• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

Shaina Rubin

Eat your heart out, Goya. Or devour your kids. Whatevs.

Dear Employees of The Learning Company:

I am firing all of you immediately if you don’t sell more copies of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis immediately. Someday, there will be mad dictators who order scientists all over the world to create the perfect human being. And humanity will not be ready to face that challenge unless they all start playing Zoombinis.

I bet some of you have entirely forgotten the Zoombinis. Ha! You’re all too busy trying to make Reader Rabbit hip and cool, but your priorities are all backwards. Our customers think Zoombinis is completely boring. You design a bunch of critters, take them through puzzles where you put different Zoombinis with certain features in different arrangements, blah blah blah…no one cares.

They’re all missing the point. Reader Rabbit teaches these kids jack shit. The Zoombinis, however, teach children 8 and up the magic of eugenics. Every time you screw up, a small blue creature of your creation falls screaming into an endless abyss. Some might call it morbid. I call it Darwinism.

Children find something fascinating about making tiny people with squiggly hair and sunglasses in the hopes that they will be more likely to survive than tiny people who didn’t have squiggly hair or sunglasses. Every time, they try to create the perfect Zoombini, hoping that, if they make it cool enough, it would be completely abyss-proof. Maybe, someday, the really gifted children will figure out that they’re supposed to make all the Zoombinis as similar to one another as possible. Those runty bespectacled kids, thanks to us, will finally realize that being beautiful on the inside counts for nothing.

It’s true. We meant for the blue-eyed, blonde haired Zoombinis to do better. And these pixilated pawns are just the beginning. We’re just planning out the perfect blueprints for a superman. Or perhaps a superwoman. (We don’t hate women; we’re not racists.)

And yet, I digress. The Zoombinis is more than just a twisted tutorial in tinkering towards total totalitarianism. The challenges those little blue heroes face mirror the challenges we face in everyday life. You—yes, you!—could learn a thing or two from this game. In the future, life will be fast and furious, and if you can’t keep up, there’s an abyss with your name on it, pal. The Zoombinis, early on in the game, must make the perfect pizza for a hungry tree-monster who will punt them like Tom Rouen if they fail. As trippy as this sounds, it is sobering to contemplate. Not doing well at your job at the local pizza joint? Work on your job performance, quick, or you may be kicked into next week.

Or, next time you find yourself in a speeding cart heading towards a haunted mine, make sure to grab a buddy and read all the symbols on the walls carefully. Okay, maybe that one isn’t completely applicable to your life. I’m just saying.

It’s fortunate that we don’t have to worry about creating the perfect creature, or keeping ourselves alive through the many perils of life. The perfect creature is already here on earth, and if we clone me, we’ll be okay.

Please try and sell more copies of the Zoombinis game. The human race depends on our success.

Contemptuously,

Your boss and overlord