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.

Think there's no such thing as farmers? Think again! Welcome once again to Jon's Farming Simulator, a simulation about farming that was created by Jon.

The first-ever episode of Jon's Farming Simulator was somewhat of a mixed bag. One of our four contestants did successfully complete the simulator's objective: driving a barrel of chicken feed to the farm via a car, a wagon and some thrusters.

The other three brazenly ignored my carefully-considered advice, and chose to set their thruster power more than 10 times higher than my recommended limits. I had originally planned to hand out accolades for first, second, third and fourth place. Instead, I was forced to award one first-place finish and three DNFs. Indeed, most of the field failed to reach the farm at all.

Today, we head back to the farm. I am a bit nervous, as I always am prior to every farming simulator. I want only what is best for you. I want you to remain safe, and I want you to succeed. It is difficult for me to care as deeply as I do without growing anxious and emotional about it. But enough about me! Let's get racin'!

THE RACE.

Music: "All I Want Is You" by Carly Simon

THE RESULTS.

1st: [unclaimed]
2nd: [unclaimed]
3rd: [unclaimed]
4th: [unclaimed]

DID NOT FINISH:
@StupidPerennial
@bigdaddyputs
@rhhenshaw
@Nude_Tayne

JON'S ANALYSIS.

I feel as though my hard work has been ignored, my passion has been devalued and my intellect has gone entirely unappreciated. I feel like dirt.

For the second consecutive episode, I have strongly recommended a thruster power rating of approximately 500. I also recommended no more than two to three thrusters. Today, instead of being mostly ignored, I was entirely ignored.

Perhaps if you could have seen me in the hour of dawn, toiling away, painstakingly making a sign for the town that read, "TOWN," delicately placing little barrels of chicken feed on the wagons, carefully placing each little car ... perhaps then you would have piloted this simulator with the respect it deserves. I would feel silly if I even bothered to chide you for your juvenile recklessness. The chickens will go unfed, but you don't care.

Maybe I'm wasting my time. Maybe I'm the one who is stupid. Maybe I am stupid to care.

See you next time in Jon's Farming Simulator.

This is a story concerning a years-old episode of Shark Tank. It is a story about what happens when boundless optimism and complete bullshit collide. What's the occasion? Well, the occasion is that you haven't heard it.

This is a plea to all of you, to the world: if you see me about to do something enormously stupid, say something. Stop me. I am not without flaws and am perfectly capable of doing something catastrophically stupid. I am a celestial juggernaut of burning stupid hydrogen, liable at any moment to erupt into a solar storm and send tails of my idiot shit whipping out into the dark of the cosmos. I am your brother. You are my keeper. It is your responsibility to save my from my dumb stupid-ass self.

Stop me if I try to pitch a business idea, literally any business idea, on national television. Stop me especially if this idea is, "I want to sell little stuffed elephants for $60."

Very briefly: Shark Tank is a reality show in which entrepreneurs approach a regular cast of business moguls and ask them to invest in their idea. I, a person who understands virtually nothing about business, find it to be great television for pretty ordinary reasons: it's busted up into digestible ten-minute segments, the personalities are interesting, and when the folks involved fall, they fall hard.

If your idea is bad, the "sharks" -- in this case, Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Lori Greiner, Kevin O'Leary, and Robert Herjavec -- will not hesitate to let you have it and hurt your feelings. Below that is an even worse indignity: if your idea is really, really terrible, they won't even bother. They'll sort of coddle you, protect your feelings, and gently explain to you that, oh no no no, it's not that you're stupid, it's just that the idea you formed was formed by a stupid person. Charity can be its own insidious sort of cruelty.

This is one of those situations. The company is called Elephant Chat, and is run by a very nice-seeming husband-and-wife couple. It, as you might gather from Cuban's stinkface, is a staggeringly piss-poor business idea:

1. This is sort of a do-it-yourself marriage counseling tool. It's a little stuffed elephant, called "the elephant in the room," that sits inside a little transparent box. That box, in turn, sits inside an opaque box.

b. You and your partner place this somewhere prominently in your home.

