As we’ve discussed before, there’s a fine line between obsession and dedication on the internet. As a result, we’ve been able to find another 10 people whose dedication to something most of us would consider petty, worthless, or kind of dumb, is so excessive, you sort of have to admire them. For example consider…
10. The guy who posts a brand new stupid photoshop of Michael Cera, every, single day
Posting to the popular image hosting site (and birthplace of all the things radio stations share on your Facebook wall), Imgur, under the fairly self-explanatory name of, ANewBadlyPhotoshoppedPhotoofMichaelCeraEveryDay, this low-key internet hero has become something of a legend amongst users of the site for his bizarre often poorly photoshopped pictures of actor, Michael Cera. Probably a good thing because it’s the only thing this guy ever posts.
All in all, this Cadillac of men has posted hundreds of pictures of Michael Cera photoshopped into most every situation and memetic image of the last few years, often hiding the awkward actor’s face so well, users don’t notice it’s one of his goofy photo edits for several seconds. Impressive, considering his (unreasonably long) username is literally the first thing every person on Imgur sees before scrolling down.
So why has this guy spent what we presume is dozens of hours inserting Michael Cera’s face into places it was never meant to go? Well, according to him, he was jealous of how good everyone else was at Photoshop and wanted to get in on that, hard. Now he’s one of the site’s most well-known and popular users.
Pretty self explanatory, a guy on Imgur has been doing this for over a year, every day without fail, for no reason, just because he can.
9. The guy who bought 365 Starbucks cards, to get free birthday coffee every day
We get it, guys, paying for stuff sucks, especially when it’s something as essential to functioning like a simple cup of coffee with extra syrup, whipped cream and powdered Oreos taken from the hands of a cooing infant wearing a Halloween mask. We, erm, don’t go to Starbucks much.
For most people this is an annoying, but otherwise unavoidable, aspect of life and we’ll dutifully hand over our three bucks all while secretly wondering how far we’d get if we simply took the coffee and sprinted out of the door, preferably bodychecking at least three people on the way out for maximum style points. For a guy known only as Mr. X though, this isn’t a problem because he abused the crap out of a loophole to ensure he’ll get his morning coffee, for free every day for the rest of his life.
In a nutshell, this unnamed figure bought 365 Starbucks gift cards and registered each of them for a different day of the year, allowing him to get a free birthday coffee every day. But simply getting free coffee every day wasn’t enough for this minor-supervillain, because he also figured out the single most expensive drink he could get (an Iced Quad Venti Vanilla White Mocha with heavy cream) and figured out a specific way to order it so it came out cheaper than it technically should. He then proceeded to order it every day from the same barista, who as an added insult to spending 20 minutes making his caffeine filled monstrosity, had to wish him a Happy Birthday as he left making jerk off motions in his mind.
8. The woman who reviewed 31,000 books on Amazon
Reviewing things online to give others a better idea of what the product is or does is a noble and worthwhile pursuit that we here at TopTenz greatly admire. At Amazon.com, there is a legendary figure known by the name of Harriet Klausner. Over the years, Klausner became somewhat infamous amongst Amazon’s more prolific reviewers for her poorly written, almost unanimously positive reviews for over 31,000 books, many of which she reviewed before they were released and claimed to have read within just a few hours.
The sheer amount of reviews posted by Klausner prior to her untimely death in 2015, coupled with the fact they were almost always positive, led some to suspect she was an incredibly elaborately constructed shill and people created entire blogs dedicated solely to trying to call her out on this fact. By Klausner’s own admission she was neither a shill nor a hack, but simply a former librarian with insomnia who liked reading, which we’re personally inclined to believe because actual interviews with her paint her as nothing more than a kindly old woman who just wanted to share her love of reading with the world. In regards to her always giving positive reviews, Klausner once admitted that any book she read in which she could “get past the first 50 pages” earned 4-5 stars because it succeeded at holding her attention.
This didn’t stop bloggers criticising her for being unrelentingly positive in her reviews (because there’s nothing people online hate more than people genuinely enjoying something and trying to share it with others) and writing literally tens of thousands of words calling her every name under the sun instead of you know, ignoring her and doing something worthwhile with their time. Klausner, showing more restraint and about 500% more swagger than her critics, only ever publically responded to them once, simply saying that they should probably “get a life.”
We honestly don’t know if they make ice water cold enough to soothe the kind of burn caused by being told to get a life by a woman who spent a considerable amount of her last few years on Earth reviewing books on Amazon, but if they do, we hope someone was kind enough to review it online.
7. A guy who bought every single ever released in the UK, for 60 years
As we talked about in the prequel to this gritty reboot in article form, there’s a super-rich dude out there called Zero Freitas who owns nearly every single vinyl record ever pressed and is planning on donating his entire collection to the world when it’s completed.
Now let’s talk about, Keith Sivyer, an Englishman who tried to do something similar and failed in the most spectacular way possible. Sivyer’s story started in 1952, when the UK singles chart was invented and he bought the first bunch of records released. From that point on, Sivyer bought every new song that entered the charts, whether he liked it or not, and carefully crammed each new record into his house.
After 6 decades of collecting, Sivyer had spent a small fortune amassing over 45,000 records on varying formats, culminating in one of the most comprehensive and best preserved collections of music in the world. When Sivyer died in 2015, he bequeathed his entire beloved collection to his brother, who took a long look at the records his brother had spent his entire adult life building and thought to himself “I wonder how much I could get for this crap on Ebay”.
Yes, after spending more than half a century building his collection, Sivyer’s own brother immediately broke it up into three parts. He sold it off for a fraction of its estimated worth as soon as Sivyer died because, screw him, we guess. You’d think given how dedicated he was to this collection, Sivyer would have donated it to a museum or something, but no, because he made the mistake of trusting his brother, the culmination of 60 years of work and dedication was almost instantly destroyed the moment he shuffled off this mortal coil. Boy, is it going to be awkward when those two meet up in hipster heaven.
6. The guy bought $3,000 worth of virtual game cards (in one day)
According to Wikipedia, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (often simply referred to as, Hearthstone to save valuable seconds that could be spent winning) is “an online collectible card game developed by Blizzard Entertainment” while according to this author’s friend, Chris, it’s “total b******t.”
Although game is listed as being free, players can, if they want to progress through the game quicker and/or win with any degree of regularity, pay to buy new card. Like with many games utilising the so-called “freemium model,” there are people out there who’ve spent thousands of real world dollars on various expansion packs and bonuses, like this guy, who spent $3,400 in a single night buying 2,700 packs of virtual cards.
What separates this story from the ones you read about people putting themselves into dire financial straits buying a kid’s college tuition worth of things in in Candy Crush is that this guy could actually afford to spend the money. Oh, and he also already had every single card in the game before he spent it. Now you’re probably thinking, if this guy already had literally every single card in the game, why bother spending money buying more? And the answer is going to leave you feeling very unsatisfied. He wanted to get all of the “gold cards” which according to the game’s own wiki are exactly the same as regular cards. In other words, this guy spent more than what most people earn in a month for the chance (because buying 2,700 cards doesn’t guarantee you’ll receive gold cards) to maybe get something he already technically had, just in a different color.
5. The guy who keeps buying hundreds of toys, every single year
For some celebrities, giving back to the community or those in need is something reserved for times when you need to get back onto the public radar in time to promote a new film or something. For others, it’s just something they do because they’re rich and because they can. NFL pro Andre Johnson is a sterling example of the latter.
Through his charity, aptly named the Andre Johnson Charitable Foundation, Johnson has spent tens of thousands of dollars on needy children who are invited to sprint around a local Toys ‘R’ Us and go nuts, with Andre paying for anything they can get their tiny hands on within 80 seconds.
The weird thing is, Andre has been doing this for years to little or no fanfare, rarely promoting that he was spending his own dollars to share the spirit of Christmas. It wasn’t until a photo of him holding a $19,000 receipt went viral that the world found out that this football playing St. Nick had quietly been makin’ it rain for needy kids for half a decade.
4. The guy pimpin’ people’s cars, with cardboard
It is arguably one of life’s greatest injustices that the experience of driving a kick-ass supercar or deathly silent electric wonder vehicle is limited to just the extremely wealthy or people willing to get their Grand Theft Auto on.
Well a Dutch prankster by the name of Max Siedentopf thought that was total horse poop and decided to fix it, using cardboard. Frustrated by what he called a decrease in the “’individualisation of one’s car,” Siedentopf began secretly sneaking out at night to give his neighbours a nice surprise in the form of a new bodykit for their whip made entirely of cardboard.
