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Stephen Prime

UNAPOLOGETICALLY SORRY. ARROGANTLY SELF-DEPRECATING. HILARIOUSLY SERIOUS. AN ORIFICE OF INK.

TL;DR Stephen Prime is not a real person. So everything I say is made up, unless it’s true.

I’m STePhEn PrImE

You have arrived at the top of the bottomless pit of Stephen Prime. You are now looking down into something that makes The Pit of Sarlacc look like a stupid over-used Disney trope… oh wait it already is.

This is the fucking problem, isn’t it? If you came for “content,” “SEO-optimised listicles,” or “life hacks,” you have taken a wrong turn into the uncanny valley of the Dead Internet. You have slipped past the Enshittification algorithms and found the raw feed. Turn back. Go drink some warm milk. Go watch a reel of someone baking bread. Go doomscroll past the heat-death of meaning. You are not safe here.

Who is This Guy? (The Official Lie)

Stephen Prime is a Yorkshire-born, Tokyo-based cultural minisplat and Post-Truth Poet. He is the Co-founder of Hungry Wolf Press (where books go to die with dignity) and the Editor-in-Grief of Sarcgasm.com.

He holds a PhD irl and works in some capacity at an undisclosed university full of ungrateful students and mithering academic fucktweeds.

While he possesses the kind of academic and literary credentials that would usually make a person insufferable at dinner parties, he chooses to remain under the radar. It’s a choice. Really.

This qualifies him to deconstruct the semiotics of a fart joke with terrifying academic rigour. He is a man who looked at the sanitised, algorithmic dystopian perfection of the modern web and decided to build a self-hosted slum of Docker containers just to keep his other hand busy while he waited for Booze O’clock.

The Actual Truth (The Uncomfortable Reality)

Stephen Prime is not my real name, it’s my pen name. You don’t know who I am and you probably don’t give a fuck either. Nobody cares what’s real anymore. It makes me sad. Stephen Prime is a containment vessel for the horrid words and ideas that burst out of my chest like the Stage III larvae of one of H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs.

(Wait, technically that is inaccurate)
Forgive me for nerd-jacking myself, but “Giger’s xenomorph larvae” is technically wrong on two counts:
  • The Chestburster Design: H.R. Giger designed the adult Alien. However, the specific Chestburster puppet used in the 1979 film was designed and built largely by Roger Dicken. Giger actually hated the final puppet; he famously called it a “degenerate chicken” (or “plucked turkey”) because it looked too raw and pink compared to his biomechanical aesthetic.
  • The Word “Xenomorph”: The term “Xenomorph” was never spoken in Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979). It was introduced in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) by the character Gorman, and even then, it was just a generic term for “alien form” (Greek: xeno + morph), not the species name.

I am the guy who reads Kafka and thinks, “You know what? The bug had it too easy. Let’s Reverse Metamorphosis a roach into a human and see how much he hates paying taxes.”

This website is a trophy case/crime scene of ideas. Here, you will find:

  • Casual Cannibalism: Tales of men who accidentally smoke the ashes of strangers’ mothers and then try to justify it to the BBC.
  • Biological Horror: Poems about Hanakuso (nose shit) that treat crystallised nasal mucus with the reverence usually reserved for cherry blossoms.
  • Paternal Neurosis: “Pwems” regarding the terrifying ordeal of being a husband and father. Read about me getting offended when people praise my kite-making skills, because the hypervigilance of my fragile ego can recognise the dorsal fin in a compliment about the Jaws kite I made to impress my son.
  • Feminist Guilt: Long-winded essays where I flagellate myself for enjoying Daniel Clowes comics in the 90s while trying to convince you I’m a “Male Feminist” without sounding like a total prick. (I fail).

The Tech Stack

This site is hosted on my own hardware. It runs on a Proxmox server in a room that gets too hot in the summer. I manage my own VMs. I wrangle my own databases. I write Docker compose .ymls and yes I have a bunch of local LLMs and other AIs to do my bidding. If you think using AI makes me "inauthentic," please feel free to hand-write your complaint on vellum and shove it up your arse.

I created Kerouac, an unhinged AI so outrageous that it has to censor its own autoprompts (true story, that’s why I had to rebuild it offline).
SYSTEM: ONLINE
CLICK TO INITIATE LEXICAL MALWARE
>>STIMULATE LANGUAGE VIRUS >>

'The word is now a virus...The word may once have been a healthy neural cell; it is now a virus programmed for control.'

— William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution (1970)

The Meat Stack

I'm not going to tell you exactly what type of neurodivergence I have, or drop in any trendy terms about my sexuality, ethnicity, or whether I take meds to calm the clearly overburdened beast in my mind, but if you keep reading you will find my work is raw and confessional and uncomfortable. Right now I'm not worried about getting doxed because I'm barely a blip on the screen. One day when I'm famous I'll simply deny it all. For now, just enjoy it and STFU and go read something I wrote that isn't all this crap.

DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE YOU FREELOADERS. I AIN'T JUST DOING THIS FOR MY MENTAL HEALTH.

Support me, buy me some laxatives, because “cheap wine ain’t cheap.”

Roll the Dice: A Random Pwem

A Poem About The Moon Exploding

And the moon starts reverberating Like a giant cymbal made of thin stone
READ THE DAMN THING →

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