This time, Espenchied added a preliminary round: an Amazon shopping spree. Contestants had four minutes to find three items on a list.

I stepped forward to get my list. The music got louder, pounding electronica from DJ Smart & Outgoing. My palms began to sweat. Sitting across from me, John looked in the zone. "Shoppers, open your lists!" shouted Espenchied.

I unfolded my list, and despaired.

Neon facepaint Sex furniture 3D glasses

Have you ever really looked at the Amazon homepage? Apparently I’ve been subconsciously blocking out everything surrounding the search bar, which makes sense: you learn to ignore banner ads, and Amazon's homepage looks like it was cobbled together from them. It consists entirely of boxy, garish links for the Fire Phone, The Wire DVDs, jeans, and portable hard drives. Except I couldn’t ignore them, because they were all I had to work with.

I decided to start with the face paint. I figured Amazon would bury sex furniture deep, and plus I wasn’t totally sure I knew what "sex furniture" was.

"It’s an industrial internet, full of islands."

I clicked the "beauty" tab on the search bar, but without a keyboard, I couldn’t enter anything into the search field. I scrolled down. At the bottom there was an ad for colored pencils. Maybe, I reasoned desperately, people who bought colored pencils also bought neon face paint, because they really like colors. It wasn’t much but it was all I had.

There is an endless bounty of colored pencils on Amazon, and apparently people who buy colored pencils just buy more colored pencils.

Wait, the reviews! Maybe a pencil reviewer also reviewed face paint. I scrolled and scrolled. Someone reviewed a wig. Wigs are in the beauty section. Black wigs. Brown wigs. Wavy wigs. Human hair wigs. Cosplay wigs. Neon cosplay wigs.

Amazon is a limitless emporium of neon cosplay wigs, and the more of them you click, the more it shows you. At no point does Amazon chime in and say, "Hey, maybe you should give the wigs a rest and check out some face paint," which makes sense, because you just clicked through a dozen pages of wigs so clearly you know what you want. The browser had no back button. I was digging myself deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of neon cosplay wigs.

"Time!"

Martha Hipley won, thanks to a fortuitously generic shopping list and deft use of the default menu options. John lost.

"What’s a Tabasco holster?" he asked.

"I mean, sex furniture?" I commiserated.