Everyone needs to go grocery shopping. Even David Blatt. Let's go grocery shopping with David Blatt.

In recent days, Cavaliers coach David Blatt nearly cost his team a playoff win by calling a timeout when he had none left. LeBron James sank the game-winning shot, but only because he made Blatt change the play originally drawn up. This comes after a report early in the season that Blatt's assistant coach often calls timeouts behind his back. Despite coaching an elite basketball team, Blatt is sometimes roundly ignored.

After the Cavs' Game 5 win Tuesday night, they have won the NBA Championship probably, and Blatt now has the time to get some grocery shopping done. Here is a story told in three acts, titled:

GROCERY SHOPPIN' WITH DAVID BLATT!

ACT I.

Pilot. What's the stench about back there? Smells horrible.
Inventory manager. It's all this fruit and all these eggs. The fruit has gone rotten, and the eggs are long expired.
Pilot. Well, throw them out.
Inventory. Like, throw them out of the plane? Now?
Pilot. Yes.
Inventory. And, like, not in boxes or anything? Just pick them up and just throw them all out of the plane by themselves?
Pilot. Yes.
Inventory manager. Okay. I will do that in just a minute.
Pilot. Thank you. They smell terrible, and they are gross.

ACT II.

Given how much we talk about the future, and how excited we tend to be about it, it seems strange to define it as perpetually, barely out of reach, to deny ourselves the ability to experience it in the present, dying on the hill of a dictionary. Why can't the future be now?

David Blatt is walking through these magic automatic sliding doors, and that's the way he feels about it. The doors don't see him, and they hit him in the sides, because he is David Blatt. And that is the story of how David Blatt enters the supermarket on this day. It is 9:17 a.m., and the day is an apple round and unbitten.

David Blatt learned long ago that a two-handled grocery basket doesn't demand that both hands carry it. Instead, he swings the handles together and neatly carries the basket in a single, closed fist. A man can only tumble through this world for so long without picking up a trick or two.

Coffee. He navigates the little tiled ventricles of the grocery store not with a compass, not with intent, but with whichever stubborn instinct tips the daffodil toward the light of the sun. He just knows. He just knows, and now he is walking heel-to-toe toward the coffee aisl-- oh shit, oh shit, oh God, someone is already standing in front of the coffee.

David Blatt's shoes make little squeaks with each of his uncertain pivots at the foot of aisle 10. He grimaces, and musters a pilot light within himself. The engines inside him belch and burn, and he places one foot in front of the other toward a shelf where someone is already shopping. He is going to say, "excuse me," and shop where someone else is already shopping, even if that might mean reaching across them or suffering eye contact. The moment is here.

The moment is missed; the winds of circumstance and fear blow him further up the aisle, and he finds himself in front of the tea and powdered Crystal Light. He pretends to want some. "Let's see here," he says, and drops a box of tea into his basket. He doesn't drink tea. He doesn't look at the box. No creature knows its flavor, and neither does the Lord, who stopped going shopping with David Blatt years ago.

David Blatt steadies his rudder and prepares for a hairpin turn around the ninth-aisle end cap, which, in voyages prior, have taken him to the Baking Needs aisle. Oil. He is out of cooking oil. As he rounds the Cheez-Its of the end cap, they draw back as a curtain would to reveal a crowd of shoppers toward the other end.

This expedition will not survive two consecutive failures, and David Blatt knows this. He cannot find solace, and now the agents of poor ideas crowd his soul. "Maybe I don't need cooking oil." He dwells upon the possibility of cooking without oil. He thinks of a fried egg growing crunchy, gluing itself to a skillet. He thinks of eggplant, unsavory, wilted like a rotten apple. He thinks upon a hamburger patty, boiled, gray as all forgotten stones. David Blatt grimaces and steps forth.

He has daylight, and grabs a bottle of Wesson without incident. He turns to find another gaggle of shoppers entering the aisle. To breach their barrier would require an arsenal of excuse-mes and let's-see-heres he does not wield. They stop, and hold a conversation. He is marooned in the middle of the aisle. He must wait.

What is a good thing for a man to do? What is a good thing for a person to do in the Baking Needs aisle? He needs not for baking, nor does he want for it. He must create the illusion of purpose. Add to the inventory. Add to the inventory. What will I do with these items? I don't need them. Add to the inventory.

David Blatt fills his basket, but remains trapped by the walls of humanity at each end. He can only compare brands of flour for so long; there are only so many motes of difference separating Gold Medal flour and AlwaysSave flour. Stand there any longer and he'll look like a real goofus-maloofus, a grade-A jimmyjohn. They'll all see him and point and laugh, phalanxes of mockery.

David Blatt pulls out his phone and fakes a call. It is his signature move, and his only one.

Hey, man!
Hey, how's it going. Good to hear from you.
Yeah, if you look at the one, you should uh, documents.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well that's what I was saying, is that if you look at the document.
Don't worry about it. I am your boss.
[laughter]
I am in charge.
I love you.
I am the boss.
I am the boss.

The phone rings, loudly, while he is holding it up to his ear. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. His panicked fingers fail to mute the phone. An un-panicked David Blatt would know what to do. This is a lesser, shit-scared, marooned-in-the-grocery David Blatt, awash in Baking Needs and terror, and he is suffocating the ring by pressing the speaker against the base of his palm. "I don't know why it's," he offers with a warble, perhaps even to one of the people he's speed-walking past. "I don't know it's something wrong, I don't know why. Phone is, hold on."

David Blatt careers through the barrier of shoppers and carts with all the urgency and pageantry of an injured cargo plane limping to its runway, and like that plane, he must dump his cargo. His inventory, a smokescreen all along, is of no use to him. Hours from now, the night stockers will find canola oil behind the diapers, and a can of vinegar -- a can? How did he find vinegar in a can? How poorly can a man shop? -- rolled under a magazine rack. He drops a bag of flour on the baseboard beneath the mascara; it thumps and offers a little puff of white smoke through the folds of its paper.

The registers come into view, and so does an uncompromising truth: there is no exit but through one of the cash lanes. He bubbles over with dread at the thought: this is one of those grocery stores. He must stand in line with an empty basket. They will see through his basket and know it is empty; they will see into his soul and know his failure.

The queue clicks forward; he is fifth in line, then fourth, then third; it would serve as an extraordinary lesson in mathematics for a David Blatt less terrified. He must put something in his basket. He must not arrive at the conveyer belt without tribute to offer.

There is a DVD rack. He takes one, any one.

There are a thousand warning lights within the unnavigable spacecraft that is David Blatt, and this one is blinking, "YOU WENT TO THE GROCERY STORE JUST TO BUY A MOVIE, THIS WILL BE WEIRD." It buzzes and shakes and is about to fall out of its console. David Blatt is next in line. He solemnly sets the DVD on the conveyer belt and frames it with a divider bar on each side: no one owns this failure but me.

David Blatt wants only to pay and pass without incident. He does not want to talk about the DVD, which he has visited a grocery store for the sake of buying all by itself. The cashier holds it aloft and squints.

Cashier. John Stone, huh?
David Blatt. Jesse Stone.
Cashier. John Stone. Oh that's right, Jesse Stone. Jesse Stone, it says. Starring Tom Selleck, it says, No Remorse. I don't know what he'd even have remorse about anyway.
David Blatt. I don't know.
Cashier. Could be because he's so dang big. Bigger than the town. Lots of hassle for everybody else.
David Blatt. That's true.
Cashier. I mean, look at the box.
David Blatt. I did.

Cashier. He's bigger than the whole dang town! Look! LOOKIT IT!
David Blatt. I am! I'm not disagreeing with you!
Cashier. LOOKIT!

David Blatt believes that through no doing of his own, he may now be in a fight. He is happy to lose every fight; it is what he is for. He is driven by the desire to get things over with; he lusts for the absence of hassle.

David Blatt runs out of the store without the DVD. He is in the parking lot, he is in daylight. It is the least successful grocery store trip the world has ever seen, but he feels as though he has won. For David Blatt, to have reached the next moment is to have won, and all else that fades in the periphery is for lesser souls to behold.

ACT III.

A bunch of rotten eggs and fruit and shit fall out of the sky and get all over David Blatt.

Jon Bois and Spencer Hall love video games, and hate video games that are bad.

Destiny is a terrible video game

by Jon Bois

I was about 10 hours through Destiny when I let out a big, long, "holy shit," tossed my controller on the floor, shut off my Xbox, and never played the game again. It wasn't out of frustration over dying at the hands of some boss. It happened on the middle of the Whatever Planet, while I was trotting from one loitering committee of dumb, easily killable aliens to the next in order to rack up points and level up. I'm in my 30s now, when I am more acutely aware of the value and finitude of time than I used to be, and a waste of time this thorough -- make-believe grunt work -- is a legitimately depressing experience.

Destiny both represents and precipitates a slow death of the heart. Ostensibly presented, as is every video game, as a refuge from our work and obligations, it instead re-packages that work and those obligations, rejoicing in them, blissfully conflating "doing stuff" with "fun." It doesn't want to say anything, nor does it want you to express yourself or see your handiwork or fingerprints in anything. It is a profoundly shitty video game better suited for the idle subroutines of a dreaming, hibernating console than any human being.

