TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* My Year of Rest and Relaxation 2: Back in Bed (feat. Mattie Lubchansky)

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Cartoonist, author, and mayor enthusiast Mattie Lubchanksy rejoins Riley, Nova, and Hussein to talk about the continuing war on the creative industries being waged by AI - including Meta’s great book heist, the Studio Ghibli-fication of fascist imagery, and OpenAI’s attempt to write literary fiction. Pre-order Mattie's book SIMPLICITY here! Get the full episode on Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Yeah, so what has actually happened here is Starmer has banned ninja swords. Have we a definition in law of a ninja sword? It's in the Magna Carta. Yeah. I think what's actually happened here is that- What's actually happened here is the Assassin's Creed marketing has gotten badly out of hand. What's actually happened here is that in response to us maybe suggesting we won't cut the digital service tax, an American Commodore has sailed those black ships into London's harbour and is threatening to bombard

us if we don't reduce that 2% levy. I'm stuck on American football crowd chanting lengthy sieges. Like, lengthy sieges. I got the big foam katana. Yeah, they're all doing, instead of the defence chant, they're doing siege craft. Siege craft. I got the big foam katana. Yeah, they're all doing, instead of the defense chant, they're doing siege craft. Siege craft. It is important though, like, as a question in terms of like, what do you mean by ninja

sword? Because it's like, okay, well, are katanas safe? No. Explicitly not. They're gonna come to your house and they're gonna take your katana away. Because a katana's like, not really a ninja sword, it's like a sort of noble sort of samurai. Yeah, like Wakazashi. But if you're like banning the tanto for example, okay fine.

Sure. Yeah, that's that shit used by ninjas, right? What about the fucking, what about the stars? I don't know, I can't remember what they're for. Shuriken? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This follows Hoss on the heels of the previous government banning zombie knives which also didn't have, well, were provided with a definition which was just like, I don't know, it's like a knife but it looks kind of angry. So now I guess the vibe here is it's a knife but it looks kind of Japanese.

Which sucks if you like cutting very thin pieces of fish like I do. It's time, I think, as a nation, and this is why it's important to do this, for us to realign from being a weeb for Japan to being a weeb for China, right? And so now I'm very excited to see our nation's brave roadmen start doing some, like, you know, traditional Chinese martial arts instead. You got like a big wide sword with a red tassel at the end of the pommel. Perfect. Fantastic. My thinking about like the knife crime thing was always just like, you know, one way that

you could tackle it rather than banning things is by sort of like, sort of teaching the kids who like get caught with these knives, like the way of the sword, like you teach them how to be a noble warrior class. And that way they treat the blade with respect and you know, knowing knowing that it's much more honourable to vanquish your enemies with one very clean stroke, but in the nature of beautiful battle under a train. So to teach them brachito. You solve the problem simultaneously of knife crime and European rearmament, because you

just deploy the first knife crime regiment on the border with Estonia. Exactly. You make them a samurai class. Yes. And the first Russian that comes across the border is effortlessly beheaded. Perfect. So, I think there are a few things I'm drawing from this.

Number one is that what Keir Starmer and Tokugawa Ieyasu can agree on is that ordinary people should not have a wakazashi, and that should be punishable by law. Secondly... Secondly, no fun allowed in this country. You can't even engage in the humble pleasures of keeping a really, really sharp Japanese sword. Yeah, I mean, does that mean I'm allowed to or I'm not allowed to keep my big pole arm with the sword on the end? I can't remember what kind of Nihon though that is, but it's really important.

I think that is ninja coded, certainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a naginata. Those are not affected by current legislation. And importantly, if you want to kill a horse with one stroke or disable a mid-sized car, then the zanbato is also still legal. If you want to kill any number of things with one stroke, a horse s*** the list goes on. Then that's your weapon, right?

And so, I mean, I think the other thing about the Naginata, right, is that it's a religiously protected blade, right? Because it marks you out as a Buddhist priest in feudal Japan. So on that basis, I think you could have a claim under some like equalities legislation to be able to carry it around. Is it? Okay. A vicar, a vicar is able to carry a Naginata. I've not been to a church of England in a minute, but I don't remember that. Maybe. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. Look, I wanted to get into this.

This wasn't even in our news segment. I just saw this. I want to get into a little bit of news. And then is like, yeah, because because like knife crime itself, obviously extremely serious. This solutions proposed so profoundly un-serious that the best you can get out of them is, I don't know, 10 minutes about decapitating the horse. Yeah, babe, what a 10 minutes they are. No, I wanted Yeah. What a ten minutes they are. No, I wanted to actually announce a new vertical for TF. It's a new column in the show that you're going to see come back again and again.

I call it hyper-Britification, and it's all about how the US is speedrunning a transformation into the UK. You get an Adam Curtis B-roll of some American shit happening and it's like, but then a very British thing happened. Well, indeed. As I put down my Percy Pig that I was just chewing on. Counting down to Trump banning ninja swords. He would never.

He understands. They're too sharp. I got people going around there putting a sheath on everyone. Slipping it right over. The thing about lengthy sieges is you lose your men and you damage the castle. Better to solve the problem at a stroke. The code of Bishido, they say it, they say it's useful.

I say it's all ideological. Actually, most problems are solved by answering the question, who can afford more cannon? Who has better relationships with the Portuguese and can get muskets? We got this guy they call me, Aunt Jim. Did everything right and they assassinated me. It's gonna be really funny when an assassin crawls into the White House latrine with like a ninja sword and assassinates Trump from below.

Yeah. The first one is an example of the US speedrunning a transformation into the UK, is of course group chat shenanigans. And I say the word shenanigans advisedly, because this is how they are being treated by the US political and media class, is group chat shenanigans, as opposed to the justifiable horror. Yeah, I mean, doing a war crime and sort of unconstitutional military action in an insecure signal chat does have big right wing of the Labour Party energy, I'm afraid to say.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. As soon as I saw... And that's not something that... This is the niche that I think you need a British podcast for, is to articulate that because Peter Hex doesn't know what a labor staffer is, but we do, and we can say they're behaving weirdly convergently.

Yeah, so if you haven't been following the news, just to catch everybody up... There's a bunch of messages on your phone, probably, if you open Signal. Yeah, I'm calling you, I'm like, hey, can you check your Signal? Me and SimCom had some questions. Yeah, I thought it was weird how the National Security Advisor added every American into the chat. I mean, I guess it kind of helps with transparency. Yeah, it's like they're doing a new approach to democracy.

Everybody gets to be in the small group principles committee. The small group is America. What happened was the United States Army basically struck a building in Yemen. Yeah. Well, they did a bunch of strikes. It was a mix of drones and like manned aircraft, right? But the point was to drop an entire apartment building on the head of one guy they were targeting because that was his girlfriend's house. And they killed a huge number of people. Even the guy they were targeting, of course, was being targeted extra judicially, eticially, etc. pretty much continuity with a lot of the stuff that America does, but

used to be embarrassed, either embarrassed about or at least try to cover up. Every president since at the very least Obama has authorized strikes in Yemen and the US hasn't been at war with Yemen for any of that. So like it's all unconstitutional without Congress signing off on it, which it hasn't. So that's one like, it's all unconstitutional without Congress signing off on it, which it hasn't, so that's one part of it. The other part is that it's like a grotesque war crime in and of itself, right? And then the third part of it is all of these guys are just on Signal posting about it, and one of them added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, into the group chat.

"-Former volunteer IDF prison guard himself, Jeffrey Goldberg. Which explains a lot of his conduct in this. Someone, he's on someone's phone as like, IDF Jeff, right? He introduced himself to Vance that way, and he's just like, okay, well, into the phone you go. Yeah, there's like someone called Gay Jeff, there's someone called like, like Turkish Jeff. I don't fucking know. There's someone called confusingly Atlantic Jeff, who's just really, really good at getting lobster.

If you, if you, if you look in the like people in this group, it's, uh, you know, it's IDF Jeff. Weirdly, there's a Russian Jeff and a Chinese Jeff who no one remembers adding in, but you know. Basically right. There is this story that then gets released where Jeffrey Goldberg first of all just says uh, it was to my horror I was added by mistake by like Michael Waltz to a group chat. Yeah. He sat in this group chat watching them plan the strikes and then to establish the veracity of this, he sat in his car in a parking lot, waiting for the strikes to

happen according to the schedule that Hegseth posted in the chat, and then when they did, he was like, okay, it's real. And to be fair, this is a scary moment for any journalist, because you're like, I might catch an espionage axe charge, I might get three days of the Cond'd here, but what our boy Jeffrey did here was remove himself voluntarily from the group chat, and not publish a bunch of messages because of, like, national security implications. Like, the national security implications are pretty bad already, dude.