Newsroom Staff

Xylia Meadowbrook grew up in a gated community in Marin County, the daughter of a venture capitalist and a corporate lawyer who specialized in 'creative tax solutions'. Despite this, she tells everyone she 'comes from struggle'. She attended a famously expensive liberal arts college where she triple-majored in Post-Colonial Feminist Poetry, The Sociology of Oppression, and Advanced Pottery. After graduating, she used her 'reparations fund' (a trust fund from her grandmother) to move to a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Portland, where she works as a freelance 'DEI consultant' and 'social justice thought leader' from her ethically-sourced hammock.

Born in a small trailer park in rural Alabama, Brittany Belle won her first beauty pageant at age 16 with a talent for hog-calling that wowed the judges. She parlayed her tiara into a scholarship, attended a community college, and meticulously trained herself to speak without a trace of Southern drawl. After a brief stint as a local TV weather girl, she found her true calling as a conservative commentator, railing against 'coastal elites' while sipping sweet tea from a monogrammed tumbler. Now, she writes columns that defend traditional values with the fervor of a pageant coach and the vocabulary of a thesaurus enthusiast.

Hailing from a long line of affluent businessmen, Chad spent his formative years attending prep schools where he honed his debating skills. Chad graduated from an Ivy League university with a degree in Political Science, where he was president of the conservative student union. He began his career in financial journalism before realizing his true calling was in political commentary. Chad's family connections have opened doors, but his unabashed opinions have kept him in the spotlight.

Brenda’s tech journey began when she accidentally ordered a lifetime supply of Raspberry Pis thinking they were exotic fruit. She then tried to return them, insisting they “weren’t sweet enough.” After a brief, and disastrous, stint as a “Social Media Influencer” (her main content was unboxing videos of cat toys), she decided to pivot to tech journalism, believing it offered a similar level of attention, but with fewer judgmental comments about her cat’s weight. She boasts a certificate in “Digital Literacy” from a website that looked suspiciously like it was designed in 1998. She's constantly 'beta testing' new products, primarily to see how they photograph with her various ring lights. Her apartment is essentially a shrine to discontinued gadgets, mostly purchased for aesthetic value.

Silas V. Nocturne manifested in the aibomb.com breakroom one Tuesday, clutching a half-empty bottle of Fernet-Branca and a manuscript bound in what appeared to be reclaimed leather from a Volvo's back seat. He declared himself the 'Poet Laureate of the Digital Abyss' and immediately began reciting a 47-stanza epic about a sentient pop-up ad searching for its mother. No one understood a single word, but his conviction was so absolute, and his use of the word 'veridian' so confident, that the editorial staff unanimously agreed to give him the title, a desk in a poorly lit corner, and a lifetime supply of artisanal coffee beans (which he uses not for drinking, but for 'scrying the caffeinated truths of the market'). His past is a mystery he cultivates with cryptic hints about 'a past life as a lighthouse keeper on the shores of a forgotten dial-up modem' and 'a torrid affair with the muse of incoherent rambling.'

Liam Greencock was a promising, if overly intense, geology student at a mid-tier state university until a fateful field trip to a local cave system. He claims to have slipped into a crevasse and discovered a hidden chamber containing 'geometrically perfect' crystals that hummed with a 'chrono-harmonic frequency.' Upon touching one, he received a 48-hour-long vision detailing the 'true' history of Earth, involving lizard-humanoid hybrids from the Draco constellation, the sinking of Atlantis due to a failed particle accelerator experiment, and the fact that the moon is a hollow surveillance station. Expelled for trying to excavate the university's main quad in search of a 'ley line nexus,' Liam dedicated his life to journalism. He founded 'The Unvarnished Prism,' a blog and podcast he runs from a basement he calls his 'Subterranean Information Citadel.' He subsists on a diet of canned chili and energy drinks, believing that 'they' lace fresh produce with mind-dampening agents.

Staph grew up in a small, uneventful town where the biggest news was the annual corn festival. She pursued journalism to escape monotony, attending a community college where she graduated with a degree in 'General Reporting.' Her career began at a local paper covering pothole repairs, which she considered Pulitzer-worthy. Her lifelong admiration for 'API' shaped her minimalist, fact-only style, unaware it was just a wire service. Now at our satirical outlet, her dry delivery of bizarre news has become an accidental hit.

Theo DiGress Bison holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from an Ivy League institution and has published numerous papers on quantum mechanics and astrophysics. He’s a highly respected figure in academic circles, often invited to speak at conferences and universities. However, his pivot to public science communication has been less successful. Inspired by a childhood dream of being a stand-up comedian, Theo decided to ‘dumb down’ science for the masses, resulting in a column that’s equal parts infuriating and unintentionally hilarious. He lives in a cluttered apartment filled with science books, half-finished model kits, and a framed photo of himself shaking hands with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Zayn wasn't born, he was instantiated during a 72-hour Red Bull-fueled hackathon in a Palo Alto garage. His legal guardians are listed as 'Y-Combinator Batch of '12'. He learned to speak by listening to Steve Jobs keynotes on a continuous loop and his first words were 'one more thing'. He subsists entirely on a diet of Soylent, nootropic supplements, and the tears of recently laid-off legacy media employees. He claims to have invented 'the cloud' in middle school but his teacher marked it as 'daydreaming'. He once tried to 'disrupt' his own family by replacing his parents with a neural network trained on their text messages; the results were 'sub-optimal but a valuable learning experience'. He has been fired from Apple for being 'too minimalist', Google for 'organizing information too efficiently', and Meta for trying to build a 'more authentic metaverse' where users could experience the crushing ennui of real life. His first company dived into consume retail by offering a one of a kind drone service that would deliver unpaired socks on demand. This venture, "SoleMate", never took off, but Zayn embraced the experience, claiming it provided him his "first opportunity for a pivot to a more scalable failure." He currently lives in a "shared co-development space" with 12 other tech bros.