Good day friend,
We here at Sentenced are HARD AT WORK!
This is SENTENCED’s twelfth weekly newsletter. Thank you for signing up! You will not be disappointed.
The Frostbyte Freeman Interview
Yes, we know it’s been long-awaited. Our last interview, “An Interview with Poet of Theater”, was our best performing article/story, and most likely will continue to be forever. It’s all downhill, folks.
However, we will not stop trying. To that effect, we’ve released an equally (if not more) interesting interview with the fella behind the Minecraft commentary channel Frostbyte Freeman. The fact is, we’ve got an incredible interview about the world of Machinima.
“There’s no acknowledgment of life offline, there’s no world outside the server.”
The fact is, we’ve got an AMAZING stream of articles and stories, and we AREN’T STOPPING.
Fluke Dimsworth — 1998-2026
We’re really confused.
We mean to say, we don’t know who did this. A murder started this whole affair, and it seems to be the case that a murder has ended it.
Yes, Fluke died. Fluke… really, really died. So, allow us to eulogize him with this obituary.
Fluke Dimsworth was a man known for many things, chief among them his serious, dangerous mental illness, but also his virulent racism. In the last weeks of his life, he killed two people. The police were unwilling to do anything about his actions. Now, ironically, they’re denying that he was murdered, despite the fact that “someone” shot him in the back of the head.
We at Sentenced would have someone investigate, but, if you’ll remember, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place.
It’s important to remember, though, that there was more to Fluke than his unhinged rants, his violent acts, and his hateful speech. He had worked for the LAPD for several years before being fired for police brutality. He was also a decent Private Investigator, trying to better himself by going to three different therapists. In time, he would have been able to manage, had “someone” not killed him.
Ironically, Fluke had become our second mascot, in a sense. No one who didn’t read the newsletter knew about him really, but he was with us for longer than our first.
Fluke is survived by his son, Doug Dimsworth, aged eight. We didn’t know about Fluke’s child until after his mysterious death, but the tragedy of Doug spending the rest of his life without a father is not lost on us. That’s why we’ve decided to adopt him.
Yes, the Sentenced editing team will be raising Doug Dimsworth from now on. And you bet the fellows and associates of Sentenced will be doing quite a lot for the kid too. As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton once said: It takes a village.
Rest easy, Fluke.
I Guess We Have To Do This…
We’ve been struck with a new controversy. This time it doesn’t make any sense to us! What was our crime? Going Viral?
We don’t have the time to respond, so we’re letting one of our thirty-one year-old interns deal with this one.
Why Sentenced Editors Don’t Read Books
by Sentenced Intern II
Sentenced was met with a baboons’ heart of hate after an announcement made on Xitter this Saturday at 10pm CST. It reads as follows:
“Literary journal editors shouldn’t read books. Reading books makes you stupid. We don’t read books and now we’re fucking famous. We don’t read books. And because of that: we’re fucking unstoppable. We’re fucking cool. So, please, bookos: fuck fuckidy fuck the fuck off!”
As of Sunday, 4pm CST, the post had 20 likes, 2 retweets, and 3 comments.
“Hoorah!” Thought the Sentenced Editor, who just woke up after a night of drinking a monkey’s paw of red, red wine. They compulsively wrapped their fingers around the comment thread button, eager to join the conversation. The hoorah broke into silence as the editor of the very same loaded into the thread, revealing the comments to be… gasp! NEGATIVE!?
Such is the life of a Sentenced Editor. The best night of your life, followed by the most awk afternoon. If you catch my drift. So anyways, that’s a pipe full of toe-curling cringe from those commenters. We sadly can’t ignore them, since they shape public opinion. That’s why I’d like to take a moment right here, right now, to defend my senseis (and sometimes senpais =D) over on the editor team. “Understand the perspective of the sentenced editors, you must.” Here we freaking goooOOOooOOOOOOOOoo! Oop, NVM, I gotta pick up my kid from church (and I oop)! I’ll let my finger-licking twenty year-old underling deal with this one 💅.
Why Reading Books Make You Stupid
By Sentenced Intern II Underling
“Just as we upset the stomach by too much food and thereby do harm to the whole body, so can we cram and strangle the mind by too much mental pabulum. For the more we read, the fewer the traces that are left behind in the mind by what has been read. It becomes like a blackboard whereon many things have been written over one another.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
There is an illusion that befalls those who read books: they think of themselves as smarter than the average citizen. This illusion stretches into the minds of the every-man, whose only interaction with a book has been picking one up, and in jest, pretending to be burned, as if the book is made of holy water and they are born of demons.
Do you believe in the lie of the smart book reader? Then why, when you ask a bookworm about how they see their body, of their place in the universe, of their opinion on anything other than their ideal bookmark size, do they stop and think? And why, if you are able to wait through their agitating hemming and hawing, do they only respond with words regurgitated from novels of old and new? Do they truly think being able to synthesize Moby Dick and House of Leaves gives their answer to your question of “how are you doing?” any weight outside of their book club?
- Why do they stop and think?
- Every book one reads nestles inside the tendrils and gaps of the mind forever. In theory, this would allow an avid reader to pull from multiple sources and produce somewhat interesting conversation through the agonizing pauses (long-form literature is a clogging agent for the brain).
- They will never, however, say anything of interest because 1) most of these readers relegate themselves to fiction, ostensibly pumping their brain with anti-reality and 2) even if they do read non-fiction, their obsession with “reading every perspective” has left their information a pointless amalgam of infinite potentialities. It’s like talking to a slot machine.
- Why are their words regurgitated?
- Dedicating your life to reading is also dedicating yourself to erasing all that makes yourself unique. Because books are so experience-full, the reader feels nothing but malaise for their reality. They begin to stop narrativizing their existence, only mustering a narrative their reading experiences — transforming each literary foray into a idea-paste, commingling with other idea-pastes until they form a confused, singular ideas-paste.
- With time, these individuals will self-identify as a “bibliophile,” which is an identity tantamount to psychic suicide. And, because their real life holds no meaning to them, their conversational ability emerges solely from a monstrous, sloppy paste of spliced-together half-remembered quotes.
- Do they think their words hold weight?
- The book thumper thinks they make sense in conversation, a type of confident, self-inflicted aphasia. Even though their utterances are nothing more than a Markov chain, with so much input text the output becomes a drivelous affair.
- Not only does a book fetishist see sense in their speech, they also think of their worded sewage as “intelligent,” which drives them to read more. Through this we can clearly spy the horror of their self-concept, that it is fabricated from a sick self-perpetuating fiction.
- We, the few, fed on mostly-humorous short stories, may be compelled to turn to hate. Don’t: for they are not the villain. It is our ever-flawed society to blame for venerating these dolts.
So what can we do as short story readers to save these literary zombies? Simply, we have to treat them like the idiots they are. Shame them. Burn their books. Slap them upside the head. Refer them to read and support Sentenced. If we don’t pull them from the darkness of reading their tomes, they will be nothing but a library of rotting flesh. Unable to think, feel, to be a human with a soul.
I hope this writing helps everyone see the Sentenced Editors for what they are: epic thinkers.
Thank you, my zesty ahh underling😫! That friggin’ rocked! Now, you three fuckers who replied, get off our goddamn backs!
Wow, thank you, Intern! That was fantastic. We hope that clears some stuff up for the readers.
Be-be dee be-da-be day be-dee de de that’s all folks!
See you in a week,
Sentenced Lit
sentencedlit.org
