Christmas is over, and so is the tension, bad music, and inevitable disappointment. But don’t worry, our retrospective will soon have all those memories flooding back! Join us now, as we review
THE BEST GIFTS OF 2018
Murder That Guy
Perhaps the most excruciatingly deep experience ever programmed, Murder That Guy allows you to encounter a literally infinite number of guys thanks to ground-breaking procedural generation, with unique faces, hopes, dreams, and boring conversational topics, and all of whom you will murder in the same room with one of four functionally-identical guns. Great for bored people.
Aaaaugh
If at any point you feel like you’re not tense enough, crack this bad boy open. Available in eReader formats, .pdfs, or even boring ol’ dead trees, Aaaaugh is a concise and thoughtful catalogue of all the bad news from the past decade, compiled with an eye to instilling maximal dread and hopelessness. As a thoughtful touch, this second addition comes with a customized epilogue – physical books get a short essay on the wood pulping process, digital copies come with an explanation on the atrophying effects of social media on attention spans.
Freeze!
A board game – hey, remember when we had those as kids? Well, here’s one again. One player runs the bank, collects the money, and sometimes yells ‘freeze!’ and then their appointed deputy can shoot as many of the other players as they like. Comes with working kid-sized taser. Pretty good fun for all ages so long as at least two people are knowledgeable about CPR.
DaileeGrind
A cool app for your phone that records your job all day and then creates minigames based around it for you to play after! Be careful – if you start skipping shifts, it fires you. Recommended for anyone who really needs more chores in their life.
lol
A fifty-GB box set of America’s finest comedy, selected from everything from stand-up comics to animated shows. Revel in a selection of humour aimed at everyone that isn’t like you. Cherish the most funny message of all: that everything is bad, but especially anything new, and caring too much about anything is really dumb. You can buy more of this stuff if you want to feel more funny with the 200-GB box set.
Chunk o’ Coral
Hey, remember the Great Barrier Reef dying? Better put a stop to that! With this tiny sample of it in a tiny tank, you can preserve a piece of what was once the world’s largest organism! Better not forget to clean the tank because otherwise it’ll be awkward when we try and put the pieces back together and your chunk looks all grody and/or dead.
Greatest Hits
This is just a link to an endless playlist YouTube generates based on your search history, but I’m told it’s good. Cheap, too.
Im Very Smart
If you’ve ever wanted success – in business, in your love life, in your local homeowner’s association meetings – then look no further than to this thoughtful tome, which will explain to you how you can fix all of your problems by acting more like a rhinoceros beetle because biology is basically all the same and people are just stupid meat robots. You will not BELIEVE how many things will be solved by you headbutting people and flipping them over with your horns. Females will love you, males will avoid you (if you’re female and considering buying this book, don’t bother, the foreword assures us you can’t read). Real fans can follow up with the sequels: Womn Are Stupd and IQ is Xtremlly Real And Larg.
Food
Everyone loves this, right? And we keep getting these headlines screaming about crop failure and ocean primary productivity loss and something about aquifiers. So buy your friends food and buy it fast, because they could probably use it soon.
Suicide Kit
Inspired by the humble and humanitarian efforts of Dr. Kervorkian yet intent on building upon them with an eye to market supply and demand, this more sophisticated mass-produced corporate model is a small butter knife and a two-page manual explaining you need to insert the dowel into the socket and jiggle the handle for best performance. For the coward’s way out, a simple lobotomy is also described. No refunds.
Small, Fragile Animal
Take care of this incredibly tiny meeping thing and get an extra thrill out of your life as you realize that if you ever screw up it will almost certainly perish. Inedible. Sustainably milled.
BANG BANG BANG
A simple game with simple controls. Pushing, pressing, or failing to press anything will make your gun fire. Watch for as long as you like. If you’re cheap, just go watch other people play it on YouTube. I heard the reaction videos are good. Remember to like and subscribe!
An Online Friend
Contains a simple machine learning program that will simulate having conversations with you on IM like you were 14 again. Commiserate with it, laugh with it, reminisce with it, realize you have grown old before your time, fall into an endless pit of nostalgia in a desperate attempt to escape the present through the re-experience of outdated corporate fodder. Comes with a shirt.
Bacon
The internet told us everyone loves this unless they’re vegetarian vegan or religious. So this is a picture of some bacon. You can still make memes with it and it’s cheaper than the real thing.
Motivation
These pills don’t do anything. Great gag though.