Wednesday saw GME go mainstream after being largely contained in Reddit, financial news, and specific social media streams. The latter half of the week was all about the "retail traders who took on Wall Street". Chief among them is DFV himself:


Let's take a moment to appreciate the (self?) portrait.

Let's be clear: many, many months ago, people like DFV and Michael Burry looked at short interest and decided they either liked the stock or they could engineer a squeeze. The movement slowly picked up steam on WSB and eventually nearly the entire front page was GME. While WSB had (now increasingly has) its share of newbie traders, everyone was pretty well aware of what was going on. This was a way to make money like any other - buying TSLA, shorting NKLA, getting in on IPOs like PLTR. This was not an attempt to yeet the rich.


I won't claim I have either the understanding or the evidence of some of the allegations that have been levied against the institutions, but it would be profoundly naive to assume massive investment firms would idly watch their money and reputation disappear. There are ways to clear things up though:


So what did and maybe did happen?

• We know that Robinhood and other brokers stalled trading in various ways, including banning GME purchases and "complex positions". They went on record claiming that they needed to protect themselves, then concern trolled in defense of The Dumb Retail Trader who is in over his head.
• The ladder attack. It's been widely alleged that the most exposed institutional investors engineered the Thursday share price drop from the high 400s to the low 100s in order to exit their short positions with minimal loss.
• Market maker/institutional investor/broker collusion. Some have pointed fingers at the financial relationships between Citadel, Robinhood, and Melvin, indicating that coordination would run afoul of regulations. Of course, we saw in 2008 that this collusion has existed before, institutional investors don't mind taking extraordinary risk to make profit, and no one ever goes to prison for this.

The media and politicians love simple, binary conflicts. And so a simple raid of Melvin's short positions turned into "Breaking: Class Warfare". WSB didn't reject the notion as it rallied more investors to the diamond hands cause. Hedge funds and brokerages were also okay with it so they could paint the retail traders in a political light, rather than someone who was beating them at their own game (this one time).



Memelord Elon has been the target of WSB's affection for years. He also has a vested interest in destroying all shorts.


Due to his part in the saga, MJB was either throwing chaff or honestly wants more regulation.


AOC's take was fairly self-aware.


The agendamemeing was accompanied by people straight up having a good time. I put a few more in the last section of this post.

		What was that movie we saw where the first half was Mad Max/Resident Evil an the second half was King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?		KO
Chris	Doomsday?
		Yes that's it! Was it as good as I remember?
	Uhhh entertaining.
		So many bad movies to revisit. Overlord. RE series.
	We need our own movie streaming service.
		Lurking WSB right now.
	Yo you should yolo 69k into gme shares and fuck the shorts.
		Lol		KO
Chris	"We can stay r******* for longer than they can stay solvent." - WSB
		Wife asked me why I didn't buy GME.
	Tell her you didn't see enough [rocket emojis].
		Brother: "I repeat, do not yolo this."
	Hahaha this is "I don't trade options" brother?
	This is *the* yolo stonk.
		Ha ha ha

(Monday)


WSBers equally dunked on Melvin and donated to various causes.

		When I'm 'fuck you' rich I'm gonna put a zipline from Sutro Tower to Transamerica.		Rob
Chris	Your zipline will travel through time?
		I only use branded building names if the company is out of business.

Look, I'm too old to be a YOLOer. Monday I talked about the GME share price "surging to $90". Things have changed a bit since then, but that didn't change the fact that I had already committed to the wheel. Having decided over the weekend that I would dip my toe into GME, that left my normal NVDA wheel funds sell puts on TSM, SPCE, INTC, and AMD. Getting into the meme-satellite stocks (AMC, BB, NOK) meant weekly covered calls in the 20% range.

But I got to watch my $9500 buy-in surge(?) to be worth considerably more while a call-holder took everything above $115.

Putting this here so I don't forget:

• Pre-Market Session: 7 a.m. until 9:30 a.m. ET, Monday through Friday
• Regular Trading Session: 9:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday
• After-Market Session: 4:00 p.m. until 8 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday
• Extended Hours Overnight Session: 8 p.m. until 7 a.m. ET Sunday through Thursday

As expected, Pliny the Younger sold out immediately. Most of the dudes I know were in F5 gang, only Kevin and Ryan got their orders filled.


Some of the chats really capture the feeling of this week.

