Deck the halls with boughs of holly fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la Teenage mutant ninja turtles fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la
I hope that gets stuck in your head for a while.
A thing in my possession: A phone running a linux distribution in my continuing quest to do simple things harder than is necessary, I now have a phone running linux. Specifically I have the Google Pixel 3a, which is a roughly 5 year old phone, and it is running Ubuntu Touch, the fork of the (relatively) popular linux distro designed specifically for smart phones. The pixel 3a, while certainly not designed for lunix happens to be one of the most compatible phones for the operating system.
After switching to Linux for my daily driver home computer a year or two ago, I thought it would be interesting to try it on my phone too. But let me tell you, this phone won't be replacing my equally old iphone any time soon.
Getting the OS wasn't particularly difficult for me, but that is mostly because I have unlocked a bootloader on an android phone previously. Before switching to ios and the iphone, I had installed CyanogenMod on my then current android phone. Android, the operating system does technically allow you to install other OSes instead of it on most of their phones, but they don't make it obvious or easy. The fact that I had done it before made it slightly easier, but I still had to watch or read multiple tutorials, and the process failed at least twice. Once I did get it up and running, the core OS works pretty well! The problem is everything else. There is an app store that can download apps specifically for the OS, but the selection is pretty bare. There are some key utilities but a lot of the stuff I would want to us is either not there or a homebrew webapp. My original thought would be that most of the apps I could want to us also have web interfaces, which is true, but also the developers have tried harder and harder to make their respective mobile web experiences worse to push people to using an app instead. Which only works if there is an app to download.
At least with Cyanogen which I had used perviously, I could download and install andorid apps ands they would be almost 100% compatible. No such luck here. Instead if I want to run an android app, I have to completely emulate an android phone inside my phone as the equivalent of a virtual machine. Which I can do! I did! I gopt it set up, but frankly the thing that broke me was that I couldn't copy and paste between the core Linux OS and my VM-android OS. Copy and paste is such a basic functionality that is actually really complicated. But it needs to work. Who knows, maybe I'll install LineageOS, the successor to Cyanogen and play with that for a while.
Poorly Organized Thoughts on Arbitrage Arbitrage, if you are unfamiliar, is the practice of buying something at one price with the intent of (nearly) simultaneously selling it for a higher price somewhere else. It's ostensibly the purest way to make a profit, but economists will tell you it's kind of impossible to actualy pull off at any scale. But I did find an example of someone doing just that while I was browsing ebay not too long ago.
But first I have to talk about Magic The Gathering. Sorry. MtG is a collectible trading card game where a player mostly collects cards in two ways: randomized packs purchased directly from the publisher, or from other players who already have the cards you want (which originally came from randomized packs.) This means there is an incredibly large secondary market for the cards where the common ones can be picked up for a few cents and the rarest ones can fetch hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's a daunting game because if you want to really get competitive you have to pour a lot of money into the game. I've played it a bit over the years, but always extremely casually. I just didn't have the effort or money to put into getting good.
But there are other ways to play magic for a lot cheaper. One of the most common is through what is called a Cube, or a carefully collected set of cards that can be used for casual games between friends. The idea is that you're only ever playing against the other games in the set, which means you don't have to always be on the chase for the latest and greatest and most powerful cards or metagame. Instead you treat it more like a board game with a limited scope. Cubes can be pretty expensive to build, but the cheaper ones are on the scale of $50-$150 depending on the cards and the size of it. Plus the effort of tracking down and purchasing all those cards individually. Or, you could just buy a premade cube from someone else.
So I was browsing ebay to see if anybody had cubes for sale, and to my surprise there were a few. Most of them were "Chaos cubes" with the idea that they were just a pile of mostly random cards for cheap just to make the count. These feel like a waste, because the whole point of a cube is that it is crafted to have a fair amount of compatibility between the cards. But the other cubes caught my eye were ones with actual card lists. These tended to be more expensive, probably because you knew what was going to be in them. But the flip side of the card list is that I could price out what those individual cards would cost if I bought them elsewhere.
So I did. There are some online magic stores that let you upload a list of cards and buy them from a bunch of individual sellers. The sellers are a mix of game stores with huge inventories and individuals just buying and selling from their personal collections. It's a cool system! And the sort of thing that makes a community successful. So I uploaded the card list and priced out one of the prebuilt cubes I found on ebay. Unsurprisingly it was cheaper. A lot cheaper. Like half the price, including shipping from 15 different stores. So it occured to me this would be a (theoretically) easy way to make money on Magic. Buy a bunch of specific cheap cards on the open marketplaces, then bundle them together for rubes who don't know any better on ebay and make money. This was arbitrage in action! The real problem, as it always is, is scale. Sure one could make $75 bucks per cube sold, but how many cubes can you seriously expect to sell? The volume isn't likely to be particularly high, even as the cost to get started is so low.
Stuff I'm Watching Godzilla Minus One is pretty good. The US godzilla movies have been more spectacle than anything for a long while. But this Japanese Import from Toho, the original studio to make Godzilla movies works really well. It's a giant monster movie, sure, but also a meditation on postwar PTSD, where the monster is a metaphor. I saw this in the theaters and it was absolutly worth it. I also made an episode of my podcast about it (full of spoilers.)
On the opposite end of the spectrum I watched Round and Round, a Hallmark Hanukkah movie about a young woman who gets stuck in a time loop on the 7th night of Hanukkah. Like all Hallmark movies it is patently silly and doesn't take anything too seriously. It's full of coincidence and contrivance and takes the premise of a time loop about as unseriously as I can imagine a movie about a time loop doing. And I've seen a lot of movies about time loops. I mostly watched this because it stars Vic Michaelis, who is a comedian I really like from their work on Dropout, and they bring a lot to the lead role here. Is it a good movie? Probably not. Is it a fun way to spend 90 minutes? Why not.
