The Risk I Took Was Calculated

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Part of a series on Troubled Birds. [View Related Entries]

About

The Risk I Took Was Calculated refers to an image macro drawing of a bird with the caption "The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math." After spreading online, the image inspired some exploitable variations and the text was applied to other contexts.

Origin

The image is a page created by The Mincing Mockingbird,^[1] a company that makes trinkets such as cards and magnets of birds with text written over the images. The image was posted to Etsy^[2] in April of 2011.

Spread

In 2013, the image was posted to Tumblr by the deactivated account oshawott-princess. The post has gained over 1.3 million views as of November 30th, 2017.^[3] On July 24th, 2014, an exploitable version was posted to the Humans of Tumblr^[5] Facebook account (shown below). On December 15th, 2014, a Funnyjunk^[4] thread showing a man throwing a toy plane that hits him in the face used the phrase.

On August 10th, 2015, a thread turning the original image into a desktop wallpaper appeared on Reddit and gained over 3,800 upvotes.^[8] There, users created various backgrounds behind the image, using the image as an exploitable (examples shown below).

The phrase and image continued to see use through 2017. Another variation of the bird image was posted to Facebook page That One Cheese Whore^[6] on February 18th, 2017 (shown below, left). The same day, Facebook page How To Bear^[7] shared an image of a bear attempting to jump on a trampoline with the caption (shown below, right).