The Invitational Week 198: We Need Your Advice
Plus: What would be worse than AI wiping us out in 10 years?
Pat Myers and gene weingarten
22 hours ago

Meteor (2021) - IMDb


An even worse doomsday? See this week’s Invitational first runner-up.
Have you ever had a hard time choosing between going to a one-year-old’s birthday party or attending your grandmother’s funeral? Neither have we, but one ditzy New York Times reader apparently did. We will deal with such grave dilemmas in this week’s new contest. But first, we address an even more existential question — with similar gravity.

Gagnarök: The worse-than-AI-doom of Week 196
In Invitational contest Week 196 we asked you to think what might be worse than the currently gravest of all predictions: that AI might wipe out the human race within ten years.

Third runner-up: After humans achieve immortality, the entire planet becomes as crushingly crowded as a mosh pit — and then we run out of deodorant.
(Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)

Second runner-up: People lose so much weight by taking GLP-1s that all the carbon dioxide produced by their burned-up fat catastrophically accelerates climate change and we all die horribly in tsunamis, cyclones, haboobs, and williwaws.
(Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)

First runner-up: A giant life-extinguishing meteor will hurtle directly toward Earth. NASA’s plan to destroy it will be called off after Trump is told it will land on a blue state.
(Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)

And the winner of the “Pluto: Never Forget” planet-memorial T-shirt:
Soylent Red, Yellow, and even Green become widely accepted food rations in a desperately hungry world. But the chaos begins when the recipe is revealed for Soylent Brown.
(Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)

Doom It May Concern: Honorable mentions
Barack Obama divorces Michelle and starts dating Kimberly Guilfoyle. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

In addition to taking over our lives, AI insists on putting its name on everything: the AI Peace Institute, the Arc d’AI, the AI Center for the Arts . . . (Art Grinath, Takoma Park, Md.)

After the AI takeover, cutely dressed humans are trained to clap cymbals and ride tiny bicycles for their machine overlords’ amusement. (Jesse Frankovich)

A deadly new plague arrives, and this time the only prevention really is ivermectin, so the only survivors are those insufferable assholes who have been all but mainlining it since 2020. (Sam Mertens, Silver Spring, Md.)

AI decides to extinguish only its most dangerous nemeses: smart people. All stupid people will be spared. (Patrick Houston, Cloverdale, Calif., a First Offender)

A Pluribus-like virus transforms humanity into democratic socialists. The global economy collapses as people spend all of their energy debating what is “fair.” (Kevin Dopart, Houston)

Due to the accumulated weight of discarded K-cups, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch sinks to the bottom of the ocean, unleashing cataclysmic tidal waves. At the end, the only things left standing are data centers. (Lee Graham, Columbia, S.C.)

A portal suddenly opens between Earth and Pluto, sucking all of the good doggos, ferrets, and people — except for one — into cold, dark, airless death. And you are the one person left behind with the most evil people in the world … except, good news! Now some of them aren’t, relatively speaking! (Gregory Koch, Falls Church, Va.)

Aliens will program all communication devices to continuously play the Kars-4-Kids jingle, rendering all humanity insane. (Rob Cohen, Potomac, Md.)

A survivalist Florida man becomes the first known case of a human carrying Moniezia expansa, a deer gut tapeworm, and scientists growing cells from his intestine inadvertently use an immortal cell line culture, creating a population explosion of immortal tapeworms that thrive on humans. Secretary Hegseth responds by bombing the lab, scattering billions of self-replicating human-seeking M. expansa. (Dave Prevar, Annapolis, Md.)

Cockroaches will learn to construct giant shoes and stomp out human life one by one. (Rob Cohen, Potomac, Md.)

Everyone begins being killed by their nightmares. They wake up screaming to find out it wasn’t really a dream. Mine involves each limb being tied to four dogsleds and someone yelling “mush.” (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)

Super Intelligence fails to destroy us all, but it does make time travel possible and Donald Trump demands to be the first to use it and travels back to November 3, 2020, to rig the election but because he is utterly incompetent fails to do so but he steps on a butterfly and irrevocably alters the space-time continuum and thus causes the complete works of Bob Dylan and Giuseppe Verdi to disappear from existence and results in a world where Anita Ward’s 1979 recording “Ring My Bell” is universally considered the apogee of human art. (Greg Johnson, Victoria, B.C.)

