Archive

internet3

YK Summer Mix Anniversary

May 28, 2022
fun, internet3, Music

Pal of mine Michael Eades used to host an annual Summer Mix series. It was before everyone was on streaming sites, so you would have to patch together a zip file of mp3s, or stitch something together and host if yourself.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of my 2012 submission which is absolutely crazy to think about. It still bangs, in case you were wondering.

I cooked it up in Spotify but a couple of crucial tracks are missing. It is still a strong listen but isn’t the same.

Made myself laugh last week

January 25, 2022
internet3

I happened to check in with Twitter just as SBNation made that Eli Manning post, so there weren’t many replies. I got 100x more likes on that post than on anything I’ve ever posted (*and* it was a funny joke).

14 Years a-Twittering

May 25, 2021
fun, internet3

That’s an awfully long time.

I still enjoy twitter. I’ve had to prune who I follow and mute the occasional trending topic, but I’ve got it to a place where I like visiting a couple of times a day.

Good Gamestop postmortem

January 26, 2021
internet3

This Bloomberg Opinion piece does a nice job of explaining the craziness that has happened in that stock over the last couple of days.

It gets a little in-the-weeds when he starts talking about the options strategies and their impacts, but I found the footnotes helpful.

The technical story is just that these two factors—a short squeeze and a gamma trap, if you like—combined to push the stock up rapidly on Friday. Something started the ball rolling—the stock went up for some fundamental or emotional or whatever reason—and then the stock going up forced short sellers and options market makers to buy stock, which caused it to go up more, which caused them to buy more, etc.

Here is a YOLO story, a story of utter nihilism. You know this story. This story is perhaps best told with a series of rocket emojis, but let’s try words instead. The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don’t know, they’re gamers, or because it’s a little comical to pump the stock of a chain of mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because a lot of professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it’d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying GameStop and they figured they’d join in the fun. Or all of those things in different combinations. Take one person who’s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like “lol gaming” or “let’s mess with the shorts,” and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves