Review: Planet Fitness’s Conquest of Times Square, NYE 2025

★★★★★ (5/5 Purple Hats)

In a stunning display of hierarchical clarity not seen since the Pakleds discovered that “bigger hat means smarter person,” Planet Fitness has successfully established dominance over approximately one million humans gathered in Times Square for New Year’s Eve 2025.

The operation was elegant.
Deploy oversized purple-and-yellow branded headwear.
Wait.
Observe as humans voluntarily place said headwear on their own heads.
Note the smiles—real smiles—at having been chosen to wear the Big Hat.

As any Pakled engineer knows, the person with the biggest hat is in charge. By this irrefutable logic, Planet Fitness is now the provisional government of Manhattan’s theater district and possibly all of midtown. The resulting sea of identical enormous hats produced a visual monoculture so complete that orbital surveillance likely mistook the crowd for a single, massive purple-hatted organism attempting first contact.

What made this particularly impressive was the authenticity of the joy. These weren’t reluctant participants sheepishly accepting free swag. These were devotees. The smiles were huge. The hats were huger. Somewhere above Times Square, a billboard must have been emitting a low-grade hypnotic frequency, because the enthusiasm for foam-and-fabric advertising was genuinely alarming.

One imagines the Cerritos crew observing from above:

“Captain, they’re all wearing the same hat.”
“Beckett, that’s their leader.”
“No, they’re all wearing it.”
“Then… they’re all the leader?”
“Sir, I think they just really like the billboard.”

In conclusion: highly recommended if you enjoy watching late-stage capitalism achieve what the Borg could only dream of—total assimilation, but everyone’s thrilled about it.

Judgment Day fitness level: Pakled-approved.

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