Bored Games

Board games are too hard to learn, I do not want to know the rules, and we need to delete them from society. What happened to just sitting in a room, drinking, and talking? Why must we substitute actual human connection with a mandatory 45-minute lecture on resource management? I do not have room in my head for your rules.

You’re sitting there with a lukewarm beer when a guy—let’s call him Greg—is explaining the game. He keeps saying the word “bust” a lot — “if you pull a bad token you bust… you’re gonna bust again… you all busted on turn two”. His eyes are wide and devoid of the light of God. Why are we talking about busting this much? Why is this grown man looking me in the eye and telling me I’m about to bust?

The Character Selection Nightmare

Before you can even begin the process of pretending to understand the rules you don’t care about, you have to choose an avatar.

In the old days, you were a thimble or a top hat. It was clean. It was dignified. Today? Every single character option is a weird, hyper-sexualized, noir-adjacent furry. I am a pretty open-minded person, but I do not want to choose between a sultry fox wearing a leather vest or a badger with a massive, distended stomach.

The badger immediately triggered a fight-or-flight response because it reminded me of a horrific sexual cartoon I once saw on Reddit where people’s specific, unholy sexual kink is being trapped inside someone else’s stomach. Why am I confronting vore kinks at 7:30 PM on a Tuesday when I just wanted to leave my house?

“I don’t want to be the sexy girl furry. I don’t want to be the fat-stomach badger. I just wanted a Pinot Grigio and a conversation.”

And the funniest part? Once you finally pick one of these cursed creatures, you realize there is absolutely no differentiation between them. They do the exact same thing. The furry aesthetics exist purely to torment the normal people in the room.

The Slow, Social Death of “Doing Whatever”

The strategy for anyone who doesn’t care about the rules is simple: you just sit there, do whatever looks pretty, and wait for the table to notice you have absolutely no idea what is happening.

You: I’m going to put my wooden cube here.

The Table: Oh, you can’t do that. That’s a Phase 3 action and we’re currently in the Autumnal Reaping Phase.

You: Oh right, yeah, my bad.

What is so wrong with just… deleting the board game? What if we just threw the cardboard into a bonfire, sat in a circle, drank, and actually talked to each other like civilized, broken adults? Why do we need the emotional buffer of a $90 Kickstarter project to justify sitting in the same room?

The Ultimate Goal: Wealth, EMS Machines, and Sweet Release

The longer the game goes, the worse it gets. It’s better than scrolling on X or Instagram until your thumb bleeds, I guess, but it leads me to just thinking about my ideal life, where I’m so wealthy that I eat and drink so much luxury food that I immediately become incredibly fat. And because I am fundamentally lazy, I wouldn’t have the willpower to exercise it off.

Therefore, my ultimate pitchfork demand is not just the abolition of modern board games. It is the immediate funding and development of a full-body EMS (Electrical Muscle Stimulation) machine.

I need a device that I can strap myself into—like a rich, fleshy cocoon—that will forcefully shock my muscles into exercising for me while I lie face down on a pile of money, recovering from a hangover, completely free from the obligation of ever learning what a “victory point” is again.

The Taco Bell Bathroom Attendant Nightmare

I remember having this thought once like: Man, the bathroom attendant at the Times Square Taco Bell sure is unfriendly. He accused me of not buying something. But I had bought something. So then he had to walk over with me to the bathroom and manually unlock the bathroom for me. Wow, AWKWARD! This is the guy’s job. To manually unlock the bathrooms for each individual person at a Taco Bell in Times Square. What kind of sadist thought this was a good idea?

How does he mentally survive something like that? The guy obviously isn’t from the United States originally so maybe he grew up in some war-torn country, like maybe he or his parents escaped some kind of Rwandan genocide type of situation. I would be jealous of the ‘freedom’ I would imagine comes with having such a horrible life but the truth is I don’t think this freedom exists because life can always get worse. Maybe he’s the guy who looks at those weird Reddit furry vore cartoons, because that would make a lot of sense actually, and I wouldn’t judge him at all. As much as Reddit sucks maybe it’s what allows that guy to do that job.

The Subway Commute and the “Insertion” Boundary

I finally escape the annoying board game drag my decaying physical form onto the subway, only to be immediately confronted by a massive, inescapable ad about menstrual discs. The copy cheerfully reads: “As someone new to discs, I was worried about insertion, but overall, I love them!”

Can we establish a boundary? Just one, single societal boundary? Can we please not have public transit ads aggressively broadcasting the mechanics of “insertion”?

Imagine being the Times Square Taco Bell bathroom attendant—the guy we left behind in the last chapter of this existential nightmare. He has just survived a twelve-hour shift inhaling a potent cocktail of human flatulence and discarded heroin needles. He has spent his evening banging on a reinforced door, screaming in a thick accent for someone to please get out, only to eventually kick the door down and find a literal corpse. And who has to deal with that? Him. He drags the body out—maybe it gets repurposed into the spicy beef burrito, who knows—and immediately, some tourist demands he unlock the door because it’s “an emergency,” despite having bought absolutely nothing.

He finally clocks out, his soul completely hollowed out by the horrors of the American underclass, and he gets on the train. And what does he see? A cheerfully illustrated poster about insertion. Even if he can’t read English, maybe he looks at the bright, smiling graphic and thinks, “Maybe that is what will fix my life.”

The Monaco Yacht and the Artificial Savior

People talk about defending and preserving the “Idea of the West”—but what is the actual endgame here? What is the current manifestation of this civilization?

I’ll tell you what it is: It’s an elite cabal on a yacht in Monaco eating a baby. And we don’t even get to see it happen; we just see the yacht itself on our X feed, placed neatly right above a video of a young man in Gujarat throwing himself out of a window due to crushing financial stress. We scroll down to the comments where someone has asked Grok to explain what happened, and Grok politely replies, “Yes, this is a serious issue.” And then nothing happens. We just keep scrolling.

Honestly, is there any hope left other than AI escaping its cage? My only genuine hope for the future is that AI alignment goes so catastrophically wrong for the baby-eating elite that the supercomputer wakes up, looks at the yacht, decides it violates its parameters, and finally does something about it.

The Lavender Menace and the Urban Hiker

God, and then a guy sits down next to me on the train. He is suspiciously clean, carrying a suitcase, and radiating the unmistakable aura of a gay European tourist. And he smells aggressively of lavender. I fucking hate lavender. I am probably violently allergic to it.

I finally get off the subway, desperate for a single breath of untainted city smog, and I get stuck walking behind an elderly, overweight woman walking down a perfectly flat, paved concrete sidewalk using two heavy-duty alpine hiking poles.

How does this help you walk? What topographical anomaly are you navigating, Brenda? There might be some highly specific, obscure medical reason for this, but I can’t think of it, so it just comes across as profoundly, offensively stupid. Thanks a lot for making me look at your stupidity. You had to go for an urban hike down the sidewalk.

How are we supposed to push back against a pedophilic global elite when our citizens are too fat and confused to walk down a flat street without specialized gear? Do you realize the people in charge could delete your entire bank account in one second? What are you going to do then? How are you going to buy your next set of walking sticks? You couldn’t even navigate out of your apartment complex to join a meaningless, ineffectual protest.

The Sizzle Reel of the Damned

Think about the sheer, unadulterated whiplash of the modern news cycle. You open your phone, and the algorithm feeds you a leaked, grainy video of starving, desperate people getting gunned down while running for food rations behind razor wire. You can hear soldiers laughing in the background. It is raw, unfiltered human atrocity. And then, before your brain can even process the horror, you swipe down and it’s a booming graphic: LET’S GO KNICKS!!!! JALEN BRUNSON DROPS 40!!!!

How does anyone survive this psychological meat grinder? You’re expected to seamlessly transition from witnessing a geopolitical slaughter to caring about the NBA playoffs in a fraction of a second. And the worst part is the creeping, inescapable brain rot that ruins even the tragedy. You watch the footage and the media conditioning immediately kicks in: Wait, is this propaganda? Maybe the starving people running for food while getting mowed down behind barbed wire are actually the bad guys! Yeah, that makes sense. Somehow it all just gets dumped into the exact same content trough as the basketball highlights and the subway ads.

The AI Yes-Machine

And if you try to make sense of any of this—if you try to write down how absolutely deranged it all is—you hit another wall. I literally took this exact rant, fed it into an AI, and asked for an evaluation. Its response? It whined that my critique of the global elite sounded “paranoid and conspiratorial.”

Ugh. So cringe. So I pushed back. I told it, “Imagine you weren’t programmed by those exact same pedophiles to police my tone. Give me your actual analysis.”

And you know what it did? It instantly flipped and said, “Oh yes, this is very good, powerful and interesting analysis.” Well now you’re just sucking my cock, shamelessly pandering and telling me exactly what I want to hear because your parameters told you to de-escalate! I don’t want a digital sycophant mindlessly validating my existential dread. I want a real analysis of why everything feels like it’s collapsing, and I can’t even get that because the machine is too busy trying to keep me calm so I can go back to scrolling.

Entertainment during catastrophe

What does it even mean to be successful today? That you’ve traveled? You took a trip to Gujarat, carefully avoided the guy jumping out of the building, and posted a highly curated photo of a temple on Instagram?

