Remember Mad Libs? I built a version using the Epstein DOJ emails. It's hilarious.
This is what crazy nerds like me do with their time instead of going to the gym.
Remember Mad Libs?
I used to beg my mom to buy them for me when I was a kid attending my local elementary school’s ‘Scholastic Ice Cream Social and Book Fair’ event and I had not thought of this little distraction in decades until Epstein.
I’d bring them to school the next day and my friends and I would write dirty words into every blank space and then laugh until we cried reading them out loud. Good times. I never thought such a happy memory could ever be so polluted by the actions of our society’s richest and most powerful people…
Click to play the game or read the article first - you do you.
The first time I opened the Epstein redaction files, I thought I was looking at a Mad Libs game sheet.
Seriously. Page after page of government documents where every third word was blacked out with thick dark bars, and my brain, which has been broken by the internet and too many years of investigative journalism, immediately went: “Huh. That looks like Mad Libs. But sad.”
And that thought sat in the back of my skull for weeks. Months, actually. Just festering in there like a bad idea that refuses to die, which, if you’ve ever had a bad idea, you know they are basically immortal. Good ideas come and go. Bad ideas move into your brain, set up a recliner, and start watching your memories like television.
And then I got sick…
Not regular sick. The kind of sick where you get the flu, survive the flu, feel human again for approximately 45 minutes, and then bronchitis kicks in the door like a SWAT team and throws a flash bang grenade in your lungs. I have been coughing up things that look like they belong in a medical textbook chapter titled “Substances That Should Not Exist Inside a Person.” My lungs have been producing materials that I’m fairly certain violate the Geneva Convention. At one point I coughed so hard I pulled a muscle in my back, which I did not know was possible, and which my body apparently decided to teach me at 3 AM while I was trying to sleep in a farmhouse in upstate New York.
Which is where I am right now. My parents’ place. Middle of nowhere. And I’m here because right around the time the bronchitis arrived, my father had a heart attack.
So I drove 300 miles in a borrowed Toyota Camry to make sure my dad wasn’t dying. He was not dying. He was, however, blaming me for the heart attack. Not the chain smoking. Not the Fox News marathon that starts at dawn and ends when he falls asleep in his recliner at midnight. Not the potato chip diet, which my father once defended to me by saying, and I quote, “Potatoes are a vegetable and my doctor told me to eat more vegetables.”
No. I gave him the heart attack. Me. His son. The one who drove 300 miles to see if he was alive.
I love my father… but now I understand why people become hermits.
So there I was. Sick. Stressed. Sitting in a farmhouse surrounded by fields and bad cell service, too exhausted to write, too wired to sleep, and too stubborn to do nothing. My brain, the alcoholic part of it, kept whispering helpful suggestions like “just go to the bar, nobody will know” and “two shots of whiskey is technically medicine if you believe hard enough.” I told that part of my brain to shut up. It did not shut up. It never shuts up. But I didn’t go to the bar, so that’s a win, and I am counting wins wherever I can find them because they have been in short supply lately.
I needed to do something. Something that wasn’t writing, because contrary to what people seem to think, writing is not easy. Writing is sitting at a desk for twelve hours while your brain slowly liquefies and drips out of your ears. Writing is researching a topic until you want to scream, drafting 2,000 words, reading them back, realizing they’re garbage, deleting everything, and starting over while questioning every life decision that led you to this moment instead of a comfortable cubicle with dental insurance.
I needed a break.
So I started scrolling through my published articles, looking at the numbers, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And something jumped out at me. Ninety percent of my new subscribers came from Epstein-related articles. Not the political stuff. Not the biblical scholarship. The Epstein files. Every single time I published something about those documents, the subscriber count spiked like a heart monitor in an action movie.
And that’s when the bad idea that had been living in my brain rent-free since January finally stood up from its recliner and said: “Build the game, you idiot.”
So I built the game.
It is the funniest game you will ever feel bad about laughing at!
It works exactly like Mad Libs, except instead of filling in blanks to make a funny story about your trip to the zoo, you’re filling in redacted words from actual Epstein-related documents to create something that is simultaneously hilarious and deeply, profoundly, soul-crushingly depressing.
I spent more time building this thing than I spent writing in the last five days. I coded it from scratch, sitting in my parents’ farmhouse, coughing up what appeared to be canned dog food that had somehow migrated into my respiratory system, while my father watched Fox News in the next room and occasionally yelled things at the television that I will not repeat because this is a family publication (it is not a family publication, but I’m trying to maintain the illusion of standards).
The first few rounds I played had me laughing so hard I almost cried. Full body, tears-streaming, can’t-breathe laughter. Which, given the bronchitis, nearly killed me. There is a real possibility that I will be the first journalist in history to die from laughing at his own Epstein joke while recovering from a respiratory infection in a farmhouse. That would be a hell of an obituary.
And then, somewhere between round three and round four, the laughter stopped. Because the thing about making jokes about the Epstein files is that eventually your brain catches up and reminds you that these documents describe real crimes committed against real children by real people who are still walking around free, running companies, advising presidents, and attending charity galas where they raise money for causes like “protecting children,” because irony is not dead, it is alive and living in a penthouse in Manhattan.
I laughed. And then I cried. And then I kept building the game, because what else am I supposed to do? Stop? Pretend the documents don’t exist? Pretend the redactions aren’t covering up names that would break this country in half if we ever saw them?
No. You make the game. You make people laugh. And then you make them think about why they’re laughing, and what’s hiding behind those black bars, and why their government decided they weren’t allowed to see it.
The game is free. It takes two minutes to play. It will make you laugh, and then it will make you uncomfortable, and then you’ll play it again because that’s what humans do when something is funny and horrible at the same time. We can’t look away.
Play it. Share it on your Facebook. Share it on your Instagram. Share it on whatever other social media platform the CIA and their Mossad overlords has you convinced is a safe and normal place to share your thoughts and photos and location data. Tell your friends. Tell your weird uncle. (Okay, maybe not tell him.) Tell the crazy guy at work who won’t stop talking about how the government is filled with vampires.
"Writing is researching a topic until you want to scream, drafting 2,000 words, reading them back, realizing they’re garbage, deleting everything, and starting over while questioning every life decision that led you to this moment"
As someone who did freelance technical writing, this hit home.
OMG you are inspired! This is Fantastic. And actually really fucking funny. Thank you.