Personal story time, folks!

As a child, my cousins and I would have speed-Waldo tournaments using the "Where's Waldo? series of books.

The winner would get a cold delicious can of Welch's grape soda. There were eight of us and I only ever won once, but let me tell you there was nothing more satisfying than finding that stripe-wearing sneak.

TikTok prankster @BlakeMessik is set to make sure at least one person is denied that satisfaction. We don't know what his beef with Waldo is, but it clearly exists.

Blake went to some serious lengths to pull a prank that's going to give someone, likely a child, a major frustration headache.

Blake's victim, probably.

Giphy

So what did he do?

Blake bought a copy of The Great Waldo Search, took it home, digitally removed Waldo from every image in the book and then returned it to the shelf of the book store for some unwitting person to purchase.

He posted a short TikTok about the prank...

We're not fans of putting the book back on the shelf.

That copy of The Great Waldo Search is likely going to end up in the hands of a child who is going to end up confused and frustrated thinking they're dumb for not finding Waldo anywhere. That child isn't going to know this is part of some internet prank done for likes.

Having said that, we'll admit that on some level this is downright genius. Evil genius.

If we had Blake's level of patience and skill, we would 100% do something like this and give the book to a friend...or enemy...or frenemy.

That video is only about 30 seconds long, which is common for TikToks, but we really want you all to think about just how much time and effort this must have taken. Blake had to purchase the book, take it home and find Waldo in every image.

That could have taken days in and of itself.

Once he found each Waldo, he had to then scan each image into his computer. Then he had to use Photoshop to digitally remove Waldo from each image.

If you've never done digital image manipulation you may not understand how time consuming that step is. You can't just delete Waldo, you have to then create patches for where he was standing.

Was Waldo in the corn? Well you're going to have to create more corn and match it seamlessly.

Once Blake was done removing and re-creating, he printed the pages out and glued them into the book. Again, you may not realize the time this would have taken.

This isn't a simple glue stick job. This required matching edges and texture of the book pages.

Blake is serious about this.

BlakeMessick / TikTok

It seems funny haha in a thirty second clip, but the more you think about it the more you begin to suspect Blake has quite the interesting backstory. You can kind of imagine him hunched in front of his computer screen in the dark cackling as he furiously deletes Waldos, his eyes shimmering in the reflected screenlight while he matches corn.

This is some seriously next-level evil mastermind stuff. This is the sort of thing you do for fun if you happen to live on a volcanic island shaped like a skull. This is like "Ooh, I just thought of the perfect Christmas gift for my henchmen" kind of evil.

Blake...who hurt you, Blake?