Since you, the player, are in this dream, you must make sense to the soulless automaton having this dream, and so you are assigned Roomba-like objectives: get a better gun! Get a better better gun! Get a scarf that stops bullets (?)!

We don't hear much from stamp collectors anymore, and as it turns out, this is where they went. They are all playing Destiny, heaping the dead livestock of time upon the pyre in tribute to The Collection Of Things.

This has worked fine in plenty of games through the years, from Deus Ex to some of the Rainbow Six games to Far Cry, the crucial difference being that those games let me feel some element of ownership of what happened. They did this via challenging me to strategize, think, prepare and learn something whenever I died. When I beat a boss in Destiny on the fifth try, it wasn't because I had gotten better or figured anything out. It was because I went back to a level I had already played, pushed a button at a gaggle of dumb aliens until they died, accumulated more of Destiny's various currencies, and came back to the boss with some slightly more effective weapons. In other words, I clocked the hours and got my paycheck. To play Destiny is to be patched from department to department until you end up with the person who can fix your Verizon bill.

The story, of course, is barely present. (When we finish a level, our little Flight of the Navigator-lookin'-ass sidekick remarks, on multiple occasions, "We have to tell the others! They won't believe this!" What "others" could you possibly be talking about? The NPC merchants who just mutter and grunt at you? There are no "others," Dinklage. The people who made this game forgot to add them.)

I'm usually fine with this in a video game, because I take it as a cue to tell my own story, however big or small, meaningful or trivial. Hey, just let me tell a story about flanking these guys, finding a hill, picking them off with a rifle, employing a strategy that mattered. That counts as a story.

Destiny clearly can't or won't tell one itself, so damn it, just -- here. Here. Let me do it. Nope. It does try to fake like it's giving you choices: would you like to play this level you can't beat yet, or go replay this world you've already been to, full of the exact same shit, and this is honestly your only real option? Would you like to equip the gun rated 65, or the gun rated 57? More compelling dilemmas are found in the tabletop games at the dang Cracker Barrel.

There are people who will tell you that 10 hours aren't enough, that "the game gets good at level 20." These are the people who felt the first dozen-plus hours were worth their time, so I do not believe them.

And strangely, there are so many of those people not to believe. Destiny is an immensely popular game. It's a boring game that asks you to wander through the cockles of its boring little heart, and incentivizes you to keep doing it with the promise of ... more of the same shit. It doesn't want you to think or plan or improve, it just wants its literal buttons literally pushed. It's a game of bean-counting and thing-collecting and checklist-filling.

Y'all dummies did this at work all day, and now you come home and play this what-you-did-all-day-you-goofus simulator. There should be games coming out all the time like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Civilization, or Silent Service, or Red Dead Redemption, or Portal -- works of gaming that challenge you, make you feel something, make you obsess over strategy, let you tell your own story.

Those games are rare, and spiritually sterile games like Destiny are common, because y'alls' bad tastes and badly-spent money are feeding that monster. Y'all suckers are fouling this up for the rest of us, showing up in the millions to buy a $60 cup-and-ball toy. Please stop it.

★ ★ ★

More from Jon Bois:The strange baseball career of Koo Dae-Sung

★ ★ ★

Watch Dogs is a terrible video game

by Spencer Hall

Watch Dogs is not just a bad game. It's a misbegotten game, a game whose very skeleton is stupid from the DNA up, a game born wrong from faulty genes and given a terrible upbringing into an adulthood of ignoramus achievement and quick obscurity. It should be destroyed, because it committed the one crime a game should never, ever commit: it bored me.

This doesn't mean it wasn't successful. A lot of shitty things are successful. Watch Dogs sold a mountain of copies on hype alone, prompting trade sites to suggest things like "Watch Dogs could dethrone GTA V as the best open-world game," and "Watch Dogs definitely will not collapse in a pile of unfulfilled expectations, leaving you, the game buyer, urinating directly into your Xbox One as a literal reflection of its piss-poor quality and concept."  It was going to be the CYBER GTA franchise. The concept alone was enough to hook suckers on eight million units sold in the first two weeks.

But that second week: oh, sales dropped 81 percent (as they usually do, even with big titles) and then to a trickle, and then the game just sort of disappeared quietly beneath the waters of public consciousness. This is mostly because people like me ran screaming to anyone who would listen about how much this game sucked, and got worse the more you played it. "Diminishing returns" doesn't really cover the Watch Dogs experience. After two hours, you began to have doubts. After five, you experience open antipathy for the game and its protagonist, Aiden Pearce, a hacker-vigilante straight from the most masturbatory fantasies of any dimwitted twelve year-old smart enough to know that computers do stuff, but too dumb or lazy to learn code or computer science.

You know that a dim 12-year-old was the target audience because a) I am a dim-witted 12-year-old, and bought this game on Day 1, and b) because the vigilante's big move is wearing a long coat no matter what the weather is. When danger and corruption need to taste vengeance, remember: it can only come at the hands of someone sweating profusely, and fumbling around in one of 22 unnecessary pockets for his mighty cellphone. He also pulls a scarf over his face when he means business. Aiden Pearce is a walking Linkin Park song and that is not a compliment.

The main character speaks in a low Christian Bale Batman voice about STOP THREATENING HIS FAMILY a lot. This, combined with the overcoat, hack back story, and terrible dialogue, force you to give up on Aiden Pearce character approximately 38 seconds into the game.

If you don't, then the bloody swath he cuts across Chicago in the name of justice or avenging his dead niece or whatever does, because if you're going to have to kill hundreds of people in a video game, you need to have the right vehicle for completely amoral behavior by proxy. After hearing five lines of Trevor's dialogue in GTA V, I would have accepted any degree of murder done in his form. After spending a few hours with Aiden Pearce, you see him kill an obvious bad dude and think "dude, you are such a dick sometimes." He's not charming enough to be a psychopath, and not convincing enough for vengeance, and thus becomes a random asshole blowing up people with his cellphone.

There's more. The game takes place in Chicago, a city whose buildings, unique architecture, and broad lakeside geographies are lovingly rendered. Unfortunately, there are no people in it, or at least not the people you encounter in games like Red Dead Redemption, GTA V, or even Sleeping Dogs, the extremely lovable GTA in Hong Kong ripoff where any random encounter with a bystander threatened to break out into an all out kung-fu riot. Chicago isn't the most interesting city to encounter at street level anyway being flat and generally well-gridded; putting it in a video game makes the effect so much worse, and all without the redemption of some charming fat dude in a Blackhawks jersey turning on you fast and threatening to beat you to death with a pipe. Chicago in Watch Dogs without its people, or at least their personality, became nothing more than a three-dimensional Architectural Digest spread.

And yet there's so much more. The driving is bad -- like, Crazy Taxi bad, and without the aforementioned classic's gleeful mayhem. Every car turns into a variably powered golf cart. Random hacker challenges came out of nowhere, and took your attention away from the eight other boring, tedious side quests constantly barking up at you. The script is a rejected CSI: Cyber episode. The fighting dynamics of the game are mediocre, and get into the realm of unintentionally hilarious once you start trying to hack into the environment to fry careless henchmen as they pass by circuit boxes. Doing this wrong ultimately became my favorite part of the game: setting off explosions, watching henchmen say "whoa" and then laughing because bad timing and dull henchmen are literally the only humorous or lifelike thing in this game.

The one advantage Watch Dogs was supposed to have was "hacking," which sounded cool until you realized the worst error of the game came in its central concept as a game. Watch Dogs asked you to interact not with people, but with cameras, phones, wiring, circuit boxes, power grids and gates, all done through the portal of your phone. So let's just point out how bad that is by chaining out the full "player to subject" workflow involved here.

You ---> Xbox ---> Aiden Pearce a muttering horrible Linkin Park song come to life ---> Aiden Pearce's phone ---> fake computer in a video game you've hacked into ---> Thing you want hacked ---> Person you're probably trying to kill while yelling "MY FAMILY, NOT MY FAMILY!"

There is zero immediacy to any of this. In any game where Person A so badly wants to beat Person B's ass for doing them wrong, the great satisfaction comes in eventually getting to beat Person B's ass, or tricking them, or figuring out the mystery behind how your ass came to be kicked and what plotting can get your foot in best kicking proximity to their very deserving ass.

Watch Dogs, though, puts interactions four, five and sometimes even six degrees away from the original player. It's meta-lonerism, the loneliest, most isolated and least personal interaction I've ever experienced playing a video game. If that was the subtle point of the emotional terrorists behind this game, then fine: millions of copies later, that's a firm mission accomplished written on the corporate whiteboard. But I don't think it was. I think this game was dumb from the start, and just bloomed into a giant, messy bag of dumbness the creators threw out into the street from the eighth window without looking.

In summary: Watch Dogs is about a boring, unemployed, sociopathic dipshit with a phone and bad taste in clothes. It is trash and I paid sixty bucks for it.

Let's hear it for food! It seems like more people are eating food each and every day, and the Memphis Grizzlies are no exception. These are the things they eat.

