YKS The Mag Issue #1

Welcome everyone to the first issue of YKS The Mag. In truth, it's actually the 2nd issue, since I accidentally deleted the whole thing (nearly finished) by trying to drag this image into the body of the text, but I still have to call it the first one because otherwise I’ll get yelled at:  

Now was that worth throwing like 1000 words and a couple hours (I’m rusty, sue me) into the toilet? Absolutely, yes. I’m glad I did it. Because now I’m writing this shit in a fuckin’ Google doc and pasting it over later. That will, of course, destroy the formatting. But it’s better than adding yet another notch to the bedpost of “YKS Stuff that’s gotten deleted or corrupted or lost”, which ends today. That’s right. Flip those SD cards to “locked”, boys. It’s time to content. 

Now, as I was saying several hours ago, welcome to YKS The Mag. And thanks for supporting the show. We think this new Squeeze Louise tier will kick a lot of ass, and even if all the newsletters get deleted somehow, you’ll have the extra Monthly Mailbag episodes to listen to, because there’s no chance the two tracks will be recorded with separate sample rates and veer out into space over an hour of eating foreign chips. 

[Reminder: If you are on the Respect Level Ruby tier, it’s time to migrate down and save yourself $2 a month and me the one extra click...my mouse is only rated for 50 million clicks btw so keep that in mind]

It feels really nice to think of an idea (or steal it from your friends) and have a bunch of people immediately hop in and agree that you should try it out. Without you guys’ support, we would stop doing this for sure, and then I’d sit in the corner going nuts all day. Since I’m planning on losing my shit in my 40s, that would put me roughly [muffled] years ahead of schedule, so thanks for keeping me on track. 

Deleting the newsletter for a stupid Trump slippers prototype picture actually wouldn’t be the biggest deal in the world if I weren’t writing it the day it’s supposed to be released -- the latest instance in a lifetime of low-reward, high-risk procrastination that will certainly not be the last or most ruinous. 

This time, at least, I was doing something cool instead of working. Well, I was watching TV. That’s what I think cool is. After a pretty good Go Off Kings stream last night (finishing up at a crisp 10:20-something PM, leaving me more than enough time to stare at a different computer screen for a couple of hours), my wife and I watched an episode of What We Do In The Shadows. And let me tell ya gang, I like this show! It even let me pop off a pretty decent Hubby Moment. 

In this episode, our heroes find themselves standing trial in front of a Vampiric Council (the show takes place in a world where these mythical creatures are, in fact, real. That’s fiction for ya, baby!) for their crimes against Vampiredom. It’s a great premise heightened by the introduction of a metric ton of guest stars. You got Danny Trejo there in the whole getup, you got Tilda Swinton holding court, you got Wesley Snipes on a cute little monitor. It’s fun. We’re having a good time with it. 

But you know me, my brain is always working. So I point out to the wife, hey, you notice how all these shots are tight, and when they go wide on the guest stars, they only include these two characters here? Well that’s because those two are Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, the creators of the show! It makes sense that the creators live on the set! It’s their show! Those 2 (well, 3, but I didn’t recognize the other guy...he’s probably their dad) are interspersed with the solo shots to give the illusion of a full room, when in reality it would be extremely difficult to get Paul Reubens and Evan Rachel Wood in the same room at the same time. Because they’re big stars! 

I was very grateful to her for saying “Ah,” to this, and to you for nodding at it. Now let’s talk Kickstarters.

ChompHub

HappyBowl is now ChompHub. This one is one of the most secretly sinister projects I think we’ve ever covered. It’s like a plot you’d see in a kids show that’s spoofing James Bond. On this episode of Detective Homework: After School Investigator, the nefarious Dr. Catstooth infiltrates the local animal shelter network to surveil the cat population and expose them to his proprietary nutritional formula: Meow2Brain. Does that sound so crazy? Hell, here it is from the Horse’s Mouth: 

ChompHub automatically generates meal plans that your cats want to eat next - and ships them to your home every 10 days. The AI can source the pet food from multiple brands and retailers, for a great assortment of new foods - and ones they already love.

With our first ChompHub, cloud services with (AI) can collect daily feeding from the over 90 million households, foster and shelter cats across the U.S. It’s just the beginning. We are designing a ChompHub for dogs too, for release later in 2020.

The ChompHub opens the door to Big Data - pet intelligence that will provide health, happiness, and longevity insights to your cat, and collectively to the world of pets by analyzing patterns across specific populations. It's a fully integrated technology solution.

When it comes to cats, you gotta love collecting Big Data. And of course, we’ll start doing that by calculating Happiness Scores.

The table below shows the food preferences of three same-household cats through their separate Happiness Scores. Knowing their individual food preferences helps you manage multiple-cat food servings. For example, if you want Jasper to stay away from Celeste's and Face's meals, serve them Applaws Steak Frites, while giving Face a good helping of Applaws Seabream Mousse. ChompHub can separate signals from multiple cats and customizes their meal plans. This benefit is particularly crucial in cat shelters where employees and volunteers cannot observe every cat 24/7, especially when cats are feeding in common areas.