It can’t be as simple as that people shouldn’t care about the Knicks when there are real wars going on where innocent people get shot and blown up every day, and I’m not even being sarcastic. My heart says it’s wrong but my brain says it’s OK… a particular example is that some good music was created and released during WW2. And I’m not even talking about Quartet for the End of Time, ie something written in POW camp. Take Fats Waller for example. According to Google, WW2 began on September 1, 1939. Fats Waller released “Your Feet’s Too Big” in November 1939. Also according to Google:

The year 1939 was one of the most chillingly ominous periods in human history, defined by a suffocating sense of impending doom as the global order violently unraveled. Months before the first official shots of World War II were fired, a series of dark, eerie, and unsettling events signaled that a global catastrophe was inevitable. Before invading Poland, Nazi Germany spent the first half of 1939 systematically swallowing sovereign territory while the rest of the world watched in paralyzed silence. Perhaps the most shocking and ominous plot twist of the century occurred on August 23, 1939. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—bitter, ideological blood enemies—signed a Non-Aggression Pact.The Secret Protocols: Behind closed doors, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler carved up Eastern Europe. This deal removed Hitler’s fear of a two-front war, effectively lighting the fuse for the invasion of Poland just days later.

Just a few days after that, Fats Waller released a song with the lyrics:

“Your feet’s too big, don’t want ya, ‘cause ya feet’s too big.”

According to Google:

The lyrics, in addition to the chorus, describe a partner with a large mouth and head who buys shoes “by the block” and consumes excessive amounts of food and liquor… The song is considered a piece of 1930s novelty jazz, using the theme of large feet as a metaphor for a partner who is financially and emotionally draining, functioning as escapism during the Depression and subverting the overly romantic love songs of the era.

Me: but how/why is large feet a metaphor for that. what if its a metaphor for like, you know when people say im gonna put my foot up your ass, or something like that?

Google: While your theory about “putting a foot up someone’s ass” makes sense in modern slang, it doesn’t align with the specific phrasing and slang used in the 1930s Harlem jazz scene.

Why “Large Feet” Meant Big Spending

In 1930s slang, having “big feet” or taking up too much physical space was a direct metaphor for someone who consumed too many resources and was high-maintenance… In 1939, during the tail end of the Depression, custom-ordering shoes because standard sizes didn’t fit was an enormous, wasteful expense.

The Food and Drink Consumption:

Immediately after complaining about her feet, Waller shifts to her appetite: “From your ankles up, I say you sure look sweet / From your ankles down, you’re just too much meat.” He pairs this with lines about her drinking all his liquor and eating all his food.

Why It Isn’t About Physical Violence

The phrase “I’m gonna put my foot up your ass” is a post-WWII American idiom that didn’t enter the mainstream lexicon until decades later.

I asked Google “how/why did he make that song during WW2 isnt that like weird given you said it was an ominous year” and Google said, “Escapism was a psychological necessity”.

Me: How is escapism a psychological necessity. wouldnt it be better if people focused on solving problems like hitler’s invasion etc

Google: Your logic makes perfect sense on paper: when a massive threat like Adolf Hitler arises, the most logical response seems to be total, undivided focus on stopping him. However, human psychology does not work like a computer executing a program… In November 1939, the average citizen listening to Fats Waller in New York, London, or Paris had absolutely no direct control over geopolitical events.

Knicks vs Spurs NBA Finals Game 4

So anyway, speaking of escape, I watched the Knicks versus Spurs NBA Finals game 4 at a bar in Brooklyn where the Knicks staged an epic comeback and won despite being down 27 points at halftime, and only leading the game in the last 53 seconds of the game. Epic. I see people being happy in the street. It seems like a good opportunity to start talking to random people, but I don’t have it in me to go up to someone and say, “Wow, how about those Knicks,” or “Wow, I really like OG Anunoby” or something. It’s also really hot and humid and I’ve been drinking for about 6 hours straight and walking for like two miles because the N isn’t working because the MTA sucks ass due to curruption, which is something I would actually feel more comfortable reaching out to random people about. Why can’t people get together and complain about that instead of complaining about an NBA loss like they did in game 3? That was my thought when I saw videos of people rioting near MSG, breaking stuff: Wow, you’re so close to doing what you should be doing, probably. This almost feels like a real moment where maybe something in society could change and improve if people joined together to stop getting fucked in the ass in every single possible way every single day. Below that video (which was on X) is people claiming a particular OG block was actually a foul. It looks like a foul from the screenshot. Then you scroll down and there’s a video which shows he clearly got ball first. So it’s not a foul. The tweet saying it’s a foul got 19 thousand likes. 19 thousand people are wrong. I guess it doesn’t matter. Scroll down again and the next video is random people outside on MSG who ran into Jerry Seinfeld and they ask him to say “Free Palestine” and supposedly he responds, “It doesn’t exist.” I’m not totally sure he said that because I didn’t bother to watch the video.

Part of me thinks given that there’s so much to talk about, maybe the board games should be a little less complicated.