Failing miserably is something that everyone does from time to time. They either obsess over it or pretend to grow from it while quietly obsessing over it. Sometimes the fails aren't of the "I did the right thing and didn't succeed" flavor but more of the "I know better but still did it" flavor. The beginning of February has been pretty faily in kilroysville, but I see it as an opportunity to grow.

But first, since the last few posts followed the GME saga, I'll provide yet another recap from the trenches of the occasional WSB post sorted by best.

$10 is not a meme

Comparisons to Volkswagen abound as people silently exit their Gamestop holdings or just look away from their portfolio. The DD/short analysis posts are hard to believe through their simple spelling mistakes. That said, the consensus as of today is, "the hedgies probably won, but in case they're hiding the pain, might as well hold".

Indeed, WSB traditionally does higher-frequency options trading, so holding GME has left lots of time for memeing. One riff on the above:

Anonymous

True story. Thea constantly cries whenever I bathe her. At first it was cause I thought she hated baths, but when Samantha bathes her she's happy-go-lucky and smiling. It started really pissing me off, especially since it only started recently. Then I realized it's cause my hands are too rough - cause I got diamond hands. To the moon.

While media has tiptoed around such names as /u/DeepFuckingValue, my lowest brow is constantly entertained by how kicking over the Reddit rock has resulted in, for instance, the WSJ referencing /u/Thicc_Ladies_PM_ME.

How do you do, fellow kids?

Institutional entities seem to have rushed to cope with this new source of what was formerly a small node of the sentiment analysis network. They've even go so far as to do what has been done dozens of times: scrape posts for ticker mentions, before doing something truly revolutionary: calling it a tool for sophisticated investors.


More manipulatively, CNBC and other outlets pushed a story about WSB pumping silver. Of all conspiracy theories, this seems to have the smokiest gun. Either several financial news sources were independently super-eager refreshing /new (and missed some of the other meme stocks) or they were asked to falsely attribute a silver frenzy to Reddit.


I woke up to a front page full of WSBers denying that silver ever escaped /new and the steady hand of moderator /u/zjz.


Back to the article above, they at least included acknowledgement of Redditors denying any interest in silver. I had some SLV from long ago, it saw a hefty increase in value but since it was covering a long-expiration call I got to watch another position languish as a covered call.

The WSB coup

The alleged nefariousness did not stop at certain entities convincing financial news to pump metals in someone else's name. Nor with "he who shall not be named" doing the rounds in the press long after having been booted from WSB for trying to monetize it. No, a flaw in the Reddit moderation model is that older (even inactive) moderators can singlehandedly ban newer, active moderators. And so they did, with various impacts to sub content and press interaction.


Only the mods and admins will know if this was pure greed or an attempt to break the back of the squeeze.


Firmly in the financial spotlight, the media reported on WSB's 24-hour coup - well, this was less a coup and more like if the queen decided to dissolve parliament.


If everyone ends up broke from this, at least they can say it was a thing that happened.


The admins finally booted the members of the (we'll call it a) coup, but decided they needed to save face and kicked /u/zjz for having both publicly and privately drawn a spotlight on the incident. Seems like a stern warning might have sufficed.

Kilroy Kapital

Bringing it back to the post title, the premiums were just too good. I bought the dip, hoping the squeeze would happen or at least go right (with insane IV) for another week or two. That didn't stop me from normal wheeling, of course, but the $10 tables feel so boring after a night in high stakes.


Sants came upon an API/service that does commission-free trading (maybe just shares?), where their profit model is order flow and money off cash balance. I might cook up a post on how I'd implement a TA trading algo.

Chris

I'm looking to sell at the price listed. If there is a better deal on a different truck, please contact that seller. I'm in no rush, I can re-list it at a lower price if no one wants it where it is. The truck should be exactly what you expect from these photos and the description - if I missed anything, ask over email and I will update you and the listing. KINDLY CONFIRM YOUR OFFER OVER EMAIL, I understand it will be contingent on this information being accurate, it should be clear my intention is to reduce our respective health risk and avoid wasting time.

I won't post the full ad, but I put a bunch of time into my Craigslist post for the old Tacoma. Basically, my approach was to disclose absolutely everything and hammer out an offer price before exposing myself to covid and annoying haggling.


As with every text wall, I threw a little light humor in there and even got props from some random passerby.

