Category Archives: Humor

Joshua Jahn: Remembered For Failure

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Today’s subject of ridicule is so inept, that I don’t even know where to begin. I hope that doesn’t mean that his ineptitude is contagious. Though if I’m experiencing the symptoms of my own ineptitude, there’s no need to panic, because caffeine usually helps with that. Also, I couldn’t fail as hard as the ass clown in question if I tried.

Who is he? The attempted “Anti ICE” sniper, Joshua Jahn.

Wow, he’s got the “sits in the back row playing on his MacBook” look down. A spokesman for the University of Texas stated that someone with his name and date of birth briefly attended a decade ago, so it seems he was a one-semester kid, which is consistent with the “the lights are on but nobody’s home” look on his dumb face.

So, what did he do? Notice how I called him the attempted “Anti ICE” sniper above? That wasn’t an accident, because he failed unbelievably fucking hard.

Because people like him try to make a name for themselves, I’m going to do what I have fun doing and take away his name, and replace it with a derisive nickname. The new name for his gravestone is Dim Shot.

Now, Dim Shot is not one of those snipers from your grand-daddy’s generation, he’s one of those new-fangled snipers who would write his entire manifesto on his shell casings if he had the space or the skill. But he didn’t, so he had to settle for writing “ANTI ICE” on just one of the shell casings, in all caps, and just wrote the rest down on notebook paper.

The gun that killed people was an 8mm bolt action rifle which Dim Shot purchased legally in August. The gun was taken into custody.

On Wednesday, September 24, 2025, Dim Shot positioned himself on a rooftop near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office. As ICE agents were unloading detainees from a vehicle, Dim Shot opened fire upon the ICE agents.

Reportedly he had intended to maximize the damage to the ICE facility, and to its personnel. But just because he was trying, doesn’t mean he knew how. Dim Shot had completely missed ICE agents, and had instead hit detainees, killing one and injuring two.

You know, the very people he was attempting to fight for.

Dim Shot then fired off one last shot, and once again, he missed completely, unless the target was his own face. In which case, he finally managed to not completely fail at something.

Supposedly, Dim Shot did his research beforehand. Which I would have imagined would have involved cranking it to cartoon ponies between looking up ICE facility locations and their hours of operations, but it seems he downloaded a list of ICE facilities, and searched apps that tracked ICE agents, which have been promoted by leftists who deliberately endangered federal agents in so doing.

Also, he looked up video of the murder of Charlie Kirk. Apparently, he admired the handiwork of a furry-adjacent terrorist who got tired of beating off on his own, so he found a male in a dress to do it for him. The left has some shitty heroes.

Okay, you ready for the chilling words of a terrorist, straight from his manifesto? Actually, a shitty-ass note he left behind? Fear:

“Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?”

Slow clap. The slowest fucking clap. Ain’t no clap slow enough, or sarcastic enough. Dim Shot was so effective at fucking over the people he set out to serve, he may as well have worked in government. At least he would have been paid to fail so hard.

In a stunning exhibition of the Dunning-Kruger effect, Dim Shot attributed his plan to his own genius mind:

“Yes, it was just me and my brain,”

And what a brain it was. I can just imagine scientists lining up to study what of it was left.

Now, ABC News wanted to pass on to us that Dim Shot liked playing video games, like anyone outside of the Amish community. Hey thanks ABC News, we care. Among the games that Dim Shot sucked at were Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Rust. Not the some Rust where [joke redacted so Alec Baldwin doesn’t sue].

He also had a Reddit account, with which he expressed interest in smoking marijuana. And now we know where he got his strategic mind, and how his aim got so sharp.

In closing, he sucked.

Angry Lunatic Muslim Woman Freaks Out

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You might remember the old YouTube classic about the angry German kid who flips out while waiting for a computer game to load. We finally got a sequel, and it made its way to us before GTA VI did.

The following video shows us body cam footage of a woman who was just pulled over. She immediately starts ranting, proclaiming herself the victim because another driver wanted to kill her. And with her X-Men supercognition, she knew that the other driver had to be motivated by Islamophobia.

By the way, people can stop calling every criticism a “phobia”. That’s been going on for about two decades now, and it hasn’t gotten anywhere. Whether you think someone is motivated by fear doesn’t make you any less wrong. Move on.

The woman took out her iPhone and proceeded to record her conversation with the officer, being so full of herself that she thought the internet would side with her, which is ironic considering how things would end up playing out.