7. If you have something you need to talk about with your partner, you remove the opaque box, rendering the elephant visible. This is meant to signal to your partner that a discussion needs to be had.

f. These people, by their own admission, are not professional counselors or therapists.

3. THEY WANT TO SELL THIS PRODUCT FOR $59.

Fifty-nine dollars. For a little stuffed animal and two little plastic boxes. That's it. There's no circuitry or electronics or licensed branding or any other excuse to justify a $59 price tag.

Naturally they are asked, point-blank, whether they realize that a stuffed elephant can be bought for three bucks and why in the sam hell anyone would dump 60 bucks on this thing.

In fairness to him, ignoring the question entirely is just about his most dignified option at this point. "Well, yeah, it's true that $400 billion is a lot to pay for a doorknob. But what you have to remember is, you can put it on your door so that you can open your door and go outside! And outside there's all kinds of folks, like Meryl Streep and Dante Bichette! And that's not all, I haven't even named all the folks!"

The sharks eventually nail him down. They always do. There is a very special joy I want to share with you now. It's the proud, earnest tenor of a very bad bullshitter who can't sell anyone his bullshit except for, tragically, himself.

i

but you

it

Backing up for a moment: y'all would probably agree that communicating in a relationship is not always super-easy. It seems easy, in principle and from a distance. But sometimes the big things seem too big to talk about. Sometimes the little things ball up like a tumbleweed and become a big thing. Our best selves would try to resolve these things with our partners, but we are not our best selves every minute or day of our lives.

Sometimes it's difficult to find the moment, and sometimes it's not fun, but we gotta do it. We just have to sit our grown asses down and talk like the tall people we are. Lord knows it's difficult sometimes. But if you and I are ever in a relationship, and I find myself so wholly incapable of communication that I have to passive-aggressively chuck a stuffed animal on the coffee table instead of using my words ... you know what, break up with me. Don't actually tell me you're breaking up with me. Just pack up your clothes and your half of our painstakingly-assembled collection of Dunston Checks In pogs we shared and move out one day while I'm at my job in the shitty idiot factory.

And if I'm like these people, and I require my little plush monument to non-communicative pouting to cost $60, and not $10, in order to represent meaning, return me to the Kohl's you took me from and pledge to the store's management that you will never steal a mannequin again. They may elect to call the police, and I need you to be ready for that.

Anyway, now we're at the part where they tell us that the first run of these things cost them $22 each to produce. A stuffed elephant and two plastic boxes. Twenty-two bucks.

I would now like to speak directly to Mr. and Mrs. couple I am not naming because it isn't really necessary.

I make things too, but I recognize we're in different leagues. I make virtual abstract Internet stuff. No matter how little I might think of the thing you made, one of our products will prop up a wobbly table leg, and one of them won't. I recognize that. You're out there in the real business world, trying to make real things.

But I think we share a common element of thing-making: sometimes the roadblocks are pretty tough to navigate. There are setbacks at this turn and that, there are snags that undo your hard work, et cetera. Sometimes that can embolden you. The experience of overcoming long odds, in and of itself, can actually make your product better than it would have been had you not encountered those odds.

Sometimes, these problems are so frequent and unnavigable that it feels like some sentient hand is laying down traps for you. Like the entire universe is telling you in its wordless yet unmistakable language, "don't do this. Don't do it. Bad. No. Do not." One such example might be ... I don't know, say you're half a century into humanity's space age and you find that the task of making a plastic box that fits into another, slightly larger plastic box at non-ludicrous expense is beyond the grasp of humankind. The universe is trying to do y'all a solid, and I would recommend you be grateful for that.

If you don't listen, you might end up in a situation in which you somehow end up taking $100,000 of your friends' money. That would be terrible!

That is terrible!

