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ORNERY ABOUT GLANDULAR

So I never finished writing about my europe trip from six months ago.... and thats because shortly after I returned home, I came down with something that was later revealed to be glandular fever.

In the time since I fell ill I have explained many times, to almost as many people: no, i’m not better yet. Furthermore: no, i can’t just work a day or two each week. I don’t blame people for not knowing these things, I am most likely the first person with this condition that they’ve ever met, but it has led me to an inevitable conclusion: nobody on the planet has any understanding of what living with fatigue is like.

Now THAT, I can fix.

So this is where i’m gonna lay it down for you. Maybe you’re one of my friends and I linked you this so I wouldn’t have to explain it again. Maybe you have no idea who I am. That’s fine too. You will bask in the light of my literary prowess all the same.

Before we begin, there is one rule: Do not feel sorry for me. I am about to say some FACTS about an experience of mine which is objectively negative, for the purpose of education. If you find those FACTS to be DEPRESSING, this falls into the “You Problems” category. I will dispense no further oxygen on this matter.

Let us begin.

The first and most important thing to know about life with fatigue (and I put this first because I expect most people will only read the very beginning of this and get bored), is that whether you know it or not, you have spent your whole life having your brain molded by a reward system where you put in effort, and get some kind of positive reinforcement for it. You spend 60 minutes studying, you get a dopamine hit. You spend 60 minutes cleaning up the house, you get a dopamine hit. Even if it was something you hated every moment of, the fact you have accomplished something feels rewarding. And its this reliable reward system that, whether you realise it or not, leads your monkey brain to doing almost everything it does.

Consider an alternate way that things might play out. You try to clean for 60 minutes. After 5 minutes you have a bit of a headache, but you keep going. After 15 minutes you’ve made good progress but you’re not only in quite a bit of pain but you are starting to get cold sweats and a little bit dizzy. After 30 minutes you’re not really making any more progress. You’re trying your hardest but your head is SPLITTING, and your heart can’t keep up with the oxygen your muscles are using just to stay standing. Your actions are slow, uncoordinated, and sometimes destructive. This is the point at which the uninitiated will give up. Only somebody who hasn’t been diagnosed yet (or is yet to learn how their condition works) will have pushed themselves this far. Fatigue veterans stop after 5 or 10 minutes because they know what’s coming. And if you were some kind of madman who decided to keep going even as your body starts shutting down and disobeying your commands, its important to note that all your steadfast determination isn’t going to make the house ANY cleaner. Your body’s physical limitations simply will not allow it.

THAT is what you need to understand to “get” the fatigue experience, first and foremost. Its that people who suffer from fatigue aren’t living in a world where they put in effort and receive a commensurate reward. In fatigue land, giving up is an incredibly valuable skill. Doing a little and giving up is the only way WE get our dopamine hit. In the above scenario, a fatigue veteran who gives up 5-10 minutes in and has a short rest has a good chance of getting back up 20 minutes later to do a little bit more cleaning. The fatigue novice, who went a full 30 minutes before they decided to give up, will be in bed for a minimum of three hours. Even if they got twice as much done as the fatigue veteran, it cost the novice what it cost the veteran six times over. “Trying harder”, “Pushing through the pain” and other strategies which serve healthy people well are nothing but idiocy in this world. So if you see somebody with fatigue lie down after doing something for five minutes, that does not in any way mean that they are not dedicated to the task they are undertaking. On the contrary, its quite possible that they have calculated exactly what rest pattern they will need to follow in order to get as much done as they can that day, and are following it to the letter.

So when a fatigue sufferer “pushes” themselves to get something done, they don’t get that dopamine hit because they know they haven’t gained anything - only lost. The only time WE get that ping of satisfaction is when we do something for a short period of time, do not tax ourselves overmuch, and cease. Then we can sit down and say, “I just put four plates and two cups in the dishwasher. Good job me. Now i’m going to have a lie down, so that in 5-10 minutes time I can do something equally tiny and productive”

Also, it is worth noting that usually, doing a task for five minutes and lying down is THE fastest path to completing it - but to somebody who doesn’t understand fatigue, this looks like laziness. Which is sad because criticism of this approach is genuinely counterproductive if the critic actually does want the task completed, since asking the fatigued to push themselves beyond their limits is straight up inefficient.

Before glandular fever, I spent most of my life doing deeply involved, highly demanding things. Now that I have it, I have done almost none of the things I used to enjoy doing, because I have a different set of capabilities. I have had to find a different set of things to enjoy, because the things I ACTUALLY enjoy are locked behind the cost of escalating pain and incapacitation I talked about earlier. I could still go rock climbing, I could still program, I could still play quake, but doing any of those things, I would experience escalating levels of pain and incapacitation. I would rather sit in a deck chair and water my oregano while feeling healthy, even though doing so is dreadfully boring by my old standards, than do the things I used to do, but do them while fighting my way through painful physical symptoms.

As luck would have it, gardening is an activity uniquely suited to the fatigued. Plants are quite happy to do most of their growing unsupervised. 30 seconds a day is quite easy to spare in order to keep them watered. From my old hobbies, on the other hand, take programming. Depending on the complexity of the project, it can take anywhere up to an hour to finish pouring all the information you need into your head, before you write a single line of code. When you sit down to do some programming, you have to remember oh yes this is what i was working on, this bit was working and this bit wasn’t, this is connected to that, and by the time you’re 10 minutes into this process, your fatigue veteran time is up. And that would be the case even if mentally taxing tasks weren’t especially difficult for the fatigued. But as it just so happens, they are. Which brings me nicely around to the second most important thing you need to understand to “get” the fatigue experience.

Thing 2: Thinking Hurts Too. The brain is an extremely demanding organ. It uses huge amounts of calories and blood oxygen, and that increases when you activate it. When you start thinking, like actually turning on your brain and spinning all the cogs, its demands increase. It starts burning more calories and more oxygen and for a body with fatigue or poor circulation (and the two often go hand in hand) that is often just too much. It is a common misunderstanding that because my job involves sitting in a chair all day, it should be one of the easier jobs to perform while under the malaise of fatigue. That is in fact the opposite of true.

The other day my partner asked me for help calculating nutritionally-complete portion sizes for her service dog, given a set of possible ingredients and a set of nutritional requirements. Instinctively, I leapt into action - I’m sure any of you would do the same if somebody important to you asked not just for your help, but for your help in something you have trained for your whole life. As a software engineer i am uniquely well equipped compared to the average citizen to help her figure out something like that, and I immediately went on wikipedia and started reading about the best algorithms for solving the knapsack problem (which this problem was sort of a modified version of).

I lasted maybe 40 seconds. My former, healthy self i’m sure would have had no issue grinding away at that problem for an hour or so until he had developed the perfect doggie meal plan, with the power of maths. But I, 40 seconds in, developed a SPLITTING headache, and ended up laid up in bed for the next few hours as punishment for my hubris. That is thing number 2 to understand about fatigue: Mental exercise is just as taxing, and just as damaging, as physical exercise.

I’m gonna leave it there. There is plenty more to know, but to tell you would be boring, and self-indulgent, and I am neither of those things. Your understanding of fatigue is now, lets say, “adequate”. Thanks for staying till the end.

This is pretty much the reason why I haven’t posted in a very long time despite having a large number of things to post about. I’ve commenced a new isolation diet that has been helping me somewhat with my energy levels though, and am hoping to resume posting occasionally with that fresh vigor. There is lots of catching up to do.

Europe adventures, part 1

So its been a while since Emily and I got back from Europe. I will chronicle our adventures, as is the ancient tradition. But before I begin, I feel it necessary to just say outright that despite how exceptionally ornery and/or traumatising some of the early experiences were that you’re about to hear retold, we actually DID have an awesome holiday. That’s something that really needs to put out there up front. But also a lot of things went tits up in tremendously spectacular fashion, and pretty much all of those things went tits up at the very start of the holiday.

Welcome, my beautiful friends, to TRAUMATISING ADVENTURES: PART 1.

(Pictured: A shot one of the side mirrors on our campervan. The man from the rental agency told me that they were apparently replacing forty such mirrors on their campervan fleet this year, which were apparently obliterated by the campervans tenants with monotonous regularity. While this was an intimidating thing to know at the time, it made me feel a lot better about what followed.)

So our itinerary took us first of all to Geneva. The place where we would pick up the campervan that would be our home for the next 2 weeks. We touched down, and after having some trouble finding the rental agency representative (which was terrifying in itself, but not interesting - and therefore not chronicled), we got the full tour of the van. And it was, frankly, amazing. It had passive heating, tonnes of storage space, there was literally 12 ikea blankets stacked up in the bedroom. The guy said that the campervan could technically house five people. “Five very small people” - in his words (and in his adorable czech republic accent). Having lived in it for two weeks with two people, I can confidently say that having three or more people would have been a total clusterfuck, but at the very least it had storage space and supplies far in excess of our needs. He told us how the myriad knobs and levers worked, and then the campervan was ours. After 30 minutes of trying and failing to get a deposit out of us (Despite being told I would be in switzerland, my bank apparently decided to block transactions of specific types until I could produce a code from my australian sim. GENIUS), the campervan man was gone.

I will admit that we could have planned this a little better. We were now in charge of a vehicle that we were in no condition to drive - it was parked in a yellow zone, and we were in a country where we didn’t speak enough of the language to figure out what the implications of that were. It was 4pm and the traffic was only going to get worse as time wore on. I hadn’t driven stick shift in four years, i’d had 3 hours of sleep in the last 36 hours, they drive on the opposite side of the road here, I couldn’t read any of the street signs, and this was the largest vehicle - by FAR - I had ever needed to pilot.

“What do you want to do?” asked Emily, in a voice that conveyed she clearly understood how fucked we were.

“Well we can’t park here long enough to sleep. I now have real food in my belly for the first time since we left brisbane. I’m only gonna get sleepier and the traffics only gonna get worse. I’m pretty sure we’re just gonna have to YOLO it.”

Emily nods grimly. Never before had the stakes of “yoloing it” been so high. But her analysis of the situation was no different from mine. It was time to grit our teeth and clench our collective, unified anus. The way out was through.

Now, at this stage I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know exactly how bad. There were two variables which I did not yet understand. Firstly, the traffic in Geneva is awful. Don’t take my word for it, listen to the testimony of the 2nd google result for “Geneva traffic”:

And the other thing is, apparently in switzerland this is what passes for a two-way road:

This is not a random image i pulled off google images by searching for “swiss road”. This is the EXACT, specific road that we travelled down during our escape from Geneva Airport, to the nearest place that we were allowed to park overnight. This road does not loop. This road does not connect to other roads which connect to the rest of the city. This road is the only way in, or out, of the parking area we were destined for. We came face to face with a couple of cars on our way down and they all just ploughed off the road into the sandy/grassy bit like it was business as fucking usual, so i guess they’re all used to it! We weren’t though.

The drive involved lots of stalling, hillstarts, deep breathing, and Emily regularly reminding me that i was driving a colossus which needed to use every inch of lane space on both sides - prompting me to reduce my left-side clearance from my habitual 1ft down to a more appropriate 1cm. But in the end we made it, and didn’t even put any damage on the campervan.

At that point, we slept.

And 14 hours of sleep later, we woke up to this:

#switzerland #geneva #campervan #holiday #ornery-adventures

[11:20 AM] Buttson Buttington: aparently im an asshole. phone calls went flawlessly, no issue, no arguments. they was short and to the point. pleasant even. [11:20 AM] Buttson Buttington: and im still mad [11:20 AM] Buttson Buttington: i hate people [11:20 AM] shadyjames: it’s because they called you man [11:20 AM] shadyjames: that shit is assault [11:20 AM] shadyjames: nobody wants that [11:21 AM] Buttson Buttington: I NEVER CONSENTED TO THIS PHONE CALL

#phones #ornery-adventures

On the public holiday for the royal queensland show (known as “The ekka” to us locals), Emily and I went to a petting zoo. Now, as petting zoos are a staple of the ekka, one might naturally assume that we attended the ekka, and went to a petting zoo therein. You could not be MORE WRONG.

