I believe most “niche” things eventually become mainstream, completely taking away anything niche about it. Whether it be Pokémon cards, On running shoes, or Thrasher t-shirts - eventually the world catches on and the next thing you know everyone owns one. Annoying isn’t it?

For me it was finding this random guy on YouTube who sang these dark R&B ballads under the username “xoxxxoooxo”. No one knew what he looked like, where he came from, or what this was all about but the music was too good to be ignored. At the time there were three tracks that were uploaded to YouTube and I had them on repeat. No one I knew was aware nor cared when I told them about these tracks. It was just me and these drug innuendo ballads 😎 

And then frigging Drake posted the tracks on his Blogger page and the whole world found out who The Weeknd was. And I no longer had this little secret that felt like only I knew about it. In hindsight my logic was completely off given these tracks on YouTube had well over a million views.

Fast forward 13 years and The Weeknd is officially winding down his time as, well, “The Weeknd”. Abel Tesfaye said in an interview recently that it’s time to “kill The Weeknd” and that the next album he puts out will be the last album as the persona that he’s come to reinvent over the years. The question now is does he pull a Prince and become “The artist formerly known as The Weeknd”? OR does he transform into…wait for it…”The Weekdy”.

…I’ll show myself out.

This week's issue is a 4 minute read:

👧 AI girlfriends

🏗️ When an entire capital city moves to another island

🎦 Modern white men can’t jump

As if you didn’t see this coming!

Next month a new highly anticipated season of Black Mirror comes out on Netflix. Obviously I will be covering this but for now we’re getting real life episodes popping up left, right, and center. The latest being a Snapchat influencer turning herself into an AI chatbot to text with her fans.

Caryn Marjorie, 23, couldn’t handle all of the messages she gets from her fans both on Snapchat and in her paid Telegram group so she decided to scale how she chats with her fans. She had a company called Forever Voices create a ChatGPT powered bot that can respond to her fans in her tone and voice. For $1/minute, you can talk to this bot about anything and the experience apparently feels like you’re talking to Caryn.

Like the movie “Her”, the chatbot was designed to create a girlfriend-like experience that the users could emotionally bond with. Outside of the fact that the Japanese have been doing this with anime and videogames for years, this is the first of probably many “bots” we will see in North America.

To provide more context, the chatbot made $100,000 within the first week of it being launched and is projected to do $5M a month when Caryn is able to upload all of the fans who have expressed interest in joining. Yeah, I know - what are we doing with our lives??

A whole new meaning to getting up and moving

ICYMI Jakarta is sinking. A combination of its citizens digging illegal wells to access clean water and rising sea levels from global warming has created the perfect reason for Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, to think outside of the box. How outside of the box you ask? Moving an ENTIRE CITY to another island outside of the box.

Not quite sure if this is the real expectation but the plan is that some form of the more than 10 million people in Jakarta would move to this new city called Nusantara. Supposedly by next August Indonesia will inaugurate Nusantara as the country’s new capital on the island of Borneo. This would mean that some people should be living there by then. Currently land is still being cleared and construction is severely behind on the sustainable towers that are supposed to house a good 60,000 people who are to move in to the new capital by the end of next year.

Critics of the proposed green and transportation friendly city point to the ghost cities of China as examples of exciting infrastructure expansion that went nowhere. Outside of putting out incentives for businesses, especially tech companies, to set up shop in the new city, there hasn’t really been a clear reason for why current citizens of Jakarta would want to move to a completely separate island to populate this new city. Meanwhile Jakarta is still sinking.

White men still can’t jump

They have officially brought back the classic early 90’s basketball film that depicted white people as slow and unathletic basketball players - “White Men Can’t Jump”. If you’re subscribed to Hulu, you can catch the remake of the classic basketball movie today. If you’re subscribed to Hulu…people actually use Hulu? I digress.

The original film saw Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes teaming up to become an unlikely duo that would hustle basketball players on the courts of Venice Beach. In the remake, Jack Harlow and Sinqua Walls are that unlikely duo, also hustling people playing basketball but in a much more modern setting. So basically instead of being paid in cash when they win, they get e-transferred money.

Hollywood already ruined Space Jam with LeBron so I guess why not ruin another classic basketball film?

If you were a fan of the original film then maybe you’ll want to check this out? But then again, it was released on Hulu so that tells me all I need to know. Do you remember when they released “Lion King 2” straight to VHS? That’s the vibe I’m getting with this remake.

OK OK - maybe I’m being too harsh. Let’s see what Twitter has to say instead 😇