Monday

Chris	[Adds Zac too the Stonks chat]
		This where all the sweet tips are?		Zac
		Are we rich yet?
	I just invest in whatever wsb mentions.
	Kevin is the TSLA guy.
	Ryan Buys a little bit of everything.
	Santos compains that he only has Google but won't open a trading account.
		This is where all the sweet tips are but we are too afraid to act. But we have a ton of "what if" stories.		Kevin
		What if we bought 700K worth of GME when Chris first brought it up in the chat at $21?

A little later Monday...

		Don't think. Buy anything that is going up because we could have done that with GME, Tesla, and a bunch of others mentioned here.		Kevin
		I'm gonna put in $2000, follow that advice, and see how much I make.		Sants
		Ok just bought $300 worth of Blackberry.		Ryan
		Yeah I did a bunch on BB when Chris talked about it.		Kevin
		Dang, I should have done that.		Ryan
		Still didn't execute until it already gained like 50%.		Kevin
		Yeah quit thinking and buy.		Ryan
		What did you buy at?
		$18.50ish		Kevin
		So you missed the jump?		Sants
		(So far)
Chris	Sell calls.
	Premiums are awesome.
	On BB.
	GME too but that could tank by Friday.
		Hey good thing I bought BB at what seems like its peak!		Ryan
		$19.06
	Buy low.
		Oh, oops. I'll remember that next time.

Wednesday

		Hey, don't look now Santos. It ain't good for your health.		Ryan
		I'm slightly concerned the wind is being taken out of the sails.		Kevin
		But I guess no need to panic until tomorrow.
Chris	Hold the line!
		HODOR
	Lol
		Isn't the correct stonks term "HODL"?		Zac
	Haha that might just be crypto.

Thursday

		BioNTech is up, but PFE is down.		Ryan
		Interesting.
		Same vaccine.
Chris	Two important phrases:
	"It's priced in."
	"Buy the hype, sell the news."
	PFE being first to market was that spike. [Image]
	That said, if they blow away earnings on the second, they could see some gains.
		Yes, I bought the hype, but too late... at the top of the spike.		Ryan
	That's when it was news :D
		Well hype is news too, unless you somehow are the creator of the hype.
Chris	Hype creation: this guy gets it.
		Ryan is the hype man for this crew.		Zac
		Today is ex div for PFE?		Ryan
		And earnings next week?
	Yeah.
	I'm holding for the 5% dividend.
		Yeah, me too.
		Lol
Chris	And hoping that nobody expected massive profits from selling a vaccine to the whole world.
	Compound interest, baby.
		Buying a Pliny the Elder with that.		Ryan

Friday

Chris	0dte GME puts are a couple grand.
		0dte?		Ryan
	Zero days til expiration.
	Put up $34,000, if GME doesn't drop you make $3,000 in four hours.
		Yeah I don't have those balls.
	I fell like the RH thing kept the GME momentum going.
	I would make that bet.
		Yeah, so do it.
Chris	I bought boomer CSPs to make a few hundred on Monday.
		So tell me more about 0dte.		Ryan
		Lots of shorts due to expire today.
	Options expire at various times.
	Sometimes every Friday. For major symbols like SPY it's daily.
	There are ones that expire at COB today and because volume on GME is so high, options prices are very high.
		Should I YOLO GME with my TSLA gains?		Kevin
		Kidding.
		Kinda.

On Friday, Gamestop had rocketed to the 70s and closed the week more modestly. I decided to fomo in; if the millennial traders were going to yeet the rich, I had better join them in case I end up against the wall some day.

Plus I need to practice waking up in the middle of the night, so I set my alarm for pre-market open, only to find the price had surged to $90. I gave it a second thought, but with calls that went all the way up to $115, my absolute worst day would be $9500 less a few thousand from a call. I got in around $95 and when the market opened, I caught some part of the downslope back to $70 writing a $115 weekly for around $2000.

Share price languished in the $70s and I wondered if the brief $130 spike was it. But then GME climbed in after hours and looked like maybe it wasn't done.

Then Tuesday came and we went to $150. Then Elon tweeted near market close and GME blasted through $200.


Meanwhile the WSB memes were split between cheering on GME and cheering on themselves for ostensibly making Melvin ask for daddy's credit card. In the now-crowded megathreads, there are a few major sentiments that include class warfare.


Of course, it's not market manipulation if highly-upvoted posts claim to simply be interested in the stock. Or:

It's the Wall Street Bets people. And they have ganged up - and arguably it's allowed by free speech purposes - to center on a few stocks... It's concerted, but maybe it's protected by free speech. The Wall Street Bets people are looking at what the high short interest is. Whether it be the short interest in Gamestop, the short interest in Bed Bath & Beyond, the short interest in AMC. What they're saying is there's no way that people can cover the 67% that's short... they are being very specific to break the shorts.

NordyNed

A CNBC article literally called /r/wsb a "dark web forum." Lmao

And while Cramer seems to embrace the potential audience from WSB, it seems like the other talking heads are clutching their pearls over this "taking out a couple of hedge funds". I think this only emboldens the retail traders.

/u/sfryder08 I love they keep calling us teenagers as if we aren't in our mid-30s and just act like teenagers.

/u/ayywusgood I haven't called people retards this much since MW2

/u/AtomicKittenz Now it's not our moms getting fucked, it's our wives

aquaticsardonic

Papa Elons next tweet Sent from my Blackberry

BB has hovered around $20. We'll see if it gets the limelight when GME finally drills. When is that? Earnings maybe, or if there's quiet period on insiders selling shares. I can't see this being a Tesla scenario.

Nearly 20% of renters are behind on rent. I didn't look at this critically (what's normal, is this sensationalist) since I already believe we're due for a correction.

tags:

current events gamestop gme investing investments news reddit stocks stonks technology wallstreetbets wsb

/u/Bendetto4 Donald Trump is no longer president and this thread is the #1 trending thread on reddit right now. If you are here from r/all, welcome. We are currently in the process of redistributing wealth from the institutional investors that made billions off the 2008 crash that left millions of Americans jobless and homeless into the pockets of retarded Wendy's workers. If you want to help here's now, go ask your dad for his credit card and buy GME shares with it. This cannot go tits up.

/u/ChantiHawk This man is right. It literally cannot go tits up. All you need to know is buy GME shares and don't sell, fuck Melvin Capital, fuck shitron research and may we all arrive in Valhalla soon

Today in the Financial Times of Kilroy: what the heck happened on Friday and what's going to happen Monday?


On Friday GME hit a circuit breaker above $70 from a 52-week low of $2.57.

OstracizedPanda

Holy shit, I'm finally getting fair value for all those games I traded in as a kid

This is Gamestop, the brick-and-mortar video game store famous for pushing strategy guide sales, offering terrible trade-in values, and mistreating their employees. It's the last holdout from the era of Electronics Boutique, Babbage's, Funcoland. Gamestop has been compared to Blockbuster, in that physical media is being phased out and can be purchased without leaving the couch. Oh yeah, and there's a pandemic happening.

Still, The Big Short's Michael Burry said in August that he was long GME.


Just as importantly, so did /u/DeepFuckingValue, now a household name around WSB. So while retail activity has seemingly been pumping GME since December, this week got a little more crazy:

What happened last week with GME stock price and option was a combination of a gamma squeeze [1] and infinite short squeeze [2]. For the first time in financial history all GME call options are in the money (ITM) because the highest call strike price set by the CBOE for Januaray 29, 2021 is $60. Note: A primer on gamma squeeze: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l2t9bf/gme_i_think_this_is_a_gamma_squeeze_where_dealers/ Market Maker [1] are in a condition never observed in financial history. Hundred of thousands of retail are buying the GME 60C across the options calendar and MM can't hedge properly because there are not enough GME shares to buy to properly financially hedge (accounting for the interest rate to borrow)

Did retail traders do this? While validating any of this is far above my pay grade, Cunningham's Law gives me some confidence in the analysis provided by so-called 4chan with a Bloomberg terminal. The major financial journals haven't loudly disagreed, although it should be noted they're probably enjoying increased web traffic from this event. That said, even an honest assessment of the GME situation could be missing the moves made by the Scions and Softbanks.


The story of WSB/FinTok/retail vs institutional traders is... well, fun. Simply, it's "real people" using their collective financial power to beat the "moneyed elites who have always done this, to our detriment" (see image at the top of this section).

Early_Negotiation_92

Citron trying to act like they know more about short selling than WSB is the equivalent of Stephen Hawking bracking to a group of 1st graders that he knows more about quantum physics. At the end of the day, who's in the wheelchair there hotshot?

WSBers with three shares of GME are proudly announcing the Retail Revolution. For me, it seems more like a bunch of traders stormed some sort of financial capitol building in a largely ineffectual publicity stunt. WSB et al broke some algos and surprised the market makers with their ability to spontaneously organize, but anonymous web forums can be manipulated and algos can be changed.

