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Being a $2illionaire at 10 years old
The most counterfeited everything list is here
Andrew Safranko
June 13, 2025
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This Week in Dulture…
Approx 5 minute read:
👹 LaChingChing’s
💰️ Disney & Universal like AI but…
👜 Counting counterfeits
🥛 Yet another TikTok trend
Dulture weekly mix
I don’t know if you read this newsletter while listening to this music but as I read it to myself and listen to this mix, I can’t help but think, you really should.
This week DJ Shtoops is playing music even HE doesn’t understand and yet the mix still makes sense - what a thing of beauty on a Friday in June.
👟 Top Shoes on GOAT this Week
At 10 years old, the amount of $2 bills I had made me look like a drug dealer.
Ohhh, wait, yeah - Canada had a $2 bill at one point.
Imagine a stack of these…
My weekly allowance was $2 so I collected and collected. The goal was always to have enough to buy a SNES game, just in case something caught my eye in GamePro.
Also, I watched one of my best friends continuously spend his cash on chocolate bars the second he had any money, so he indirectly taught me that balling out in the convenience store wasn’t sustainable.
Although one summer he completed his goal of trying every single chocolate bar under the front counter 🤷
 | I stuffed my cash in one of those classic 90’s canvas velcro wallets where you could literally only fit a few coins and a couple bills. Anything beyond that and the thing would start to tear apart. Every kid had a wallet like this in the 90’s. Why haven’t these made a comeback? |
When I eventually had enough cash for a game we’d go to the local Toys R Us, I’d grab one of those slips from the video game wall, and bring my wad of 2’s to the cash.
I paid for Super Street Fighter 2 with over FIFTY $2 bills.
So I didn’t really feel a type of way when my 10 yr kid came home with a brand new Labubu and she told me she paid $90 for it. She had saved the money and that’s what she wanted.
But damn, these China fluffy keychain toy things cost that much?
Actually no, they cost MORE.
Now I get it, those are all limited edition ones - you can get them for way cheaper, if they aren’t already sold out.
The only question I have is: when do they start collecting dust beside all those Beanie Babies and Funko Pop things?
And you can blame thank her for how popular these things have become 👇️
Bottomless Pit of Plagiarism
How do you like your AI slop?
A little bit of box art? A touch of 16-bit? How about ol reliable Ghibli style?
Only a couple years ago tools like MidJourney changed our entire world forever - now we’re questioning everything we see online…I mean, if you didn’t before, you probably are now.
The original debate involved what was going to happen to artists who draw and design things manually…using their creativity and brains.
The new debate (aka lawsuit) is the tool is allowing anyone to become a Simpson’s artist (or any artist that might be employed by Disney or Universal) - oh and there’s the whole copyright issue as well.
iShowSpeed vs Ashton Hall
As you could expect, people have been creating Darth Vaders and Yodas galore since MidJourney first came out. The tool scrapes the internet for images so you can get the best possible version of what you prompt it to do - which would include scraping licensed characters from Disney and Universal.
They obviously don’t like this…although they like AI…just not this.
Here’s my thing.
You ever wonder how a Simpson’s episode is made? I’m going to tell you.
First they do the whole ideation thing, come up with a plot, what’ll happen in the episode, and then they storyboard it.
Once the storyboarding is done and the production is set on sequencing of events and backgrounds, the artists “draw” the characters and backgrounds in full to prep them for animation. I say “draw” because it’s well known that characters and backgrounds get reused quite often - why reinvent Homer when you’ve got a perfectly good one from the last episode?
Once the drawings are good to go, they’re sent to a company called Akom in South Korea who has been doing The Simpson’s animation for the better part of 25 years. With the direction from the team in the States, Akom puts together the animation for the episode that you effectively see on TV.
The whole process usually takes around 1.5 months to complete.
NOW. All of this is done digitally. Characters and backgrounds are reused. Akom is used because their staff is 1/3 the cost of animators in the US.
Knowing that the visuals and animation are generally the same, if not very similar for most episodes, can I ask why they’re not looking at using AI to help speed up the process and the work to create an episode? Especially if they want to save money by outsourcing the work to South Korea?
You can read the long-winded break down on how they do it here but really, it should be one sentence:
“We have a database of episodes from the past 30 years that we use AI to pull from in order to create the new episode in a matter of minutes”.
The end. Lawsuit dropped - can’t we all just be friends?
And the Most Counterfeited Is…
In 2024, US customs alone seized over 32 million counterfeit items - the majority of them being the replicate Air Jordan 1 Lost and Found’s I own.
…just joking. But I do have a pair of reps - you’d never know the difference!
Aside from Jordan’s, here’s the most common products in their category you’ll see as fake. I didn’t realize the last one was so popular…
Most counterfeited handbag
Most counterfeited sneaker
Most counterfeited women’s shoe
Most counterfeited watch
Most counterfeited clothing brand
Most counterfeited jewelry
Most counterfeited phone
WTF is a Fridge Cigarette
I used to be jealous of the people who went out for smoke breaks at work because they made it sound like they were going out on a legit break.
Not some chinsy 5 minute go to the washroom and then back to staring at a computer screen break.
The rise of the fridge cigarette has appeared on TikTok staring Diet Coke.
The idea is a cold, crisp Diet Coke pulled straight from the fridge is the new metaphor for a cigarette.
Unless you smoke, then perhaps you’re having a cigarette AND a fridge cigarette.
THIS apparently is one of the reasons for the trend 👇️
@reallyrachelreno time for a crispy ciggy in the summer @Diet Coke #fyp #dietcoke
What is your ideal fridge cigarette? |
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