Covid continues, but the surge appears to have tailed off some. I guess this is the new normal until one of the many "almost-there" vaccines works out.


Erik recently had his pool resurfaced with (approving nod) fiberglass. This may be in my future, so I'm going to go check it out when he hosts an unofficial League of Sport pool vball event. His flyer really encompasses August 2020 and demonstrates a photoshop ability I never knew he had.


The Unnatural Ones are naturally still on hiatus; four dudes in Mark's office is simply not responsible. Plus we already maxed out our irresponsiblity with that use of emoji.

And finally, Rob sent me a hacker news post linking to a post titled "Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website". Smh at that flex.

The personal website is a somewhat mysterious animal that lives mostly unobserved in the jungle of the Internet. A few inexperienced Internet users who live completely within the golden-walled gardens of Facebook and Google may not even be aware of the species' existence. Other inexperienced users may consider the personal website to be either extinct, like brontosaurus, or a myth, like Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman. The truth is that many specimens exist in the wild, but in order to successfully hunt the personal website, a hunter must know the habits of this species well.

The black-on-pink colorscheme and overextended metaphor led me to believe it was a legitimate peer of this particular dark corner of the internet. Few things:

• Through the metaphor, the author identifies that manual or autogenerated referral sites simply have better SEO than blogs.
• He goes on to discuss driveby sites - web sites that exploit your browser via some automatically-executed code (you don't click something dumb). Either the author knows far more or far less than me, but I'm pretty sure this hasn't been a thing since browser vendors got serious and Flash went away. A Javascript blocker doesn't hurt, but all that should be operating in sandboxes within sandboxes these days.
• The author says that only a hundred or so famous blogs ever show up in search results, although I wonder about very specific searches "anime pool volleyball mask jpow". Bad example since those words are from a picture and would be hard to index - no wait, those words are in the post now. From my occasional overspecific search, I notionally believe engines are more inclined to drop words (even with a +) than index/show something from the end of the internet.
• He says that blog searching is limited to blogrolls - an ad hoc network of blogs via sidebar links.

Hilariously, barring a really deep metaphor, there's no mention of aggregators such as the one Rob linked or the top comment newsletter that makes blog hunting a hobby (view without subscribing).

				Cattle
		First confirmed kill
Chris	Oh nice. Those are fun and useful in the kitchen.
		Haha! Bam! Spice it up a notch
	Holy shit.
	kshot.
	3d print a spice weasel skin for that salt shooter.
	We'll make thousands.
		Might as well print money		Cattle
		Hot damn
Chris	In the mean time, what kind of rail systems are you looking at?
		I got a 6x on it
		And a salt loop
	Nothing for recoil? Man's man.
		I hip fire
		Use an inverted periscope to see through the 6x
		Lmao		Kshot
	Omg I need a drawing.
				Cattle

Months after playing the game in pre-release, RoR2 finally went 1.0, adding a final boss that we have only tried to beat once.


In addition to items and levels, the really neat addition is scrap. Before, a 3d printer (trade random item you have for a known output item) was a crap shoot, now you can shred items you don't need and they are the first thing to be printed. It's a great way to focus your build, and has the balancing effect of making you carry inert scrap around between finding the scrapper and the 3d printer.

Speaking of focus...


We've had some pretty good runs on regular difficulty, but haven't yet beaten the curve.


We call the rock near Aurelionite's spawn Party Rock. This run had Party Pillar.


The lolbaters (and Jes) have also given the new meme game a try.


Like the video says: Mario Party + MXC + Ninja Warrior + Rocket League. Not a ton of levels though.



After a pretty substantial campaign, J and I finally finished Divinity II. A brief (gameplay spoiler) recap of our journey:


We got some neat new spells and abilities.


We raided a wine cellar.


We destroyed the last sentient tree... which I think was good cause it wanted to kill all non-elves(?!?).


We fought a kraken.


We fought some really heinous battles, including the one where enemies respawn as long as there's (difficult to extinguish) cursed fire... and their attack creates cursed fire.


We read some funny callbacks to the first game.


J extinguished the souls of like a zillion people/candles in order to *weaken* an enemy. Smdh.


We hid in the corner while a dragon fought the final boss...


...and his pet kraken.


Really though, the final battle was pretty good. The first stage is a easier (not easy) us-vs-them. Then it becomes a three-sided free-for-all that allows for the run and hide tactic.

Everyone being stuck at home means everyone has ample time to chat about things they can do while stuck at home.

