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A few pics from holiday travel.





A few of the world/economic news storylines that I've been following seem to have intertwined. Or at least the twines are quite close to each other.
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The other big piece of concurrent Elon news was that he announced his intention to proceed with the Twitter acquisition.





Is this yet another reason to go cash/oil gang? The Ukraine saga has taken a few interesting turns since last time.





This one is all about plateaus and precipices. And other things.
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Global security and politics are a bit out of scope here, but I ran into some interesting stuff during nap time reading. News headlines at the moment are all about Russia potentially reprising its 2014 Crimea invasion with another attack on Ukraine.
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I happened upon a pretty interesting Reddit comment that connected a bunch of dots between this and various news items over the past decade. The author explains that it's a synopsis and up to the reader to validate to their satisfaction. Emphases mine, spelling errors left as-is:





I know what you're saying, "cool portmanteau". Thanks. Time for another installment of the covid saga. We're getting a little more clarity on Omicron; more transmissible, maybe less severe (to vaccinated people?), the cause of a measurable bump in cases and professional sports cancellations.





Posting has been somewhat hamstrung. For one, I've upgraded my phone and camera hardware. The other blocker has been an overhaul of my photo preprocessor.
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In Celt news, Janice is back in headlines, stepping up her crazy game.





Huh, no posts about covid in months.





Jack arrived!





I tried to think of a better title - I really did. It's bad now, but in a couple years I'm going to say, "A portmanteau *and* that word we no longer use, spluh". But, like, that's what it was. Memorial Day weekend and then the memening of GME, AMC, and BB. There's no other way to describe it. I'm sorry but I will not apologize.





The WSB v. hedgie class war briefly took a back seat last week as an unrelated institutional investor caused Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to do a Margin Call LARP.










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.
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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.
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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.





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:





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.





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





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.
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From Buzzfeed News
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From Yahoo News





So there was a pretty lengthy article in The Atlantic about what could be in store for November. It's absolutely worth the read, but here's a tldr with some silly graphics.





Two weeks ago it was uncertain how this covid thing would play out. I don't think much has changed. I get the feeling we'll look back on this as either the biggest overreaction since terrorism or the epic disaster we absolutely could have avoided.






Jon came down for the weekend. Naturally, this meant hot pot, Settlers, and diving. The hot pot was good, but needed chilies. Settlers was fun, Connie/Jessica beat Jon, Erik, and Jes/me. The dive was significantly different from Maui, but it was good to get underwater.





So Yahoo reported on a study by a German research group that concluded that racing video games are linked to reckless driving.
'Driving actions in these games often include competitive and reckless driving, speeding and crashing into other cars or pedestrians. Those who played the games most often were more likely to report engaging in aggressive and risky driving and getting in auto accidents.'





Back when the Cedar Fire happened, Rob and I went to scope out the scene.