Regardless, it seems worth pausing to enjoy how a pandemic, social media, and free/cheap trades managed to create a brief moment of financial history for a company that shouldn't even exist. It's a pandemic and Netflix's action movies are total garbage, it doesn't take much to entertain me.

...the MM's/brokers are going to have to deliver a ridiculous amount of shares when these expired options settle. Typically, settlement is on Tuesdays. I've read estimates that 10-15M shares worth of calls expires ITM last Friday. Again, this is fucking retarded. Please note that none of the above movement relates directly to the short squeeze... but it will. Because there are now 10-15M shares tied up in the clearing houses, there are now even fewer shares to be borrowed. There are estimates that the true short interest on this stock was around 300%. Now, with about 20% of the total float committed to the fucking clearing house as they sort out Friday's shitshow, I expect true short interest is closer to 500%. Demand for GME will continue to pump on Monday. This is a cultural event now, where every lay person can be a modern-day Robin Hood. The shorts are going to have their positions closed whether they like it or not if this continues (which it will). Since there are far far far fewer shares floating over the next 2 trading days, though, a squeeze on Monday or Tuesday could utterly destroy Melvin and the other shorts.

Source.


Most of WSB is focused making GME a repeat of Volkswagen in '08. The other ticker that is making the rounds is Blackberry. It would be interesting if retail investors rolled their GME earnings into an even bigger move on the company formerly known as RIM.


Still, I thought I'd compile a list of stonks I track for wheels and long term/401k.


Sadly, I think I bailed out of NXTG and FIVG a bit early.


I haven't gotten to deep into it, but Corey recommends selling calls on SPACs that have options. He provided some examples with monthly OTM calls for about 10% purchase value.

Symbol	Name	Current price	Sector	Role	Notes
AMD	Advanced Micro Devices	$90	Semiconductors	Wheel/growth	AMD and Intel seem like stable investments - their x86 processor lines aren't going to gobble up market share, nor are they going to lose it immediately. Apple and Microsoft have already indicated acceptance of a longterm move to ARM, but for now they'll pump out processors and try to one-up each other. At a sub-$100 share price, AMD is half a Microsoft and a fifth of an nVidia. I'm not sure the Xilinx acquisition will do too much.
BATT	Battery ETF	$19	Metals/technology	Growth	A way to capture the growth of battery metals as well as electric vehicle companies.
BB	Blackberry	$15	Software	Growth/bet	Research in Motion's second act: abandoning secure handsets in favor of embedded operating systems (they bought QNX some time ago). Currently this may be WSB's next pump and dump, but it has legit growth potential - just not at this price.
CRSR	Corsair	$40	Hardware	Wheel/growth	Corsair moved beyond RAM to a crowded gaming hardware industry that has two camps: gratuitously overpriced and sketch. Could they establish a go-to brand for PC parts and peripherals? Regardless, they carry nice premiums without much investment.
ERIC	Ericsson	$12	Telecommunications	Growth	Buying Ericsson is basically a bet on Europe and the US permabanning Chinese mobile infrastructure companies.
MJ	Alternative Harvest ETF	$20	Cannabis	Growth	If there's a sector that warrants investment in an ETF rather than a single company, it's cannabis. This industry isn't likely to disappear given the current climate and has plenty to gain.
MSFT	Microsoft	$225	Software	Wheel	I'm not sure Microsoft's stock price is going anywhere fast, but it's stable and perfect for selling calls with a mid-level investment.
NOK	Nokia	$4	Telecommunications	Growth	Buying Nokia is basically a bet on Europe and the US permabanning Chinese mobile infrastructure companies.
NVDA	nVidia	$550	Semiconductors	Wheel	Bounces between $500 and $600 pretty regularly, weekly wheels can be traded for $400-$1,000. ARM acquisition makes me bullish about this company long term.
PFE	Pfizer	$36	Biotech/pharma	Bet	There's a case to be made for owning a huge pharma company. I'm going to look at February earnings and perhaps bail out. Being first to market with a vaccine was priced in a while back, but the full financial benefit might not yet be understood.
PLTR	Palantir	$32	Defense	Wheel/growth	While this company has limited customer growth potential, it is irreplaceable in its domain. Option premiums are currently high and it may be undervalued.
RKT	Rocket Mortgage	$20	Financial	Wheel/growth	IPOed around 20 last year, options volume is middling but may gain momentum as the economic climate settles.
SLV	Silver	$23	Metals	Hedge/inflation	A hedge against monetary policy and required investment to talk to stacker/libertarian friends.
SMH	Semiconductor ETF	$240	Semiconductors	Wheel/growth	Fairly high already, semiconductors are only growing. Worth buying into for growth after the next correction.
SPCE	Virgin Galactic	$35	Space	Wheel	Volume high relative to share price, and you're buying into the meme "Pleas fly again".
TSM	Taiwan Semiconductor	$130	Semiconductors	Wheel/growth	Huge name in semiconductors which are, you know, going in more and more things like light bulbs, exercycles, and vaccines.
TWM	Russell 2000 2x Inverse ETF	$16	Financial	Hedge/correction	While the Russell doesn't capture the mom-and-pop businessess that are supposed to be hit hardest by the pandemic, large small businesses may be more affected than the Fortune 500.
UVXY	Volatility ETF	$10	Financial	Hedge/correction	This will slowly decline in value but skyrocket when the rug pull finally arrives.
VXX	Volatility ETF	$16	Financial	Hedge/correction	Volatility ETF that doesn't turn quite so sharply as UVXY and VIX.
XLE	Energy Sector ETF	$42	Energy	Growth/dividends	If you don't mind unethical investing, the energy sector is recovering from 2020 and XLE has ETF-level exposure.
XOM	Exxon Mobil	$50	Energy	Growth/dividends	If you don't mind unethical investing, the energy sector is recovering from 2020 and XOM pays hefty divvies.

