk into a bookstore, choose a book completely at random (perhaps aided by a digital algorithm to remove any unconscious bias), and then plunge into it without any prior research onto its contents, then we are doomed to more or less always have an expectation of what the book we are holding entails. Even if the above procedures were followed, the cover of the book would provide us hints as to what was in store. Illustration of a spaceship on the dust jacket? It’s a sci-fi novel. Stock image of a historical landmark and the name of a country? It’s a travel guide. Female author? It’s terrible.

This is all entirely unnecessary yet unavoidable, removing the potential to stumble serendipitously upon something that defies our expectations. I yearn for a world where I pick up a book and have not the slightest clue as to where it will take me or what truths it will reveal. Imagine the revelatory shock if we were to begin reading a technical manual on Scandinavian furniture assembly, only to find halfway through that it contained a hidden historical story about Byzantine priests. Consider how your brain would react to reading a light-hearted comedy on office romances, but it was peppered throughout with an introductory course on the fundamentals of JavaScript. The surprise of this bait-and-switch when our minds are opened and primed for information of a different nature would make any material infinitely more powerful and memorable.

Such was my intention when compiling the work which you are now reading. Unless you are severely dyslexic, or have truly followed the random process outlined above, then you would not have failed to notice that my nom de guerre is almost identical to that of a much more worthy and talented writer than myself: Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin. It is the distinction of Twitter anons to choose a fun and witty sobriquet without much thought to it or to where it might lead. When I chose the name Mencius Moldbugman, it was nothing more than a pun on the words Mencius Moldbug and bugman, that oversocialised scourge of the modern landscape. My Twitter account began life dedicated to skewering the shallow phenomenon of Funko Pop bobbleheads (we will come back to these repulsive collectibles), thus the Moldbugman pseudonym was both fitting and accurate. Naturally, though, more than a few people have mistaken my account for the genuine Mencius Moldbug, and my follower size probably owed at least half of its number to this misunderstanding. It is my hope that those who made such a mistake, yet continued to follow me, have had their expectations pleasingly compensated. Sign up for the political discussion; stay for the puerile memes and offensive language. To those who were not overly disappointed when they discovered the truth, I give you my thanks. To those who expressed upset that they were conned into following not an intellectual political commentator, but instead a random anon who mostly Tweeted about colour-coordinated bookshelves, I owe you my apologies and direct you instead to true and honest Twitter representations of famous figures like Zero HP Lovecraft and the Real Xi Jinping. Yes, I was surprised too that those guys have so much time to post on Twitter—especially Howard, who has been dead since 1937—but if there is one thing I have learned from associating with anonymous racists on the Internet, it has been to be more broadminded.

As I previously alluded to, it was my dear wish that this book could defy expectations and trick those unfortunate souls who thought they were opening up a series of essays on political discourse. I imagined publishing a book with zero prior information to an unassuming public and watching with glee as baffled reviewers on Amazon complained that instead of an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the media and the ruling party within a democracy, they were actually subjected to bizarre short stories about obese YouTubers or men who have sex with dead women. To aid such deceit, I considered filling the initial 20 percent of the book with the words Jeff Bezos can suck my hairy cock repeatedly so that nobody could decipher the true nature of the book using Amazon’s sneak peek function. I envisioned furthering the con by featuring a series of stories that utilized the same titles of Moldbug’s essays in Unqualified Reservations, but which had radically different content. How Richard Dawkins Got Pwned would be not a thoughtful examination on the dynamics of the atheist movement, but instead a gruesome fictional exploration of Richard Dawkins approaching a female atheist in an elevator and then, through a series of tenuously connected events, burning to death in a 20-foot-high wicker phallus hastily constructed by a matriarchy of Californian Wiccan priestesses. Alas, such a feat proved too much beyond the scope of my abilities and of the realities of secrecy in a digital world, so instead of an elaborate hoax, you are now reading what is just a rather mundane collection of short stories written by yours truly. Incidentally, Moldbug himself has succeeded where Moldbugman has failed, having attracted subscribers to his new Gray Mirror Substack with the promise of penetrating political insight, and then confounding them with a poetry blog. He remains an inspiration.