Shark Tank is a substantial degree crueler than other shows of its ilk. It's easy for me to conclude, right or wrong, that American Idol's William Hung was in on the joke. The ringer -- the person a show's producers find time for even though that person has absolutely no shot in Hell -- is among the most noble and beloved institutions of 21st-century television.

The ringers of Shark Tank are not in on the joke. They didn't march in here with a funny suit and a bad voice. These people have actually, in real life, invested massive amounts of time and money into ventures they genuinely believe in. You can go look their websites and read about them in business journalism. This is for real.

The show runners, without doubt, knew they were sending this couple to their certain doom.

It's okay that these folks are horrible at business. You get to be horrible at something. Everyone does. These two are probably great at a number of other things, and if this brief glimpse into their lives is any indication, remaining happily married -- no small feat -- is one of them.

But, again, business, not one. I just looked up their website, elephantchat.com. It spreads across several pages and even has its own video hub. It exists solely for the purpose of selling the Elephant Chat Cube, the only product they sell.

Right on! Let's click it!

oh

cool

Welcome to A Huge Dog. You're probably wondering, what the heck is this place? Well, Jon's here to explain.

i don't know it's a site

alright, later

The New York Times was recently harshly critical of selfie sticks, comparing their users to psychopaths. They are wrong. Selfie sticks are neat.

NOTE: This article is tuned to various degrees of confidence. Changes in my level of confidence/seriousness in my statements will be noted accordingly.

(Stated with 100-percent confidence)

Selfie sticks are great. Because with selfie sticks, you can take a photo of yourself from the angle that you would like! Neat!

The criticism of selfie sticks most often said out loud is that they're obnoxious and obstructive in crowded public settings. In certain circumstances, such as concerts, I could buy that.

(68 percent)

Although if you have it in you to be bothered by your half-obstructed view to be barely more obstructed by a few selfie sticks, you're probably too uptight to appreciate music anyway. Try some marijuana pot!

(100 percent)

Anyway, I work a couple blocks from Times Square, and walk through the heart of it during peak tourism hours on my way to this or that. It's a silly place and not really one I want to spend much time in. It also might be the selfie stick capital of the universe. It's a very crowded place in which tons of people are taking selfies with these things. I have suffered literally zero inconvenience from this. There are those out there who have suffered the existential horror of having been bumped by a plastic stick one time, and I don't mean to trivialize their stories or their struggles. I can only tell you that this has never happened to me.

(91 percent)

The false problem of obstructive annoyance is the criticism people say out loud. The "stick" component is just the touchstone for their grievances. The problem they actually have with the selfie stick is the selfie itself.

(77 percent)

Because they're waspy as hell and can't loosen up or stop inventing problems.

(100 percent)

The next selfie you see on Instagram or Facebook or wherever will probably have likes and positive comments. Selfies are a way to boost ourselves and each other up. They're great. The selfie stick helps get more people in the shot. It's cool, fun and (unless you are a misanthrope) perfectly benign.

(87 percent)

Which is something uptight folks can't stand. For the sort of person who has a problem with this sort of thing, "That's fine" is an unthinkable conclusion. The conclusion instead is that these people suffer some sort of social disease. They must be psychoanalyzed and diagnosed, a hundred thousand at a time. There is something wrong with them, they say. Here is a bad New York Times column from last weekend:

Much of the research on selfies reveals that (surprise!) people who take a lot of them tend to have narcissistic, psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.

(79 percent)

You sound like a phrenologist. I lack the authority to explicitly refute this, but I am so, so suspicious that you've massively misread or misinterpreted something along the way to this conclusion. I do not believe you and I think that this is full of shit.

(100 percent)

All right, setting aside my massive skepticism for a second, let's just suppose that this is true, and take a second to sort this out:

1. Person A enjoys taking a lot of selfies, and isn't hurting or inconveniencing anybody.

2. Person B insults and condescends to Person A, pretends to have been inconvenienced by Person A, and digs up evidence used to conclude that Person A is a Machiavellian psychopathic narcissist.

