For the Ethically Minded Agoraphobe: an app which shows you the species of monkey that your current anxiety medication was tested on, and what happened to each of those monkeys and how they are doing now, and when they are going to be allowed to go back to the forest—with before and after pictures.
For Anxious Pet Owners: an app which tracks the movements of your cat, and that lets you give it a small electric shock if it’s heading toward a road. Not to be sold to child-psychopaths.
If you’re forced to travel: an app for when your plane is going down, or you feel like it might be, and you’re shaking too much to type, then at the touch of a button this app will send out a bulk mail of “I love you” messages to a predefined contact list (with an added feature that embargoes delivery for an hour, in case it’s just turbulence).
For the Overweight Agoraphobe: a motivational app that shows you what you’d look like naked if you were built. Or if you’re already built, it shows you what you’ll look like if you go back to being fat.
An app for inter-state work conferences (assuming you survive the flight) that translates corporate euphemism into everyday speech, so that when the head of the division says that “the company has decided to transition from open-culture to thought-leadership culture”, you’ll know you’ve travelled all this way just to get shitcanned.
For Stay-at-Home Parents In Danger of Harming Themselves: an app which plays a noise cancelling soundtrack with musical notes that are the reverse of the musical notes from the song “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen, which when that song plays anywhere in your vicinity the app soundtrack also plays and you don’t hear anything.
For the Hardcore-Gamer Children of Pedants: a grammar app that records your speech, so that when you say “I so can’t believe the Wi-Fi is out again” it shows you how you’re using “so” as a vague intensifier of the word “can’t”, and that what? What are you implying? Are you saying that you can’t and won’t believe the wifi is out? Is that how you want to express this situation to your pedant father?
For Writers: an app that lets you upload lots of sub-plots, which the app will a) extricate a theme from, and b) weave into a coherent main-plot that resolves beautifully. And it will also tell you what the fuck happened at the end of Infinite Jest.
For Readers: a dictionary app that determines whether a Cormac McCarthy passage is in Spanish or whether, no, that is actually English (noting that the app also allows you to convert your speech into Cormac English, so that if you were say you were “going to take a piss” what you would hear is that you were going to “void yourself from your periphery into the maw of a coprophagic god that had formed out of this world’s first porcelain.”
For Those Who Feel the Realness of Fictional Characters: an app for Bruce Wayne, so that he doesn’t have to go outside to look up in the night sky every ten minutes to see if the bat signal is out, and he can just find out if shit is going down in Gotham from the privacy and comfort of his bat-cave, or bat-car.
For Obsessive Dope-Smoking Cinephiles: a Stars Wars app that tells you what the fuck did R2D2 just say? and Chewy.
For the Shy and Reluctant: a nightclubbing app that gives you instant access to a community of verified artisans whom, based on the photos you provide of a Target Female, will supply you with a fail-safe pick-up line which is guaranteed to get you as far as you’ve got the potential to get with a Female (subject to your level of sobriety and that fact that they might be out of your league).
For the Perennially Alone Agoraphobe: a masturbation app that tells you how many orgasms you’ve got left before you begin to suffer from a) colour insensitivity, b) blurred vision, c) tunnel vision, d) full blackout.
For Men Seeking Women: an app that analyses the transcripts of actual chat-room conversations between a male and a female to calculate the probability that the female will be flattered if he asks her to have sex with him. The app determining, with accuracy, the probability that the female will not be flattered, and will be disappointed and will consider such a request another example of how you can’t be pen-pals with men. Rates misogyny on a scale from 1 (light touch) to 10 (irredeemable).
————
Glenn is from Sydney. He wrote the memoir Man In A Grey Suit with one hand. He is married with kids and believes in God. He has clean skin and a nice face, but he lost his arm, and went bald, after being attacked by a shark a few years ago. And going bald has been an issue for him. In fact, he’s just noticed that even the word “bald” carries a great deal of charge, for him. Because he used to have hair like Nick Lachey.