YKS The Mag #31

Well it’s the big Stock Tips edition of the YKS Newsletter, which I think we should call Steak Tips. Bulls are cows, Bull market is a stock thing, cow is steak. So welcome to Steak Tips.

My advice on Steaks (stocks) is to make sure to buy when they’re fresh and double check that date (don’t rely on unfounded rumors, and make sure to stay flexible), season your meat appropriately *before* you start cooking (diversify your holdings so you aren’t over-committed) and don’t forget the vegetables (bonds)!

That’s pretty stupid but it’s also the type of thing that made Jim Cramer a zillion dollars once upon a time. You could turn on the TV and see some bald guy whipping a koosh ball around a studio and talking like Pee Wee Herman, and the point of it would be that the government decided to help kill some people across the world so the gas station with Tony the Tiger on it got to ring a big bell in New York. It was very coherent, and valuable, and we were all better off having participated in any of it. I really believe this!

Now let’s talk about something a little less freakin’ silly....bad Kickstarters! Oh!

Social Opinion - From Episode 22

I won’t go back and listen to the old ass episode this was originally on under any circumstances, and I don’t recommend anyone else do it either. But I really don’t remember noticing the David Dees stuff in this one. I probably didn’t look very hard, or even know who he was, and I was probably drunk. But one upshot of spending the last few years soaking in the big nasty stew of Qanon is that now it’s pretty easy to see when some lady’s scarf has some hidden swastikas on it.

Also just noticing that the shitty old laptop has a Q on it. I think that’s for Compaq, but the coincidences sure are stacking up! What else can we divine from this simple photograph. Ah here we go. Social Opinion. Let’s look at that lettering. Not all is as it seems, is it? The backwards ‘c’...what does that symbolize? Well, what do we do with our eyes? See. See = C. But turn them inward, and what are we looking at? Ourselves. America. The government. What we need to see is inside the government. Look closer. The ‘n’ is backwards as well. And what do we suppose is the significance of that? Ah yes. A dumbo designed the logo. Right.

Peanuts Mobile - $6593 of $150k

Penis mobile. See ya.

ACCOUNTABILITY NOW - $4032 of $3500

There’s a bigger, badder version of this grift that you’ve probably seen before. It’s called Mad Dog PAC and they’ve done billboards like this in the past:

I guess the NRA went out of business recently, or pretended to, or whatever. So that’s fine. But I don’t think it was because of this billboard. It wasn’t the genius of the guy behind the PAC, @truefactsstated that “stopped Trump”. Although their website kind of makes it seem like it was.

OUR MISSION:

Mad Dog PAC was founded with a simple goal in mind:

Fight Fascism. Stop Trump. Our mission is to restore sane and ethical government to this great nation.

Trump has been stopped, but there is much work to do to rehabilitate the Republic. FOCUS: 2022.

Yeah, hey, the thing we wanted to do happened. That’s why we’re closing up shop and returning the remaining donations. Just kidding.

You want to donate to a candidate for office, alright. I think the national ones could maybe do without, but that’s fine. I get it. I’m not gonna do it but that is okay with me. What I don’t understand is giving your money right over to the middleman and hoping that does something somehow? The message means nothing, the people who matter don’t see it, if they did they wouldn’t care, and the font is stupid. That’s why we were gonna do a billboard as a joke until the Hollywood Handbook guys did one. Now we can’t. Maybe we’ll sponsor a bus stop in Michigan or something. And it could say, like, “Hey. Let’s do this together.” And there’s a pic of us eating a big hoagie on it. That’s pretty good actually. ACCOUNTABILITY NOW. THERE WAS NO CHIPS.

For You To See My Last Ride - An Alternative Funeral Coach - $1 of $26,900

I’m not a big fan of motorcycle guys to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ve just never met the right one. But motorcycles seem like they were designed to be significantly less safe and exponentially more annoying than even cars, which is incredible, really, considering how many people are killed very loudly by cars on a daily basis. The aesthetic is kind of wack too. The Angel/Devil motif is dated, half the model names sound like slurs now, and I think most bikers went up to Sturgis this year for the explicit purpose of getting sick and dying. Just seems like a dead end lifestyle. Hey, we have video games now. Yeah they pretty much perfected them. You don’t have to ride this loud stupid shit in the rain and get your leg ripped off if some guy in front of you looks at his Sirius radio too long.

Anyway the more I looked at this one the better I felt about saying it sucked. The boot-licking is gross when it’s just dipshit military guys, but I think it’s probably at least as bad when it’s just guys who had $50,000 tricycles with customized Captain America gas tanks. You died, I get it! At least burying the bike would be cool.

Jesse

Bridging the Gap - $51 of $5k

There’s good news and bad news on this one. I’m sort of a sad sack kind of guy so I will first tell you the bad news: the song and lyric video on the Bridging The Gap Kickstarter page has been removed. Everyone is kicking the dirt and sticking their bottom lip out and saying “shucks” at this. Now, to exclaim triumphantly that the good news is yet to come, buoying hopes that all is not lost. Gang, the good news is that the old lyric video was replaced by an even longer and wackier one. Oh my god everyone is going crazy, they’re throwing dollar bills at old JF and he doesn’t even know whether to stop and pick them up or just shake his ass around and throw ‘em back! What a hell of a turn of events. Going bad news first was a big risk but boy did it ever pay off with this insane comeback victory. Also it wouldn’t have made any sense the other way around. But mostly you just gotta respect the Xs and Os.

News History Podcast - $1 of $100k

What a turn we had on this one, huh? I think it’s actually a fairly informative demonstration of the importance of organizing visual information coherently. Look at this image. Can you tell what’s going on? Who on the right side of the screen is in control of what’s happening on the left side of the screen? Is anyone? When screening a piece of media with a point of view you don’t share, is there a way to communicate to the audience that there’s a division between you, the host, and your subject? Is it loudly munching chips in a tiny corner of the screen? It probably is.

People tell us all the time that listening to YKS helps put them to sleep, and I think it’s both a compliment and a small joke at our expense. And it’s nice! These folks must feel like the low energy, meandering conversations we have every week are both relaxing enough to enjoy in the moment and inconsequential enough that it’s okay to dip out of them every now and then. Even if I weren’t inclined to be proud or accepting of that, there’s nothing I can do about it really. I just talk like that. DB talks like he talks. It is what it is. So after watching these guys, I feel so damn lucky we don’t sound like they sound. They are more or less doing the same things we are doing: clicking around the computer, saying “Uhhhh”, not knowing what the point is, having long silences in between words, eating chips into the microphone. But I could barely stand a few minutes of it. I don’t know, maybe you guys will like them. Maybe they’ll be your new favorirte show! Would serve me right for making fun of them!

It's Buzzin - $1 of $1k

This shit is not buzzin’ at all! “Total and complete, 100% freedom of speech, with no exclusions, oversight, or boundaries. Except…” will always be funny to me, no matter how many bad haircut guys think they are coming up with the idea for the first time. Making the whole thing look like Facebook circa-whenever, with all the little avatars and Cutie Coins and crap on there, instead of what it actually is now, is just icing on the cake.

Okay everyone thanks for reading, or politely scrolling by. We will see you on Friday with an all new YKS Premium. And that’s the Prime Rib of the Week!