What’s really fascinating is that the moment the woman learns that she is going to be arrested, things turn religious. But not in a good way. She’s not bringing a message of love, or of patience. Nor is she bringing a message of salvation for all people.

No, she was being religious in a bad way. Her message is one of vengeance and vindictiveness. As she saw it, the arresting officers who were just doing their jobs were deliberately siding with a fallen angel, and will eventually pay a price.

Oftentimes, when someone is delusional, they’ll insist that they’re something special, like one of “the two witnesses”, or that they’ve discovered some great secret, or otherwise have some grandiose fantasy. As they see it, it’s because of this that some entity is out to get them, usually a powerful entity, such as the government, or demons, or a government that serves demons.

If demons were actually involved, it seems more reasonable to expect that they’d be messing with a person by feeding into a grandiose delusion, and convince them that the government is out to get them.

One thing that the woman reiterates is how special she is. That the officers aren’t supposed to “do this” to an Arab. How a male officer isn’t supposed to cuff her, or search her, or even touch her (the officers would bring a female officer to assist). It’s all an obvious and desperate attempt at evasion, knowing what’s coming and making it as difficult as possible, and proclaiming that there will be consequences if she doesn’t get her way.

One thing that’s particularly amusing about this is the implication that because she’s an Arab woman, she’s indemnified of all crimes. I wonder how long she might have believed this. If your belief is that you can’t be arrested, that’s a belief that’s going to go splat the moment it collides with reality.

And speaking of reality, it left the chat. As the woman is being driven to the station, she proclaims herself to be Muhammad. The Muhammad. And the officer lost his chance to bow down to her when he refused to take her orders.

You know about that seventh-century chomo warlord who claimed to be a prophet? That was Muhammad: A New Hope. That was old news. Now we’re talking about Muhammad: The Empire Strikes Back. This is the one without those stoopid ewoks.

I feel bad for anyone who dated her. That had to have been a nightmare. Of course, it’s possible that her genes benefited heavily from arranged marriages for generations.

Let’s be a little more serious for a moment. Based on what little I’ve seen of this incident, I suspect that drugs were involved. I suspect that the woman wasn’t always like the way she behaved in the bodycam footage, but some substance abuse, or possibly a side effect of medication, caused the woman to become disinhibited. When a person becomes disinhibited, their personality and beliefs usually don’t change. Instead, the person will become more candid with their beliefs, including those which they may have been too reserved to share. The woman’s erratic driving supports the hypothesis that controlled substances were involved.

If this is the case, then it follows that she had to have gotten the idea that she was special from somewhere. I suspect that such an idea may have been culturally impressed upon her, likely from her family, and likely from a young age. Under most circumstances, she would have known that sharing such ideas, some of which are racist, is usually not a great idea. However, if drugs were involved, she would have lost her inhibitions, and her ideas may have had grandiose elements added to them.

I would imagine that, if the woman were later sober, she would not have been happy to hear her own words played back to her. Especially if they were played back in a court of law.

If the woman were sincere in the delusions that she expressed, one could ask how she was able to function in society up until the point of her arrest. That’s not to say that it can’t happen. Back in my days of working retail, I’ve seen people of various degrees of interesting, but as far as I know, none of those people started trending on social media.

While it’s fun to imagine the crazy woman who goes from day to day thinking herself the modern day Muhammad, what we saw was probably just her worst moment. I say that as someone who didn’t much look into her case.

Whatever her background may have been, it likely fed significantly into what came to the surface, and when it did, it was quite a scene. Perhaps we’ll see more out of her, soon.

Working at Sears sucks.

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Currently listening: System of a Down – Toxicity

So I got enough for three packs of Pokemon cards. Or I can wait another 2 weeks for a volume of Azumanga Daioh. Life is good. But knowing me, another trip to Suncoast will result in me waiting longer.

Maybe I can distract myself with Metroid Prime 2. Still didn’t beat it.

Maddox did another article. It was funny, but he seems to be putting them up less often now. He’s trying too hard to sound smart.

Maybe Maddox can do an article on my neighbors. They’re yelling again. Do they think we can’t hear them?

(56k warning)

Currently, Deoxys is at level 63. They made it so that you’d have to beat the Elite Four a bunch of times to get to 100. A Lucky Egg would really help.