Of those two, which is the genuinely more interesting specimen? Person B's behavior is more fascinating.

(68 percent)

And vacuous.

(91 percent)

Than Person A's could possibly be.

"It's such a low barrier to press ‘like,' but I think people -- I'm no exception -- get obsessed with likes," said Mr. Chawla.

People like things! People like liking things! Jesus, that was a real whodunit. Anyway, a time-honored tradition of the Tenuous Argument Column is to wheel out presumed authorities in some stage or another of bewilderment or delusion. Here is Mr. College from the college factory:

"People forget that narcissism is not just about being an egomaniac -- it's also driven by underlying insecurity," said Jesse Fox, an assistant professor at Ohio State University's School of Communication who studies the personalities of selfie takers. "They need to get ‘likes' to get validation."

(100 percent)

Oh, f*ck off.

(73 percent)

I swear, sometimes when i hear academics open their mouths I think of what John Holt said, that school is where you go to learn how to be stupid. I, a person who definitely does not have a college degree and, in fact, only graduated high school because a teacher or two quietly did him a solid, could have cobbled together some, "I saw this on Person of Interest" nonsense like that if you'd asked me.

What if there are no selfie sticks because ~~~ we're all in the matrix ~~~

(100 percent)

This is all to lament that people out to feel good about themselves can never seem to do that in peace. The rest of us reject their behavior like it's a virus. We go to great lengths to argue (to ourselves, because they don't care) that they are sick and ruined. Selfies are great because they make people feel nice, and selfie sticks are great because they let people take better selfies.

Further, I would like to add that bacon tastes boring, Spaceballs was more thought-provoking than every Star Wars film combined, and Kim Kardashian seems like a cool enough person.

20 years ago, Microsoft produced eight or so of the most aggravating, endearing, cringe-inducing and confusing minutes of video I have ever seen. It's probably dangerous to watch it before you're ready.

You've just wandered into an exploration of an official Windows 95 promotional video. This video was intended to educate retailers about Microsoft's 1995 lineup of products. It stars a nameless prop/impersonation comic who bent the whole thing into his personal paradise of anguish. He built it with your bones.

Somehow, he plays 26 different characters and fits them all into eight minutes and change: Indiana Jones, a stereotypical Frenchman, a hula dancer, a Swiss mountain climber, a baker, an optometrist, a surgeon, a hillbilly, a pianist, a janitor, a fighter pilot, Satan, a flight attendant, a beach bum, a referee, a businessman, Carmen Miranda, James Bond (I think), a disco dancer, a nerd, the nerd's son who is also a nerd, a priest, a human cannonball, a wizard, Ishmael from Moby Dick and a fortune teller.

Every single one comes with its own pun.

w e l c o m e

t o

h e l l

The full thing is over here, and will account for the eight most annoying minutes of your entire life if you watch it. I stumbled upon it about five years ago, and ever since, I go back every few months and give it a hate-watch.

At least it ... it was hate-watching. Now it's an emotional cocktail. It's capable of making me embarrassed, angry, amused and empathetic, all in the same instant. I've rarely experienced anything quite like it.

The cringes come early and often and they do not stop. It's like mainlining Bad Content and emotional confusion. Just know that I'm going to be right here with you through the whole thing, and you can stop any time you'd like.

This is how the video starts. I don't want you to feel like you're supposed to understand it.

That guy is the only human being you will see throughout this entire ordeal. I tried to find his name, but couldn't dig up any information about this video, who produced it or who was in it. Coming across this video is like finding a prehistoric monolith: we can estimate when it came from and why it was made, but the voices who made it fell silent ages ago. I mean, I'm sure they're still alive, walking among us, but I wouldn't want to take credit for it, either.

