Boris Johnson & Bored Apes 🦍🦧

Jan 13, 2022

Mōrena lil shits!!

Good news - The Shit Show is back!!! In case you didn’t know, SYSCA has two podcasts - The Shit Show (our weekly news wrap up) which is hosted by my older brother Nick and I, and Culture Vulture (our weekly pop culture wrap up/ deep dive) which is hosted by Liv and me! I’m sure you already knew that, but there are a few new pals here who I wanted to keep in the loop! Anyway, they both RULE and you should go and subscribe to them.

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In today’s newsletter:

The Shit Show is back!
Harry Styles, Ye, & Billie Eilish are headlining Coachella
WTF is Bored Ape Yacht Club?
Boris Johnson is on BLAST
Horoscopes!
Pineapple on pizza?

Harry Styles, Ye, & Billie Eilish are headlining Coachella

The other day I tweeted this:

vigilante shit you should care about @SYSCAbout

tf is harry styles up to

I must have known that something was in the water because a day later I find out that COACHELLA is what Harry is up to! Along with Caroline Polachek, Phoebe Bridgers, Daniel Ceaser, Maggie Rodgers, Still Woozy, Carly Rae Jepsen, Role Model, Conan Gray, girl in red, Arlo Parks, Jessie Reyez, FINNEAS (plz come over for a BBQ), Alec Benjamin, (these are just my faves but there are SO MANY OTHER GOOD ACTS.)

BUT! Coachella is happening in April and considering there is very much still a pandemic going on, this... might be a bad idea… a great lineup all the same tho.

Also - and I know a bunch of you have been thinking about this - Coachella is certainly not without its controversies:

“In July 2016, the queer advocacy group Freedom for All Americans published a report showing that Philip Anschutz — the billionaire entrepreneur whose last name provides the “A” in AEG, the entertainment group that owns both Live Nation and Coachella — had donated $190,000 to organizations with anti-gay ties through his Anschutz Foundation between 2010 and 2013.”

Anschutz said he didn’t know about the organisations’ associations and has done some work to put his millions in better places (like the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s LGBT Fund), and Lizzo even spoke up about why she still performs there.

This is a really good piece about what Coachella has done for queer artists (and festival-goers) and lays out all the elements of the story which I would really reccommend reading!

The world has gone apeshit. Bored Apeshit.

Have you heard of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)? If not, I’m jealous of you. It’s kinda the biggest thing in NFT’s right now and kinda really dumb and intriguing (like most of what I write about hehe) so I’m gonna explain it to you. Side note: I explain it in full detail on this week's Shit Show which you should listen to here!

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of 10,000 ape avatars that also act as tickets to an online social club. A while ago, when they went on sale, you could buy one (using Ethereum, a type of cryptocurrency) for 0.08 ether, or around $190USD. Now that they’re all sold out, and in high demand, these apes (which let’s not forget are literally just digital images of apes) are being resold on OpenSea (an NFT trading site) for around $266,000USD MINIMUM. Buying and reselling these apes so far has generated more than $1 billion in total sales… AGAIN, TO OWN A JPEG OF AN APE.

You might be wondering why people are buying them??? Well - it’s kinda an elitist thing at this point. You buy one, you make it your Twitter avatar, and people know you’re in the club. Eminem just bought one for $462,000USD, joining a bunch of other celebrity buyers like Jimmy Fallon and Steph Curry. People buy for investment purposes too - I mean, you just SAW how much you can sell one of these for with all the hype around it atm.

Now, since there are only 10,000 original apes, Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a few things to keep owners and potential buyers interested. They’ve created the Bored Ape Kennel Club, “offering owners the opportunity to "adopt" a dog NFT with traits that mimic those of the Bored Apes. Another freebie came in August: digital vials of mutant serum. Owners could mix their Bored Ape with the serum to create a Mutant Ape NFT. Both Kennel Club and Mutant Ape NFTs sell for a lot.”

When you buy these apes, your ownership and transaction lives on the blockchain (which we explain here for anyone who needs a refresher on how that works) which is meant to be super secure and transparent. Apparently, though, that doesn’t stop apes from being stolen.

One collector fell prey to a scam and lost his collection, including a bunch of BAYC NFTs (lol look at THAT acronym), worth $2.28 million. Look at this iconic tweet where he called for help:

OpenSea, the NFT marketplace I mentioned before “froze” the stolen NFTs which kinda raised even more questions from the crypto community about how a decentralized platform can even freeze assets in the first place.

Anyway, Bored Apes are now moving off-chain - which means off the blockchain - which feels like it’s literally just adding to the centralized brand-driven society that the blockchain is trying to fight against?? Or the new world they are trying to make? There’s a Bored Ape game being made, some bored apes partnered with Adidas on their NFT collection, one ape was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine (which then was then sold as a collector’s item.)

And because owning a Bored Ape NFT gives you full commercial rights to it (though there is nothing to stop me hitting right-click, save as, and making your ape my twitter avatar), ape holders are taking advantage of that in some creative ways:

“One Bored Ape owner set up a Twitter account for his ape where he created a backstory, turning him into Jenkins, a valet that works for the Yacht Club. In September, Jenkins was signed to an actual real-world agency. He's getting his own biography -- written in part by New York Times bestseller Neil Strauss. Universal Music Group has invested by signing a band consisting of three Bored Apes and one Mutant Ape.”

Just another big example of how apeshit the world we live in today is, and how some people just have more money than they know what to do with.

THE SHIT SHOW IS BACK FOR 2022!

Novax Djocovid and Bored Apes? - The Shit Show — open.spotify.com

Happy first episode of the new year everyone! We're coming at you refreshed (but as chaotic as ever) to talk about everything that went down over the break. We had a rogue Elmo, a huge Omicron outbreak, a tennis star ALMOST not get to play tennis and some bored apes that got... stolen? All will be revealed in this weeks episode of The Shit Show!

Boris on blast

Boris Johnson is facing calls to resign after he attended a ‘bring your own booze’ gathering in the garden at 10 Downing Street on the 20th of May 2020 (breaking lockdown rules). He said he was there for around 25 minutes, to thank his team for their hard work during the pandemic, but had "believed implicitly that this was a work event".

Even more importantly, the gathering had sausage rolls and crisps which were reportedly laid out on trestle tables. Classy brits!

Here, have some horoscopes!

I know it’s the end of the week so I won’t give you a weekly one - here’s a daily one instead!

Here’s a little snippet of mine (I’m a Libra): 

Take a chance on a heartfelt desire, Libra! An adventurous moon aligns with Mercury in your passionate fifth house, making the world feel a lot like your personal, pearl-bearing oyster. Have you been playing coy or hard to get? Enough with that routine! Fortune favors the bold! Explore the possibilities and take a risk with a new friend or romantic interest, even if they're not your usual "type."

Guess I’ll be in a relationship by the time Monday’s newsletter rolls round!

Pineapple on Pizza?

I’m a huge fan of a sweet + savoury combo, so tbh pineapple on pizza is for me - turns out it’s for 60% of you too! I was a bit surprised by this since so many people seem to have a vengeance towards pineapple on pizza, but of course, the SYSCA audience has excellent taste.