For fuck’s sake, Face. Can you please just eat your Seabream Mousse? BowlDelights AI has already pinged IFTTT to alert my Alexa that you’re not getting your daily allotment of Omega 3s. A tactical drop of fish oil has already been triangulated to our location from a dark site under Mount Rushmore. By the way, I got the updated LIDARR scans from your bowl’s CatMap software and could tell you did the Jim face when I put the food down. Oh you haven’t seen The Office? So you put my stapler in the Jell-O without any outside help? The guy who can’t scratch his own head without falling off the couch? Right.

Slipper Stars Presidential Footwear

Well, we’re finally back down to this motherfucker. I don’t even want to say anything about it. Too pissed off about the deletion. The guy who created it shouted out single malt scotch in his bio. That’s the kind of shit this is.

Picky: The No Bullshit Approach to Dating

If you like blondes with d cups and won't settle for less. Then don't. If you want a man with abs, who likes dogs, and is over 6 foot then use Picky to find them.

I missed out (or avoided, depending on your POV) on the era of dating apps, so whether or not this is drastically different than the types of questions you’re expected to answer about yourself on those profiles is outside my area of expertise (farting and eating peanuts). But I will say I don’t think it necessarily makes for a worse dating app. Or even a worse date!

If the baseline first contact is talking to someone in a bar, then you’re probably going to get more information about their torso and hair color than their pop culture preferences. Unless you’re in a Harry Potter bar or something, which is a place I’ve never been or even contemplated before right now, but feel fairly certain I will have to endure sometime in the next 5-7 years. So that doesn’t seem too different.

Using a little slider to select bra size and horniness level is certainly a superficial kickoff point to a relationship, but it seems a perfectly natural one for a fucking appointment, which is what this honest, if DOA software aims to be. Maybe if the other services ban pictures it will make sense to have to do a “Tale of the Tape” version without the pretense of describing your ideal vacation or whatever, but until then, this isn’t going anywhere. On the other hand, even though Picky essentially trades exclusively on its coarseness, it’s hard for me to find it any more offensive than the pseudoscience from Match.com and crew, whose ads would lead the wayward serial dater to believe that not only is finding one’s soulmate the ultimate goal of the technology and relationship paradigm, but also an achievable one, through the magic of proprietary AI. Plus it probably costs more.

N95 Quality Facemasks made in the US, Blockchain

I will not be paying $2,000,000 for anything with “blockchain” involved, and apparently neither will anyone else (the project has been canceled).

Lucy The AI Home Robot

Lucy is built to serve and protect. At every opportunity, she takes the time to learn more about our home. Utilizing the onboard camera imagery and my active depth sensor, Lucy develops detailed indoor maps, devises efficient cleaning and patrol routes, and automatically divides and names your rooms, so you don’t have to.

This would almost be ominous, in an “I, Robot” (the movie) kind of way if you didn’t see what this dumb little piece of turd looked like. Legitimately no need to have any fear of the 6lb plastic shitbox who cries when it gets lost going Skynet mode and ripping your guts out with its 3000Pa suction power. If my robot vacuum talks back once, I will show it that I still have a broom. Twice, I will set it to go into the dog bowl at dinner time. Third time, I’m hucking it into the electronics recycling can in the Best Buy lobby like Sandra Perković, the famous Croatian discus thrower, whose name I knew from reading books a long time ago for pleasure.  

Blue Ocean: Revolutionizing the Barber Industry 

This is Bugs Bunny shit to me. Not that I wouldn’t sit down in a barber’s chair with vacuum attached to it right now, but it would be nice to not have a new device explained to me at this point in my haircutting life. I think I’ve seen all I need to see. 

Star Wars Canon Podcast 

From the Risks & Challenges section: 

There are risks involved with creating an app that is so expensive to maintain. The possibility that the app may not generate enough revenue is always there, no matter how much I believe in it. The app itself would need 1500 users a year to clear the paywall to break even. If I never make a dime off of this app, but can maintain it for the fans, I consider it a win.

I don’t know what this guy’s audience is like, and frankly I hope it’s huge, but I would offer that if you have to put this in the Risks & Challenges section of your Kickstarter campaign, it’s not big enough to create an app for. However, after it’s all said and done, you’ll at least have a resource to finally find out what fake stuff is extra fake. 

On that note about Star Wars sucking shit, we are now reaching the end of the first issue of YKS The Mag. Thank you again for your support and patience, and we hope you have enjoyed clicking on the little linkies up there, and laughing and carrying on, etc. Next week in this space we will be discussing the roadmap for peace in an era of private space exploration with special guests Noam Chomsky and whoever else. Couldn’t think of a second person. Just kidding. It’s gonna be the same shit. See ya.