Since the ekka is a place that is full of both humans and influenza - two similarly virulent diseases that Emily and I both share a distaste for - that morning we decided that we needed a plan B that would allow us to cuddle baby ducks without undergoing The Trials of the exhibition.

This was apparently a circumstance that Emily foresaw some time in advance, because she was very quick in locating the website of a pet store slash farm slash petting zoo on the north side of town that also by pure coincidence, happened to be having a “Family fun day” that exact day.

BROOM BROOM OFF TO THE PETTING ZOO (which was held by northside produce, if you want to go support them!)

D’AWWW TINY PIGLETS.

There was one fenced area with staff supervision which had some small versions of fairly conventional farm animals. Goat kids, tiny piglets, even a young cow who was actually still enormous. But there was this one lamb who decided i was a house.

When I looked down on my left side, this is what i saw. It actually took the little bugger quite some effort to work his way in there. He’s enormously fat/fluffy compared to the space he was occupying, so it felt like he was trying to burst out of my legs with his fluffiness, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

Matching view of what i saw on my right:

Yep. Thats a sheep.

When we had our fill of the petting zoo, we went into the main structure where there were....SO MANY CUTE THINGS

For one, BABY CHICKENS:

We got to cuddle a snake:

And of course the main event.....DUCKLINGS!!! AAAAH

It was pretty much the best day ever, and the staff were super nice. Emily even got to cuddle a crayfish! Although I didn’t get photos of it unfortunately. And yeah i mean like, one of these:

and the crayfish was super chill about the whole thing. There were border collie cross puppies too, and it was pretty much just like 5 solid hours of ogling and cuddling animals and it was great. You should definitely checkout northside produce if this sort of thing is to your liking, although make sure its cuddle o’clock on their schedule before you do so.

YOU’RE WELCOME

#ducklings #birds #sheep #piglets #animals #ornery adventures

This post is about predicting the future

The more times you start out being bad at something and then start to get good at something, the more patterns you start to see in what it takes to get good at ANYTHING. They all have common elements. And one of those elements I would like to teach you all about today!

I call this concept, “Nth-order predictors”. And most of you will already be familiar with it in some way, however small or large. But I think you will find that it is powerful to put the concept into words, and actively seek higher-order predictors when you are learning new skills. But I digress. Stay with me!

Most practical skills involve making observations, making predictions based on those observations, and taking some kind of action based on those predictions. For example, an animal handler who knows that an animal is going to be aggressive based on its species and that it is mating season, will have a great advantage over an animal handler that only realises it’s aggressive once the animal has raised its hackles and lowered its ears. Furthermore, THAT animal handler will have a great advantage over the animal handler that only realises once the animal is in the process of lunging at their throats. The futher ahead you can predict outcomes, the better positioned you will be, as a rule.

Another example might be an engineer who can tell a building is at risk of collapsing simply from its design, without needing to see stress fractures. They would have an advantage over an engineer who needs to see the fractures before they understand, and moreso over an engineer who only realises when the building collapses.

But the example I’m going to use today is Driving. Mostly because driving has lots of freely available screenshots online for me to use as illustrations, thanks to everybody having dashcams these days.

So lets start with this. This is the “Event” we are trying to predict in our driving example - hitting a pedestrian. We can call this the 0th-order predictor, though it can hardly be called a predictor in the traditional sense. But this is a thing we don’t want to happen (Or do! Who am i to judge? *nervous laughter*), so we say, “How can we predict THIS?”, and i’m sure most of you are all so good at this already, that you will skip straight to the 2nd or 3rd order predictor, but it’s important to go step by step to illustrate exactly what is happening. The 1st order predictor is, “Is there a pedestrian in the path of my car?”

Yes you’re still way ahead of me, you would’ve seen that guy well before that point. So whats the predictor for “Is there a pedestrian in the path of my car?”. Obviously we ask, “Is there a pedestrian travelling towards the path of my car?”. This is the 2nd order.

I’m sure you’re still way ahead of me, but it’ll get interesting soon I promise. How do we predict “Is there a pedestrian travelling towards the path of my car?”. If we assume our human doesn’t have wheels or a jetpack we have a very convenient single predictor of where they’re about to go - Balance. Balance of nearby pedestrians is the 3rd order predictor of a collision.

For a stationary pedestrian to move, or for a moving pedestrian to change course in our direction, they have to shift their balance in our direction. However, you could consider this a point where our predictor tree “branches”. There are a number of ways a pedestrian could start moving towards the path of our car, and so “Is there a nearby pedestrian wearing a jetpack?” and “Is there a nearby pedestrian wearing roller blades?” are also very useful 3rd order predictors which should not be ignored! But since this is just an example lets assume our pedestrian is just wearing regular stuff and look at how we might predict future changes in their balance - a 4th order predictor. And the 4th order predictor is of course muscle contractions. (Thank you Emily, who is the greatest and also super smart, for helping me identify the relevant muscles)

Now i’m sure this is where a lot of you are thinking, “Hold on James, how on earth would I be able to perceive and react to a barely-visible muscle contraction on a nearby pedestrian while i’m also driving a car?”. And thats a fair point. Maybe before you are able to exhaust all the predictors available to you, you first exhaust your feeble human minds ability to process it all in a timely fashion. But there are three important things to note here:

1. Perhaps we have now hit the limits of our human abilities in this example. But have you hit the limits of your human abilities ALL your walks of life? How many predictors are you considering when you go about your day to day life, whether its knowing how best to befriend people, or knowing how to be excellent at your job, or knowing how to keep yourself and the people around you safe? I would wager quite a sum that you are only using a third, or less, of your potential at some things - simply because you haven’t known how you could possibly apply yourself to improving. My hope is that thinking about higher-order predictors will show you new ways to push yourself to your full potential in whichever things you choose. It is a concept for EVERYTHING you do.

