Upsetting Day: Ride Inside, Stay Alive🌭 (Patreon)

I’ve been avoiding this.

Challenging, when I see them every day.

Posters adding dead kids to every commute.

Every endless commute to art kindergarten to teach line editing to fund grocery runs to fuel gym torture to offset authentic fusion tapas to impress doomed dates to fill coffin-sized bedrooms to avoid endless deadlines to support doomed dreams to delay costumed terrorism to repeat endless commutes, New York shows me fun-sized corpses.

It's strange. The entire project, not just the art style changing every panel. That’s just my governor missing a button in MidJourney.

I don’t want to be the dead kid guy. It’s easier to tell dates you’re the nazi music expert, or the passive-aggressive wizard. Or even the backup anime specialist. Everything sounds better than "I write about dead kids for attention and rent."

But fucking look at this.

Look. Ignore my zany backdrop and take in “black (respectable)” traced over the Civil War funeral. The first one, with the kids, not the black (respectable) one halfway through. Claude worked hard on this.

Have you blessed your eyes? Have you seen my taxes subsidize Altman’s trial lawyer? Behold, the age of miracles.

I prefer Millar’s tale, where the misery pornstars were fictional and had lines. Ride Inside, Stay Alive is all stilted narration. Nothing smothers representation like speaking over them as directly as your medium allows. Sure, direct narration’s a great loudspeaker. So great, that it still works when you have nothing to say.

I shouldn’t copyedit gravestone graffiti. But help Ryan survive? Bit late. He’s with Aunt Beru and the good Kennedys.

The team-up shot baffles. While wakes can be adventures too, that’s not what the MTA’s going for. Dissonance creeps in when you mulch thirty issues of Power Pack and press “urban.”

Ah yes, Nigel. Our BMX mascot. Each strip ends with him staring ahead like a confused celebrity cameo. After years of watching skate park suicide attempts, Nigel betting his image on Ride Inside, Stay Alive is the wildest trick I’ve seen. Respect.

As for why this happened. Some faiths say a girl touched [any object] and now we’re damned. I prefer cribbing from Douglas Adams. Either way, you’re stuck here until you fall off a train at sixty likes an hour.

See, the MTA wants you to stop subway surfing.

Right, we’re online. For some of you, this came out at midnight. You may have kids undecided about subway surfing, or be one. I should set the stage before belting jokes about dead authors and civilizations. Well, those authors and civilizations were subway surfing.

Subway surfing is medicine for boredom, with three awesome side effects.

Some people fixate on that third bit. They’re jealous of all the pussy. Keep subway surfing.

Unconvinced? Consider this official academic diagram.

Hopefully that helps.

Fine, subway surfing’s only awesome in moderation.

I get that. I really do. Subway surfing kills you faster than ghost riding a train. Subway surfing's dumber than trusting the L not to stop at random. Subway surfing bets your life on signals older than integration. There are better arguments for standing in front of a train than on top of it.

However.

I've never been more tempted. After each comic, my soul says “These six-fingered failures simply lacked ball knowledge. I’m sick with it. I do flares when doomed date banter falters. I have the balance and death urge for bowl skating. I left art school without cirrhosis. While losers shouldn't subway surf, I could tame the train.”

And die.

Happy? Responsible clowns and stuntmen are a sign of the end. Leaving Nigel’s involvement’s a total mystery to me. No sane adult thinks web personalities can solve the panic of the week.

Well, anyone can slap their name on a project. Bald Tweed was probably too busy fisting the budget to touch this.

Nope.

I’ve got this one book, Psychic Yoga. It says stretching making you telepathic. Let’s talk Psychic Yoga. We can leave alopecia and oppression robots behind.

Of course it’s Eric. We’ll be fighting in hell.

I could stop here. Leaving EricPosting’s my only mature choice this decade. And 2k words of dead kids is a tall order. But all my friends are watching, and I despise the forces in my way. If I survive, my social stature could improve in life-changing ways. My leaders have no vision for or concept of the future, only reactive short-term graft, like blonde versions of…Yoon Suk Yeol. Why should I be better?

In short, there’s no other choice. Reputation murder-suicide is my only option. We have to cover Ride Inside, Stay Alive.

For context: Eric and I have a rivalry. Back in college, one of his scams exploded in our fraud lab, disfiguring my beautiful face. Now I plot vengeance, while he explores new frontiers of fraud.

Yet if Ryan’s poster were a one-off, I’d still leave it alone. 2026 has a few competing indignities, and I don’t need more compact graves in my portfolio. But Ride Inside, Stay Alive is following me.

