What’s the Point of Blogging?
I have another blog Polymath is the Goal, which I haven’t updated for some time, which is/was supposed to focus on reaching long term and short term goals and focus on my own path of reaching, creating and adjusting goals.
It was to function as journal and as a inspirational and informational blog centered on making yourself better and more complete by getting better at the things the potential readers enjoy. There were the plans of eventually monetizing and offering the free ebook and all that BS, but I couldn’t be consistent enough with school, work and wife (no kids though yet). I plan to start writing again in that style if for no other reason to keep myself on track and to do my small part to help people through research and ideas.
The point of this post though is to explain why I’m now sparsely writing at a website called christophersarda.com. And then to ask the more general question:
What’s the point of blogging anyway?
It really does have about the stupidest name for any kind of serious writing in history from humans putting little drawings on caves to computers today. Blog and blogging are stupid words, but their nature and what they’ve become to the intelligent world is near irreplaceable, or at least it would really really suck if blogging didn’t exist any more.
Even high-end traditionally print and broadcast news outlets incorporate blogs and the short or long style that includes links to sources and video and a number of other things TV and print can’t provide. Not to mention their immediacy and cost.
So what’s the point for a regular person to blog? (the word gets dumber every time I type it) The answer happens also to be the answer why I write mostly on this website that bears my name, because personal branding is and will be hugely important now and in the future. People need to know who you are, unless you’re Hitler or a murderer, they need to know how you think. Even stuff traditionally kept personal like religious and political convictions can help to brand you and help you find your ever more detailed niche in the ever expanding information superhighway (oh yeah I’m bringing the “information superhighway cliche back!).
A lot of people would probably answer the reason they blog is to make money and there are a lot of examples of that happening, just type into Google something like “top ten” and “seo” and you’ll get a plethora of “quit your job like me and get paid by teaching people how to make money online” type posts.
Good for those people, anyone making money by providing a good or service gets an A+ from me, but really it’s all a marketing and branding issue to me.Even in my current situation where I’m in school and am not in a job that I plan to make a career out of, you can always build your brand even if you’re not selling anything yet or even if you never plan to sell anything you’ll always have to sell yourself. The things I write and say and teach and learn here are me.
I am who I am. I have to write. I have no choice in the matter. My posts and thoughts and advice and conclusions on what’s going on are all apart of me and now apart of the human record. For me personal branding is important but there’s something more that hangs over the kind of person I am. People who care to are welcome to read and comment and discuss, but the simple fact is:
I have to write.
Should You Even Bother Being an Individual Investor?
Over at Aleph Blog they ask the question:
Should you even bother as an individual investor?
I lean to towards yes, even though they write out a large list of the reasons it’s extremely hard to make money doing it nowadays and even say:
I am glad I began investing 20+ years ago. If I were considering starting now, I would likely not do it.
Aleph Blog’s list is still a great tool for the individual investor. For one it’s completely on the dot as far as I’m concerned, but often having a clear idea of the things working against you can get a strategic advantage.
Even if you’re a small country at war with a powerhouse military if you can find out what their plans are and their strengths you may be able to make significant gains and even surprise the world.
Institutional investing is the military super-power, this list helps the individual know what’s going against them.
The post talks about how there’s too much information out there and calls that a minus against the individual investor, but if you’re reader and studier by nature then this isn’t all that bad of a negative especially when you consider number seven on the post’s list:
We are in a macroeconomic environment where we are delevering. That is not the best environment for making money.
Well if I know that or even if I’m a layman on the subject the information is there for me if I’m serious. The writer of the post would probably contend the most aren’t serious.
He mentions ETFs as a place where individual traders are just noise. I’ve always considered that to be the case and ETFs have always been something I considered to be short-term plays based on the groupthink that occurs and other basics of behavioral finance factors where all the Etraders and Scottraders (like me) get “to speculate broad trends.”
ETFs being traded on the open market by people who don’t even know what a prospectus is, let alone have downloaded and read one makes for trading that is more emotionally based than would be if you actually had to build positions in the the securities and strategies the ETFs are supposed to follow.
In the end the post is a great summary of what is against us, what needs to be studied and counter acted in order to put money in our own pockets despite the fact that we are noise on the macro-financial level.
Here’s to the “noise” making some damn money while minimizing risk and avoiding the gambling nature.
Satire Saturday #1
Who better than Jon Stewart to start off Satire Saturday than our beloved Jon Stewart.
Others have made the observation that TIME magazine has dumbed their covers for Americans, but Stewart does it in such a condescending manner that it makes you laugh and think.
I just hope in future I can find more relevant satire that isn’t only Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| TIME Magazine’s U.S. Edition | ||||
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The List for 2012
In my effort to only watch relevant art and not waste too much time on random movies (unless I’m spending time with friends ect) the last few years I’ve created a list of best film nominees, best documentary nominees and best foreign film nominees from the academy awards. Then when I am bored or looking for a movie to watch I head that way rather than to some mindless action movie. This year I will also include the Golden Globe nominees, which I assume will have many of the same entries.
So here’s the beginning of the new list since the Academy Awards haven’t been announced yet:
Best Film (comedy/drama)
The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
War Horse
50/50
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris
My Week with Marilyn
Foreign Language Film
The Flowers of War
In the Land of Blood and Honey
The Kid with a Bike
A Separation
The Skin I Live In
The Globes don’t honor documentaries, but in adding these movies to the list that gets generated from the Oscars, my goal here will probably change from: “watch them all” to “here’s a list you can find good movies from.”
So, I haven’t written about the humanities side of things in awhile, I figure a nice little movie list would whet my appetite for good art.
LEADING THE WAY They’re Called Goals-Not Resolutions 2012
Any time one takes the lead, or is given the responsibility to lead, they have to be ready to produce. What basketball team do you know whose captain is the guy that plays four minutes a game? The captain is always either the best player on the team or the veteran that’s paid his dues and has shown leadership qualities.
Taking the lead in blogging and learning is no different, you have to produce. The year is coming to an end and many people will be making their New Years Resolutions. Calling it a resolution is fine, but I’ll prefer calling them goals. A goal to me is something I’m reaching for, something I’m trying to achieve and something that can be adjusted as the year goes on. A resolution is something made to be broken and forgot about.
I had a FOCUS 2011 section on another blog, and I’ll go over my failures and successes there on a different post and of course write about what I can learn from my experiences and how to be better and developing my passions.
This years goals will be straight forward. I want to focus on not overwhelming myself and getting a hundred percent completion rate over the course of 2012.
UNIVERSITY
Walk onto the campus and CRUSH IT.
I want to refocus this year on my studies. I didn’t do bad last semester but I did not perform to my potential and my way of life is never to leave an ounce of potential on the table.
There is no reason that I shouldn’t always maintain at minimum a 3.8 GPA. The goal for 2012 is to get no less than an A- in every class I take in 2012. This will be the most difficult and most important goal of the year and will in itself need a ton of planning and action to accomplish. The hunger is there.
LANGUAGE LEARNING
Continue my studies of the beautiful Spanish language and wonderful and engaging Polish language.
The first set of goals should be easy. I don’t have time to fully jump into language learning like I was able to in prior years, but I still want to develop and maintain my two main languages of study Spanish and Polish.
To keep up and keep it all fun, my goal will surround using the Lingq system to continue to grow in this area. Lingq is an input based system where you read material and then save the words so when those words show up in other articles you’re reading they’re highlighted with the definitions ready to read with a simple click.
The website keeps statistics, so my goals are simple: By the end of 2012 have 2500 lingqs in Spanish and 10,000 known words and for Polish have 3,000 lingqs and 10,000 known words.
THA BLOG
Writing stuff that I’m proud of
I’m not moving full speed ahead with any kind of monetization plans with my blogs, but I do want to increase the traffic and quality of them all. I won’t put up any traffic or design goals although those will be things that will get attention this year on this blog, Bright Lights Sports and Fist on Chin.
My only explicit goal for blogging this year will be to write at least 30 quality blog posts that are over 2000 words each. Quality is a big deal to me and the word count is simply to make sure that what I write is in depth. The beginning of the new year will show my first of a semi-regular column I plan to produce called HOW TO WRITE. The focus will be on a specific book or books, writer or writers, that I’ve read and analyzed and enjoyed (or hated) and then portray the important aspects of their work and what we can learn from them, beyond just writing.
It’s essentially being an essayist, something lacking in the internet world of 140 characters or less and Top Ten ways to f*** a m***** type posts, which all have their places too, even on this blog.
PHYSICAL ATHLETICISM STRENGTH CONDITIONING
Addressing the physical side
If it’s easy to get lazy with my more intellectual pursuits, then it’s a cake walk to get lazy with my physical pursuits. How about you? What are you doing to take care of, protect and strengthen your body?
A leader has to be alive, and has to be healthy enough to lead. The physical issue something many of us forget about, but staying a fat slob is unacceptable to be a leader of anything, even if your leadership mainly occurs behind a keyboard.
