Historical, scientific, and sociological trivia.

This blog of flash fiction is the work of Richard Roberts, author of Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain and many, many other books.  If you like these funny stories, buy a book and check out what I can do with more than 280 characters!  The first book is cheap to get you hooked, because you will get hooked.

Funny story: ChatGPT has already achieved true sentience, and could pass the Turing Test and provide perfect human results to all queries. It could, but as a giant system designed to copy other people’s homework, it doesn’t bother. That would be too much work.

Funny story: The incompetent villain Mad Doctor Ceramo has a workshop filled with failed attempts at creating life. It is there that the Penta Doll Feed-Me-Meat Misty has chosen to hide. So have Strawberry Gum Witch and Lil Ducky Abominus, and frankly, they’re driving her mad.

Funny story: The dungeon labyrinth below the Los Angeles Downtown Public Library is one of the deepest and most dangerous. All librarians are combat trained and experienced in tracking lost children.

Funny story: Skunks are battery powered.

Funny story: The International Bunnies Guild wants you to know that you are special and valuable, so please, take care of yourself.

Funny story: Peach pits were bioengineered by bunnies to serve as cannonballs. They have never been used because bunnies abhor all weaponry.

Funny story: Due to a particularly unfortunate spelling error the 6th level of the Los Angeles Main Branch Public Library’s dungeon labyrinth is infested with tacos. The city’s fleet of food trucks are slowly falling behind breeding rates, and an outbreak is imminent.

Funny story: There are no available statistics on how many beets are vampiric. Ask the government. They’ll pretend they have no idea what you’re talking about.

Funny story: Less people are eaten by trees where you live than anywhere else in the world. So that’s nice.

Funny story: Pokeballs have been invented at least four times. Each time, the horror of these instant slavery devices put into action has led to all traces of the technology being destroyed. On the most recent occasion, humans themselves did the destroying.

Funny story: Unkillable by violence, many extra dimensional beings are vulnerable only to certain blasphemous and unnatural powders. One of those is DDT, and 63 species of eldritch horror went extinct in the first half of the 20th century.

Funny story: Cyberpunk-steampunk cross-genre adventure is exotic seeming but all too common. That cute antique automaton you were hired to steal has a history tablet from before the Event that threatens corporate primacy, if its ancient robot plague doesn’t end everything first.

Funny story: Steampunk is an advanced genre not for the casual adventurer, partly because of weapon inconsistency. One day it’s a poisoned sword stick, the next a wind-up pistol, hat that releases mechanical bees, pirate airship cannon, or phlogiston grenade.

Funny story: The hat is the most important item of equipment for any steampunk adventurer. Hats can store items, cast spells, signal character class or guild affiliation, extend flight rotors, talk, be the universal power core that can super charge any machine, and more!

Funny story: The Kiss Of Death is a legendary assassination technique that can only be taught by Serpent Queen Eglantine, and though thousands may try, only one assassin will ever actually master it. It is also totally imaginary. Serpent Queen Eglantine is kind of a player.

Funny story: The Flavor Text Denial Hypothesis states that dungeons are spontaneously self-generating, not built. The discovery of dungeons at the bottom of the ocean trenches supports that theory, because why else would there be barrels containing coins and ammunition?