Moving out of the neighbourhood I grew up in was a culture shock in some respects.  Although I moved to another neighbourhood only about a 25 minute drive away, it felt like a whole different world.  I grew up in a place where it was very common to hear people outside at all hours of the day, police sirens on the regular, and just general urban noise.  Where no noise sometimes meant something was wrong in my old neighbourhood, no noise was completely normal in the new one, which created a ton of paranoia for me as I went for runs through the neighbourhood.

Growing up, I knew all of my neighbours and everyone knew me - it was an actual community.  And then I move and gain new neighbours where we have to share a driveway and this is what happens:

We never spoke to our neighbours as they never made eye contact with us when they were outside.  I quickly realized just because we were neighbours it didn’t mean we had to know each other.  But what if your neighbour was the second richest man in the world therefore one of the most well known people in the world?  

It turns out being Jeff Bezos’ neighbour is nothing special

Recently Bezos announced that he’s moving to Miami from his main residence in Hunts Point, just outside of Seattle.  His neighbours shared a bit of what it was like to be his neighbour, which truthfully sounded like it wasn’t much of an experience at all as he was rarely ever seen and the gates to his house were always closed.  Residents mentioned that his staff were seen much more within the community than he was.  And given that this community boasts the likes of other billionaires like ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Costco cofounder James Sinegal, it’s not like Bezos was living amongst peasants.  

When the community did the annual cleanup, billionaires were out cleaning up as Bezos was nowhere to be found.  Same could be said about the community’s annual 4th of July party as well as local charity fundraiser events. It’s safe to say Bezos lived in the neighbourhood but really didn’t from the residents reactions to a Business Insider interview.  And although Bezos is worth an estimated $168B, his ex-neighbour Steve Ballmer being worth an estimated $128B still keeps his gates open and answers the door himself. He probably answers it like this still too:

This week's issue is a 5 minute read:

🗼 World’s worst lineups

📱 A whole new level of tipping

🤘 Inevitable rockstar avatars

I love lineups, said no one EVER

You ever go on vacation just to wait in line for stuff? If you’ve gone to Disney World then you’re currently nodding your head. But what about other major attractions around the world? Well, Hawaiian Islands ran a little study off of TripAdvisor data where they looked at basically every major tourist attraction in the world (sounds insane, right?) and counted up how many times someone complained about a long line up. Firstly, that’s a lot of complaining. Secondly, the results kind of surprised me, not gonna lie.

Here are the top 5 tourist attractions that get the most complaints for long line ups in the world:

#5 - Basilica de la Sagrada Familia (Spain)

One of the tips I read to avoid long line ups with this Castlevania-esk attraction is to…drum roll please…go early. Only the best travel hacks here, folks.

#4 - Legoland Windsor Resort (UK)

Now remember, this list is a GLOBAL list about the most complained about line ups in the world. According to Queue-Times.com, the longest wait time in this particular Lego Land is 42 minutes for the Flight of the Sky Lion ride. My kid waits over an hour to ride a rollercoaster in Wonderland in Toronto, 42 minutes seems like nothing in comparison.

#3 - The Colosseum (Italy)

OK - the above picture speaks for itself. Also if you read about what tourists say about their experience with the Colosseum on Reddit, it may discourage you from not wanting to go see the thing in the first place.

#2 - London Eye (UK)

Eye spy a line up in London - how bad was that on a scale of 1 to 10? All jokes aside, this just looks like the lineups you see in Niagara Falls for their giant ferris wheel. Although, the duration of the ride for the London Eye is 30 minutes. Sitting in a giant ferris wheel thing for half an hour after waiting over half an hour to get on it - maybe not a bad trade off after all?

#1 - Eiffel Tower (France…duh)

The most complained about wait time in the WORLD is at La Tour Eiffel. Wait times can get to be 2 hours just to wait to go up to the second floor and then another 90 minutes waiting there to go up even higher. Of all the attractions on the list, that kind of wait time would get me complaining too.

Perhaps I can no longer complain about wait times at Canada’s Wonderland to my wife. Perhaps.

Why are we tipping people on TikTok?

That was a rhetorical question - I don’t get it. But it’s happening, people are spending $11 million per day tipping their favourite creators on TikTok. ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS IN TIPS. In 2021 TikTok started testing new tipping functionality with select creators and eventually opened it up to creators with 10K followers or more. Since then TikTok has surpassed cumulative revenues of over $10B in consumer spending with a forecast of $15B in consumer spend by the end of 2024.

Ice cream so good

One creator, as I cringe to describe this, called Pinkydoll gets tipped for doing this:

This acting like an NPC trend (non-playable character - essentially the dummy characters in a video game) blew up over the summer with people tipping icons to the creator while they were on live stream. The creator would see the icon pop up on their end and react to it. In this case in the above video people are tipping things like ice cream, fire (?), and other random things. Also yes, she’s popping 1 kernal of corn in a hair straightener.

Trust me, I’m trying to be as professional as possible as I write this.

Essentially you can buy a pack of coins from TikTok (on average $19.99 for a bundle) for which you can then gift to the creator of your choice and then they get paid as a tip. This obviously has blown up given the insane daily revenue TikTok makes off of this. Pinkydoll makes on average $3000 per live stream to act like an NPC. As much as that’s a lot of money for acting like a broken record, what just dawned on me is maybe people are actually throwing digital coins at her to stop - a lot of digital coins.

How rockstars can retire and still tour

This was inevitable wasn’t it - avatars of musicians are being created so that they can go on tour and “play” concerts in front of live audiences. The famous Swedish group, ABBA, has already done this and now the legendary face painted, tongue smacking, band KISS has also got themselves 3D rendered, ready for a stage near you.

George Lucas’ VFX company, Industrial Light and Magic, created the avatars which are now being discussed to be put on tour within the next 2 to 3 years. ABBA currently makes $2M a week from their tour where their 3D rendered virtual avatars play to sold out crowds.

The whole process seems similar to the motion capture technology used for at EA for sports games. For the ABBA shows a special stage was constructed to immerse the audience in a way that allows the avatars to shine through massive 10 meter high screens that display the band in 65 million pixels to give a life size 3D representation of the members.

With their own avatars, in theory KISS could have multiple concerts happening on the same night in any given part of the world. I’m not going to lie, this is a really cool idea. Check out the quick video below get the full picture: