I could personally think of better things to spend $1200 dollars on, but I could also find better things to do with my time than play Cards Against Humanity.
Upvoted.com $1,200 can pay for a lot of things. A month’s rent. New cell phones for the kids. Round-trip tickets to India. Or, if you’re Max Temkin, 50 gallons of lube.
On Wednesday evening, the co-founder of popular adult card game Cards Against Humanity tweeted an Amazon receipt for his gift to Ammon Bundy’s Oregon militia.
After the armed protestors currently occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge asked the public for snacks and got glitter and sex toys instead (thanks, redditors!), Temkin decided to join in the fun—by sending something to help them put all those dildos to good use:
Some redditors questioned why the militia was allowed to receive mail in the first place when they’ve seized a government building—giving rise to one particularly compelling theory:
Despite these unfounded (but believable) rumors about the President’s amusement, authorities haven’t been completely inactive in dealing with the occupation over the past two weeks.
On Friday afternoon, OPB reported that police made their first arrest in connection with the armed protest. According to The Oregonian, 62-year-old Kenneth Medenbach was picked up for driving a stolen car to a local Safeway to purchase supplies for the militia.
If “55 gallons of lube” was scrawled at the top of Medenbach’s grocery list (in Ammon Bundy’s hasty, repeatedly underlined handwriting), the militia is in for a sweet, slippery sigh of relief when Temkin’s care package arrives.
But if not, the militia might release another delightful Facebook video like this one—in which Jon Ritzheimer asks Internet trolls to stop sending dildos (and edible bags of dicks):
UPDATE: It turns out Cards Against Humanity is continually engaging in stunts like this. Here’s what they did with a cash windfall from last black Friday, in 2014.
Business Insider This past Black Friday, the so-called “party game for horrible people” Cards Against Humanity had a hilariously bizarre deal: Give them $5 and get absolutely nothing in return.
In a blog post today, Cards Against Humanity’s founders revealed that this stunt made the company $71,145, with 11,248 giving $5, and 1,119 people giving more than that. One guy even gave $100.
All for literally nothing.
“This promotion was a huge risk – we had no idea if it would get a positive or negative response, or any response at all,” Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin tells Business Insider.
Temkin also says that while the long-term impact of this sale remains to be seen, traffic to the Cards Against Humanity site has been “very healthy this weekend.”
“The best way for me to make sense of that response is that these kinds of pranks are like an improv scene where the public is our scene partner. We create a funny setup, and they make it real,” Temkin says.
But wait, there’s a punchline here: How Cards Against Humanity used the cash.
Shopping list
“There’s been a lot of speculation about how we would spend the money from Black Friday, and we’re happy to announce that this time, we kept it all. Here’s what we bought,” Cards Against Humanity writes in the blog post.
While Cards Against Humanity actually has a history of making big donations to charitable causes, this time, they used the cash more selfishly, splitting it evenly among its 17 employees for about $4,185 each.
It then goes on to break down what employees actually bought with their windfalls.
“It’s been really fun seeing everyone react to our employee’s shopping list. We go out of our way to hire generous, funny, well-rounded, and diverse people, and they did an amazing job with their holiday spending (which we dropped on them pretty suddenly as the Black Friday promotion started blowing up),” Temkin says.
Cards Against HumanityThe Cards Against Humanity Black Friday “sale.”
Lots of Cards Against Humanity employees bought Sony PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Wii U video game consoles. Others put money into savings, bought gifts for others, including a $1000 car, or paid some of their student loans.
But the real highlights include a “custom suit of men’s armor” ($1500), two front row tickets to the Chicago Cubs home opener ($1,058), and a 24-karat-gold YVA vibrating massager with “eight pleasure settings” ($3,120).
Finally, and the absolute best part: Despite the gag of Cards Against Humanity keeping the money for themselves, several Cards Against Humanity employees actually gave in the hundreds or thousands to charities and nonprofits including Planned Parenthood, DonorsChoose.org, and the American Refugee Committee.
“We’ve been doing these kinds of jokes for a few years now, and I think the key thing that we’re learning is to trust our gut a little more than we usually do. If something makes us laugh, it will probably resonate with other people as well,” Temkin says.
