Trivia / KSI

• Artist Disillusionment: He underwent a form of one in 2017 for four months, figuratively and literally "going dark" online — blacking out all of his profile pictures and banners across social media, also taking down some of his videos — alongside uploading a series of tweets where he explained that he had become disillusioned with his status as a "celebrity". This mindset would inform the tone of his next release, the Space EP, whose lead single "Creature" talks explicitly about how he felt like him being a celebrity had led to him being treated like an animal instead of a human being.
  • Part of it was because of the Wall Street Journal scandal PewDiePie experienced that year, as he revealed on Homegrown, a podcast hosted by fellow Sideman Josh Bradley (Zerkaa).
• Blooper: A long-standing one that has been going on for his screencapped videos for some time now is that he has an "Activate Windows" watermark^note indicating that a user is not using a "genuine" non-pirated version of Windows on the bottom-right corner of his computer screen. This isn't KSI's fault, though; there was a bug in Windows 10 that caused a number of Windows machines to be misidentified as non-genuine. The bug has since been fixed, but apparently, JJ has never learned about this or doesn't use Windows Update on his PC. It finally ended in 2022 when KSI got a new PC rig.
• Creator Backlash:
  • With some bits of info to go off of, he now holds a less than favorable opinion of his song "Friends with Benefits".
  • He doesn't really like his first-ever Machinima video. He tweeted that he'd upload it if said tweet got 2,000 favorites, a goal that was accomplished in less than ten minutes.
  • He's gone on record stating that he wants to distance himself from the more edgy and off-color comedy of his earlier years, most notably his "rape face".
  • There's also his reaction about his Eurogamer Expo 2012 experience. His "No. Just… No" Reaction just says it all really.^Backstory At the 2012 Eurogamer Expo (now known as EGX), KSI interviewed several female fans for a video, asking them some questions that the organisers found inappropriate. Eurogamer (today Gamer Network, with Eurogamer now being the company's flagship brand) thus banned KSI from all their future events for life, and Microsoft, who KSI was a promotional partner of at the time, also cut all ties with him. The incident ultimately ended up being a minor setback and black mark to his overall career, what with his co-founding of the Sidemen, his rapping career, his boxing matches, and so forth.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • One of his "Try Not to Laugh" challenge videos on his second channel, "I CAN'T BREATHE", posted in 2019, was retitled to "I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING" in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, as "I can't breathe" is a phrase tied to the Black Lives Matter movement following its use by several black victims of police brutality, including Floyd himself.
  • The video for "Creature" would have had a building on fire and a fireman putting it out, but in light of the Grenfell Tower fire, its release was delayed so the scene would be edited, as it would have been in poor taste.
• Promoted Fanboy: He claimed that Emile Heskey, whom he made into something of a memetic legend with some of his FIFA videos, was one of his biggest idols, and he wound up getting to play a game with him.
• Trolling Creator: As he admitted in this video, he singled out Ethan in a half-joke, half-serious way when he mentions why he "left the Sidemen" which ultimately snowballed into a series of diss tracks between him, Ethan, and Harry. Fortunately enough, they all became friends again after the entire thing.

---