I’m very displeased when a Magic 8-Ball says “cannot predict now” or “ask again later” or some other similar horseshit. What could a plastic die floating in blue slime possibly be doing that it’s too busy to answer my question? Maybe these snide non-committal messages are meant to be some sort of a joke, but in practice the only logical response to them is to immediately just reshake the ball. Why are you wasting my time in this fashion? The equivalent to this would be if in every Tarot deck there was a card that said, “Sorry, we can’t really figure out your fortune this hand. Fuck you, reshuffle the deck.” Magic 8-Ball manufacturers should just create a fewer-sided fortune die and throw the neutral messages in the garbage, because that would really save me a lot of time late at night when I’m trying to determine whether a girl likes me. And there’s nothing “magical” about dicking people around.

I can tell backgammon is a classy game because it often comes in a little briefcase, which is more than I can say for games of chance like chess. Sometimes I imagine commuting to work carrying my backgammon briefcase—who’s going to stop me? I have important business to attend to. It’s called playing backgammon. Backgammon should come with those handcuffs you sometimes see douchebags at the airport attach to their briefcases. If somebody stole my backgammon briefcase, I have no idea how I’d ever recover that data.

If I ever needed to deliver a briefcase full of cash to somebody, you can probably guess which kind of case I’d secretly bring along. I’d slowly turn the briefcase toward the druglord or whomever, and his eyes would begin to light up in anticipation of the cash. Then I’d pop open the case, and boom—backgammon. I’d be lost in hysterics as they proceeded to shoot me in the face, but what the hell were they expecting? I don’t have that kind of cash. My laughter nerves would probably still be activated for two or three minutes after they shot me, like how mammals’ limbs sometimes twitch after death. I’d just be lying there dead, laughing my ass off.

There’re a lot of useless keys on a standard PC keyboard, but only the insert key has the power to fuck with your work. I would rather the insert key be replaced with a button that gives you a mild electrical shock. Prior to pointing devices, the insert key might have had some utility, but now it’s just a trick button. What it does is it transforms your keyboard into a living nightmare in which everything you type replaces the text in front of it, as if all that other text in your document was just hanging around for decoration. The only scenario this would be useful is if you wanted to get rid of the proceeding text of your document, but only in a quantity of characters that was exactly equal to your newly-inserted text. What kind of asshole would make such an edit? “Man, I really need to delete the thirteen characters to the immediate right of my text cursor, and I also need to insert a word that’s exactly eleven characters long, leaving two extra characters for spaces. Time for my trusty insert key!” How about you insert a bullet into your head? Meanwhile, the insert key is located right next to backspace, which is for people who edit text in an educated fashion. So I’m constantly hitting the insert key on accident, and there’s no way to tell that you’ve toggled on overtype mode until you notice that your new text is eating the shit out of your old text. Maybe there’s a way to disable this—maybe there is. Maybe there’s also a way to pry the button off with a carving knife. But I would like to know if any sort of person needs their insert key, because perhaps I speak out of ignorance. Do coders use overtype mode? Has anybody in the last twenty years hit this key on purpose? Or should I organize a protest?

I don’t know why I never realized this as a child, but “Toys ‘R’ Us” is an absolute grammatical nightmare. In 7 short letters, they managed to violate nearly every rule of the English language. And just what are they trying to communicate in this street jive of theirs? “We Are Toys”? Go fuck yourself, Geoffrey, that doesn’t even make any sense. “Babies ‘R’ Us” works a little better, considering you could kind of imagine a baby constructing such a poorly-worded sentence, if babies somehow figured out how to talk. But are you really naming your store “We Are Babies”? Who says that? Guess what, I was kind of hoping there was an adult salesperson around who could sell me some fucking baby clothes. Or at the very least a baby salesperson who can speak without using illiterate gang jargon.