LL see

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.

ll

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.

PBH

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?

Assuming

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….

Predation

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.

Even triggers

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.

Soft

One of my photos from ages ago, when I used to shoot models. This was shot on real black and white film, and developed by me in an actual dark room. I believe this was on Agfa 50 ISO film which was fantastically expensive but lovely, for any of you other old-schoolers out there.

soft

The grain is intentional, for any of you used to the digital world — the whole idea of the photo was the distinction or lack thereof between the world and the body. Or some other pretentious shit like that; anyway, I like the photo even after all these years.

Unreliability of ROM

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.

Very sconeful

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. ๐Ÿ˜‰ 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.

Bern sides

What’s funny about Bernie Sanders’ supposed “unrealistic, utopian” dreams is that to a one they are all things that we used to have — like free college in various places — or that other countries have implemented successfully and have had for many, many years.

In fact, many of the pundits who are accusing Sanders of these crazy utopian dreams were educated in California in the 1960s and 1970s where they — you guessed it and I checked it — received a completely-free college education.

That there are so many people intent and bent on telling us that we just cannot do something is mystifying especially when it’s something that we have already done.

Admit it

The Problem With Elite-College Admissions.

Really, all college admissions.

The brilliant poet, distinguished novelist, or political cartoonist of the future who just did not care about that physics course in his or her sophomore year (and received a grade that showed it) is told that he or she doesnโ€™t have a prayer of getting into one of the selective schools. So is the kid who starts out entertaining tourists on the street but who will eventually do extraordinary work as a performance artist. There is an appreciation for diverse talents, but only if they go hand-in-hand with great College Board scores and uniformly high GPAs.

The truth is due to my past I couldn’t get into any university except maybe Phoenix (and who would want to get into that one), but in all areas except some math classes, I’d blow even 99.9% of top students out of the water every time.

That’s not being arrogant or rebarbative; that’s just a fact. But why would I want to do this? I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me this. That is utterly worthless to me.

College is optimized to churning out unquestioning corporate drones at the undergrad level or spawning more academics at the grad level — those things aren’t intrinsically wrong, by the way, but are just how matters currently stand.

It is a system that like most is finely-tuned to perpetuate itself and little else. Pretending that it’s anything more than that does not square with reality.

Shelled out

I was looking through some old PowerShell scripts of mine.

What in the world was this attempting? It appears to be trying to add, multiply and concatenate numbers, and to be reading out the contents of files and directories to the console. Which are completely unrelated and connected by no logic. Why, just why?


Function Examine-Dir($contents, $padding)
{
write-host "Examining folder"
$spacer = "".PadLeft($padding)
Foreach ($file in $contents)
{
$isDir = Test-Path $file -pathtype container
write-host "$spacer Found $file $isDir"
if ($isDir)
{
$childContents = Get-ChildItem $file
$childPadding = 2+$padding
Examine-Dir $childContents $childPadding
}
}
write-host ""
}

Function My-Add($num1, $num2)
{
return $num1 + $num2;
}

Function My-Multiply($num)
{
return $num * $num
}

Function My-Concat($num)
{
return "$num$num"
}

Function Switch-On-User-Choice()
{
write-host " 1) for add"
write-host " 2) for multiply"
write-host " 3) for concat"
$choice = read-host "Please make a choice"

write-host "You typed [ $choice ]"
$starter = 3

switch ($choice)
{
1 { $result = My-Add $starter $choice }
2 { $result = My-Multiply $starter }
3 { $result = My-Concat $starter }
default { $result = "[input not recognized]" }
}
write-host "Starting with $starter, result is $result"
return $result
}

# Start program #################################################

$r = Switch-On-User-Choice

write-host "------returned from function: $r------"

$files = Get-ChildItem
$padding = 2
Examine-Dir $files $padding

I can think of no reason I wrote that, nor what I ever would’ve done with it.