The short story is a much-maligned art form. Once the vehicle for many a fine author to express themselves in (Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells…even Charles Dickens), the short story has fallen out of favour in the 21st century. Publishing styles were to blame for both the rise and the fall of the short story. Back in the 19th century, authors looking to establish themselves would submit their stories to magazines and journals, thus stories would have to be short and concise to fit within the magazine’s word count. It is easy to forget that one of the greatest literary creations of all time—Sherlock Holmes—was a regular appearance in short story form within the pages of The Strand Magazine; only four novel-length Sherlock stories were ever written. Even those famous stories, which have entered our cultural consciousness as proper books, began their life as weekly or monthly submissions to literary journals. American readers stormed New York’s wharf when the final instalment of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop finally made it to their shores, though later the entire saga was re-published in book format.

Readers in the Victorian and Edwardian eras wanted short stories that they could follow over time and discuss with friends; they were the fin de siècle equivalent of devouring an HBO series boxset and dissecting it over the water cooler with colleagues. This trend continued with the rise of science fiction magazines during the 1930’s to the 1950’s which gave legends like H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Bradbury a platform for their works. However, just as publishing demands gave rise to the short story, it also smothered it. TV all but killed off the weekly and monthly literary journals, the stodgy old New Yorker magazine pretentiously stubbornly standing alone. Today, the big publishing houses won’t touch a short story collection unless you are Neil bloody Gaiman. Unless an author is already very well established, there seems to be little demand for short story collections, and getting one published in the mainstream is nigh on impossible. With the decline of story reading, big publishing houses have to bank on the big novel-writing names to generate profits, meaning fewer and fewer chances are taken on short stories by unknown authors.

This is of course a terrible shame, as some of the best books I have ever read have been collections of short stories. I grew up fascinated by my anthologies of Conan Doyle’s tales of pirates and Roman warriors, and my own writing skills developed from reading the concise finely crafted mini-epics of H.G. Wells. Thankfully, where the mainstream media has failed us, it has once again fallen to those anonymous geniuses of Twitter to fill the void. Twitter, with its emphasis on creating short but captivating epigrams that capture as many likes as possible, is almost a Darwinian factory in producing the skills essential to writing short stories. Twitter anons like the aforementioned Zero HP Lovecraft and the now-legendary Delicious Tacos have reclaimed the territory of the short story and infused it with a masculine energy sorely missing from the sorry soy-riddled pretences to literature that contaminate every colour-coordinated bookstore shelf in meat-space. It could not have come a moment too soon. Neil Gaiman—a man whose primary talent appears to be a cynical aptitude for catering to the whims of overgrown head girls who never realised that adult life should be about starting families and not obsessing over the romantic possibilities that could exist between werewolves and vampires—has now almost entirely cornered the mainstream short story market as his own personal territory. Gaiman possessed some originality of thought in his early days, but is now entirely devoted to the mechanical process of Let’s do a story about x, but as a dark fantasy. Women can’t get enough of Snow White BUT dark! or Hansel and Gretel BUT dark! His current anthologies are repetitive compilations of this exact formula. Sometimes he even sneaks one into the foreword as a bonus to the dedicated reader. It’s extremely easy to replicate this model. I’ll show you. Let’s take something popular with girls…Disney’s Frozen will do. Now we give it a dark twist.

I Know You’re in There

Knock. Knock-knock-knock.

The rat-a-tat of her sister’s hand banged against the thick wooden door. At least this time it wasn’t the sound of scratching. That was much worse. Though she knew that her sister couldn’t pass through, especially without an express invitation, the thought of her sister’s cold breath condensing on the opposite side of the door scared her enough to make her move as far away as possible to the other side of the room.

Anna... hissed a voice through the thick oak.

The room was so cold. Anna knew that her sister used her powers to make the room bitterly cold. Shards of ice were even forming on the bedroom walls. Anna tried to warm herself with a blanket from the bed, but it too was icy with frost.

Do you wanna build a snowman? Come on, let’s go and play.

