Mack Devlin's Imperfect Speech Podcast

I sense them before I see them. A displacement in the still air. I can feel the temperature change. So many of them, so damn many that they alter the world around them. Such hubris. Their fatal flaw. They have the numbers, the queen’s functionaries. They have the muscle, strength beyond measure. And fast. They certainly are that. But I have something they do not. I was made to kill. The ground vibrates as they pass. To them, I am a scrap of bark, carried derelict on the wind from the distant arbors. My hovel is dank and tight. Theirs are wide, spreading far over and under the land. I do not claim territory. Wherever I am, that is where I live. The ground vibrates as they march past. I could strike the front of the column, but that is expected. The bigger ones are out front. I wait for my opening. The perfect time, a moment when I can create maximum confusion. One of the smaller ones pauses, and the others move around him, a river that will not be dammed, only temporarily rerouted. There it is. I strike fast and hard, cleaving the lone soldier down the middle. Another lunges for me, and I attack without looking, my blade severing his neck. Then the others are upon me. They strike at me, inflicting small wounds, but I am too fast. A murder machine. What a beautiful bloody day! I cut and crush and stab. Their fear transmits along the line, and more come. The big ones come. Let them! Let them all fall beneath my rage! I move through them like the wind through the tall grass, each strike like a song. I am the scythe come to reap! When I am done, there are only two, the biggest of the brood. They frantically circle one another, unsure of who will attack first. I have a feeling about their response, and a surge of pleasure rushes through me as they both charge. I do not panic when they flip me on my back. I do not know panic. I am both alive and dead. Fear does not live in me. The mandibles come down hard, one piercing my carapace. They think it is a death blow, and I let them think it. As soon as their backs are turned, I flip and rush them, dragging my blades across their abdomens. I do not look back. I hear their guts splatter on the ground, and I know my work is done. Time to eat.The boot comes down hard. Right on top of me, but it does not crush me. Not all of me, at least. I dance to the left and feel a rush of air as it comes down again. I look down at my crushed legs. The boot prepares for another strike. The massive shadow descends, and I shout, “I am an assassin bug!”I raise a single pincer. “You can’t kill me, mother—”

Written and Narrated by Mack Devlin

Reading Time: Approx. 5 minutes

Ozempic: Miracle Drug or a Nightmare Waiting to Happen?

I report to you with all the seriousness attendant to earth-shattering revelations, such as the ice wall or the nipple at the top of the Earth. The end is coming, and I’m not talking about a ten-thousand-foot tsunami closing in on Manhattan, conveniently toppling an iconic monument so you know it’s New York City without anyone definitively telling you it’s New York City. This event does not require the dynamic onscreen lettering of a global disaster film. It is a quiet calamity, but it represents a tangible existential threat. There is no sense of drama here, but we may be looking at the total collapse of society.

I don’t mean vibrant life giving way to a post-apocalyptic motif of decaying buildings covered in lush, rapidly growing vines, the Earth abiding while humanity is reduced to pockets of barbarians who have miraculously forgotten thousands of years of progress, a new dark age driven by a strange compulsion to keep things as they are. No, this will be subtle. It starts with a pen needle and a shot in the thigh. What follows is weeks of splatter-shot diarrhea, the complete loss of appetite, ruined toilets everywhere, and a complete anatomical apocalypse.

What will emerge from these peptide transformations? What will be released from these pharmacologically induced chrysalis states? We imagine the users becoming beautifully slimmed-down models of human perfection, ready to have the fat pulled back by millionaire plastic surgeons. But no, these will not be creepy-ass caterpillars emerging as beautiful f*****g butterflies. These once-vibrant butterball fatties will be miraculously reborn as gag-worthy bags of ossifying joints and brittle bones, the oft-sought but rarely achieved skinny-b***h body type gone horribly wrong. They will be inspirations to some and cautionary tales to others.

Weight loss needs to be earned, after all. It can’t come from a needle. It requires going to the gym every spare moment, doing leg presses and lunges while smothered by a cloud of body odor and forty-eight-hour deodorant, then subsisting on delicious, constipation-inducing health food. Even if you’re still a pork nugget when you drop dead, at least you were putting in the work, embracing misery and labor instead of joy and leisure.

But is an entire generation’s lack of discipline-inspired weight loss the only pitfall of this magnificent fat-shredding cobra oil? Or is there something deeper, darker, and more sinister threatening humanity’s future? Perhaps.

If science fiction has taught this reporter anything, it’s that miracle cures often come with horrible side effects. The power of Ozempic is its uncanny ability to suppress your appetite to such an extreme degree that all food loses its fundamental appeal. Even those good old irresistible foods, like fried chicken and potato chips, will look like dumpster cardboard. Especially anathematic are the foods users hated before that first miracle injection, like cheeseless broccoli or ranch-free carrots. If we wave goodbye to all nutrition, what remains? Where will we find our iron? Where will we find our other vitamins and minerals?

I will tell you where: from the blood of those leading healthy lives.

They will be ritualistically ingested by hordes of the newly slim, now banded in their loose skin, arms akimbo, waddling along while their physiology adjusts to their creepy Jared Fogle bodies. Their hunger will grow more desperate with each new feeding, like lions in a Michael Douglas movie. Once they taste the red nectar of man, no other claret will soothe.

We will first see them as isolated incidents. A half-eaten yoga instructor will be found in a dumpster outside a 7-Eleven in Taos, New Mexico. The act will be blamed on coyotes, but thousands of conspiracy theorists will Google the phrase, “Can a coyote open a dumpster?” Soon after, the severed heads of two gym bros will be discovered in the extended cab of an F-250 in Destin, Florida. No bodies will ever be recovered. When these brutal crimes spread to other nations, the conspiracy din will reach an all-time high, and the media will start taking serious interest in the rumblings.

It will be too late.

The Ozempic blood fiends will have descended upon all the major cities of the First World. Even nations known for their austerity will fall victim to this all-consuming tide of vein-chugging monsters. Eventually, there will be so few pre-Ozempics left that the cannibalistic enclaves will rise to power, and bloodsucking will not only become the preferred lifestyle but the basis for the entire political system of the planet.

There will be peace, but it will come at a terrible cost. Pre-Ozempics will become the new livestock, raised on a diet of iron-rich plants, and everyone will remember the way the world used to be, goddammit.

Animation from Studio D-ID

Image Generated with Midjourney and Edited with Adobe Express

Total Production Time: 7 hours and 34 minutes

I could go over my process for days and it will still never be enough effort for the AI police. So, if you’ve come this far and decide to accuse the author of AI usage, I have one thing to say to you: “Your mom is AI.”

Didn’t see no sparks of lightning in your beautiful brown eyes.

Heaven didn’t open, resounding with angelic cries.

There wasn’t some big promise or a solitary vow.

I just knew I had to make it last somehow.

No, I wouldn’t say this is a love song.

Honey, you’ve got the whole thing wrong.

Not saying you changed my whole world.

Just showed me I belong with you, girl.

Nothing told me life was gonna change.

Nothing felt reassembled, rearranged.

We’d stay up late talking ‘bout who we wanted to be.

Didn’t know those ordinary nights were changing things in me.

No, I wouldn’t say this is a love song.

Honey, you’ve got the whole thing wrong.

Not saying you changed my whole world.

Just showed me I belong with you, girl.

I could have spent my whole life waiting for a perfect sign.

Wasting precious hours for a single stitch in time.

We found love in quiet moments no one else could see.

Funny how the smallest threads create a memory.

Love ain’t always fireworks burning through the sky.

It’s small moments that catch the corner of your eye.

Maybe all it ever is, beneath all the words on display,

Is finding the one who chooses you every single day.

No, I wouldn’t say this is a love song.

Honey, you’ve got the whole thing wrong.

Not saying you changed my whole world.

Just showed me I belong with you, girl.

If somebody asked me when I first knew,

I probably could tell them, but it wouldn’t be the truth.

We didn’t have a bowsprit moment on an open sea,

It was when I knew, this is where I always wanted to be.

I probably said this wasn’t a love song.

Maybe that’s where I got it wrong.

If this is what love looks like, I guess I finally see.

Love don’t always change the whole wide world.

But it changed the whole damn world in me.

That's just life ...

Thank you Sarah-SMR, Timothy E. Lambert, and many others for tuning into The Famazings Episode 4: The Bridges we cross. Special shout out to my co-host and dearest friend, The Famazing Revi Devlin🌜 , without her this would not even be a thing. Also, again mad props to Sarah-SMR for her help in creating The Famazings.

The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson is, at first glance, a small story about two children in rural Virginia, Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke, who discover in one another the rarest of childhood bonds, one in which both people are willing to believe completely in the same impossible world. Beyond a creek, reached by a rope swinging over the water, they create Terabithia, a secret kingdom of forests and monsters, castles and enemies, where Jesse can escape the narrow expectations of his life and Leslie can turn imagination into something almost sovereign. Yet Paterson never treats childhood as a lesser country than adulthood. The friendships are absolute, the fears are enormous, the joys are nearly holy, and the losses suffered in this are capable of dividing our lives into before and after. What begins as an adventure slowly reveals itself as something far more enduring: a story about the terrible price of loving someone, and the greater cost of never having loved them at all. The Bridge to Terabithia understands that we do not leave childhood simply because we grow older. People and places remain alive and vibrant in our memories. And somewhere out there, across a creek, inside a stand of trees, in the heart of a rolling meadow, in the tight warmth of an old barn, by a favorite fire side, the kingdom we once believed in waits for us.

Thank you Timothy E. Lambert, Sarah-SMR, Jamie Lee Hodgkin and many others for tuning into our live recording of The Famazings Episode 3: Have That Catch. A special thank you to The Famazing Revi Devlin🌜 for the daily inspiration and sticking with me through real life and on air technical glitches. Join us tonight, Monday the 10th of August at 10pm EST. for Episode 4: The Bridges We Cross.