exploding kickstarters

Yesterday my woman-friend and I were talking about the ridiculous Exploding Kittens kickstarter campaign, which as of this moment has collected over 3.8 million dollars in pledges. 

Three point eight MILLION dollars.

For a card game. 

My woman-friend says of course it has, because if you wanna make a lot of money online, you don't tell people you're sending relief to Ebola victims—you sell them poop in a box. She did not say this as an insult against Exploding Kittens, but rather in reference to the real-life poop-selling campaign that was recently run by the folks at Cards Against Humanity (Over thirty thousand poop-packages sold! Go capitalism!).

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that we should stop all the frivolity. We should feed all the starving and cure the curables and liberate the captives, and only then should we come back and spend six dollars on a box of cow plop. 

I wanna say that. I wanna write some screed against our stupid-dumb spending habits, but who knows? Maybe there's someone out there who's been really, really down, and Exploding Kitten Poop will cheer them into hugging a stranger, and maybe that stranger won't mow me down with an automatic weapon at the mall next year. As a general trend, it says something about our culture that we're throwing the crazy money at popular frivolities. But on a case by case basis, who knows? While our hearts should be breaking for the pain and suffering in the world, what sort of world would it be without any frivolity in it? Without art?

Then again, I might just be trying to get a head-start on my own guilt, in case the kickstarter campaign I've been working on for most of the day happens to actually work, or even go a bit nuts.

Like, three-point-eight-million dollars worth of nuts. 

[shakes dice. rolls]