Craigslist scam

Thanks for the swift response. I?m satisfied with the price and the condition on the list, kindly withdraw the advert from list and considered it sold. I would have loved to come and take a look and purchase with cash but due to the Corona virus social distancing I will add extra $50 with the original price while you remove the ads. I will overnight a Cashier Check/ Certified Check to you and I will make the pick up arrangement as soon as you have the check clear and you have your cash, I'll need you to provide me with the following information to overnight the Payment : Name to be on the payment ........... Address to mail the check to Not P.O.BOX ........ City, state and Zip code ............ Last Asking price................... Phone number to text you on ........ The check will be overnight to you asap and deliver to you within 24hours. hope to read back from you soon

No, this isn't a story of blindly falling for a Craigslist scam (for that level of stupidity, see the following section). But getting the suspicious email (above) led me to seek the answer to a question I'd had for some time, but didn't yet need the answer to: how does a check cashing scam work for a vehicle purchase? Like, I get that bad personal checks and fake cashier's checks exist, and that trading cash/gift cards for a check isn't a great idea.

The above email led me to dig deeper - well not much deeper, some federal web site had all of the red flags demonstrated here:

• Offers to pay more - no one ever does that.
• Paid by cashier's check.
• Bad grammar (actually not too bad here).
• Generic email (copy and paste).
• Dealing completely by mail.

Okay, it's shady, but what's the scam? It seems that even a bank-issued cashier's check can come back as fraudulent (or legitimate without the required funds) *long* after being deposited and even "cleared". It's weird, cause I thought the whole point of such things was that they could be verified immediately and carried the actual value on the paper.

The sale

The sale was not particularly exciting, but faily. I had two offers that were reasonable. The first one did the "hmm hah" routine (pointing out the issues I had already explicitly stated) and offered lower than the agreed price, doing the usual Craigslist trick of pulling out the cash (with likely the difference in his other pocket). I wanted to drive away and let him either pay the agreed price or go home empty-handed, but other priorities forced my hand. Indeed, "I am in no rush" was a pretty big lie on my part [angel face emoji].

I hate that I violated my own rules of engagement, but at the end of the day I spent a net $3,000 to have a truck for ten years.


Here's a bad one. The battery in my D700 somehow became stuck. Like, really stuck. The compartment fits very snugly around the battery, so it relies on it having free travel to fall halfway out before being pulled the rest of the way by hand.

A quick internet search found someone who had put an off-brand battery in his camera that bulged and became stuck. This was a genuine Nikon product, but perhaps years and humidity finally took their toll. I tried their suggestions, in order:

1. Tap the camera body on a table. Didn't help with the battery and it felt really bad to be doing that to fine optical equipment.
2. Superglue string to the bottom of the battery. The string just pulled through the epoxy that I used.
3. Drill a screw into the battery. RIP battery, but that allowed me to grasp it with pliars and yank. There were no sparks, but the screw felt warm. Painfully, even a two-person pull would not separate the two.

Now I was into uncharted territory. I thought, if the battery is bulging, maybe releasing pressure on the inside would allow it to be pulled free. Putting a screw into the battery made it unusable anyway, so I took a drill to it. Smoke, heat, small sparks appeared before I got very far. Hoping that would have relieved pressure, I quickly tried to pull the thing free, to no avail.

As the battery cell slowly simmered, I reasoned that it would be helpful to cool the thing down - both because it appeared to be in a 3.6 roentgen meltdown and because things shrink when they're cold. I started with the fridge and was prepared to use the freezer, trusting that these cameras were build to survive thermal extremes.

After an hour in the fridge I gave the screw another pull. Success! The battery came free, but the D700 came free of my hand and fell to the tile. On the plus side, it landed on its grip and didn't appear to contact the lens. On the minus side, that was incredibly stupid and rather than planning for an unsuccessful extraction, I could have simply sat the f down.

Oh yeah, no bulge. Somehow, epoxy resin had made its way onto the battery and solidified there. I can't imagine how that could have occurred, but this is definitely friendly fire.


After a few shots, the camera seems fine. I'd actually be more worried if the battery had bulged and leaked, but thus ends my story of problem solving while sleep-deprived.


I did a quick plot of accrued visitors to this site since stats began in 2014. These numbers are filtered to remove bots and header injection attempts, discussed in this post. Latent fail: the numbers in that post are probably inflated by not truncating multiple requests from the same IP.


Another view would be to look at hits on a particular month's content from any time, rather than hits on any content in a given month.

Of course, these are rookie numbers. That's fine, my intent here isn't to get rando traffic save for maybe if someone is looking for ways to not dislodge a battery from their Nikon.

Where's the fail?

Oh don't you worry. I had some tabulation issues that took me a bit to debug, eventually finding a rookie/lazy expert Java mistake:

If you do this...


... don't forget to do this...


Cuz, you know, hash sets work a lot better when they know how to call the right equals.

AnonymousTwo

Don't you mansplain meme weapons to me.

The squad's favorite meme weapon is the MG3. We've also been working the meme strats in bot league, short clips to eventually make a vignette:


C4 from the glider - difficult to aim.


Smoke screen for APC vehicle kills - difficult to drive.

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