Zombie Watch: I saw sombody hobbling who had a piece of straw paper on her face. Turns out it was only an old person. But soon, the outbreak is going to happen! And when it does the flow of the era will be to those of us who prepared!

Thanks for reading. My exciting saga continues! Maybe I’ll go to Arby’s after this. Where the pull of Suncoast is even stronger…

Let’s Categorize the Losers Who Hate Anime

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To the end of arbitrary categorization, let’s look at various types of people who hate anime, with brief descriptions.

The Hanna-Barbara Boomer

This is the guy who remembers back when cartoons didn’t take their viewers seriously, didn’t bother with things like “character development” and “quality”, and still sees them as being for children, as though children don’t deserve a quality product.

The cartoons that he grew up with were boring and insipid, so it’s no surprise that he grew up to become yet another yutz who produces nothing of value, but still somehow has money. You probably somehow payed for the tech that he uses to fire off his mouth.

When he discovers Family Guy, his head will probably explode.

The MSM Karen

She’s one of the few people left who still listens to the mainstream media, so it’s no surprise when, after first hearing about anime from the MSM, she became convinced that it’s the biggest moral problem facing our country. She’s too closed-minded to listen to any facts to the contrary, which her minuscule brain will interpret as an attack against it.

If confronted with her, you can divert her attention if you were to present her with another documentary on another topic, provided the music is sufficiently creepy/mysterious-sounding, then find an opportunity to escape from this perfume-drenched outrage junkie.

The Baseball Cap

Jocko’s main beef with anime is that it’s complicated, therefore, he perceives it as threatening. And his way of dealing with threatening things is with torches and pitchforks.

The Baseball Cap looks forward to being accepted into college through a sports scholarship or, failing that, getting into the Army, unaware that the Army turns away those with an IQ under 82.

The Eagle Eye

This guy goes out of his way to make sure you know that he hates pedophiles. And because his peanut brain conflates anime with child abuse, he also hates anime and vilifies anyone who watches it.

Like anyone with dreams of being e-famous, he has a podcast that’s listened to by maybe one or two people, just in case you’re interested in the next installment of the series of “have I mentioned that I’m not a pedophile, today?” He also picks on furries. Or pretty much anything, as long as the heat’s off him and whatever the hell it is that he’s into.

The Funko Pop Bookshelf

The face of consoom culture, with the bookshelf to match. He unironically believes that buying Marvel crap makes him a better person, by reason of whatever the hell activist causes that multinational media conglomerates are currently bloviating about.

Like the Baseball Cap above, he’s an idiot. So if you were to get into the social commentary of Gundam or the psychological elements of Girls Last Tour, you’d likely be met with the same thousand-yard-stare that you’d see out of his rows and rows of near-identical Funko Pops.

The Espresso Spiritualist

This chick has the entire “You’re About to Hear Bullshit” starter pack. Power stones? Check. Thick-rimmed glasses? Double-check. Black nail polish? Standard issue. Hardcover copies of dubious spiritual tomes? It’s what the knapsack is for.

She basically believes that the Japanese are trying to hypnotize Americans with brainwaves, and that if you watch anime, you’re funding their efforts. You deal with her the same way as anyone else on this list: by not talking to her.

There you go. There’s others, but these are the kinds that are less likely to comprehend how embarrassing their viewpoints really are, increasing the likelihood that these are the ones that you’ll encounter.

Skeptic Officer Pushes Man Out Of Wheelchair, Arrests Him For Home Invasion

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I think we can agree that when a public servant carries out their duties, they generally get a pass. But when the servant is put in a position of power over other people, there’s much more on them to not act like a colossal smeghead.

Let’s have a look at one way a person could fail catastrophically in that regard: The officer who attempted to arrest a paralyzed man over an allegation that he kicked in a door.

You’ll likely find it evident what was wrong. But that’s assuming a typical level of intellect. The arresting officer was a special kind of savant who knows that skepticism is a sign of intellect, so he decided to take it to a whole other level.

When he met the man who was falsely accused, a man who was in a wheelchair, he called him out, saying that his alleged paralysis was a ruse.

Here he is, the arresting officer, Markenley Bolette:

This is the officer who wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to a paralyzed man, who he knocked out of his wheelchair as he arrested him, insisting that he had to have somehow kicked in a door, then get into an altercation with a resident before somehow making a getaway on foot.

