Seepers: A Love Story

Ladies and gentleworms. I’d like to present this guest post by a former co-writer of DMReporter and an old friend of mine, Paul Huxley…

DM Reporter has since its inception been anonymous. At least hopefully it was, I’m sure with a little digging it would have been easy to discover the person, or persons, behind it. No longer being behind the keyboard at the DMReporter palace of weary outrage I think it’s safe to poke my head above the parapet. Besides I want to flog you something I hope you might like.

A few years ago, back when the news wasn’t so insane that it self-generated satire, this feed was more preoccupied with making bleakly ironic jokes about the state of the world and the media that fed it to us. The focus now is of course to highlight the specific manipulations of our most cherished news outlet, the one that Wikipedia doesn’t allow for citations because it’s not trustworthy enough.

It was during those halcyon days when amusingly improbable headlines still carried some novelty, that I shared the writing duties for DMReporter and was complicit in saturating Twitter with yet more fake news. You have to remember that this was back when fake news was a joke and not a government-sanctioned propaganda initiative. Once I’d run out of jokes, DMReporter was left in the hands of the [PERSON] who started it all and who continue with it today, constantly amazing me with [THEIR] insight into, and resilience to, the modern media faecal deluge.

[PERSON] has graciously allowed me to use this platform to make you all aware of a little film I’ve written called Seepers: A Love Story which has commenced shooting under the steady leadership of director Melanie Gourlay. I describe it as a tasteless horror-tinged comedy set in a post-Brexit wasteland where fuel scarcity has driven people to kidnap and farm humans to extract bio-fuel from them. Imagine that bit in the Matrix where Neo wakes up in the desert of the real with tubes all coming out of him and he’s covered in Swarfega. Only it’s in Sheffield. We’ve been inspired by everything from ‘Bottom’ to ‘RoboCop’ and ‘Pink Flamingos’ and think that it’s going to be pretty good. If not it’s going to be pretty disgusting which more than makes up for it.

So why take the time out to get you guys involved? Seepers: A Love Story is all self-financed and is being made by a talented cast and crew who have waived their usual fees. We’re going to give them sandwiches and hugs and our eternal gratitude. But like gaining access to high ranking government employees, blackmail piccies of you ‘yiffing’* with a  constituent and bribes to get your terrible human rights record ignored so you can host a global sporting tournament, some things are worth paying for.

We need you to back our Kickstarter campaign so we can afford some of the more complex special effect sequences we have planned. This is all practical stuff that needs time and skill to pull off.

So if a light-hearted comedy about the exploitation of the weak set against the backdrop of our failing Empire, all wrapped up in an improbable love story that also promises at least one person exploding, then please click through to our Kickstarter page where you’ll find a lot more about this ambitious project. If DMReporter has ever made you laugh, or indeed cry endlessly into the sickly lambent green glow your phone screen, then please consider sending a little love our way.

Paul Huxley

 

*look it up. Or don’t actually.

You can find everything you need to know about the project by clicking here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seepersmovie/seepers-a-love-story-a-tasteless-horror-comedy-feature

The Second Annual Don’t Read the Daily Mail Day

Let’s celebrate Paul Dacre’s birthday in style… click the image for more details.

I Hate All The Jews

This was a post I wrote last week about being on the receiving end of a very brief and slightly boring media shitstorm. It didn’t last for long (about an hour or so) but it was the first time I’d been called an anti-Semite so I wrote down some thoughts for preservations sake. I didn’t publish it because…

A) It wasn’t very funny.

B) I kind of forgotten about it.

However, by writing an Israel / Palestine joke this evening and then being on the receiving end of twattish abuse from both sides (I’m a Nazi / no Jews are Nazis / no Hamas are Nazis / I think we can all agree you hate some kind of race and that makes you racist, you Nazi) I remember that the post was sat here unloved and unpublished, so I thought I’d pop it out.

So, expectations sufficiently lowered and the anger from being lured here under an inappropriately salacious title hopefully dulled, here’s the whole goddamned shebang….

———————-

I have a confession to make. And it’s a big one. I had hoped to keep it secret for a bit longer but recent newspaper articles have forced my hand.

The sordid truth is that I hate Jews. Broadly speaking, I hate all races apart from the white race but I really really hate the Jews. They way they do Jewish things, being all Jewishy. It’s madness. They drive me crazy they do.

