We already knew that although Patreon and Kickstarter can fund some valuable projects (e.g., Kelly Houle’s Illuminated Origin of Species project and the Jesus and Mo artist), there’s a lot of people getting a lot of dough for stupid stuff. I won’t name names, but you can probably think of some.
But here’s one you may not have known about: a project whose only apparent goal is to make potato salad. It’s now up to over ten thousand dollars and still climbing, yet you get basically nothing for donating:
The guy has even made a video thanking all the suckers:
The donations continue to mount rapidly, which goes to show one thing: a fool and his/her money are soon parted. I can’t believe that people would fund this and other things almost equally worthless. Why do they do it?
I’m now thinking of doing one of these* to support my squirrels, for, with the constant purchase of sunflower seeds, walnuts ($3.99/lb.!), and peanuts, the damned rodents are bankrupting me.
See? Here are the Three Tuftys—the whole brood of juveniles—which have become so pugnacious over food that each one requires his or her own personal pile of seeds to keep them from squabbling. The male is the one in the middle, and he’s dominant, so I put a pile of seeds on either side for the two females who sneak in from the ledge.
And, unlike some Patreon e-beggers, I actually provide what I promise: pictures and videos of squirrels!
_______
*Just kidding!
Ha ha you should start a kick starter for the squirrels!
It’s over $22K now.
It’s gone utterly viral now – it was around 10k literally a couple of hours ago when I last looked.
Actually, there’s something a bit weird going on over there. About 20 minutes ago it was up to 44k, and now it is back down to 15k.
My guess is that they’re getting a bunch of high-value joke pledges from throwaway accounts with phony credit card info.
When I opened the page, the total was at $28K. By the time I scrolled back up, it had risen to $38K! And still 25 days to go.
At this rate we should be on the lookout for a project outline along the lines of:
“To acquire and consume two bottles* of 1982 Pétrus. Largest donation secures an invitation to share, plus a signed book about the veracity of evolution.”
*Just encase the first one is corked.
You write books about evolution?
I get the joke, and I’m not surprised that at first people continued to donate more than he asked for just for giggles.
But at this stage, I don’t understand the psychology behind why people continue to donate money. The joke has been made. The total is already rapidly approaching what a lot of the world’s population don’t even manage to earn in a year.
Yes, people are free to give money to whatever they want to; and yes, it’s just for fun. But of all the things to donate money to in the world…
Curious, I Googled ‘psychology behind being a sucker’ and the first hit was ‘the oral stage of psychosexual development’. So that must be the connection with the potato salad. Somehow. 🙂
😮
It is weird. I guess people mostly just want to be in on the joke.
People do like getting in on things, even tragedies. Think of all the people that pile on to a tragic death if they get to tell people about it.
In on the joke, yeah. But to me, it’s only funny if you’re sitting around the computer with a bunch of friends, egging each other on, laughing at how silly it is (and it probably helps to be drunk). Sitting at home alone on the computer, donating money for potato salad…not so funny.
Hey, some people have to make their lives fun.
Yes, I’d like this to be explained psychologically. There has to be a reason why people are doing this. Do they just like seeing the money go up and up? Are they betting each other? Is there something else just weird about human psychology?
It’s better than donating to the RNC or the Creation Museum — or the collection plate.
I think people like the intentional irony, are grateful for a chuckle, and are curious about where it goes.
Yeah, but it would be great if the guy gave all that money to save lives, say of starving African kids. Think how much PlumpyNut it would buy!
Or squirrels. Some could go to the squirrels. 🙂
Free potato salad for African orphans!
There are about 1000 people with $1 donations, 600 with $2 and 500 with 3$ donations. So I suppose, it’s a cheap price to be on a ‘joke’.
People’s average donations are increasing. At the time Jerry posted this, it was at an average of $7.04 per “backer.” Now it is at $12.83 or so.
This is just the beginning. Soon he’ll be making talk show appearances as the guy who raised $25,000 (or whatever) for potato salad. Then comes the book deal and the made-for-TV movie.
It’s the American way!
I am sure there are many lame but successful Kickstarters. One was to build a large statue of Robocop in Detroit, and it reached its goal in just over a week.
On what planet is a giant bronze statue of Robocop “lame”?!