Anyway, he (referred to herein as "he") opens up with an Indiana Jones impression, which consists entirely of:

1. Wearing Indiana Jones stuff
2. Saying "whip it on me," something Indiana Jones never said, and everyone else also never says

Please don't ask me any questions about this guy dressed up as a stereotypical Frenchman standing in front of the Eiffel Tower while a hula dancer and Swiss mountain climber -- also played by him -- dance over his shoulders. I left a few frames of it in here just to let you know what we're skipping, but I don't really want to talk about it.

I like this one, because I like to imagine him just standing in front of a camera and making those noises before they stretched out the video in post.

Comic: Of all the half-baked ideas! Whooooooooaeeee! WHEHEAAOOOOOOOEEEEA!
Producer: cut. why do you keep making those weird noises at the end
Comic: Because I'm dressed as a policeman!
Producer: but it
you're not even
god
Comic:[bares teeeth] BLEEEEEEEEEEEEAEEEEEEEAEOEOERERRUUUURRRRRGHHHHHH

He also plays the role of a key on a computer keyboard, which I didn't mention because I guess I was too sad?

1. "Hit" is barely a key/keyboard pun, because you'd be at least as likely to "press" or "push" or "type" or whatever a key.

2. It's even more barely of a key/keyboard pun, because he says it like "het" for some reason.
3. He nods to the side, because apparently keys push sideways instead of up and down.
4. "Hit me in the right direction" is another thing no one ever says.

Wardrobe took the L on this one, opting instead to trot him up there in a polo shirt and just green-screen him into a keyboard. This reminds me of the kid who'd go trick-or-treating with us without ever dressing up. "I'm going as a kid," he told us. And he went as a kid for years.

Well, guess what, it's you.

That game actually looks really fun! Unfortunately I never played it, because I never heard of it. It's called "Fury3" but is spoken as "Fury Cubed" in the video, and they only briefly whiz the box across the screen, so fast you can't really even make it out. I played the Hell out of computer games around this time, and I gawked at Best Buy newspaper inserts every Sunday, and if even I hadn't heard of it, I think they did something wrong.

They also did this entire video wrong, and a lot of other videos wrong (they're kind of famous for it), and whole operating systems wrong. This was instructive for me when I was younger. I had somehow picked up this assumption that, well, if you throw an enormous enough volume of money and resources at a problem, it will be fixed, as though it's a mountain: well, you're just not using enough dynamite. Windows ME, for instance, was a trash operating system, and that coupled with its inability to keep third-party computer companies from stuffing it with bloatware left me with basically the worst time I've ever had on a computer.

But there was just a little solace there: that not only could the giant be beaten, he just might do himself.

Ah the hell with it, let's watch the French guy part.

WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

WHY

There was absolutely no lead-in to France or anything French or anyone French. For some reason he suggests stuff we can go do? Is ... he talking to me? Don't you have stuff to talk about? This is like if De Niro turned to the camera in the middle of Raging Bull and said HI I AM ROBERT AND I AM IN YOUR FILM DO YOU ENJOY ICE CREAM I SURE DO.

The things he suggests we (?) go do are mountain climbing and hula dancing, neither of which are really French things. This dude clearly has a pre-ordained set of gimmicks. He's just gonna drive 'em all right through, making life hell for the poor son of a gun who has to produce this thing.

Not that I have sympathy for that person, because that person also decided that the character and narrator should be in a relationship.

They flirt with each other on several occasions throughout this thing. The guy's playing an optometrist here to play on the "see" in "you want to see other people?" "You want to see other people?" is led in by nothing and comes out of absolutely nowhere. I swear to God there is a subset of writers whose entire idea of writing is just:

That, unbelievably, is not even the worst non sequitur. That is probably this:

Why would you want someone to call you Ishmael if everyone else calls you Nancy? I guess a man having a lady's name is the funny part? So the narrator, who could have Encarta'd literally anything in the world, searched for orca whales just to set you up to play a character from Moby Dick, an opportunity you used to make an "I am a man with a lady's name" joke that has absolutely nothing to do with Moby Dick?

