YKS The Mag Issue #5

Well, I did it. I went and got myself in a damn pissed off mood again. Fuck!! I’m all mad and junk. Grrrr haha. Nah, but seriously. I’m mad. 

For one thing, I fucked up and released the newsletter a day late, which you’re not supposed to do. As my own boss, I forgive myself, and offer to work with me on finding a process better suited to my workflow and skillstrengths. As my own employee, however, I realize I can get away with anything because my dumbass boss has no idea how to do his own job, much less mine, and plan on milking this situation for everything it’s worth. Haha. And I’m going to shit in his bathroom also. 

But that’s not even the thing I’m mad about! That’s simply the result of the thing I am mad about. The late newsletter is the son, and the dad is my stupid fucking broken washing machine. Piece of shit. It’s 7 years old, too, which is a great age for a stupid son to piss you off. And I’m around it more because of the quarantine. Metaphor breaking down. Like my fucking machine!

At the risk of getting too close to saying, sincerely, that I’ve “been preparing for this my whole life”, which I have actually, and it’s OK for me to say it, staying indoors and minimizing my contact with strangers has not been especially strenuous on my mental health. I would like a haircut for sure, and I could go for a movie I guess, but that’s it. I don’t care about the other stuff! I already got over it a long time ago or never liked it anyway. Of course, I would like everyone to be able to live a normal life without getting a horrible disease, but if I had to sit on my chair for a really long time, that’s fine by me. 

That’s all to say that doing a load of laundry every day is not a coping mechanism I developed to ward off the bogeyman of agoraphobia. I wasn’t about to do a Howard Hughes before I realized it would be nice to have a clean pair of socks on most of the time. But it was a routine I had come to depend on. First thing in the morning -- what needs to get warshed? No clothes in the basket, let’s hit some towels. Hell, towels dry quick, toss the sheets in. It can keep going while I do something else. That’s Passive Chore Income. Cleaning your gutters takes focus, but laundry is just a quicktime event. Press Y when prompted to kick Clothes into Dryer. Bam. Then it’s a cutscene of me wearing the socks and getting the big medal like Chewbacca. Unnghghrrhhhgghtth. 

But now the fuckin’ thing is busted to hell, and it’s not one of the things I can do myself. There’s too much computers in there, and the parts are very expensive, and I’m going to be so mad looking at all the little wet plastic nuts and rubber gaskets sitting on the floor if I try to take it apart. So I’m going to wait a week for the repair guy to come out and tell me that the motor is under warranty but the motor housing isn’t, or some bullshit like that, and they can fix it for $2xx but the part is backordered right now. Meanwhile my socks stink like shit! 

So that’s why the fuckin newsletter is a day late, because I sat there looking at my dumbass washer all day. And my boss is too stupid to fire me. Let’s do some Kickstarters.

FitMen Discreet Urine Bottle

“There is also, another extremely important user of this bottle...which is the long haul truck drivers. The out back roads of the USA , and other western countries are currently littered with old discarded coke bottles etc -  half filled with urine. My bottle is designed to be constantly reused, something that can become a truckers companion, that he feels ownersip of and isnt an embarrasing medical looking bottle. It can sit in its own unique carry bag and be rinsed at truck stops...This has the opportunity to save thousands of discarded bottles littering our beautiful countryside and in turn help keep our enviroment a lot cleaner and our trucker drivers happier and on the road.”

Long-haul trucking is a black box to me. I know a handful of things about it, which I will now list in order of confidence:

1. Paid by the mile, could easily game this system by scooting back and forth in front of their house

2. There’s a little bed up in there where they go to jack off on the side of the road

3. Pee in bottles while driving (dangerous if not wide mouth) 

I also believe -- but don’t know -- that at some point, the trucking bigwigs will use the idea of computer drivers to fuck over all the drivers, then the computers will get confused and drive a bunch of trucks into each other, destroying one million pounds of zipties and screen protectors, or whatever other people order online. That’s what I get. Maybe you guys get, fuckin, I don’t know, what is it. Cups of lotion. 

But if I could walk into my Trucker Cerebro for a moment...instantly forming an intense, neural bond with millions of road pigs and grease jockeys across this great Earth...Yes...ahh...I am sensing their feelings and desires...I am one with the Truckers. I’m pulling into a Love station outside of Texarkana, in search of a big bag of circus peanuts, and I mean a big fuckin bag of ‘em. I’m speeding down the 405 trying to scratch my nuts with a plastic fork as an unsecured load of Jose Canseco memoirs bounces around in my trailer. I’m backing into a Wal-Mart dock in Altoona, PA and realizing I forgot to pick up the fuckin shit I was supposed to bring. The dock guy will open up the door and see that my truck’s totally empty, so I’m gonna try to hop in the back and pull my pants down so he has to look at my asshole and hopefully we get a good laugh out of it. And I don’t care at all if I have to pee in a thing that doesn’t fit into a sleeve that says For Men on it, because it’s fuckin’ pee, and I’m like 65 years old. 

EYEONPOLICE - APP to End Police Brutality, Anti-Black Racism

They updated this one since we talked about it on the show, in a way that is technically an improvement, but which in reality is just over-polishing a turd. Like taking a tiny, downtown lot and subdividing it 3 ways so you can slap together a few “sleek” metal and glass shoe boxes and rent ‘em out for $3200/mo. Wow. An incredible slam on modern architecture and its intersection with gentrification. Real estate guys are like...ahh….noo….stopppp...haha. 

