Weeknotes 03-05
- Technically this is weeknotes 03-04 but I am hedging my bets (FORESHADOWING!!! Sorry...) against missing this again next weekend.
- And a midweek weeknote!! What!! Bringing the standard Nicky Chaotic Good energy to weeknotes! Please enjoy.
- So lol I bought a fun money amount of a GME share. Like, yesterday, I'm not making millions out of this. I kind of find it hard to believe anyone is? Despite what Reddit says. Anyway. My first foray into stocks! I used the money I won from our first lockdown poker game nearly a year ago 😳
- This shit is WILD. It feels like when I went to New York (or maybe it was San Francisco? Remember travelling? I clearly don't..) in like ... 2007, I think, and on a street corner, in the newspaper box thing like they have there, which is enough of an exciting novelty in itself, was, I swear, a printed version of the Onion. Which I had only ever previously seen online. This GME Reddit thing is like the internet has come to life and started sodding about with the stock market. It's fascinating, and WAY too easy: here, download this app, fill in some details, some of which involves verifying personal details and tax status, but it's all done in less than five minutes, then top up with Apple Pay with touch ID. People are switching out their pensions in an app on the basis of what someone on Reddit says!? WTF. WILD. Way too easy. Very addictive. Maybe I could do this instead of smoking? Anyway. I had an exciting afternoon, I've been either poorer or "richer"* at various points. Pfft! Poker is more fun and I think honestly easier to win money.
- * Not actually richer, right? Unless you can sell them at the right time! Might still be poorer! Who knows! WILD.
- Is the phrase "more fun" grammatically correct? It sounds wrong. I don't remember being taught this kind of grammar at school, and now I'm learning about and having to talk about a million new tenses in Spanish that I don't have an automatically easy grasp of, even in English. Wtf is the present imperfect? Why would I know this? (Except for that I'm now learning another language so it's useful to have names for things). Do most people know these things?
- It was my partner's birthday last weekend. We took a few days off work, obviously we barely left the house, but it was an extremely good time, to spend some time together away from the computers, eating a lot of delicious food and making cocktails, and generally faffing about and not being responsible for anything other than ourselves. Basically a holiday, by any other name?
- We are doing an enjoyably twee "lockdown fun" thing at work. When I signed up to help with it I imagined it would involve having to try to encourage people to "please get excited about yet another weekly zoom quiz or craft hour but this one will be fun, honestly" (no shade on those! but enough is enough!). But instead what we've done is planned out 8 weeks of ideas for daily Slack channel discussions, with a few of us taking turns to post each day. Things that sound a bit boring now I'm writing about it, like "what's your favourite film?", or, "what's better, star trek or star wars?", low stakes but it has been super lovely and interesting to hear peoples thoughts! I love peoples thoughts. It took about 20m to think of all the ideas and put them in a calendar with names assigned so we know when we should each post a thing, it's low effort for the poster on the day once people get a bit involved, and it sometimes takes on a small life of its own which is really nice. I miss fun! This is a low key way of dropping into some fun when you can, in those ten minutes in between meetings, not having to schedule an hour of another video call, and getting to know some of my colleagues a bit better. Hat tip to Ed at work, who made this happen, and Alice for providing inspiration in the form of this blog post about the FT team lockdown radio show. Nice.
- The main thing I have learned from the above exercise is to be very clear about what you're asking from people in the daily post. If you post just saying: "What's your favourite film?", a bunch of people will legit just reply with the name of the film and nothing else. Which is technically exactly what you asked, you idiot. What you want to post is: "What's your favourite film, and why?".
- The chest freezer abides.