Why does food need to be challenging? And what dork asks this question? Who is so devoted to being trendy by doing unpleasant things to themselves that they seek out ones that aren’t even trendy yet?
I beat the cinnamon and ice bucket challenges at the same time by combining them, swallowing a spoonful of ice water in under a minute.
Kidding, kidding. I beat the cinnamon and ice bucket challenges by not doing something stupid for the amusement of hyperbolic childish misanthropes. These are what happen if you combine America’s Funniest Home Videos and the film Groundhog Day.
You could say America’s Funniest Home Videos already had a Groundhog Day aspect, but they sure found a lot of different ways to hit people in the crotchal zone. Ice buckets have a very limited range.

As the great sage Papa Bear once remarked: it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be food! Where’s my sweetsie cola?! I put forth that it is not supposed to be challenging, either. If you find food challenging, it might not be cooked properly. Or it might be broccoli or squash. Nobody wants to watch the broccoli challenge. Maybe if you call it Doritos Presents the Jeep Toyota Summer Squash Concert Series Pepsi.

i imagine some dumb meep filling a bucket with water, freezing it, and then just dropping the bucket on someone. That probably would have been a better picture than this one, which is possible to interpret as me “accepting” the “challenge” in a “funny” way when I think it is a very dopey thing. I should have shown a dope doing it.

This suffices. The picture bores me by now. And that is just after seeing it twice!

“but it’s for CHAIRity!” Much like the hop-a-thon, I do not see how the action causes money to materialize so I will not do it. I thought I mentioned the hopathon before, apparently I did not. I did mention the coerced saving of yogurt lids, but the principle is the same. Somebody who has a set amount of money to donate will REFUSE to donate it if I do not perform some totally unrelated, arbitrary act.

I wrote about the hopathon in relation to some “sponsored” video game sessions, and I apparently thought it was too dumb to mention. I never encountered it outside of the stupid venues where I post drawings on the internet, and imagined it would reflect badly on me to exhibit awareness of it. And thus something dumber came along and forced almost everybody to know about it.

In my first grade I was invited to participate in a hopping competition at the school I attended. To date it is the only real, fair contest I have ever won. Supposedly it was a charitable situation. I did not understand how hopping helped anybody but I knew I could do it. What I did not do was sign up any sponsors. That part did not make sense to me. It still does not, but I at least know the mechanics of it. Apparently I, a 6ish year old child, in addition to hopping, was supposed to thuggishly pester outside parties until they agreed to pay money based on how much I hopped, and then not to me. Had that been explained to me I might have asked why somebody needs me to hop before they will give money to someone else. Is that entertaining to them? To hear that a tiny human hopped many times? Are they to feel enriched and satisfied, and pay in appreciation? There were certainly no spectators. I did it in a hallway outside the principal office. The only others present were inferior hoppers and a suit-wearing man monitoring the hopping. I imagine HE got paid for that. He did not hop.

And imagine if even the people who bothered to get sponsored had not hopped. Would no money have been given? And then whose fault would that have been? The people who failed to hop or the potential donators who refused to do so due to inadequate hoppage? I do not understand why so much roundabout effort is put into guilting people into donating money. I didn’t understand it with yogurt labels that hurt no one (except me when I inadvertently see somebody licking one), and I definitely don’t understand it with momentarily exposing yourself to unseasonably cold water. It does not exhibit “devotion” or “passion” because the pain comes afterward, and is brief. When I lived in New Haven, and turned the heat off at night, and then had a shower in the morning, it was pure horror. That didn’t make me feel like donating money to any foundation, nor did it make the neighbors who watched me do it through the window want to donate. If anything it made me want to hoard more money so I was less worried about using so much heat that the monthly bill was difficult to pay, and maybe get some curtains.

You will probably do more for the cause of world health by not eating this pizza than the fraction of the purchase price that possibly gets donated would. That is NOT what this pizza is for! I say that as somebody who probably ate a hundred or so of these across the years (that was from 2005) when I had a functioning oven. If we go by the model of “donate over someone who did nasty things to themselves for no good reason,” then you may go right ahead, but the consequences always came later.

There is more regularly an event called “the penguin plunge” in which dorks jump into freezing water after taking their clothes off. This is just as stupid and has just as little causal relationship to money appearing as hopping or bucketing, but apart from a single local news filler story per year, nobody tries to make it my problem.

In the end, people are supposed to be impressed by your determination, I suppose. If you just jump in a lake or dump a tiny fraction of a lake on yourself it is over pretty fast. And if, in the case of the video game fans, you just do what you would have done anyway, then it is completely meaningless. The person in my example didn’t even show it all. He insisted that he played video games for two hours while offline. Well gosh so did I. I have probably played video games for thousands of hours throughout my life. And remember all the pizzas that I ate, long before any pink ribbons got involved! That is the kind of philanthropist I am.

I think I felt bad for the guy when I realized his other posts were mostly about the effects of his untreated diabetes, so I did not press him on the topic or save pictures of it. But here is a story of somebody who was “paralyzed” and got dorks to give him $20000 to play video games, before accidentally showing he was not actually paralyzed, and then people stopped paying. My question: why does being paralyzed make you eligible to get $20000 to play video games? And why does not being paralyzed make you immediately ineligible for it? It is a scam either way! The man was not playing them with his mouth, for eat’s sakes. Why would anybody donate money because anyone else sat in place and fiddled around for hours, if the fiddling produced nothing? Imagine if I requested donations for this! Imagine if [email protected] was my paypal address. Wouldn’t I seem like a useless hippie bohemian who gave nothing to society? Be glad you only imagined it!

I suppose on some level all entertainment fields are scams, and I should be glad that production companies and record labels do not have exclusive control over collecting money for the distribution of wretched garbage. But this still comes down to gaining your legitimacy through someone else’s product. Somebody else’s gimmick that you inherited or adopted. And from what I have personally witnessed (on the topic of video games), the sight is not all that spectacular. People wear trashy clothes (and you know because the person is recorded next to the game output, for some reason), and they grunt and breath a lot, and are not necessarily very good at the video games, and the deal is shown unedited. I am just supposed to be in awe of them as people, even though they are strictly regular at best. If I am going to observe a stranger poke about with what we should not deny are toys, they had better be gosh darn beebly good at it or uniquely entertaining in the way they do it. And at that point I could probably take it for about 20 minutes at most.

I remember, a few years ago, when I found a video series called “battle of olympus blind run.” I thought, from the title, it meant a blind person was playing the video game called Battle of Olympus, trying to get through it on sound cues and memory alone. That might justify it happening in 32 ten minute installments, and the footage showing the character falling into pits and starting over constantly. And still probably not been too much fun to look at. But no, it was less than that: just some dork who had never played the game before who thought his imprint was so precious that all five hours of it needed to be documented and preserved. And again totally unedited and unrehearsed, despite it not being streamed live. At least when something is live you can potentially interact with the dork you are allowing to waste your living.

I had a HUGE problem with “let’s play video games and FAIL,” but at least those ended fairly briefly, with the no-effort glory-seeking twit giving up in shame. I may even have criticized it for that, so let me clarify: You don’t need to give up at the game, but you don’t need to film your hours and hours of successive failures, either.