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A major ebook announcement

The Clean Reader debacle got me fucking thinking.

I am fundamentally opposed to blue-nosed bowdlerizing gobshites, puritanical prudes, and nattering slobberdonkeys who advocate censorship. And piss on you if you want to conscript my books into fighting your culture war.

And it seems to me that there's too little goddamn swearing in the world. Hell, even in my books.

So I am pleased to announce that I have negotiated an exclusive ebook distribution deal for all of my titles. Henceforth my titles will only be available for purchase through the new ebook reader app Dirty Reader:

dirty fucking reader, yeah!

Dirty Reader uses advanced NaughtyWords™ artificial intelligence technology to scan a corpus of text and detect the optimum location in which to insert a metric fuckton of cuntybollockspoofacefucknuggets to enliven your reading experience and bring it closer into line with the author's state of mind after spending 180 consecutive working days alone in the office except for a sullen, intermittently incontinent cat, wrestling with a buggy word processor while fending off dumb-ass editorial emails and bloody inane suggestions from Marketing. It's enough to drive anyone to drink, and indeed, "novelist" is right up there with "farmer" and "quality assurance engineer" in the alcohol consumption career stakes.

Dirty Reader debuts today, April the toad-felching first, 2015.

58 Comments

1:

Argh, my eyes! How could I see this in the March 31st part of the world, where I have to believe it's real? Oh the perversion of it all!

2:

I'm not sure how this is better than Clean Reader, save for the fact it will really annoy the sort of people who think Clean Reader is a good idea...

Actually, now I come to think of it that's a good enough reason all by itself. Objection withdrawn.

3:

Awesome! I think I need to run my first novel through it. One of my beta-readers commented that there wasn't enough cussin' in it. I think I've rectified that in the current one, it's damn near fucking Scottish.

Oh, and must remember the different time zones.

4:

Perkeleen hienoa!

(You need to fucking expand to other languages besides your bloody English.)

5:

Fuck yes! Needs one more option after Filthy: Australian!. "Aw fuckin', my dear fuckin' Holmes," I fuckin' said, "fuck me this is fuckin' too fuckin' much, ya fuckin' cunt."

6:

Ah, but will it add creative variance to the fucking swearing? Will it converge or diverge after repeated round trips through Clean and Dirty reader - and end up with the same words, repeated over, or an expanded vocabulary?

I'm thinking of creative swearing programs, where you do cycles through the tools and see how you can improve the foulness of your language for verbal use.

Once it's a setting on Siri, allied with a regional accent, we can have some real fun.

"Hello Siri" "What the fuck do youse want, ya wee shite?"

7:

Oh - and watch the latest series of "Bluestone 42". Not only is there sufficient swearing that Dirty Reader would think twice, it now passes the Bechdel Test with ease...

8:

I should add that on Charlie's instructions I have filed a UK trade mark application for the word "cuntybollockspoofacefucknuggets" in the following classes:

Class 16 - books and other printed media

Class 41 - education, entertainment and cultural services

There is, I admit, the minor issue of persuading the UK Intellectual Property Office that this proposed trade mark (which certainly meets the test of being distinctive of Charlie's products and services) does not contravene section 3(3)(a) Trade Marks Act 1994 but if need be I shall point to UKTM 2130833 as the thin end of the wedge in this respect.

9:

Of course, those texts which have entered the public domain will also be made available to "Dirty Reader" subscribers:

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a fucking wife.

and of course, in an attempt to win over readers from the inferior "Clean Reader" their out of copyright favourite book is also made available in new "Dirty Reader" form:

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a cunt. But when I grew up, I put away childish crap.

And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall fuck me over.

Get a deeper appreciation for your favourite text - presented as the authors would have wished (if they could have got away with it).

10:

I'm very much taken aback with the ill-conceived choice of words the author has found necessary to inflict on our minds on the topic of 'narrative enhancement' this day very of the year.

P.S: Once in a year one should expect all the motherfuckers to leave shit well enough alone and not trouble us with their asshole badmouth attitude.

11:

Modern geo-historians date April 1st 2015 as beginning of the CussWars at the close of Anthropocene epoch.

Both Clean Reader & Dirty Reader began with simple textual replacements, but authors and readers on both sides of the debate began altering texts to avoid substitutions. This now classic example of the Red Queen hypothesis in play led to rapid co-evolution as competing apps applied ever more sophisticated models of author and reader.

Inevitably this led to increasingly complex theories of mind, exponential growth of post-human intelligences, and mass-conversion to computronium substrates.

Humanity. Fuck 'em.

12:

Well, there's always this precedent: (s/senior Civil Servants/trademarks/ and s/incompetence/inadequacy/)

Yes, Minister, Episode Eight Sir Arnold: If once they accepted the principle that senior Civil Servants could be removed for incompetence, that would be the thin end of the wedge. We could lose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds, perhaps.

Sir Humphrey: Thousands.

13:

Personally I look forward to the day when we can customise the filth in our reading; my personal preference would be a faux-Victorian setting; that would give me a knee-trembler to the unmentionables.

14:

German version out on April 2nd, Italian and Russian versions still in very early alpha and likely to be postponed indefinitely, though we're in talks with the Lega about a sponsored Northern It^w^w, err Padanian version. Just don't ask about a Neapolitan one again soon, 'mkay?

BTW, Wikipedia never fails to waste my lifetime in most entertaining ways...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity_in_American_Sign_Language

15:

"toad-felhing" has now officially entered my canon of invective.

You Sir, very nearly owed me a keyboard.

16:

Bollocks. This needs more tentacles.

17:

The question is whether Roger's Profanisaurus (the de facto standard in such matters) can be linked in to the Dirty Reader tool, without breach of any licenses.

I see your toad-felching, and raise you dog-rimming.

18:

Well, that should see to those rectal cranial inverted corruptors of the morals of livestock...

19:

I would fucking buy this.

I own many books that would be enhanced by a liberal application of "nattering slobberdonkeys" and "toad felching."

I wonder if we could get O'Reilly to publish technical books using Dirty Reader? It would certainly spice up the fucking reading.

20:

"The sky above the port was the colour of a porn star's anal bleaching"

22:

Bet it won't sell well in the American Midwest until the "religious freedom" option is added, with customizable racial, ethnic, and belief menus. That's in v2.0, right? And v3.0 will add international English vocabulary and options on cognitive diversity, right? So I guess we'll have to wait until v3.0 before this displaces Kindle as the default standard for reading in the free world.

23:

The application is bleedin' obvious and fucking awesome. Direct the DirtyReaderTM fecal product back into its data entry orifice and create an unconstrained positive feedback of filth, rapidly achieving hard take off of the Weakly Gobshite singularity.

24:

Fuck fuckety shit dickless fucking fuck cocksucking asshole cunty fuckstain.

I'm sorry. I had it set on maximum filthy.

25:

Ah me. Can I point your reader at this please? I'm sure most people here will enjoy this one if they haven't already seen it.

26:

A fucking great initiative from an science fucking fiction writing cunt for all donkey-raping dogwankers around the third lump of shit from the sun!

27:

What illegitimate orphan of a fly-blown feculent camel and a dingleberry laden conservative commentator came up with that load of radioactive bilgewater? It's brilliant!

29:

For the US midwest and South, you need to add more religious cursing, by Allah's balls and Jezuz' nose hairs....

Reminds me of a set of fuckin', or, rather, unfucking Tarot cards I have, the Yeager deck. The original had nudity. Big deal. The reprint... literally, it looks like someone had their 13 yr old crayon swim suits on them. No fucks for them....

mark "by Klono's gadolinium guts!"
30:

I think I had a prototype version of this from A2EB. It was a collection of all the Patrick O'Brian novels and scattered through the books were phrases like "bollock 60" which had no connection to the rest of the text.

31:

Well, that made my goddamned day. Thank you very fucking much.

32:

"It was a fucking cold day in April, and the cunting clocks were striking thirteen."

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from fucking awful dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous thundercunt."

"It was the day my grandmother fucking exploded."

"Manfred's on the fucking road again, making bastards rich"

Is there no first line of a great novel improved by this wondrous innovation?

33:

"In a fucking shitehole in the piss-stained ground there lived a wankhumping hobbit."

By Jove, it does work on everything!

34:

Can't wait to apply this to the works of Enid Blyton, & especially the "Noddy" books ...... However, after googling for the titles, I also cam across the follwing - the textual variations of the actual, erm, "adventures" could be very interesting:

Five run away Together Five go off in a Caravan Five go off to Camp (!) Five have a Wonderful Time Five have plenty of Fun Five go to Billycock Hill (!!) - Yes, that's a real title... Five get into a Fix ( Bondage AND Drugs are possible here ...)

35:

Any by-blow or whoreson who disagrees with Sir Charlie is an abydocomist.

36:

Have you forgotten "The Comic Strip Presents...", and the rather memorable "Five Go Mad in Dorset"?

Timmy and George were very friendly...

37:

"The sky above the port was the colour of a pornstar's pissflaps"

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was "Wankbadger".

"In a hole in the ground there lived a short-arsed hairy footed shitgibbon"

38:

And one last note: I read this back when I was reading about linguistics - it was actually collected from an Australian, I think in the first half of the 20th Century (I can't bring myself to say "the last century"):

"It was a fucking beautiful day, and I was walking along the fucking road, when I meets this fucking beautiful girl, and we goes out in the field and has intercourse."

mark
39:

This from an ACTUAL paperback just taken down from my shelves just behind me in my office ...

John Creasey " THE TOFF GOES GAY "

You could buy a copy of your very own ..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toff-Goes-Gay-John-Creasey/dp/B000VC62T0

But WAIT!! Theres More!! ...

John Creasey " The Toff At Butlins "

40:

I downloaded the DirtyReader app from Itunes and used it to edit my Encarta Dictionary of Personal Names, with these results:

Leon Twatsky Eric Crappedon Ernest Hemmingroyd Ralph Dildo Emerson John Upchuck Helena Bottom Farter Numb Chumpsky Sigmund Fraud Tielhard de Realhard Niels Bohring Franklin Dillado Harold Icky John Kenneth Badbraith Gerard Deeperdudu Valery Giscard de Shitstain J. Robert Floppenheimer Napoleon Bonerpart Edgar Allen Pollack

Good thing it was free...

