Over the weekend, I suddenly got news that Malaysia had gone to war- thankfully, not literally, since that would just be a garbage cherry atop the incomprehensible mess that’s been going on for the past two years.

Instead, we have Popcat. For those unaware, Popcat is a clicker- all it does is make a funny image of a cat pop whenever it’s tapped, recording your score. Unlike other clickers like Universal Paperclip, however, there’s no automation- you manually keep clicking.

Where Popcat is genius, however, is its leaderboard. Rather than promising individual glory on its leaderboard, instead you have National Pride. Each country is ranked by their score, with our very own Malaysia sitting at third as of this writing.

So how did we get here? While it’s not the catalyst, the fact that at one point we were behind Singapore certainly helped. While Singapore may have us beat on minor things like their handling of COVID and number of Pokemon Centres, Malaysia soon surged over our National Ex out of the 20s and into the top 3 for Popcat, where we’ve been chilling behind Taiwan and Thailand, our brothers i-in-arms of the Milk Tea Alliance.

Even our representative angry Millennial, MP Syed Saddiq has proven his chops by posting his contribution to the PopCat cause, boasting an impressive 21k score since making a cat pop its mouth doesn’t require a simple majority.

Why Are You Even Writing About This

I don’t know if you’re aware but things are kind of not great right now. Seeing a country come together to flex on the world in something as mundane as a clicker game is pretty much the break we needed, and the fact we haven’t discovered Popcat is secretly a bitcoin mining rig makes this the perfect bout of innocent fun.

More importantly, National Day is this month- a day to be proud of your country, no matter how badly it’s tripped over its own shoelaces. And nothing screams nationalistic pride like superiority- that is, over the other countries apparently too good to pop a funny meme picture. Sure, we just had the Olympics, and those guys are no doubt heroes- but what I’m saying is, if you popped that cat, you’re a hero too.

Will we ever get to number one? I don’t know. Thailand and Taiwan have a pretty big lead on us. But who knows, maybe the power of bored Malaysians will give us the big surge we need and give us a gold medal that would make Tunku Abdul Rahman proud.

Malaysia Boleh, guys.