Anna didn’t want to play. Not the kind of games that Elsa wanted to play anyway. Those games always ended in blood and death. Despite the chill of the frozen blanket, she wrapped it tight around her body.

I never see you anymore! cried the voice, muffled yet sharp. The door handle rattled, but the lock held. Come out the door! the voice shouted. It’s like you’ve gone away!

Away or not away, there was no way Anna was ever going to come out the door. Her sister would never hurt her—she was the only person her sister would never hurt—but the same wasn’t true for anybody else. That’s why the castle was so empty these days. Looking across the room to the door, she saw her sister’s piercing blue eyes stare at her through the keyhole.

We used to be best buddies, and now we’re not, the voice exhorted. A mixture of syrup and venom. I wish you would tell me why.

Elsa knew very well why they were no longer friends, thought Anna. She was three years older than Elsa, but in many ways, Elsa was the far older creature. Elsa had only been five when she had first attacked their horrified parents. Anna shuddered, and not just because of the freezing cold. The thought of what Elsa might be capable of when she was fully grown froze her even more. One day, she would have to escape far away into the mountains to get away from her sister, but ‘til that day, she had this room and this door, and that was good enough for now.

Do you wanna build a snowman? the voice persisted. It doesn’t have to be a snowman….

Anna felt sick at the mention of snowmen. Jumping off the bed, she looked through the bedroom window to the fields outside to see if her sister had been adding any more snowmen to her collection. Here and there, between the flurries of snow and lifeless trees, she saw them stretched out upon the ground. Thin men. Dead men. Men with looks of sheer terror frozen onto their petrified faces. All life had been drained out of them ‘til their skin had lost its colour. Their pale white corpses littered the grounds outside. These were Elsa’s snowmen. And sometimes it wasn’t just men. Sometimes it was women.

Sometimes, it was children...

Go away, Elsa! Anna shouted.

There was a moment’s silence.

Okay. Bye...

And Anna heard her sister walk away, but she knew that in a few years she would come back. She always came back.

The End

See. It’s that easy.

All of the above is my very roundabout way of introducing this collection of short stories that you now hold in your hands. I will not pretend that there is any one unifying theme that threads through each of the stories, like Joss Whedon trying to add layers of meaning that don’t exist to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer season arc. If there were perhaps one theme that occurs repeatedly in many of the stories, it would be the diabolical (and I mean that in the very literal sense of the word) effect that the Internet is establishing over our real lives and identities, though it doesn’t feature in every story. Long-term readers will notice sly references to the usual staples of my Twitter account: bookshelves, Funko Pops, and unnecessary digs against Sweden.

The opening story, and the longest in this collection, is entitled Rickadoodle Applestrudel. The name is based on a certain YouTube performer of some considerable notoriety, though, of course, any further resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. My lawyers have advised me that any further explanation is potentially litigious. However, although the title of this story is taken from a different person, it will not take the sharpest reader to quickly perceive that this is somewhat of an autobiographical story. One of my observations about digital discourse is that the polarizing effect of the Internet has a tendency to transform us into doppelgängers of those that we most despise. This tale could be said to explore my own personal fears about that doppelgänger effect and my hope that by verbalizing such a process, I can avoid joining the grey narcissistic goo that memorializes the egos of so many other online personalities. If it isn’t obvious, I had a lot to say in this particular story and could have easily lengthened it into a full-length novel based upon that most pitiable of modern creatures: the lolcow. This story is also my mea culpa on the fears that prey upon me and led to the deletion of my Twitter account.