Before we jump to the conclusion that Bolette had already herped every last derp that was available on the market, then hocked them on eBay at scalper prices, let’s turn a look to the woman who made the complaint. Katherine Jensen had previously dated the accused, though it had been decades since the two last saw each other.

There are many reasons why you don’t date crazy. Among them being that there’s no telling how long she’ll stew over old wrongs and decide to get revenge in the most characteristically crazy way possible: with a bullshit allegation.

I don’t know why the relationship ended, but considering the facts surrounding this case, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that it was her fault.

For a bit more irony, let’s consider the name of the accused: Charles Read. For the arresting officer, the name Read probably triggered repressed memories of his time in the education system, when those judgemental teachers insisted that he develop a particular skill as a requirement for a middle school education.

To drive the point home that officer Bolette is something special, he insisted that Read’s paralysis was a ruse as he apparently sought assistance on how to proceed with the arrest, and another officer had to lay out for him just why it was unreasonable to expect a paralyzed man to invade a home. By kicking a door in. Then attempting to strangle its resident. Then make a getaway on foot.

I used to think that stupid people were harmless. They’d do stuff like lose track of how much is in their food stamp account before going to the store, or pour energy drinks into their lawnmowers, or leave their clothes to sit in a washer for days to find them crusted in mildew. They naturally harvest the consequences of their own unwise behaviors.

But I see now that I was wrong. Stupid people have a corrosive effect on the world around them. They’re the ones who nearly cause vehicular homicides because they pull out at intersections, assuming that other motorists also have a stop sign. They’re the ones who hot box in their apartments, creating the risk that their neighbors fail drug tests. Also, Hamas supporters.

Their effect is more corrosive still when they’re put into a position of power over other people.

I know that this is a bit of an old story, at this point. But that doesn’t mean that anyone should think it’s safe from my scrutiny. There may be a statute of limitations for crimes, but there is no statute of limitations for having the stupid.

You Might Have This Weird Superpower!

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In times past, I would have used the term “simple situational awareness” to refer to an ability that I thought that most people had. As it turns out, this was projection, and this ability is more rare than I thought.

This was what I’ve learned through a long history of nearly bumping into people who back up without looking, or seeing people strike up conversations in doorways.

To me, one aspect of situational awareness is a reasonable understanding of your current situation, and where it’s taking place. After a long time exercising this ability, it’s almost automatic. I’d walk into a room, and note it’s layout, the exits, and likely high-traffic areas that a reasonable person would not want to poke around in if they don’t want to be annoying.

It can also be the wisdom that comes with avoiding certain behaviors, if the location is such that the behavior had the potential to lead to an undesirable outcome. For example, it hope it’s obvious why it would be risky to play pin the tail on the donkey while on an industrial mezzanine.

It seems like I’m one of the few who have this ability, which is why one of my previous employers had to put up a sign telling employees not to gather in front of the lunch room door to chat it up. It’s awesome that they put the sign up, but it sucked that they had to.

Come to think of it, I don’t recall anyone in management or anyone in a leadership position failing in situational awareness to the point of holding up foot traffic. And it stands to reason, because if someone is going to posture as an intellectual better, they can at least exhibit intellect.

When it comes down to it, the purpose of the brain in animals is to allow for decision-making for mobile creatures. To make decisions in light of our environment is one of the key features of the brain. It’s expedient to survival.

So then, why are there so many people who lack situational awareness? I’m guessing that it’s because the nature of society provides some amount of insulation from some of the worst consequences of recklessness. Sure, some consequences are still there, but they’ve been reduced to the point that people have relaxed some of their basic survival skills.

And, as you might expect, stupidity has filled in the resulting gap.

So it seems like simple situational awareness isn’t so simple anymore, it’s become more like a superpower.

Is this a superpower that you have? If you can use it, please do.

Watch out, here comes “dark woke”.

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Okay guys, we need to get our concerned faces on. The Democrats are up to something that they’ve totally never tried.

Thankfully, we have The New York Times, that bastion of journalistic integrity, to keep us informed.

Democrats are trying out a new attitude. It’s provocative, edgy and perilously toeing the line of not being too offensive.

Uh oh, are they painting their fingernails black and listening to The Cure?

There was a time last summer when the Democratic Party was cool.

Wrong.

Okay, I broke sarcasm there. But that was dead wrong.

Kamala Harris had just stepped in as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in the waning days of Bratsummer. She went on the popular podcast ‘Call Her Daddy.’ Tim Walz’s outdoorsy drip led to a Chappell Roan-inspired camo trucker hat. The memes were flowing, and the party’s mood was high.

One thing I’m not letting Democrats live down is that they thought that Kamala Harris was a viable candidate. Auto-complete finished that sentence for me, and I’m not ashamed of that. Even now, Democrats still don’t know why they lost, and they’re looking like they’re going back to the same strategy.

But now, it’s looking like that’s all about to change.

As liberals try to get their groove back, some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump’s no-holds-barred version of politics.

Remember when Democrats abrasively criticized you and your virtues to a pulp? Well, watch out! Now the Dems are getting serious!

It’s an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing. And it requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.

Online, it has a name: ‘Dark woke.’

Okay, I’m going to go ahead and bust out the laughing anime girls for this one.

You might remember that the left already attempted a “dark” branding with this confidence-inspiring gentleman:

“Being able to use this strategy of being raw and unapologetic and unabashed about our beliefs is something our base really wants,” Mr. Ossé said. He referred to a quote by one of Mayor Eric Adams’s advisers, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who said, “When they go low, you gotta dig for oil.”

I seem to remember that leftists called people who disagreed with them Nazis, and attempted to get them regarded as such. It’s one of many reasons why you can’t expect a leftist to argue in good faith.

I also remember that a leftist Disney director had called for students to be thrown into wood chippers for smiling while wearing MAGA hats.

I remember that it was leftists who called out “punch a Nazi” and “bash a fash”, while implying that their political opponents are fascists, advocating for violence against them.

And while I can continue with the long list of examples, for brevity, I can point out that if leftists want to try something new, they can start by shutting their mouths.

‘We can be bold, we can be petty, we can be punchy and still have a moral compass. We don’t have to replicate the right’s formula.’

That’s exactly what the right does. And for the right, it comes natural. That’s because the right are the cool kids, not the edgelords who are trying too hard.

It’s not resonating with everyone. For some, the universal truism that it can never be cool to try so hard applies here. Others, too, have criticized Democrats for seeming to place a premium on affect over policy.

To be fair, NYT does seem to have some introspection, here. The problem that they point to, that Democrats favor affect over policy, is intrinsic to the feminized nature of the political left, tending to prefer the subject to the object. Their focus is on optics more than problem-solving, and the nature of this political environment has made it way too easy to maintain positive optics while being intellectually dishonest.

Alex Peter, a lawyer and left-wing commentator who makes content under the handle LOLOverruled, said the Democrats’ new focus on viral ‘dark woke’ posts was just ‘a lot of hot air.’

‘Part of the problem with the mainstream Democratic Party is that it all kind of rings hollow,’ Mr. Peter, 33, said. ‘I don’t care about another clapback. People want concrete deliverables.’

That, and the fact that “dark woke” is really nothing new. I remember that the left were the principle agitators behind the “Summer of Love” and the George Floyd riots. And now they mean to tell us that they intend to start dressing in black and throwing chairs in the ring?

It sounds to me like they’re continuing with the same failed strategy while trying to trick whoever’s listening into thinking that they’re trying something new.

Leftists are planning a one-day “economic blackout” for tomorrow. LOL.

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Hey look, another stupid one-day boycott:

Pictured above is the gameplan for a left-wing one-day boycott of major businesses and services, in the hopes of sending a message. That message being, “we show them who really holds the power”.

The boycott is being pitched as non-partisan, but considering it’s traction among the left, it’s plainly a reaction on their part because they’re upset that they’re losing their grip on culture. The claim of being non-partisan is clearly intended as an attempt to expand leftists’ influence when they know that they are not culturally dominant.

They are not the “silent majority”, and the 2024 Presidential election provided the numbers to prove it.

Here’s a list of their extended gameplan, which makes mention of companies that have ditched DEI, such as Wal-Mart and Amazon:

You might be wondering, “Raizen, what are you doing sharing their gameplan? Doesn’t that help them?” I’ll explain why passing this info along doesn’t help them in the following list of reasons the boycott is almost certain to fail:

  • Boycotters prep for one-day boycotts by making their purchases in advance, or making up for them in the days after, so the companys’ bottom lines are often unaffected. This is especially the case with products such as gasoline.
  • Investors who learn of the boycott in advance can reallocate their investments, and thus profit off the boycott.
  • Imagine consoomers not consooming for a day.
  • Some people may decide to spend an inordinate amount on the day of the boycott, out of spite.
  • People tend to have less money when they don’t understand how the world works. For that reason, if leftist foot soldiers decide not to spend for a day, it’s probably not going to be very impactful.