Carpenter's pasta

submitted by Mike Conley

Ingredients:
1 box dry fettuccine noodles
Tap water

While bringing water to a rolling boil, stack the noodles together and break them in half. Form another single stack with the broken noodles and break them in half again. Continue to repeat this process until the noodles are one inch long and the stack is as wide as a dinner plate.

Pour some noodles in your mouth. Swish in some boiling water.

Crunchy eggs Benedict

submitted by Kosta Koufos

Ingredients:
Six jumbo grade-A eggs
Meat from the damn store
Biscuit

Grease the biscuit by wiping a bicycle chain with it, then toss into a preheated oven. Set the eggs on a cutting board and tenderize them with a rolling pin. Scoop what you've got there into a preheated skillet and cook on high for 78 to 79 minutes.

Get some of that dang meat you got and cook it. Assemble your ingredients eggs Benedict style and stop bothering me.

Hot brown

submitted by Russ Smith

Ingredients:
Bread

I picked this one up during my days as a Cardinal. It's a Louisville classic! Blow your nose into a piece of bread.

Astronaut porridge

submitted by Marc Gasol

Ingredients:
Lava rocks
Ice

Take a bunch of lava rocks from the landscaping in your neighbor's yard. If you do not have any neighbors with lava rocks in their landscaping, you will need to go to either Memphis or the 1980s.

Any ice will do, but the older, the better. Try to find ice in the freezer of a vacation home that hasn't been occupied since last summer. If you're lucky, you'll run across ice cubes that have sat in a tin ice tray in an ice box since the 1940s. The taste of old ice is unmistakable. Pour in a bowl with the lava rocks. Eat with four chopsticks, two in each hand. They are also good finger food if you have some of those.

Memphis salad

submitted by Zach Randolph

Ingredients:
A lot of beef
A truck-hijack of 3-in-1 oil lubricant

Commandeer the truck to your backyard and empty all the 3-in-1 oil into a giant drum -- you should have 50 to 60 gallons worth. Drop in a match and wait for the fire to stop. Drop in your beef in two-pound chunks, and allow them to fry for 20 minutes. While beef is frying, argue with a friend about whether you could shoot down a helicopter with a pistol, whether go-karts are street legal and/or Wolverine's past. Fish beef out with a shovel. Kick over the drum; oil is good for the dirt.

A kite made of asphalt

submitted by Courtney Lee

Ingredients:
Lots of asphalt
18 cinder blocks
26 Datsun hub caps
Every heavy object you own or can borrow
String

Well hell, that's not even food. Well hell, that's not even gonna fly. Well, shit. Leave me alone.

Very old Zima

submitted by Vince Carter

Ingredients:
Very old Zima

It's still good. It can't go bad. It's from the earth.

Fool's toast

submitted by Beno Udrih

Ingredients:
Bread

It is bread.

Eggplant parmesan

submitted by Jon Leuer

Punch a cat.

It's 1982, and Larry Walters of North Hollywood is sitting in a lawn chair. He has a BB gun, a radio and some sandwiches. He is floating 15,000 feet above Los Angeles. He is in trouble.

Welcome to Pretty Good, a YouTube show about stories I think are pretty good.

This story concerns Larry Walters, also known as Lawn Chair Larry. He went on his adventure 33 years ago, and most do not remember him. Most who do remember him as a legend. Enjoy! This video costs $785 to view.

Written, illustrated, produced and narrated by Jon Bois.

CB audio recording acquired via markbarry.com, a top source for original research on Larry Walters' flight.
GoPro footage: Kristoffer Örstadius/YouTube, sivrot/YouTube

Song credits:
"Dark Star" by Poliça
"Toccata" by Jaga Jazzist
"See Me On Top" by Big K.R.I.T.
"Hawk" by Broadcast
"Blame It On The Tetons" by Modest Mouse

Previously on Pretty Good: Oh my God, they gave Koo Dae-Sung a baseball bat.

Please rank the characters of Friends in order from best to worst.

We are on a quest to determine the best and worst characters from Friends. If y'all would be so kind, please fill out this form. I will crunch the data and present it later today.

Feel free to argue in the comments below, although there will be another opportunity for that later today. Enjoy your form and stay safe!

One thousand of you volunteered to answer some questions about 'Friends.' After crunching the data, it would appear as though Ross is the worst.

This morning, I asked a bunch of nice people to rank seven Friends characters -- Phoebe, Monica, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Ross, and Gunther -- in order of best to worst. To properly understand who likes who, I also asked respondents to note their gender, passion for the show and overall confidence in their answer -- just in case any particular trends emerged.

No, not really, save for the conclusion that Ross is the worst. Lots of people think Ross is the worst. Of the 1,000 applicants, 131 admitted on the very form itself that they didn't really know what they were talking about, and that their answers should not be counted. So, accordingly, I tossed those out, leaving 869 meaningful surveys. In all, just over half of those surveys -- 50.7 percent -- listed Ross as the very worst character.

DISCUSS, IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO

Throughout the world, over 1,000 people eat lunch each and every day. Perhaps you're one of them! Leave a comment below describing your lunch, and Jon will rate it on a scale of 1 to 10.

Your lunch is not really about you or your personal nutrition. It is about me, Jon, whose duty it is to judge the lunch you have eaten.

This is the first day of Lunch Judgment in the year 2015. In case you are new here, this is how it works:

1. You leave a comment below describing the lunch you ate, or are eating, today.

2. Time permitting, I will reply to your comment with a 1-through-10 rating of your lunch. I will also do my best to explain my ruling. I will certainly not be able to rate all your lunches, but I will get to as many as I can.

3. You accept my ruling as objective, absolute, and superseding of all legislative rulings at the federal, state, and municipal levels. You may also dole your own rulings of the lunches at hand, but since you are not the Lunch Judge, any such rulings will be meaningless.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will begin by assessing a rating of my own lunch.

GO.

After complaining about Destiny and Watch Dogs, it's only fair for Jon and Spencer to talk about games they love. Jon loves Far Cry 4, and Spencer loves Far Cry 4.

Previously: Jon and Spencer hate Destiny and Watch Dogs. Haaaaaate them.

Jon Bois: I loved Far Cry 4

I'm somewhere in northern Kyrat, and I'm playing out the funniest, weirdest, loudest, stupidest, and most chaotic scene I have ever witnessed in a video game. I am sprinting in circles. I am out of bullets and ideas and everything has gone wrong and I am totally fucked.

Seven or eight minutes ago, I swear, the world of Far Cry 4 made sense. I was crouched behind a tree just outside this enemy outpost. I had a sniper rifle and assault rifle full of ammo, a few grenades, and some bait for luring away any wild animals. Through my binoculars, I was noting the patrols of every guard in the outpost. This guy walks circles around this building. This guy walks along the wall, but stops every time to talk to his buddy. This guy's asleep. There are probably a dozen of them. I am one guy trying to take down an outpost of at least a dozen men all by myself. I've spent the last hour trying to do this on the "hard" setting, and failing, and this does not bother me at all.

Moments like these are, to me, what elevate video games from forgettable time-wasting to fascinating experiences. The market is flooded with video games built with the idea that getting better at a game ought to be a product of putting in grunt work and clocking the hours, rather than actually getting better. There is no handier example of this than Destiny, a graphically marvelous celebration of stamp-collecting and errand-running that is one of the worst video games I have ever played. Games like Destiny aren't really about you getting better. They're about you appeasing whatever bean-counter of a god runs this game until you earn enough brownie points to earn a more powerful gun. In so doing, the game gets easier. The game gets to do all the evolving; you're just the jerk pushing the buttons.

There are plenty of things to collect in Far Cry 4, but whenever I succeed in taking down one of these outposts — there are dozens of them in this beautiful, terrifying micronation — it's always because I finally got smart. I had to take down guys in the right order, stay as quiet as I could, sneak over and shut off an alarm. This is the most surefire way to get me invested in a game: give me total ownership of whether, and how, I succeed. I could have done it ten different ways, but this is the way I did it.

The outpost missions are just one of many, many gameplay elements Far Cry 4 offers. You also hunt bears, climb ancient crumbling towers, break out of prisons, grapple up and down unforgiving cliffsides, and stagger through fluorescent LSD freakouts full of demons and magical tiger-gods. You assassinate agents of the totalitarian state with your sniper rifle, or maybe with the bumper of a 1990s-era minivan. You dork around in a little gyrocopter, hang off the edge, and spray bad guys indiscriminately with a knockoff Uzi. It really feels as though, at every turn, the makers of this game paused every five minutes. "Is this fun?" they would ask. If not, they'd toss it, and if so, they'd tweak it until it was more fun.

This is pretty clearly a game made with love, and its most stunning achievement is that all the little gameplay experiences that make up these games — intense and casual, demanding and relatively easy, driving with super-simplified controls and planning a one-person invasion — are all perfectly calibrated. They made the gameplay as simple and accessible as they could until they reached the point at which the depth of the game was compromised, and then they backed off. I imagine that is very difficult to do, by virtue of how rarely I see it pulled off with this level of mastery. I think one can walk away from Far Cry 4 with the stupendously wrong impression that video games are easy to make.

It seems unfair that a game as well-considered as this can also produce the batshit chaotic nonsense other games would kill for but can only aspire to.

I'm sprinting laps through this God-forsaken outpost. Sometimes I'll sprint by an unprepared guard; he yells "HEY" and I'm around the corner before he can draw his weapon. A lot of them are chasing me. So is at least one lion and a couple of wolves. Occasionally I'll make a lap and see that the lion is feasting on one of the guys who was chasing me a minute ago.

I run inside a hut and see a giant dude in heavy armor stagger toward me. In a state of panic, I inadvertently hit the button that makes me throw a little pebble. It bounces off his armor. Dink, it goes. WHOOOSH, goes his flamethrower. I am now on fire, desperately trying to pat it out, still sprinting, still chased by kleptocrats and wild animals. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH goes the alarm. "More reinforcements coming!" says the radio. "Thirty seconds out, from the west!" No, no, those are their reinforcements.

So now I am chased by, I don't know, 25 bad guys and some wild animals. An elephant has showed up in the outpost. Why? I don't know! He just fuckin' wandered in here, because clearly this scene was missing an elephant, stomping and trumpeting, either delighted or furious at what is happening.

You can't round up any group of 25 humans without ending up with at least one really dumb guy. That really dumb guy mans the mortar gun on one of the roofs and just starts letting it rip like a lawnmower with a bad starter. KABLOOOOSH. The mortars always fall and explode where I was four seconds ago. KABLOOOOOSH. If I stand still, I am dead. I am cursed to keep sprinting until I am dead.

I don't know how much time passes, exactly. All of a sudden, the mortars stop. Everything is quiet. I stop and turn, and I find that the mortar guy, in his indiscriminate stupor, has killed just about all his buddies, and probably himself.

There is one guy left. He opens fire at me. One of the wolves sprints out of a nearby building, takes him down, and eats him to death as he screams.

I won.

★ ★ ★

More from Jon Bois:Larry Walters' flying lawn chair adventure

★ ★ ★

Spencer Hall: I loved Far Cry 4

As I played, I kept a running list of ways I died in this game. I've never done that before, but Far Cry 4 made me do a lot of things I'd never done in a video game before.

Eaten by dogs

Eaten by wolves

fall out of hang glider

You can't really explain a lot of what's going on in Far Cry 4. Explanation ruins almost everything, but it really ruins a game built on the premise that a twenty-something dude with no military training could be dropped in the middle of DEFINITELY-NOT-NEPAL and immediately begin wrecking shop with no fewer than 65 highly specialized forms of weaponry.

That doesn't sound too different from other lurid shooters, you say? Well no, it doesn't, at least until I tell you about the demon-spirit world you have to conquer with the help of a spirit tiger you can command with your mind, or the mad side missions you run for a demented fashion designer named "Mr. Chiffon" who has zero respect for endangered species status. These challenges are called "Kyrat Fashion Week," and they involve shooting a carnivorous demon fish with a grenade launcher from a cliff while gunmen periodically empty a .50 cal into you from a gunboat. This is a SIDE MISSION.

shot by sniper

eaten by dogs

Rolled out of truck, died

blew up self with C4

I destroyed endangered species with high-powered weaponry for boots. I pushed a man in a cage perched over a cliff to his death as he screamed for one more chance to talk to his daughter. (He deserved it, but still: I did that.) I walked willingly into the tent of two known and sketchy drug dealers who had previously drugged me and left me for dead in the Kyrati wilderness. They drugged me again. My character woke up hallucinating demons in the middle of a very real forest fire. When I got out of the forest fire, I was immediately shot at by random gunmen, who were then themselves attacked by golden eagles the size of Pteranodons.

Once, I sat in a bell tower's staircase baiting bears with meat and picking them off with a hunting bow for ten minutes until the entire room was filled with a six or seven foot thick layer of black bears.

I did surreal, terrible things in this game.

fell off tower to death

eaten by bear

shot by sniper

shot by sniper

failed to open parachute on wingsuit

Far Cry 4 was fair, though. It did surreal and terrible things to me, but also to everyone in the game. Wingsuiting is a perfectly logical way to commute through the open world of Kyrat. (This kind of logic is baseline normal in Far Cry 4; weird goes into a very, very weird territory from there, and it is a long, long way up to those heights.) On what I thought was an innocuous flight over to something I needed to kill, I decided to land and try to sneak up on my quarry from a distance.

I hit the wrong button and hit the ground at 160 miles per hour. I did not die, but was really close to it, and hit the health syringe a few times to get back to full health for exactly two seconds. Because I landed in a pack of wolves. Wolves that immediately began snapping at my arteries while I frantically spun in a circle emptying a shotgun into the bushes. I set them on fire with a flamethrower-- because again, that makes sense in this game, at least until they attack you WHILE THEY'RE ON FIRE AND SET YOU ABLAZE.

I finally killed them all, and stood satisfied and only slightly charred in a patch of scorched earth on the edge of a scenic Himalayan cliffside.

Then an angry yak blindsided me, butted me off the cliff, and I died.

shot by soldiers

shot by soldiers

set on fire by ninjas

stabbed by ethereal blue demon

stabbed by ethereal blue demon

stabbed by ethereal blue demon

stabbed by ethereal blue demon

Sometimes it doesn't even involve you. Late in the game, I had to go back to a base to help defend my compatriots' territory. When I got there there was the usual firefight, but with a special bonus at the end: a pack of wild dogs was ripping up one of my soldiers, and in need of help. But before I could act, I heard the whooosh-slip of an RPG round from somewhere to my left, and in the dark I saw a flash of yellow flame and heard honestly one of the most ungodly sound effects in a video game ever.

Somewhere there's a file in Ubisoft's vault labeled "the exact sound of ten wolves and one man being blasted to Valhalla by a rocket launcher." Like Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man, I have listened to the unlistenable, and command you to never hear it yourself. (And that's how the AI acts toward itself. What it does to you is charitable by comparison.)

set on fire by demon

set on fire by demon

set on fire by demon

set on fire by demon

set on fire by demon

There's a villain you end up liking way more than anyone else in the game, and allies you desperately want to vaporize the instant you meet them, and all the morally complicating factors a lot of shooters sort of half-assedly throw at you. That's all there, but there's a lot more extremely mean-spirited fun, too. Did you know you're told the solution to the game in the first ten minutes of the game, and that if you just follow directions you'll be taken to the spot where you leave your mother's ashes, which is why you were doing this in the first place? But you didn't, right, and just jumped straight to the shooting and mayhem and setting things on fire, because deep down this game knows you're not actually into solving problems with anything but a sniper rifle and a flame thrower?

clubbed to death with rifle butt

fell from cliff

clubbed to death

shot? I dunno, could have been like seven things at once

shot by sniper

shot by helicopter

shot by helicopter

blindsided by rifle butt while shooting at helicopter

And that the game-- through that malicious but extremely charming villain-- basically tricks you into becoming him? Which was the point of Far Cry 3, sure, and also a hundred other games and movies and stories where the camera pans to you and all but writes YOU ARE BECOME A DANG MONSTER on the screen? But here seems less like thunderous moral judgement, and is instead more like "Well, wasn't that a fun way to play a mean and fiery trick on you, and no fewer than three thousand unfortunate lackeys along the way?"

shot by helicopter

shot by sniper

fell off giant buddha

set on fire

fell off giant buddha

It has the widest streak of mean-ass humor of any video game I've ever played short of GTA V. I might have even enjoyed it more for that because the GTA series is so bound to a specific context. Far Cry 4 gets to start with a relatively blank slate, and make its jokes out of the brutal slapstick you walk into every five seconds or so. Yes, that Himalayan landscape is beautifully rendered, but you can't gaze too long because you just stepped on a honey badger and he's not happy about it. Yes, we know that's an African animal, and this is the Indian Subcontinent. But look, this is a game, and we'll put honey badgers in it if we want, along with rhinos, and yaks, and whatever else we want to arm the landscape with in order to turn every moment of the game into a potential predator/prey situation.

Sometimes I'd just sit on a cliff at sunset on my elephant and throw meat into an enemy camp until large, hungry predators ate everyone in the place. Inevitably, there would be the sound of gunfire cracking from across the valley, and the wreckage of the 87th gyrocopter I'd crashed into a cliffside in the background. It's always a beautiful morning in Kyrat, I'd think to myself, watching henchmen frantically swat at hordes of growling honey badgers swarming on them below.

And then I'd hear the rocket launcher go pffffffft out of the tube from somewhere in the bushes, and blow me and the elephant straight back to the respawn point.

trampled by rhino

eaten by wolves

rammed off cliff by two-ton cargo truck

eaten by wolves

fell to earth after chasing plane in wingsuit

clubbed to death by rifle butt

attacked by dog while on fire

For decades, water guns were benignly stupid things. Grown-ups still found a way to ruin them, because we ruin everything.

The water gun followed the chronological arc of the sports card and the comic book: it existed for decades upon decades, largely unchanged, and then the 1990s -- the decade that paved over everything, and has since itself been paved over like the cut-rate, busted-up Quikrete it was -- got its hands on it. These things mutated into garish, sardonic commentaries of themselves. They glued baseball cards to pieces of Omar Vizquel's sliced-up glove, and charged four bucks a pack for the privilege of finding it. They killed Superman, drew Hillary Clinton into his funeral scene, and expertly used the plot device of "nevermind y'all" to bring him back.

I am ten years old and walking up a hill in 1993 and wearing the water gun's analogue. See this thing Race Bannon is wearing in the closing credits of Jonny Quest?

That's what it looks like. I'm wearing this giant plastic tank of water like a backpack; I probably weigh 75 pounds, and this sucker has to weigh at least 20. A tube connects the tank to a giant, three-foot-long cannon. It shoots when you pump it, and it requires such strength to operate that I have to set it against the ground like a trench mortar and push down on it with both hands. I'm staggering up this hill, and I've lost the screw-on cap at the top of the tank, so water sloshes all over my back with every step. I'm drenching myself far more than I could ever drench anyone else.

That right there is the most useless moment of my life. Water-gunning is already a fundamentally useless institution: there isn't the evidence left by the paintball gun, or the finite ammunition of the Nerf gun, or the scorekeeping of the laser tag gun. There's no such thing as being a good shot, or avoiding being shot. The water gun is the simple joy of running through a sprinkler, repurposed and weaponized into a portable hurter of feelings. It's fucking dumb.

That, more or less, is the water pistol that remained almost entirely changed for generations. It was a useless instrument in the service of a useless thing, and as such, it was entirely appropriate. On average, it probably shot a foot and a half.

The thing that bridged the gap between this and my giant, weird-ass, Rob Liefeld-doodled dorkus-malorkus-ass too-big water cannon that I hunched and skulked under like a little-ass dipshit was the original Super Soaker 50.

It was a borderline miracle: a water gun that actually worked. After 50 or so years of nonsense, someone finally bothered to invent an actual decent gun. That someone is Lonnie Johnson, who helped invent the stealth bomber and later joined NASA to help send a probe to Jupiter, but all that junk comes after the table of contents in his Wikipedia entry. The lede is all about the Super Soaker.

Johnson teamed up with a businessman, Alvin Davis, who passed away Friday. They sold millions, and the Super Soaker became one of the most ubiquitous toys of all time. Being a water gun, it was a useless thing, but it was the best useless thing. God bless those guys for that.

The success of the 50 inspired an arsenal of increasingly weird and even-less-necessary water guns. If a gun is so heavy that it necessitates a guitar strap, it might be worth considering who or what this thing is even for, but introspection hasn't and won't ever halt the march of progress, and we ended up with a thing that resembled a cow's digestive tract as much as anything else.

Since the arc of the water gun was yoked to that of the sports card, they were inevitably adult-ified. Grown adults set up card shows, fretted over mint condition, monitored issues of Beckett like stock tickers, and used words like "investment" when talking about a hologram of Don Mattingly standing around in the batting circle with a bat with donuts on it sitting on his shoulder (action-packed!!!). The man-baby slouched in his folding chair, sneered at any kid who dared to look around, tilted his ass, farted, and ruined the baseball card.

The same was not quite true of the water gun, but dang if Laramie didn't evolve into a defense contractor. There were spring-powered guns, motorized pumps, and eventually the Constant Pressure System, which was important enough to achieve its own acronym. Super Soakers with the CPS carry the label:

CAUTION: USE WITH ADULT SUPERVISION

DO NOT SHOOT AT ANYONE'S FACE OR EYES

They cannot push the envelope any further than this unless they roll out Super Soaker: An Actual Gun.

Have you ever heard older folks sit around an AMVETS lodge? They love talking about the specifics of the instruments they used in their military days: the make and model of their chopper, the caliber of their rifle, the treads on their halftrack, all that. The Super Soaker is for those of us who were too chickenshit to join the military but still want to have those conversations. It is adult people like us who bother to populate the Super Soaker Wikipedia entry with things like:

The original version of the CPS 2000 was released in spring of 1996. Being the first water gun to ever sport a Constant Pressure System (CPS), it began what many refer to as the "third age of water wars" (the first beginning upon the release of the Super Soaker 50 in 1991 and the second after the Super Soaker 300 was released in 1993). The most powerful blaster of its time and still currently unmatched except by homemade water guns, it sports a 25X water output (1X equals 1.2 oz/second).

Don't read all that, just know that adults took the water gun -- something that was already completely stupid and pre-ruined -- and somehow re-ruined it.

I have only one pleasant memory of the water gun to share.

There was a kid in my neighborhood who got pretty much every toy he wanted. Among them were a pair of street hockey goals, which he'd drag away with him in pouty disgust in the middle of a game without letting us finish. Another was an awesome bicycle. When he received it on Christmas morning, he screamed and cried at his mom because it wasn't the color he wanted, and then he went outside and kicked his dog. He was a little shit.

Another of those toys was this ridiculous water gun headset. Like, you put it on like a pair of headphones, and flipped down this little plastic reticle over your eye like the world's dumbest monocle, and there was this little water gun mounted to the side. It was voice-activated. Whenever you shouted into the mic, the gun fired. It cost a lot of money, so he thought it was awesome and that he did not look like an enormous tool.

This headset-gun didn't care what you said, just that you made noise. Naturally, he decided to go with, "FIRE!", only he affected a sort of Cobra Commander-like accent. The cannon didn't have a lot of range, either, so he just frantically ran around, getting soaked by everyone, endlessly yelling, "FI-YAAAH! FI-YAAAH! FI-YAAAAAAH!"

Ten minutes into it, he's exhausted. He's breathing heavy and just kind of stomping around fatigued circles. He's been drenched several times over by everyone else, and he's not hitting anybody, because his gun sucks. He stopped saying, "FI-YAAAAH!" minutes ago. He's just offering this ceaseless sort of groan: "aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh." It's enough for the gun to keep firing, but the gun itself is running low on batteries, and there's nothing left but this pitiful little trickle of water. "aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh." It almost sounds like wailing.

If that isn't the funniest story you have ever heard, it's my fault for not telling it right.

Between the mascot assault, near-fatal coke habit, murder plot, three World Series rings, and going down as one of the worst goats in baseball history, Lonnie Smith's story is one of the most fascinating of the last few decades.

Lonnie Smith is mostly remembered for about a five-second span of the 1991 World Series, but his entire career is one of the most fascinating sports stories of my lifetime. This is the third episode of Pretty Good, a show about stories that are pretty good.

Written, narrated, illustrated, and produced by Jon Bois, who knows how to do stuff, but barely.

Music credits:

"'Cause I'm A Man" by Tame Impala
"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A.
"Beehive" by Dr. Lonnie Smith
"Disappearing" by The War On Drugs
"Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty
"Team" by Lorde

Other episodes of Pretty Good:

LARRY WALTERS HAS DROPPED HIS PISTOL AT 16,000 FEET, AND IS TOTALLY SCREWED.

OH MY GOD, THEY GAVE KOO DAE-SUNG A BASEBALL BAT.

Are you interested in golf? Do you feel that friendship is a death cult? Do you want to learn the rules of golf? Golf information might be for you. This brand-new comic strip, starring superstar Tiger Woods, will teach you all the information that you need to know about golf.

(1 of 8) January 17th, 1443

(2 of 8) March 6th, 2088

(3 of 8) June 29th, 1145

(4 of 8) November 23rd, 1557

(5 of 8) May 28th, 3017

(6 of 8) February 2nd, 2006

(7 of 8) December 9th, 6803

(8 of 8) September 15th, 1987

This week, an op-ed has made the rounds arguing that we should rob Thomas Jefferson's grave and put it in our guacamole. Enough is enough, argues Jon Bois. You should NOT do that.

Most important reason: It's profoundly disrespectful

Supposing Thomas Jefferson were some ordinary person, this moves beyond the realm of poor taste. It's a gesture of absolute disrespect, and even one of contempt.

As humanity whittles itself, slow as the whittling may be, into what we will one day become, many of the things we once held sacred are -- sometimes for ill but often for good -- shaved away. The sanctity of a burial space, however, is as un-compromised as it has always been. Its vandalism is an act of malice below even animalism, as creatures such as the elephant are known to create and respect resting places for their dead.

Is Thomas Jefferson's life intrinsically and objectively more "important" than yours or mine? Well, I won't hold court on that. I would also like to make it clear that criticisms of Thomas Jefferson's character, however essential to take into consideration any time we take his life and legacy into account, are beyond the scope of this particular article about guacamole.

Please feel free to register your discontent with the man, but if you ask me, reducing his personal effects to guacamole ingredients is less a gesture of protest and more the immature doings of a no-count felon. Which carries us to our next point.

Second-most important reason: It's against the law

I am not your lawyer, nor am I your secretary. I will not do myself the indignity of researching Virginia's grave-robbery laws on your behalf. Nonetheless, I am supremely confident that municipal and/or state courts have been afforded more than enough legislature to send you to prison.

