Author: -- ms

Mostly lived as an observer and this was not completely by choice. (past tense used on purpose)
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Newsnous, a news page

I haven’t posted in a while. That doesn’t really mean I haven’t been staying busy doing something worthless. Here is a news page I look at daily. It is an adaptation of my News+ page that I made a while back but it broke because of javascript package issues probably. I didn’t have the patience to figure it out. I did have the patience to fix Newsnous as it broke a couple of days ago.

https://www.democritus.biz/newsnous.php

It is written in PHP and Javascript. Also, I used the Bulma CSS library which is something I know little about.

I recommend using it. There are no ads and you can share easily. You can even see news from reputable sources you may never come across any other way. It is fun sometimes to just hit the browser “translate” function and read news in English off an Arabic, Portuguese, or Chinese site just to name a few.

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Chuckify, an api test

“Hi guys”, as any YouTube personality would say. Here is my latest contribution. It is a Jack Handyish image/text generator. I bring text in from the Chuck Norris Internet DB and random images from Unsplash. I made sure I gave credit to both too. If you want to see it directly, go here… https://www.democritus.biz/2020chuckit.php and if you want to add a crypto address for future giveaways, go here… https://democritus.biz/wp/2020/02/23/crypto-address-submission-pagefor-giveaways/

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crypto address submission page(for giveaways)

bitSplash

This is an iframe from the same site that this WordPress CMS is running on. I only brought it in as an iframe because I am not sure yet if I want to use WordPress as a user management software for anything crypto I play with. There are plug ins that would let me embed php code into post pages or regular pages. I probably would go that route.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash – https://unsplash.com/photos/sBbm92cRIQo
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash – https://unsplash.com/photos/Xeo_7HSwYsA

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RobinHood update

What the hell has been going on with RobinHood in my life? I never stopped using it. I have made 14% since the last time I checked since I opened the account. I have a lot more money in there though(relative to my life), than I first posted so I can’t post graphs and such. They have announced a couple of things that people still aren’t paying that much attention to. They will be introducing banking and I am on that wait list. I am also on the wait list for fractional share purchases but I didn’t hop on that one as fast as I did with banking. Fractional shares are a pretty big deal.

One thing that should be noted though is that the biggies have gone commission free. As far as I can tell, TD(which just got bought by Schwab), Fidelity and Etrade all went commission free. It didn’t really get that much press. But, there are a couple of other events that signify why it is a bigger deal than meets the eye.

The Chinese government recently came out in support of blockchain use. I haven’t read extensively on what they intend to do but I think it will be just a matter of time before integrating their blockchain use with a cryptocurrency that is either state sponsored or a “mainstream” one. This type of announcement goes along with Facebook’s release of Libra sometime in 2020.

Robinhood has listed cryptocurrencies for a while now but has allowed for trading in only about 5. Coinbase now allows you to stake USDC and XTZ(which deserves a separate post). All the companies involved in crypto are making incremental changes but the general public and the US government are still not onboard. Facebook will probably be the main catalyst within the US for blockchain adoption or cryptocurrency use. Bitcoin is really seeming dinosauresque in this world now but it will always stick around as an original player probably.

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voice journal entry October 9th 2019

So here I am hanging out near the Como pavilion of Lexington in St Paul and there is a group ride for boosted boards. helicopter just flew over head. I’ve only been to one other group ride and it was a mixed experience. I am going to greet the situation with an open mind. I may never go to another group ride but I’m not sure yet. I’m almost at 2,000 mi right now and that in and of itself is an accomplishment of a different type that’s difficult to pin down. only the boosted community will understand what I’m talking about easily. it’s basically the only community I’m a part of at this time and I used to be a part of a few other communities. I took a few photos. I visited a local bike shop called bike chain and that was interesting. I gave myself a bit of time off for today so I didn’t have a plan. I have to admit that doing a voice entry is very very smooth at this time. I can sit and watch the text go into the post.

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My Favorite Magic The Gathering Card

I have to admit, my favorite magic card is called “Disinformation Campaign”. I like it because the real-world counterpart is literally never, absolutely ever, discussed. So, if you want to at least pretend you are in the real world, you can use this card in a game.

https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=452917

Disinformation Campaign goes along with a spell or ability called “surveillance”, which also rocks. So, if you use DC and play it, you can bring it back to you to use it again if you engage in surveillance. How quaint. Conceptually, they go well together. That happens in MTG a lot, actually. There are conceptual continuities based on creature type, item or color.

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It #2 and memory for sale

I got out of work a little early after getting a decent amount done during the week. I figured, why not go catch It Chapter #2 and order a pizza and a beer and see if it is any good. It was not what I expected but it was definitely too long. Maybe they are trying to copy Japanese film editors from the 90s or something. I find that the concept of selling a sequel on parts of the 1st movie really applies to this film. It must have sold well enough for people to ask, how can we pull that off again. They didn’t space it too long after the 1st one and they were able to add footage of younger actors as they have not aged much since the 1st one.

I actually did like the idea of blurring magic and sci-fi. I don’t know Stephen King’s work that well but what I do know is that he wrote both sci-fi and horror. He actually had a cameo in the film. Interesting scene. He wore a Neil Young “Harvest” T-shirt. It is the only Neil Young album I own and it is pretty good. Also, as a side note, Rich, the character played by Bill Haider had a Santa Cruz skate/surf sticker on his T-shirt and that is one of the few stickers I have on my Boosted board.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/Screaminghand-tee.png

I feel a sort of pity for Hollywood. This movie isn’t the only one that brings this about. They are so incredibly outdated now. They just keep on going too and squashing all forms of innovation. Youtube is the only saviour at this time. At least there are some seriously talented people on Youtube or I would have a lot of disappointment for passive 2D video media in general. That’s not to say that people should make another Imax or 3D film. Those are getting increasingly embarrassing too.

I can understand the dynamics of the characters and how they could be stretched out to the ages that they are in the sequel, 27 years later. But, the 1st movie did such a good job with quick flashes of childhood experience, I didn’t really want them to rehash it and water it down. But, that is what sold the 1st one so they went balls out doing just that.

Let me just quickly return to my embarrassment with Hollywood. Stadia is coming out this fall and that will up the ante. What Hollywood is lacking is audience participation. This does not have to mean less work for all the people that would be involved in a feature film. But, they are so small minded and paralyzed with fear, they will squash innovation because they think their bigass casts and crews won’t be able to get their pumpkin spices. They can still have their pumpkin spices and innovate. I will give you one example and if I am not lazy, I will paste in the link to the independent effort to add audience participation(got it>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renga_(video_game) ). It involves pointing lasers as a group of watchers at specific points on the screen and having that be a type of group controller(not movie but video game but you get the idea). Anyway, this technology is at minimum about 20 years late. Let’s just postpone it another 10 years or so because we just love the emotional impact of 2D.

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seeing some live tunage

I decided to head out for the evening instead of playing MTG Arena like I have been doing. I am currently at Platinum 4 Constructed Rank and Gold 4 Limited Rank. You can play the game just for fun but there are opportunities to play it in a ranked way. Really, it is not that much of an accomplishment because there are 2 main age-old methods of ascension, either you put in the time or you put in the money and statistically it is almost impossible to fast track. As far as latitude for strategy, the game is a lot more fun than chess though. There are a few hundred things that you must keep in mind during play. You can almost quantitate them and I am sure many do, mostly in-house developers though. ok.

At this time I prefer not to hint at how much time I have put into this game. Let’s just say, it rivals the average yippie yuppie gen-zy Netflix consumption. I did manage to get powder-puff, kid-glove recertified in Advanced Google Analytics last weekend so I guess I do more than just play that game. I slam the certification because I know when I have walked away from something and felt like I have learned it. In this case, I am not using all aspects that i am studying so I don’t feel like I have learned it as well as I could have. This isn’t really their fault, I just want practical value for everything I learn. I am forever attention frugal in that sense.

I just started the audiobook of Google’s origin. I was pleasantly surprised at the writing in the beginning but I do not need to learn how to create a company at this time. I tried that before and I misunderstood tactics of competition. Now, it is about 20-25 years later and the only patience I have for running a company would be to operate like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. I cannot say enough how great both the Wall Street movies are. Maybe someday I will throw in my 2 cents on them.

I do plan to finish the audiobook. I am just being a little ciritical of the first part of it. My recent audiobooks have been pretty good, actually. I have dipped into tea trade history by Sarah Rose, and the exciting natural world by David Attenborough. I had to move over to “How Google Works” because my library loan of “Main Street” by Sinclair Lewis expired and all the copies were out. I will definitely go back to it because it was pretty good.

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F-ing Market

I am writing tonight because I am a bit pissed off. I was in the middle of consolidating 2 accounts and my funds were in flux when the market crashed the largest amount so far in 2019. I am not too surprised about that timing. I sort of expect it so I probably should have done it a bit piecemeal like I had done up to the present. I was just in this “clean-house” mode and thought I could get more efficient. That still is the idea. Both the account I was transferring from and the one I was transferring to charge commissions on trades. The account I talk about a lot on this site doesn’t and it had nothing to do with this transaction.

I’d like to keep talking about Robinhood the way I did for a while on this site. But, I can’t do it in the same way now. There is no way to segment out my holdings and I didn’t want to create a second account. In other words, I can’t do screenshots anymore and I really liked doing that. I don’t really want to make a fake portfolio and spend time “fake buying and selling” with it. That seems like a kind of waste of time. I haven’t decided this completely though and if I revisit the idea of a fake portfolio, then I will post the trades on this site.

I’d say that since I started investing again in 2013, i have overall lost. I’ve lost quite a bit in comparison to figures in my income, savings, and retirement planning. This is generally not a good idea either. I just hate the idea of only making money from real estate. If I would admit to having a mental illness, it would be in the relatively false believe in the value of real estate.

So, anyone that ever pays attention to me when I talk about money should always do so with an idea of learning what not to do rather than what to do. Also, you can pay attention out of the desire to learn about tools because I spend a lot of time learning about the best or cheapest ones.

I plan to get much more in to Robinhood now. They seem cheesy sometimes but what the hell, all millennial companies seem that way now just as 80s or 90s companies would seem such to someone from the 60s.

Final thought: In regards to the stock market, the game of playing favorites with who gets a crack at the village pump is as old as time itself. Who gets rich in the US is most often based on lineage. You’d have to prove it to me that it isn’t the case.

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