41:

Apparently the Electoral Commission has just rejected the Beer, Baccy and Crumpet Party on the grounds it is demeaning. I was wondering whether one could get the Toad-Felching Party registered.

I have just looked up the law that Blair introduced under orders from the tabloids, and it appears that toad-felching is NOT illegal in at least England. Whether it is in Scotland will depend on whether there is an older law forbidding it. However, a recent law DOES make it illegal to even possess images of it.

42:

In Scotland, they'd probably prosecute you for toad-felching on the basis of it offending public decency. Of course, if you ensure that you do it furtively, in private, it's hard to make a case for the public aspect of the charge. Although at a guess they'd then have to hand it over to the SSPCA for investigation ...

No toads were licked (or felched) in the making of this comment.

43:

Last lines, too:

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were fucking off."

44:

Can you please cite the law that demonstrated that some politician had the foresight to illegalize possession of toad-felching porn?

I would like to understand where that person was coming from. Did he or she just wake up in the morning thinking "We must stop those toad-felching pornographers"?

Does Rule 34 apply here? Searching for "toad felching porn" gives false positives that have nothing to do with toads, but if I instead search for '"toad felching" porn' I only get hits on this page and copies of it.

45:

Therec are a few issues here. Is this just one or two intespecies sex incidents? Did the toad give consent? If not it may be an animal rights issue.If it's just a matter of two (or more) consenting toads it's not a problem. The consent problem is muddied a bit by the fact that animals do not give consent to artificial insemination, hunting or slaughter for food.

46:

I salute your courage. I probably wouldn't dare google "toad felching porn."

47:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/4/contents

Paragraph 63(7)(d) "An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following - . . . a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive), and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real."

Yes, I know that is image, not text, but that's crossed over into censorship. Exactly WHAT harm is done if one possesses pictures of people shagging dead sheep or felching dead toads? Let alone computer-simulated pictures of such activities? There is absolutely no justification of protection, not even of the animals concerned. It's not yet illegal to describe such behaviour, but just you wait :-(

48:

Next thing they'll be banning the late Gilda Radner's "Let's talk dirty to the animals".

49:

What’s the legal position on Scare-crows? ...

" Lonely shepherd found dead 'after having sex with scarecrow that he'd dressed in wig and lipstick' "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3024460/Lonely-shepherd-dead-having-sex-scarecrow-d-dressed-wig-lipstick.html#ixzz3WMkJ2ygB

This sort of thing always causes me to smile like a fiend when I come upon news references to appeals - legalisticaly phrased - appeals to “The International Community”

We, over here in the U.K. are in the midst of this sort of Stuff in the most peculiar political election campaign since... err, the last one?.. and so need no explanation, but, in the event that you, in say, the US of A, are interested just type “uk politics country sports and sex" into a web search and be prepared to laugh at our expense.

50:

What is the Age of Consent for Toads? Does this age vary from country to country as it does for Humans?

If so then what happens if one partner in a sexual congress is standing at one side of an International Border between states and the other partner is at the other side of the border?

What happens if the age of either participant changes as they move? What about time zones?

What happens if, in the throes of passion they perform various sexual acts at either side of the border?

These things are Important and we should be Told and advised lest we slip into Error.

Just come upon this...

http://www.ageofconsent.com/uscitizens.htm

The fine print is a bit off putting but really it is worth a look and a giggle...that is to say we should mull upon these matters in a grave and thoughtful manner.

The law as it applies to Toads is probably even more complicated and risible.

Not that anyone here is laughing! Perish the thought!

51:

Not that I'm at all snarky, but I'm wondering if some of the nominees on the new Hugo slate would read better on Dirty Reader...

52:
Not that I'm at all snarky, but I'm wondering if some of the nominees on the new Hugo slate would read better on Dirty Reader...

My train of thought once I saw the slate certainly read like the output of DR :-/

53:

I really am a sad person :-) I thought that I would check up about the legal situation of Clean/Dirty/Politically Correct/ Mammonite/Trotskyite/This/That/The Other Reader.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents

Paragraph 80 allows an author (who has asserted his rights) to object to its publication by means of CleanReader. Paragraph 103(2) allows him to apply to the courts for a "Who's been a naughty boy, then?" order, requiring the CleanReader publisher to declare that the author isn't happy.

Aw, gee!

54:
requiring the CleanReader publisher to declare that the author isn't happy.

Scary. Particularly if there are no other sanctions. I expect Clean Reader are quaking in their boots...

55:

I feel like there's a boffingly beautiful crossover with Jasper Dodo Dildo Fucking Fforde possible here.

56:

Impurgated. I'm trying to remember whose SF (novel?) it was that referred to impurgated literary classics in passing.

57:

LOL read late, posting late. Two thoughts as I read it: "Oh no, what will happen to the Kindle books I just bought..." "Oh wait this is April. Too bad - what a great ides."

58:

OMG while I'm rather depleted of enthusiasm for JDDFF, I would read that book!

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on April 1, 2015 1:01 AM.

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