Happy birthday! I got you a compression spring with a 518.71 N load capacity!

Packs of ten? Well, yeah, theoretically they come in packs of ten, but… I… The other nine… (puts hands in pockets) They didn’t send them, which is fine with me, because I don’t even LIKE compression springs with a 518.71 N load capacity.

Do you love to play games with complex rules about moving units of soldiers into different hexagons, with each having different qualities, with each quality having their own lengthy set of rules? Yes? And you’re tired of only being able to share your pedantry with your personal computer?

Enter Civilization, The Board Game. If your friends don’t already hate you, they will after hour nine of this “game.” The rulebook begins with 14 pages of setup and gets better from there.

If you can’t manage to shake the people who love you by putting them through Civilization, there is Advanced Civilization: The Board Game. You might have to pay $599.99 for the privilege of playing it, but seeing the people in your life throw down their gamepieces and storm out of your house one-by-one is something every role-playing rulemonster should experience at some point in their lives.

“Life” is perhaps the best way to describe this 24,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, a hell-carnival of dolphins, planets, hot-air balloons, and eagles. I can’t think of better metaphor to use for such a fluorescent, sisyphean ordeal.

The best thing about this problem-in-a-box is that it’s 14 feet long when finished, meaning that it must be assembled on the floor. What’s six months spent in a fragmented Lisa Frank hellscape if your back isn’t cramping up the whole time?

Weight-loss is an amazing industry. Nothing is forbidden, and nothing is too ridiculous to sell.

The whole-body-vibration machine is the newest trend in exercise equipment, and it comes just in time for people tired of shaking their Shake Weight, last year’s home-exercise accessory of choice. While it may be years until a fitness company can debase thousands of people with another pornographic jerkoff machine, the vibration platform will do for now.

As you might imagine, a vibration platform does not accelerate weight-loss through any physiological mechanism, and it can potentially injure soft tissue, especially in your spine. You might feel sore after you’re done, but I feel sore after sitting on my butt in a computer chair, and it doesn’t mean I exercised.

The vibration platform does have one benefit, though: It allows you to install a giant vibrator in your house and demand privacy from your family while you use it. Kids, give me twenty minutes. I have to…. exercise.

If you’re the kind of person to watch 94 Ax Men episodes in a row, and cry out to the heavens “Why hast thou forsaken me?” when your DVR backlog runs out, Woodcutter Simulator may be the video game for you.

The reviews (mostly one-star) say that the game is slow, unfun and crashes frequently, which sounds a lot like the workday of a lumberjack.

The premise of the Magic Bullet blender is that you can use it for dozens of things. This piece of shit used to be all over TV last decade. A smiling mom would put some avocados in it and make some guacamole, or smoothies, or dip, or broccoli dip, or bean dip.

I owned one of these briefly and the motor burned out when I put in half an avocado, some cilantro and lime juice. Keep in mind ripe avocado is already mushy, and you can usually make guacamole with a fucking fork. I don’t know why the Magic Bullet couldn’t blend ripe avocado, but the blade spun around a while, and the avocado kind of jammed in the end of the thing, and it broke. So I threw it out.

Beside that, you don’t need to reduce everything you eat to a mush, unless you’re a baby. It would be great for baby food. Except if you actually HAVE a baby, you don’t really have time in the day to maintain the world’s worst blender and keep the dozens of blades, collars, and containers washed.

It’s a good idea to weigh yourself regularly and adjust your diet to account for small losses or gains in weight. But for some reason I can’t help thinking it’s a bad idea to have your scale report your weight to the Internet, where Google will probably add it to the file of everything you’ve ever searched, your entire email archive, the list of everyone’s house you’ve ever Street Viewed, and all the videos you’ve ever watched on YouTube.

If you buy one of these and you start seeing Google Ads that say “Weigh 181.4 lbs? Here’s a diet plan that’s good for you” or “Is your body fat between 20.4% and 20.9%? Try this cracker” then you know why.