Third-most important reason: Whatever's in there is surely inedible, and perhaps very dangerous to eat

I do not pretend to know the entire contents of Thomas Jefferson's grave, but we're probably dealing with inedibles from top to bottom: bones, coat buttons, books, and Lord knows what else. This isn't a mere issue of nutritional value; eating such items could be highly dangerous. Consider how much of it might be traced with lead!

Fourth-most important reason: It would taste disgusting

You have finally shocked me. It does not surprise me that there are individuals who would do something as heartless and foul as to rob Thomas Jefferson's grave site -- if there is one lesson taught by our shared existence, it is that the human is a broken animal.

But while I do understand what absence of ethics allowed you here, I do not at all understand the motive that led you to this point. More than likely, the odor will be unpleasant, the texture will be hostile to your tongue, and it will taste like dirt. Why you would expect anything different is entirely a mystery to me.

Fifth-most important reason: It isn't a sustainable practice, because there is a finite amount of stuff in Thomas Jefferson's grave

Thanks to a number of government initiatives, we're slowly making progress toward sustainable, responsible practices when it comes to our food. But if you think tuna is in short supply, you should see the contents of Thomas Jefferson's grave.

It's probably, what, eight feet long by three feet wide? Sure, there are probably enough remains and personal effects for you to make your guacamole. Oh, but now your friend wants some. So she takes some stuff from the grave. And then she tells her friends. And so on and so forth, until suddenly, the grave site is cleaned out entirely.

You can't just grow a new dead Thomas Jefferson. It's a finite, exhaustible resource.

Sixth-most important reason: Guacamole is not your playground. There are rules.

I also insist upon this when I see people add goat cheese, or bacon, or even mayonnaise -- mayonnaise! -- to their guacamole.

Avocado, salt, pepper, lime juice, cilantro. Maybe some onion. At its essence, guacamole is both simple and elegant. It's perfectly balanced. I don't think there is a food on Earth so delicious that is so difficult to screw up. It's a gift. Some of you are incapable of accepting a gift, and so you defeat and humiliate yourself by trying to turn guacamole into your own stupid-assed funhouse.

If you want goat cheese, mayonnaise, bacon, olives, Thomas Jefferson's petrified gallstones, or sour cream in your guacamole, I say to you that you do not understand guacamole. You lack even the slightest appreciation of grace or subtlety. You are doing the dishes with a hammer. Stop it.

Seventh-most important reason: Acquiring the contents of Thomas Jefferson's grave would be a real pain in the butt

At this point we are forced to suppose that you are entirely determined to make guacamole with the contents of Thomas Jefferson's grave. Fine. I hope you're ready for weeks of planning and hours of hard labor.

Firstly, Jefferson is buried in Monticello, a highly trafficked attraction that is protected by 24-hour security. Secondly ... well, do yourself a favor and run an image search for his grave site. It isn't the marker-and-headstone deal you were hoping for. It's a giant stone slab with a large obelisk on top.

It can be moved, but you will need friends, and your work will not be silent. How one could successfully vandalize Jefferson's grave without paying off the guards is beyond me, and I doubt they're cheap. And now, after hours of back-breaking labor and thousands of dollars spent, you're left with a bowl of guacamole that not only tastes terrible, but is entirely unfaithful to the tradition of guacamole. You are a jackwagon. Enjoy.

Eighth-most important reason: You could break a tooth

There is so much stuff in that coffin that could send you straight to the dentist. If you insist on procuring Presidential effects for your guacamole, at least go with Grant's grave. There's probably way less stuff in there to break your teeth on, because he died poor as shit.

Jon surveyed y'all and used your responses to simulate the perfect game of baseball. The result: more than 100 runs scored, a pitcher named BUTTSBUTTSBUTTSBUTTS and fielders who couldn't stop crying.

Baseball is the shittiest sport in the world, and the people in charge of it have not made it better because they are too stupid. That's where we come in! This week, I simulated a baseball game with about 1,500 of you. We were on a quest to construct the greatest game of baseball ever played.

I gave y'all a form to fill out. First, you gave your name, or made one up entirely. Second, you had the option of selecting which sort of baseball individual you wanted to be:

• Batter
• Pitcher
• Baserunner
• Fielder
• Crowd
• Person in stadium parking lot who is stealing shit out of cars

And third, you decided what, exactly, you would do. We had God-like powers, in other words. You could decide to hit a home run, hit a single, strike out, or whatever else. If you were a fielder, you could choose to catch the ball hit at you, or you could choose to commit an error. If you were a pitcher, you could throw a strike, give up a home run and everything in between.*

*Except beanballs. If I allowed for a "hit the batter" option, you would have done it a thousand times in a game, and it would have taken me a month to count it all up. I know y'all really well at this point.

All of us were on the same team: the "Away" team. The "Home" team was completely faceless and passive -- we made all the decisions. We could choose to play well, or we could choose to intentionally destroy ourselves. It was up to us.

Each of you (well, about 400 of you) were permitted to quantum-leap into the game for exactly one play. You were up, the player did what you wanted for exactly one pitch, and then it was the next person's turn. I didn't mess with the order or manipulate any of the results, I just processed the requests in the order I received them. One at a time, like this:

Of course, y'all were playing blind: while requesting your action, you had no knowledge of the score, the count, or anything else about the game situation. But if you ask me, that shouldn't matter. This was an entire game of baseball made up 100 percent of things you wanted. As such, it was the perfect baseball game.

I accepted the historically significant privilege of piecing the game together, action-by-action, until it was complete. I feel that I have identified six key tenets of the ideal baseball game:

1. The ideal baseball game is very high-scoring

We won, 121-27. Within eight innings at the plate, we had managed 126 hits. Ninety-four of those hits were home runs. One particularly bloody sequence in the bottom of the seventh played out like this:

Home run
Home run
Home run
Home run
Home run
Home run
Home run
Double
Home run
Home run
Groundout
Home run
Home run
Home run
Home run

While it's true that such a long, drawn-out game was a real bear for me to calculate, I only feel grateful that the score wasn't worse. Y'all could have hit the home run button over and over and over until we'd scored a thousand runs. Thank you for not doing that.

2. The ideal baseball game has a whole lot of foul bunts

Bunts are what baseball is all about. After all, bunting is the act of holding a baseball bat, and baseball bats are very closely associated with the sport of baseball!

We love bunting so much that we bunted it foul 45 times in this game. Remember, that doesn't mean that we wanted to bunt and it just went foul. It means we looked at the button that said BUNT IT FOUL and we pushed it because we specifically wanted to bunt it foul. We love it. Just can't get enough of that good bunting shit.

I want y'all to know that the way in which you ended the sixth inning is very special to me. With two out and nobody on, Andy bunted the ball foul for strike one. Max stepped up next and bunted it foul for strike two. Cat Party bunted foul a third time to end the inning.

You could have done whatever you wanted, and you chose to bunt yourself to death. God bless you all.

3. The ideal baseball game is 19 hours long

Baseball just doesn't engage young people the way it used to, and chief among the reasons is that the games last only three hours. They're cut tragically short, and they move with such blinding speed that no casual observer can hope for any understanding of what is going on.

Thanks to the way y'all elected to play, the two teams combined for 166 hits in this game. Based on a small arbitrarily-chosen sample, it looks like a baseball game lasts about 6.9 real-time minutes per hit. That means this game, if played in real life at a realistic pace, would last about 19 hours.

As a baseball fan, this ought to be perfectly manageable. It will allow five extra hours per day to do other things baseball fans do, such as:

• Talking about hot dogs
• Talking about bacon
• Taking hot dog and bacon quizzes online
• Doing the joke where you ask whether a hot dog is a sandwich
• Doing that same joke eleven billion trillion times because you were built in a factory
• Wilco!
• Simpsons quotes
• Knowing who Dan Kolb is

4. The ideal baseball game finishes with a fielding percentage of .700 and a lot of crying

Whenever one of you pitchers selected, "pitch ball that gets hit to one of your fielders," it was then a fielder's turn to play. The fielder could then choose to make an out, or record one or more errors. Strangely, our fielders elected to actually do their jobs most of the time.

More often than not, they did so while sobbing. I made sure to ask all 190 of our fielders whether they were crying while making the play. 103 of them -- that's 54 percent -- said that yes, they were crying.

Do you think any baseball player has ever cried while actually in the middle of playing? Like, what if Randy Johnson, in his prime, pitched an entire game while openly crying with big, heaving sobs? Just wailing? It would scare the shit out of you.

5. The ideal baseball game should emphasize crowd participation

If you signed up as "the crowd," your job was to come up with cheers throughout the game. I just randomly assigned one of these cheers to a play in the order I received them. Here were some key plays from the game, and the cheers that accompanied them.

BLOOD ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY

-- In response to Turd Ferguson bunting foul with no one on-base.

HEY HEY PITCH THAT BASE CATCH THAT BAT WHO CARES

-- In response to Blobby giving up a home run.

WE'RE NUMBER ONE

-- In response to Batting Man bunting foul with no one on-base.

6. The ideal baseball game should provide an opportunity for people to hang out in the parking lot and steal shit out of cars

Car burglary is such an easy crime to get away with that I'm surprised more folks don't get into it. You might walk away with more stuff than you had before -- especially if the car isn't yours to begin with!

To those of you who decided to get in on the ground floor of something big rather than playing weirdass big-sock grown-up musical chairs, I asked what you stole and why you stole it:

money

-- Doug, explaining why he stole an iPod.

$

-- Nice Guy, explaining why he stole baby strollers.

I am the Seinfeld i have to be the Seinfelt

-- Ray Romano, explaining why he stole Jerry Seinfeld's gym bag.

I must learn what the spin doctors sound like

-- Jacob, explaining why he stole Spin Doctors CDs.

I like tapes

-- Marlon Byrd, explaining why he stole tapes.

So what do you think of the big game? Do not leave comments. I regard them as acts of vandalism.

★★★

Pretty Good:Jon Bois has a pretty good story about baseball

Every Home Run Derby, kids are allowed to take the outfield and try to catch some of the fly balls. The tall kids sometimes catch them. The short kids never, ever, ever catch them. Welcome to Short Child Baseball, a brief video game about defeat.

In Short Child Baseball Simulator, you will not be able to make very many meaningful decisions. You'll just watch yourself as you continue to fail, and you'll be lectured endlessly about life lessons, morals, and other things you do not care about. In other words, it's just like childhood.

Enjoy! Oh, and if you're on mobile and are having trouble accessing the game, click here.

Welcome to Golf information, a comic strip featuring star golfer Tiger Woods! Let's follow along as Tiger heads to the British Open -- and has quite a few adventures along the way!

Here is the previous edition of Golf Information.

Here is this edition of Golf Information.

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YouTube is full of videos that were automatically uploaded by phones or cameras. Little, if any, thought was given to it by the people who made these films. Often, no human being on the planet has ever seen them. Until today.

Here's a fun trick. Search YouTube for "IMG XXXX," where "XXXX" represents any random four digits. IMG 2018. IMG 3714. Whatever. Search, and then sort by upload date. You will be rewarded with the sort of spectacle that makes dada art look like a watercolor of ducks flying over a pond.

You see, it's the height of absurdity, because it's entirely earnest. There is no gag. Those who created it weren't really trying to say anything to you, because these videos were most likely uploaded by pure accident. Their phone is set to auto-upload all videos, or some such thing. Never once did this process involve a human thinking, "I am going to share this with people." It just happened.

Here are some such videos.

IMG 2918

Published on April 27th, 2015
Runtime: one second

It's a story set within any one of a dozen identical neighborhoods in a dozen different states you have visited. Each building, a squatty fat-assed obelisk in tribute to newness and largeness -- one glance at the white house sitting past the young man's left shoulder, and one might think its builder was determined to build an indoors so large as to become an outdoors all its own.

The story, like the neighborhood and all its spoils, is something most of us do not have access to. That fully half the the film is spent on a freeze-frame conclusion underscores the wonder of what we are missing out on. It's been several months since this fateful day on the asphalt, and this young man is out there somewhere, probably being important to someone. His story continues, undeniably and unseen.

IMG 1184

Published on May 12, 2014
Runtime: four seconds

I'm struck by the themes shared between IMG 1184 and Kendrick Lamar's landmark 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city. "You have to be able to accept failure to get better" is certainly resemblant of the journey taken by a younger Lamar, who wrestles with growing up, being a son, gangbanging, alcohol, and coming to examine himself with a critical eye. He certainly stumbles sometimes, but m.A.A.d city sprouts a minor theme that would eventually blossom in 2015's To Pimp A Butterfly: that acceptance of one's self, warts and all, is crucial -- but not mere self-acceptance. Self-celebration. Self-love.

Both IMG 1184 and m.A.A.d city end with a tender message for a loved one. The kid offers, "hi, Mom and Dad." Lamar's mother leaves him a voicemail message: "I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes, and come back a man [...] I love you, Kendrick." Within the context of the album, it's one of the more poignant moments put to wax in recent memory, and this nameless boy could not hope to capture such heft. But shadows tell their own story all the same.

IMG 6183

Published on April 29th, 2015
Runtime: three seconds

A young woman enjoys some reading while two unseen bit players conduct the briefest of exchanges. The exchange itself is so close to an intentional acknowledgment of the unintentional institution of the accidental upload:

Are you recording?

Fuck! Yes!

This video appears to be the second of a trilogy of brief unintentional upload. Seek out the other two only if confusion is your friend.

IMG 4824

Posted on January 5th, 2015
Runtime: 30 seconds

She's five! Five! And before I found this video, she had been drumming for the benefit of a grand total of three viewers.

An Internet media outlet could easily slap "Watch This Five-Year-Old's Epic Drum Skills" on this and draw a respectable amount of traffic. Me. People like me might do that, I mean. People like me, people who make and share Internet content, would like you to believe that you are fixed to railroad tracks we are building. That you could not, and would not, possibly be the one to find something before we do.

You can wander. Find something unpromoted, uncurated, unsharpened against the cold steel of social media strategy. Simply sit with someone who has, it is implied, invited you to sit in with them, and you will find what you were after.

IMG 0471

Published on July 15th, 2015
Runtime: one second

This video sucks.

IMG 0031

Published on July 15th, 2015
Runtime: nine seconds

Nothing is surer to win a million views than an "animals of different species being friends" video. And yet, I suspect I may have been the first human being in the world to see this. I don't just say this because YouTube said "no views" when I happened upon it. See, this is a surveillance camera that appears to have automatically uploaded this video and dozens like it.

What I'm saying to you is that nobody made this video. Someone put the camera there and someone rigged the system up, and someone owns the video, but no one truly authored it. This cute little animal-friends moment was on the internet for 12 days. It had its own page and title and everything and it was right there. And for a time, if what I suspect is true, exactly zero human beings had ever seen it.

When my grandkids ask me about my first encounter of the singularity, I'll think of this moment, the moment the great Internet robot made content for itself and for no humans. What a world, y'all. What a damn world.

Twitter has a button that will send you an archive of all your old tweets. Never push it.

A while back, Twitter introduced a "request your archive" feature. It is available on the settings page, and you should not click the button unless you want to grind your teeth into cricket flour.

If you've ever looked through decade-old emails you've sent, you can partially grasp the feeling, but only partially. Even all those years ago, you probably had a pretty decent grasp on the basic nuances of email. Twitter, on the other hand, is a profoundly different medium that exploded in popularity very quickly, and it kind of messed us all up.

In lieu of looking through your own shitty tweets, I am offering mine up for tribute. Here is my first tweet of all time. Let's see what you were up to, Jon!

In The Old Days, Pittsburgh Pirates Were Actual Pirates http://sbnation.com/e/920425

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 13, 2009

Jon, you're an enormous dipshit.

For the first couple months, my Twitter was nothing more than an auto-tweeting link dump. When I published an article, the system tweeted the headline and link from my account. You can view the story here if you want. In November, a month completely saturated with sports, I decided to post something on a century-old baseball poster on no occasion that nobody had any reason to care about. I didn't even post the poster itself, I tried to tell you to click through to another site to look at it.

This is the most useless piece of content anyone has ever written. And to sell it, I decide it's good enough to just Tweet Out The Headline With Every Word Capitalized and just drop it in front of you like it's a rent check. Good job, Jon! Heh! Write about some sports, share it on Twitter! This'll get people talkin' and get 'em clickin'! Heh! God you're such a goofus.

B-B-B-Bengals And The Jets, As Simulated By Tecmo Super Bowl And Madden 10 http://sbnation.com/e/1005844

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 9, 2010

Heh, an Elton John reference ... right on, right on ... cool beans ... gotta, uh, gotta click on that ... good stuff, cool deal ...

I sent out like 50 of these before I ever actually wrote an actual tweet. It's a tweet in the same way the protein bars made out of cockroaches in Snowpiercer were food. The actual post, by the way, was about how I simulated that day's Bengals-Jets playoff game in Madden. I didn't show any of the game or talk about anything that happened in it, I just posted the final score.

This is completely sub-useless for any reader, of course. And at the time, I knew it was sub-useless. Here was the deal: as SB Nation's weekend editor, I ran the entire website by myself on the weekends. There were no other editors, and there were no other writers. I had to write a news update about a golf tournament I wasn't watching, and then write a short op-ed of some kind, and then post an injury update about a player I had never heard of, and then update a post about a coaching search in a sport I knew jack shit about, and then desperately make up some other sports opinion to have. I was one guy doing about six to nine peoples' jobs, and doing a horrible job at all of them.

I did this 12 to 14 hours straight on Saturdays until both my eyelids were twitching; by the end of the day I had written 25 posts and forgotten what most of them were about. I'm not complaining, because you gotta pay your dues and all. This is just a statement of fact. 2009 Weekend SBNation.com was an absolute worthless shitpile that didn't deserve the 76 visitors a day it received, and I am the one responsible. Sorry if you were one of them. We had stuff to figure out.

Anyway, don't let me interrupt you, Jon! Finish this bad boy off with a bang! Leave 'em wantin' more!