Dubbed Slapdash Supercars, Siedentopf’s Need For Speed-ing of neighbours vehicles wasn’t exactly taken well, but that’s the beauty of doing things at night when you can’t be caught. Then again, he did eventually post pictures of his work online under his real name, proving that his dedication to cardboardifying old cars was greater than his dedication to not being punched in the face when people found out who made them late for work because they had to rip 30 pieces of cardboard off their car.
3. The woman so addicted to clothes, men can’t date her
For most of us, clothes are an inconvenience we tolerate because we lack either the muscle definition or confidence to freeball when we’re at work. For others, clothes fill a void in their life that apparently can’t be filled with a less embarrassing vice. Lisa Harman, a secretary from England, is a person with just such a void in her life.
According to a 2014 profile of the clothing addicted 25 year old, she estimated that she’d spent in excess of 50,000 British pounds buying thousands of items of clothing, the majority of which she’d never worn.
But there’s more! In addition to spending 3 hours of her day buying random crap on ebay using 8 different credit cards, Harman also admitted to alienating several men she’d dated in the past by treating them like personal shoppers, sending them pictures of clothes she wanted and making them buy them for her before meeting up for dinner, preceded by what we’d assume was the most time anyone has ever spent waiting for their date to get dressed.
But Harman isn’t all bad, because she also admits that her dedication to always stylin’ and/or profilin’ usually extends to her dates, who she tries to dress. Surprisingly, not many of her boyfriends in the past reacted well to being told they dressed like homeless people and Harman admitted that her relationships were often short, bittersweet, but otherwise incredibly fabulous affairs.
2. The guy who quit his job, to take selfies
In 2013, the Oxford English dictionary said that “selfie” was their word of the year, which was met with equal amounts of derision and sarcasm from the internet at large because taking a picture of your face and uploading it to the internet isn’t that hard and shouldn’t be celebrated or encouraged, except for all of the times when it totally is. Then it’s okay.
Inspired by the record breaking amount of selfies taken by The Rock in 3 minutes, Indian-born Bhanu Prakash Racha quit his job as a hospital research assistant to dedicate himself to training to take selfies full-time, with the goal of taking 1800 or more in under an hour, breaking the previous record of 1449.
Racha’s training consisted of strengthening his wrists and hands, as well as training himself to take selfies using nothing more than muscle memory and condensed narcissism. Racha also spent many hours learning to accurately wield a selfie-stick, a device that should really only be used to look round corners and check for spiders, but we digress.
As of yet, Racha has yet to break the record, though he claims to be able to comfortably take over 1700 of them in just under an hour, so chances are that when he does attempt it, he’ll succeed and will be able to write “trained to be a world champion” in the as-of-right-now, awkward 6 month gap on his résumé.
1. The guy who wore a different costume every day, to annoy his son
Thanks to the existence of things like Halloween, Christmas, and Never-Sober-October, there are plenty of excuses for people who like dressing up to cover themselves in cheap plastic and wear a silly mask. For Dale Price though, the only excuse he needed was annoying his teenage son, Rain.
Starting in 2010 on his son’s first day of 10th grade, Price and his wife thought it would be nice to wave him off together as he boarded the school bus. When Rain expressed embarrassment at this, Price saw it as a personal challenge to one-up himself and the next day he did it again, wearing a Chargers uniform. Then again the next day dressed as Anakin Skywalker. Over the course of the next 170 days, Price continually stepped up his game creating every more elaborate costumes ranging from a sweet ninja outfit to a wedding dress. The next year, with his son, now officially known as “that kid with the dad with way too much free time” Price did the exact same thing again, only this time limiting his costumes to once per week, not because he was running out of ideas, but because the bus changed routes and stopped parking outside of their house.
Not wanting to break the streak, which by this point had received international news attention, Price created even more elaborate outfits the following year, dressing as everyone from Braveheart to the Terminator, finally ending the 3-year long tradition by waving his son off wearing normal clothes, arm in arm with his wife.
But the heartwarming, gooey stuff doesn’t end there because Price’s son, who graduated high school with honors, is currently working as a missionary in Liberia, while his dad continues to periodically update the blog originally dedicated to cataloguing his various outfits but now uses it to keep people posted about his son, with the goal of using the ad revenue raised by it to pay for his college education.
Gee, talk about dedication.