Am I doing FIRE right?

The last two weeks have been... strange. Since the controversial stuff seems to have finally burned out, I'll do what I can to recap the lunacy and the memes. For posterity.

But first...


A few sessions in, I have my tele/surf setup:

• D700, 500mm f/4, polarizer, lenscoat
• Ruggard backpack
• Bespoke monopod
• Board shorts
• Dive booties

Photo by Derrick; an optional but useful piece of photo gear.

So unless you're reading this a decade from now, you know that a bunch of people more or less walked into the capitol building while congress was counting the electoral college votes. I'm not going to be Wikipedia or talk radio, but rather cover the high points.

Prelude

That Atlantic article was pretty spot-on, even predicting the last request that would be made of the VP:

The Trump team would take the position that the constitutional language leaves those questions to the vice president. This means that Pence has the unilateral power to announce his own reelection, and a second term for Trump. Democrats and legal scholars would denounce the self-dealing and point out that Congress filled the gaps in the Twelfth Amendment with the Electoral Count Act, which provides instructions for how to resolve this kind of dispute.

But it didn't predict what would start in the streets.

The blitz

In normal times, the press has exclusive access to events. Whether they're reporting form behind police/FEMA lines, embedded with the military, or on the list for press conferences, traditional journalists get closest to the action. Occasionally a shaky cellphone video on Youtube is the *only* source of video of an event. In this case, journalists reported from outside the capitol building while Twitch carried the amply-streamed invasion in real time.


It didn't take long to notice a distinct difference between the streams from January and the streams from summer; no show of force, no tear gas.


The streams largely showed nonviolence and cosplay. We wouldn't know until later that there was theft, vandalism, and death:

"That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us," said the officer, who has been with the department for more than a decade. "They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs... They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military," the officer said, referring to two suspected pipe bombs that were found outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. The officer even described coming face-to-face with police officers from across the country in the mob. He said some of them flashed their badges, telling him to let them through, and trying to explain that this was all part of a movement that was supposed to help.

Protestors seemingly walked through barricades and eventually took the chambers of congress. It was bizarre.

Memeing begins

Whether or not democracy was under attack, everyone could agree that capitalism was safe.


Appellation d'origine contrôlée jokes never get old.


Why would Zuck do this?


The capitol violence prompted numerous "this you?"-type retweets.


Yes, there was no shortage of irony in the chat.

Sorting it all out

Somehow 'failing' or 'losing' didn't go over well with the guy they were fighting for.


The false flag accusations came were interestingly made between folks in the same camp.

From Buzzfeed News

Platforms respond

In the process, [Colorado Representative Lauren] Boebert and her cohort have exasperated other lawmakers and Republicans. "There is a trend, in both parties, of members who seem more interested in dunking on folks on social media and appearing on friendly cable networks than doing the work of legislating," said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and former press secretary for House Speaker John Boehner. "They seem to see public service as more performance art than a battle of policy ideas." In recent days, Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a 25-year-old freshman who claimed he was armed during the Capitol riots, have questioned or outright flouted guidelines meant to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders, or the spread of the coronavirus.