August 21

Chris	[Above vid]
		Which one of those is Chris?		Zac
	Boomer who WSB LARPs.
	Kinda want to be theta gang.
		Y'all are weird		Kevin
		How's Vacaville houses?
		Ty and Zac?
		Also, Chris, I didn't put 2k in, but did go ahead and buy a little of everything you mentioned except the bet on volatility because I don't know how to do that and SLV and ERIC are down today
		But RKT is covering those losses. So you have made about 30 bucks
		What's the list of purchases?		Santos
		SLV, RKT, ERIC		Ryan
		Hold on, I know Quicken, but not the other two		Santos
		Silver and Ericsson		Ryan
		I thought you were the one talking up silver, not Chris		Santos
		No, it was Chris		Ryan
		Also, the crazy dude at the campground
		Good luck		Santos
		Remember to sell options to hedge
		That's what Chris says the really wealthy do
		So if you do it, you're really wealthy by Chris's own definition.

August 22

Chris	[Rocket emoji][Soon emoji][Moon emoji]
		Man, good thing I got on that on Friday		Kevin
		I probably should have bought more than 20 shares		Ryan
		Yeah I got 100. Gonna be a millionaire		Kevin

August 26

		How come no one told me TSLA was going to be up another 5% today?		Zac
Chris	Uhhh don't look at SalesForce.
		I looked.
		WTF?
	It's not even a meme stock.
	I guess earnings mean a lot.
		Earnings are overrated.
		Remember when PHUN was worth like $9B?
	Haha legendary pump and dump opportunity gone to waste.
	Just saw NIO's market cap, it's like the whole Chinese economy to sell 10,000 cars.
		NIO. Riding that to the moon.		Kevin
Chris	Oh shit, you in on that?
		Yup, ride or die by anything you put in this channel
	Hahaha.
	Some of it is sarcastic.
	But hey, you only yolo once.
		Doesn't matter. If I have seen the symbol I am buying
		SalesForce here I come. Hopefully its on the up and up
	Uhhh it's up 25%.
	Not a lot of room to grow...
		Says the guy who didn't recommend to buy TSLA at $1000		Zac
Chris	Haha. I did hedge with calling it a meme stock.
	Not the best financial hedge, but it makes me feel better.
		Look if you didn't think I should buy it, then we shouldn't be talking about it		Kevin

A brief summary of my adventures in etrade, or, How I Didn't Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the QE.

Oil

Let's start with the worst. Oil is back at like 40 or 50 I think - crude futures or whatever casuals trade the most. Just before that extreme dip (to negative prices and contracts being called) seemed like a great time to buy since demand for fuel and plastics isn't exactly disappearing. Having read enough to not want to take delivery of 1,000 crude barrels, I just went with that Barclay's ETN when it was at like $8. I didn't care if it went lower in the short term. Except I should have because the ETN was liquidated at like $3. Right strategy, wrong symbol. Diversify.

It hurt to the tune of like $4,000, but really hurt because it should have been - at worst - like being cash gang.

Thanks, Obama

I guess where we should have actually started was the stuff I had held for some or most of the last decade. Companies and sectors I had believed in: BCOSX, SMH, AMAGX, CSCO, and a few others. They were pretty good, but over that stretch you could make money in pretty much anything. SMH alone was $6,690.53 having gone from $40 in 2013 to $131 in 2020 (with dividends in between).

Inverses, never again(?)

Thanks to the F5 key, I was able to catch the beginning of the February/March madness. It was probably a good time for options trading, but I did inverses: DOG, DXD, SCC, SDS, SH, RWM, SPXS, QID. I timed some well, some poorly, and am probably down a couple percent overall on these. They're definitely not right for the kangaroo market but might be worth options plays in a few months.

Day trading

With all of the covid pharma news, stocks in that sector were pretty volatile. Hitting f5 on finviz.com, I rode one (ENZ) for a 10% gain from testing the waters with $1,000. With enough time and limit orders, this could be a thing, but as they say, ain't nobody got time for that.

Options

I've still only done the most basic (single leg) options trading - I think I need to do paper trading to get the hang of spreads. That also means I'm not buying more than a handful of contracts. Options have been a mixed bag due to being bearish during the V-shaped recovery (that simply must be a 'V\' recovery). Puts on BJK, CZR, and IYR expired worthless. A NKLA earnings put salvaged a modest 30% - again we're talking like $50 gains here.

Calls have been pretty good, SNE (120%), ERIC (100%), TWTR (300%).

It's more fantasy football than investments with these.

Finaly, boomer- er, bonds

I feel like an idiot for having held so much money in a savings account for years. Also I feel like an idiot for having done all of the above stuff when trading bonds has comprehensively been better for me.

And yeah, trading them, not simply holding them for 5% every six months. I mean, I have a bunch of those, but then there's:

• Avis 12% on $4,500
• Bed Bath & Beyond 18% on $7,000
• Tupperware 30% on 10,000
• Goodyear 13% on $8,700

Most of these were low-coupon and still risky enough to make it worthwhile to cash out. Also in there was a CA muni that made similar money and one that was called and lost $250.

Related - internal

Related - external