Will either of these simulations be anywhere near accurate? Wait and see. In the meantime, stay tuned for more Tecmo/Madden simulations.

Stay tuned for more of you playing madden and then just telling me the final score? GOD JON YOU ARE SUCH A GOD-DAMN TOOL

football is boring and sucky

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 11, 2010

pffffffft

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 11, 2010

A couple direct replies to friends aside, these were my first actual, non-automatic tweets. I actually remember feeling guilt right after I tweeted them. I was genuinely reflecting on the fact that, I don't know, 250 people were nice enough to follow me, and I was betraying their trust by fooling around with my Twitter account like this. I genuinely thought that.

Elsewhere In Misspelled Superstars: 'LaBron James' http://sbnation.com/e/1073636

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) February 14, 2010

"Elsewhere"? Where else? There isn't a Part One to this, you just decided to kick off a story with "Elsewhere." You are a nitwit.

What's the difference between "it's" and "its"? Give up? So has everyone on the Internet!

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 26, 2010

No favorites. No replies. Good. Your mallcoppin' ass deserves to be lonely.

Tiny gadgets are everywhere these days. Smaller TVs, phones, & computers. Seems like the only thing getting bigger...is my credit card bill!

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 18, 2010

This one didn't get any favorites or replies either, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Actually, the complete absence of interaction makes this so much more beautiful. I could knock the capital letters off this thing and tweet it out right now. It would get a few favorites and replies, and if you were a stranger who stumbled across it, you'd see those interactions and think, "OK, well, at least this tweet is 'for' somebody out there."

But this tweet just sits here, like a tri-fold "global warming is a hoax" display all the adults are ignoring at a science fair. There is no evidence that anyone ever acknowledged it. This is from a time when I had very few followers, and hadn't really tweeted a lot of silly stuff yet. I don't think people really knew what they were looking at. They probably just thought I was a giant idiot.

If this were anyone other than me, my heart would break. There are few things sadder than a stupid lonely person.

4

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 17, 2010

I never even saw this until today. It took me more than five years to notice it. I'm pretty sure it's my only butt-tweet. But hey, I tweeted it at 4:20. And you know what that means! Heh! Bet I was--

wait, that's 4:20 on a wednesday morning

good god jon get your shit together

In my opinion. University of Louisville fields a basketball team that plays against other basketball teams.

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 11, 2010

This is the exact sort of thing you tweet when you have absolutely nothing to say but still harbor an overwhelming urge to take up two and a half seconds of everyone's time. That urge is very real, and explains about 30 percent of my tweets to this day.

Around this time I was using a barely-working desktop I had built, and I squinted at an old CRT box monitor all day. The display was so blurred-out and fuzzy that half the time, I honestly couldn't tell whether I had typed a period or a comma. That explains the weird punctuation. As I would later learn, this problem can be avoided if you just stop using punctuation altogether.

Sorry about the brief site issues, everybody. SB Nation is now back in action.

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 14, 2010

Building a site from nothing is really hard.

Prior to 2009, SB Nation was a collective of team-specific blogs that had their own unique ecosystems, but the actual main site -- sbnation.com -- was really just a portal to take you to those blogs. We weren't sprouting off from some huge existing publication, and social media wasn't what it is now, so we couldn't pull in a lot of traffic that way. It started from scratch, more or less.

So we all recognized that the first few months were about figuring it the hell out. (SB Nation had a "beta" tag on its logo for the first year.) During my shifts as weekend editor -- which would have made me the boss, were there other people around to be the boss of -- there was this unmistakable sensation that I was working on the Moon. Nobody commented on any post, ever. I'd look over at the real-time traffic data and see that literally 21 people were visiting the site, and only four or five were actually clicking around on it.

Then I'd look back to the recap I was writing of that night's regular-season Hawks-Magic game. I was recapping a game I didn't watch, because there were only so many things I could actually watch. As I painstakingly tried to assemble the box score into some sort of farcical account of the game, I'd know that a) three human beings would see it, and b) I was letting them all down. Both felt bad; the latter felt horrible.

But I kept my head up, because there wasn't really a choice. And I'd tweet things like this

Sorry about the brief site issues, everybody. SB Nation is now back in action.

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) March 14, 2010

to my 77 followers and pretend that any of them gave a shit. Right now, no one does. Nobody, Jon. The good stuff comes later. You don't get to have that stuff yet. Right now, you will sit in your monitor-lit apartment with both its ceiling lights shorted out, hunched over a keyboard with the 7 key missing and a pencil you use to poke the contact whenever you need to type a 7, and you will get to work shoveling dung for nobody.

Oh, and stop capitalizing your tweets, you chucklefuck. Capitalizing on Twitter is like swimming with your shirt tucked in.

Would you like to be a farmer? Well, you can't, because farming isn't real. That's why I have created Jon's Farming Simulator. Haul your feed back to the farmstead as quick as you can, and save the day!

Last year, I attempted to spark competition with the NBA 2K franchises by releasing Jon's Basketball Game into the market. It was ultimately a flop for many reasons, namely:

• It was not actually a playable game
• Players were more likely to be exploded with dynamite or have a locomotive crush them to death than actually play basketball
• It lacked an official NBA license

After going back to the drawing board, I am once again ready to publish a video game using the robust Garry's Mod engine. This time, some of you will even get to play! Here's how.

Welcome to Town. It is a town I designed.

In this town is a merchant who is prepared to sell you barrels of chicken feed -- and as fate would have it, that's just what you need! You're not about to let your chickens go hungry, are you? Some farmer you'd be!

In every race, there are four cars. Each car is towing a little wooden wagon. That's where you and your barrel of feed will sit.

That's you! Look at you! You look so happy with your chicken feed, and so proud of the profession you have chosen. Now hold on tight, because it's time to go for a ride!

This is an example of a well-piloted feed run. The farmer and his feed are headed to the farm at a steady clip, but not so fast that the feed will be knocked overboard. See all that exhaust? That's coming from the two thrusters I attached to the back.

All y'all who play will be racing each other, four at a time. All I'm going to do is hold down the thruster. Now, this is where you come in: you choose how powerful your thrusters will be, how many thrusters you will have, and where you would like to attach them.

Please let me know by filling out this form. If I choose you, I will rig up a car just for you, based on your exact specifications!

Later this week, I will rig up these cars accordingly, run the races, and share the video/GIF evidence with all of you.

AN IMPORTANT WORD OF PRECAUTION

After conducting a series of test runs, I strongly recommend a number of safety guidelines. Although you are allowed to set your thrusters to a maximum power of 10,000, I urge you in the strongest possible terms not to exceed 400 to 500. If you exceed that power rating, you run the risk of losing control of your car, feed barrel, and/or wagon, and you subject your wagon-riding person to injury.

Additionally, since you are simply trying to drive straight forward toward the farm, I strongly recommend placing a modest number of thrusters -- perhaps two or three -- at the rear of the car. In this example, I have placed two:

And would you look at that! It's a swift, yet easy ride for you and your barrel of feed! With this balance of speed and safety, you'll make it to the farm in no time!

There is really no reason to place thrusters on the front, left side, right side, or hood of your car. Please do not do that.

Hope to hear from you soon. We'll be back later to watch some fun wagon races. Until then, happy farming!

AN ADDITIONAL WARNING

Please adhere to the thruster guidelines I have laid out here. Once again, I am compelled to warn you that failing to do so may lead to wagon damage or loss of cargo. You'll never get your feed back to the farmstead that way!

Farming has always been make-believe ... until now! Let's all get together and play a game of Jon's Farming Simulator, a simulator about farming.

Monday, I surveyed y'all on how you wanted to calibrate your vehicle, and how much you knew about farming. I then selected four of you to play in this game, and customized each vehicle according to that person's specifications.

You were allowed to set your thruster power as high as 10,000, but I cautioned you never to set it above 500. 500 is more than enough power to quickly and safely propel you back to the farm. You do not need any more power than that. Set the power any higher than that, and you are likely to lose control of your vehicle and/or cause bodily harm to your person. I was very clear about this.

Let's see whether you listened.

THE RACE.

Music: "Captain Of Her Heart" by Double

THE RESULTS.

1st:Joe Garbe (green)
2nd: nobody
3rd: nobody
4th: nobody

DID NOT FINISH:
[Anonymous] (blue)
Jake Winderman (red)
David Lunch (yellow)

JON'S RACE ANALYSIS.

It should come as little surprise that the person who is actually a farmer in real life would be excellent at a farming simulation. Joe Garbe slowly, but steadily, propelled his way to the farm with nine thrusters: five in the rear, two on the left side, and two on the right side. They were set to a power rating of 450 -- which, as it turns out, is a perfectly safe and acceptable setting.

The other three farmers blatantly disregarded my warnings. Two of them upped their thruster power to 10,000, and the third set their power to precisely 6,969. That is profoundly juvenile, and does not offer proper respect toward the noble profession of farming.

I cannot help but feel disappointment. I wanted to make a fun farming simulator that everyone could enjoy.

I will run another of these simulations as soon as I can find it in my heart to trust all of you again.