Nuclear Monster

  • Well this is bizarre. The CEO of the company that owns the mobile video trivia app I wrote about just last week,  Rus Yusupov, threatened to fire the game show’s most popular host (Scott Rogowsky) if a reporter ran a profile about the host.

    Taylor Lorenz:

    Scott agreed to the interview and chatted with The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon. The Daily Beast simultaneously reached out to the HQ public relations email account and Yusupov, one of HQ’s founders, letting him know of our plans to write a story about the show’s host.

    Several hours later, we received an email from Yusupov stating that HQ was “not making Scott available to discuss his involvement with HQ with the media/press.” The reporter informed Yusupov that we had already interviewed Scott and that the story was nearing publication, but encouraged him to call us with any concerns.

    That’s when things went off the rails.

    Yusupov, the CEO of HQ, called the reporter’s cellphone and immediately raised his voice. He said that we were “completely unauthorized” to write about Scott or HQ without his approval and that if we wrote any type of piece about Scott, he would lose his job.

    The rest of the article gets even more outrageous. A friend wondered if  Yusupov’s reaction was inauthentic and intended to get more people reading about his trivia game, and I really don’t think so. HQ is run twice daily during the week and the next game after this article was published was late due to “technical difficulties” and Rogowsky’s on-air behavior once the game finally started was a little awkward early on.

  • Terry Cavanaugh makes some wacky games, or art pieces in this case. This website, and this itch page, are for his new project called Constellation. You type things in and they might appear onscreen. It’s free through the website, or for a name-your-own-price download on itch.

  • Most people have stopped syncing their iPhone with iTunes but the one big loss from that is loading your own custom ringtones, 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo has a workaround using the free Garageband app from Apple. This process should really be easier.

  • There are plenty of reviews out there now, but few had much time with the iPhone X  before it was released because Apple chose to not give reviewers an opportunity to spend much time with it.

    Nick Heer:

    The iPhone X is a product that feels like it shouldn’t really exist — at least, not in consumers’ hands. I know that there are millions of them in existence now, but mine feels like an incredibly well-made, one-off prototype, as I’m sure all of them do individually. It’s not just that the display feels futuristic — I’ll get to that in a bit — nor is it the speed of using it, or Face ID, or anything else that you might expect. It is all of those things, combined with how nice this product is.

  • James Bridle has a terrifying and important article, it’s pretty long but the most important point is that people and businesses are systematically generating new videos for YouTube that appear to be tame pirated copies of shows like Peppa Pig but after a few minutes they change to be really awful and the YouTube app and site for kids don’t filter these out:

    A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular?—?although, confusingly, what appears to be the real episode is only available on an unofficial channel. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here

    The reason why this crap skates by is because YouTube (and Google, and other companies) refuse to take responsibility for moderating what they host. Instead of hiring more people to moderate these things, the moderation is offloaded to algorithms and viewers.

    Even if you only start a video on an official channel, auto play and the recommendations next to and after the video may take a viewer to another one.

    tl;dr: Don’t let your kids watch YouTube. If you don’t have kids, please let your friends who do know about this problem.