Kickstarter has become a wonderful way to watch hilariously deluded people fail to achieve their completely ridiculous dreams. Thanks to the dedicated crew at Reddit’s /r/shittykickstarters community, we’ve found for more incredible anti-gems for you to check out that will hopefully never find enough suckers to get successfully funded.
Free AC
Wow! Free air conditioning! That sounds awesome! Tell me how you do it!
Oh wait. You just drilled holes into the top of your fridge and used some tubes to funnel the freezer’s cool air through an air conditioner unit? And you think this is actually going to save you money without completely wrecking your freezer? Oh my.
The Free AC Kickstarter project has mercifully been halted, likely after the inventor realized his harebrained scheme was a very terrible idea. As one Redditor notes, freezers “don’t ‘create cold,’ they extract heat” and “unless that heat is removed, the room’s temperature will increase significantly, as both the freezer and AC unit will be competing with each other and will subsequently be spewing a ton of heat (and drawing a ton of power to boot!)”
Even so, this project managed to convince five backers to pledge $270 before it got killed off… and it originally wanted to raise a stunning $50,000!
geoLARP
Let’s not mince words: Live Action Role-Playing (a.k.a., LARPing) is one of the single dorkiest activities that you can do. For the uninitiated, it involves dressing up as elves, dwarves and wizards and then running through the woods tossing bean bags at one another and hitting one another with foam swords.
That said, the two saving graces of LARPing are that it actually does involve (sort of) socializing with others and it does involve doing a decent amount of physical activity. However, one brave Kickstarter inventor wants to take away these few redeeming aspects of LARPing and wants to make a virtual LARPing smartphone app that will let you fight others without moving from your couch or meeting them face to face.
The creator of geoLARP wants $8,000 to make this dream come true. So far, he’s raised a cool $10. However, he still has 53 days to go, so there’s still hope!*
*No there isn’t.
Not Harder, SMARTER
This Australian man is trying to raise $10,000 to… well, we have no idea. He seems to be making a bunch of self-help-style sessions… but again, we have no way of really knowing because his Kickstarter pitch is only sort of written in English.
“Infinity Loop brings you Smart, because life doesn’t need to be hard work,” Not Harder, SMARTER’s creator says in his opening pitch and it only gets better from there. “Using the internet, this knowledge can be shared with almost everybody in the world. Imagine a world where everybody is getting what they want without stress, tension and unpleasantness. Imagine how much happier everyone will be. Imagine how much more people can contribute to making the world a better place if they can achieve their success quicker and easier.”
So yeah, it seems that he’s telling you that if you give him $10,000 he’ll share his secrets about how you can become wildly successful by putting in little to no work.
Things like this make me realize that Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk really wasn’t such a gullible sucker. Because after all, even if his magic beans never grew up to be a magical beanstalk, he’d still be able to eat them, which is more than the people who waste their money backing Not Harder, SMARTER will ever get.
The Cat-Bath Contraption
There’s something charming about Kickstarters that are so bad that their creators don’t even bother putting much effort into fooling you that their project is worth funding. One such project is the Cat-Bath Contraption, which is… a plastic tub that you fill up with water and then use to bathe your cat. We’re not making this up. This is the entire description of the project:
The picture above is of our current prototype for the cat bath – we hope to move beyond a simple bin and create a cat bath revolution!
The Cat-Bath Contraption is cutting-edge new technology designed to make bathing your cat a whole lot easier!
Ah yes, the sort of cutting-edge technology that involves filling up a plastic container with water.
And say, aren’t cats clean animals anyway? And why would you really need $500 to “build” a cutting-edge plastic tub that anyone could buy from the Dollar Store for 50 cents?
Thankfully this project doesn’t look like it’s going to meet its goals — it’s raised $7 so far with less than a day to go.