And a bunch of leftists presume to tell the rest of us about economics.

So no, it’s not necessary for you to make a big ol’ shopping list and go wild on Friday. The left-wing one-day boycott is largely self-defeating.

And with how much better off companies that ditch DEI are likely to be in the long-term, they probably won’t much care.

The McDonald’s collaboration with Genshin was a huge failure.

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Hospital food has more personality.

I had just started playing Genshin Impact months ago. And upon finding out that there was a collaboration event involving McDonald’s, I was psyched.

Sure, McDonald’s is well outside of my typical menu. I care about my health, to the point that people are telling me that I could be a little heavier. But when I found out that I could get a special glider for my Genshin account, as well as a special in-game recipe, I was ready to remedy a problem that most people would be happy to have.

But, you saw the title. You know how it went.

The deal is, you download the McDonald’s app, and place an order for a couple Genshin-themed items on the menu. Then, you get a code to copy and paste that grants in-game items, and you could pick up your Genshin-themed meal and/or apple pie, and, if you’re lucky, you meet other fanatics who play this game, and fire it off over your favorite character, and why Sigewinne is totally underrated and you don’t have to be a psychopath to like her.

That was the deal. And it fell through.

First, and most catastrophically, I didn’t get a code. I checked my email, where I expected it to arrive, and then the spam folder. Nothing. I checked again after I picked up the meal, but still, nothing.

Before continuing, I’ll point out that rising fast food prices aren’t just bluster that you see on social media. Twelve dollars for a medium chicken sandwich meal that includes an apple pie? I heard that the overhead costs of keeping a business running (including energy, property taxes, and wages) are going up, but I wasn’t aware just how badly this impacted the cost of fast food. Just a few meals at McDonald’s, and you’ll have spent enough that you could have instead guaranteed a 5* on a limited banner.

But then there’s the meal. There was nothing Genshin-themed about it. The apple pie box was supposed to feature Kazuha, with his normally-soft features in battle-ready stern determination. Nope. Just the ordinary box.

As it turns out, you had to have emails enabled from the app to get the code. Which I didn’t. I was being punished for my own smart practices when using cell phone apps.

Because I figured this out in the dining area, I toggled on the switch for emails, then placed an order for just the Genshin apple pie. Minutes later, I got another apple pie, also in a regular non-Genshin box. Still no code.

And, to top it off, I didn’t even get my soda.

Having subjected the dubious calorie sources in the meal to my metabolic processes, I began to have a crisis. What was I even doing with my life? I decided to buy fast food, which I seldom do, because I wanted digital assets that don’t really exist for some cell phone game, and didn’t even get them. This game, enjoyed by millions, isn’t something a soulless fast food chain cares enough about to amuse you with a code and printed cardboard.

When I got home and checked Reddit, I discovered that I’m not the only one who had this experience. Many other players out there placed their orders, doing everything right, but still didn’t get their codes. Some players did, but for some reason, many of us didn’t.

From what I could glean, McDonald’s was actually manually sending the emails with the codes. If that’s the case, what’s up with that? I’d have imagined that it would have been an automated process: just place the order, and the code would be automatically sent to your inbox. Makes sense, right?

But no, instead it sounds like it’s more like place an order, and some untrained, unskilled worker at a data center (who probably hates Genshin Impact by this point) has to copy and paste an unused code into an otherwise manually generated email, on top of the many that he’s been swamped with in the few hours since the promotion began.

I can believe that the incompetence is McDonald’s fault. It stands entirely to reason. Mihoyo made a mobile game that’s relatively high production value, and played by millions of players, with frequent promotions that usually go off without a hitch. They’re software programmers and engineers, which are usually in the ballpark of SD+1, at least. While a bright person could end up working at McDonald’s for one circumstance or another, that’s usually the place where a person ends up if they can’t get hired anywhere else. (I spent a few months there. It was my first job, at the time, no one else would hire me.)

So, that’s it. I didn’t even get a Happy Meal toy. You know, a little something to set on my desk and sometimes look at before it eventually takes its place at a landfill, like so many other pieces of merchandise that are real enough to do so.

Maybe I’m making a big deal out of what is really just a mundane disappointment, like I can really expect McDonald’s to give a shit about those of us who enjoy things that aren’t McDonald’s.

To put things into perspective, a bunch of Hezbollah goons had their nuts blown off when their pagers exploded, so it’s not like I’m the saddest boy in the world, today.

I just wanted to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Maybe I’m the asshole. Not the worst one, but it might actually be that McDonald’s is not to blame.

I decided to check eBay, and this is what I found:

See the second listing, where it says “116 sold”? That kind of seller is why people like me who want the wings and the apple pie recipe for our Genshin accounts can’t get them, because the system is swamped by scalpers who are buying $12 meals by the dozens, then selling the codes off for a hefty profit each. Genshin almost had a pretty cool promotion, but then a bunch of shitheads ruined it.

We might be missing out on codes, but at least a bunch of scalpers could afford to do the line, tonight. We might be pissed, but they don’t care, because they’re getting high.

Looks like Mihoyo might have to do something other than redemption codes for similar promotions.

The “Free Money Glitch” Shows That Stupid People Really Are All Around Us

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When I first heard about the “free money glitch” that was trending, I had questions. The first was, “How’s that working out?” And it turns out that the answer is, “Not well.” My next question was, “Is TikTok somehow involved?” And you could probably guess the answer.

A trend on TikTok shows people going to ATMs to take advantage of a “glitch” that lets them withdraw arbitrarily large sums of cash, and then showing themselves reveling over handfuls of squishy money.

I’m not going to share how it’s done, partly because I don’t want to catch the ire of the financial institution involved. Picking a fight with teams of billionaires is usually not a great idea, as a bunch of TikTokers are starting to find out.

While it’s sad enough that people are uploading videos of themselves committing check fraud to social media, having no idea what could possibly go wrong, it’s sadder still that enough people are falling for this to line up around city blocks for their turn to do the same.

You could probably guess what comes next. The same people ended up with their bank accounts frozen, with negative balances in the tens of thousands of dollars. And possibly also face arrest, because, you know, check fraud.

If you’re wondering whether so many people could be so stupid, then you probably never worked retail. When you work retail, you’re going to see upwards of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in a day.

As for me, ten years of my life went to waste on that bullshit, which is ten years too many. Afterwards, I went to school for Electronics, reasoning that if something is difficult to learn, the payoff must be great. So, I really applied myself and studied hard, and as most other students in my major dropped out or switched to something else, I got great grades and eventually graduated with honors. After that, I spent about a year in an electronics repair job where I made a dollar more per hour than someone stocking shelves at a nearby grocery store. I did get out of that place, but I was there long enough to see some circuit boards come back for repair again, because the customers did the same thing with it that they did before.

So, at that point, I still hadn’t quite managed to completely get away from stupid people. And I learned a sobering lesson about correlating effort and hard work to better outcomes.

But yeah, stupid people exist. And if you’ve worked retail, the memories of them that you haven’t successfully suppressed will be quite vivid. Sure, most people will be completely ordinary, and therefore, not memorable. However, 10% of the population are on the leftmost 10% of the area of the bell curve, and your experience with them might stick with you.

I still remember the guy who wasted ten minutes of time I could’ve spent on something else searching for some mystery product that he insisted that we regularly stocked. Eventually, I found out that he wanted onion rolls, except he was pronouncing “onion” in his own bullshit way, and I didn’t find out until he finally said “onion” normally. No, he didn’t end up getting jackslapped, because it just wasn’t worth it.

Or the one who was on a program that required her to only redeem her voucher for specific products of a specific size, but she tried redeeming for a box of breakfast cereal that was the wrong size. After finding out this wouldn’t work, she just threw the box down the cereal aisle. The program that gave her the voucher was intended to assist single women with children, so I had to contemplate that someone like her procreated.

There’s more, but I’ll just get to the point: stupid people exist, and they exist in great numbers. If you can avoid working with the general public for a living, then you’re going to be happier than people who do.

It’s no surprise to me that there are enough stupid people out there to line up around a city block to get what they believe to be free money from an ATM, entirely unaware of the crime that they’re committing, and that they’d be expected to pay back the money that they’d steal.

They’re no longer my problem, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t laugh when they do stupid shit, and face the obvious consequences.

I’ll leave this with some food for thought: Much of the internet is tricking people into doing things. Also, TikTok is corrosive bullshit.