Gambling Horoscope For 2021 – Is Today My Lucky Day To

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what are my lucky gambling days - win

Bitcoin and speculative stock investing are dark mirrors of each other and the whole system is rotten.

Hey guys. Not entirely sure if this is the right place for this post, but here goes.
Since the GameStop short squeeze and the Elon Musk Bitcoin pump happened, there's been a lot on my mind about both Bitcoin and regular stocks and I need to get this off my chest.
One thing above all has really been bothering me and I couldn't put it into words until recently: how rotten the whole system is and how it allows a minority to earn enough money to never need to work again.
Whether it's Bitcoin or speculative stocks, it works out very similarly. People throw money and hope they get lucky, no better than any gambling.
When they win, it's not because they were smarter or did some great service to society. They only had to install an app on their phone, go through some KYC and throw money at their crypto or stock of choice.
Money is a currency used to determine how much access to society's resources someone has. The more money you have, the more resources you can access. This can be better apartments, lambos, yachts, mansions, whatever.
The winners of crypto or stocks are just gamblers, they get a disproportionately high share of society's resources without creating anything of value.
And then there's people like me. I work a day job, working hard every day and trying to improve my skills, hoping to get recognized and achieve some measure of success in life, yet I get a pittance while all these gamblers win big.
To be clear here, I'm not salty because I didn't invest money or lost it. I don't believe in either speculative stock investing or crypto "investing". I realize that speculative investments have a far higher chance to lose money, and losing money can really hurt you and your life prospects.
With both Bitcoin and speculative stock investing, what happens in practice isn't very different. They're glorified casinos and the winners are set for life, and it really grinds my gears because they didn't do anything to earn it, while I'm sitting at a desk day in and day out, working hard yet barely getting anything out of it.
But what's even worse is that the winners' wealth is created through exploitative means. For someone to win money in the casinos, someone else has to lose. Usually a lot of someones. And the losers? They can be drastically affected by their loss.
It's even more sad when you realize that most of them were suckered into playing the game with false promises: "Bitcoin/Gamestop is guaranteed to moon! Invest now and you'll never need to work again!" and so on.
Then when things fail and the hysteria ends, a lot of people are left holding the bag. Some turn to substance abuse, others commit suicie, yet others double down and throw more money at the casino in the vain hopes that they'll win the next time.
And even if speculative investments had a 50% or higher chance of making you a winner, what would that mean for our society?
I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure that our society would start running low on resources as people buy more luxuries they couldn't afford before and this would result in price inflation. Which in the long-term, would nullify the winners' wealth and make everyone else worse off.
It's all so upsetting, and very sad what our society really values.
Sorry if this was too long or rambly, but I really needed to get this off my chest. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Edit: This might not have been clear to some, but I'm not a Bitcoin supporter. I know how it works and why it's terrible.
Edit 2: Well, my free day of shitposting is ending, so I'm wrapping up this thread. Thank you all so much for your responses! There were many interesting discussions, even with coiners. I might respond more tomorrow, but not as much as today.
submitted by Darxchaos to Buttcoin [link] [comments]

PSA for new Dogecoin / Crypto buyers

Some points to newcomers after reading some frightening comments over in dogecoin:
·If you don't hold the keys to the crypto, you don't own the crypto. If you can't even withdraw the crypto, you definitely don't own the crypto. RH doesn't sell crypto, period. They sell supposed unwithdrawable custodian rights to crypto, and we are hopefully now all aware that RH is full of crap.
·Setting price targets like that of Bitcoin (30k or whatever) is completely nonsensical. Bitcoin has 18M coins out of 21M total possible mined coins. Dogecoin has 128B coins right now, thats 7100x as many. DOGE also doesnt haven't a hard cap due to regularly halving rewards, so its not deflationary in the way BTC is. It would need a market cap of $4Quadrillion to hit Bitcoin levels. In other words, bigger than all equity markets combined afaik. Dollar cost average (DCA) sells on the way up unless you want to drop off the cliff of euphoria into a 50-90% loss like Jan 2018 for a lot of people here. Its already x8 in a week. Bull runs rarely take coins more than x20 or so in a single major rally, and rallies are normally spaced a couple of years or so apart.
·Don't chase rallies. Buying significant positions after a 800% rally is a good way to be left holding bags. You should be DCAing buys, not throwing all of your savings at it at once. Its also pretty stupid to be all-in on a 9B mcap coin. That's high risk gambling if you're dropping most of your assets into it. It will legitimately most likely throw you into a year or two long depression if you lose half of your savings on Fing Dogecoin.
·Crypto should not be a significant part of your investments. If you're throwing most of your assets in this, and especially at one coin at the end of a major rally, you're not only placing yourself at an insane amount of risk, but you put steady growth of the asset at risk when you inevitably panic sell once the momentum runs out or a big seller enters the market. Everyone in crypto has done this to some degree. Its easy to say diamond hands all you want, and convince a thousand other sardines to buy in, and then have a whale decide they want to sell $200M worth over the next month who doesnt give a shit how it effects you. People have their own motives, and most whales probably aren't on Reddit. The people posting six figure holdings aren't remotely close to whale territory. There's 15 addresses with more than 1 Billion DOGE, and more than 100 with over 100 Million DOGE. Those people could potentially wipe out a rally solo.
·Diversify your bonds. Have other investment vehicles, AND other coins. My favorite analogy is that of a castle. You want to build your castle with stable assets, this is your emergency cash fund, index/mutual funds, maybe some large cap stocks, real estate, bonds. That should comprise at least 50%, ideally 80-90%, of your assets. Speculative investments are the raiding party that you send out to loot shit once the castle is built. That's riskier stocks, options, cryptocurrency, etc. Yes, its possible to get lucky if you're solely doing speculative gambling, but its fucking reckless and stupid, and for every DeepFuckingValue, theres 20 people posting loss porn about how they took out a loan for a crypto/options play and got destroyed. It's rolling around with a small army with no defensive position. Really easy to get annihilated by shifting tides in the market, particularly when its all in ONE position.
·Time in the market > timing the market. Quit trying to get rich in 3 weeks, or you'll end up constantly desperate for get rich quick schemes because you never bothered to build a stable base. Having a large emergency fund, and a significant amount of assets because you played it safe is a peace of mind that you cannot know until you have it. Don't throw away the possibility of that in a few years because you wanted to YOLO into Doge and be rich next month.
·The diamond hand thing is really...unconvincing, in case you're wondering. If you're trying that hard to convince yourself and others that you can hang on, you won't. Because anyone who's trying to convince themselves of it is clearly not used to having investments go +100-2000%, especially at the speed that crypto does it, so you won't have any instinct for when to take profits. Greed will set in, and you'll convince yourself that it can survive any correction, and you'll still be waiting for the quick recovery once it drops 60-80% and sits there for 2 years. People who do well in this market have limited exposure, and thus can basically forget about their coins for months or years, because they have other investments and secure finances whether crypto does anything or goes to 0. Euphoria and blind optimism doesn't keep someone holding until something goes x100+. Indifference, apathy, and patience are the more frequent catalysts, because you arent checking Blockfolio every 20 minutes and goading yourself into a panic sell when it corrects hard or crashes. Living in an emotional state thats constantly tied to whether the market is red or green blows. Most of us in crypto experienced at least a little of that in our first year or so. In a away, its exciting because the risk doesn't let you focus on anything else, but its a horrific way to live. The mania eventually gives way into broke disillusionment if you don't have at least a partial exit strategy.
Good luck and be safe. I'm sure this sub would really prefer not having to sticky the suicide hotline number again
Edit: please take note of ajaxhacker who has posted numerous comments to this thread spamming amc, nok, gme. This is shilling 101. "We the people have spoken"...lmao. Okay buddy. If the people had actually spoken it would involve financial regulation, not trying to make a quick buck. You think we haven't seen this crap before? People were doing this nonstop in 2017 with crypto. Your know what happened? Whales gobbled up everyone, a few shrimp got minted into sharks, but mostly...the rich got richer. Institutions will happily take profits off these before all retail investors have the opportunity to. Who, once again, don't give a shit about "holding the line with their diamond hands" and you losing money, because they've been holding since fall of last year and are already +10s of millions or whatever. Don't be naive and don't get stuck holding bags. This type of sentiment is your worst enemy in trading and is one of the earliest and most painful lessons in speculative markets. These are the whales Im talking about:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/reddit-day-trader-army-fattens-fortunes-of-world-s-super-rich
submitted by PlantWolf to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments]

Never Blindly Follow All "Stock Market" YouTubers | Possible Exposed Fraud [Tom Nash] & The 5 Reasons Why I Believe Tom Nash Is Lying

Hello everyone! This isn’t my usual kind of post, but man, I can’t stand to see how people just follow every freaking YouTuber out there blindly! In this post, we are going to talk about why I believe Tom Nash may be a fraud, so please do have some patience and read the full post, as I will go through an in-depth research of his past and his claims.
~Very Long Post~
Let’s start by talking about who Tom Nash is & says he is. He is a new & trendy “finance & stock market” YouTuber which has recently passed 150K subscribers after exploding during this retail investor boom, but here is a short video from his YouTube describing himself.
In the video he is claiming he is a former “senior financial analyst” which is very hard to believe in my opinion after doing a lot of research about him.
So let’s go through the 5 reasons I believe he is lying about his past & why you should never take anything any YouTuber out there says for granted and you should do your own research as well:
1) Let’s start with the biggest one, his valuation methods are flawed
Even though he has posted some videos that have panned out, it’s very hard to differentiate good analysis from pure luck in this recent bull market, even monkeys could throw darts at stocks in the past 11 months and be right after the March sell-off.
I was pretty curious of his valuation methods so I joined his channel membership and asked him a direct question, about his DCF valuation, to which he responded bluntly that I am doing things wrong. I also sent him a direct link to a well-known financial institute, where we can see that the most common cash flow used for financial modeling, which is the unlevered free cash flow, implies that you subtract any capital expenditures of the company, which contradicts the way he sees it and is plain wrong, it’s like he uses 2nd grade math, if you subtract a negative number then your cash flow actually increases, which doesn’t even make sense. How can something that costs you money be a positive on the free cash flow?
I’ll let you digest this as I will next show you some of his DCF valuations & how he uses absurd numbers and changes the formulas as he pleases just to reach some insane valuations for companies just to be catchy.
Here are a couple of short extracts from his Salesforce DCF calculations,
Exibit A - everything seems legit until here, now he starts with the biggest mistake in this DCF
Exibit B - I’ll be blunt you can never, ever add the Capex number to a DCF valuation, that literally throws the hole calculations off, but let’s continue…
Exibit C - So, using a discount rate of 6% is also insane, even with the current low interest rates, you should at least discount the average SP500 return, or use the WACC or any other type of metric, which is much safer than picking out a single company, as the SP500 has proven over long-stretches to be a great performer.
But yeah guys, this isn’t the first time he has done these kind of errors, you can see he is using most of these methods in many stock picks which are then spread out to thousands of new investors, who don’t really have the knowledge to test what he is saying. I’m just showing you here a couple of stocks like Dynatrace, Opendoor, Alibaba, Peloton, Salesforce as I showed in the previous video and even Apple that have been analyzed and spread to the public this way.
The other big issue with his valuations is that he is using insane long-term growth rates, as he used a 5% growth rate for Peloton to reach a higher valuation, so can you imagine? If Peloton grows at a 5% rate in perpetuity it means they should more than double the inflation rate every year and is way higher than any GDP growth the US has seen since 1984.
He is also implying that Peloton has no debt on it’s balance sheet, which is 100% false, as you can see HERE, he used the cash, cash equivalents & marketable securities to calculate the short term assets while completely ignoring the over $700M in accounts payable no to mention the other current liabilities which would add up to almost exactly the $1.4B in assets he added to his calculations.
But who knows guys? Maybe he is the real deal, as he has made some correct DCF implications for some stocks like Fortinet and FuboTV, by actually subtracting the Capex finally, though he doesn’t do this in every analysis, not even in the most recent ones while also keeping that big long-term growth rate at 5%, when I myself never use a bigger one than 4%.
Just for an example I took his CRM numbers and popped them up in my spreadsheets, and even given his methods I couldn’t quite get to the same results without manually editing numbers, as those implications resulted in a 7% undervaluation for the stock, while only adjusting the Capex to be a negative on the cashflows and not touching anything else that might be wrong in this DCF, resulted in a 10% overvaluation for the stock.
So, I think if he really was a 10+ years wall street analyst I don’t think he could have made these obvious mistakes.
2) So, Is Tom Nash whom he says he is or is he lying about his past?
HERE is the channel intro for his YouTube (Which I can't even see anymore, but i was lucky to download it a couple of days ago)
As you Can see, I don’t doubt that he actually went to Michigan or that he got and MBA, but I do doubt that all of his Successful “Senior” Financial analyst & consulting Career can be described with only a couple of weak-ass photos of him at an NBA game, or him casually at some kind of a course program as that is exactly what it looks like with the other guys in the back-left of the photo.
Also, are we to believe all of this great financial career ended with him just taking out his fake plant from his office, while also smiling as he threw away at least a decent salary for a gamble on YouTube, which is very hard to do, especially when you are starting, as YouTube doesn’t really help the small guys.
His YouTube journey seemed to have started on the path of exposing guru’s and not financial advice, as he also says in the video, so how did he turn to do financial analysis on YouTube? Seems pretty convenient that he just became an expert in stock analysis as YouTube videos on such things were booming.
You can see HERE, he didn’t make a single stock analysis for the most part of 2020, which seems pretty off, as now most of his videos are on stock analysis, and while his channel was created in 2017, he conveniently deleted all the previous videos, which is another weird move to do.
I also went on a deep internet dive and did a lot of searching about him and I found this video podcast of him.
His main intro in this podcast is that he works as a consultant indeed, from Israel, and also the consultancy job isn’t for a financial company, it’s rather to help people on YouTube grow, so let's look at some extracts from the video:
Exibit I - We can see the main part of the talk is nothing about anything related to his financial past, let’s continue
Exibit II - It seems he started with a gaming channel, not even a fake guru channel, and I also found something about that FB GROUP which isn’t active anymore and all of the videos he made for that have also been deleted as you can see in this post from way back in 2018 as he was teaching how to make money on YouTube well through 2019, and was even giving out free workshop experiences as he was pumping out creator content which is miles apart from financial analysis (BTW, he is using the same freaking photo in his old banner & logo as his current one, just changing the green screen background), just look at his old YouTube banner (YouTube tips & tutorials)
Exibit III - Yeah, it seems he also did some video on how to promote on Reddit, and what comes next guys is literally mind blowing, how much more can this dude lie & hide?
Exibit IV - Well… Nothing to hide then… He even had a Fiverr account which was called tomernash you can see clearly HERE, that is his username, and when I went out to check it out right now, he is using a fake picture & and still might live in Israel, not the US, and on top of this he might not actually even be from Russia, which he has been saying over & over again on his channel. You can SEE he reiterates he is a certified YouTube consultant with no mention of his financial skills or certifications.
And even more, you see what picture he uses as a logo yeah? Well, I did a reverse google search and found the other guy also has a YouTube channel about kinetic cycling.
Maybe he was one of his clients that he reached a deal to use his picture, wtf, the more I dig in the more I am amazed of the lengths this man has gone to reach fame on YouTube.
Exibit V - So… A financial analyst with no sheets, no paper, no nothing, great stuff for a senior financial analyst, I literally can’t take more of this so let’s move to the next reasons
3) Getting in front of the lie?
I believe that’s what he was trying to do to, by making a VIDEO on this very subject in mid-2020 and popping up higher in the search rankings before his channel boomed.
In the video he clarifies that Tom Nash isn’t his real name, but he also restated that he was working for a big consultancy firm as recent as this summer, and that he does shit tons of stuff which is very hard to believe, as usually this big consultancy firms have different departments for different things that he mentioned in the video. You can still find that video on his channel if you are interested
But, by the way, how was he working on that job while also doing hundreds of Fiverr jobs as a YouTube consultant?
He also claims to not offering any courses, e-books or other stuff like this, which is false as i showed in the previous reasons with his past YouTube courses & other stuff, and as you will see in the next reasons, something smells really bad out here.
4) Claims about his past
I also took a deeper dive into more of his past, as you can see in his previous channel cover and info, he had only about 4K subscribers as he was doing guru video reviews on YouTube, but all of a sudden, he became a senior financial analyst from wall street that was living in Israel & doing Fiverr gigs, I don’t know what to say but it seems pretty fishy to me.
I also checked his LinkedIn page, and all of his skills & endorsements seem to be related to his YouTube skills and nothing about finance or the stock market.
But I also found his profile on Quora, where he wasn’t that active but still, well back in 2017 he was posting things about gaming & YouTube while supposedly still working on Wall Street as a financial analyst, and it’s interesting that there is no mention of him following anything related to stocks, finance, economy, accounting, statistics or anything other related to the stock market.
So yeah guys, I guess when you make a new type of video and it boosts your channel from just 10K subscribers all the way up to 150K subscribers, you are willing to push the limits and lie about your past just to keep everything going, as YouTube is a really good way to make money right now.
5) The Transformation
He has had even more channels in the past not only this one, which he has transformed overnight from a YouTube Channel Reviewer to a Guru Reviewer and finally to a financial analyst , as He created a second & third YouTube account called GearlyReviews where he reviews electronics and EuroBall where he only posted 2 videos.
I also searched him through his Reddit posts and only could find things related to marketing & social media, nothing about finance yet again.

So, my personal opinion which I doubt to be wrong guys, if there is a case of a dubious & fishy person out there, he is one of them.

I believe that he has never worked as a senior financial analyst and especially not a stock market, asset or any other type of equity analyst.
Most of his stock picks are small-caps that are highly volatile or a couple of recent high flyers which are very catchy to any YouTube audience.
There are many things wrong about the picture he has painted about himself even though he has gone through a lot to try and erase his past. The fact that there are no mentions of things from the wall street or consulting firm, bad stock analysis and methods, fishy and dubious moves of his YouTube channels and especially fishy things about him being a consultant & analyst in early 2020 while he was already doing YouTube and other stuff back in 2017-2018 really makes me not want to buy his story.
Folks, be careful out there, you can find a lot of YouTubers out there who make more money from their advice giving on YouTube, Patreon or other kind of subscriptions and courses, compared to the actual money they are making or have ever made in the stock market.
So yeah guys, I don’t want to make a final judgment on this guy, but you should consider everything I have showed about him and all the problems with his past & his financial methods & just remember as always in a bull market everyone is an expert & genius, while in a bear market you can’t find any of these people as they all flee.
Later edit: He has currently disabled his Fiverr gigs, learned Russian and deleted the profile image LOL
SEARCH / PROFILE / RUSSIAN
Thank you everyone for reading🙏 Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion! Have a great day and see you next time❗
submitted by 0toHeroInvesting to stocks [link] [comments]

Losing touch extended version - now with ideas for changes

Hello all
Some days ago I made a post that got a bit of attention (scopely_you_are_losing_touch_with_your_playerbase).
But my post did not focus enough on what can be done to help alleviate some of the problems we are seeing in the game right now. So therefor I will try to do a better job of that in this post. It’s not going to be perfect, probably not even close, but I really hope it can spark a discussion that Scopely, Cerebro in particular, can take some points from and try to make this game that we like so much, and make it that much better.
Before we go into the nitty gritty, I would like to say thank you for all the positive feedback I got on the last post. I had feared that it there would be a lot people throwing mud at each other or starting to bash Scopely. But most of you kept it sober and constructive, so I hope we can keep that tone.
With that said, this post can be a bit more dividing of the community, cause we all have one thing that we think is the most important thing to fix. And some of the solutions I am going to propose might not hit the spot for you or at all, but I hope it sparks a discussion.
This is going to be a long post, and I know that it will not go down as well as the first one, for one it is simply too long, but also because it gets too focused on what changes I would like to see. Cause we can all agree on that we want changes, but when we then have to discuss what those changes are, then we get more divided. I really want to point out that I don't expect everybody to agree on what I have written. And also that my native language isn't English, but I hope that my points still gets across.
But lets get into it...

Red Stars

We are going to start out with what I personally find to be the biggest issue in the game right now. I know that RTA is a more hot topic right now, but I find red stars to be the biggest issue.
Right now red stars are a double edged sword. Cause when you get the 5+ red drop on the new character you of course get happy. But with the droprates in mind, most of the time red stars leave you with a sour taste.
Getting 3 red stars or lower on a new good character is so deflating that even id you got good pulls on your last 2 characters, that goodwill is out the window straight away.
So what can we do to make red stars a bit better? I think the solution is in the silvegold promotion credits. If silver credits was added to red stars so that when you get a duplicate character, then you also get some promotion credits.
Here is how one solution could be, the numbers might have to change a bit, but this is just the general idea.
1-2 star dupe: 1 silver promotion credit
3-4 star dupe: 2 silver promotion credit
5 star dupe: 3 silver promotion credit
6 star dupe: 1 gold promotion credit
7 star dupe: 2 gold promotion credit
These are just numbers to showcase the idea. If we look at my pulls for Bishop then this is what it would have netted me (all my pulls where dupes apart from the 3 star Bishop):
20 1-2 star pulls = 20 silver credits
19 3-4 star pulls = 38 silver credits
6 5 star = 18 silver credits
Total = 76 silver credits.
Now that is not a lot, and I don’t think that would break the promotion system. But I do think that it would help with the bad feeling about red stars.
With this system red star orbs are still the driving factor, and if you get lucky then you still get happy, but now when you get unlucky, then at least you progressed a bit still by having more promotions credit.
I would also like to get rid of the promotion store. We have enough randomness in the game. If we could promote characters straight from the character screen, then the system would feel a lot better.
I get that the store is probably there to make people burn some cores when they are chasing that on character they want to bring up.
Also, let us update them way faster. Right now over a month passes on most new characters before they are even added to the store.
I think the worries from Scopely is that we would start hoarding, and then only spend on the “best” new characters. But I really don’t see that as a problem in the long run. Cause with the added focus on wider rosters you will still have to bring up more characters instead of focusing on a few.

RTA and the Battlepass

So this is the hottest topic right now, at least with the people that I talk to.
If we look to other games battlepasses are generally a positive thing, but in almost all of them they are also something that you can get done by playing the game as usual. I play PUBG and while the battlepass here is something that divides the community a bit, it is one that I like. Some days I just have to get some kills and I progress. Other days I have to get kills with a crossbow (I’m not good enough to get that done), but its all something I can do by playing the game as usual, I just have to pick up some other weapons than the “meta”.
Battlepasses are created for two things:
· Have people log in every day.
But in MSF people already have to do that, so the battlepass doesn’t do anything at all for that.
· Have people spend extra money, especially in FTP games.
If spenders got the possibility to buy all the prizes we get from the battlepass for 20$ without having to grind it out, then I am 100% sure that way more people would buy it. But with the current way its tied to the RTA I actually think you are just losing money.
The current form of battlepass that is implemented is really just an offer with extra steps.
In MSF you have tied the battlepass to a single gamemode, and that takes all the possible fun out of that game mode. No people I have talked to likes RTA, not 1 person has something positive to say about it actually. But when you ask around, then a lot of people really started to like the balanced draft.
So what can we do to make this a bit better?
Solution 1: make us able to complete the objectives in other gamemodes. And if you really want us to grind the RTA also, then make it count double so that there is an incentive to play it if you want to get it over with as fast a possible.
And that is where I think the biggest problem with RTA is right now. Its not fun, it is only a grind. The way I play it is to open RTA and press auto when I’m at work. I don’t even look at it, I just wait for the winneloser screen to pop up, and then go in and do it again. I get annoyed when people are slow, or if they don’t load in.
As I see it there are 0 positive things about RTA right now. And the biggest problem I have is that no one I asked could actually find a way to make RTA fun with the current setup.
Leagues and events could be a saving grace. But since we don’t even know what Scopley have in mind about these we can’t event try to make that better. I’m afraid that events is just like the battlepass, but I think that leagues could take RTA in the right direction. Cause if you make RTA about winning and trying your best, then its suddenly competitive instead of just a mindless grind.
And I think it goes without saying, but I’m going to do it anyways, please revert the changes you made in 5.1 about quitters.

Doom raid

After my original post I was told that the Doom raid wouldn’t actually be for a limited time. And that changes my view a lot. Cause I do like that there are new and hard/almost impossible challenges. I was only worried if it was a limited that most people wouldn’t ever be able to get in there before it was taken down. But if its there to stay, then I don’t mind the current difficulty, even though I won’t step in there for at least another 6 months at best.
But the point about the prizes still stand. They are simply not enough. Not even close actually. And right now only the top alliances are even able to get them, so you have created a “the rich getting richer” scenario, cause the prizes in there are what makes you able to compete in there.

Availability of new characters

I personally don’t mind the cadence of new releases of characters, new characters are what drives the game forward. But you have to make them available faster. The last couple of releases we have seen them added to orbs pretty fast (Longshot or Shatterstar was even added as their event was going on), and that is a small step in the right direction. But lets take a look at the most grievous current unfarmable character, Beast, he has been in the game for over 7 months (possible longer, I couldn’t find the exact date he was released.) without being farmable. That is simply not good enough.
I know that he didn’t sell that well, and that Scopely has probably tried to wait with making him farmable to see if they could make more money of him, especially now that he actually seems to have a good place on the Axmen, I get it. I personally unlocked Beast at 3 stars, and I have not used him in anything than a throwaway blitz team. Is that fun? Is that something that makes me want to invest further into him? I think you know the answer.
A possible solution to this problem is to add them to some of the stores faster. I understand why you are hesitant to add anything newish to the blitz, raid or arena store. Cause people now have so many credits stockpiled that any further income on them once they are added are out the window. But I think you can add them at a much higher price point in the stores. That does two things:
You now give people something to use their credits on that they actually want, and at a higher price you are getting people to deplete their resources faster and taking both the blitz and arena store economy to a place where we once again have to make decisions on what to invest into. But at least you are giving us something to invest into. As of right now I have 150k blitz credits, so when you added Electro at 500, that wont even make a dent into that economy. But if you added new characters faster at a premium price, lets say 5-10,000 credits. Then you are giving us something to invest in, and you are bringing the economy to a better place. They of course shouldn’t stay at the premium price forever, at given intervals they should have their prices reduced until they hit the 500 credits that normal characters in the store has.
I personally don’t mind that a few select characters are orbs only for a while. I get why they are that. But I also understand the frustration that a lot of players feel about orb only characters. I only mention this so that a discussion can spark from it.
If we look at the prices on buying new characters I think we can all agree that they are too high. But I get why they are high and I don’t think that will change. I personally don’t find it to be that big of a problem, but I understand why a lot of people do. I also think the problem would be alleviated a bit, if we could start farming them in one way or the other sooner. Then players who really want the newest characters can pay and be ahead of the meta, and the people who can’t/won’t pay can still try to catch up without having to wait half a year, where the ones they can now farm are probably power crept anyway.

New player problems

This is only something that I have heard a bit about, and only mention it so that others can chime in.
But right now there is a huge scarcity of blue ability mats. And there is no real good way of farming or even buying them.
I think the problem stems from the powerlevel of characters, so now newer players don’t have to spend time on the lower raids that actually give these mats like we did when we started out. It doesn’t take a long time for a new player to be able to get into an alliance that does at least U6 or even U7, where these mats aren’t something they get.
A simple solution that I could see working out is to simply remove green and blue ability mats from the game. I doubt that Scopley are making any money on these mats, and for people that have played a long time these mats are a non issue and never will be cause we have pretty much infinite of them.
As I said, I don’t know too much about this problem as I only just heard about it on a stream not so long ago. But I wanted to add it to the list anyways. And there are probably more new player problems that I don’t even know of. So please add that to the discussion below, but also please try to be constructive about it, not just “We want more”.

Skillitary/new teams videos

We like that we can see new teams in action, but when you showcase them you have to be upfront about them. Skillitary has left a sour taste in the mouth of most people who bought into them.
Yes, they can win against Marauders if brought up to the same level, but its still a gamble and more luckbased than playing with actual skill (on pun(isher) intended). But if you miss that first disrupt on Stryfe, then the whole team just crumbles. So if you showcase a new team as the new team to take out the “big bad”, then they have to at least be able to punch up a bit on them. I’m not saying that they should just win 100% of the time, but with Skillitary they even struggle on punch downs.
If Shadowlands turn out to be as big of a letdown as Skillitary I think that will make you lose a lot of goodwill and at this point in the game, that will be very hard to gain back.

War

I am generally pretty fine with war and how it plays out. There are two pain points that keeps popping up tho. The most obvious one is the matchmaking sometimes makes you go up against unwinnable opponents. And that does make it feel very bad. But I also understand why you can’t always have it close to your own TCP. Cause who would the top alliances ever face if it was only trying to match on TCP?
If it was changed to only factor in TCP, then we would suddenly have alliances in the top leagues, who where a 10th of the biggest alliances, but they would never have to face them because of the TCP difference. So the current matchmaking system is probably the lesser of the two evils. And yes, I know that it is very demoralizing to get 50m+ punch-ups week after week. But I think that stems from a problem that is unfixable, and that is the huge TCP difference between alliances. If we take a look at Legion_of_Cabal they currently have a combined TCP of 400 million. If we look at the 100th most powerful alliance they right now have a combined TCP of 251 million. That is such a huge difference that war matchmaking will just not ever be perfect.
The second pain point of war is time spent. And in that also when you have to spend that time. Luckily my own alliance aren’t too focused on war, we are only G4. Most of the time we face alliances that wont clear us and we wont clear them. But higher up in the leagues, clearing as fast as possible is the only way to win. And that means getting on every time new energy is available, also if that means disrupting your sleep schedule to do that. I personally would never do that at where I am in life, but I understand why. I was fighting for world first in WoW back in the day, so I get why people do it. The problem is that they have to do it 3 times a week. Instead of just, in the case of WoW, when new content comes out. Its just not healthy.
I don’t have any experience in high level war in MSF, so I hope that some of you that do can weigh in on this with ideas how to make it better.

Resource bottlenecks

This is a sore point for everybody in the game. I think we all understand why bottlenecks are a thing, and we all probably understand that it is also a necessary thing in a game to have something to grind for. But in the current state of the game, there are simply way too many bottlenecks.
My proposed solution would be as follows:
Get rid of green and blue ability mats. They serve no purpose anymore other than hindering new players from catching up. Then when the next level of ability levels are introduced, then you can add new currency for that and have us start out on the same level. Spenders will then be able to get a head start as always, and that is fine. Also take away the gold cost for leveling up abilities, or at least lower them.
Get rid of training mats all together. Or change it so that they are the only currency needed to level up characters. It simply can’t be both gold and training mats unless they are giving them out a bit more freely. And I know it’s a balancing act, cause you don’t want people to have too many resources, and if we had infinite resources, that would also be bad for the game, as there is nothing fun in having everything given to you.
If the above are implemented, then I don’t even think you have to make any changes to the gold we gain now.
We of course don’t know how much money you make out of creating these scarcities, and I get it if the metrics show that you can’t just make them go away. But then at least acknowledge the problem that players are feeling about the bottlenecks. You don’t have to fix it in one big swoop.
Gear is another bottleneck, but one that I personally find better balanced. Sure, right now getting G15 isn’t easy, but I also don’t think it should be easy. A change that I would love to see however is a better way to be able to focus on the gear that we need. Right now its all random, even the offers you made us are random. But again, I get if your metrics show something else and that you are doing this to make the most profit. But sometimes the most profit is not the way to go, if the cost is that you lose players by doing it.

Help us help you

In my first post I stayed away from mentioning bugs on purpose. Bugs will happen, and if you address them as fast as possible then that is probably ok.
But you have a limitless amount of people who would gladly help you test upcoming patches for free. Right now you even have an envoy program that you clearly aren’t using to its full potential. Have them help you out with testing new features.
Just look at ISO8, when you first announced it people where up in arms about it. But you decided to have the envoys weigh in, and it has been the best and most polished feature you have ever brought out.

Finishing remarks

Right now the game is in a rut, I don’t think that is up for discussion. It is natural for a 3 year old game, mobile at that, to lose players over time. But I still believe that you, Scopley, have the bones of a game that could live on for a long time. But you need to treat it a bit more as a game than as moneymaker. It can be both, and it can be successful at both.
Make it fun again, that’s what games are about, entertainment. There has to be things that are hard or almost impossible to get, but it just can’t be every aspect of the game.
You said you wanted to look at reducing the low quality screen time, and then added RTA. I hope you can see how that makes us have trust issues.
I know this post isn’t perfect in any way, and I am very well aware that it might not change a thing. But I do hope that will, I really really do.
If you made it all the way to the end, then thank you for reading it all, or at least skimming the points that you feel are the most important.
And please, again, lets have a civil discussion about the issues we as players feel. And remember that even if we feel something is wrong, it might not actually be wrong for the game.
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I'M TURNING 50! NOW, WHAT?

My blissful, hilarious and wacky financial journey…. I hope you all learn something
THE FIRST 10 YEARS OF MY LIFE
I learn how to sell, how to read and write. I play money a lot. And I enjoy it. Play selling and teaching too. Enjoyed them all.
I lost my dad and I hate my mom. She did a lot of mean things to him based on her stories. I hate her for doing that to him. She is mean.
I discover that writing can always help me. Like I have a best friend.
I know there is God.
I hate to be poor. I am so ashamed of it.
I feel guilty asking for money for the things that I like. Mudra made me feel this way. Her message is we are poor. I cannot have money. Some were spoken. Some were not.
I made kupit from mom's box of money. The excess from the kupit, I throw beneath the sleeping place.
I do not like who I am. I formed a belief that I am not worthy, I am dirty.
I know I am also kind and smart.
THE NEXT 10 YEARS (11-20)
I know what I want. A happy family, wealth, and being somebody. I want to measure up, to belong.
I know I am not deserving of anyone. Nobody will love me. My male playmates did something they should not do that made me feel this way.
I read a lot. I enjoy it. Magazines, stories.
I want to help my mom and my sisters.
I finished college.
At 20, I had my first and last boyfriend. Got married.
THE NEXT 10 YEARS (21-30)
At 21, I gave birth to my first son, at 23 to my second child, a baby girl, at 25 to my 3rd child, a girl again, and at 28 to my 4th child, another girl. All through a C- Section. You can imagine how much it cost that the last girl had to be in a public hospital where you have to buy your things from gloves to anesthesia and everything. Libre nga lang dr at the hospital!
At 22, live on our own, me the hubby and the first child. Plain housewife.
At 24, the hubby lost the job with 2 kids around. Life happens. Prepare. Learn a lot from other people who had the same story.
Started incurring debts.
Move into parents with 3 kids, move out, and accumulated lots of debts, starting this and that (business).
For those who lost a job. My first advice is to get one. If you do not have ipon do not loan to start a business. And even if you have ipon, do not gamble it on starting a business you hardly knew about. Learn first. Make money from your high paying skills.
I read a lot. Enough to inspired me. We joined a community as couple. A big help in passing through the early test of married life.
THE NEXT 10 YEARS (30-40)
At 32, I gave birth to my youngest son. Last na to!!!
I go back to my profession. Work in the hospital as a nurse for 3 years. Still accumulating debts.
Change job from being a staff nurse, to becoming a clinical instructor. Teaching this time. A lot bigger salaries but still not enough to raise 5 kids, in elementary and hs and one in college.
Renting home. Our 9th move in since the time we got married.
I learn the value of giving tithes and had my income doubles and triples in the next few years. From 8,000 working as a staff nurse to 48,000 teachings on nursing students and hundreds of thousands to millions in the next years to come.
AT 40 – TILL 49
I sell real estate. I leave work at school teaching nursing students.
I bought my own home. I have a happy family. Sometimes not so happy.
We bought a second-hand car.
I started investing in stocks, equities, and real estate.
I encouraged my OFW sister to learn about stock investing. She listens. She now has more than a million portfolio. Thanks God she did. She is now buying her fifth real estate, 3 in the Philippines, 2 in Italy.
I am now starting to teach the younger one, an OFW also. A bit emotista than the other one. They were both married living abroad with their families. They both have a son.
Also at 40, I earned my first millions but still creating a lot of debts. I can only pay a few
I bought life insurance for one year and St. Peter then blows it all up. I was not able to continue paying the following years.
I screwed up.
I almost lost everything. The only one left was the house we currently live in. It is fully paid.
I have very bad records on lending institutions, cooperatives, and the likes. My credit score is soooo bad. Here’s what I found out. I started debiting for the fear of not having enough. When I was able to work out on those fears there’s more. The guilt. I need to feel guilty making money.
My lesson takes away- money will make more of what we keep inside. If you are afraid before the money, more money will make you more fearful. Work on the inside first.
I hated my mom and repeated her cycle of debting. By the way, it took time before I realized this. She is more than 12 years gone now. Don’t get me wrong. I deal with my issues with her and I am eternally grateful for having her as my mom. Our strongest emotion moves us unknowingly. Both the pleasant and the unpleasant.
I lost my eldest son (damn heartbreaking and financially draining. Memorial lots etc.. but the pain is the worst. Life happens again. Prepare. I don’t know-how. Read Tuesdays with Morrie. I’m glad I did before I lost my son.
I published a book and started a blog.
I sent to college 3 of my daughters. All working now. I sell all my stock investments to my eldest daughter. We started a business. 3 of my children are on their way to starting their financial journey.
I am starting again, done with the inside.
I have money now every month coming from the board and lodging fees I am charging with my three working girls. They are still living with us.
I’m nauseous thinking about the roller coaster ride I went through on my finances. I hope you all learn.
NOW AT 50? I COULD HAVE MADE A LOT OF WEALTH HAD I GOTTEN MY SHIT TOGETHER EARLIER IN LIFE.
Back to real estate again, the love of my life. Got some very good deals.
Done with emotional intelligence.
Writing. An international publisher takes notice of my book. Doing some allotment for marketing expenses.
Figuring out which life insurance to buy. The financial nightmare I’ve been through made most of my blood chemistry high. Those were some of the things I accumulated over the years of stress! Cholesterol, Increase BP, etc. So I have to buy my life insurance today in case I depart pre-maturely. I’ll have something to leave for my youngest who is still in Senior High today. Knock on woods.
I'm drinking malunggay tea everyday and walking!
I write my financial plan some 18 years ago, which I never follow. You can guess what I am doing now.
More stories later.
Most of you are very lucky. You are learning early. Good luck everyone.
PS…...(a day after I made this post)
I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I never thought my financial story would create this kind of engagement from all of you, truly grateful.
I promise to answer all your insightful questions in my upcoming post here. And for those who would like to read more of my stuff. just visit my blog. https://thehappyoikos.com/
You see your old dog here is a bit running out of time. I’m turning 50 remember? So I decided to only do the things that truly matter to me moment by moment, well don’t worry because that includes writing and making people happy. So you can expect to read a post that will answer your query.
Thank you again, everyone!!
Sending you all my love and hugs!
Aui V.
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In 1567, Lord Darnley died after an explosion at Kirk o’Field, smothered near the wreckage of his home. Who murdered Darnley, the dissolute husband of Mary Queen of Scots and a man of many enemies, and how much did Mary know? A set of Mary's letters might have the answer—if they're authentic.

Lord Darnley was not a man mourned by many. Today, his short and indolent life is overshadowed by his legendary wife and the circumstances of his death. But even today, more than four hundred years later, those circumstances are, in many ways, still a mystery. Of the hundreds who would have loved to see him dead—lords, lovers, and ‘friends alike—could his wife have orchestrated his murder? And what of the strange letters that seem to incriminate her?
Note: This is several mysteries wrapped up in one, so, fair warning, it’s disgustingly long. it's also another I have no idea how to tag. Murder? Lost artifact? It's 3AM and I don't care anymore. Apologies for the clunky title, too.
Life:
Lord Darnley, as he is commonly referred to, was born Henry Stuart sometime in 1545. In his infancy, his father—an earl—was found guilty of treason and exiled to England. Darnley received a classical education and was the model of a carefree noble’s son. Eventually, his father’s title was reinstated. Now, Darnley was an ideal candidate for any noblewoman in search of a husband.
One such woman was Mary Queen of Scots, Darnley’s cousin. Mary was taken with him immediately, but not all were; as Sir Walter Scott put it, “Young Darnley was remarkably tall and handsome, perfect in all external and showy accomplishments, but unhappily destitute of sagacity, prudence, the steadiness of character, and exhibiting only doubtful courage, though extremely violent in his passions.” Mary was not dissuaded, and they wed in July 1565, much to the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth. To no one’s surprise, the marriage was not a happy one.
Mary faced incredibly high expectations as the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland and, as many considered her, the legitimate heir to England’s throne. Darnley was not a partner with whom she could share her burdens; instead, he was “shallow, vain, weak, indolent, selfish, arrogant, vindictive and irremediably spoiled.” Darnley spent his days gambling and avoiding court business and his nights with women of ill repute. But he was also prone to fits of jealousy, and was involved in the murder of Mary’s secretary, David Rizzio. Though Mary seemed to forgive him, many have questioned how genuine this was—for all that she was saddened by the unhappiness of her marriage, she was a consummate politician. Whatever the case, she tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a divorce. Despite this, she gave birth to a son in 1566, and Darnley spent more and more time away from court.
Death:
As the distance between Mary and Darnley grew, Mary became closer to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and Lord Admiral of Scotland. Like Darnley, Bothwell was known for his brutality, licentiousness, and pride. Unlike Darnley, Bothwell was power-hungry and cunning, though he was “more opportunist than strategist.” Darnley, perhaps aware of the close relationship between Mary and Bothwell, became sullen, and eventually, in 1567, took ill (possibly from syphilis) in Glasgow. Mary traveled to him, and decided he would be sent back to Edinburgh to recover at Kirk o’Field house, a small two-story dwelling in a church courtyard (now covered by modern-day Edinburgh, likely under the Old College). Soon after, Mary left to attend a wedding. Allegedly, she remembered she had to attend the wedding at the last minute, after previously saying she’d be spending the night with Darnley.
On February 10th (note: some sources say 9th), a gunpowder explosion destroyed the house. But the explosion didn’t kill Darnley—his body, along with the body of his attendant, was found in an orchard nearby, likely smothered, with a cloak, dagger, chair, and coat beside him. Darnley wore only his nightshirt.
The explosion was strong, powered by two barrels of gunpowder placed under Darnley’s bedroom, and another servant was killed by the blast, which rocked the nearby church buildings. But Darnley and his attendant were not in Darnley’s bedroom, where they almost certainly would have died instantly. What passed for an autopsy in 1567 was performed, revealing internal injuries likely from the explosion, but no visible marks, from strangulation or otherwise. Some contemporaries believed that the surgeons lied about the lack of external injuries, but they would have had few reasons to do so.
Theories & Suspicion:
The most likely scenario is that something—but what?—alerted Darnley to the danger he was in, and he escaped from the house with his attendant using the chair and rope found with them. A pursuer, likely the person or persons who set off the gunpowder, chased Darnley (who would still have been weak from illness), and strangled or smothered him. Alternatively, some think that the explosion was never meant to kill Darnley, merely cover it up—but when Darnley escaped before he could be killed and his body burned, he was murdered in the orchard instead. According to one witness, 12 men went through the gate into the courtyard, and after the explosion, another eleven went by. Witnesses presented a problem, however, because of the differing opinions on Darnley and Mary. But the real mystery isn’t how Darnley died. It’s who did it. Or rather, who ordered it.
Unsurprisingly, Darnley had no shortage of enemies, political or otherwise. As consort to Mary Queen of Scots and scion of a controversial family, dozens of people would have loved to see him dead, to say nothing of his personal unpopularity. In Kirk o’Field alone lived Duke James Hamilton, an enemy of Darnley’s family with whom he had competing claims for the succession of the Scottish throne and the Douglas family, an enemy of Darnley with whom Hamilton had connections. And that’s in addition to the many, many others who might have come to Kirk o’Field to kill the convalescing Darnley, who was, as rumors had it, stark raving mad from syphilis; the family of the murdered David Rizzio, for instance, was quite prominent. In killing Rizzio, Darnley had also committed two capital offenses—unprovoked murder and high treason—and there is a strong possibility that Darnley’s murder could have been an extrajudicial execution, since, as Consort to the Queen of Scotland, he never could have been tried. Another very viable suspect is James Stewart, Earl of Moray and Mary’s illegitimate brother, who may have been attempting to kill both Mary and Darnley to seize the throne; there is evidence that Mary was expected to be with Darnley that night, leading several historians to believe that the target was not only Darnley, but Mary. James has also been accused of having signed a bond with other Lords in December of the previous year, pledging to dispose of Darnley, which makes it just as likely that Darnley was the sole intended victim. Some even argue that if Bothwell or Mary did it, it might have been James Stewart whispering in their ears and manipulating them the entire time—two birds with one stone for him, getting rid of the troublesome Darnley and casting a pall of suspicion over his political rivals.
Bothwell & Mary:
Despite the pool of suspects, the likeliest to most people of the time was Bothwell, who was already considered an upstart with ideas above his station. According to him, thunder came out of the sky, burning the house and leaving Darnley’s body intact. But according to one lord’s memoirs, Bothwell’s servant would allow no one to see the body. he certainly had motive; Bothwell, remember, wanted power—with Darnley gone, Mary’s hand would likely be his, and everyone knew it. Bothwell was tried by Scotland’s privy council in April of that year in what was largely considered to be a sham trial and acquitted. Queen Elizabeth herself seems to have believed Bothwell was responsible, though she was tactful enough not to mention her opinion on Mary's alleged participation. Soon after, he married Mary. It is still debated whether Mary was a willing participant or not; according to her letters, she chose to marry him to protect herself and her country. It is most likely, however, that she was forced through violence or fear to marry Bothwell. As time passed, many still remained convinced that Bothwell, possibly with Mary’s help, had killed Darnley.
Despite his acquittal, Bothwell’s accused associates were not so lucky. One, a captain, was hanged—likely a scapegoat—and several others were hanged and quartered. One of these men claimed that he, under the orders of Mary and Bothwell, had placed gunpowder under Darnley’s room. He also claimed that Mary had given him a key to the cellar under the pretense of wanting a new bed, which is considered strong evidence for her involvement. Mary also did comparatively little to investigate Darnley’s death, especially when compared with her usual forthrightness. And, on the night of Darnley’s death, Mary posted no guards to his house, as she usually did. Allegedly, Mary—who had visited Darnley the day before his death—had also planned on spending the night with him, but had changed her mind. But despite the suspicion, little could be done to the Queen of Scots.
The Casket Letters:
One of the most interesting parts of the Kirk o’Field mystery are the Casket letters. Soon after Mary’s wedding to Bothwell, James Stewart—another possible suspect in Darnley’s death—rebelled, leading a group of ‘Confederate Lords.’ Bothwell fled to Scandinavia, where he was caught and imprisoned, and died in April 1578, in “appalling” conditions. Mary, however, was put under house arrest (castle arrest?) and abdicated in favor of her infant son, becoming the Regent of Scotland.
Rumors soon spread that she was abdicating because incriminating letters had been found proving her involvement in Darnley’s death. This seems to have begun with James Stewart, who told an ambassador (and not Queen Elizabeth) that he’d “heard of” someone having found letters from Mary to Bothwell about the murder. Then, the Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, said he’d also heard of these letters, and that they showed Mary urging Bothwell to speed up the plot. According to a document from the Confederate Lords, these letters were found and disseminated before Mary’s abdication, and the existence of these letters was confirmed in a statement to Parliament confirming Mary’s abdication: “it is maist certain that sche wes previe, art and part (complicit) and of the actuale devise (plot) and deid of the foir-nemmit murther of her lawful husband the King our sovereign lord's father.” In the official charges against Mary, called Hay’s Articles, its alleged that a servant of hers was ordered to retrieve the letters but was caught and, after torture, gave the letters to Earl Morton, one of the Confederate Lords.
Thus far, the letters seem like little more than slander. But the so-called Casket letters were soon presented to a group of officers of Queen Elizabeth, and compared with known samples of her handwriting. The results—at least those released officially—were that the Casket letters were genuine. And, suspect as these results may seem, several other independent investigations revealed the same, even by those who wanted strongly to support Mary.
The collection itself, housed in the titular silver casket, contained eight letters, two marriage contracts, and twelve sonnets. The authenticity of the sonnets are questioned;, as one historian pointed out, they are far clumsier than what Mary would likely have written, and don’t fit the genre of “courtly love poetry” she would have known. The marriage contracts, which allegedly depict Mary and Bothwell’s union a full month before they’re known to have wed, seem to be an almost certain forgery, since they include excerpts from events that occurred after they were allegedly written, though some argue that the dates could easily have been either confused or deliberately miswritten. But the letters themselves, if true, are the most damning. The first two, known as “the short Glasgow Letter” and “the Long Glasgow Letter” (note: the texts of both are linked, beginning on page 127, as well as some excerpts. There are several translations, all of which differ, but the overall meaning is the same) allude most obliquely to a murder plot and affair between Mary and Bothwell. Some claim that the disparities in dates may be because all of the writings are Mary’s, but different dates were added later to make the Casket letters more incriminating.
Today, we would be able to compare Mary’s known writing to these letters and determine her guilt once and for all—but the letters are lost. They seem to have remained in Earl Morton’s possession until he was unexpectedly executed, after which they changed hands several times. Eventually, they ended up with the Earl of Gowrie, who refused to give them to Queen Elizabeth. Instead, they were given to King James VI, Mary’s son, and likely destroyed in 1584, though some still hope that they might have been hidden away. Several copies remain, one in French and the others translations into Scots and English. Now, whether or not the letters were authentic is almost impossible to ascertain, and as such, so is the true extent of Mary’s guilt, if she was guilty at all.
Final Thoughts & Questions:
The evidence against Bothwell—and perhaps Mary—certainly seems strong. But some, maybe conspiratorially, think that they were merely scapegoats. The English government certainly had reasons to want them gone, blamed for this crime and forever shadowed by it, their rule and chances for the throne destabilized. It certainly did shadow Mary for the rest of her life, and she never quite escaped suspicion. But Mary and Bothwell, as well as the English government, were clearly not alone in wanting Darnley gone, and the various nobles had motives that were just as strong. James Stewart, Earl of Moray, certainly ended up quite well; he flourished as regent of Scotland (note: before his own assassination where, fun fact, he was the first head of government assassinated via firearm) while Mary was eventually executed after a long period of captivity.
Interestingly, yet another mystery surrounds the events at Kirk o’Field. You may have noticed in my images the inclusion of sections from a sketch; this drawing, from soon after Darnley’s death, was created to summarize the murder scene. But several elements have been a source of confusion for hundreds of years; the artist includes, for instance, a group of riders in the corner. Those riders, however, were not mentioned in eyewitness testimonies until weeks later. How, then, did the artist know about them?
Sources:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/map-of-the-murder-of-lord-darnley-1567#
https://www.tudorsociety.com/10-february-1567-murder-henry-stuart-lord-darnley/
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kirk-o-field/
https://www.rse.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Who-Killed-Lord-Darnley.pdf
https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudodownfall-mary-queen-scots-execution-murder-lord-darnley/
https://www.britain-magazine.com/carousel/who-killed-lord-darnley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lord_Darnley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casket_letters
https://archive.org/stream/casketlettersmar00henduoft/casketlettersmar00henduoft_djvu.txt (the letters)
I genuinely thought this was going to be short. hahahahaha
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A Little Help for our Friends with Zac Clark: RECAP

The hosts say that his proposal made them teary.
Asked to expand on his story of addiction and recovery.
First notice of the addiction being a problem.
Challenging part about working in recovery.
Family’s importance and that dynamics.
His experience and his family.
Definition of hitting a rock bottom.
Sobriety
Release Recovery and his work.
Recovery and life in general
WHAT A GUY!!!
Very rarely do you hear someone who is so self-aware, kind, humble and eloquent.
Please listen to this because the hosts were amazing too. They let him speak and he didn't hold back.
submitted by RemarkablyCrazy_007 to thebachelor [link] [comments]

The limits on $GME may not be the fault of Robinhood, Webull and other brokers. Transferring funds to other brokers is likely not a solution to trading limited stocks.

This post was created for wallstreetbets, but is important for anyone trying to understand market movements over the next couple weeks, particularly anyone with exposure to any of the targeted stocks. I'd appreciate if the mods didn't remove it just because it's tangentially connected to another board. The behavior of the DTCC has the potential to effect everyone with money in the stock market, not just the WSB people gambling on meme stocks. If anyone wants to help figure this all out, it's appreciated.
I'm not a fan of Vlad, but this might not ultimately be his fault and if we are going to actually get this fixed, we need to go after the people who actually made the decisions that created this situation; The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. The DTCC owns the DTC, Depository Trust Company, which is the primary platform trading occurs on. Over 95% of all stock, options and securities trades in the US are handled by the DTC.
The DTC issued a rule to clearing houses like citadel on Thursday that they needed 100% margin on $GME (and all the other short squeeze meme stocks) buy orders, as explained by the Webull CEO on Benzinga. Clearing houses each have 2 day "clearing periods" each week that vary from clearing house to clearing house. This means brokers which have been allowing trading on $GME will stop as soon as their clearing house is in it's clearing period, which will start on Monday or Tuesday for the brokers that have not halted buys yet. Brokerages are only able to trade $GME and the other limited stocks by essentially borrowing enough money from banks to match every dollar we spend on the stocks we like, which is how Robinhood was able to allow limited purchases until they apparently ran out of money. Again. RH could have allowed unlimited buys until they ran out of money, but that would have turned into a few people consuming all potential shares as soon as this information was public knowledge.
The explanation behind the rule from the DTC is to prevent a market failure where someone selling their share would not receive money for it, which could happen, but the DTCC, DTC's owners, are the ones allowing naked shorts in the first place through "failure to deliver" stock sales. They should carry the ultimate financial responsibility of allowing this situation to exist. The DTCC is desperately trying to cover up the fraud they've been facilitating for decades and the only reason we can see it now is because they are running out of options.
If the DTCC is forced to end the practice of failure to deliver stock sales, or put restrictions on it, the value of all securities with significant short interest could see massive spikes in value as the short positions are forced to close. If the DTCC is allowed to continue this practice, hedge funds will continue being able to drive otherwise stable companies into bankruptcy through market manipulation and financial restriction.
The only mistake Vlad made was trying not to look underfunded on national television, which also made it much harder to find out what was actually going on, and likely guaranteed that he will remain underfunded for the remainder of eternity even if he's lucky enough to avoid jail time.
We have a chance to recreate the entire financial system in the image of DFV but it won't happen if we waste our energy trying to get Vlad to pay for our tendie party from inside a prison cell. There's way to many moving pieces here for me to figure it out, I'm retarded, but someone here is probably less retarded, or at least, I'm willing bet 75% of my life savings on it. Like I said. I'm retarded.
If we don't get this sorted out by Monday, the shorts might pull something we don't see coming in addition to all the people who just moved to TD potentially being locked out again. Holding isn't enough, we need to fight the meta war.
36 shares $GME 20 @ $40 16 more @ $200
I'm not selling till $128,128.69 after this.
submitted by KirbSOMPd to Fire [link] [comments]

My Christian Upbringing and How I Escaped

Discovering and embracing Satanism is an easier task for some than for others. I just wanted to share a little of my experience for anyone coming from a strict Christian upbringing or even a Christian cult. It's rare that someone is able to escape the clutches of a cult unscathed and then go on to thrive. It's not something that happens overnight and it can involve undoing a lot of ingrained beliefs, going through an identity crisis, losing family or friends, and changing your entire perception of yourself and life. Going through it, I wasn't sure I was going to ever get out. But now, I can really stand back and be amazed at how resilient we can be.
In the 80s, my midwestern parents found themselves in a self-destructive lifestyle, and after attending a church-hosted and horrific dramatization of people being dragged off to hell, they turned to Christianity as the magic cure for their unhappiness in life. When I was born, they were still brand-new born-agains struggling with substance abuse and addiction, but they went all in. And I mean ALL in. They ghosted all their friends, cut ties with every member of my extended family, and made a new family of believers. We were Pentecostal - the 700 club-watching, faith-healing, tongues-speaking, Proctor and Gamble-boycotting variety. If you've ever seen Jesus Camp that was basically my life. I don't remember a lot from those early years, but I've heard stories and have seen family photos to know that I don't want to remember.
As my sister and I got older, they attempted to shelter us from the horrors of the sin-ridden secular world. We were homeschooled with an all-Christian, church-approved curriculum taught by my mother (who had an 8th grade education) while my dad was at work. My textbooks contained and presented as fact the typical hoaxes and flawed analogies that form the basis for Christian science-denial, and I didn’t know any different. We lived in the Bible belt on a small farm, and everyone I knew was at least some form of Christian. There weren't enough non-believers to convert, so we spent most of our time trying to convert the Catholics and Baptists to "real" Christianity. My mom always said Pentecostals came first, Catholics and Baptists came along after and bastardized Christianity. Most of my "classes" were based in homemaking or farm work, and went along nicely with our weekly Wednesday night girl's program, The Missionettes. It was basically girl scouts but focused on Bible memorization and turning us into good Christian wives. We had badges like sewing, knitting, cooking, grooming, ettiquette, abstinence, and first aid. Of course we also had religious badges for communion, prayer, healing, fruits of the spirit, and the armor of god etc. A very well-rounded education.
While my parents went to church and we put on the face like we were living the blessed life, things at home weren't great. The hardest thing growing up was hearing all the adults at church go on and on about how great my parents were and how lucky I was to have such good Christian parents. One day, I remember my dad pulling me aside to tell me there was something wrong with my mom, that I should never make her angry because he wouldn't be able to choose between us. When I was 5, my mom threw a pair of scissors at my dad. They got embedded in his leg and he had to go to the emergency room. When I was around 6, my mom began to threaten my dad in front of us, saying by the time he got home from work, we would be gone. That my sister and I needed to pick who we wanted to live with because by the end of the day, we needed to be packed and ready to leave. My mom was a big fan of belts and the wooden spoon, and she never spared the rod. I have had many objects broken on me. When she would make us bend over, I would try to look back and apologize, to ask what I had done wrong, or what i could do to fix it, but anything other than complete eyes-foward submission was viewed as rebellion and only added to the count. She told me once in a joking manner that when I was in trouble, all I would say was "I want to hold you" to try to get out of punishment. She laughed. When I was 7, my mom told us that Satan told her to kill us with a potato peeler, and that she was going to kill us, my dad, and then herself. But “luckily” god "saved" us! After that, I remember my sister and I used to hide in our closet and pray to god to turn us into farm animals. Horses, dogs, chickens, anything, so we could run away and be free. We didn't even want to be human anymore. By the time I was 12, suicidal ideation set in and never really let go. Satan didn't scare me anymore. My mom did. Hell was real and I was living in it.
When I was 13, my mom found a pencil in a parking lot from a local high school and determined that it was a sign from god that we should be enrolled in public school. I was terrified. These people weren't anything like me, they were all lost sinners and it was my job to be the shining light in the midst of darkness, to teach them the way. However, it turned out, I was the one who did most of the learning. I was exposed to more math and science in high school than I had been in my entire life. I learned about other cultures and history. I actually made some friends and got to see how other people live for the first time in my life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, at that high school even touched the evil I experienced at home. There were days I didn’t want to go home. I never missed a day of school if I could help it.
The things I had believed started to not make sense in my mind anymore. It took several years for me to put all the pieces together, but the final straw was actually reading the Bible entirely from cover to cover for the first time, rather than just the “reading plan” i was given. I learned when the gospels were actually written, who possibly wrote them and why. I started reading about as many different religions as I could and started realizing the similarties of them all. I had a good friend at the time who wasn't afraid to challenge every religious and political position I had, and realized that I didn't even know why I believed what I did, only that I was told to believe it and always had. I began to reexamine everything I believed, no matter how trivial or obvious. It became clear to me that more than anything, I just wanted more out of life than I was given.
Originally, I wasn't going to go to college. We didn't have enough money, no one in my family had ever gone to college, and my parents had just assumed that I'd end up being a pastor's wife who played the piano for church services. But on the advice of an advisor, I applied to and auditioned for a music program, and I got in. I was finally getting out. But not before my mom could have the final word. When my parents found out I had been talking to a boy at school and that I liked him, she called me "the whore" for a month. One day, I had the flu and missed school for a few days. My boyfriend asked if he could bring over a can of soup and the homework I had missed. My parents agreed, and when he came in, he sat on the end of my bed (the door was wide open and I was under a ton of blankets) to ask how I was doing. My mom walked by and screeched at the top of her lungs that he needed to get the fuck out of my room and out of her house. That we weren't allowed to be in the same room without supervision. I had basically learned that sticking up for myself was useless, but I would stick up for him. He hadn't done anything wrong. I got out of bed and got up into her face and called her a psychotic bitch. She demanded that my dad throw me out. I looked at him and he looked at me and I will never forget what he said. "I told you not to make her angry because I can't choose between you. This is her house. You have to leave."
So I left. I slept in my car that night and eventually stayed with my boyfriend's family until my aunt (who my parent's ghosted) heard what happened. She took me in for several months until I could make enough money working a few part-time jobs to afford a small apartment. I completely left the church after that. I did visit a few others and even worked as a choir director at a non-denomination church for a while as a side gig, but it just wasn't the same. The veil had been lifted.
Out of the dozens of families who knew me, who watched me grow up and spent time with my family (some who even knew what was going on at home), none of them attempted to contact me. Out of all of my church friends, I am still in contact with only one, who left around the same time I did. When people say leaving a cult is like commiting social suicide, they aren't exaggerating. I was completely cut off.
If you asked my parents today, they would tell you that around 18, I gave into doubt and fell from grace. That the friends I made outside of church brainwashed me. That going to college was the nail in the coffin of my salvation. They'd tell you that by the time I turned 18, I was lost. But I was never lost. Not really. They’d never tell you that I always got in trouble for constantly questioning things. When I was eight, I wrote on the back of an offering envelope “If god created us, who created god?” and left it on a church pew for one of the elders to find (and subsequently got a beating for it). They’d never tell you that at ten, I got into an argument with the children’s pastor for saying men were superior to women because they were created first. They’d never tell you that as a Missionette, I got caught skipping sewing class to crash the Royal Rangers’ (all boys group) flag football games and outdoor events. And they’d certainly never tell you that I was eventually replaced as the president of a bible study group at school for focusing on the less-read and more appalling stories in the Bible, telling people that the gospels weren’t actually written by eye-witnesses, and encouraging people to actually read and think for themselves.
Discovering Satanism was actually one of the biggest steps in trauma recovery for me. To realize that all of my actions and behaviors were based in natural human needs and emotions that aren't at all sinful. That my learned helplessness was a direct result of my upbringing and I didn't need it anymore. That I had control of my life now. That I'm resilient and capable of going through a fire and coming out on the other end, and that I don't have to forgive anyone for anything. That the only person I can rely on is myself.
Here I am on the other side of it all, through many twists and turns. I'm the first of my family to graduate high school, go to college, or go to graduate school. I'm now a professional scientist working on Alzheimer disease research and a keyboardist in a working band. I'm active in my community both in local politics and through volunteer work. Things are far from perfect. I still struggle with old emotions, behaviors and thought patterns. It’s taken many rituals and even daily effort sometimes, but I've achieved a level of happiness and fulfillment in life I never thought possible.
——————
There is no heaven of glory bright, and no hell where sinners roast. Here and now is our day of torment! Here and now is our day of joy! Here and now is our opportunity! Choose ye this day, this hour, for no redeemer liveth! Say unto thine own heart, "I am my own redeemer." Stop the way of them that would persecute you. Let those who devise thine undoing be hurled back to confusion and infamy. Let them be as chaff before the cyclone and after they have fallen rejoice in thine own salvation. Then all thy bones shall say pridefully, "Who is like unto me? Have I not been too strong for mine adversaries? Have I not delivered MYSELF by mine own brain and body?"
The Book of Satan - Anton Szandor LaVey
submitted by SubjectivelySatan to satanism [link] [comments]

I am 35 years old, make $56,000 ($231k combined), live in Seattle, and work in higher ed administration

Note: I was technically supposed to post this earlier this week, but noticed that no one was signed up for today (plus I was super busy earlier), so I'm posting a bit late, under a throwaway account! Fair warning: I'm VERY verbose, so this will be long!
Section One: Assets and Debt
As I mentioned above, I make $56k per year as an administrator in higher education. My husband (K) just got a raise to making $155k per year. He works as a lawyer, has been in the workforce for about 12 years. I won't get into too many details but he works for a small boutique firm, not Biglaw. He also sometimes gets a yearly bonus of around $10k-20k but it's not guaranteed or anything like that. K and I have totally combined finances, so the below numbers are for both of us. I have a humanities PhD but I decided to leave academia and find an alt-ac job. My current position has good work-life balance (I never work past 5 pm), but pays terribly and my university is very badly run. I'm hoping to leave higher education all together in the future and am currently enrolled in a certificate program to try to make a career transition to instructional design.
The big elephant in the room is that my husband, K, makes a lot more money than me. When we first met, he was paying off massive amounts of student loans and making much less, and I was debt free with a lot of savings, so we both spent about the same amount. Now he makes 3x what I make and we are both debt-free, so the difference is much more noticeable. We do argue about money sometimes (more in the past), but the reality is that I have a humanities PhD and will likely never out earn him, and he knew that when I married him, lol. Because of all the labor I do around the house and in our lives to support him as he works a much more intense job, I was very clear that I believed we should split our finances equally as soon as we got married. We don't have separate accounts and we generally check in with one another whenever we are planning to spend more than $100. This system works for us for now.
I also want to address the question about parental or family support. Although I technically paid all of my own bills since I got my Bachelor's degree, my parents supported me a lot by paying for my flights home to visit at Christmas or in the summer as Xmas presents/birthday presents. My parents also paid for my undergraduate degree (and K's parents paid for his undergraduate degree as well). They also gave us about $15k to pay for our wedding.
Finally, my parents recently gave me $20k as an "early inheritance." They told me they plan to do this every year (depending on the stock market). We put this money into a brokerage. I don't consider my parents rich, as they both worked hourly jobs in health care my entire life (as a nurse and respiratory therapist - both with only associate's degrees). We never owned a new car, when we went on vacation we stayed in hostels , and shopped almost exclusively at Goodwill. But they scrimped and saved and now they have over $1 million in a retirement account. So I want to acknowledge my financial privilege in that I came from this kind of background. K's parents are similar.
Retirement Balance: $186k (combination of 401k, 403b, 457, 2 Roth IRAs, and taxable brokerage account).
Equity: None, we rent.
Savings account balance: Approximately $45k.
Checking account balance: Right now, around 8k.
Credit card debt: Right now, around $3k. But we pay it off each month with our checking account balance.
Student loan debt: $0. We finally paid off my husband’s law school loans (around $130k), last year. I didn’t have any student loans from undergrad (parents paid) and my MA & PhD were fully funded.
Section Two: Income
Income Progression: I’ve been working in my current field for 3 years. I started off making about $53k and got tiny 2% “merit increases” twice. Then in July my payroll title was changed, which triggered a required raise of about $2k. (I am dramatically underpaid).
Before my current position, I was in academia. I worked as a visiting assistant professor for one year at my alma mater (made $50k for 9 months of work) and before that I was a graduate student for 7 years. I was paid $18k-21k in stipends each year and my tuition & benefits were covered. Luckily, I lived in a very low cost of living area and this was enough for me to live on without going into debt. I got my PhD in 2017. Before I was a graduate student, I taught English in Japan for three years and made around $36k per year. In high school and college, I had random jobs that provided grocery/spending money, but I was lucky enough to have parents that paid my tuition and my rent in college.
I’m currently trying to make a career change (as you will see in my diary) and enrolled in a certificate program which runs from Autumn 2020 to Spring 2021 in order to help with that.
Main Job Monthly Take Home: $7,634. This probably seems low relative to our joint income, but we max out our 401k (K) and 403b (me). I work for the state government, which means I’m also eligible for something called a Deferred Compensation Plan (457b). This is basically the same as a 401k but you can withdraw contributions and gains from the account at any age without penalty (of course, you still have to pay taxes). I also max this out, and the limit is the same as a 401k/403b - $19.5k. Also this number is before K’s raise is accounted for. It won’t increase until his end of February paycheck.
Other deductions - I have health insurance taken out (about $80 a month for me, K’s firm covers his premiums) and taxes. WA has no state taxes, so it’s only federal taxes. I used to have to pay $50 / month for a bus pass (K's was free), but I don’t pay any longer because I’m working from home during COVID.
Final note - the sum I mentioned in the headline includes a variable bonus my husband gets. My base pay is $56k and his is $155k (as of February 1). This year he also got a bonus of $20k, which is set up a bit strangely. About $4k of this was structured as a 3% matching contribution to his 401k and the rest was taxable income. In small law firms, it’s unusual to get any 401k match so this was nice.
Side Gig Monthly Take Home: None.
Any Other Monthly Income Here: We get some interest from our savings account… like $25 a month.
Section Three: Expenses
Rent: Rent comes to approximately $2,050 total for a one-bedroom apartment. Rent itself is $1886, then we have pet rent ($25 per month), bicycle parking ($15 a month) and water / sewage / gas, which is usually $120-150 (variable cost).
Renters insurance: $157.76, paid annually. $13 a month.
Retirement contribution: In addition to the 401k, 403b, and 457, which all come out before taxes, we max out our Roth IRAs. That means $500 each per month per person (for a yearly total of $6k each). As I noted up top, we match out our 401k and 403b (19,500 each) and our 457. My employee also offers a 7.5% match. K's employee offers a 3% match but it is included in his yearly bonus so it's not guaranteed (confusing).
Savings contribution: We put $500 per month into our emergency fund. We also put about $860 a month into our “sinking fund,” which covers large and small annual or sporadic purchases such as vacations, gifts, Amazon Prime renewal, car insurance and renters insurance, etc.
Investment contribution: $875 per month into a taxable brokerage at Vanguard.
In total, we save about 47% of our gross income. We can do this because we keep our housing cost low relative to our high income, we don’t have any debt remaining, we don’t have any kids or parents who need financial support, and we’re very privileged in a lot of ways. We are hoping to FIRE within 10 years.
Debt payments: None.
Donations: We budget $100 per month for donations, which includes one-time donations as well as some reoccurring donations. My husband does pro bono work as well. I would like to increase this by quite a bit, but I still have a hard time budgeting for donations because I spent 7 years living on approximately $20k a year. To go from that to making more than 10x that amount within 3-4 years is obviously something that I am very privileged for, but it is still hard for me emotionally to comprehend at times.
Electric: ~$50-100 (billed every other month)
Wifi/Cable/Landline: An extortionate $87.12 for slow internet that only works for Zoom calls about half the time. Do I really live in one of the tech cities of the future?
Cellphone: $170 (This includes both service and paying off two new iPhones. We could have paid them off up front, but it was actually cheaper by like $50 to go on a payment plan.)
Subscriptions: BritBox ($7.70), Spotify ($16.50), HBOMax ($16.50), We Hate Movies Patreon (my favorite podcast - $8.81). My parents pay for Netflix and my sister pays for Hulu, and we all share.
Gym membership: None. K and I both run and do yoga with YouTube videos. Before the pandemic, we went to yoga classes pretty frequently in person. I’d like to do some online synchronous yoga classes but find it hard to make time.
Pet expenses: Varies, but I budget $50 per month and also include an emergency fund for my cat’s vet bills in our sinking fund. She’s 11 years old and probably asthmatic, so I know her vet bills are going to increase over time.
Car payment / insurance: We own our car outright. Insurance billed yearly is $2,097, about $174 per month.
Regular therapy: $0
Paid hobbies: Nothing regular, sporadic language classes and art supplies.
Other expenses: Right now I’m doing a certificate to hopefully help with a career change. The total cost for tuition is about $5k and we already saved it up (included in our 'sinking fund') basically through spending less during the pandemic. I’ve paid two quarters so far, and the last quarter (due in March) will be a bit more - about $2.3k.
__________
Day 1
Morning: I wake up at 5:30 am. Ever since the pandemic, my sleep schedule has been shot. At first, I was so happy not to have to leave the house at 7:15 for my 45 minute bus commute and I slept in a lot. But the stress (and maybe getting old?) has made me an early riser, no matter how much I try to sleep in. I do value my early mornings with just me, my cat, and my coffee, though.
I start work at 8 am and begin by triaging my emails. I have a bunch of deadlines this week, so it’s busier than usual. My job tends to be very seasonal, and sometimes I have a ton of work and sometimes I have none and can work on other longer-term projects. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and place a Whole Foods delivery order for the following day at 10:30 am. We made a meal plan and put everything in the cart the day before ($117.36, including tip).
Afternoon: I have my lunch break from noon to 1 pm. It doesn’t really matter when I take my lunch break, since I’m salaried, but the others in my office are hourly so in the before times we used to always close our office during the same time. I have a piece of leftover delivery pizza and some spinach risotto that I made a few days earlier. I also have half a brownie – the last one from a batch I made a few days ago (K gets the other half). He also has leftovers for lunch.
I should say at this point that both K and I are lucky enough to have been working almost entirely from home since early March. An area near Seattle was one of the first places to get hit by COVID-19, and my state and both of our employers have been taking it very seriously ever since. Working from home hasn’t always been easy since we live in a 600-square foot apartment. Also, there is a three-story townhouse being built directly next door to us and I can hear the pounding in my dreams at this point.
Around 2 pm, I go for a 2-mile run. I feel like some money diarists tend to toss off things like “oh, I went for an easy 7 mile run,” at the drop of a hat, so I want to be clear – running for 2 miles isn’t easy for me; it’s exhausting, annoying, sweaty, and generally gross. Also I am very slow. But it has kept me sane during quarantine.
Meanwhile, my husband goes to our local pet store to get an enzymatic cleaner (our cat peed in one of our suitcases… I think it’s probably a lost cause, but it was basically brand new, so worth a try) and special weight-loss cat food. Our cat is an 11-year-old rescue from the Humane Society and she is a chonky girl. We had to sign a waiver when we adopted her, saying that we understood that she was very overweight, lol. Our vet recommended a special diet food, rather than just restricting her intake as we have been doing, so we will give it a try ($78). My husband also stops buy our local wine store and picks up two bottles. We’ve been doing a dry January, so this will be our first drink for a while ($27.53).
I have a phone interview scheduled for 4 pm – just a preliminary interview with an internal recruiter. It’s the first ‘corporate’ job interview I’ve ever had, since I’ve been in academia my entire life. I’m trying to make a pivot into instructional design / training and development. I’m just excited to get an interview. It seems to go pretty well, but who knows. They tell me they will probably get back to me by the end of this week.
Evening: My husband whips up a random meal of fridge remnants – pesto pasta with sausage and a fridge salad with feta and bell peppers. It’s pretty tasty with a little Sauvignon Blanc. During dinner, we play a card game we call gin rummy, although it bears no resemblance to the actual game. After dinner, I make a chocolate cake with orange buttercream frosting and we watch Cobra Kai.
Daily total: $222.89
Day 2
Morning: Up early again, a piece of toast for breakfast (very exciting). We’re out of eggs until our Whole Foods order arrives. I’m working on creating some tedious but necessary spreadsheets this morning.
Noon: Our Whole Foods order arrives around noon. Excitement! They’ve given us a half-rotten bag of romaine lettuce and substituted pecans for hazelnuts. I should probably just double mask and go to Trader Joe’s myself (our regular spot, only a 5-minute walk from my apartment). I’m just getting anxious about these new variants.
I have leftover meatloaf and spinach risotto again for lunch. Lots of meetings and more organizing spreadsheets in the afternoon. Around 3 pm, I go for my daily ritual - a 20-minute walk around my neighborhood. It’s still raining slightly but I need to get out. Halfway through the walk, I get an email from my apartment manager telling me the apartment will no longer accept debit card payments, direct deposit, or credit card payments for paying rent. In other words, only checks or money orders (?!). Ugh. Our lease is up in 4 months and we will not be renewing our lease. Our last apartment manager was a gambling addict who may have been stealing people’s identities, but by God, he kept things working. Ever since they fired him, this place has been going downhill.
Evening: I check my bank statements to update my budget spreadsheet and realize that I have been billed the wrong amount of rent. They actually charged me less than they should have. I don’t trust my apartment manager not to start charging me a late fee or something for this, so I call them up. They are baffled by how to fix this, which you would think would be the one thing you would want to get right, if you’re renting out apartments.
K cooks dinner – steak with a Roquefort sauce and glazed brussels sprouts. It’s from a French cookbook we recently bought and it is delicious. I work on classwork for my certificate program while he cooks. After dinner, I do the dishes and buy the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I watch the first episode – lots of shocking twists and turns! I’m planning to watch the rest of the episodes together with my younger sister, M ($22.01).
Daily total: $22.01
Day 3
Morning: K has an 8 am dentist appointment, so he takes off early. He already paid for the work last month, so there’s no charge. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and get to work checking my emails. It’s 8:20 am and the construction crew building a townhouse next door is blasting mariachi music. I’m glad someone is having fun. At least the sun is coming out.
Someone at work has made a critical error, but it wasn’t me, thank God. I was the one who found out about it, but it’s still going to cause a big old headache for me. I’m ready to be done with this job. K and I go for a run so that I can exhaust myself enough to no longer be furious about said careless error.
Noon: I have leftover spinach risotto and meatloaf again – exciting. I’m busy at work but frankly, not a lot going on other than that. Still no word about fixing my rent payments. I’m not really willing to pursue this any further at this point.
Evening: I start making chili (Turkey Chili from the NY Times) and cornbread (from my new cookbook, Jubilee). K is doing some work on our investments when he announces that, somehow, a transfer was scheduled from our checking account to our savings account of $55k (?!) We obviously don’t have $55k in our checking account, so we start frantically trying to figure out what’s going on. Numerous phone calls later, we still don’t know if that was a hack, if my husband somehow mistakenly scheduled the transfer himself, or if the bank messed it up. Either way, it doesn’t seem like any harm was done since the bank with our checking account just declined the transaction. But it seems really strange and worrisome. We get to work changing the passwords on all of our accounts, just in case it was some kind of hack.
After dinner (and chocolate cake), I have a Zoom happy hour with a local friend. We occasionally see each other outside but it’s nice to have a longer chat from the comfort of our living rooms. We both love murder mysteries, so we signed up for a service where a company sends us letters with clues and we try to solve the mystery together. It’s a fun way to stay connected and look forward to something during the pandemic. The service costs about $15 per month, but I paid for it in lump sum for 3 months, so it’s not included in my budget above. I drink some wine and we vent about work (we work at the same place) before getting started on the puzzle.
Daily total: $0
Day 4
Morning: I sleep in a bit, which is nice. Get up around 7 am. My parents are both getting their 2nd vaccine today – they’re both in their 70s and I am so relieved. I send my mom a “congratulations on being vaccinated!” text and we chat for a bit. I have leftover cornbread with honey and butter for breakfast – soooo good.
Work is not particularly exciting today, but someone sends me a last-minute request for something that does not need to be so urgent. I feel annoyed. Still no word from the interviewers on Monday, and I’m beginning to suspect I wasn’t selected to move forward. Too bad. K pays for a Wordpress website for the year (it’s a work-related website, but sadly his work doesn’t reimburse him). It costs $92.48.
Noon: The mariachi music is particularly loud today. I stand out on my balcony in the sun for a while and watch the workers. It’s been interesting seeing a house go up next door in real time, especially since I’m at home all the time. The workers are balancing on the top of the third story wall without, as far as I can see, anything like a safety line. It seems unsafe, but I presume they know what they’re doing.
We booked a cabin for the upcoming weekend in the Hood Canal region of Washington to do some hiking and birdwatching. I want to be as safe as possible and not go to any grocery stores or risk spreading COVID in any way while I’m there, so I place another grocery order with Whole Foods just for some special treats for the weekend. The cabin has a small kitchen and a grill, so we’re planning to make a fancy steak salad on Saturday. I order chips and hummus, some fancy cheese and meats, Tate’s cookies (I’ve heard a lot of good things about these), a baguette, and the ingredients for the steak salad. I also order a few staples I forgot in our last order, like sweet potatoes, more coffee, and half and half. It comes to $87.41, including tip, but that does include like $30 worth of steak. For some reason, I can’t order a small amount of steak online, so I’m planning to freeze half of it for later. (I include this purchase in our vacation fund budget, rather than under our regular grocery budget).
Around 2 pm, K makes a quick trip to our local wine store to buy an Oregon pinot noir and some port to enjoy at the cabin ($59.45). This store has an outdoor walk-up counter where you can tell the owner what you’re looking for, and he brings you some options (the store is way too small to allow customers to enter during Covid). It’s fun to chat with another human being, even briefly.
Evening: After work, we spend a little time rebalancing our investing and retirement accounts. We decide to put more money into bonds and a little bit into REIT’s as a hedge against a potential crash or recession in the future. Then I start making dinner – Broken Eggs (Huevas Rotas) from the NY Times cooking site. You basically cook the potatoes in a skillet in water, spices, and olive oil, and then sauté them to crisp them up once the water evaporates. Then you add onion, lots of garlic, and finally some eggs. It is delicious. I eat it with leftover cornbread while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 with my sister – we watch the first two episodes. It’s full of twists and turns. A note about this – we have an elaborate procedure for watching shows together developed during quarantine whereby we start the show at the same with an earbud in one ear, while FaceTiming. I also have chocolate cake, of course.
Later, I get an email that I’ve signed up for HBO on Amazon Prime. I definitely have not. I text my mom, who shares my account, and she tells me she signed up by mistake. I cancel right away and luckily they won’t charge us for it.
Meanwhile, K is doing an online Japanese language class over Zoom. He’s been interested in learning ever since we went to Japan last January. I lived in Japan for 3 years so I was able to take us around to a lot of more obscure places and he really enjoyed the trip – it was a blast.
K starts a YouTube yoga class (from Do Yoga With Me – my favorite channel) and I join him for part of it before bed around 10 pm.
Daily total: $239.34
Day 5
Morning: I get up around 7 am and we go for a run first thing. I prefer running early in the morning because there are fewer people to avoid during COVID. We do a different route today – it’s longer (3 miles) but has fewer hills. It’s a slog, as always, but I feel good when I get back right around 8 am. I jump straight onto my computer to start checking work emails and my husband makes us avocado and egg toast for breakfast - it is absolutely delicious.
We talk about how our bathroom smells distinctly mildewy (yay for being a grown-up because I guess this is what we talk about now) and we buy two big buckets of DampRid on Amazon ($26.60). I’ve found this to be a necessity in Seattle. Mid-morning, I take a break from work and start packing for our trip to the cabin.
Noon: I have leftover potatoes and cornbread for lunch, and my husband has the leftover chili. We finish getting ready to leave and head out right after lunch, taking a half day. The only problem is that I have attend a meeting at 3:30 pm, so we head out hoping to get there in time. Our cabin is near Quilcene in the Hood Canal region of Washington, about a 2 hour drive or a 2 hour ferry ride + drive. We are initially planning to take the ferry both ways, but realize that we mistimed the ferry departure, so we drive the whole way instead. Luckily, there’s little traffic mid-day, and we arrive at our Airbnb around 3:00 pm.
The Airbnb is beautiful! It’s a small cabin handmade by the owner, whose house is next door. It’s very rural, with a beautiful view. It’s tiny, but has a little kitchen and a waterfall-style shower with river rocks on the floor. It’s a great place to get away for a short time. Luckily, it also has good reception and I’m able to sit in on my meeting with no problems. My husband also does a little work, and then at 5 pm we’re free!
In our planning, we decided to get takeout on Friday night, since the little kitchen isn’t designed for any serious cooking. We call ahead to a local restaurant to order burgers (one of only 2 restaurants in the whole town). It’s around 5:30 pm and the place is deserted. It’s a microbrewery, but they tell us they haven’t been making beer since COVID-19 hit. None of the workers are wearing masks when I walk in, but they put them on when they see I’m wearing one. I pick up our order - a few bottled beers and burgers and fries ($49.52 including tip).
Back at our Airbnb, we watch Big Trouble in Little China and enjoy our very messy, but delicious, burgers (it costs $4.39 to rent). The movie is very campy but fun. I love silly action movies, as you will see with my other viewing choices. We wrap up the night in a very exciting fashion, eating chocolate cake and watching old episodes of the original Star Trek.
Daily total: $80.51
Day 6
Morning & noon: When we wake up around 8 am, the weather is looking thankfully clear and even sunny! We were expecting rain, so we’re really glad. We decide to go hiking today, and we head out before even having breakfast, with snacks and lunches packed. Our first destination is a hike called Mt. Zion, but unfortunately, we run into enough snow 2 miles before the trailhead that we decide to turn back. We don’t have any traction for our Subaru and don’t want to risk getting stuck on a very narrow mountain road. Instead, we drive another hour or so to the Lena Lake trailhead, a very popular and less strenuous trail. It’s about 7.5 miles roundtrip with 1200 feet of elevation gain.
By this time, it’s around 11:30, but luckily there is still parking. It’s a great hike up, and we run into relatively few people. We always mask up whenever we pass anyone, as does about 50% of the people we meet. The others… not so much. Around a mile from the lake, we start to run into snow. It’s turned into a beautiful sunny day, and I’m loving seeing all this snow! It’s a bit slippery, but not too bad. We make it to the lake mid-day, and it’s super jammed – there’s only a small viewpoint accessible, so everyone is crowded in there. I feel a bit uneasy with all the unmasked people, but we manage to find a spot away from the crowd and sit down to eat our lunch of apples, chips, and energy bars. There are a ton of robber jays there (Canada Jays) which try to eat our chips. It is fun watching them, but I’m annoyed to see some kids feeding them – it’ll just make them that much more aggressive. Bad trail manners.
On our way back down, we get stuck behind a group of 5 unmasked adults, who refuse to cede the narrow trail to faster hikers. I’m a slow hiker myself, so, to be clear, I’m not angry at slower walkers being on the trail but have some self-awareness and let people pass! especially if you’re going to go hiking in a big group during a pandemic! We finally get back down and head back to our Airbnb.
Evening: Back home, we explore some of the trails our Airbnb host has set up around his extensive property, and then relax on the deck. The sun is breaking through the clouds and it feels wonderful to sit out in nature and feel the sun on my back. We open up a bottle of wine and have a few pre-dinner snacks (more chips and hummus). For this night, we brought ingredients to make a steak salad. Our Airbnb host has kindly set up a charcoal grill for us, so we grilled the steak and toast some bread on the side.
We eat dinner while watching the truly terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport and finish up the very last of my chocolate cake. It’s amazing that anyone ever let Van Damme act… or should I say ‘act.’ I also have a Tate’s chocolate chip cookie or two, accompanied by a little port. My husband and I are truly very old people at heart, so we finish up the night watching a few episodes of Columbo.
Daily total: $0
Day 7
Morning: Unfortunately, K had insomnia last night, so he sleeps in pretty late. I drink coffee in bed and enjoy looking at the view out our big windows. Once he’s up, we get packed up and write a thank you note for our host. It was a great stay.
One of my big hobbies is birding and K enjoys wildlife photography, so we go out to look for some lifers! (The first time you see a new species of bird). Did I mention we are very old people in (relatively) young bodies? We first go to Dosewallips State Park and see some bald eagles, great blue herons, lots of various ducks, and a flock of Canada Geese, which, strangely, includes a domesticated gray goose. He’s much larger than the Canada Geese and seems to be watching over them. It’s kind of cute. Unfortunately, a lot of the birds are too far from shore to be seen clearly.
Our next stop is Point No Point (I love all the sad & disappointed names that early Westerner explorers gave places in the Washington/Oregon coast), a popular birding spot. We see a ton of birds here, and I can understand why it’s so well-known - Red-Breasted Mergansers, Western Grebes, Common Goldeneyes, Pacific Loons, and a few others I can’t identify yet. Most excitingly though, we see a whole pile of otters! They’re lounging around together on a rock just offshore and a ton of people are watching. We watch as they all slip off the rock and go hunting in the shore. It’s my first otter sighting in the wild, and it’s so cool! We also see some seals and possibly a sea lion. It’s a great spot for wildlife. We eat some snacks (hummus, chips, some sliced meat & cheese) before we head out.
I really want to come back to this area another time and explore further, but K has decided that we need to get back home in time for the Big Game. We take the 3:00 pm ferry back to Seattle ($16.40) and get home around 3:45 pm. I veg out at home while my husband watches football. He’s a Patriots fan but he still loves Tom Brady (??) so he’s happy to see Florida win. I don’t understand sports team loyalties at all, but whatever, I’m glad he’s happy. We order from a new Indian place called Spice Box and get vindaloo, roganjosh, and vegetables pakora – so tasty ($53.96). Happily, there’s enough left over for lunch the next day, since I have no plans for what we will eat yet!
I’m really dreading work the next day, as I know that it will be obnoxious. I want to get out of my job so badly, but it doesn’t look like I’m going on to the next interview stage for the job I interviewed no back on Monday. I’m feeling kind of down about it. I try to stay positive and promise that I’ll apply for at least 2-3 new jobs next week. I bake up some frozen cookie dough I had in the freezer and feel sorry for myself. We end the night by watching another episode of Columbo.
Daily total: 70.36
Food + Drink: $395.23
Fun / Entertainment: $26.40
Home + Health: $26.60
Clothes + Beauty: $0
Transport: $16.40
Other: $170.48
Grand Total: $635.11
I think this week was pretty normal for us. Obviously we spent a bit more than usual due to the weekend cabin trip, but nothing outrageous. Our largest consumer spending category is definitely food and drink – we live in a very busy area of Seattle with tons of restaurants and bars so believe it or not, we actually used to spend even more on eating out. We still try to support our local places by getting takeout or delivery during the pandemic and even occasionally getting a few drinks outside. I spent more than usual on groceries due to stocking up for the weekend away.
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Old Austin Tales: Forgotten Video Arcades of The 1970s & 80s

