Top 10 Insanely Dedicated People

As we’ve already discussed, twice, there’s a fine line between dedication and obsession. What one person would consider to be a perfectly normal hobby like owning the same VHS tape 500 times, another person might see that as a tad bizarre or even god forbid, excessive. However, we think that kind of enthusiasm for anything is rather endearing so we scoured the internet to find 10 more people who are insane(ly) committed to the thing they love.

10. The guy who’s updated Wikipedia thousands of times, to correct the same mistake

Judging by roughly 80% of the comments on every article ever written on the web, spelling and grammatical errors are the number one pet peeve amongst internet commenters

behind seeing an article written by someone with a female byline. For most people, silently seething inside or perhaps leaving a terse comment about an incorrect usage of the word “your” or a misplaced apostrophe is enough. For Bryan Henderson though, that wasn’t enough.

Bryan, rather than impotently bottling his anger up, weaponized it and used to utterly eradicate his personal bugbear, the misuse of the words “comprised of” from Wikipedia, forever. To date, Bryan has made tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia all to correct that one mistake, by hand.

Annoyingly, it seems that Bryan’s quest will never end because, along with new all of the new mistakes that crop up as the site is updated with new content. There’s at least one troll dedicated to following him around undoing all of his work. Man, that’s some inception level of Wikipedia editing right there.

9. The guy who has a life goal of owning every single copy of Speed ever made, on VHS

In the hierarchy of Keanu Reeve’s best roles with names that begin with a “J,” Jack Traven from Speed falls just below John Wick but slightly above Johnny Utah. Now we’re not saying Speed is a bad film, we’re just saying Keanu Reeves has done way cooler things. Which is why Ryan Beitz’s goal of owning every copy of the film ever made, on VHS is so hilariously brilliant.

In a frank and rather surreal interview with VICE Beitz notes that there’s no particular reason why he wants to own thousands upon thousands of copies of the same film in a now defunct, but surprisingly hardwearing format, he just thinks it would be cool to own them all, or at least as many as he can get his hands on. The best part is, Beitz doesn’t even look after his tapes, he just piles them up in the back of his van (which he’s trying to make look like the bus from the movie). Hell, he doesn’t even known how many copies of the film he has because he’s never bothered to count. When asked he simply responded “who really cares?”

Erm we don’t know Ryan, you?! Hey, speaking of owning a copy of everything ever made in a dead format …

8. There’s a guy who owns every Dreamcast game ever made

The Dreamcast is one the many failures on behalf of Sega to defeat their eternal blood rivals, Nintendo, in the apparently never ending console war. Like the Sega 32X and Sega Saturn before it, the Dreamcast was considered a riotously flaccid commercial failure, which is a shame because had some pretty good games. And of course, there’s a person out there who owns all of them, including a bunch of games he doesn’t understand and will never play.

Now anyone who has a Steam account will tell you that sometimes you will buy a video game because it’s like 2 dollars and then never play it simply because you never have the time. But this is different because Tom Enright has gone out of his way to buy video games he will literally never open and thus will never use for their intended purpose. This is kind of like buying a book that you will never read, only the book comes with a giant kick-ass set of plastic maracas you can wave around like an idiot.

You have to at least respect the resolve of a man who can resist playing with something that cool.

7. The Brazilian businessman who has secretly been buying up all of the world’s vinyl records

Vinyl records are a strange commodity because despite the format being hugely outdated, they will always be superior in terms of audio quality because they’re an analogue representation of the original recording. With that in mind it’s not surprising that people collect these things. What is surprising though is there’s a man out there called Zero Freitas who owns almost all of them.

No seriously, unlike Ryan Beitz up there, Freitas isn’t pussyfooting around, and he’s used his vast wealth to buy millions of records with the singular goal of one day owning every piece of music ever recorded. Freitas plans to one day make his collection public and has had a keen interest in securing music made by artists in countries where transferring music to a digital format isn’t commonplace, thereby saving them from disappearing forever. Freitas is so dedicated to his goal that it’s not unusual for him to buy every record a person owns, in secret, just to secure one that his collection doesn’t have. Because that’s just how Freitas likes to roll.

6. The guy who rage bought a bunch of toys, so other people couldn’t have them

Remember a few months ago when a story broke about some guy buying all of the apple pies in Burger King just to spite an annoying kid and how everyone thought it was awesome even though it later turned out to be spectacularly fabricated and untrue? Imagine if that happened for real, only the guy buying everything did it just because he didn’t want other people to be happy, not to teach a child an important lesson about moderation.

