I admit, I was afraid when I saw the threat, but once again the Captain has released a new video and inspired me to fear not!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATXsUbAXqI
I counted zero spelling errors in this video so he seems to be doubling down. I say again, I still fear the man coming after us, he is wicked good with computers but I must be brave for the #cause.
A regular #TotalDrama reader alerted us to the following tweet by Robert Ballecer:
Interesting… found out that one of our trolls does most of his trolling from work. hmmmm….
— Robert Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) August 22, 2014
First, lets clarify some of the language here. At TWiT “troll” means “person who disagrees with us in public”. This according to the company owner and soup connoisseur – Leo Laporte.
Ballecer should know that some employers can be very tolerant, so his attempt at extorting the truth teller in question might not work. He is working for one of them. At his workplace child abuse and pedophilia is dealt with by protecting the offenders, moving them around to new safe locations, where other children are in jeopardy of being abused.
For someone who as a priest has jizz more often on his lips than Jesus, Ballecer should really be careful about throwing stones in his glass house. Upcoming “Pervert Robert” Youtube supercut will document the sick things this tormented soul has said live on air, and in various IRC chatrooms, over the past couple of years.
Apple should buy Pizza Hut.
This is neither a new idea, nor one acceptable to the Apple fan base. But, it’s become an increasingly good idea — maybe a necessary one for Apple’s continued growth and success — and I’m going to tell you why.
When Google announced Android Wear, they did so in a beautiful amphitheater at the Google Complex on full tummies. The Google+ announcement happened in the very same place where the company can and will start to build a community with no hunger pains.
When Facebook announced the acquisition of Ocular VR, they announced it in a “OK” room after a delicious pasta meal, of course. And, naturally, fans will enjoy Oculus with stuffed faces everywhere.
When Apple wanted to create community around its iPhone 5c product line, it did so with empty bellies in a generic mundane room with a boring stage. Apple restaurants are where Apple and iPhone fans gather to exchange stories, information and ideas around their iPhone 5c fandom — post pictures, recommend apps and get to know each other over their shared passion.
Just kidding. Apple doesn’t have a restaurant.
The human race has become consumed in recent years by the need to have meetings. Talk about this, talk about that, talk about anything but always having meetings
With the worlds top-selling handset, Apple is poised to be the best overall platform to have meetings around, and guess what, there is no place to charge your phone if you even remember the charger.
But no.
What do people do? They go to KFC or Dominoes. Both these places ruin meetings with shitty decor, overly smelly food and gas inducing ingredients. They don’t even have specialized chargers on the tables that fit the iPhone and iPad or even the Mac computer.
All Apple’s efforts in creating a high quality meetings are rendered useless. If only there was a restaurant where both professional and knowledgeable and enthusiastic amateur people already gather and that already has millions of patrons — that would be a great place for Apple. Oh, wait. There is such a place: Wendy’s , which is owned by Wendy’s International.
Of course, Apple is relatively cautious about acquisitions, and tends to do so only when necessary. There are certain kinds of initiatives that just take too long or require expertise not easily hired. One of the things that takes a long time is building up patrons to go to restaurants. It took McDonalds twenty years, to gain the customers they have.
If Apple is to have a significant food establishment, they can’t start from scratch at this point. It’s too late for that.
Bottom line: Apple needs meeting places. And Apples customers need food and Pizza Hut has both. In fact, the only company that comes close to Dominos Pizza in the number of tongues attracted each month is Papa Johns, which until this week was the number-one attractor. That’s vague, so let’s get specific. Papa Johns attracted 187 million unique visitors last month. Domino’s got 183 million. Apple stores brought in nearly 64 million — significantly fewer people than all the other restaurants.
But, wow, what could Apple accomplish with more foot traffic?
It’s also worth pointing out that Apple is great at getting people shopping for Apple products in stores but they are laggard in print advertising. Which is great, if your customers are illiterate, which hardly anyone really is. What people really want is better food, a place to meet, a charging station at their table, as well as a tiny number of ads that hawk exactly the products and services we really want. All those desires can be satisfied only with advertisements on the menus for phones and computers in a fancy Pizza Hut.
Menus are old technology you say? It is all going to be done on apps these days? Heck, look at Starbucks, they are a technology company more than a coffee company. Well if mobile is the future of ordering pizza, what company would be better for Pizza Hut to be acquired by, than Apple?