From Yahoo News

It's kind of boring, but all the major social media services issued high-profile bans in response to the event.


After his Twitter ban, the president used his alts...


... and was promptly subjected to satire reaching back to the 90s.


To this day I don't know if this is true.


Even some of 4chan bailed from the sinking ship.

Parlez-vous securite?

Birthed from the Reddit/The_Donald ban, Parler had become the social media platform du jour for organizers and the president's legal team. KO sent me a series of tweets that covered it pretty well:

Holdouts

The drama continued until the inauguration, there remained a belief in the (not-so-)fringe right that Biden being sworn in was *necessary* to bring the harshest of charges against Biden, Pelosi, etc.



Review-by-chat that (*warning*) spoils the premise:

		Tenet was pretty cool, but hard to follow for most of it. Though it seemed like one of the better time travel movies...		Zac
		And it reminded me of that awesome super low budget movie where the dudes invent time travel in their garage
		And I couldn't remember the name of it. But I found it: Primer.
		And I remember it being awesome, but I plan to watch it again this weekend
		That is all. Tenet was weird and interesting but I didn?t feel compelled to watch it again to see how it all fits together
Chris	Yeah very much like Primer.
	Honestly would have been cool if people never timetraveled, just a few objects.
	Still, great action and a cool concept.
		I thought Tenet was weird. I also couldn't follow it. Thankfully I had Beth next to me so I could ask, "what did he say?" And she could respond with "I have no idea what's happening."		Sants
		I think it's weird that you can normally affect objects in reverse
		Unless that object is oxygen.
		Photons are clearly working just fine. Shouldn't they be going the wrong way?
		It was too farfetched for me. If they didn't do the oxygen thing, I would have been okay, because then I could suspend my disbelief with other stuff. But by trying to be all clever with the O2, i couldn't ignore the similar things.
		What I did love, and so did Beth, were the actors.
		I thought they acted - and I guess were directed - fantastic. I really liked the lead. The deepness of the relationship between him and the wife was a bit forced considering his experience as a government agent. Ignoring that, it was great.
Chris	Yeah true, feels like if your at the toppest of the tier of operators you kind of have to be a no joke sociopath.
	It's funny how quickly the film moved, no filler scenes. It almost felt like it could be a 3-4 part miniseries where they *could* put a little filler in to give the audience a second to understand some shit.
		I thought it was funny that The Protagonist never has a name		Zac
		But I rewatched Primer last night...it seemed sooooo slow after watching Tenet.
		It only 80 minutes long and Erin fell asleep 30 minutes in.
		They also need oxygen tanks to travel to the past (which I did not remember). Maybe that was Nolan paying homage?
		Or just straight stealing their idea
		That would be a pretty big homage to a small detail		Sants
		They needed oxygen because they were in a box for so long, right?
		The box is filled with argon gas. So they need it to breathe		Zac
		But still... the plot of Primer is very good at making it seem realistic, even though it is bonkers.
Chris	And when they were in reverse time they needed oxygen.
		Would be cool to have the same realism with the sweet action scenes and real actors
	Uh you already got that
	Austin Powers 2 The Spy Who Shagged Me.
		And the small time machine box with a-list actors?		Sants
		Bill & Ted
	A-list actor.
		I said what I said
Chris	Haha I mean George Carlin counts.
		Keanu is a national treasure.		Zac
		Bill... not so much.

2021 brought a pretty decent swell. I can start making notes on surf spots now:

• Ponto: good surfers and a close, hollow break. Microjetty. Great for photography.
• Black's: good surfers, break is sometimes close. Low viewing angle means better perspective but often inside waves occluding view. Sun doesn't hit the water until an hour or so past sunrise due to the cliffs.
• Horsehoe: okay surfers, break is not ideal for 500mm. Rocks are a great place to get a semi-elevated perspective.
• Windansea: okay surfers, break is medium-close. This one didn't catch the swell as much as Black's.

It's 2021 now. Not too different from 2020 but people are more optimistic.


A new calendar year is a chance to take a look at the year I started actively investing. Etrade provides a helpful comparison to indexes, but it isn't particularly useful due to the inseparable inclusion of ESPP.

Luckily, I can do simple maths:


It's probably not useful to look at long-term holds, so I didn't include those.

As I suspected at various points throughout the year, individual bond investments have given me the best gains. And this is just the ones I bought and sold - bonds that gained ~10% and had a low coupon value. It also doesn't account for interest payments (can't find that in etrade for the life of me). ETFs were something of a mixed bag since I traded regular market index-types and inverses. My ETF bottom line is dominated by the Barclay's oil fund that I bought just before crude bottomed out. I went in with the intent of holding it until the inevitable rebound (petrol and plastics simply aren't going away). Unfortunately, Barclay's decided to liquidate the fund and I was effectively forced to sell low.

I guess SPY finished 15% up from the start of the year, so if that's the benchmark I am a terrible investor. Then again, if you told me in March that I could net 10% on the year safely or 15% while risking a pandemic market, I'd have taken the former. Since the year was about cashing out long positions and learning how to stonks, it's been one for setting a baseline rather than being compared to one.

Should I just hold SPY until retirement because stonks always go up? Well:



Black's is supposed to be firing tomorrow, but I took the 500mm down this evening to get some sunset shots. I'm not super into the silhouettes and focus was troublesome (backlit haze), but it was worth experimenting.



On the Borderlands 3 front, me and J finished the Krieg DLC and proceeded to switch to our alt characters (Zane and Moze, respectively) to level them, play through the DLC, and check out their new skill tree.


Having a fourth skill tree is somewhere between 'awesome' and 'game-changing', simply because there are so many ways to create synergy between skills. Really the only disappointment was a lack of class mod and relic diversity.


The new(ish) takedown isn't easy. Like, squishies take minutes to kill with builds that can rip through Penn and Teller with relative ease. Aside from the difficulty, the fatal flaw for me was the platform jumping. This really sucks when there are no revives. Still, J's Amara build made short work of the bosses after I fell to my death.

We're going to take a second pass at Krieg in a bit, but have since switched to...


Continuing a saga of Souls-like games that started with Nioh, we're roaming a monster-filled gothic metropolis.


It's a very atmospheric game. Dark and magical isn't my preferred genre, but I can still appreciate the style.


Like Nioh, the maps are meant to be played through multiple times. Instead of save points, you unlock shortcuts so that when the boss beats you, it's not a 45-minute return trip.


The combat is... not easy. One of the main combat mechanics involves blasting enemies with your pistol when they do a strong attack to stagger them. Tens of levels in, I still can't get the timing - or really recognize the incoming attack. With insta-death hits and combos, I probably would not last very long in Bloodborne without my coop buddy. Even with him (and sometimes an internet rando/guru), the game can be pretty frustrating but that's only because I haven't played Battletoads in a long time.


It's mostly video games, coding, streaming, and house projects. Still. But there was some golf.


Continuing down the road of photo augmentation that doesn't rely on that one style transfer algorithm, I tried to train a network to mimic the posterize artistic filter. My dataset amounted to a sampling of images from the archive with the posterize filter run on them en masse. Starting with a monochrome network, I pretty much just stacked some convolution and dense layers, omitting any maxpooling or transpose convolution.


For each of these I ran a set number of epochs that would be 4-6 hours, spitting out sample tiles along the way.




Applying the trained network to hard-edged tiles of a complete image gives an output that isn't too far off from the answer key (input, actual, prediction below):


In principle, a machine learning algorithm has the potential to be more content-sensitive in its application of lame instagram-y filters. The key to this, however, may rest on properly training it to identify when the hard algorithm does things well and poorly. And what about training it on orthogonal output data and seeing if it can find a happy medium between, say, posterizing and crappy HDRization? Well, a lot of this rests on moving out of monochrome.

Color space

I'd been thinking about color spaces for a while; one of the training examples I'd seen used YCbCr (luma/brightness, red-delta, blue-delta, implied green-delta). Notionally, when you treat a loss as the RGB distance from the desired output, you're penalizing color difference. This approach isn't unreasonable, but in many cases one of the most critical things to get right is the brightness of the output. So using YCbCr or HSV (hue, saturation, value) seems like good way to prioritize getting brightness correct. In talking image stylization, oftentimes style is derived from differences in hue or saturation so there's a case to be made for writing a loss function that emphasizes the brightness component even more.


Here's the posterize 'answer key'.

RGB

RGB isn't too far off, but isn't guessing colors very well.

YCbCr

YCbCr similarly finds the contour, but wants everything to look puke green.

HSV

HSV seems to replicate contrast the best.