2. Perhaps this is the limit of our human abilities while driving a vehicle, but muscle contractions could still be used as a predictor of human changes in balance in an environment where you are singularly concentrated on another person, such as in a self-defense scenario (particularly relevant because when your life is at stake you need every advantage you can get, however minor), or maybe something like competitive sports.

3. Perhaps this is the limit of our HUMAN abilities, but soon the age of self driving cars will arrive. Perhaps a self-driving car that looks in the fisheye mirror of the car in front and detects when the driver contracts their triceps to anticipate when they are about to turn the steering wheel seems silly and farfetched, it’s most definitely POSSIBLE (I should know, after all, being software engineer for my day job). It simply won’t be done because it’d be a huge amount of work to write, and the safety benefit would be trivial.

All that being said, now that we’ve pushed this example to the limits of practicality, let’s see how impractical we can get.

We need to go DEEPER

5th order predictor (predictor of muscle contractions) - Neurological activity

I’m really glad this came up, because this is a predictor that cannot be observed, and you will run into these occasionally. And the reason i’m glad it came up is because even though you can’t see inside somebody’s head, you can STILL predict what MIGHT be going on inside it with.....yes....higher-order predictors

5 and 6 happen inside the brain, so they can’t be observed, but Lo! There are predictors for INTENT! Despite having hit was might have seemed to be a “dead end” by finding that something could only be predicted by knowing what was going on inside a persons head, we have emerged, because there are predictors for a persons intent! It’s a good thing we didn’t give up. Let this be a lesson to you for whenever you encounter predictors for which you can’t collect data in your own machinations.

7th order predictors (predictors of Intent) Much like our 3rd order predictors (Back when we chose “Balance” instead of “Are they wearing rollerskates or a jetpack?”), there is a whole clusterfuck of predictors we could choose here:

What time is it? People are more likely to be heading towards residential areas in the evening, and more likely to be heading towards business centres in the morning. What route have other pedestrians taken? Whats the highest traffic path? What demographic is the person and what attire are they wearing? If they are wearing a McDonalds uniform, they will probably be heading towards (or away!) from the nearest mcdonalds. If they are wearing a priests or nuns habit, they might be heading towards the nearest cathedral.

You will notice all of the things that i’ve mentioned are weak predictors. It means they have a very good chance of being wrong. However they still give you information. The weather forecast has a good chance of being wrong, but if you were not sure whether it would rain today and you saw clouds and felt a breeze, knowing the forecast said rain might just be enough to change your prediction one way or another. In the end, combining weak predictors just comes down to the age-old question “How many coincidences make a fact?”, to borrow a phrase from the famous hacktivist th3j35t3r:

Now, all of the predictors we just mentioned are observable, and I don’t know any way to go deeper. So i think this might ACTUALLY be the end of our blog post finally. Has anybody ever overthought driving this hard? Who knows! Should the average person overthink driving WAY MORE? Absolutely. But this isn’t about driving. Whether you’re trying to get better at watering your garden and giving your dog belly rubs, or trying to survive a life-or-death situation, I bet there is a bunch of extra overthinking you can do to make whatever you’re doing go that much better. And I hope I’ve inspired you to look a little deeper at every single thing that you do.

Thanks for reading <3

#life #driving #predictions #text post #wall of text #ornery adventures

Take a moment to admire my aiport photo. Take note that it is nighttime. The time is 4:50. It is nighttime. When i woke up two hours ago, it was nighttime. When we board the plane in 40 minutes, it will still be nighttime. When the plane takes off at 6:00, it will still be nighttime. So why the FUCK *walls reverberate with the power of my fuck* did these shitlords get me up at 3 in the morning for “additional security screening”?

For those who don’t know what i’m so ornery about, you might be interested to know that after a recent terrorist scare, the Australian government decided it would be a good idea to add “Additional security screening” at airports, including for domestic flights. Now, I don’t have a problem with this in principle. The airline AND the news told me separately that i would need to get there TWO hours before my flight instead of my usual 45 minutes. A LITTLE ANNOYING, BUT STILL FAIR IN PRINCIPLE.

But the thing that finally broke me, the thing that REALLY chafes my butthole, is that when i showed up at 4:00am, exactly 2 hours before my flight, i breezed through security in 5 minutes. Then the time was 4:05, and i had 2 hours until my flight. In fact, when i initially showed up at the airport, the BAGGAGE DROP wasn’t even open. So i showed up early, mentally prepared for them to put their clammy hands in all my orifices checking for explosives for the next 2 hours before my flight, and instead I just stood there waiting for the baggage drop to open. TIME I COULD HAVE SPENT SLEEPING.

The lack of respect these turd munchers have for their fellow mans time is truly exceptional.

HNNNNNNGGGGGGG MAD.

#airports #australia #flying #ornery adventures

Stockmarket terminology!

So one of my favorite things about the investment/stockmarket community is that, other than being a disarming glimpse of everymen (and women!) from all walks of life, is some of the hilarious sayings and slangs are commonplace in our midst. So I have decided that for this post i’m giving everybody.... an ORNERY STOCKMARKET TERMINOLOGY TUTORIAL.

In Australia the largest investment community is a forum called HotCopper. And much like the market itself, its a wondrous place full of a similar quantity of gems and cancer. Everybody’s on their own noble quest to make a buck and secure their financial future, and that makes it really human when you get down to it, past the initial compulsory internet bullshit. Some of those quests end in success, others end in tears. Lest we forget poor old denbo:

To add a comment somebody made on this image on the facebook investor group i read:

"The day SGH goes in to trading halt will be the most beautiful day of Denbo's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted." - Tyler Durden

Now, SGH is now valued at 7.5c/share. In their last half-year report, it was recorded that they their net tangible asset backing per security was NEGATIVE 41.76 cents. In layman's terms, that means they are in so much debt, the debts principal is more than 5x greater than the value of the company itself.

Look up at that little smiling picture. That is the face of a man who, if his word can be taken as truth, lost over half a million dollars in the last year. And that HURTS me inside. But there is no room for pity here. We all put our money down knowing exactly the risk we’re taking and we accept it. We are accountable for our actions and we live or die by our wisdom or our foolishness. The stockmarket doesn’t know what colour you are, and it doesn’t care. It is the purest meritocracy on this earth, and I find it beautiful in all its brutality.

I wanted to check up on denbo, so I did. And he aint dead. I don’t know if he’s on his way to becoming a veterinarian but he aint dead, and good on him for it. Poor bastard. But enough about that, its time for your lesson!

THE BASICS

Long and short To be “Long” on something, means that you are positioned such that you will benefit from the price going up. The simplest way to do this is to simply own shares, but you can also do things like buy call options (or sell put options). Vice versa, to be “short” on something means you are positioned such that you will benefit from the price going down. This is most commonly done by short selling or buying put options. I know you don’t know what call or put options are, but options aren’t in the scope for today’s post, I’ll talk about it another day if people care. Also, the terms “long” and “short” are NOT to be confused with “long term” and “short term”, which are completely unrelated. You can be long for the short term, or you can be short for the long term. People cocking that up is the rookie beacon, but nobody makes fun of rookies because investors usually have better things to do than be cunts on the internet. Bullish and bearish While long and short refer to your own situation, with regards to your portfolio, bullish and bearish refer to your outlook. If you are bullish you think something will go up in the future, if you are bearish you think it will go down in the future. Likewise if you are bullish on something, you ARE a bull, and if you are bearish on something you ARE a bear. The market is often termed as a competition between bears and bulls. Often if you are bullish on something, you’ll have some long positions in it, because you expect it to go up and you want to make money from that, but its not necessarily so; there are lots of stocks and commodities I have a bullish or bearish outlook on which I’m not confident enough in to cough up money and bet on it.

Ramping Ramping is posting (typically on forums or social media, but is occasionally extended to refer to broker analyses) which contains (usually baseless) declarations about future success/failure of a stock. The term is a reference to attempting to indirectly manipulate the price via public opinion - you’re not DRIVING the car, so you obviously can’t affect it directly, but you’ll still try and put a ramp under it. Negative ramping is usually called “downramping” to be explicit, and its frowned upon because pretty much nothing a ramper says is worth reading and is just wasting everybody’s time.

Dead cat bounce “Even dead cats bounce!” it is often declared, when a stock falls off a cliff and then bounces back up somewhat. While i’ve never tried throwing a cat off a cliff, dead or otherwise, and I have no idea whether they ACTUALLY bounce, it is still sage advice. Just because it goes up, doesn’t make it a good investment. Nobody wants to buy a dead cat.

(Nobody wants to) catch a falling knife Before the bounce comes the fall -- a security that is in freefall is often an attractive target to contrarian investors. However people who are tempted to buy something thats in freefall are soberly reminded that people who attempt to catch falling knives are very likely to lose some fingers. Speaking of fingers....

Trying to pick the bottom will just get you stinky fingers This is a real thing which real people say, and I love it from the deepest depths of my heart. Much like catching a falling knife it is a warning of the dangers of trying to anticipate where the bottom of a bear market is, but - at the risk of over-explaining it - ends in a juicy double-entendre about putting one of your digits in a literal butthole.

“Please explain” This is probably my favorite one, so much so that i’ve refrained from putting the actual slang term in the paragraph title to foster a proper comic delivery. A “Please explain” is one of a few colloquialisms which refer to the issuing of an “ASX Aware query” in australia, or whatever similar ritual your country’s exchange has, wherein a company is served with a notice asking it whether it is in compliance with the exchanges disclosure rules which are designed to prevent insider trading. I wont’ go into exactly what the rules are, but suffice to say that when a stock skyrockets for no explainable reason, or falls off a cliff under similar circumstances, the exchange issues one of these notices. We like to call em “Speeding tickets”.

THERE YOU GO LADS, now you know shit about TALKING INVESTMENTS! Ah, but what would any investment post be without signing off with DYOR? That inescapable achronym that seems to follow every single statement made by every single investor. It appears there is one final hole in your lingo lesson which I need to fill.

Even if you trust the word of the person you’re reading, and ESPECIALLY if you like what you hear. Never take a thing another person says for granted when you’re putting your own money on the line.

Always and forever: Do Your Own Research.

#investing #stocks #terminology #asx #ornery adventures

Life goals, volume 1

So in the bunya mountains post about my (mostly) failed attempts to feed the birds, i posted this list of my life goals which I hope you might be familiar with:

And, at the time, I said that its quite possible that every single thing on this list may warrant its own blog post. Well, just as it is time to make another blog post, it is time to collect on that promise.

But the question is which goal shall I elucidate?

What? Whats that you’re saying? It would be TOO MUCH to just start talking about life goals, and you need a META-POST, ABOUT THE LIST ITSELF to ease yourself into it? Fear not, dearest friend. I have this meta-discussion shit nailed the fuck down and wrapped the fuck up, you can leave it in my capable hands. I won’t let you down.

By very specific design, my life goals follow a pretty steep curve. When people read it for the first time, their reaction is usually something like,

We did just go from feeding small fluffy animals to LITERALLY BECOMING GOD without really nodding in the direction of the fact that they’re slightly different ball games. But it is that very distinction which I choose actively to ignore.

See, there are two things I prize above all others in my own life: The first is ambition, and the second is the ability to enjoy my own life. In many cases, these are competing forces. Opposites, even. To most people hedonism comes at the expense of their future. They buy shit they don’t need instead of investing and then wonder why they could never escape the slavery of the working class.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are so obsessed with success that they lose the ability to enjoy their lives. They lose the ability to form meaningful relationships. They have the money to buy the things they want but no time to enjoy them. They often find themselves alone, but even when they do not, many of them regret not finding more time to enjoy their lives while they were still young.

To me, this list is my eternal reminder not to forget that balance. I want to chase my dreams; I am not even ashamed to say that I WOULD become the God Machine if the opportunity arose, and become humanity’s eternal guardian until the heat death of the universe. But in my pursuit of such things I need to remember to pat dogs. I need to remember that the little things are some of life’s greatest pleasures. I need to remember to stay grounded.

But all the same, I do not wish to stay on the ground. No matter what I accomplish, it can never be enough, because as soon as you decide it is enough, your story ends. People are defined by what they strive for. I don’t want to reach the top of my mountain and realise my journey is over. I would rather point at something nobody’s done before, and say, “Maybe that’s the mountain that will finally kill me”.

#ornery adventures

So I thought it was high time I finished chronicling the bunya mountains trip. It was actually a pretty long time ago now, so I don’t remember it all, but there’s a little bit of stuff I need to record if only for my own future reference.

You’re not here to check out my sweet rainforest pics, although they are without a doubt pretty sweet, you’re here to hear about shenanigans! So without further OH SHIT LOOKOUT ITS ANOTHER SWEET RAINFOREST PICTURE

Sorry about that everybody i’m not sure how that happened.

Anyway, through the power of bringing lots of frozen stuff with us (including but not limited to the amazing ICE VEST), we were able to get some short bushwalks done. Oh yeah, did I mention it was really fucking hot? We went up in the middle of a heatwave, which is funny because the reason we went up there in the first place was to escape the heat. The bunya mountains are usually 7 or so degrees cooler than the surrounding flatlands due to their elevation, which was the big draw for us. In fact, an entry in the guestbook dated FOUR DAYS prior to our arrival held the fireplace in very high esteem, saying it was great for the “chilly nights”.

Fast forward a couple of days, and our sorry asses show up. It is clearly not fireplace weather. On the second day, we drive down to kingaroy and pick up a fan to help us sleep in the heat. Doing stuff out of the house under these conditions was a little trickier than it needed to be, but emily came well prepared and we would just pack an eski full of frozen shit to get us through the day and put it all back in the freezer at nights.

But, back to the business at hand, we managed to get out and do a couple of short bushwalks. This is important because, during one particular bushwalk, we were walking along a clifftop path towards a lookout - because I LOVE being on top of high things, and looking down on other things - when we heard a sharp “CRACK” echo through the valley below.

In the split second that followed, I thought I’d heard a gunshot and that our bunya mountains adventure holiday was about to turn into an agatha-christie esque weekend-away murder mystery and we were the only people who might barely qualify as witnesses.

Of course nothing that exciting ACTUALLY happens, but what happened instead was still actually pretty cool - In the valley below, we saw the collapse of a large and distant eucalyptus, ripping open a hole in the bushland canopy as it fell. Fallen trees are a dime a dozen as you can probably imagine, but to catch its falling with your own eyes is something that had never happened to me before.

Needless to say, we treated all the trees we walked under on the way home with an elevated level of caution.

In parting, i leave you with a fuzzy “ghost forest” we saw, a stand of small trees that had been engulfed in a hairy moss.

#ornery adventures #bunya mountains #rainforest

Public housing adventures, vol 1

So, as is common knowledge, my dearest Emily is not a picture of health. There are certain kinds of assistance available to those who are not able-bodied, and one of them is public housing, which has the considerable advantage of being wheelchair-accessible, and the rent being a little cheaper. Unfortunately the kinds of people who inhabit public housing are not always people with disabilities. A lot of them are very capable, energetic people, who use their energy and capabilities to do very un-constructive things.

THESE ARE THEIR STORIES

DOOM DOOM

PART 1: THE CASE OF THE UPSTAIRS NEIGHBOR

THE PROBLEM: So there is a woman living upstairs from Emily who is pretty much an unmitigated tumor. Living on government money (she very clearly doesn’t have a job based on how late she stays up screaming at her children every night), she is nevertheless filling an important societal role by drinking and having screaming domestics on a daily basis, cumulatively wasting hours of police time. Despite our best efforts, she has not been arrested yet, nor stripped of her public housing, nor her children adequately protected from her. This is despite the fact that when her children were watching the police arrest her last boyfriend after a particularly savage domestic, the children said to the police, and I quote, “She is worse than he is”. That is a pretty damning confession coming from a woman's own children, still fresh with the marks of “his” abuse. Most likely I think the police are afraid to arrest an indigenous woman for PR reasons, so she is allowed to remain at large, despite our best efforts to get something done about it.

THE SOLUTION: Well, it’s only a partial solution, since there is still no cure for cancer, but Emily has devised ingenious ways to treat some of the symptoms.

That my friends, is a logitech speaker system pointed directly at the ceiling of Emily’s bedroom. As the apartments on top of eachother have exactly the same layout, it just so happens it is also pointed directly at the FLOOR of her NEIGHBORS bedroom. Once upon a time, the woman upstairs would scream at her children till well after 3am on a regular basis. However, she has long been subjected to what I like to call a “sleep schedule regulation system”. Any time the woman upstairs keeps Emily up at night with her banging and screaming, Emily puts a name on her Naughty list. When she wakes up in the morning, she consults her Naughty list, and if her upstairs neighbor needs her sleep schedule regulated, to fit more closely with civilised society, she blasts music at full volume into the apartment above. This morning at 9am, after shouting her lungs out until well after 4am the night before, the woman upstairs woke up to this:

And I tell you what, though she may get kept up at night occasionally still, Emily does NOT get kept up two nights in a row anymore.

#public housing #ornery adventures #australia

See interest over time on Google Trends for impeaching the president - Worldwide, Past 5 years.

I’m just gonna leave this here

#donald trump #america #google trends #ornery adventures

It’s time for COMPULSORY ADVENTURES: VOLUME 3

So one of the things you can do in the bunya mountains is feed the birds. I love the shit out of birds. Anybody who knows me - and i’m assuming you’re one such person, since i’m not famous - can attest to the fact I love those fluffy torpedoes, or flappy planes, or feathered assholes. However you call them, they are adorable, and I adore them. So having wild birds land on and around me so that I can watch them eat is pretty much a dream come true. Feeding birds is actually on my list of life goals, which I have attached for your convenience.

I think this list requires its own blog post, or perhaps a blog post for every item on it - there is a world of content here that we have only begun to explore. For now at least, we will put the rest of the list aside, and focus on the first item: feeding birds!

You can see that it’s already ticked - that’s because it’s something that I’ve already accomplished years ago, both through feathered asshole ownership, and through a prior trip to O’Reilly’s. Almost no bird feeding took place on this trip, despite our best efforts. This adventure was not COMPLETELY compulsory, since we did opt-in to the bird feeding thing. However I can assure you that the adventure we received instead was not the adventure we volunteered for.

So there’s a place up there that does bird feeding sessions in the afternoons. We showed up at 4:30 hoping to catch the tail end of some bird feeding, to be informed that the bird feeding was already over, but that we could buy some bird seed provided we didn’t feed any birds within the bounds of the national park. Well that shouldn’t be too hard, I thought. Our little cabin was privately owned, and it had rainforest out the ass and a flappy plane feeder out the front. It was pretty much an ideal situation.

By the time we got back it was a bit late to get our bird feed on. The flappy planes had settled in for the evening, and darkness was falling on the mountain. Since tomorrow was our last day, and check-out was at 10am (10 what sorry?), we decided the best way to feed birds would be to leave some seed out on the bird feeder so that we could wake up to the pecks and warbles of an assortment of bird life sitting on the bird feeder in front of our porch, so that we could enjoy their company while we packed up.

Which sounded like a GREAT idea, until this asshole showed up:

YOU AREN’T A BIRD! Fuck off of our bird feeder!

I didn’t actually try to get him to fuck off of our bird feeder because we had plenty of bird seed and it was an opportunity to ogle some wildlife, but the POINT IS he was being a LITTLE SHIT. And then THESE assholes showed up!

“NONE OF YOU ARE BIRDS!”, i cried, “YOU ARE MAMMALS.”

“YOU ARE MAMMALS AND THAT IS NOT A MAMMAL FEEDER YOU ARE EATING OUT OF, NOR MAMMAL SEED YOU ARE EATING.”

They stared back at me in that wary, slightly-maligned, fish-eyed way only nocturnal herbivores can. All the while rapidly stuffing their faces without once breaking eye contact.

“THIS IS THOROUGHLY OUTSIDE YOUR JURISDICTION.”

My pleas for law and order going unheard, i just sat there on a deck chair that was fortuitously situated on our deck, and ogled them for 20 minutes while drinking a glass of milk.

The next morning, when i was carrying boxes of stuff into the car in preparation for leaving, a single fluffy torpedo was there to keep me company. I didn’t get a picture of him, but through my many trips to the car, a lone pied currawong ogled my activities while pecking away at the remains of the bird seed from the night before

Thank you mister currawong.

#birds #possums #bird feeding #adventures #compulsory adventures #ornery adventures

Part 2 of my coverage of my Bunya mountains holiday, i bring you:

COMPULSORY ADVENTURES: VOLUME 2

So one afternoon, i wished to wash some dishes. However the sink was full of water, atop which was floating a layer of congealed shit. Emily had been washing the only oven tray - a pizza tray, as it happens. Her first step had been to put the perfectly round pizza tray into the perfectly round sink, and run a bunch of hot water over it.

Well, fair enough. In an attempt to free up the sink, I try to remove the tray from the bottom of the sink, which is preventing it from draining. However it quickly becomes apparent.....that this will not be an easy task.

Silly boy, one cannot simply “pick up” the pizza tray. The pizza tray has transcended the realm of hands. It is a perfectly-fitting false bottom, beyond which no liquid may pass. The sink is now a bucket. You can’t get the pizza tray out of the sink because there is no pizza tray and there is no sink. There is only bucket.

It was at this point that we started trying to think laterally. Boy was THAT a mistake.

Our next move was to remove the S-bend from the pipes below the sink, because we’d spent the last ten minutes elbow deep in congealed shitwater trying to wrassle the false bottom back out of the bucket. This approach yielded exactly zero success, but we felt we still weren’t covered in quite enough shit at this point in the afternoon, so we rolled up our sleeves and took off the S-bend.

The idea was that if we took out the S-bend, we’d be able to stick something UP the drain-hole, and dislodge the pizza tray using the power of MUSCLES. There were a couple of problems with this plan though. There was a shelf in the cupboard below the sink which was right beneath the S-bend. As such, the shelf couldn’t be removed without removing the S-bend first, and you couldn’t put a bucket below the S-bend before removing it because there was a shelf in the way. So we removed the S-bend as it was, the only thing we could really do, and rank shitwater pissed all over the cupboard and floor.

“Excellent”, I thought to myself. “This is going exactly as I had hoped”

It turned out that there was a clusterfuck of metal spokes and gratework between the pipes and the sink, which was far too dense for any of our long knives to penetrate. So in the end it turned out that our amateur plumbing adventure was in vain, and had only served to further the proliferation of rank shitwater.

In the end, the solution to the problem was bucketing out, and then soaking up, the rank shitwater on top of the pizza tray. The soaking was mostly done with toilet paper, but at one point Emily was trying to stick a sanitary pad to the pizza tray in the hope the adhesive would be able to pull it free. It was only when most of the pizza tray was above water that we were finally able to take it out using the power of MUSCLES.

Stay tuned for Compulsory Ornery Adventures pt 3

#rank #shit #water #shitwater #rank shitwater #ornery adventures

I just got back from my holiday in the bunya mountains with my dearest Emily. I had a lot of adventures while i was there, but there are too many adventures to fit into a single blog post, so i’m going to split the adventures into categories.

The category of TODAY’S blog post is, “Compulsory adventures - Volume 1”! That is to say, adventures that happened in, or in front of, our lodgings. Some of them we wanted, and some of them we didn’t, but ALL of them were compulsory.

First was the wallabies. There were SO MANY wallabies. I know this is exactly how people overseas picture australia and we put a lot of time and effort into going “Australia is just like any other developed nation, 99% of days I don’t see any kangaroos at all, and i encounter creatures containing deadly venom even less often!”. I’m setting back the efforts of my countrymen a long way with this post but yes okay i opened the front door, wallaby. I get in the car, there’s another wallaby. I drive to the end of the street, there’s a family of wallabies staring at me while i give way with my indicator on. The photo above is a picture of a wallaby *at the literal entrance to our cottage*. This is not an isolated occurrence, if you look closely there’s actually two of them in the photo, and there was another one off camera to the left. Most of them are pretty smart but there’s also quite a few among them who love to jump in front of cars, so you’ve always gotta keep an eye out for the suicidal little buggers.

Usually at this point in the post, i’d employ a segue. Which, funnily enough, i’m doing through this meta-discussion about segues. More traditional segue approaches have no power here - as the chain of events in this blog post bear no resemblance to the chain of events in real life. Something something BEDTIME

So one morning, i woke up to the sun hitting me directly in the eyes through the kitchen window, pictured above. Since Emily, fortuitously positioned between me and the window, was serving as a shield from most of its harmful rays, i simply rolled such that my back was to both her and the sun, and continued sleeping. When I awoke many hours later, the contraption above is what i woke to - a pillow fort of sorts, made of chairs and blankets and, well, pillows - sitting atop the kitchen bench. This was a device Emily constructed - somehow without waking me up - to keep the sun from getting in. Not in the picture above, is the kitchen sink. That is because the kitchen sink is buried inside that thing. I fondly remember washing up my breakfast bowl that morning, half in reality, half inside a pillow fort. It conjured up warm fuzzy sensations from my childhood, but alas I was too big to fit inside it comfortably. This device was rebuilt every evening, with my total approval, for the entire trip.

Stay tuned for Compulsory Ornery Adventures pt 2

#australia #straya #wallabies #fuck the sun #ornery adventures

James: Yeah man, the thing for me with cats and dogs is just

James: If something is going to be inferior to me - which they obviously are

James: then they should at least act like it

#cats #dogs #both #cats and dogs #ornery adventures

So, my dearest Emily and I were at this thai place for dinner the other day. Its the kind of thing we do all the time, it’s rarely eventful. But this time we had a series of really stilted interactions with the wait staff. Which SOUNDS like a really boring blog post but the way it ends is really funny to me so I hope you’ll stick it out.

Emily was in her wheelchair this particular evening, which is always a great place to start when it comes to interacting with strangers. In the beginning our day together started because I was taking her to bunnings - the restaurant outing just sort of happened because we were hungry. So I was cruising around barefoot, shirt and shorts. Meanwhile, Emily saw it as an opportunity to wear a new dress she’d gotten very recently, and was looking proper fancy. I can only imagine what the people who saw us were thinking, but i assume they interpreted it as there having been a miscommunication between us about how formal the outing was.

Emily is very heat sensitive and the air con was doing fuck all in this particular restaurant. She asked for some cold water, because it would help cool her down, and the waitress didn’t know whether she wanted bottled water or a jug. Which is fair enough, but she chose a fairly poor set of disambiguation questions, (i think the first one she asked was “is tap water ok” and we’re like “uhh if its cold?)

Eventually it got to the stage where she asked, “Do you want to pay for it?”. To which we responded “no”. “Will you need your wine glasses?” she asked next “No thanks,” I started, before remembering that Emily might want a drink and adding, “Unless you want something?” “Oh uh....we’re BYO actually” “WELL THEN”

And so the nice lady, who seems FAIRLY uncomfortable by this point, takes away our wine glasses. We eat our food (which by the way - fucking amazing), and I go pay for us while emily scoops the remains of the meals into takeout containers. And after I pay, the waitress thanks me, and places two mentos on the counter.

Now, a thing that *I* know, and a thing that EMILY knows, is that if she eats sugar she falls deathly ill. So obviously she’s not going to eat the mentos, I am. However the waitress doesn’t know this. All the waitress sees, is that as emily is making her way over with the filled containers, I quickly snatch the mentos off the counter and put them in my pocket. At which, she suppresses a laugh into a snort, because i’ve just taken a girl on a date barefoot and stolen her after-dinner mint. I just.

I don’t know what kind of person she thinks I am now, based off that one evening of observation. But i’m sure I seem fucking incorrigible. The thought of the impression she must have of me fills me with glee.

#mentos #shenanigans #text post #ornery adventures

So christmas happened. I didn’t really participate, for thoroughly documented reasons

I did however, enter the bus you see above. It was like entering some kind of “Christmas cave”. The bus had been decked out with tinsel to the shithouse, and even the proverbial shithouse was covered in suspended ornaments and fancy santas.

I’ve made it abundantly clear that i’m not the christmas type, but at the same time it made me so HAPPY to see this, not because I cared about the decorations, but because somebody had clearly REALLY enjoyed themselves putting all this shit up, and the thought of some old busdriver or a group of schoolkids or whoever it was who’d been responsible for this, pottering around and sticking up ornaments everywhere was really cute. I wished the driver merry christmas when I saw it all just in case it was the driver who had been responsible. Though my heart may be three sizes too small, it is warming to see people enjoying themselves.

As for actual christmas day, I literally just played videogames all day.

It has been TWO years without a real christmas. I am hoping that by depriving myself of christmas completely, the next time I finally have to experience a real family christmas, I will have gone so long without one that they will suddenly be charming again instead of burdensome.

#christmas #public transport #ornery adventures

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