The second has been published previously and is my most overtly political. Normally, I prefer to address politics esoterically rather than directly, but hopefully this entry does not veer too much into polemic territory. President N-Word was first published in The American Sun in October 2020 during the run-up to the U.S. election. Again, one of the underlying themes is how the two sides in America are being pushed so far apart that they often meet on the opposite side in terms of behaviour and mania. President N-Word posits the theory that perhaps there exists a magical word—that most taboo and fraught word in today’s America—that if uttered publicly could maybe break the tension and cause our endless culture wars to evaporate like so many tears in the rain. Unlikely, of course, but these are fictional stories, please. If you are interested in reading an accompanying piece that also concerned the U.S. election, then be sure to check out Many Such Cases, which was my contribution to Bill Marchant’s anthology of short stories, Ending Bigly: The Many Fates of Donald Trump. Published just days before the electoral steal of January 6, 2021, Ending Bigly asked the question How will Trump end? then got a bunch of Twitter users to answer it. My own contribution is a fun and lighthearted piece that was more an experiment in using images of fake Tweets to tell a story rather than a serious attempt to divine Donald’s future. If you have not purchased Ending Bigly yet, I do urge you to do so. The best day to get Ending Bigly was the day it came out, but the second best day is today!

I once had the idea to compile a mainstream book that was to be filled with female-centric horror stories. These were to be little short stories preying on women’s deepest fears that might have even given me a chance of making some sweet normie bucks as long as I changed my name to Womencius Moldbugwoman or something. I eventually gave up the concept as a potentially disastrous idea that would unleash a torrent of angry Goodreads reviewers upon me. The succeeding five stories are the remains of that idea: a quintuplet that perhaps could be compiled under the title Bad Things That Can Happen to Women.

These misogynistic memes for sexist teens begin with More Than Just a Housemate, a story that was inspired by some of my own personal horror stories of searching for a room to rent in late-2000’s London. All five of these stories are based in England, but More Than Just a Housemate could only take place in the city of London, that city of high rent, jobless university graduates, and vibrant diversity. The American equivalent would be New York.

For the Children is the one attempt in this compilation to write a science fiction story; this is a tale set in the very near future and I still believe it has a plausible chance of becoming reality.

Shadowmen plays with the same themes as Rickadoodle Applestrudel and is again an exploration into the world of opposites. Unlike Rickadoodle Applestrudel, Shadowmen dives into how the genders have become opposed rather than the political or ideological.

Safe Space is my attempt to emulate the creeping madness of a Lovecraftian horror story, but through the lens of a modern young woman. It draws upon the terror of ancestral realisation that Lovecraft described in Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, which deals with the horror of what takes place within a person’s mentality once they feel they have tainted ancestry. The ending of the story directly references the conclusion of The Rats in the Walls and the petrified exclamations of the narrator when he sinks into insanity over his discoveries. There are many other Lovecraftian references thrown into this story, too, and the eagle-eyed reader may notice that the anonymous narrator of Safe Space is the same person featured in Shadowmen.

Finally, Left in the Dark is a simple straight-up horror story that I wrote after a romantic dinner in one of those once-fashionable restaurants which are staged within complete darkness. To be perfectly frank, I found the experience more terrifying than romantic, and this story is a reflection of that, as well as women’s fears of being abandoned.

After such relentless misogyny, you will no doubt be in need of something with a different taste, so at the halfway point of the book I offer you an intermission. In another attempt to bait and switch the reader, The Great Grumble is a children’s story, but is one which I will tell you upfront and with candour is just a disguised metaphor about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration. It is probably not the strongest story in this book: however, if I was approached by Peter Thiel with the offer to turn one of these stories into a Hollywood movie, I would choose this one just because of the scope for inserting insidious wrongthink into children’s heads. The Great Grumble is written in the style of a folktale so may not be to everybody’s taste. You have my permission to skip this one if that is indeed the case.

Normal viewing resumes with my attempt at a corporate horror story. Human Capital was originally composed over a series of drunken Tweets during a very bad week at work. Please don’t ask any further questions; suffice to say that it involved that most dreaded of interactions with Human Resources: the mandatory training session. The ensuing torrent of drunken angry Tweets was subsequently tidied up, given a more legible ending, and featured in American Greatness magazine in November 2019. This version is the American Greatness version rather than the original, which still exists within the darkest depths of Twitter. Hopefully, it retains some of the flavour of the original and still carries across the nightmarish emptiness of corporate communications. If it fails to do so, please direct your complaints to your Human Resources Officer.

The next five stories all have some connection with China. China, due to its strangeness, its extremeness, its sheer foreignness to the Western world, represents an ideal landscape upon which to inscribe dystopian fantasies. The first is an excerpt from a book entitled Party Members that I published in 2016 under a different name which you can find on the Internet if you do enough sleuthing. The book is a dark comic fantasy about the lives of mid-level Chinese bureaucrats, as well as a discourse on what a Chinese interpretation of the Nietzschean Übermensch might look like. Dinner Party is an excerpt from an early chapter in the book which I think perfectly encapsulates the empty materialism and vapidity of the modern Asian bugman. Dumplings and Leftover Women are set in the same fictional Chinese city of Huaishi as Dinner Party and are hopefully a fun postscript to the original story.

The following story—The Tourists—is a short piece that I submitted to the Passage Prize contest in January 2022 and deals with interactions with the Chinese rather than China itself. It’s also a semi-tribute to that most wonderful of English children’s books The Wind in the Willows. Bored readers may attempt to amuse themselves by trying to figure out the deeper meanings behind some of the names which the characters and places in this story possess. It is a travesty to this day that I did not win the aforementioned competition.

The final story in the China collection is not about China at all, but is a Chinese Lovecraftian story that I translated and published in another book of mine: The Flock of Ba-Hui. Nadir is not written in the usual cosmic horror style that is Lovecraft’s go-to narrative. Instead, Nadir is set within the Dream Cycle stories and takes us on a journey through many of the dreamy locations that Lovecraft created like Ooth-Nargai, Dylath-Leen, and Sona-Nyl. The result is a unique story that contemplates the nature of existence and eternity.

I end this book with Hot Singles in Your Area, which also began life as a Twitter thread. It was originally an improvised tale that I made up Tweet by Tweet, but I have tried to tidy it up and present in a more comprehensible format. The story gets no further elaboration here other than my hope that it leaves you finishing this book utterly and totally depressed.

Thank you, dear reader, for making it this far. Eat banana as reward.

Rickadoodle Applestrudel

In other words, the double’s imaginary power and resonance—the level upon which the subject’s simultaneous estrangement from himself and intimacy with himself are played out—depends upon its lack of material being, upon the fact that the double is and remains a phantasy. Everyone may dream—and everyone no doubt does dream all his life long—of a perfect duplicate, or perfect multiple copies, of his own being; but the strength of such copies lies precisely in their dream quality, and is lost as soon as any attempt is made to force dream into reality. The same is true of the (primal) scene of seduction, which is effective only so long as it is a phantasy, something re-remembered—so long as it is never real. Ours is the only period ever to have sought to exorcize this phantasy (along with others)—that is, to turn it into flesh and blood, to transform the operation of the double from a subtle interplay involving death and the Other into the bland eternity of the Same.

—Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

In order to tell my story, I need to tell the story of Rickadoodle Applestrudel. Our histories are intrinsically linked; so, though it pains and repulses me to devote so much time to such a ridiculous figure as Rickadoodle Applestrudel, there genuinely is no other way for me to fully explain the circumstances that have foisted themselves upon me. Every online personality has a real name and a real face hiding behind the pseudonym, whether that creator of content reveals their true face or hides behind a digital avatar. Though his true identity was no secret, the original human who lies submerged and hidden within the rippling folds of greased skin and fatty tissue of the creature that now bears the name Rickadoodle Applestrudel had been known to me since my earliest years. For you see, long before he became Rickadoodle Applestrudel, Rick had always been plain old Richard to me. Richard Cherry to be exact. A very standard, very boring, and very normal name—one could say a vanilla name rather than chocolate. It was a perfectly good name that was quite probably too normal for Rick to have endured for long. I did once point out to him that at least his boring old white person’s surname shared its meaning with a type of food, a fact that pleased Rick so much it subsequently became a running gag on his YouTube channel, where he would reference the time he had popped his cherry and completed his transformation. What exactly his journey had transformed him into was a matter for debate, but in Richard’s mind, he meant his metamorphosis into the hit Internet sensation that was Rickadoodle Applestrudel.

