Currently rewatching the Wednesday Addams series on Netflix.

1 - I fully enjoy this series. It doesn’t lag, doesn’t have a slow burn to get to the plot. It feels more like an ongoing action movie, and

2 - I really love that we’ve slowly watched Wednesday grow up. From 6 years old in the 1964 series, to 11-13 in the 90’s films, and now to 16ish in the 2022 series. Even if each Wednesday has the same traits overall, each era shows the typical traits in that age. I think that’s why I don’t mind the “Wednesday vs her mom” theme. Even Morticia hinted at it in the first episode: “I’m told girls your age say hurtful things, and I shouldn’t take it to heart.”

Shout out to Jenna Ortega for bringing Wednesday Addams to life and playing her well. Wednesday will forever be my girl.

#wednesday addams#wednesday netflix#the addams family#morticia addams#jenna ortega#carolyn jones#lisa loring

Aunties, can you please explain the whole GameStop stock debacle in normal-people terms?

Anonymous
bitchesgetriches

Bahahaha! I’m fucking STOKED you asked. This is the kind of absurdity that I live for, cry over, and reinforces my belief that MONEY IS FAKE. Ok here goes…

First a definition: What does it mean to “short a stock”? Shorting or even short-selling stocks is when you borrow shares in a company then immediately re-sell them in the hopes that you can buy them back later at a lower price. You then return the shares to the original lender they were borrowed from and pocket the difference. It is a STUPIDLY RISKY way of making money on the stock market, and has traditionally only been used by Wall Street Evil Knievels and people so hopped up on cocaine they thought the housing collapse of 2008 would be a great fucking idea. None of you should try shorting stocks. Buy stocks, invest for the long term, and go about your business. 

Mmkay, so with that out of the way, let’s talk about what’s going on with GameStop. 

Hedge fund managers (people who run big conglomerations of investors and investments) are betting on GameStop to fail, business-wise. They think the stock is crashing and that the company is in trouble. Why? Not important for the purposes of this explanation. They have just made certain projections that show GameStop is failing on the investment front. So the hedge fund managers want to capitalize on this failure (read: get rich off of GameStop’s demise) by shorting GameStop stock. With me so far?

This is all business as usual for the world of high stakes investing. But heeeeeere’s where it gets interesting. There’s a Reddit forum called /r/WallStreetBets. Their whole thing is sharing stock tips and hot investments. It’s for people who know the stock market well enough to literally play with it on a small scale. They found out about the plan to short GameStop stock. And they took evasive maneuvers. 

Suddenly, members of this Reddit started buying up GameStop stock en masse. These purchases drove the price of the stock way up (that’s how the stock market works) AND it prevented the stock shorters from fulfilling their scheme AND it forced them to lose a ton of money. For example, the professional hedge fund managers lost $1.6 billion in a single day last week. By contrast? One of the WallStreetBets dudes turned $50,000 into $11 million.

But what does any of this literally have to do with GameStop? ALMOST NOTHING. The company itself is not doing anything any different. Its value and stock prices are soaring not because of anything GameStop has done to improve itself… only because people who play with money are artificially inflating its value through this weird war.

In my opinion, the heroes here are WallStreetBets. They are demonstrating, in real time, how fucking arbitrary the value of something can be. They are calling Wall Street’s bluff and fucking with the people who–FOR A LIVING–just regularly decide to drive an individual company out of business and its employees out of jobs. 

Whatever your thoughts on GameStop as a company, this is an abject lesson in how capitalism is not some hallowed law of the universe, but an arbitrary system we made up. That system can be hacked. It can be broken. And it can be fun!

Anyway, hope that helps. This is as close to a simple explanation as I could get, and a LOT of nuance is missing so please don’t @ me. If you want a way more in-depth read that’s still simple enough for those who don’t know shit about investing, I got my information from Vox. And if you enjoyed this explanation, maybe read these ones too:

A Brief History of the 2008 Crash and Recession: We Were All So Fucked 

Dashit Just Happened, Equifax?

afolksongs

and he’s left with Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan trains Anakin at first out of a promise he makes to Qui-Gon, not because he cares about him. When they find Anakin on Tatooine, he says, “I feel like we’ve found another useless lifeform.” He’s comparing Anakin to Jar Jar. And he’s saying, “This is a waste of time. Why are we doing this? Why do you see importance in these creature like Jar Jar Binks and this 10 year old boy? This is useless.” So he’s a brother to Anakin, eventually, but he’s not a father figure. That’s a failing for Anakin. He doesn’t have the family that he needs.He loses his mother in the next film. He fails on this promise he made, “Mother, I will come back and save you.” So he left completely vulnerable. And Star Wars ultimately is about family. So that moment in that movie which a lot of people diminish as, “Oh, this is a cool lightsaber fight.” But it’s everything that the entire three films of the prequels hangs on, is that one particular fight. And Maul serves his purpose, and at that point, died before George made me bring him back. But he died, showing you how the Emperor is completely self-serving. He doesn’t care, he’s using people and now he’s gonna use this child.

ohitsjustcorina

This is where I sincerely respected Dave Filoni. He gets it.

#dave filoni#the mandalorian