In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a young teen growing up in far North Austin, it was a popular custom for many boys in the neighborhood to assemble at the local Stop-N-Go after school on a regular basis for some Grand Champion level tournaments in Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. The collective insistence of our mothers and fathers to get out of the house, get some exercise, and refrain from playing NES or Sega on the television only led us to seek out more video games at the convenience store down the road. Much allowance and lunch money was spent as well as hours that should have been devoted to homework among the 8 or 9 regular boys in attendance, often challenging each other to 'Best of 5' matches. I myself played Dhalsim and SubZero, and not very well, so I rarely ever made it to the 5th match. The store workers frequently kicked us out for the day only to have us return when they weren't working the counter anymore if not the next day.
There is something about that which has been lost in the present day. While people can today download the latest games on Steam or PSN or in the app store on your smartphone, you can't just find arcade games in stores and restaurants like you used to be able to. And so the fun of a spontaneous 8 or 10 person multiplayer video game tournament has been confined to places like bars, pool halls, Pinballz or Dave&Busters.
But in truth it was that ubiquity of arcade video games, how you could find them in any old 7-11 or Laundromat, which is what killed the original arcades of the early 1980s before the Great Crash of 1983 when home video game consoles started to catch up to what you saw in the arcade.
I was born in the mid 1970s so I missed out on Pong. I was kindergarten age when the Golden Age of Arcade Games took place in the early 1980s. There used to be a place called Skateworld on Anderson Mill Road that was primarily for roller skating but had a respectable arcade in its own right. It was there that I honed my skills on the original Tron, Pac Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Defender, and so many others. In the 1980s I remember visiting all the same mall arcades as others in my age group. There was Aladdin's Castle in Barton Creek Mall, The Gold Mine in Highland, and another Gold Mine in Northcross which was eventually renamed Tilt. Westgate Mall also had an arcade but being a north austin kid I never went there until later in the mid 1990s. There were also places like Malibu Grand Prix and Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheeze, all of which had fairly large arcades for kids which were the secondary attraction.
If you're of a certain age you will remember Einsteins and LeFun on the Drag. They were there for a few decades going back way before the Slacker era. Lesser known is that the UT Student Union basement used to have an arcade that was comparable to either or both of those places. Back in the pre-9/11 days it was much easier to sneak in if you even vaguely looked like you could be a UT student.
But there was another place I was too young to have experienced called Smitty's up further north on 183 at Lake Creek in the early 1980s. I never got to go there but I always heard about it from older kids at the time. It was supposed to have been two stories of wall to wall games with a small snack bar. I guess at the time it served a mostly older teen crowd from Westwood High School and for that reason younger kids my age weren't having birthday parties there. It wasn't around very long, just a few years during the Golden Age of Arcades.
It is with almost-forgotten early arcades like that in mind that I wanted to share with y'all some examples of places from The Golden Age of the Video Arcade in Austin using some old Statesman articles I've found. Maybe someone of a certain age on here will remember them. I was curious what they were like, having missed out by being slightly too young to have experienced most of them first hand. I also wanted to see the original reaction to them in the press. I had a feeling there was some pushback from school/parent/civic groups on these facilities showing up in neighborhood strip malls or next to schools, and I was right to suspect. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First let's list off some places of interest. Be sure to speak up if you remember going to any of these, even if it was just for some other kid's birthday party. Unfortunately some of the only mentions about a place are reports of a crime being committed there, such as our first few examples.
Forgotten Arcade #1
Fun House/Play Time Arcade - 2820 Guadalupe
June 15, 1975
ARCADE ENTHUSIASM
A gang fight involving 20 30 people erupted early Saturday morning in front of an arcade on Guadalupe Street. The owner of the Fun House Arcade at 282J Guadalupe told police pool cues, lug wrenches, fists and a shotgun were displayed during the flurry. Police are unsure what started the fisticuffs, but one witness at the scene said it pitted Chicanos against Anglos. During the fight the owner of the arcade said a green car stopped at the side of the arcade and witnesses reported the barrel of a shotgun sticking out. The crowd wisely scattered and only a 23-year-old man was left lying on the ground. He told police he doesn't know what happened.
March 3, 1976
ARCADE ROBBED
A former employee of Play Time Arcade, 2820 Guadalupe, was charged Tuesday in connection with the Tuesday afternoon robbery of his former business. Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Ronnie Magee, 22, of 1009 Aggie Lane, Apt. 306. Arcade attendant Sam Garner said he had played pool with the suspect an hour before the robbery. He told police the man had been fired from the business two weeks earlier. Police said a man walked in the arcade about 2:45 p m. with a blue steel pistol and took $180. Magee is charged with first degree aggravated robbery. Bond was set on the charge at $15,000.
First it was called Fun House and then renamed Play Time a year later. I'm not sure what kind of arcade games beyond Pong and maybe Asteroids they could have had at this place. The peak of the Pinball craze was supposed to be around 1979, so they might have had a few pinball machines as well. A quick search of youtube will show you a few examples of 1976 video games like Death Race. The location is next to Ken's Donuts where PokeBowl is today where the old Baskin Robbins location was for many years.
Forgotten Arcade #2
Green Goth - 1121 Springdale Road
May 15, 1984
A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to a January 1983 murder in East Austin and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Jim Crowell Jr. of Austin admitted shooting 17-year-old Anthony Rodriguez in the chest with a shotgun after the two argued outside the Green Goth, a games arcade at 1121 Springdale Road, on Jan. 23, 1983. Crowell had argued with Rodriguez and a friend of Rodriguez at the arcade, police said. Crowell then went to his house, got a shotgun and returned to the arcade, witnesses said. When the two friends left the arcade, Rodriguez was shot Several weeks ago Crowell had reached a plea bargain with prosecutors for an eight-year prison term, but District Judge Bob Perkins would not accept the sentence, saying it was shorter than sentences in similar cases. After further plea bargaining, Crowell accepted the 15-year prison sentence.
I can't find anything else on Green Goth except reports about this incident with a murder there. There is at least one other report from 1983 around the time of Crowell's arrest that also refer to it as an arcade but reports the manager said the argument started over a game of pool. It's possible this place might have been more known for pool.
Forgotten Arcades #3 & #4
Games, Etc. - 1302 S. First St
Muther's Arcade - 2532 Guadalupe St
August 23, 1983
Losing the magic touch - Video Arcades have trouble winning the money game
It was going to be so easy for Lawrence Villegas, a video game junkie who thought he could make a fast buck by opening up an arcade where kids could plunk down an endless supply of quarters to play Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids. Villegas got together with a few friends, purchased about 30 video games and opened Games, Etc. at 1302 S. First St in 1980. .,--.... For a while, things, went great Kids waited in line to spend their money to drive race cars, slay dragons and save the universe.
AT THE BEGINNING of 1982, however, the bottom fell out, and Villegas' revenues fell from $400 a week to $25. Today, Games, Etc. is vacant Villegas, 30, who is now working for his parents at Tony's Tortilla Factory, hasn't decided what he'll do with the building. "I was hooked on Asteroids, and I opened the business to get other people hooked, too," Villegas said. "But people started getting bored, and it wasn't worth keeping the place open. In the end, I sold some machines for so little it made me sick."
VILLEGAS ISNT the only video game operator to experience hard times, video game manufacturers and distributors 'It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100 .
Pac-Man's a lost cause. Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Ronnie Roark says. In the past year, business has dropped 25 percent to 65 percent throughout the country, they say. Most predict business will get even worse before the market stabilizes. Video game manufacturers and operators say there are several reasons for the sharp and rapid decline: Many video games can now be played at home on television, so there's no reason to go to an arcade. The novelty of video games has worn off. It has been more than a decade since the first ones hit the market The decline can be traced directly to oversaturation or the market arcade owners say. The number of games in Austin has quadrupled since 1981, and it's not uncommon to see them in coin-operated laundries, convenience stores and restaurants.
WITH SO MANY games to choose from, local operators say, Austinites be came bored. Arcades still take in thousands of dollars each week, but managers and owners say most of the money is going to a select group of newer games, while dozens of others sit idle.
"After awhile, they all seem the same," said Dan Moyed, 22, as he relaxed at Muther's Arcade at 2532 Guadalupe St "You get to know what the game is going to do before it does. You can play without even thinking about it" Arcade owners say that that, in a nutshell, is why the market is stagnating.
IN THE PAST 18 months, Ronnie Roark, owner of the Back Room at 2015 E. Riverside Drive, said his video business has dropped 65 to 75 percent Roark, . who supplied about 160 video games to several Austin bars and arcades, said the instant success of the games is what led to their demise. "The technology is not keeping up with people's demand for change," said Roark, who bought his first video game in 1972. "The average game is popular for two or three months. We're sending back games that are less than five months old."
Roark said the market began dropping in March 1982 and has been declining steadily ever since. "The drop started before University of Texas students left for the summer in 1982," Roark said. "We expected a 25 percent drop in business, and we got that, and more. It's never really picked up since then. - "It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100. 1 was shocked when I looked over my books and saw how much things had dropped."
TO COMBAT THE slump, Roark said, he and some arcade owners last year cut the price of playing. Even that didn't help, he said. Old favorites, such as Pac-Man, which once took in hundreds of dollars each week, he said, now make less than $3 each. "Pac-Man's a lost cause," he said. "Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Hardest hit by the slump are the owners of the machines, who pay $3,500 to $5,000 for new products and split the proceeds with the businesses that house them.
SALEM JOSEPH, owner of Austin Amusement and Vending Co., said his business is off 40 percent in the past year. Worse yet, some of his customers began returning their machines, and he's having a hard time putting them back in service. "Two years ago, a machine would generate enough money to pay for itself in six months,' said Joseph, who supplies about 250 games to arcades. "Now that same machine takes 18 months to pay for itself." As a result, Joseph said, he'll buy fewer than 15 new machines this year, down from the 30 to 50 he used to buy. And about 50 machines are sitting idle in his warehouse.
"I get calls every day from people who want to sell me their machines," Joseph said. "But I can't buy them. The manufacturers won't buy them from me." ARCADE OWNERS and game manufacturers hope the advent of laser disc video games will buoy the market Don Osborne, vice president of marketing for Atari, one of the largest manufacturers of video games, said he expects laser disc games to bring a 25 percent increase in revenues next year. The new games are programmed to give players choices that may affect the outcome of the game, Os borne said. "Like the record and movie industries, the video game industry is dependent on products that stimulate the imagination," Osborne said "One of the reasons we're in a valley is that we weren't coming up with those kinds of products."
THE FIRST of the laser dis games, Dragonslayer and Star Wan hit the market about two months ago. Noel Kerns, assistant manager of The Gold Mine Arcade in Northcross Mall, says the new games are responsible for a $l,000-a-week increase in revenues. Still, Kerns said, the Gold Mine' total sales are down 20 percent iron last summer. However, he remain optimistic about the future of the video game industry. "Where else can you come out of the rain and drive a Formula One race car or save the universe?" hi asked.
Others aren't so optimistic. Roark predicted the slump will force half of all operators out of business and will last two more years. "Right now, we've got a great sup ply and almost no demand," Roark said. "That's going to have to change before things get- significantly better."
Well there is a lot to take from that long article, among other things, that the author confused "Dragonslayer" with "Dragon's Lair". I lol'd.
Anyone who has been to Emo's East, formerly known as The Back Room, knows they have arcade games and pool, but it's mostly closed when there isn't a show. That shouldn't count as an arcade, even though the former owner Ronnie Roark was apparently one of the top suppliers of cabinet games to the area during the Golden Era. Any pool hall probably had a few arcade games at the time, too, but that's not the same as being an arcade.
We also learn from the same article of two forgotten arcades: Muthers at 2522 Guadalupe where today there is a Mediterranean food restaurant, and another called Games, Etc. at 1302 S.First that today is the site of an El Mercado restaurant. But the article is mostly about showing us how bad the effects were from the crash at the end of the Golden Era. It was very hard for the early arcades to survive with increasing competition from home game consoles and personal computers, and the proliferation of the games into stores and restaurants.
Forgotten Arcades #5 #6 & #7
Computer Madness - 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Electronic Encounters - 1701 W Ben White Blvd (Southwood Mall)
The Outer Limits Amusements Center - 1409 W. Oltorf
March 4, 1982
'Quartermania' stalks South Austin
School officials, parents worried about effects of video games
A fear Is haunting the video game business. "We call it 'quartermania.' That's fear of running out of quarters," said Steve Stackable, co-owner of Computer Madness, a video game and foosball arcade at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. The "quartermania" fear extends to South Austin households and schools, as well. There it's a fear of students running out of lunch money and classes to play the games. Local school officials and Austin police are monitoring the craze. They're concerned that computer hotspots could become undesirable "hangouts" for students, or that truancy could increase because students (high-school age and younger) will skip school to defend their galaxies against The Tempest.
So far police fears have not been substantiated. Department spokesmen say that although more than half the burglaries in the city are committed by juveniles during the daytime, they know of no connection between the break-ins and kids trying to feed their video habit But school and parental worries about misspent time and money continue. The public outcry in September 1980 against proposals to put electronic game arcades near two South Austin schools helped persuade city officials to reject the applications. One proposed location was near Barton Hills Elementary School. The other was South Ridge Plaza at William Cannon Drive and South First Street across from Bedlchek Junior High School.
Bedichek principal B.G. Henry said he spoke against the arcade because "of the potential attraction it had for our kids. I personally feel kids are so drawn to these things, that It might encourage them to leave the school building and play hookey. Those things have so much compulsion, kids are drawn to them like a magnet Kids can get addicted to them and throw away money, maybe their lunch money. I'm not against the video games. They may be beneficial with eye-hand coordination or even with mathematics, but when you mix the video games during school hours and near school buildings, you might be asking for problems you don't need."
A contingent from nearby Pleasant Hill Elementary School joined Bedichek in the fight back in 1980, although principal Kay Beyer said she received her first formal call about the games last Week from a mother complaining that her child was spending lunch money on them. Beyer added that no truancy problems have been related to video game-playing at a nearby 7-11 store. Allen Poehl, amusement game coordinator for Austin's 7-11 stores, said company policy rules out any game-playing by school-age youth during school hours. Fulmore Junior High principal Bill Armentrout said he is working closely with operators of a nearby 7-1 1 store to make sure their policy is enforced.
The convenience store itself, and not necessarily the video games, is a drawing card for older students and drop-outs, Armentrout said. Porter Junior High principal Marjorie Ball said that while video games aren't a big cause of truancy, "the money (spent on the games) is a big factor." Ball said she has made arrangements with nearby businesses to call the school it students are playing the games during school hours. "My concern is that kids are basically unsupervised, especially at the 24-hour grocery stores. That's a late hour for kids to be out. I would like to see them (games) unplugged at 10 p.m.," adds Joslin Elementary principal Wayne Rider.
Several proprietors of video game hot-spots say they sympathize with the concerns of parents and school officials. No one under 18 is admitted without a parent to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre at 4211 S. Lamar. That rule, says night manager David Dunagan, "keeps it from being a high school hangout. This is a family place." Jerry Zollar, owner of J.J. Subs in West Wood Shopping Center on Bee Cave Road, rewards the A's on the report cards of Eanes school district students with free video games. "It's kind of a community thing we do in a different way. I've heard from both teachers and parents . . . they thought this was a good idea," said Zollar.
Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall last year was renovated into a brightly lit arcade. "We're trying to get away from the dark, barroom-type place. We want this to be a place for family entertainment We won't let kids stay here during school hours without a written note from their parents, and we're pretty strict about that," said manager Kelly Roberts. Joyce Houston, who manages The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf St. along with her husband, said, "I wouldn't let my children go into some of the arcades I've visited. I'm a concerned parent, too. We wanted a place where the whole family could come and enjoy themselves."
Well you can see which way the tone of all these articles is going. There were some crimes committed at some arcades but all of them tended to have a negative reputation for various reasons. Parents and teachers were very skeptical of the arcades being in the neighborhoods to the point of petitioning the City Government to restrict them. Three arcades are mentioned besides Chuck-E-Cheese. Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall, The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf, and Computer Madness, a "video game and foosball arcade" at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Forgotten Arcade #8
Smitty's Galaxy of Games - Lake Creek Parkway
February 25, 1982
Arcades fighting negative image
Video games have swept across America, and Williamson and Travis counties have not been immune. In a two-part series, Neighbor examines the effects the coin-operated machines have had on suburban and small-town life.
Cities have outlawed them, religious leaders have denounced them and distraught mothers have lost countless children to their voracious appetites. And still they march on, stronger and more numerous than before. A new disease? Maybe. A wave of invading aliens from outer space? On occasion. A new type of addiction? Certainly. The culprit? Video games. Although the electronic game explosion has been mushrooming throughout the nation's urban areas for the past few years, its rippling effects have just recently been felt in the suburban fringes of North Austin and Williamson County.
In the past year, at least seven arcades armed with dozens of neon quarter-snatchers have sprung up to lure teens with thundering noises and thousands of flashing seek-and-destroy commands. Critics say arcades are dens of iniquity where children fall prey to the evils of gambling. But arcade owners say something entirely different. "Everybody fights them (arcades), they think they are a haven for drug addicts. It's just not true," said Larry Grant of Austin, who opened Eagle's Nest Fun and Games on North Austin Avenue in Georgetown last September. "These kids are great" Grant said the gameroom "gives teenagers a place to come. Some only play the games and some only talk.
In Georgetown, if you're from the high school, this is it." He said he's had very few disturbances, and asks "undesirables" to leave. "We've had a couple of rowdies. That's why I don't have any pool tables they tend to attract that type of crowd," Grant said.
Providing a place for teens to congregate was also the reason behind Ron and Carol Smith's decision to open Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway at the entrance to Anderson Mill. "We have three teenage sons, and as soon as the oldest could drive, it became immediately apparent that there was no place to go around here," said Ron, an IBM employee who lives in Spicewood at Balcones. "This prompted us to want to open something." The business, which opened in August, has been a huge success with both parents and youngsters. "Hundreds of parents have come to check out our establishment before allowing their children to come, and what they see is a clean, safe environment managed by adults and parents," Ron said. "We've developed an outstanding rapport with the community." Video arcades "have a reputation that we have to fight," said Carol.
Kathy McCoy of Georgetown, who last October opened Krazy Korner on Willis Street in Leander, agrees. "We've got a real good group of kids," she said. "There's no violence, no nothing. Parents can always find their kids at Krazy Korner."
While all the arcade owners contacted reported that business is healthy, if not necessarily lucrative, it's not as easy for video entrepreneurs to turn a profit as one might imagine. A sizeable investment is required. Ron Smith paid between $2,800 and $5,000 for each of the 30 electronic diversions at his gameroom.
Grant said his average video game grosses about $50 a week, and his "absolute worst" game, Armor Attack, only $20 a week. The top machines (Defender and Pac-Man) can suck in an easy $125 a week. That's a lot of quarters, 500 to be exact but the Eagle's Nest and Krazy Korner pass half of them on to Neelley Vending Company of Austin which rents them their machines. "At 25 cents a shot, it takes an awful lot of people to pay the bills," said Tom Hatfield, district manager for Neelley.
He added that an owner's personality and the arcade's location can make or break the venture. The game parlor must be run "by an understanding person, someone with patience," Hatfield said. "They cannot be too demanding on the kids, yet they can't let them run all over them." And they must be located in a spot "with lots of foot traffic," such as a shopping center or near a good restaurant, he said. "And being close to a school really helps." "Video games are going to be here permanently, but we're going to see some operations not going because of the competition," which includes machines in virtually every convenience store and supermarket, Hatfield said.
This article talks about three arcades. One in Georgetown called Eagles Nest, another in Leander called Krazy Korner, and a third called Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway "on the fringes of North Austin". This is the one I remember the older kids talking about when I was a little kid. There was once a movie theater across the street from the Westwood High School football stadium and behind that was Smitty's. Today I think the building was bulldozed long ago and the space is part of the expanded onramp to 183 today. Eventually another unrelated arcade was built next to the theater that became Alamo Lakeline. It was another site of some unrecorded epic Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat tournaments in the 90s.
But the article written before the end of the Golden Era tell us much about the pushback I was talking about earlier. Early arcades were seen as "dirty" places in some circles, and the owners of the arcades in Williamson County had to stress how "clean" their establishments were. This other article from a couple of weeks later tells of how area school officials weren't worried about video games and tells us more arcades in Round Rock and Cedar Park. Apparently the end of the golden age lasted a bit longer than usual in this area.
At some point in the next few years the bubble burst, and places like Smitty's were gone by the late 80s. But the distributors quoted earlier were right that arcade games weren't going completely away. In the mid 1980s LeFun opened up next in the Scientology building at 2200 Guadalupe on the drag. Down a few doors past what used be a coffee shop and a CVS was Einsteins Arcade. Both of those survived into the 21st century. I remember the last time I was at Einsteins I got my ass beat in Tekken by a kid half my age. heheh
That's all for today. There were no Bonus Pics in the UT archive of arcades (other than the classical architectural definition). I wanted to pass on some Bonus newspaper articles (remember to click and zoom in with the buttons on the right to read) about Austin arcades anyway but first a small story.
I mentioned earlier the secret of the UT Student Union. I have no idea what it looks like now but in the 90s there was a sizable arcade in with the bowling alley in the basement. Back in 1994 when I used to sneak in, they featured this bizarre early attempt at virtual reality games. I found an old Michael Barnes Statesman article about it dated February 11, 1994. Some highlights:
Hundreds of students and curiosity-seekers lined up at the University of Texas Union to play three to five minutes of Dactyl Nightmare, Flying Aces or V-Tol, three-dimensional games from Kramer Entertainment. Nasty weather delayed the unloading of four huge trunks containing the machines, which resemble low pulpits. Still, players waited intently for a chance to shoot down a fighter jet, operate a tilt-wing Harrier or tangle with a pterodactyl. Today, tickets will go on sale in the Texas Union lobby at 11:30 a.m. for playing slots between noon and 6 p.m.
Players, fitted with full helmets, throttles and power packs, stood on shiny gray and yellow platforms surrounded by a circular guard rail. Seen behind the helmet's goggles were computer simulated landscapes, not unlike the most sophisticated video games, with controls and enemies viewed in deep space. "You're on a platform waiting to fight a human figure," said Jeff Vaughn, 19, of Dactyl Nightmare. "A pterodactyl swoops down and tries to pick you up. You have to fight it off. You are in the space and can see your own body and all around you. But if you try to walk, you have to use that joy stick to get around."
"I let the pterodactyl carry me away so I could look down and scan the board," said Tom Bowen of the same game. "That was the way I found out where the other player was." "Yeah, it's cool just to stand there and not do anything," Vaughn said. The mostly young, mostly male crowd included the usual gaming fanatics, looking haggard and tense behind glasses and beards. A smattering of women and children also pressed forward in a line that snaked past the lobby and into the Union's retail shops.
"I don't know why more women don't play. Maybe because the games are so violent," said Jennifer Webb, 24, a psychology major whose poor eyesight kept her from becoming a fighter pilot in real life. "If the Air Force won't take me, virtual reality will." "They use stereo optics moving at something like 60 frames a second," said computer science major Alex Aquila, 19. "The images are still pretty blocky. But once you play it, you'll want to play it again and again." With such demand for virtual reality, some gamesters wondered why an Austin video arcade has not invested in at least one machine.
The gameplay looked like this.
Bonus Article #1 - "Video fans play for own reasons" (Malibu Grand Prix) - March 11, 1982
Bonus Article #2 - "Pac-Man Cartridge Piques Interest" - April 13, 1982
Bonus Article #3 - "Video Games Fail Consumer" - January 29, 1984
Bonus Article #4 - "Nintendoholics/Modems Unite" - January 25, 1989
Bonus Article #5 and pt 2 "Two girls missing for a night found at arcade" (truly dedicated young gamers) - August 7, 2003
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