Anyway the video is as lazy and insulting as you would expect a description of a police brutality app to be. It’s one thing to mock up a review of a cop that says “I just got tackled by a police officer. I understand I had a little bit too much to drink because it was New Year’s Eve but WTF!!! His badge #172912. 1 Star” and indicate that you think this could and would be used as evidence in a decision to discipline or terminate (!!!) a cop, but then to just lazily Photoshop an actual Yelp page on top of it is something else. I’m mad! I want Yelp to protect their trademark! Lol

Really good shit on here now though. Way to search “bodybag” on Google Images and tell people it’ll be their kids next if they don’t give you $75 for a hat with a bobo CBS logo on it. Stay classy!!!

SnzTrp: A Responsible Way of Coughing & Sneezing in Public

I’m in a better mood than I was earlier in the newsletter because I went to sleep. That’s right, it’s the next day now. I had a bug bar (what my friend Greg calls protein bars) and some cold brew java and feel a lot less pissed off. My washing machine is still fucked, but maybe something good will happen today?? What fuckin’ part of Mars is rotating around the star shaped like the Coca-Cola bear this morning?

Actually, I do want to make some ribs and watch Empire Strikes Back with my 6 y/o, who really liked A New Hope. I think she’s only into it because we told her there’s kissing in the other movies, but that piqued her interest enough for her to wake up the other day and search for Star Wars on Plex, then watch about 50 minutes of The Rise of Skywalker because she had no idea there were 11 fuckin’ Star Wars movies now and just assumed whichever one she saw would be the next film chronologically. I haven’t seen the newest one yet either, but apparently she would have been confused anyway. It turns out the guy who came up with Darth Icky was an integral component to the logical storytelling structure of his own Intellectual Property. Which kind of sucks, doesn’t it!

The SnzTrp makes you look like Watto, who is a guy from Star Wars.  

Ensven - Smart Modular Bed Rocker for Your Best Sleep Ever

Another cool thing my kid did this week -- and I’ll talk about the Ensven in a minute probably -- is wake up this morning and immediately ask “Does life ever end?” They’ve been having sleepovers in our room lately, with their mattresses on the floor and a bunch of stuffed animals and toys surrounding the whole area like battlements, which is pretty cool. So I go over there to see why she’s still zonked out and she asks me about life. Actually, the first thing she did was ask what “game board” we’re going to play today since I told her we could get out Kids on Stage (charades) or maybe I’d teach her Yahtzee. 

But then she asked me the life question. And I was like, ah, man. Uhhhh well, did you have some weird dreams there, kiddo? You know, trying to run out the clock on explaining death and the afterlife first thing in the morning, or forming an opinion on it myself even. But then she goes, “I mean do you just keep playing or what?” BIG RELIEF. She was talking about the game! That’s so good. Not that I can answer that question either, because the game is so boring I’ve never gotten to the end of it, but at least I can say that I don’t know without feeling guilty about it.  

My kids are pretty good sleepers now, and really always have been. I guess the most inconvenient part was when they were first born, and I’d wake up what felt like every 5 minutes to make sure they were still alive over there in the bassinet. I know a lot of kids will keep weird hours or get colicky and hack up a bunch of boogers all night long, but I only know about that from one episode of Home Improvement. In this house we all sleep like dogs, rolling around with our big bellies hanging out and snoring. 

The Ensven is an invention for adults that we would not have used in this family even for the babies. It’s like a butt wipe warmer that has a cool, modern theme instead of a sticker of a playskool lion on it. I don’t need that! Maybe you do, though! Maybe your bed has a 6 foot yellow tape safety radius and you have ceded the side of your toilet to a big cube full of hot paper for your ass. I don’t know! I’m just over here sleeping and wiping my butt normally. 

Shifting Realities - Why the Law of Attraction will not work for you

“First of all The Secret offers one solution that theoretically should fit everyone's situation and needs. We're all different human beings, we have different cultures and ideas and we manifest our goals in disparate ways. With Shifting Realities we will look into the common elements of the manifestation process and how to adapt them to your own personal situation.”

Q: What makes Microsoft Official AntiVirus Repair different from Nigerian Prince Funds Transfer?

A: First of all, having a guy call and say your MacBook Air has a Windows virus is really good, and we love it. But we didn’t think of it so we had to think of a different scam. Which is why your long lost cousin needs a lot of opals transferred to a US bank in the next fortnight. (Pic of me with a bunch of opals) 

The Illuminated Tweets of Elon Musk Coloring Book

Some people would say that a belief that making a coloring book of illustrated Elon Musk tweets is good if the artist were doing it to mock Musk and his fans, but bad if she actually liked Musk and thought he was cool is an example of hypocrisy. However, what this newsletter supposes is that it’s actually a brave repudiation of narrow-minded prescriptivism, and a rebirth of Kantian principles. Now there’s a smart guy you can go read about in a book somewhere. He didn’t even have to kill a bunch of people with a shitty iPad car to become famous. But you can get a coloring book with him in it, so, joke’s on me I guess. 

Alright I’m going to go explain The Force (pre-Midichlorian retcon) to my kid, while trying to avoid discussion of what happened to Obi-Wan on the Death Star. See ya later

-jf