YKS The Mag Issue #2

Hey everyone and welcome to Issue #2 of YKS The Mag. This is the newsletter where we talk some shit about the Kickstarters from Monday’s show, as well as do some prestige longform journalism with some of the brightest minds in publishing today. Haha. Just joking. It’s mostly about what I’m watching on TV. 

Anyway, thanks for supporting the show. We’ve had a lot of people write and call to say that they’re glad we’re still doing this shit, which is of course very nice to hear. Keep in mind, though, that we don’t know how to do anything else (or even this, arguably) so calling each other on the computer and talking about getting jerked off by a mummy is as much an act of self-preservation as it is dogged consideration. 

But it does seem crazy sometimes! I guess that’s one of the striking things about -- and not to get too haughty here -- an “empire in decline”. If you read one of those big ass bug-squishing history books with the insides falling out like we had in middle school, it always seemed like one day everything was cool, then an hour later the whole place was on fire and everyone was rowing out in little boats. Well I guess that’s not the way it goes. The way it actually works is: everything’s actually been fucked up the whole time, and it takes a while for everyone to notice, then there’s a bizarrely long period afterwards where you still have to go through the motions and bureaucracy of living with the acute knowledge that there’s no point and it’s almost over. 

It’s like shaving your nut hairs when you’re 100 years old. There’s no point, man. You don’t have to make your nuts or your yard look good. You’re almost dead and The Army is out front blowing up the neighborhood.

It feels kind of weird to be goofing around now, but if you couldn’t do any goofs while there is suffering and injustice in the world, there would be like maybe one goof ever. And it wouldn’t even be that funny, probably. Like maybe the first human farts and points at a dinosaur. Lol. Okay that’s actually better than I thought. But, fuck! I’m trying to make a point. Well, Philip K. Dick said it better than I could, because he didn’t get sidetracked with dinosaur farting. 

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

He’s right! This shit sucks major ass! He was talking about shooting robots in the head, I think, and we’re not there yet, but it still applies. If you’re a conscientious person, you’re aware of how much wrong you have to do, or end up doing, sometimes without even necessarily trying. That’s because the people who set the whole thing up were not conscientious at all, and didn’t care about doing wrong. And the Universe or whatever it was that set them up in the first place, really didn’t care about doing wrong, because it didn’t know what that meant. So we’re just stuck here, fucking up all the time and alternating between trying not to think about it, trying to make up for it, and convincing other people to do the same thing, and it’s a big time pain in the ass. 

Which is why every now and then, you gotta do some goofs. Let’s talk about Kickstarters.

[And here’s some sources for doing good stuff also]

ButterHub

We didn’t see the extreme success of the Butterhub ($131,000 and counting) coming, and that’s probably because “having trouble getting butter on stuff” is something of a blind spot in our households. My kids, for instance, are able to get out the step stool, put the bread in the toaster, remove the bread, open the butter dish, slice the butter, spread it on the toast, put the knife in the sink, replace the butter dish lid, and eat the toast without having a complete, glass-shattering, grease-flinging breakdown. They’re not even that good at doing stuff! It’s just…very easy to make toast. And frankly, if it were this difficult for me to make toast I would just eat something else. Toast is out of my life forever. Not worth it to me, man. 

Realistic Gift Ever - Unlimited Choices & Customization

One of the many great shames of doing this show for me is when I start talking about a project and I can tell that Mike is thinking, “Oh this one is not that bad really.” This phenomenon is known as “Cuckstarting”, and it’s the leading cause of podcast hosts under the age of 32.5 getting kind of snippy. We must stop this now.

I admit, this guy making wack little figurines ain’t hurtin’ nobody. And I bet if it were a video on r/DamnThatsCoolAndWild, I’d stop and look at it for a second. I’d probably think about how I wish I could draw, and wonder if he’s got a little shop somewhere, and then I’d remember what shopping malls are like now, and then I’d probably scroll down and see a woman jumping on a trampoline and forget the whole thing.

However, they cost $150 and look like this. So I think I’m actually right. 

Good Cop, Bad Cop

I know I said earlier that existence is suffering, it’s only human to want an escape from that at times, etc. But there’s got to be a better way than this. I read all the comments on the page and not one of the 442 backers has said anything like “Well, sort of bad timing on this game about figuring out who the good cops are, huh?” They’re all just like, hey, this game looks fun! Alright. Here’s one of the comments: “Sometimes the police work with dogs but never felines... Guess there’s no such thing as a COPy cat…” Is that true? Yes! Absolutely, and I’ve been saying it for years. But a little awareness from Board Game Guys would be cool maybe. 