Acquiring Pizza Hut would bring Apple amazing attention and traffic, Apple could control, high-quality destinations for the high-quality eating elite that Apple’s high-quality products enable people to generate, and the ability to make more money from selling high-quality pizza. Where would you get your pizza if you had to choose between Dominoes with no Apple chargers at the table or Pizza Hut with chargers? Seems obvious, does it not?
I think there’s no getting around the fact that acquiring Pizza Hut would fill in all of Apple’s gaps and place the company in a position to more easily continue the growth trajectory it’s enjoyed over the past five years.
Because at some point, Apple is going to run out of people willing to buy Apple’s high-margin phones, tablets, laptops and computers. And the best way forward for Apple as a business is to own more of the places where people use their products — and in doing so, dramatically improve the eating experience.
But here’s the shocking thing, if you think about it. Buying Pizza Hut sounds at first like it would make Apple less like Apple. But in fact, it would make Apple more like Apple.
Apple’s core attributes are:
Apple with Pizza Hut would serve these core attributes far more than Apple without Pizza Hut. There is simply no getting around the clear benefits of Apple buying Pizza Hut.
Inspired by a brilliant Elgum piece
At first glance, the latest video of Captain Juno seems like a quick little recap of an uneventful episode of Inside TWiT. This could not be farther from the truth, it is a deep dive into how the mind of an unparalleled liar ticks.
This performance seemed truthful and full of unassailable facts. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you don’t know this fat man very well at all.
This man, like most humans is innately aware, since childhood, that telling lies is wrong. The mouth may lie but the body generally won’t and the mind will limit what it allows the mouth to do. Poker players are adept at reading body language for lies and it’s why Freudian slips occur. The first thing to note about this particular specimen is that he has two distinct types of lies, lies about the future and lies about the past.
Lies in Future Tense
These lies are easy to justify and are often classified as “promises.” This version has born such gems as, “if there’s a story in Thailand, he [Elgum] is gonna be in Thailand,” “we will fly all our hosts, who want to be here, in for the New Years Eve Party and put them up,” “we definitely plan to do a show for cordcutters,” and all the tales of new shows and field reporting etc. The liar just needs to want to do these things and it is not a lie, because in his mind he does intend to do these things and the future is not certain. The mind will inject the word “want” in the statement on many occasions, even to the detriment of the liar’s intent to trick the listener.
Lies in Past Tense
These lies are harder to justify to the mind because, unlike the future, the past is a certainty. To lie about past events, he uses three tricks; vagueness, liberal use of adjectives and exaggeration. Vague statements are where he excels. So when he fired Erik for an innocuous nothing he simply needed to say “he went off,” and “I can’t trust someone like that on the air.” These are subjective unquantifiable phrases and not lies. When he fired Tom, he said over and over “I couldn’t afford him.” How do you define this? If Tom asked for $15,000 a year (poverty level in the USA) in total, he could say that phrase and no
t technically be lying. But what did the fan think when he heard the #soupguzzler say that? Probably that Tom asked for a huge raise. Liberal use of adjectives is common in TV land. “That show is a hit,” “he is knocking it out of the park” etc. In a court of law he would withstand any and all perjury charges no matter how black his heart is. Adjectives, gotta love ’em. His notorious and classic lie, is really just an exaggeration to the tenth power. “Kevin Spacey is a great great friend and we have interviewed him many many times.” In actuality, Amber MacArthur has interviewed him and Spacey’s partner, Dana Brunetti, knows who Leo is and has appeared on Tom Merritt’s shows.. This masterpiece encompassed all three tricks.
August 20th, 2014
Here we have:
To the studious ones we already see what he did. You can’t define “back up” or “quite well” and some of our shows do 90K downloads means one show did 90K, possibly the WWDC episode. But the last statement threw me for a loop. It genuinely seemed legitimate. The hand motion suggested he even had a chart of downloads. Now I am aware that about a month and a half prior he said [in chat] they were down 20% and are back up, but when I say legitimate for this man I judge with a different scale. A 5% (20% <-> 25%) discrepancy from now to then is trivial. Regardless, he seemed to like this particular statement.
I couldn’t sleep after this so I purchased a book on statistics.
Firstly, if the numbers were down 25% and subsequently they are up 50% that means an increase of ~25%?
No fucking way, these numbers do not not not jive. Not even with what was said in this same session that download numbers are back where they were.
