Only Lovers Left Alive

Forgot how good the soundtrack of this film is. Lots of postrock tracks, done by Jim Jarmusch' own band, Sqürl

books, films, series ,games

 *James Roose-Evans - "Ergens en de grote beer" - zware spellingfouten maar ik zie hoe ik het ooit een mooi boek vond

* Julia Armfield - "Salt Slow" - bloody weird, short stories, think Kelly Link but different, just how I like it. Amazing suggestion from...?

* Ava

* Free Guy - ok, bit simplistic but very funny, good jokes about things burning in the background

* Another Round - Mads Mikkelson (?) him from Hannibal, about four teachers trying out the theory that man is born with 0.05% too little promillage. Beautiful and funny and asd

* Judas and the black Messias - about FBI infiltration into black panthers. never knew about this

* Squid Game - *the* Netflix hit, good, enjoyable

* Kevin can go fuck himself - her (Alice?) of Schitt's Creek, in this somewhat sitcom but then darker parts series, where sitcom scenes and more serious stuff, different lighting etc, follow each other as she tries to find her own life. Interesting as a concept but slow. The sitcom bits were too good. They irritated the fuck out of me. Fast forwarded most of it.

* Saint Maud - Did I watch this before? Young girl, recently turned towards Christianity, helps an elderly lady, a dancer. Burns herself at the end. Good film.

* To the lake - Russian series about pandemic that is more about the people than the scary bits. Good

* Venineth - game, marble, abstract, found via Jacob Geller and Errant Signal. Good, although I'm too stupid for its puzzles

* Dark Souls - Because Marcelo and Zoltan forced me. Jesus Christ it's hard.

* No Time To Die - final Daniel Craig bond.. Good! Loved it. Not too long. Loved every bit.

Harrie Nilsson - "Mr Tinker"

Natalie Merchant - "Butterfly"

Olga Ravn - "The Employees"

Intriguing book about a starship sent from Earth, orbiting a strange planet, where the story, or rather the setting, is told via interviews with employees; both humans and human-alike androids.

I know the smell of oakmoss because you've planted it inside me, just as you've planted the idea that I should love one man only, be loyal to one man only, and that I should allow myself to be courted. All of us here are condemned to a dream of romantic love, eventhough no one I know loves in that way, or lives that kind of life. Yet these are the dreams you've given us. I know the smell of oakmoss, but I don't know what it feels like to the touch. Still, my hand bears the faint perception of me standing at the edge of a wood and staring out at the sea as my palm smoothes this moss on the trunk of the oak. Tell me, did you plant this perception in me? Is it a part of the programme? Or did the image come up from inside me, of its own accord?

Sayaka Murata - "Convenience Store Woman"

For me, a typical Japanese book, where I feel I miss a lot of its emotions and swirling feelings because I don't understand the culture well enough.

Curious book, about a woman unable to understand human emotion, who completely identifies with the proper working of a convenience store.  Meets a terrible guy who always complains and mentions the Stone Age. 

Nothing really happens. But a lot does, under the surface.

Gordon Corera - "Secret Pigeon Service"

Bought at Bletchley Park, wonderful book about the pigeons "serving" in WWII. There are pigeon prisoners of war!

MI14(d) was running operation Colomba.

The [BBC] broadcasts encoured them to defy the invaders and parodied the propaganda spouted by the Germans. For that reason, the Nazis hated the BBC for its subversive influence. Almost every member of the population listened. A German officer given the accurate time by a little girl on the streets asked how it was possible she knew it was a quarter past seven when she had no watch. She replied, 'Don't you see? There is no one on the street. They are all listening to the English radio."

... a British intelligence officer would ring up the BBC and identify himself with a codename - rather bizarrely, for Belgium this was Napoleon Bonaparte and for the Netherlands Bing Crosby. He would then ask for a specific phrase to be broadcast, such as 'here is a message for Adolphe - the wine is warm' - which was meaningless to everyone else but acted as a coded signal for a particular group.

This special crack team was called the Falcon Destruction Unit, and could be sent to a particular area at the request of any government service. The 007 of the bird world, it had a license to kill. [...] MI5 sprang into action with its counter-pigeon team - section B3c - led by the dedicated Richard Melville Walker, the security service's counter-pigeon expert.

film,series

•  "Wrong Turn" - wonderful night of terror style horror film
• "Sex Education" - third season, still good. Nice soundtrack as well
• "Get Out!" - Jordan Peele's amazing horror. Noting in case I missed doing that with the original
  

stuff - films, posters, series, games

* "The White Lotus" - dark comedy series, though more painful than funny which made it good, about a fancy Hawaii resort and various fucked up guests visiting; the moron guy on his honeymoon stabbing the manager, the woman scattering her mother's ashes.... music reminded me of Utopia and turned out it was the same composer: Cristobal Tapia de Veer

* Control - game, fun, amazing, levitation, good storytelling, amazing X-Files, 80/s feeling

* Neon Evangelion 1.01, 2.02, 3.33, 3.01+1.01 - all four good, yeah maybe better than the series, although the series introduced me to something I never knew before

Pen Vogler - "Scoff"

Nice read on food and class and how they intertwine and impact each other in Britain, although some paragraphs, pages and chapters are a bit enumerative... long long lists.

Things I learned: Aga is a household brand for kitchen stoves, parkin is a kind of cake, posset some sort of drink with hot milk and something alcoholic.

Dinner parties moved back and forth in time. First a sign of wealth, then something to eschew because too bourgeouis.

It is a linguistic tick that survives to this day. Southerners and posh northeners have 'lunch' and 'dinner'. Northeners, particularly the working classes, still have 'dinner' between noon and 2 p.m. and 'tea' in the early evening (and perhaps a 'supper at night). For a long time, children had 'dinner'. In a Victorian house of a few servants the mistress might eat her 'luncheon' while the children and servants had their dinner. It might be the same food or, more likely, a rehashing of the employers' beef or mutton from the previous night or weekend, served with milk to drink and a solid pudding.

High tea keeps to an early evening time of 5 or 6 o'clock; and everybody sits up at the table – the adjective 'high (probably) distinguishes it from low drawing room armchairs. Although high tea is associated with the North of England and Scotland, here not all teas are 'high'; it is likely that whatever is on the table is your 'tea' (even without the drink); and that the meal you have had in the middle of the day is called 'dinner', just as it would for our medieval ancestors.

Compared with the lionized British beefy dinner, supper was always a lighter and more sophisticated meal. 

Pete Matthew - "The Meaningful Money Handbook"

 

 

Make sure there's an amount and a timescale. This is important because it will help you determine how to invest your money to reach your goals.

meaningfulmoney.tv/myrisktolerance

a bond is an IOU. In return for your money, you receive an IOU, which states the amount you have lent Marks & Spencer, the interest rate, called the coupon, which Marks & Spencer will pay you while they have your money, and the date at which Marks & Spencer will pay you back.
... 
These bonds are traded
...
Pension trustees approach you and offer you £1100 for your bond. You just made £100 profit, because you paid £1000 for it. In 2025, when Marks and Spencer pay back the money on the bond, now owned by the pension trustees, they will only pay back £1000, so the pension fund has lost £100 on the deal. That is the price they pay for securing that income of £30 per year until it is bought off.

It's a little simplistic to say that bonds are lower risk than shares, though historically they have been less volatile and their returns a little smoother than shares. It is more accurate to say that bonds behave differently to shares, and that's why it's usually a good idea to hold some of each in any portfolio, to benefit from the return of both kinds of investment.
When companies issue bonds they are called corporate bonds. When governments want to raise money, they can also issue bonds. In the UK, government-issued bonds are called giltz, in the US Treasury Bills.
...
Finaly you may hear bonds as an asset class called fixed interest or fixed income investments.

A share is a tinye slice of a company. Shares are often called equities. Returns come in two forms. Firstly, if the company makes a profit, a dividend may be issues, which is a distribution of the profit to the shareholders.
Secondly, the price of the share itself will rise and fall depending primarily on sentiment.

Private equity: involves companies which buy up other companies
Hedge funds: they make money when stock markets are falling.

A fund offers similar benefits to investors who want to buy shares, bonds, or other assets. If you invest on your own, you will probably buy a handful of different shares before it becomes too much work. Get your friends involved and you have a larger pot of money to invest with. Scale this up so that now there are hundreds of thousands of joint-owners.

The most common type of fund in the UK is an open-ended investment company, called an OEIC. The open-ended part of the name means that i more people want to invest, the fund can create more shares in the fund for those people. 
Unit trusts work similarly to OEICs but have one key difference in the form of something called a bid-offer spread. This means there is a difference between the price at which you buy units (offer price) and the price at which you sell them (bid price).  Most investors do well to avoid unit trusts.
Investment trust are closed-ended companies. Finite number of shares; you have to find someone willing to sell. This reduces the liquidity compared with open-ended cousins, OEICs

Exchange Trade Funds, ETFs, low-cost funds to track a particular share market. ETFs are still funds which hold underlying investments, but rather than the fund holding assets chosen by a fund manager, they aim to track a given asset price, like gold, or an index, like the FTSE 100. TAKE CARE. Two types. PHYSICAL EFTS actually hold underlying shares. SYNTHETIC ETF uses complex algorithms. Should avoid.

Active investment requires research and insight, skill, experience and luck; will have a very well-paid fund manager backed by a team of analysts.
Passive investing simply requires fund manager to match the fund's investment with the market as a whole each day; can be done largely by computer algorithms; often known as index funds, tracker funds, or just trackers.
Active investors try to beat the market. Passive investors aim to track or match the market.

I believe most ordinary investors are best served by opting for a passive investment strategy. Keeps your cost down and reduces the amount of research.

you invest into assets by buying funds to get benefits of economies of scale. wrappers are the next level up. key thing that distinguish one wrapper from another are tax treatments and access.

General investment account (GIA) - basic form. no special tax advantages or access limitations. use only if you exceed the amounts you can put into other wrappers

Individual savings account (ISA) - these accounts are entirely free of both income and capital gains taxes. Form the backbone of your wealth building process.

Pension - save money until you retire. you pay tax when you take money out eventually.

Investment bond - technically contracts of life insurance. fallen out of favour. some benefits particularly when used within trusts.

Venture capital trust (VCT) - wrappers in which you hold investments in small companies. in return for boosting economy, government gives very beneficial tax breaks. Risky and money is locked in.

Enterprise investment schemes (EIS) - similar to VCTs but w/ slightly different limits and tax breaks. minimum term of three years. designed to be invested into specific assets which can be less liquid and more volatile.

[wrapper chapter] Decide on the split between pensions and ISAs. Depends on your life stage.

Best place for non-financial advisers to research platform marketis the lang cat.

[tax chapter] majority of people will never be in a position to save full ISA allowance and full pension allowance in one year. saving into ISA and pension is the best way to avoid income and capital gains taxes

Choose a multi-asset portfolio fund: spread your money across different kinds of assets, and across the whole world in one convenient off-the-shelf package.
Four investment sectors, as divided by the Investment Association. All funds in a given sector will have a similar approach, idea is by grouping them you can easily compare similar funds.
1. mixed investment 0-35% shares
2. mixed investment 20-60% shares
3. mixed investment 40-85% shares
4 flexible investment

Films and series

* Breaking Bad, starting at season 4

* Thor:Ragnarok, directed by Taika Waitit, him of Jo Jo Rabbit. Funny enough, almost slapstick

* Black Panter: enjoyable but some twisted "logic"

* Loki: series, watched about three episodes. Quite nice.

Nobody

Innocent soul whose past caught up with him and now he's going berserk.

Bob Odenkirk is amazing.  And with "Doc Brown" Christopher Lloyd!

Great film

bbc6 - Iggy Pop - 2021-07-23

Fatima Al Qadiri - Hip Hop Spa

Reminds me of that Alice in Wonderland game.
Instrumental though with wordless vocals.

Somi & Common - When Rivers Cry

She reminds me of Wende.  The rap is nothing amazing, but okay

Big Jade - Dem Girlz (feat. Erica Banks & BeatKing)

Strangely I like it. Very dance-ish. 

Sophia Kennedy - Orange Tic Tac

Strange mix of an almost Amy Winehouse voice with, again, dance-ish lyrics/rap.

Above & Beyond - "Back room boy" (live at the hollywood bowl)

Jacob Geller - youtube channel

Amazing episodes on games and philosophy.  Learning a lot.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Intense telling of historic events. Only listened to half an episode... most are 5-6 hours long

Schitt's Creek

Series really grew on me.  First season is so-so, but there's a wonderful progression.

Mad Decent - "Blood Bros - First Blood"

https://soundcloud.com/maddecent/blood-bros-first-blood

Amazing work out mix, Rocky, quotes, boxing, kungfu

Rival Consoles - Pulses of Information

Electronic.  Nice.