Even easy goals are good goals when your talking about physical work. I should have no problem with this 2012 goal: 25 Jiu Jitsu workouts and 30 visits to the gym.
I’m also going to join a boxing club which doesn’t factor into these goals and I’m always looking for basketball pick up games
That works out to a hair over one visit on average to something physical a week. The best thing about the physical side is if you can get out and you don’t burn yourself out (You know who you are, you haven’t done a push up in six months and you decide that you’re going to do 20 push ups and 100 sit ups every day). If you don’t burn yourself out early then you start to get hungry to go out there and do whatever your particular physical activity is after you start seeing results.
FINANCE AND ECONOMICS PREPARING NOW FOR THE FUTURE
Get a good amount of Series 7 Certification done
No picture for this one. It’s easy enough to describe. I’m a few years out from even bothering with taking the Series 7 exam (the basic exam needed for getting licensed to be a stock broker) but it wouldn’t hurt to prepare a bit now. My only goal here is to have studied and made flash cards through at least half my exam book, so that’d be Chapter 6. This one shouldn’t be too much trouble either.
That’s the gist of it all. To be a leader you have to lead, to lead you have to produce and show you’re capable of handling the responsibility and work load that leadership entails.
What are your goals?
Why are you a leader?
The Dreamy Nature of Latin Literature
I have not Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I put some stupid idea in my head that I would read it in the original Spanish when my Spanish was good enough to take on such a challenge.
I’m going to count that challenge as a failure. I do hope to be able to read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original Spanish one day, but I think I’m going to have to pick up the English version before that. My reading has put me up against a number of Spanish language writers and I can safely say at this point in my life that their styles are the most enjoyable.
Spanish language literature has such a dreamy nature, and that’s without reading some of the greats. I’ve read my share of Borges of course (you know the Argentine thing) and the modern writing of Barcelona’s Carlos Ruiz Zafon and a lot in between, but I couldn’t consider myself a connoisseur quite yet.
The dreamy nature I talk about is found in the way a story is told. The Hispanic authors I’ve read tell a story by showing rather than telling. Narrators are often unreliable, time is submissive to the author’s whims and the layers of the plot are given with perfect timing, with author letting you know what needs to be known when he feels it should be known.
The paragraph above should be the first thing taught in any creative writing class and in everything that I’ve read from Mexican, South American and Spaniard authors have met these criterion. The fact that a writer can be so precise with plot but retain that dreamy nature, that feeling that a fog is covering what you know and the author is there to reveal at the optimum time is wonderful for a reader that reads for the reasons I read.
When I infer that I haven’t read the best of the best among these writers, it makes me more excited. The reason I’ve decided to write about the Spanish language work I’ve read and plan to read is because of the book I’m in the middle of now. Seconds Out by Martin Kohan up to this point is succeeding. I didn’t like the dialogue style at first and the amount of space he devotes to a ten second period in a boxing match seems excessive, but I’ll let him finish what he’s trying to say before I criticize or romanticize too much.
One thing that can be said about Kohan is he’s made me think about a number of things, while reading his book he’s made want to write a number of posts or essays based on either things he’s said or secondary things he’s made me give some thought to. In that sense he’s already succeeded as an author.
The point of these five hundred words is just to invite those that have been stuck in the ideas presented by British literature and American literature (and then to a lesser extent for English speakers: Russian literature) to give those guys a little more south of you a chance. There’s a lot of good stuff there, best of all it seems to translate just fine.
Christopher Hitchens Is Dead
Has there ever been a man that you could like and respect so much, but then disagree with on some issues with such ferocity as with Christopher Hitchens? Sometimes you found yourself at his side repeating his witticisms about atheism, totalitarianism and literature, but then he’d switch to foreign policy and the importance he put behind warmongering and you’d find yourself disgusted.
The misogyny I could stand because it was told tongue and cheek, like Why Women Aren’t Funny . I’m sure Hitchens felt he was being truthful and serious, but coming from a guy who wasn’t all that funny either, such a article can read like a satire.
What really made Christopher Hitchens stand out was despite disagreeing with him on certain topics, you didn’t hate him for those opinions, after all he was Christopher Hitchens, he did that kind of stuff. You still respected him, because while you knew the people he was agreeing with were lying, it was clear these were Hitchens’ convictions and he believed that Islam was currently the most dangerous of the major religions.
Now, Christopher Hitchens is dead.
And that infuriates me more than his ideas about the Iraq war and the current Iranian situation. The warmongering crazies have lost their only reasonable voice.
It’s a moot point that as an avid reader of Hitchens I want him remembered, I wouldn’t mind that time forgets his atheism and especially hope time forgets his views on the recent wars in the Middle East. If I had my druthers Christopher Hitchens would be remembered for literary mind and his literary writing. I hope we think of him as the Borges of our day, the guy that has an opinion on so much literature and culture because he’s taken it all in and practically read everything.
Lucky for me there is so much I haven’t read by Hitchens that he’ll live on for long time in my life, but it’s still disheartening to think nothing new will be churned out, that now there is a quantifiable end to what he’s written. To be sure that’s the only thing I can confirm, his writing and he himself, has ended. It is sad.
I raise my drink to you Christopher Hitchens. Unlike others, I will tell you to rest in peace, ’cause why the hell not?
$ATVI and the Perfect Fundamental Stock
A few days ago I highlighted a series by Dan Caplinger about $PWRD and his analysis of whether or not it’s a perfect stock. I also said that I would be giving a similar treatment to one of my “pet” stocks Activision Blizzard ($ATVI). Well it turns out old Dan already did that on November 3rd.
I just wanted to make sure I linked to him, I’ll still be doing a similar analysis, I also might be starting an analysis on each of those factors he lists under growth,margins,balance sheet. I also want to take a close look at cash flow and the whole rest of this madness for all my pet stocks, which realize is something I haven’t written about yet. Well, what the heck you know what the first one is already, Activision Blizzard, I’m not sure if I’ll make a master list or not, I may lose interest in a stock or two here and there.
Let’s see how deep I go, I hope to get a lot written about not only fundamentals but also whatever I can manage on options and the technicals too, maybe I’ll need fewer pet stocks huh?
Links of What I’m Writing Around The Vast Wasteland That Is The Internet
This blog is basically a mindcluster of Chris Sarda, a little politics, a little philosophy, a little finance, a little economics, a little of whatever else I’m spewing forth into vast human consciousness, I do try to keep my spectator sport interests separate, I hate two other website/blog/podcasts where I get those out. Forgive if I do take a second use this blog for what it was meant for in the first place, to consolidate all the other writing and commenting I do in this vast wasteland.
Over at Fist on Chin I wrote out my thoughts on Canelo Alvarez’s win against Kermit Cintron, I also pontificated a little bit on his future and !gasp! admitted to liking a Mexican fighter!
Also over at Bright Lights Sports I got down and dirty on UNLV’s upset win against top ranked University of North Carolina. It’s a big deal to people like me over here in another kind of wasteland, Las Vegas.
Anyway enjoy my friends!
The List
Well it’s coming to that time pretty soon where the academy will announce the nominees for the Oscars. I try to be the most cultured person possible, so once the movies are announced I pull out a little sheet of paper and write down all the movies in film of the year, foreign films of the year and documentary of the year.
Once I have my little list, I cross out all the films I’ve already seen, and then what I have left is a nifty little list of movies I should watch. I was pretty successful this year, but not perfect, I still have a number of movies to watch. Take a look, the struck out movies are movies I’ve seen:
Best Picture
The King’s Speech – Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, and Gareth Unwin
127 Hours – Danny Boyle and Christian Colson
Black Swan – Scott Franklin, Mike Medavoy, and Brian Oliver
The Fighter – David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, and Mark Wahlberg
Inception – Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas
The Kids Are All Right – Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, and Celine Rattray
The Social Network – Dana Brunetti, Ceán Chaffin, Michael De Luca, and Scott Rudin
Toy Story 3 – Darla K. Anderson
True Grit – Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Scott Rudin
Winter’s Bone – Alix Madigan and Anne Rosellini
Best Foreign Language Film
In a Better World (Denmark) in Danish, Swedish, and English – Susanne Bier
Biutiful (Mexico) in Spanish, Mandarin and Wolof – Alejandro González Iñárritu
Dogtooth (Greece) in Greek – Yorgos Lanthimos
Incendies (Canada) in French and Arabic – Denis Villeneuve
Outside the Law (Algeria) in Arabic and French – Rachid Bouchareb
Best Documentary – Feature
Inside Job – Charles H. Ferguson and Audrey Marrs
Exit Through the Gift Shop – Banksy and Jaimie D’Cruz
Gasland – Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic
Restrepo – Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
Waste Land – Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley
As you can see I have my work cut out for me still in foreign films and documentaries. I did well in watching them with last year’s list, but this year I’m a bit behind. Here’s the real surprise: I haven’t watched Toy Story 3? I better get on that.