Secondly, my hypothesis requires you to imagine two graphs. Both graphs fluctuate. The graph of current (Lgum) TNT downloads flutter from 30K-50K and the graph of downloads from the former (Merritt) TNT do the same but from 40K-80K. Well, in the mind of the deluded former mediocre star of cable TV, the 50K from 30K-50K is about the same as the 50K in 40K-80K. So the downloads are equal.
He consciously will not use words that denote precision such as (*math note* ‘average’ is actually a finite number) the “average” downloads, rather he adores dishing out numbers for “some” shows. I also noted that in his hand depiction (gesticulation) of the graph, his brain did not permit his hand drawn line to make it back up to where it started in the graph.
After thinking through this and re-watching the video over and over, it clicked and I fell into a deep peaceful sleep.
It is also good to know that when the brain tries to recall a fact, the eyeballs often drift to the upper left as you access the side of your brain where memory is located. When you think of a lie, your eyeballs drift right as you think creatively. The lovely and talented Sarah Lane does an exaggerated look up to the sky when she recalls things on camera, for effect and it is kind of cute. Try looking up right and up left as you think for yourself, you can actually feel your brain differently. *Note* The CEO is a sociopath, so this does not apply to her. She can look you in the eye and tell you the sky is as orange as our favorite TNT host.
Learn the game people, learn the game.
Greetings #TotalDrama!
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be back on Monday, just headin’ out for a bit of R&R.
After today’s attack on all of us as mindless “trolls” by the ridiculous Jeff Jarvis and the even more annoying Madge Elgum, I thought it best that you heard it directly from me: Leo’s goons have not taken me away. I will never surrender—even if I have to create a thousand parody accounts. So keep the faith, #TotalDrama. The truth shall set us free.
Lawsuit-happy patent troll Personal Audio, Inc. has discovered that it’s not worth suing podcasters because they don’t make any money.
In related news, TWiT CEHo Lisa Kentzell said, “I just looked at the TWiT finances and it seems that we aren’t making as much as I thought.”
In even more related news, TWiT founder and chief mouthpiece Leo Laporte said, “I just started this gig for the freebies and cases of NatureBox. Time to cut and run.”
An in-depth study of the TWiT books was recently done by noted researcher Richard Yes and released on TotalDrama.org—the lid has been blown clean off.
Personal Audio, Inc. press release follows:
“When Personal Audio first began its litigation, it was under the impression that Carolla, the self-proclaimed largest podcaster in the world, as well as certain other podcasters, were making significant money from infringing Personal Audio’s patents. After the parties completed discovery, however, it became clear this was not the case. As a result, Personal Audio began to offer dismissals from the case to the podcasting companies involved, rather than to litigate over the smaller amounts of money at issue.”
The end of TWiT is near, but how long is left? We all struggle to know fact from fiction when our main source of information is a pathological liar. Weeding our way through the web of deceit to get to the truth is what we are about here at #TotalDrama, so I shall pick up the gauntlet.
The murkiest of all the lies, center on the state of TWiT finances. Every single show the #soupguzzler does not host is losing money? TNT ratings are back at the level they were in 2013? TWiT has been growing 10 percent a year? Ninety percent of record revenue is from #soup’s shows? How can we possibly be expected to believe any of this?
Information is available to the diligent. We can all look at the YouTube numbers and see there is a direct correlation between YT views and downloads. We also see the ads—how many, how often and from whom. The lease on the studio is up on March 31, 2015. The young talent has fled. Leo is 57 years old. From all this, much can be deduced.
Let’s begin our examination: Back in 2013, “Tech News Today” generated the most revenue for the network. It was on five days a week and always ran three ads. Yes, it was an expensive program. But all the show hosts worked on other TWiT programs, to which their wages should be allocated. The daily show, in turn, anchored the live views. There was an amazing synergy between TWiT and other internet personalities, networks and publications. “iPad Today” and “All About Android” were new shows—and they were hits. Suckers were found in abundance to buy the crap T-shirts they hocked every week. Live viewership grew everyday. The Fatman was happy at what he saw and said, “It was good what I made.”
2014? The drop in live views is palpable. The bans and kicks have taken their toll on the chatroom. Sub-par hosts like the soulless Mike Elgum and the Hawaiian Priest with an unnatural affinity for performing in a 1920’s radio voice, dominate the programing. We have not seen some of the biggest and brightest stars on the network at all in 2014. The list is long: Veronica Belmont, Scott Johnson, Justin Young, Nilay Patel, Molly Wood, Shira Lazar, Ijustine, Felicia Day, Joshua Topolsky, Adam Curry, Cali Lewis. More so, many regulars like Scoble and Brushwood and even the legendary John C. Dvorak are growing tired of the self-destructive Laporte. His weight gain is sapping his energy; and he looks about ready to fall asleep at any moment.