The bulk of Rick’s followers—bulk being an optimum word to describe the majority of the types of people who sincerely enjoy Rick’s videos—believe that he chose the Applestrudel surname because of his love of all things sweet and syrupy. Certainly, Rick has done his best to convince his viewers that this is the case by posting a minimum of one video every three months where he attempts to eat six or seven apple strudel pies in one sitting. What most of them don’t know, not counting the laser-focused trolls on sites such as Kiwi Farms who archive his videos like historical artefacts and surprise even myself with the information they dig up, is that the fruity dessert-related moniker actually originates from Rick’s now-airbrushed history as an extreme vegan lifestyle vlogger.

Oh yes, it’s true. The man who has made a reasonably successful career from videos with titles like EATING 50 CHICKEN WINGS IN JUST ONE HOUR! and RICKADOODLE APPLESTRUDEL EATS THE ENTIRE BURGER KING MENU! originally took a shot at Internet fame with a series of videos promoting a wholesome vegan lifestyle. Rick was not yet the man back then that he would later become—both literally and figuratively. When I look at some of the photos of Rick from his vegan days, I see a thin and rather fragile-looking boy, not the bloated monster that he has since ballooned into. The problem with Rick, as I pointed out in one of my first threads about him, is that he always took things to extremes. He could never be himself. He had a number of health issues when he was a vegan because he took it too far and was depriving his body of the vital nutrition he needed. Anorexia is perhaps too radical a word, but the days when Rick used to eat a mere mango a day led to some serious blackouts and at least one case of nervous exhaustion. Now Rickadoodle has ricocheted to the other extreme and I will be surprised if he is still alive by age 35 at the rate he is now consuming.

The food, however, is the least of his addictions. I have no doubt that his mind is genuinely warped by the chemicals he ingests through his daily junk food diet, but all that monosodium glutamate is most likely nothing to the dopamine that rushes through his veins every time he posts yet another drama to his YouTube channel or posts another video that attracts over a million viewers. Rick feeds off drama and derives greater sustenance from pretending to cry online over other YouTubers bullying him than any of the five-kilogram trays of spicy ramen noodles that he will ram down his throat for clicks and views. I have never seen Rick happier than the time I once visited his home and he was hunched over his laptop grinning manically while editing a video that revealed one of his rivals had been caught uttering a racial slur. The sweat glistened on his brow and his eyes elicited an unnatural gleam as he played back a reaction video of himself expressing shock and outrage that anybody could use such a term in the current year.

I won’t deny that I am familiar with the dopamine feedback loop. It was my own online addictions that led to the situation I now find myself in and the reason why I am telling you this in an attempt to explain some of the accusations that are about to circulate about me on various social media platforms. It is my sincerest wish that those who truly know me and who have enjoyed my writing over the last few years will recognize that, despite some of my faults, I have always tried to tell the truth and portray the world for what it is. Fame was not the reason why I started using Twitter. If I had wanted fame, there are easier ways than posting edgy comments under an anonymous handle—Rickadoodle himself is testament to that fact. No, I began using Twitter because there are sick things, wrong things, in this world and I wanted to scream out about the madness. Our hyper-surveilled world where nobody can utter the truth for fear of repercussion meant that I had no other outlet than hiding behind a pseudonym on Twitter. I wasn’t doing this to become famous. I was doing it to find out if I was alone or if there were others out there who saw this clown world for the insane freak show it had become.

Your sin will find you out, as my grandmother always used to say, and every action has a consequence. Looking back, it is quite easy to pinpoint where my original sin sprang from. I have railed online about leftists and brainwashed liberals who have reported their own families to the police or shamed them on social media for having incorrect views or for being on the wrong side of history. I’ve quote-Tweeted posts from garishly-haired millennials complaining about having to endure another Thanksgiving dinner with their racist parents and compared them to the child spies of Soviet Russia or Orwell’s 1984. Family should always come first, and it is wrong to air one’s dirty laundry in public no matter how righteous it makes you feel, whether you are a blue-haired bluecheck ranting about your racist dad or a based edgelord complaining about your gay brother. I was a total and utter hypocrite—I admit that now—but it was just too easy. Rickadoodle Applestrudel is my cousin and I had a front row seat to his degeneracy that I wanted to reveal to the world. He was