Sorry, that’s Apple’s flagship “Shot on iPhone” quality. Here’s a few legible panels.

Antoine’s a bit old and sober for subway surfing. Shame it ruins his life anyway.

This is one good beat away from being “Loss (East Coast Remix).”

Perfection. Granted, this must be an old story. Today, conductors don’t blink unless they lose three uptown kids in one tunnel.

Sometimes genre-leading geniuses make fake signs. So at first, for a second, I dreamed Ride Inside, Stay Alive might be a rib. But, per the MTA's inexplicably public archive, there were twelve launch comics. Expensive gag, for a city that could only afford six cops per turnstile.

I suspect they wanted more. Ride Inside, Stay Alive isn’t subtle about covering its demographic bases. In Eric’s perfect world, we’d have a maimed child for every notch on the census. In practice, we settle for the hits.

Wait for it.

Subtle. The day a Shirley Temple wipes out, they’ll put gun turrets between cars. We won’t even have trains anymore if Barron eats rail. Good thing they don’t drink much at NYU.

Eric’s dead, and Ride Inside, Stay Alive marches on. Somewhere, an incurable middle manager loves these comics and hates paying artists. You know, the kind of poll-powered drone that becomes governor by accident. Not to impugn Hochul's record of inhaling and exhaling. She’d never watch a convenient disaster from a comfortable distance.

For 8.2999 billion of Earth’s citizens, I have high standards for accusing them of petty fraud. Eric’s involved, so nope. Ride Inside, Stay Alive ripped off, or at least wasted the time of, a bunch of teenagers. At least half an SAT.

Flash back to this refreshingly dull 2023 poster:

The first wave of Ride Inside, Stay Alive PSAs were manmade, with standard blocky designs, and copy noting that dying sucks. Courtesy of student artists with faces and dreams from the High School of Art and Design. At a glance, the school looks great. For all my jabs at dark academia, NYC has anime-style specialized high schools for fashion, robots, and posters. I guess corrupt despots were inevitable.

The MTA touted student involvement in the 2025 comics. Maybe that was the plan, at some point. No plan survives contact with Eric.

Right, quotes get boring without overt insanity. The point’s that they rang the “kid power” bell again before this disaster. Here’s a photo from the 2025 Ride Inside, Stay Alive back-patting conference. Featuring a wonderfully enthusiastic Nigel. That’s a face with Hawk-level sellout instincts.

.

Fun times. “Look what our wonderful youth have crafted. They even got to stand near a BMX survivor.” But–and this is insufficient evidence for any non-Adams–the kids say they got dicked over. For instance, on the MTA’s Meta soapbox:

I filed this user under “bored troll,” until 5 AM. When I scoured Ride Inside, Stay Alive press releases like a normal person, and found this user in the photo op above. I’ve blurred the face and username, since I don’t need that lawsuit. But if they’re playing, they’ve done a masterful job of faking a decade of art nerdery, side projects, and shitposting across two accounts.

The theme recurs elsewhere. Namely, MTA reposts of this dud. Bragging about heists is fine–tradition even. But block the targets first.

Now, could the students have lied about AI art? Absolutely, and I hang one from the gallows for it every semester. But 2023’s “Subway Squad” got public credit, while 2025’s comics remain notably blank. In a vacuum, the MTA’s pretty consistent about recognition. “Gemini” just makes for an awkward byline.

More importantly, our other suspect is Eric Adams. A human shitcoin. This darkling just became Albanian to stay out of a cell. And that’s not his loudest fraud this month.

For the record, I reached out to the MTA, the School of Art and Design, and various children. The old “Prof. Dayle/The New Yorker/Princeton blood magic” routine. Then my used Steam Deck came in the mail, and The Rogue Prince of Persia rules. But the truth is out there.

Could I do better? Anyone could. Writing “Stop it” on a candy wrapper is better. But, as a reformed ad daemon, half-reformed maniac, and unreformed egoist, I’ll play my part.

First, one in the current style. The current style sucks, but I’m meeting these chimps in the fucking middle.

Next, one for me.

Finally, a hybrid.

There, four campaigns. You can find the fourth if you squint hard.

And that's the end! Only a petty, spiteful fuck would really print these. Five hundred stickers each, for pickup on Thursday. I normally take a taxi, but my roommate agreed to give me a ride.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Waylan Russell, who would never subway surf but is more than happy to quiznos surf.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM