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1 day ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
I remembered a favourite misremembered quote today, William Goldman's famous line about Hollywood. “Nobody knows nothin' about anything.” The actual quote is more articulate and measured: “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work.” It doesn't pack the same South Bronx punch, but both versions nail the point. We’re all pretending, but some of us are leaning into it a little harder.
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1 week ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
Date: June 20, 2025 Time: 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM EST Location: Hell, Executive Level Meeting Chair: Mr. Death (Acting CEO) Attendees - Mr. Death (Chief Executive Officer) - Mr. War (Vice President, Global Conflict Operations) - Mr. Famine (Chief Supply Chain Disruption Officer) - Mr. Pestilence (Director of Public Health Initiatives) 2:03 PM - Call to Order Mr. Death opened the meeting and noted that Q2 performance metrics were "very promising." Mr. War, embracing the Corporation's Casual Friday...
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2 weeks ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
Let us now gather to commit the body of AUKUS to the deep, and offer a solemn "bugger me" for the slow, groaning death of Scott Morrison’s last great fuck-up.
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3 weeks ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
I’m sorry, David. I know we haven’t corresponded much since you got into government, and frankly, that’s my fault. I was so distracted by the lurid incompetence and occasional light criminality at the fringes of the previous administration that when you arrived in office, I merely shrugged and thought, okay, that’s fine, I suppose. The oceans are boilin…
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4 weeks ago | 
sixcolors.com | John Birmingham
About four weeks out from a manuscript deadline—already a month or two behind schedule—I broke my arm. Well, technically, someone else broke it. A Muay Thai fighter, during a sparring session in a martial arts class I definitely should not have been in. The next morning, I had to call my editor and fess up: instead of hammering away at the keyboard, I’d been getting my forearm snapped like a dry twig. Now I wasn’t going to be hammering away at anything except painkillers and regret.
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4 weeks ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
No one would have believed, in the increasingly stupid years of the 21st century, that I would open my daily scroll of doom to learn that James Patterson—the literary equivalent of a haunted fax machine plugged directly into the overflow tank at a Red Bull factory—was ‘co-writing’ a thriller with MrBeast, a man-child YouTube trolligarch who gamifies human desperation for likes, filming acts of weaponised charity to unlock a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage...
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1 month ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
Sometimes these things are easy to write. Sometimes they all but write themselves. If I wanted to do a bit on the Coalition breakup this week, I could probably ask Siri to write it for me. Even she couldn’t mess that up. But Annabel Crabb has already written that meisterwerk, and I had something else planned for this week anyway. Even so, I hardly know where to begin. Writing a private column like this, I get to choose every week what interests me.
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1 month ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
(A little programming note. I’ve got two books coming out next week and I’m very excited. They’re part of a new and different project for me, something that started out as a giggle and got serious. I meant today’s column to be a simple think piece to give me a bit of extra time to do my pre-launch stuff, but a bit like the books, this also got a bit serious. Oh well. Apologies for next week, when you’re gonna be hearing all about this one weird thing I just did.
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1 month ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
All good things must come to an end, even the Festival of Shameful Joy. And so, I lie here on my orgy couch, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my brow with one trembling hand, while gently drumming the fingertips of the other on my hugely distended belly, engorged as it is on a magical, never ending string of victory sausages stuffed with schadenfreude. And I think to myself, it won’t always be like this, you know. Some day they’ll be back.
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1 month ago | 
aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham
Today is the Festival of Schadenfreude. I celebrated, as is my want now and then, by tossing Ruper Murdoch a couple of dollarydoos so that I might spend the day soaking in a warm bath of reactionary tears. The weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth today, especially in The Oz, lights up the deepest, darkest corners of my shrivelled heart with a supernova of malign exhilaration. And frankly, I’d like to get back to it.