That was the scenario in January of this year for eager gamers looking to get their hands on the latest batch of Amiibos (cool interactive figurines) being released by Nintendo. The guy, identified as “Dose”, reportedly bought 100 Amiibos of the character Rosalina purely so that her fans couldn’t get one. He revealed that he had tens of thousands of dollars stockpiled so that he could do it again, just to annoy a few people who liked something he didn’t. We feel that it’s important to note that every character this guy had a problem with happened to be female and that he was shall we say, coarse, in his choice of language describing his reasons for disliking them. That said, we can’t fault the man on his dedication, even if he’s apparently dedicated to just being a generally unpleasant [Please feel free to finish this sentence by picking any word that you feel fits from this list of synonyms – Karl]

5. Ashton Kutcher bought every possible domain name, for his daughter

Privacy is a big issue these days and ever since the iCloud phone hacking scandal last year, celebrities especially are keen to keep people out of their damn business. Whereas some celebrities are happy to just barricade themselves in their mansions and occasionally take a swing at a member of the paparazzi, Ashton Kutcher looked at their efforts and said “Pffft, amateurs.”

After the birth of his daughter, Kutcher and his wife went out and bought every domain name containing her name, because, to quote the man himself “I don’t want a porn site with my daughter’s name.” You might think that sounds extreme, but you know that there’s someone out there who would totally do that and we’re sure Kutcher doing this won’t prompt someone to try and find the permutation on his daughters name he didn’t think of and register it online.

4. A guy bought every other seat in a cinema so couples couldn’t sit together

Valentine’s day is often one of the most difficult days of the year to find a seat in a restaurant or cinema because almost everywhere is filled with couples. For most people this is a minor inconvenience, for one man in China, it was a personal insult.

The man (who posted online under the name, UP) was so incensed by the thought of young couples enjoying each other’s company that he gathered a group of equally sad and lonely friends and booked out every other seat in a Shanghai cinema. He then took to online message boards to brag about his plan, which we’re sure helped him immensely on the whole “getting a girlfriend” front.

3. The man who owns the moon

In 1980 a man called Dennis Hope was looking for a way to make some money when he looked out of the window and saw the moon. After pondering for a moment Hope half-remembered that the 1967 Space Treaty said that “no country could own the moon” but it didn’t say anything about individuals. So he decided to write a letter to the UN and declare ownership of it, something no one had apparently thought of before.

As it turns out, the treaty Hope was thinking of did actually specifically state that individuals can’t own the moon, but that hasn’t stopped him from selling off plots of land on it for decades. When asked to comment on the fact he’s essentially selling people useless pieces of paper, he responded by saying because the moon isn’t in the UN he doesn’t have to abide by their rules, you know, even though as a member of the United States he couldn’t own it in the first place.

2. The man dedicated to calling out rappers wearing fake watches

Ever since smartphones with built in clocks became the norm, watches have become more of a fashion accessory than something you necessarily need. However, just because we don’t need watches anymore doesn’t mean they aren’t still popular. Because really nice watches tend to cost Kanye levels of money, a lot of people resort to buying fakes which is, well, a little sad.

An Instagram user going by the name of fakewatchbusta agrees with this sentiment and has dedicated his time (get it?) to trawling through all of the #Swag, #Ballin and #LivingLikeanOG tags on the site looking for and then pointing out fake watches. Which as you can imagine, results in some pretty hilarious reactions from wannabe rappers and even real rappers because oh yeah, along with busting try hards and posers, fakewatchbusta has managed to catch out famous rappers like Ice-T, Rick Ross and Souilja Boy. The best part is that according to the anonymous man himself (he hides his identity due to inexplicable legal threats from jewellers selling fakes), he has no formal training in horology, he just likes watches.

1. The man who found love, with math

       

Finding love is tough, but with the advent of online dating and the subsequent removal of the stigma surrounding online dating, it has never been easier. Still though, it can be a gruelling and often demoralising experience, especially when you get turned down or meet someone you don’t feel like you could joined at the hip with physically and metaphorically.

Chris McKinlay was one such disenfranchised lovebird and after dealing with constant rejection and stony, ego-withering silence, he decided to do something about it. Using his skills as a mathematician, McKinlay spent weeks painstakingly figuring out how OkCupid’s algorithm’s worked, before creating a super profile perfectly engineered to appeal to the exact kind of woman he wanted to meet. McKinlay’s profile went from getting a handful of views a week to hundreds per day and he was bombarded by women wanting to meet him. After a few weeks of playing the field and having what we assume was an astonishing amount of sex, McKinlay met a girl he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

And that’s the though we want to leave people with, if you dedicated and committed enough and also happen to have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, you too can find love, or at least have tons of awkward sex with strangers.

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