Exactly
And at least that Robocop kickstarter was about creating something expensive and artistic. This guy is just making a big potato salad, and then presumably pocketing over $15000 (as of right now), given to him by fools who wanted to be part of a viral internet joke.
A statue of James T. Kirk in Riverside Ia. would be cooler.
But Detroit could use…. But Detroit needs a lot of….
Oh, hell, OK, you are right. A tourist attraction based on an over the top and kinda good movie in Detroit is a good idea. 👍
Building an expensive statue of Robocop in Detroit sort of indicates a lack of understanding of some of the points that the movie was making about Detroit’s urban decay and governmental corruption.
Not on my planet! 🙂 Violent 80s robot shows rocked!
Yeah, and I liked that movie for what it was. Is the recent remake any good?
I haven’t seen it but I’d like to. The sequels to Robocop were so bad though – too much robo wrestling. The first was great. It said a lot about the 80s.
This might end up being a curse. To fulfill his promises, he’s going to have to say thousands of people’s names while making the salad, mail out thousands of pieces of potato salad, cram hundreds of people into his kitchen while he makes it (assuming they show up), etc. Still, for tens of thousands of dollars, I’d do it. 🙂
This Kickstarter project says nothing about the value of crowdfunding, or potato salad, or the guy who ran the campaign. It basically just says that Kickstarter either doesn’t really vet projects or that some people are just plain dumb. Based on the number of religious fanatics you post here, potato-salad funders are definitely NOT the stupidest people we have to worry about. Seems to me thay might be running a close second, though. It’s probably too much to ask that the guy donate most or all of his proceeds to charity, huh? Maybe the tuber department at the Culinary Institute, or something.
So it’s funders vs fundies.
Sub
I like this concept, a lot. It’s comedy performance art at a high level of irony, and probably appeals to irony-obsessed millenials and hipsters. To be fair, the guy doesn’t appear to be a ripp-off artist. He’s invited the entire Internet for a bite.
I recommend the FAQs and the full biography.
/
I doubt the Internet will come. The Internet is a notoriously finicky eater. Keeps mumbling something about Gluten.
If you start a kick starter for the squirrels and for any of the other animals you care for, count me in. I will donate.
So I guess this is the Pet Rock of whatever the heck one would call the current decade.
Pet rocks were a fad? But I’ve got dozens. They might even outnumber the owls, if I counted them all.
Some of my pet rocks a psychoanalysts!
Some network mogul right now is crafting a pitch for a kickstarter reality tv show.
I tried launching an well honest crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to purchase a concert grand pedal harp (I’m an aspiring harpist, you see) only to get not a single substantial result no matter how much money I spent trying to spread the word about it. Well after spending over a year vainly crowdfunding for a harp and struggling to pay for credit card bills for a few months afterwords. I decided to call it quits on the crowdfunding project and go move to something else. It has cost me way too much money to do crowdfunding projects. No one seems to be interest in helping to raise funds for a large harp, I suppose. And yet they go nuts (pun intended) pouring in funds to support some stupid projects like this one! Maybe I’ll start a different crowdfunding campaign similar to what you suggested: “Hi. I’m trying to raise “Grizzly” the outdoor cat and your funds will perfectly help me supply him with food for the next several months.
If God didn’t want them sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep!
It better be one of those really good potato salads.
With bacon
Government should train homeless people to write Kickstart projects and help them publish them. “I’m trying to sleep in a air-conditioned room for the rest of the summer”, whatever. Then sit back and watch money flowing.
I pretty well give to everything except the Copenhagen zoo 🙂
Maybe his potato salad recipe involves Dutch Tulips.
I read the page and it made me laugh. If I wasn’t a miserly git, I’d give him a dollar for entertainment value.
You can get walnuts for only $3.99/lb? You ‘ave it looky! Here they’re $NZ38.50/kg ($US 15.35/lb)!
Is this post maybe your effort to raise squirrel feed money? Where can we send donations? How do we pledge?
Yep, I would definitely donate although I would prefer not to have to ‘join’ anything like you have to on Kickstarter.
That kind of thing is really starting to piss me off where all I want to do is download a driver or a manual or donate some money but I can’t before I give out all my details.
// Rant mode off 🙂
And to think I wasted all that time on a grant proposal…