But, as you know, there’s nothing I love more than sticking it to the Mail – so when the opportunity arose to attack the Mail AND a Jew in one tweet…? Well, I was ruddy delighted I was, absolutely ruddy delighted.

One of the “leading lights of the leftwing Twitterati?” I’m flattered, Harry. Better that than ‘tosspot of all trades’ I suppose.

On the 4th of July a new user called ‘Abuaisha10’ posted a pretty obviously fake call to Jihadist arms on the Muslim community forum Ummah. The thread has now been taken down but you can see a cached version of it here.

Pretty swiftly the message was chased back to a Daily Mail IP address with one user naming the former Daily Mail writer Richard Ferrer as the source. I didn’t know who Richard Ferrer was. I probably should have Googled him.

I was sent the link, I sat on it overnight to see it gain a little bit of traction, checked it hadn’t been immediately discredited and then posted it on the morning of the 6th. This was my tweet:

Since it was pretty obvious (right, right?) that Richard Ferrer was unlikely to be trolling Muslims there was two options; a low-level intern at the Mail was using an old IP address and had done something stupid, or the whole thing was fake. There was a really interesting Reddit thread running which deconstructed it well and the general consensus was that it was at least plausible.

What was fascinating was that it was broadly agreed that it was probably fake, but what was stopping people from outright calling it was that it genuinely seemed like something the Mail might do. Any other paper? No doubt a spoofed IP address. The Daily Mail? Well, y’know, we wouldn’t put it past them…

However, it turned out that Richard Ferrer is editor of the Jewish News and conspiracy theorists were taking great delight in throwing all manner of abuse at him. They thought he was race-baiting and that this dodgy-looking forum posting was all the smoking gun evidence they needed. Suddenly this was proof of the New World Order, of the Jewish drive towards race war, of the Zionist somethingorother, and by God were they going to let him know it. In the worst way possible.

He wrote an article about it for the Independent, and it’s really good – even though it tries to guilt me by association into having spearheaded a racist hate mob. I’ll let that one slide as he was having a bad day.

Now, as we know – the only people on the internet who aren’t reactionary fucknuggets are you and me – and while we’re grown up enough to understand how compooters and inturnets work most people will still, in the words of David St. Hubbins, believe virtually everything they read. Is that my fault? No. I’m a comedy Twitter account who takes great pride in not being trustworthy. If you take anything I tweet as any more than frustrated abyss screaming then you get what you deserve, frankly.

Speaking of reactionary fuckwits, let’s see if Harry Cole has calmed down yet.

Apparently I’ve made up a smear on a random journalist. My very own media swirlstorm. How exciting. If pounced on in the street by journos I must remember to give my name as Raoul Duke. Unless, that is, ol’ Guido is accusing me of spoofing an IP address and writing that post… ah, I give up. On their deathbed no-one ever wished they’d spent more time arguing on the internet.

So I got a bit of abuse, Harry Cole got some abuse, Richard Ferrer got some more abuse – everyone got abuse, basically. The Daily Mail confirmed it didn’t come from their server and no-one really knows who spoofed the their IP address. Either it was a nutjob subtly race baiting or a hacker who picked an ex-employee name at random. Whoever it was, they played us well and I congratulate them. It’s nice to know we’re all as predictable as each other.

The other reason I posted the first tweet was because I wanted to set up this joke for two days later.

However it bombed heavily, so I can’t really use that as an excuse.

A few notes:

• I never named Richard Ferrer – I didn’t know who he was. If you’re unable to grasp that everything I tweet (yes, even the ‘serious’ ones) is to be seen through the simplified, blame based prism of the rightwing press then, frankly, you should probably stay away from my feed.
• I do offer my apologies to Richard Ferrer though – no-one should receive the sort of abuse he did, and while I do think that blaming me for anti-Semitic hatechains is a bit like blaming Russell Brand for UKIP, I do acknowledge that the sheer ubiquity of my tweet did ramp up attention on the story. However, it was also a fucking fascinating story – ‘real’ or not, and since I’m not a journalist I can tweet whatever I want however I want.
• Another perk of not being a journalist is that I can call Harry Cole a “reactionary fuckwit” without falling foul of an editor. I’d also add “shit-stirring little weasel” too.
• I still really massively hate Jews. Like, loads. Proper hate them.

PS: I hate Jews.