Metal grill brushes like these, when used, shed their bristles. These razor-sharp thin wires, if they stick to your food and enter your body, can become lodged in your esophagus, puncture your stomach, intestines, or liver, or even cause a pulmonary embolism, which could be fatal. Physicians universally recommend against using metal grill brushes, but since it’s technically a cleaning product and not a food, it’s apparently harder to regulate.

The bristles are so thin they don’t show up on X-rays, and are difficult to remove using non-invasive techniques.

Grill season is more or less over this year, but you might want to just wad up a piece of aluminum foil and use that to clean your grill from now on. (And no, before you ask, you can’t use The Grillbot, the Roomba-ed version of the same metal grill brush.)

This billiards table doubles as a dining-room table. (Here’s what it looks like with the table-top cover.) Since it’s a thin, light table that would move if you bumped it or leaned on it, it would be horrible for billiards, but don’t let that stop you from dropping four figures on it.

The world is a dark place these days, so why not ruin your girlfriend’s day by getting down on one knee and opening an electric fartbox in her face?

Caring for a houseplant is a relaxing and fulfilling responsibility. That’s where Planty comes in. You hook it up to wi-fi and it turns the simple act of watering a plant into  another red dot to the never-ending list of tasks your phone commands you to perform throughout the day. You can even press the “water the plant” button while you’re at work, to prove to the ruling class that you value labor above all else.

The only thing more depressing than Planty would be a wi-fi gadget that lets you push a button on your phone to give your dog a treat while you’re at work. And because our world is a dirt-crusted globe of despair, that gadget exists.

Finally. A golf club you can piss into, that stores your piss.        

Maybe you want to be confronted with a giant Jeff Goldblum chilling with a gorilla every time you go into your bathroom. It’s your life, not mine. Do what you will.

If you can’t already tell, we live in a dystopia. The technology we’ve spent decades to harness and refine now controls what we see via black-box algorithms. Whether it’s training us to view and like sponsored content, or simply catching us in a novelty-seeking loop to increase interaction and time-on-site for shareholders, we’ve slowly allowed the promise of the open internet to narrow and centralize until it mostly serves the needs of private investors.

The Pavlok delivers an electric shock to your wrist when it detects you are engaging in a self-declared bad habit. It connects to your phone, where you enter your bad habits. This may work (users report it breaks soon, sometimes before its first use) but it’s a short leap from masochistic lifehacking to companies offering bonuses to employees who wear Pavlok to increase their productivity at work. Then, the companies require use of Pavlok during work hours for all employees, to make it “more fair.” On-call employees have to wear them at all times outside of work, for obvious reasons.

Then, a study shows that schoolchildren show a 6% increase in test scores when equipped with Pavlok. The superintendent describes the electric shock as a “fun tickle” in the assembly where the devices are distributed.

You receive your Time-Warner Pavlok along with a pamphlet that compliance will earn you $20 off your monthly cable bill. All you have to do is remain in the room during commercial blocks. (The electric shock will warn you that you are out of compliance.)

Below is a real illustration from Sony patent 8246454 B2 from 2009. Our dystopia is real. This is what we got instead of the equality, leisure time, and freedom we could have had if the greed of the ruling class hadn’t condemned us to this living hell.