Images/numpy

Trying various ml applications left me with a utils file that grew like mold and was as organized. Finally understanding all(?) the needs I might have for preprocessing an image file into a numpy array, I wrote the following that probably demonstrates how unwilling I am to look up proper pythonese:

Beyond posterizing

I tried that model on a hodgepodge of other filter effects, it seems like it might work for an arbitrary transform. I still need to refine the stitch though.


In this episode: a drive in the gold Mirado gone wrong, opponents feeling the bite of the circle, an am-bush, more creative physics, and a glider drive-by.

• Medieval Gridiron: After a bye week, I benched CeeDee and Gio while Ryan got almost 40 from Tannehill. I did poorly in the consolation match.
• Password is Taco: Another bye, but actually a victory in the semi-finals. Then I unwisely played the Indy defense over Pittsburgh - in retrospect the home field advantage should have been more of a consideration than the respective teams' recent form. It came down to Rodgers getting me within a point in the third quarter of the SNF game. Then he threw a pick and Tennesee stalled, so he had no reason to overcome the less-than-one point gap.
• Siren Fantasy Football: My bye week rolled into another matchup against Tannehill, this one also had three 20+ point RB/WRs I sputtered in the consolation game.

Week	d'san andreas da bears - Medieval Gridiron -	Covid-20 - Password is Taco -	Dominicas - Siren -
1	Danville Isotopes 110.8 - 72.5 W (1-0)	Black Cat Cowboys 155.66 - 78.36 W (1-0)	TeamNeverSkipLegDay 136.24 - 107.50 W (1-0)
2	Screaming Goat Battering Rams 119.9 - 105.9 W (2-0)	[Random UTF characters resembling an EQ] 115.50 - 115.74 L (1-1)	Dem' Arby's Boyz 94.28 - 102.02 L (1-1)
3	Nogales Chicle 106.5 - 117.8 L (2-1)	Circle the Wagons 100.42 - 90.02 W (2-1)	JoeExotic'sPrisonOil 127.90 - 69.70 W (2-1)
4	Britons Longbowmen 122.9 - 105.1 W (3-1)	Staying at Mahomes 123.28 - 72.90 W (3-1)	Daaaaaaaang 138.10 - 108.00 W (3-1)
5	Toronto Tanto 105.0 - 108.2 L (3-2)	Robocop's Posse 111.32 - 134.26 L (3-2)	Alpha Males 86.20 - 76.12 W (4-1)
6	Only Those Who Stand 108.2 - 66.7 W (4-2)	KickAssGreenNinja 65.10 - 84.02 L (3-3)	SlideCode #Jab 71.60 - 53.32 W (5-1)
7	San Francisco Seduction 121.7 - 126.4 L (4-3)	Ma ma ma my Corona 118.22 - 84.20 W (4-3)	G's Unit 109.20 - 92.46 W (6-1)
8	LA Boiling Hot Tar 116.2 - 59.4 W (5-3)	Kamaravirus 118.34 - 109.94 W (5-3)	WeaponX 113.14 - 85.40 W (7-1)
9	SD The Rapier 135.0 - 90.8 W (6-3)	C. UNONEUVE 117.80 - 90.16 W (6-3)	Chu Fast Chu Furious 128.28 - 59.06 W (8-1)
10	West Grove Wankers 72.9 - 122.8 L (6-4)	Pug Runners 98.90 - 77.46 W (7-3)	NY Giants LARP 75.24 - 75.06 W (9-1)
11	SF Lokovirus 127.9 - 87.1 W (7-4)	Bravo Zulus 116.34 - 45.50 W (8-3)	HitMeBradyOneMoTime 107.42 - 89.22 W (10-1)
12	Danville Isotopes 154.7 - 98.9 W (8-4)	Forget the Titans 92.84 - 125.14 L (8-4)	TeamNeverSkipLegDay 132.78 - 140.84 L (10-2)
13	Screaming Goat Battering Rams 136.9 - 84.5 W (9-4)	[Random UTF characters resembling an EQ] 135.20 - 72.52 W (9-4)	Dem Arby's Boyz 97.62 - 63.52 W (11-2)
P-1	Bye 99.2	Bye 129.30	Bye 94.12
P-2	Screaming Goat Battering Rams 112.0 - 125.4 L	Ma ma ma my Corona 127.42 - 104.46 W	G's Unit 118.56 - 142.52 L
P-3	Britons Longbowmen 86.4 - 125.8 L (4th)	Forget the Titans 114.84 - 115.72 L (2nd)	TeamNeverSkipLegDay 78.62 - 94.44 L (4th)