The Trump Arch is built to a height of eight miles. Then, due to cheap materials and ignored safety regulations, the wind blows it over. The resulting crash rivals the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, blotting out the sun, and we all slowly freeze to death. (Jon Gearhart)

A new law requires that when you get up in front of a group of people to give a speech, you have to be naked. (Art Grinath)

As part of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, Costco finally raises the price of its hot dog and soda combo. (Jeff Contompasis)

In a bizarre evolutionary reversal, human physiology is altered so that we all consume and defecate with a single orifice, like an amoeba. Unlike amoebae, though, which orifice we must use changes every three weeks, so they all get a workout. (Sam Mertens)

In a moment of inspired genius, world leaders ask AI to go find a way to stop it from destroying the world in ten years. AI responds with an improved solution, and the world is now expected to be destroyed in five years. (Jon Cannon, Potomac, Md.)

The leopards finish eating everyone’s faces and start in on other body parts. (Duncan Stevens)

I bet every cent I had that AI would kill us all, and now Kalshi can’t pay up. (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.)

It turns out we’re all living in a simulation, and the simulation’s trial period is up and we have to pony up 19.95 glargons a month to continue but nobody even knows what a glargon is. (Sam Mertens)

And Last: Every doomsday scenario that got ink in this contest happens simultaneously... and not one of them was your idea. (Jesse Frankovich)

The headline “Gagnarök” is by Jeff Contompasis; Jesse Frankovich wrote the honorable-mentions subhead. The Loser Community’s website with all the Invitational stats and stuff is now NRARS.net; the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook is here. Join and they’ll anagram your name; Art Grinath, who happens to be rather slender, is RAG-THIN RAT.

New contest for Week 198: Snarky advice for real NYT ‘Social Q’s’ questioners
Q: How do I stop guests from bringing their children to my parties?
A: Have your parties at a strip club.
Q: My sister is delusional and an attention hog. Can I ignore her texts?
A: Uh, you don’t have a sister.
Q: How can I stop my wife from badgering our friends about climate change?
A: Solve climate change.
Our good friend Robert Basler, who runs the excellent Substack newsletter 5 a.m. Stories, recently issued a challenge to his readers that we today accept on behalf of our readers.

Every so often, 5 a.m. Stories does a withering parody of The New York Times’s “Ethicist” column, in which Basler takes real ethics questions posed by Times readers and answers them in a funnier, far less staid and earnest way than the Gray Lady did. Recently Basler introduced his readers to the Times column “Social Q’s,” which the NYT describes as “lighthearted advice about awkward social situations,” but comes off as just as staid and earnest. Basler calls its often inane questions “neurotic nincompoopery,” and says he’d go off on them, too, but who has the time for that sort of nonsense?

Ahem.

That’s your challenge. For Invitational Week 198: Here is the master index page of “Social Q’s” questions. The Times responded to them boringly. Your job is to do it un-boringly, as in the examples above, which were acidly answered by Rachel Manteuffel. You may use any of the real questions on that lengthy page, which, as you will see, goes back years, and indeed includes the question from 2024 at the top of the column, about the birthday party and the funeral.

Three special notes:

Special note number one: If you are not a Times subscriber, you will not be able to access the actual columns in question, with the answers the newspaper gave. It doesn’t matter — we don’t care what pablum the paper served up. We don’t want pablum — we want ghost pepper chili.

Special note number two: Each archived question is followed by an explanatory sentence. You may use that, too, if you feel you need it to get your point across.

Spcl. nt #3: Brevity. Terseness. Don’t write an essay. Anything over fifty words will seem long to us.

Super-important formatting instructions!
Begin each entry WITH THE DATE, spelled out as below, of the question in the index.
Then follow it — on the same line — with the question, and your answer. You can either copy out the question (and following sentence, if you like) or just sum it up. Like this example, also from Rachel:

August 5, 2026: Q: Can I ask my boyfriend to straighten and whiten his teeth? A: “Straighten”? “Whiten”? No. That is homophobic and racist.
Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-198.

The winner gets three very small, very dead, indeed thoroughly desiccated, Manchurian scorpions. They are packaged with a little ultraviolet flashlight because UV light is supposed to bring out their natural blue phosphorescence. And here is the best part: They are advertised as not merely “edible,” but “delicious! Try them in a drink and watch them glow underwater!” Here’s a picture we found at the website labeled “Wholesale Edible Insects.” While we (at least the Empress) will confess to having eaten okay-looking food out of a wastebasket, even we might not try this shot. Donated by Dave Prevar, Donor of Potentially Glowing Scorpions.

Manchurian Scorpions – Wholesale Edible Insects


Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Still running — deadline Saturday, Oct. 17, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our perennial Ask Backwards contest in which we give the “answers,” such as “What it should say on the Trump Arch” and “A 21-nun salute,” and you tell us the questions. Click on “read full story” below for details.

InvisibleInk!
Idea: ()
Examples: ()
Judging: ()
Title: (Jeff Contompasis)
Subhead: (Jesse Frankovich)
Prize: (Dave Prevar)
Add:H:1588: ()
VisibleInk!