Lots of people talk big on the internet. I’m not one of those people. But everyone likes proof, right? Here’s my latest trade. I haven’t lost any money — even one cent — on any trade in over five years.

Name of the stock is unobfuscated because I have no plans to trade that stock again. I don’t care what it does in the future. But ya’ll don’t need to know how much is in my billfold (honestly, I don’t trade any money I can’t afford to lose) but rather that I am actually doing what I claim to be doing.

Held that stock for about two hours.

And no, I don’t offer advice because that doesn’t help me do what I do. Anyone selling or giving away stock tips probably is not the real deal, remember.

So here’s my tip: don’t try to do what I do, because you probably can’t.

If you’ve never seen the forgotten 90s movie Playing by Heart, you should really give it a watch.

It’s not perfect by any means, but Angelina Jolie as Joan is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Seriously. Just a funny and rooted portrayal of a great character. It’s a rare thing when an actress can take a character who is actively annoying and frustrating in a whole variety of ways and not only make you like her but love her in so little screen time. That is true skill.

And before all the usual bullshit complaints come up (well, they probably won’t about a forgotten movie on a mostly-unread blog, but still) about her being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl whatever, the entire tale is told from her viewpoint and examined from her perspective about what she wants.

Just because a character is a weirdo and female doesn’t make her a MPDG. There are a lot of weirdos in the real, actual world. And many of them are in fact female.

Or haven’t you noticed?

This is the cheapest price on this desk I’ve ever seen. It’s the one I have. I paid a good bit more for it.

It’s a bit of a hassle to assemble, but it’s very solid, has a decent amount of storage and is large without being overbearing.

Just happened to be clearing out some old bookmarks and noticed the price was very low now.

Recommended if you need an L desk.

Assuming the economy stays about like it is now, if Trump is the nominee and Clinton is it for the Dems, Trump wins.

If Sanders is the nominee and Trump for the Repubs, Sanders wins.

Reason is that the populist messages of both Trump and Sanders appeal across the aisle (and most people aren’t invested in identity politics and/or are quite racist themselves), but Clinton is highly detested by many voters due to both sexism and because she’s a neoliberal war-monger.

However, if it’s Clinton vs. Rubio or Cruz, Clinton wins.

But I stuck at politics, so take with a grain of salt….

Strange world that I can make money by hitting the right buttons while sitting at my desk.

For the amount of research I put in, made north of $3,000 an hour recently. Just like that. I hit two buttons. But I knew which buttons to hit and when.

Stock market games. I wish a world didn’t exist where I could even be good at something like that.

Not going to tell you what I was trading because I plan to do it again. That’s how you make money: find your own tricks and don’t tell anyone till you’re done playing them.

But damn. This world doesn’t even make sense no matter how at home I feel on the playground.

Being kind is ideal; I strive to be kind in every interaction. That should be the goal — even if we fail — of every thinking human.

I even support the idea of trigger warnings, but rebel against their use as a cudgel to censor and suppress undesirable ideas, which seems to be their primary purpose these days.

Because the truth is everyone who has experienced violence and trauma has triggers. Because in a violent world, so-called “triggers” are not maladaptive. They are in fact very useful.

Today we were at a restaurant where many people were walking behind me and I couldn’t see them well. I do not like people behind me because of how many times I’ve been ambushed and attacked from behind in my life.

It’s nearly impossible to sneak up on me because I’m so watchful of people in my periphery and (luckily for me) have ridiculous (for humans, anyway) peripheral vision — but still, people walking up behind me puts me in attack mode. It’s something I have to deliberately suppress.

So it doesn’t make for a pleasant dining experience, and it might make for an extremely unpleasant dining experience indeed if someone made the mistake of touching me from behind if I happen to not see them.

That’s a trigger. That was also completely adaptive where I grew up.

What should I do, put a sign on my back in blinking lights that says, “Don’t sneak up on me from behind unless you like the flavor of knuckle sandwiches?”

Of course that’d just make some assholes try it.

Expert systems are already better able to diagnose illnesses than doctors. Have been for many years.

My contention that if allowed to expert systems would be far better at picking long-term partners than we ourselves are.

The future might once again be arranged marriages — but marriages arranged by machines, that nearly everyone participates in because they are so superior to what we’d choose ourselves.

I was going to make a joke about Ram Dass, but not sure anyone would know who he is.

Anyway, I have a collection of burned CD- and DVD-ROMs that are from five to 13 years old. Remember how those things were marketed as good long-term backups?

Not so much! Of course that has been known for years.

But it’s true; of the oldest ones, about half the data is readable. A few of the disks do not work at all (though I tested them all when burned). Not the first byte can be read from them.

These are mostly photos I took on my old digital cameras, so no great loss. But still, if you have any older CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs, pull the data off them now before it’s too late.

Why are donuts the most popular pastries in the US?

They are terrible. Almost every pastry except scones — which are an abomination — is better than a donut.

Donuts are the fast food of such confections — all similar-tasting, all too cloyingly sweet and with all the personality of a rock.

In Germany, walking into a true bakery for the first time I was agog. I ordered literally as much as I could carry. The pastry counter alone must have been twenty feet long. Approximately 150 selections. There is nothing like that in the US, not even in NYC.

And this was just an average bakery in Germany. There were far better and larger ones, claimed many people.

Absolutely everything I ordered was delicious, better than any almost anything I’ve ever gotten in the US at any bakery.

Why is that impossible here? Perhaps the contemptible donut cabal is suppressing all the good bakeries. 😉 Either way, nearly all the food I’ve had overseas is better than what you can get in the US at any price, generally speaking.