There's something about this that really fascinates me and kind of creeps me out. Everything's so disjointed and makes so little sense that it makes this seem like a massively disorganized effort. Like the comedic talent was farmed out, and the producer just had to make a smorgasbord of whatever they filmed. But that can't be true, because somehow, simultaneously, there's this haunting rapport between all the moving parts. Recognizing those two things at the same time is like the first time you had a guillotine explained to you. "Oh God, it's ... it's supposed to do that."

That's what I was getting at when I talked about this bringing me such a conflicting array of emotions. It's endearing and funny and maddening on account of how bad it is. Its refusal to let up the pace, even for an instant, or recognize itself is bewildering. The energy and earnestness with which it's acted and narrated lends me a sort of vicarious humiliation.

And, finally, the miscellanea it sifts through makes me so fed up with these gosh dang people. You know how one of the great aesthetic scourges of the Internet, and of computing in general, has been the "stretch-to-fit" option that sent millions of images all out of whack proportionally?

Until I saw this, I had no idea that at one point in our history, we did this on purpose. We wanted this. We thought it was neat.

I sure don't think that this video was very good!

Since last December, Jon has lived in New York all his life. An acclaimed writer and accomplished poet, Jon offers this ode to the city he calls home.

I've called New York City home since December of 2014, and it's already made an impression on me. I think this city makes an impression on anyone who pursues artistic endeavors for a living. After months of appreciating the beauty of this place, I wanted to express my love for New York the only way I know how: through writing.

After months of obsession, I am proud to present a small collection of poems I've written about the greatest city on Earth. I hope you enjoy.

This Crazy Town
by Jon Bois

You never know what you'll find
In this crazy town
Ladies with kind of short hair
Fellas with kind of long hair
Folks with permanent tattoos that go past the elbow
And all the way to like the bottom part of their arm
So get the heck out of here if you're a small town sucker
Get with the times
Folks wearing shirts with cuss words on them
Like shit and fuck
Get with the times

Dispatches from LaGuardia
by Jon Bois

LaGuardia Airport, it's quite a place
Airplane engines blastin'
Computers from the airport companies beepin' and bloopin'
Folks scurrying all about
Trying to catch their flights
And get where they are going
Every sound is a song
In this crazy town
A one-way ticket to New York don't mind if I do!

New Yorker, born and bred
by Jon Bois

I'm a New Yorker, born and bred
Lived here for many a month
No one understands New York except for me

I passed some sucker on the street
He smiled and said "I understand New York too"
I punched him and threw him off a bridge

The Big Apple
by Jon Bois

So they call it the Big Apple?
Ya don't say ...
Methinks I might just take a bite.
What's your dish? Veggies or fish?
Burgers and dogs or foreign-style food?
Grab your fork and a knife
And get ready for the New York City life

You're in New York City now
by Jon Bois

You're in New York City now
Pack your bags and hightail it to New York
'Cause you're in New York City now
Look up directions for how to get to New York
'Cause you're in New York City now
Buy a one-way ticket to New York City baby
'Cause you're in New York City now
You are somewhere else currently
Yeah Yeah baby you're in New York City now

Bad News Side of the Tracks
by Jon Bois

Watch out, pal
This isn't like the small-town stuff you're used to
You're in the big city now
And you're on the other side of the tracks
So you better SCRAM

The Downtown Boys
by Jon Bois

Let's hear it for the downtown boys
Donnie, Jerry and Mitchell
Always on Main Street livin' it up in their fancy jackets and footwear
Let's hear it for the downtown boys

Farewell to the Five Boroughs
by Jon Bois

I am a sailor from times of old sailing across the seven seas
But forever I will miss my love I left in the five boroughs
The big business in Manhattan
The neighborhoods of Brooklyn
Catching a Yankees game at the Bronx
The various items of Staten Island
Find out where Queens is
Eggs
Sugar
Coffee
Do laundry
Finish poem about New York
Organize notes on phone

★★★

Pretty Good video: Oh my God, the Mets gave Koo Dae-Sung a baseball bat