apologies, explanations and corrections for YCPD issue 3

07 Apr, 2026

i have spent the bulk of this afternoon attempting to remedy the several mistakes in the first 50 printings of issue three. this included the scribbling out of many typographic errors and the reprinting of an entire physical page which resulted in an obscene amount of unstapling and restapling. yet there is still one major mistake that stands uncorrected, and i think that this mistake is worth explaining.

on page 45 in a true story called "the swimmer" in which i recount a disastrous race at the year seven swimming carnival about the year seven swimming carnival, i had tried to describe my mental and physical swimming technique, writing:

in my head i practiced the ian thorpe visualisation method, imagining that my body was a mechanical vessel operated by tiny crewmembers, also in speedos. as they pulled their levers and pumped their bellows in a rhythmic motion, i quickly surpassed all competitors

now you might have read this as innocent and charming, or, with a more critical reading, you may have read it as plain homophobia, as if i were trying to get laughs by conjuring up the idea of gay sexuality, assuming that gayness is innately comic... this was not my intention and i apologise for any injury or annoyance caused.

i only realised how these sentences could be misconstrued when i woke up this morning with the sudden insight that i had written something harmful. i will ask you to manually correct it in a moment, but first, i must attempt to explain my thinking process in my writing of these lines.

“the ian thorpe visualisation method”

in grade four we were asked to write a short biography of an olympic hero, for which i chose the australian swimmer ian thorpe. for my research i consulted his 2002 autobiography “live your dreams”, a book published with children in mind in which he spends an entire chapter recounting his love of lego, and later in the book, stating that when he swims, he visualises his body as a submarine operated by tiny crewmembers.

this idea was very profound to me--a body operated by tiny people. i went to the pool and tried this technique, and it worked, really helping me to focus on my movement in the moment, and not on my time or lap count. i still use this visualisation technique today.

but it never occured to me that my several dozen readers would not have also read this children's autobiography, a book exclusive to members of the scholastic book club.

it also did not occur to me that thorpey is not only known as a famous australian swimmer, but also as a famous australian gay swimmer. if i had remembered this, i would have not followed this sentence with the next two sentences.

“operated by tiny crewmembers, also in speedos”

every piece of writing in the yiz county public digest goes through at least five edits over a period of several months. with each edit, i may take out some stale ideas and add in some cool ones, but occasionally, these cool new ideas turn out to become the stale ones, and worse, rotten ideas. the joke ‘also in speedos’ was added to the end of the sentence at the very last minute, right before printing, and at the time, my thinking was this:

1. it would be funny for men on a submarine to be wearing speedos because the whole point of travelling in a submarine is you don't get wet.
2. if the swimmer is wearing speedos and all the crewmembers are tiny versions of himself, then it would make sense they be wearing speedos too.
3. wearing speedos in the wrong context is universally humourous, but very embarrassing for the speedos-wearer. by visualising his body being operated by a crew of other speedos-wearers, the character feels less alone.

not once did i think “ian thorpe is gay. therefore, the men in his visualisations should wear speedos”.

this logic was not my intention, but i am aware that for the average reader, this is the only logic they have to hand, for i had not given them the necessary breadcrumbs to make the same connections.

while i chose this joke for reasons of incongruity theory (1), bergsonian theory (2), and general feelgood empathy theory (3), the only theory of laughter that readers can identify is the nastiest theory, superiority, and thus the nastiness of the "superior" author is reaffirmed by the very next sentence:

“pulled their levers and pumped their bellows”

please note i did NOT intend this phrase to sound like a euphemism. i did not intend any rude connotations at all. i was only thinking pragmatically.

if you picture a submarine in the victorian era, made of brass and powered with steam or clockwork or whatever, what do you imagine the crewmembers doing? pressing glowing buttons? swiping their ipads? checking google maps? no!! levers and bellows are the only periodically appropriate workstations i can think of, and 'pull' and 'pump' are the only verbs that go with those nouns.

i asked the internet what other actions 1800s submariners might have done, and i was exactly right. other than pumping and pulling, the only other things to be done is the silent checking of things: are we going in the right direction, do the candles need replacing, has rodney gotten over the seasickness? actions much too passive to be visualised in the frenzy of a swimming race.

so it is very unfortunate that my previous two sentences have framed this factual sentence as intentionally rude, and worse than rude, the joke is cheap. once again i am sorry for what i didn't think about.

and perhaps you think i am reading into my own writing too much, or that by bringing undue attention to the unintentional homophobia, i am being even more homophobic. well. all i can try to tell you is, i hold NO fear, contempt, hatred or superiority towards anyone, except perhaps the normies, but even for them, not that much, its not their fault they were born or raised to be uninteresting, and also, it was an accident, and also, im sorry.

and HERE is where you can make the corrections:

turn to page 45 and with some tippex or correction tape erase the words “ian thorpe” and then, with a pen or pencil, replace them with “osmosis jones”.

this will make more dennotative sense to the average reader and also remove the unintended connotations, however, the problem now is that the reference to osmosis jones, an animated film released in 2001, will be highly unrelatable to most people... yet it happens to be the most appropriate option.

other options were:

• “meet dave” visualisation method, referring to the 2008 eddie murphy movie where a big murphy is controlled by little murphies. this would suit the tone of the story, but unfortunately this reference would be anachronistic with my 2006 setting.
• “fritz kahn” visualisation method, referring to his 1926 artwork “man as industrial palace”, which would be visually accurate, but my eleven year old self would not know who that was, nor would he have read deleuze and guitarri.
• “ratattouille” visualisation method. again, this movie came out a year after my story, but there is a chance i might have seen a trailer before then. however, the guy’s body in this movie is controlled by a rat pulling the strings of his hair. this makes sense for cooking a meal, but not for swimming. why would a rat be an expert at breathstroke?

if you have any better replacements for ian thorpe, please feel free to write them over the tippex. alternatively, you can keep ian thorpe as the rightful olympic hero he is, a legend in many regards, and simply white-out the sentences that follow.

i will leave the decision with you.