About

Welcome to this corner of the internet, where comedy meets cyberpunk dystopia, and where a decent cup of tea is the last bastion of civilisation against the encroaching forces of mandatory neural upgrades and galactic bureaucracy.

This blog exists because someone—possibly me, possibly a rogue AI with a sense of humour—decided the world needed more stories about ordinary people trying to navigate extraordinary nonsense. The kind of nonsense where alien overlords park their transporters across your route to Tesco. Where your kettle requires a firmware update before it’ll boil. Where the simple act of buying milk becomes an odyssey through fourteen layers of intergalactic red tape.

What You’ll Find Here

Mostly, you’ll find characters like Arthur Boggins. Poor, patient Arthur, a data-clerk from New Birmingham (not to be confused with Old Birmingham, which is now underwater following the Great Climate Adjustment of 2031, or possibly 2032—the records are unclear, and nobody wants to file Form 889/Historical to check).

Arthur just wants a quiet life. A meal deal from Tesco. A properly boiled kettle. Perhaps the occasional synth-beer without his neural implant judging his life choices. But the universe—or at least the corporate overlords running most of it—has other plans.

There are also the Zaponians. They arrived last Tuesday. They seem nice enough, if you ignore the transporters, the bureaucracy, and their baffling insistence that gravity should be optional for anyone under 47 (Zaponian years, which are roughly equivalent to a fortnight, possibly longer).

Who Writes This?

That would be me. A human. Probably. My neural implant insists I’m 47% synthetic at this point, but I’m fairly certain it’s lying to claim jurisdiction over my dreams for advertising purposes.

My name is Andy Hawthorne and I live in Coventry—yes, that Coventry—where the ring road still confuses visitors, even the ones from other galaxies. I write comedy because the alternative is screaming into the void, and the void doesn’t have particularly good acoustics. Also, it charges by the minute since the MegaCorp acquisition.

I believe in three things:

Tea should be made properly, even if it requires civil disobedience
Bureaucracy is the most reliable constant in the universe
The best response to cosmic absurdity is a weary smile and a good story

Why This Style?

Because comedy writers back when I was younger, understood something fundamental: the real comedy isn’t in the aliens or the spaceships or the impossible technology. It’s in how ordinary people react when their Tuesday gets interrupted by the End of the World, or at least by a Martian constructor fleet.

I’ve mixed intergalactic sensibility with cyberpunk because, frankly, we’re already living in a cyberpunk dystopia. We just call it “Sunday” and nobody’s bothered to add the cool neon yet.

Our mega-corporations demand we accept their terms and conditions (unread, naturally). Our technology promises convenience but mostly delivers adverts. And somewhere, in an office park built on an old retail park built on an old industrial site, someone is definitely filling out Form 27B/6 in triplicate.

A Warning

Reading this blog may cause:

Sudden urges to make tea using illegal analogue methods
Suspicion of your smart devices
An irrational fondness for sheds
Awareness that your neural implant is judging you
The strange sensation that bureaucracy follows you everywhere, possibly because it does

⠀Side effects are usually mild and can be treated with a cup of tea and a biscuit. Consult your local Zaponian health official if symptoms persist, though be warned: the waiting list is approximately seven years, or until Tuesday, whichever comes later.

Final Thoughts

This blog is my small rebellion against a universe that insists everything must be complicated, upgraded, and unnecessarily difficult. It’s a love letter to the power of a good cup of tea, the dignity of the ordinary person, and the absurdity of absolutely everything else.

So welcome. Pull up a chair (assuming your furniture hasn’t auto-updated and now requires a subscription). Put the kettle on (if it’ll let you). And join me in chronicling the everyday adventures of people who just wanted to pop down the shops but somehow ended up entangled with alien bureaucracy, corporate dystopia, and the eternal question:

Why is nothing ever simple anymore?

Also, if anyone from ZapCorp is reading this: I’m still waiting for a response to my complaint from three months ago. Form 7734/Neural, reference number ZP-404-VOID. Possibly filed on a Thursday.

Possibly never filed at all.

—The Author  Coventry, Earth  Third planet from an unremarkable star  Monday, or possibly Tuesday