#my feed likely makes no sense RN since those posts from a couple days ago JUST published themselves

[rainey-staerie-daize]

Of course, when we have a child living here who would actually fucking benefit from an unplugged summer, that's when Mom gets us new wifi the fastest she ever has.

For reference, I'm not sure the youngest (who is seven) has ever seen a router in person ever. And I've personally spent quite a few months unplugged myself when unfortunate things have happened, like my phone falling in the toilet in high school, so I'm quite salty that my siblings aren't being raised the same way. We didn't have wifi when we moved into this house; we would've survived without it for longer.

But the universe hates us older "kids," so, y'know, we have wifi now. Like, our own. It's a terabyte, and it's named Rainbow Bright. Skye suggested MyWirelessDude Jr., after our dad's old wifi, but that was ignored. Which is a shame because I thought that would've been neat.

The first movie that was streamed was Mitchells versus the Machines, which I think is very appropriate. Did my brother (the one who needs to unplug) absorb any lesson from it? I can almost guarantee that's a no. At least Mom now has an app where she can pause the connection for specific devices now!

She's likely gonna be too lenient with that, just like everything else, but one can dream.

I'm just left wondering two things: whether or not our device names show up on that app and if she can see specific websites we visit. Because, y'know, I'm a grown person... And my VR headset is named "A Quest to Get My Swamp Back."

[asrisgratitudejournal]

BTS Meal

It's 19:32 pm and I'm closing my day in the office (after I got to write 2 descriptive paragraphs the whole day - I definitely did better at that time I was preparing for my IELTS), but I feel like I got to say a thing or two about the BTS Meal phenomenon that just happened back home. No one asked my opinion. No one needed to hear of solutions nor how to make things better, and not that what I said here could be helpful for anyone in any way juga. It's just my "scientist" and "problem solver" brain, I guess?, that motivates me to write this, so here we go.

My day started with this "mess" about BTS Meal on (surprisingly, not my stan Twitter account, but) my main Indonesian Twitter account. The tone of the tweets mixed a lot between very sweet and positive ones (especially from my mutuals that are also ARMYs) and the kinda-mocking meme-y ones (those tweeted by the "funny" "woke" guys - which mostly were not tweeted by my mutuals, just saw some of the tweets passing by on the tl).

I won't talk about the positive sweet tweet ones because... I wouldn't just be telling the world that we are the best fandom in the world or anything (yes, BTS teaches us self-love, but we're not that full of ourselves). Then again, as I mentioned in the previous post, quoting Pak Dosen Prama, "people everywhere are in a normal distribution". Of course, there are very nice and kind ARMYs out there who gave the drivers 100k IDR tip, a sack of rice, bottles of drink, a bunch of snacks, chocolates, etc. But, there are also, as we're mostly known of, toxic and mean ARMYs out there, that (thank God) didn't show up a lot in my timeline today.

I would love to talk mostly about how these "funny" "woke" people on the timeline react to these nasty videos of huge crowds, drivers stuck together in a closed indoor space without masks, polices closed down McD branches, people shouted in anger because of the McD closure, Pol PP tried to rip down a huge BTS Meal banner in front of the McD building, you know... those kinds of videos. Disclaimer: by these "funny" and "woke" people, I don't mean the ones who made dad jokes on ARMY as TNI or edited King Nassar into BTS Meal packaging -- I found them very funny, thanks, King. I specifically reacted to these people who think that we, ARMYs, (well, not we technically because geographically I'm not part of them rn? Well, anyways) were not considerate of the drivers who had to wait hours in line, were just causing unsafe environments for the drivers in the middle of a pandemic, were panic buying, were irrational and childish, and were possibly making a new cluster of Covid-19 because of this 50k IDR worth of meal.

Well, I'm not trying to find a scapegoat here, but in the perspective of someone who has been following perkiprahan BTS Meal all over the world, all of this craziness actually could be avoided and prevented very easily. If only, if only, McDonald's Indonesia had learned and studied and seen how the BTS Meal has been released in other countries, has at least consult an ARMY (it took only one person to estimate the number of ARMY in Indonesia. Heol, they didn't even have to consult. It's one google away), they could've easily made a strategy to prepare for this.

Before I go into possible solution(s) McDonald's Indonesia could've/should've taken, I'd take time first to explain why BTS Meal would matter THAT much to ARMYs. A famous Twitter chef in Indonesia tweeted after eating the meal: "so this is it? what's so special about 10 pieces of McNuggets, fries, 2 dipping sauces, and a cup of coke?" -- well, probably not the exact verbatim, but I saw a couple of tweets in a similar nuance: asking what's the hype of this BTS Meal.

Hhhh, here we go, the difficult part. It's always very difficult, at least to me, to explain something I love so much (as much as it is unconditional) to other people who are not on the same train of thoughts and feelings and mind. But, anyway... I'll try.

It's probably the cheapest official thing we can get as an ARMY. Let's say the price of one BTS Meal is around... 50k IDR(?). That amount of money is actually VERY cheap compared to BTS official merch (ranging from 100k to more than 500k apiece), an album (300k to 500k -- I even bought my BE Deluxe at £50), an online concert ticket (350 k and above), a BT21 merch (100k to 300k), a BTSxSamsung phone (18000k), a BTSxSamsung earbud (I don't know, 5000k?), and their many other expensive stuff. To be able to pay only 50k to show how we support them??? Why didn't people just let us be? Anyway, this BTS Meal is not made to cater to you, muggles. It's specifically marketed to us ARMYs. Don't get into a fight you're not supposed to be in, please. Ok, that's number 1.

