Thoughts and questions

On April 7, 2025April 7, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video games5 Comments

I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?

FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.

SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?

THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.

…

Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.

Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.

In which that was fun

On January 28, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I dunno if you’ve been following this GameStop thing or not.

I decided to start fucking around with the stock market a couple of weeks ago, partially out of boredom and partially because I actually do have a small amount of discretionary income right now and who knows it’s not impossible that I’ll live long enough to consider retirement. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not dumb enough to believe that dropping $25 a week into stocks is going to magically make me rich or anything, but getting my feet wet and gaining a basic understanding of how this shit works seemed like a good idea.

And … well. Then the GameStop thing happened. Well, is still happening, technically. I think. An explanation, if you haven’t been following this: Reddit discovered that a particular hedge fund held (don’t ask me how this is possible, it’s on the long list of things I don’t understand) more short sales in GameStop than there were actual shares available for the company. A short sale is when you borrow a stock at a certain price, sell them at that price, wait for the price to drop, then buy them and return the shares you bought to the entity you borrowed the shares you sold from. Since you bought them at a lower price than you sold them at, you make money. If this seems somewhat counterintuitive and also a little unethical to be making money off of some other company doing poorly, that means you understand the process correctly.

So Reddit started buying up shares of GameStop. Lots and lots of shares of GameStop. To the point where it was trading at like $4 a share earlier this year and earlier today was up to $500 a share. In the process they blew up that hedge fund, which apparently has gone bankrupt, so it’s good news for everyone.

I went ahead and got in for $100 when the stock was at around $270. This morning when I woke up and it was damn near $500, so if I’d sold instantly I’d have made about seventy bucks. (To be clear, other people have made millions in the last few days.)

I did not sell instantly, and by the time I got out of the shower this morning the app that nearly all of these folks have been using to buy up the stock had decided that they were not only not going to allow further buying of GameStop stock, they even disabled looking it up, making it impossible to do anything but sell. In the course of a ten-minute shower, the value of the stock plummeted nearly a hundred and fifty dollars a share. As of right now, according to the Stocks app on my computer, it’s down to $132.

There’s been lots of dark muttering lately about how what the Redditors did (and those of us who aren’t Redditors but heard about it) should be illegal, because … reasons, and I’m unclear as to what those are, since this is literally some folks on a message board who decided to act as a group. I have heard no dark muttering about how what Robinhood, the app in question, did ought to be illegal, and I feel like arbitrarily deciding it’s okay for them to cause small investors to lose money is okay while small investors causing big hedge funds to blow up is … well, sadly typical is probably how I think that feels, actually.

One way or another, I’ve closed everything out with that app. I ended up breaking about even on GameStop, selling at the wrong time to make money but the right time to avoid losing any, and ended up making maybe $15 over the course of those two weeks. I feel like– and this is no surprise– unless I want to make this a Big Hobby, I’m almost certainly better off putting more money into the withdrawals my job already takes and ignoring that money, because I was spending way too much time watching the rich folks feelings charts tick up and down over the last few weeks. I haven’t been stressing about it, but it’s occupied more of my attention than I need it to.

I will enjoy watching those same Redditors burn Robinhood to the ground over the next few weeks, though.