The year is 2019, and Donkey Kong is a trans ally. Welcome to the future.

On January 19th, YouTuber Harry Brewis — better known by his handle Hbomberguy, or simply Hbomb — embarked on what he thought would be a straightforward endeavor: streaming a marathon run of Donkey Kong 64 on Twitch to benefit the UK-based charity Mermaids, which provides resources and support to transgender children. A followup to his video about the peculiar joys of speedrunning (the art of playing through a game as quickly and/or completely as possible), Brewis intended the stream to combat the “woefully misinformed” media narrative about trans people, choosing Mermaids after learning that The IT Crowd co-creator Graham Linehan had influenced the UK’s Big Lottery Fund to consider withdrawing a ₤500,000 grant promised to the organization. (The Big Lottery Fund distributes revenue from the UK’s National Lottery to “good causes,” particularly to groups working in health and education.) “Well done, Graham,” Brewis noted sarcastically in his announcement video. “You have a massive audience and the power to choose to fight for progress in all the many forms we need in the world right now, and you used it to make sure some children won't have access to helpful resources.”

But Brewis never could have anticipated what happened next. Over the course of the 57-hour stream, viewers donated a total of more than $347,000, blowing past all of Brewis's donation goals and staggering even Mermaids chair Susie Green. With the help of a rotating team of moderators, Brewis began hosting guests in the stream's voice chat, and the channel quickly became a sort of internet Woodstock; one could tune in at various points to hear Chelsea Manning, Mara Wilson, or even the voice of Donkey Kong himself, Grant Kirkhope, jump on and yell “trans rights!”

“Nothing of this magnitude was planned,” says stream moderator and self-described “Internet sloth” Casey Explosion. “Harris asked me to be there to talk while he was sleeping, so the stream wasn't just dead silence while he was taking a nap. That was the only collaboration that had been arranged ahead of time.” The idea that the stream might explode didn't occur to her, she says, until she managed to get popular gaming critic Jim Sterling to make an appearance. “I thought I was a miracle worker for getting [him] on stream, and I had absolutely no idea what would happen later that evening.” Eventually, American political upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would join for ten minutes to discuss how transgender oppression is linked to economic marginalization (and why the Nintendo 64 was the best video game console of its day), leaving Casey in “stunned disbelief.”

Beyond the stream itself, rapid-fire updates and stream-related memes poured forth on Twitter, where one could sense the vibrant pulse of community emanating from each screenshot and flabbergasted tweet. Not a single trans person I knew could believe what was happening, in part because everything about it was so absurd. What had begun as an excuse to enjoy a goofy N64 game while thumbing a collective nose at Linehan (“you trash man! You piss boy! You prodigious buffoon!” chortled Brewis in his announcement) had rapidly ballooned into a charitable juggernaut, as powerful as it was ridiculous.

Then again, perhaps it was that exact weirdness that allowed the stream to so quickly catch the zeitgeist. Over the past few years, our shared cultural touchstones have trended increasingly towards the bizarre, from Ja Rule's Fyre Festival devolution into Lord of the Flies to Elon Musk calling a rescue worker a pedophile. The dizzying barrage of news arising from the Trump presidency has itself produced a psychological sense of time dilation for many, a cultural context in which even going about daily life can feel surreal. The President might be the agent of a foreign government and I'm just going to do the dishes like nothing's wrong? Ours is an age in which it is impossible to guess what will happen tomorrow. Why wouldn't a YouTuber be able to dunk on a transphobe so hard they accidentally raise a third of a million dollars?