We Indonesian ARMYs are part of the bigger family that is the global ARMYs all over the world. We have this sense of camaraderie that by eating this BTS Meal, it'd feel like we have lunch together eating the same exact meal with other ARMYs from SK, US, Egypt, Peru, and other countries (which has BTS Meal of course). Especially, looking at we, Indonesia, is included as one of the latest countries to release BTS Meal, our social media timeline and feed has been full of BTS Meal since two weeks ago and we can't help but order right away as it is out!

BTS Meal is an homage to BTS. I don't know if all Indonesian ARMYs even know about this, but the og story of BTS Meal is that it's BTS' favorite meal package that until a week ago exists only in South Korea (especially the cajun and sweet chili dipping sauce). And since BTS loves ARMYs so much (at least that the narrative the McDonald's marketing people trying to build here), they want all ARMYs around the world to taste it, too. //Mungkin kalau di Indo macem paket panas special gitu kali ya, saking favnya jadi pengen dishare ke orang lain juga (yaampun jd ngidam paket panas special huhu belum makan dinner lapar)//. So, of course, to receive that love BTS wants to share with us their ARMYs, we feel and act as enthusiastic as we could be!

There might still be more reasons why ARMYs are THAT crazy over this meal, but I've tried to outline at least 3 of them. Well, I don't represent all Indonesian ARMYs. They might have those reasons I mentioned above, but they also might not. They probably would just simply said, "because we love them and we want to support them". But there I tried to "explain" the rational reasons under the irrational logic hiding behind the word "love".

So now let's go to what has gone wrong and what McDonald's Indonesia could've done better in anticipating this huge event of BTS Meal release. Well, they still can implement these suggestions actually, since the event itself will still run for a month(?) if I'm not mistaken. Many Indonesian ARMYs (Indomys) Twitter base accounts actually also already have reminded ARMYs to not do panic buying on the 1st day of the release of BTS Meal. However, you just can't help it when you see people on your timeline started to get theirs, updated, and posted pictures of their meal (sigh, the scary side of social media: the FOMO phenomenon).

System! There's got to be a system here. Be it the ordering system (if they need to do buka-tutup strategy or minimum purchase) or the line waiting system for those ojol drivers (put sign everywhere if necessary). I don't know if they even care about this BTS Meal, but McDonald's Indonesia really didn't learn. I've mentioned before that Indonesia was one of the latest countries to release BTS Meal. In the past weeks, we had South Korea, the US, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, even our closest neighbor, Malaysia, releasing BTS Meal. If only the management of McDonald's Indonesia could've seen and learned how those countries did their job magnificently, I believe all of this chaos wouldn't have happened. Take, for example, Malaysia. What they'd done there was to take orders only from McDelivery, drive-thru, and takeaway counter. Simple and neat. No third-party delivery is involved. And even for the takeaway, they already separated the line for regular order and the one for BTS Meal. Every sign is written clearly to make sure everyone follows the social distancing rule. Ah... why can't we be like Malaysia, though...

Clear notice/announcement on the availability of the packaging. One of the things that sadly successfully drive ARMYs to do panic buying today is that there's this rumor going around that the purple packaging is limited in numbers and they will run out if we don't buy it fast. Until now, we didn't know about the real fact, some ARMYs said that the packaging is produced in the country so they can print them as much as they can, some others said there's only 1000 (? need ref here) of them per branch, we really don't know. The only thing we know for sure is that as in Malaysia, the packaging was out on the 3rd day (? need ref here) of the release. So of course that makes us scared in a way, and that's normal because we've been waiting for it since a month ago! Just imagine our frustration? If only McDonald's Indonesia Twitter account can say a thing about this, especially to give assurance to Indomys that the packaging won't be out, that'd help big time. At least, by knowing that, these ARMYs could strategize, plan their schedule around their time so that they can come by themselves via drive-thru or even order it on Gofood/Grabfood app at other time that's not 11 AM.

Better communication with the authorities. It'd just be nice if McDonald's Indonesia has talked before with local police about this release and the effect it probably will cause. At least just to give notice to them that there will be this special package coming out and there probably be a little bit of traffic here so please mind the disruption. And they can even ask these authorities for help! It just breaks my heart, though, seeing a lot of McDonald's branches are now being closed down by force because they were considered breaking the law for making crowd :(

Waa panjang juga ni bacotan saya. Dari nulis di office sampe laper terus pulang karena takut keburu gelap dan dingin alias ga bawa jaket samsek, sampe akhirnya lanjut lagi di rumah (ini jam 22.52 pm) dan belom dinner gara-gara saking semangatnya abis mandi langsung buka dashboard lagi. Terus sekarang ini ceritanya dah cape berbahasa Inggris jadi mulai ngIndonesia. Dah deh gitu aja. Nga ada yang baca juga ini pasti, tapi at least punya bacaan lah ntar in the next 5 years bakal ngomong "yaampun bucin banget ye dulu w sama BTS sampe gini aja diomongin ditulis panjang lebar". Semoga 5 tahun lagi SUDAH BERHASIL KETEMU LANGSUNG SM BTS DI WEMBLEY YA ALLAH AAMIIN YRA. Minta doanya ya teman2.

-fin,

Oxford, 9 Juni 2021, ditulis karena kesal sama netizen yang gatau apa-apa tapi komen mulu tentang BTS Meal