CDN-Zoo: Rethink content delivery!

Here’s the deal with this thing: let other people use your internet and you’ll get a small amount of money. The charitable way of describing it would be “Uber for data”, which is exactly what they say of course, without irony, and without an acknowledgement that Uber doesn’t make money, never will, and is a disaster from essentially every conceivable angle other than the number of tiny water bottles with one sip taken out of them. 

Admittedly I’m a little more concerned with privacy than the average person...like sometimes I’ll use an incognito window for non-porno stuff because I don’t want Google knowing I’m trying to figure out which X-Men have died. RIP Microwave Man, The Human Punch, and Bug Mayor. But there’s no fuckin’ way I’m letting somebody get on my shit and fuck up my streaming for a dollar. That’s not even considering they want to lock down my network with their weird little firewall, acting as a middleman to all my network traffic, and doing god knows what with my X-Men searches. Plus, if this idea is so good, why wouldn’t I just be the guy who subscribed to other people’s internet instead of letting them piggy back off mine? For $18/month? How many people do I need buffering my kids’ Netflix before I get the cost of a fuckin Arby’s sandwich back in my PayPal? Stupid.

Freedom of Speech, Social Network Platform

These “freedom of speech” social networks are a dime a dozen on Kickstarter, and they tend to have a few things in common.

1. They are overtly right wing, “freedom of speech” being used as a dogwhistle for “you get to do some nasty shit on here”

2. There is no animating thought behind the project other than “you get to do some nasty shit on here”, limiting the audience to the small group of people who want to do nasty shit above all else and were so bad at it they couldn’t do it on the normal sites that pretty much let you do whatever you want anyway

3. The people who want to make these sites don’t know how to make a site, or talk about making a site, and they don’t know anyone who does

But this one’s different maybe! 

The creator of the project -- which, alright, doesn’t have a name or brand, so in that sense it’s like all the other ones -- does apparently have a background in project management and engineering. That doesn’t mean she’s not an incompetent conservative wacko, of course, but it’s very weird that the force behind this isn’t a psycho conspiracy guy. She does link to a YouTube video of a psycho conspiracy guy as an example of the content that it’s good to have and, curiously, which is disallowed from mainstream social media sites such as YouTube, but uh, maybe there’s going to be good stuff on there?

Well, there isn’t going to be good stuff on there, because it’s gotten $0 of funding out of a $220k goal. And even if she pulls a website together, no one will post on it because you don’t get a popular website by raising money on Kickstarter. You do it by stealing the idea from some Harvard guys then targeting it to horny kids, then slowly changing everything about it over the years until it serves paranoid grandparents ads on why their family wants them dead. 

Blaze Bands

I happen to think this guy just found some shit laying around and decided to try to make a buck off it. But I do wonder if maybe it would have been better for the entire wristband to change color with the temperature? Kind of like shuffling deck chairs on the titanic here, since nobody needs their temp taken constantly, or can do much with the information even if they get it, even presuming it’s accurate to judge temperature based on a piece of metal sitting on your arm, which I’m not sure it is, but uh. The little thermometer thing on it is so small hahaha. 

Awesome.

The Deplorable Choir Takes On Nashville

The Deplorable Choir goes into the “YouTube Bucket” of stuff I look at and can’t really interact with in any meaningful way. There are a few other buckets: Kpop, Audiophilia, Baseball, Fortnite. Although I think Fortnite might be absorbed into the YouTube bucket soon because the only other time it’s come to my attention is when we went to a birthday party for a boy in my daughter’s class and he had these little party favors that said “Eat. Sleep. Fortnite. Repeat.” And she’s parroted that sporadically for like a year despite not knowing or caring what Fortnite is. Takes after her old man. 

I do understand that there are Republican people who like listening to music that says politics memes back to them because they hope someone sees them tapping their toes and gets triggered by it. But I really do think for the most part they’d rather just listen to normal country or pop music that either reflects their values implicitly or excludes the values antithetical to their ideology because it’s even hard for them to argue that a YouTube red hat lady doing a parody of “Hello, Darlin’” about Obama wearing a tan suit is better than just listening to Conway Twitty and thinking about the tan suit on their own time. In other words, they’re snowflakes doing virtue signaling in their safe spaces. 

The music does suck, though! Alright. Thanks for reading YKS The Mag, and remember that if you’re still on the Respect Level Ruby tier, go ahead and pop down to The Squeeze Louise level. You’ll still get all the good shit, but you’ll save yourself the $2/mo, which you can donate to charity or buy a corn dog or whatever you want. See ya next week