“Fortune…cookies favor the brave, wait, no, that isn’t the reason for this is it? Jesus Christ, is this my fault? IS THIS MY FAULT?”
~Matt Damon
Hey! It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, mostly because we’ve been active in the popular current hobby of learning how to hug our knees and rock back-and-forth instead of reliving recent traumas.
Normally, you’d expect us to break a long silence because we discovered a comic book about a esports team, or found out about the discontinuation of the Choco Taco (DAMN YOU UNILEVER!) But instead, we are here to talk about two things that could not be farther apart. Or so we thought.
Fortune cookies.
And fucking Cryptocurrency.
Strap the fuck in, loyal readers, it’s CURSIN’ TIME. FUCK!
Crypto Is Advertising Itself on Fortune Cookies and Maybe the World Has Finally Broken?
While our staff has been pretty quiet as of late, we still insist they come into the office every day, maskless, preferably after attending an all-night Berlin rave the previous night (it’s not a COVID thing, we’re just treating Monkeypox the way suburban mothers treat chickenpox).
But as a rare treat, today we decided to order from a local Chinese restaurant we’ve always liked. Since we got a few fortune cookies with our order, and we enjoy a healthy dose of mass-produced pseudo-mysticism in our lives, we cracked open one of the cookies.
And look. At what. We fucking. Found.
We flipped it over to see that the logo for FTX, a Bahamian cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2019 that has found sponsorship with the MLB, Tom Brady, Kevin O’Leary (the meaner of the Shark Tank dudes), and who last year acquired the naming rights to home arena of the Miami Heat.
So naturally, the next logical step in building their brand recognition was to troll your post-Chinese-food-take-out treat. What the actual shit is happening. We are writing this article as a shout for help. The ship is sinking and we want to see if anyone else can see the murky water around their ankles as well.
Here’s another FTX fortune cookie we got! What does this actually mean!? This is nonsense! If your hands were made of diamonds at the same proportion, this fortune is asking you to aggressively and with malice lacerate the people you care about. There is nothing sharper than diamond hands! Is this a metaphor we don’t understand, or is the result from the last electrons fired off from the depleted mind of a FTX Intern suffering heat stroke? Possibly both?
At this point you are probably wondering—AFFotD, you seem really mad about this kind of inoffensive, silly thing. Do you hate crypto? Do you hate fortune cookies?
So we’ll set the record straight.
Fortune cookies are kind of bullshit? The fortune aspect is fun, but are they good cookies? Fuck no. Our staff eats a tiny square of the cookie (as if there was a rule that you have to “eat the cookie” to “earn the fortune”) and we read the fortune and we go on with our lives.
But let’s be honest—no one would ever pay for a fortune cookie at a restaurant. This is not a lava cake. It’s a mass-produced lie on a piece of paper inside of a folded cookie wafer that someone whispered the word “sugar” into during the baking process.
As for cryptocurrency? Listen, we’re not going to go into that. We first dismissed crypto at around the time that if we had invested in it we would be actual millionaires by now, so we are the last people who should have a strong opinion about the future of decentralized currency, or blockchains, or any of that shit.
What we can say about cryptocurrency, however, is that 95% of people who bring it up unprompted in a conversation are literally the worst people you’ve ever met in your life. Just a neck beard, soul patch, spoiler on their Honda kind of personality. The kind of person who can somehow manage to talk about their CrossFit routine in the same breath as a bad beat they got in a poker tournament. Think, a monkey’s paw, but you don’t even have to make a wish, you just have to be in its presence to feel sweaty and tired and just shitty.
To all the crypto bros reading this feeling we’re being unfair to you and your tribe—name the last time a group was referred to as “____ bros” where they were viewed as a net gain on society. We’ll wait.
So not only have the crypto bros taken over our Super Bowl commercials (until realizing maybe don’t waste money on marketing something that is inherently volatile and can lose trillions in days when your marketing efforts bring in tens of thousands of inexperienced, amateur investors) but they’re now taking over fortune cookies.
Why!?
Fuck FTX and fuck Greg.
There are even more of these out there. It appears they started showing up at the end of 2021, and have increased in volume since June of this year. And we hate this. So much. Gone are the days where we could chuckle at the occasional fortune cookie with a dad joke or a genuinely intriguing typo.
Now we live in the darkest timeline, one where we have to see Dogecoin puns, and bad ones at that, and where someone with a chinstrap beard is guaranteed to comment on this article with a “well actually” sentiment without even reading far enough to see that we called his shot.
WHO IS THIS FOR!? Fortune cookies are such an innocent, innocuous thing that this feels like an active attack.
No one wants this. Crypto bros are not going to open a fortune cookie and say, “HELL YEAH, MY FAVORITE CRYPTOCURRENCY EXCHANGE INCORPORATED IN ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA IS INVESTING IN COOKIE MESSAGING.” It won’t even register to them. Everyone else will just say, “What the shit is this? I just wanted to be told I was going to be lucky in love in the fall, or something.”
It’s weird at best, and a harbinger of doom at the worst. FTX, if you’re reading this (and if you are, hahaha, fuckin’ WHY?) just know that 99.99% of people who get one of your broke-ass, lazy, shitty-copy fortune cookies will respond in this exact way.
/Wellthatsucks indeed. Give us back our fortune cookies, cryptocurrency, and if you play your cards right, we’ll begrudgingly let you keep Matt Damon.
America Fun Fact of the Day 