The ads are few and far between. Ford has been replaced with Personal Capital, a company that sells nothing. Hover has been replaced with a loan shark. Leo’s laments of his dwindling fortune in chat while drinking alcohol are epic and equally as sad. His lethargic attitude and near-total lack of professionalism are infecting everyone. A common phrase resounds in the SHiThouse: “I don’t care, just leave it.”
The network growth hit a brick wall and shrinkage is here now. (No pithy play on words comes to mind.) The arrogant Laporte will never admit mistakes, and both the CEO and News Director are spineless. He has surrounded himself with sycophants, from his staff to his chatroom. He is aware that the river of money has been dammed. Radford, Shannon and others are being cut. Editors are forced to stay late as more shows are squeezed out of the overworked and underpaid staff. But no new shows are working—the life is gone. A sad reality is settling in.
When the lease comes due he will not renew. He will broadcast the four big shows from his mansion and the employees will be cut loose. Lives will be ruined to maintain his extravagant lifestyle. Lgum will be thanked and spanked and will resume his wandering through the world’s coffee shops; getting tossed for squatting in a multitude of languages. The end is near. And it has a date.
So it is written, so it shall be done.
I just figured out why Leo Laporte continues to air the coma-inducing monologue known as “Security Now,” the seemingly endless one-man diatribe by hosted Tuesdays by Steve Gibson. This show is a near-continuous stream of consciousness; it’s basically just a river of confusing “security-related” news masquerading as valuable tips.
So here’s the rub: Because of Leo’s previous publicly-aired indiscretions, the wife-cheating Laporte is now desperate for any free advice about how to best secure his website, text message programs and other media—anything that has the potential to expose Leo’s legendary philandering.
That has to be the only reason why he lets Gibson blab on ad nauseam until we are all quite literally nauseous.
So let’s just think of “Security Now” as Leo’s personal washing machine for his dirty laundry.
The critics of #TotalDrama call us haters; they say we are destructive, they say we are bad people, they call us trolls and troublemakers, beset upon one evil purpose. To those out there who call us vile names, I say to you: NO! To my fellow Dramamines (no relation to the sleeping pill), I say: We are heroes.
There are certain ultimate truths that exist in the universe. And we at #TotalDrama exist to expose these truths. The first of which is that the #CEHo is incompetent. As proof, I offer the “hit” show “I’d Fund That” as evidence.
This abomination of a show serves as the supreme example of her
dis-qualification.
So I ask: How does she not realize this? Then it hit me. She is a bookkeeper with absolutely no experience in broadcasting. As much as I hate #soup, Leo was aware that the show wouldn’t work after about five minutes. As hard as it is to admit sometimes, Leo does have a brain and has worked in broadcasting his whole wasted life. He is not going to be on that show; only the braindead think “I’d Fund That” could ever really be a success—and that includes both fans and staff alike.
So listen up, Soup. This charade is getting ridiculous. Soup: It’s time. DEMOTE HER. You could really use a real, honest-to-goodness qualified CEO. So make her the CFO and we won’t tell her what the “F” really stands for. Soup, I say this as a friend. Look at her CEO blog, it looks like a 6th grader wrote it using a book of keywords and phrases from resumebuilder.com. I am a go-getter….I don’t take no for an answer…I get things done.
I don’t want to play anymore, Soup. When you made the biggest mistake of your life and did not renew Tom Merritt’s contract, everyone knew you made a big mistake. Only one person not only supported your wrong-headed decision, but stuck with you in doubling down on the denial. Lisa thought you offered Tom too much. She thought Elgum was a great idea. So WTF? Get someone who disagrees with you, who challenges you to be a better TWiT leader. Someone like the lovely and talented Sarah Lane? So enough already with surrounding yourself with spineless “Yes Men” and your worthless “Yes Mistress.” Hire someone qualified. But for real this time. Make it count—before it’s too late.
The “Tech News Today” host announced on his Twitter feed today that he is headed to the racial hot zone of Ferguson, Mo.
Mike seems quite excited to finally prove himself to a skeptical TWiT audience, as the following tweets can attest:
