Welcome to IMGL | IMGL

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.

Edit: It’s not just Africa. Sorry for the confusion:

[...] same document said something about "Mukokuseki" [...] in regards to Afro-asia. I'm taking this as them making the next Fire Emblem game based on a mix of Indian, African, and Middle Eastern aesthetics

https://boards.4channel.org/v/thread/536999120
On one hand this sounds nice, on the other hand this sounds like a marketing disaster given how Japan can be. Not to mention this is a 4Chan leak
Wonder how familiar these guys are with game development at least. They’re basically acting like it’ll release like this and burn the series down. I’ve heard of at least 5 block buster games or characters in the last 5 years that were originally more “Diverse” before management neutered it into something more marketable. A ton of Street Fighter 4 characters were Black/Mexican before being lightened or white washed by management.
Dude said “As of right now” at least.
Edit: Copy-pasting the post's text for the future. Someone might see this in a couple weeks when the threads been removed

Google translated a Nintendo leak. Won't be posting a screenshot to avoid getting stung by lawyers. I'll try to break it down.
Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem Devs) planned three new installments during the Switch's lifetime but can't bc COVID. They should reveal a remake next year and a new game by 2022.
They're at an "Idea" phase for the new game, concept art as of now suggests focus on dark-skinned characters for some reason (Olive, brown, and black), same document said something about "Mukokuseki" (無国籍) (Look it up) in regards to Afro-asia. I'm taking this as them making the next Fire Emblem game based on a mix of Indian, African, and Middle Eastern aesthetics. Like how most previous titles mixed European aesthetics.
Doesn't sound very marketable in Japan so I doubt this works out.

I was asked to make a post about some stories within the Casino grounds so I thought I'd share. I have many so I'll do my best to pick the better ones.
Some back information: I've been a Casino Dealer for 11 years, I've been a supervisor for five years, and I've been a Surveillance Operator for one year. I've worked at three properties, none of which are connected or owned by the same company. I've worked on : Government/Private/Native American owned casinos.

1. From Hero to Zero.

At my first Casino, I was one of the first group of people who were trained to deal Roulette . After 4 weeks of working 6PM-3AM then doing roulette training from 3AM-8AM (Not paid) , I actually really enjoyed the game and after about six months I became extremely quick at the number game and the pace of the action was steady with very low margin of errors. Young man walks in, cashes in for $500. He buys in for $2 chips and just loads the board. After a few spins and pretty decent hits, he then changes his chips from $2 to 5$ then to $10 and racks his winnings up to $10,000. It was then, five spins in a row, he loaded the board with some pretty gross bets, and every spin I would hit the ONE number with either NO CHIPS on it, or maybe 1 chip , He lost all $10,000 in a matter of minutes. He leaves , and I go on break. After my break I was going back to the same table and wouldn't you know it, the same young man walks in and cashes in another $500. He tells me he just sold his car outside and this is all that he had left. So we do the same deal, buys in for $2 chips, then slowly starts betting $5 chips, $10, $25...and he makes $10,000 AGAIN. Within the next 25 minutes it was straight agony. Every spin, same thing, he would bet $2500 in chips, and win only $250, $400, and after about a half hour he lost it all . Never saw the guy again.
2) Man down
At this property, we are 24 hours for table games. It's currently 5AM , and I'm dealing some $25 Blackjack to this guy. He's probably early thirties , heavy guy. He's sober as can be, but right away I can tell he's been losing. We know how much you've bought in for, how much your down, or up, and I could see he was down $2000+. After about twenty minutes of pure losing, his temper starts to flare.At this point I now have two other guests at my table. Drinking coffee, not saying a word, just losing their money. After losing hand, after hand, this guy looks me straight in the eye, seized up, starts shaking, he can't move. He tries to punch towards me and smashes his stack of chips all over the place and falls backwards to the floor. I call for security, we cannot touch him due to liability . I can't move from my table because, well, liability / casino cash property, all I can do is try to talk to him. As I'm doing so, these other two woman who are sitting at my table just look at me and one says "OK, dealer, cmon lets go " as she taps the table telling me to start dealing and forget about the guy having a stroke on the floor. As security takes him to the ambulance out front, I had to stay behind for a couple minutes and give a statement. I go on break. I come back, and 45 minutes later, he comes right back in with a oxygen tank and keeps gambling for the remainder of the morning.
3) You get a dildo, and YOU get a dildo!
On a late summer Saturday night, we had a large event for these massive muscle guys/strongman competition type thing. After their show, I'm at the roulette table , and five of these boys come over to play. They were absolutely hilarious. They were feeling pretty good, cashed in somewhat large amounts and I could tell this was going to be a fun time. After about a hour of dealing to these guys, it's almost midnight, everybody is pretty hammered , I spin the ball, and all five of these guys take out these god damn (what I can only tell was) two feet purple dildos from inside their pants, and wiping them around in the air. The ladies were just loving it, one of the dildos landed in the roulette wheel and we had to shut the table down to re-calibrate the wheel to make sure nothing had been changed. I just remember that night was so much damn fun, I couldn't believe what I was seeing and I would never forget it.
4) Full Moon
On this day, I was actually training dealers / supervising them on small games like Three Card poker. We opened the table at 10AM, and this older man came and sat down . He played all day. The jackpot was $21,000 and that was pretty high for this table. He played, and played and played. He's one of the players where you know he's wearing a diaper because he's been drinking coffee/pop all day and hasn't moved in eight hours. As the day went on, this man never moved from his chair. Getting closer to midnight, he was aggravated and said "I need to go have a smoke, I'm getting killed in here". He left, and the very next hand, the lady beside him was dealt the jackpot . He didn't say much, but you could just tell he just hated life at that very moment because had he not gotten up, it would of been his hand. The man calmly took his cane , his hat, jacket, coffee, and left. The next morning I found out when he did leave he drove his car straight through his bank and was arrested.
5) Slick Robber
I actually give props to people who can actually pull this off. This story may confuse you so I'll try and explain things as best as possible. A lot of casinos have machines as soon as you walk through the front doors. A man walks up to one of these machines and sticks in HIS $100 bill. He doesn't gamble it, instead he hits the cash out button and gets a $100 TITO ticket where he then takes the ticket to the ATM machine to get his $100. Now remember, his Original $100 is in the slot machine. He then takes the $100 from the ATM and goes back to the same machine, and repeats this process over a hundred times. Essentially he's taking money from the ATM, and loading up the Slot Machine . Now he knows he can't do it too much because if the slot machine gets full of money, the machine will shut down and the slow attendant will have to take all the cash out. So he deposits over $10,000 , then has a small crowbar, he cracks the machine open and makes a run out the front door. To my knowledge he was never caught . But damn, that was pretty smart .
EDIT:
6) Mental Health is a thing.
10PM man walks in to play some high limit BlackJack. This guy knows the game and played well. Dressed nice, drank juice/tea , a little bit of a attitude, cashed in over $10,000. When this man was half way down his buy in, he said something a long the lines of "If I don't win here tonight, I'm going to go set myself on fire." I wasn't sure if he was serious because when people are down, they tend to say a lot of nonsense. I actually left early that night, and from a third party was told he did exactly that in the parking lot. The next day it was clear something terrible had gone wrong in the parking lot .
EDIT:
7) Nothing good happens after midnight
After a busy Saturday night, I was dealing a mix of games, and during this story I was in the middle of Blackjack. I had one young kid (probably 19) sitting in the middle, one older male probably in his later 40's sitting beside him on his right, and I had a really nice couple in their 20's sitting together at the other side. This young kid wasn't playing just sort of watching, and ever time the old man won he would give this young guy some of his winnings. The older man, was a wine drinker, and he had black between all of his teeth, I'll never forget. He's a little drunk but nothing terrible. As the night goes on, the older man goes and uses the washroom, at which point the couple asked the young guy "Oh was that your dad?" and the young guy says "Hah, no I wish!". The couple and I just looked at each other. This old guy, was in complete control over this kid. Absolutely disgusting. The night ends, and I find out the couple called a few of their friends, and they all waited outside by this old mans truck and beat the living hell out of him. 40 years old, sleeping with a 19 year old, completely brain washed . Very weird.
8) That one co-worker where you just wish they would quit.
One of our co-workers, nice guy but had a very big ego and we as employees just sorta left him alone. One day he had enough of the atmosphere and quit. Now usually when you quit, you cannot come back until you paperwork is finalized. How ever, HR was in that day, and he was given the paperwork the very next day. He came in, cashed in $1000, and made $50,000 in about a hour at the Baccarat table. My manager, was extremely annoyed, because now this guy is just mocking the casino and having the time of his life (Thanks for the big tip by the way :) ) and so he decides to call it quits. He wants to ban himself and he wants $50,000 in cash. The casino says Nope, we are going to give you a cheque. Now here's the thing, most business people will take the cheque, how ever you CANT CASH the cheque until the following monday because it's on that day where the funds are available. The casino on the other hand will cash their own check in anytime , because they want you to play. So this guy pretty much said go to hell I want my cash, and he called the police. Police show up, and management promptly gave him the cash.I though it was absolutely hilarious .
​
9) No good deed goes un punished
I was dealing Three Card Poker, and the jackpot was around $17,000. This old man (a regular) was sitting there all day grinding it out. Super nice guy, always a pleasure to deal to. Well, after hours of playing, he stands up and says "Hey john!, can you come here for a minute?" so his buddy John comes over. He says to John "I need to go take a piss real quick, can you play my card until I get back?" John agrees . John takes the chips and I stop him and explain he can't play his friends chips, he needs to cash in and play his own. And he does. Welp, second hand out and bam, doesn't he win it. The old man comes back and is so happy, he can't believe it. John, took his $17,000, didn't say a word to his "buddy" and walked away. I never felt so much hatred in all my life. Didn't give him a dollar, not a thank you, nothing. The old man sits back down again, the progressive resets to $2500, and he sat there grinding away again.
10) The Top Knot
I had this player , young guy, who was born into a fortune. One of his relatives passed away and left him a pretty big sizable amount of money, so he played poker every single day for the rest of his days. I will add, he IS a good player. I did not enjoy his company just because of the "Know-it-All" attitude, but he was good. We'll call him John. John is 5'10, and well build, with muscle. John also decided today was the day to show off his Top Knot. (google top knot if you're not sure what I mean) So he sits down, and he's absolutely KILLING the table. Every hand, after hand, after hand. And because he's in such a good mood, he's playing any two cards, calling any $500 bet, and he's just dominating. This one guy at the table decided he had enough. He got up, without saying a word and left. A moment later, he comes back in, walks behind John, and takes a pair of scissors , and cuts off his Top Knot. I for one couldn't believe it, dying laughing inside, and it just turned into one big brawl. That was a good day.
11) That one bad seed
One of my best friends who I haven't seen in YEARS ended up being part of the crew. Was kind of nice to catch up. We never really got along as we grew up because he has a very high picture of himself . He wanted that 10/10 woman. A mansion, and a new Corvette. So every month or so we would all go up to the other casino to play. I myself would bring no more than $500, but I couldn't understand how this guy (we'll call him Kyle) was spending THOUSANDS of dollars at the tables. So this wen on for a few months. Well, one day, as we're closing the casino, he and I are in the High Limit room and we're getting ready to close the tables. We are told to take the chips out, count them, put them back, sign this piece of paper and that's it. Well as the supervisor was locking the tray, the piece of paper fell to the floor, so she asked Kyle to grab the piece of paper. As he bends over, a great big $500 chip falls right out of his sock. Kyle was fired immediately , but it all made sense. They offered Kyle a deal where if he replaced all the stolen chips they would not make it public. Not sure how that turned out.
12) If I ever decide to write a book, this will be the last chapter: <3
After working at my first Casino for five years, I met a Indian woman who was visiting from another part of the country. During this time I was explaining a game to her, which honestly I don't think she even cared. She explained she was visiting and sight seeing , and that was that.Well, two years later I ended up moving to the other side of the country and transferred casinos, and low and behold she worked there as a Dealer. We got married , and it's been 5 years.
13) The Tip
One of our tables that we've had for a couple years had a progressive jackpot that had reached $100,000. The dealer at the table was sitting pretty lonely. Nobody really played the game because people knew it was extremely difficult to win the jackpot. My memory is a tad foggy, but you somehow needed to flop the royal flush. This young guy sits down and says to the dealer, we'll call him John. "John, if you pay me that jackpot, I will tip you $10,000" Well John started dealing, and about a half hour into his shift, he F*cking did it. He dealt him the royal. And you know something?This young lad, kept his word, and he made sure there was a audience, and he tipped exactly $10,000. That was a moment right there. That pay cheque was real nice. I think we all got about $500 more than usual. The moment that jackpot was awarded they got rid of the table because the money it was making was not near what the casino wanted. I'm sure there have been bigger tips at other casinos, but that was something special .
14) The Lawsuit
Now this story I'm going to have to beat around the bush a bit due to the nature of what happened. I can't won't answer any questions that you may have on this topic other than what I have to say because it had a lot of publicity . The waitresses at this casino had to wear very thin sexy clothes. Not borderline legal, but it was noticed. One day they called all the waitresses to come in and explained they were changing their outfit to something even more sexier. Now these new dresses were very very borderline legal . The staff said No way. We're not wearing that.So , friday night comes, and the staff work their whole shift, then at the end of their shift were called into a meeting and were all fired. Welp, one of those ladies father was a pretty big time lawyer. Brough the casino to court and won. They won big. Good for them. We had no waitresses for a couple days haha.
Thanks for reading along, I have many more I can add as the day goes on, those were just some off the top of my head. Feel free to ask any questions of the Casino industry. I don't really have many stories about the surveillance department because that's the one area where I can't really say a whole lot due to its privacy and contracts I was and still am under.

I think it’s time to start experimenting with a bear raid and short squeeze or two as a tactic for activism.
Now that may at first glance sound like securities fraud, except that a bear raid involves spreading false rumors to cover short positions. So this is not quite the same. Check with your legal council, but as far as I know, the following suggestion is straight up, legit Capitalism. If it's not strictly legal, then at the very least it's hard to prosecute and punish!
So who’s the target (or targets)?
Well XR should have a big press release and public announcement to kick off the raid. Call it the “Carbon Criminal Game” perhaps, and say there's a prize for the correct draw. The criminal is drawn (supposedly “randomly”, but actually decided beforehand) from a big hat of carbon criminals who are listed on the stock exchange. But obviously you carefully (and secretly) select the victim in advance. I would recommend a few private meetings with Young Turk City brokers (“debt-merchants”) to solicit their advice, but basically the target should be a small retail bank (preferably in financial trouble and either Chinese or Indian). Keep the brokers and celebrity endorsers informed all the way down the line (because they are going to be the actual bear raiders and financial muscle behind the scenes – they simply can’t resist trading on inside information!).
Once the victim has been drawn from the hat with great fanfare, then you read out all its sins in public and announce solemnly that anyone that banks or invests in this entity (the Target) is aiding and abetting crime (I don’t know of any banks that don’t engage in crime!).
Then the raid begins.
Rebels (and just about the whole world, including the broker-insiders, and everyone and their dog at home who is following this story and wants to make a buck) begin selling the stock short, driving it as low as possible and holding it there for as long as possible until you cover the participant's short positions or a circuit breaker triggers and trading is suspended. Then go onto the next victim (quickly, so that the insider-investor herd begins to panic).
The media dialogue will likely focus on the legality of this, so XR spokespeople should be financially literate and extremely radical sounding and intimidating. Hopefully someone uses the term “financial terrorist.” In which case, own it! Then point out that there is nothing at all to see here, it’s just one group of financial terrorists going after another group of financial terrorists. And then lay into HSBC’s and other bank's track record of literally funding terror (with impunity).
Where does the money for this come from?
Banks incorporated in the UK and listed on the LSE usually have market caps in the billions, and rebels are probably only able to raise about 10 orders of magnitude less than that (if they are lucky). But it doesn’t really matter, in the larger scheme of things. It would be awesome if XR could announce it was “bringing down a bank” and then go ahead and pull it off, but the odds of that are slim (for one thing, the Establishment will defend the bank with all they’ve got, because what’s at stake for them if this becomes common practice is so astronomical it’s barely even thinkable). If it did happen, XR itself would then have the rebel equivalent of a nuclear weapon. You would then just sweep up the ranks of banks, in the ascending order of their market cap, and as you went, capital would take flight ever faster as a self-fulfilling prophecy and vicious cycle ensued. Debt-parasites are herd animals and very, very skittish. And the banks are all zombies and secretly bankrupt down to almost the very last one. If you could take down a small, struggling Chinese or Indian bank in the morning, by the afternoon you could be bringing down arch-criminals such as HSBC and Barclays (and that’s why the debt-parasites would be forced to mount an all-out counter response). If this turned out to work, by the next day the world would be a very different place.
But I wouldn’t get too fixated on that outcome. It’s an extremely long shot. The main point of all this is just Psyops. If the protest monkey is getting sophisticated and learning to experiment and fiddle with the Elite's very own financial power levers, mass terror in the 1% is highly likely. They are used to rebels being economically and financially illiterate, to the point that their whole rotten game relies on it. So this is training and education for XR rebels too (and indirectly, the public at large) just as much as it’s directed against unearned income and debt-parasitism. It’s the beginning of an education on how the financial world works and for most rebels their first look behind the curtain of how this toxic global system functions (or malfunctions). I’m guessing that when rebels get to know first hand just how rotten The System is underneath; it will radicalize them far faster than getting arrested for civil disobedience in street protests.
But how do rebels get their hands on cash (even a little seed capital to gets this going)?
I would recommend that part of the “Rebellion Against Unearned Income” include a mass “Rent Strike Against Unearned Income” targeted towards rent-parasites (which includes mortgages) that begins as the prelude to the Autumn Rebellion. The idea is not to completely renege on mortgages and rent payments, but just to temporarily “borrow” from the rent-parasites (with the intention of paying it back after the Autumn Rebellion). But a word of caution: If you take rental and mortgage payments, and divert them to speculate with short positions in the stock market, you are highly likely to lose the money, so rebels had better be able to take the consequences!
You could conceivably make out like a bandit (in which case rebels should take their profits from the raid and give them to XR, after covering losses in a pool to catch up with individual rent and mortgage arrears). But what’s more likely is you will get caught in a bear squeeze. The reason for that is, as I said, the debt-parasites will have to “support” the victim of the raid (i.e. buy it’s stock like crazy, because there is a lot at stake for them in the bigger picture here). So what happens if you lose your shirt and get a “margin call”? It’s up to individual rebels, I would say. But by my way of thinking you would just give your brokerage the finger and call it the first salvo in the #DebtStrikeForClimate (assuming you can square it with your rent-parasite or mortgage holder).
To recap.
Rebels fund the raid however they can (accepting the significant risks of losing the money), but preferably with rent money held back in a global #RentStrikeForClimate. If possible, the landlord's rent-parasite money would be paid back and arrears caught up after the Autumn Rebellion. Any surplus would go into the XR war chest. The specific timing of all this would be done by each participating rebel based on staying on the right side of the eviction process (assuming that the rebel cares about being evicted). It’s important to highlight the fact that rebels with a bit of financial swagger could actually go out and get temporary, unoccupied (or donated for temporary shelter) rentals and mortgages for the sole purpose of using (and losing) them to support the #RentStrikeForClimate (assuming they can afford losing their deposits and take a hit to their credit ratings). I would even recommend considering pooling resources for this purpose to get a few “flagship” rental, mortgaged or leased spaces that are offered as shelter to a large number of homeless or distressed folk. And then treat any attempts at eviction as a cause célèbre and justification for mass action on the streets.
What about precipitating a bank run?
Yes, by all means do. And even announce your intent to do that beforehand (so the self-fulfilling prophecy works in your favor). If the target is a retail bank then get rebels to open accounts and deposit funds there (rather than keeping withheld rental money in their regular bank accounts).
Spread rumors about who The Target is, to put all small-cap banks on edge and worried about taking on new deposits in case it's a trap. And do a few diversionary actions to harass some of The Target’s peers and make them think, “They’re it”.
Then, just in time for D-Day, everyone starts hauling money out of The Target like crazy and transferring to brokerage accounts in readiness for the Big Short (on the hopefully weakened victim).
At that point, mount a few psyops actions involving supposedly “panicked” rebels who stage a Northern Rock and queue outside The Target, play-acting “desperately hoping to get their money out in time before the rebellion starts” (whether they have any money there or not). Outside the real victim of course.
At that stage it doesn't really matter if you “pre-announce” the victim, just so long as you can get 3rd parties to rush down and haul their money out “just in case.”
If it’s successful, won’t the government just bail the bank out?
Who cares at that point? Just move rapidly (like within minutes or hours) onto the next (bigger) victim and repeat all the way up the ranks!
However, pick the first victim carefully. I can’t see the UK bailing out a smallish bank domiciled in China or India. China or India might bail them out, but then that’s just gravy. Think of how hard it is to spin that one in the press in Beijing or Mumbai! You can almost hear the sound of Asians pulling their money out of foreign banks en masse already.
But not all rent-parasites are evil. Some are just old folks on fixed income, for example, aren’t they? Why should we possibly inflict suffering on them?
“For their own good!” is how I would respond to that.
I strongly feel that people in Britain need to get their heads straight about the acceptability of rent-parasitism in the coming global Collapse. If anyone is thinking they are going to blithely glide through the coming crisis in Britain, and around the world, by sucking rent out of some property or other while people starve at their feet, then they have another think coming!
It’s unconscionable to even begin to conceive of some people still extorting rent out of others during a collapse. For one thing, it will become an unnecessary source of interpersonal conflict. If people are living off rent-parasitism at this stage (and sometimes it seems to me that half of Britain is living off the other half), then the kindest thing is to wake them up while there is still time to make other plans.
What personal repercussions are likely from this?
Apart from the risks I’ve already stated, the debt-parasites and their stooges in government have to nip this kind of praxis in the bud at all costs. They simply cannot afford to let this kind of rebellion spread.
XR must loudly proclaim that these are all just experimental tactics to work out the kinks and weaponize them for rebels to use in America for The American Spring.
You cannot even begin to imagine the terror this is likely to cause in the 1%. So much so that I would not be surprised if a few of them tried to break ranks and come and join the rebellion out of fear of the coming pitchforks. Remember that the rich are far better informed than rebels in general, and they have a far keener sense of what’s around the corner. So many of the smarter ones are already looking for an out. And rebels must be prepared to give then that out, otherwise it puts the enemy on “death ground” or “desperate ground” prematurely, and that’s not desirable.
So expect unlikely allies if the Autumn Rebellion succeeds. But as for the rest, you are digging down through the garbage heap of ever-hardening and incorrigible psychopaths. If victory is ever in sight then steel yourself to give the last holdouts no quarter, otherwise you will regret it!
You can’t reconcile with a scorpion.
What the hardliners are likely to do is to try to prosecute as many rebels for stock manipulation and securities fraud as they can. But prosecuting masses of rebels for a white-collar crime is problematic for them when compared to legal action against civil disobedience, for example. Unfortunately for them, they will be prosecuting using the aristocratic house rules they normally reserve for themselves.
I’m not a lawyer, so take what legal advice I give with a grain of salt. But in my mind rebels should plead “not guilty” in all cases and push for jury trials. At trial a good defense lawyer should be able to persuade a jury of “the bigger picture” argument and win them over in a way that a magistrate would never countenance. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for a “necessity” defense) (in front of a judge or jury), because the connection between heist-finance and environmental activism is too tenuous in the mind of the average Joe (and requires them to concede too much of their comfortable worldview, which is largely pro-Capitalist).
But I think the best defenses are:

1. It’s not conventional securities fraud because you had no intention to profit from it (in fact the contrary). And you should perhaps file affidavits before the raid to attest that profits you make would go to XR or some other non-profit (for-purpose) entity.
   
2. It’s not a bear raid, per se, because you only traded on information in the public domain (XR’s fanfare announcement of the carbon criminal rap sheet is more than adequate to count as “published news”) and you never spread any untruths or rumors, only the hard facts (which is actually a civic duty).
   
3. The existing securities laws and infrastructure are unjust and therefore invalid, because they allow banks like HSBC to support terrorism, money laundering and other criminal activity and get market support because they are virtually immune to prosecution due to their vast wealth. In other words, rebels are just doing (in a rather unconventional way) what market makers do routinely and legally on a daily basis, and that’s price stocks correctly.
   

Now if anyone tries to take legal action against the tactics outlined above, the following is crucially, crucially important. The best outcome of all is what’s known as a “perverse verdict” in the UK or “Jury nullification” in the US. At all costs, try to educate rebels around the world that the current body of Law itself is unjust, and juries have the power to nullify the laws themselves.
So the defense council should push juries to come to a “perverse verdict” conclusion. And rebels should not plea-bargain or settle under any circumstances.
But let's hope that it will be too difficult for the Establishment to take legal action against this tactic if thousands or even millions of people participate.

[Updating as I go]
Demographics

• Gender: Male
• Race/Ethnicity: Indian (Asian)
• Residence: Virginia
• Income Bracket: 70k
• Type of School: Public IB Magnet
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): None

Intended Major(s): Creative Writing/English + Business
Academics

• GPA (UW/W): 3.94/4.61
• Rank (or percentile): 10/295 (3%)
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: All IB, 1 AP, 1 Dual Enrollment
• Senior Year Course Load: Hardest possible at my school

IB Psychology HL, IB World Topics HL, IB Spanish VI, IB Biology SL/HL, AP Calculus BC, IB TOK II, IB Language and Literature HL
Standardized Testing
List the highest scores earned and all scores that were reported.

• SAT: Not submitting
• AP/IB: IB Math SL (5) [HL not offered]
• Other (ex. IELTS, TOEFL, etc.): None

Extracurriculars/Activities
List all extracurricular involvements, including leadership roles, time commitments, major achievements, etc.

1. Dances: Indian dances: Bhangra, Raas, Garba. [competition names] - first place. Collegiate choreographer, 5x best dancer. 13+ years; 20+ recognitions. Nationally recognized.
2. Published an anthology: [name]. Topics about paper to suicide. Next publication [name] passed the editing stage.
3. [Organization] Religious Head (Under 18 Board Member): Assisted in planning a religious convention; created fliers, media posts, increased engagement 200%. National, we raised $10,000+; creative organizer.
4. Pickleball Player: [Local city] Pickleball Elite, practice on courts 2+ hours daily. 4.0 rating, taught sport by myself, competition appearances. No placements due to COVID.
5. Mock Trial: Lawyer, Witness, & Prime Speechwriter: Speechwriter: creative writing. Regional (2x team win): best lawyer and witness; 2 judges. State (4th place) solo top 5; National Empire appearance.
6. Church Youth Group Leader Not Christian, volunteered to learn about other religions; Group leader; 100+ members; Helped children with Creative Writing Workshops; 15 communities.
7. Family Responsibilities (family business director) Marketing and media director; Creative writing through fliers and media posts to increase engagement (100%+); Writing work emails; analyzing products. [Parents own a small convenience store].
8. Sales and Marketing Director (charity organizer): Local charity drive organizer; Creative writing on media and posts; $1000 (3 years); contacted local businesses and created a raffle: host; 10 people.
9. Tennis assistant coach and player: Played top 6; assistant coach: organized practices and drills; 2 playoff appearances, t-shirt creator; solo games, high doubles record (11th).
10. Other things: [Local tennis academy] - disabled tennis helper; food booth president [organization]; foodbank volunteer (50+ hours); Librarian (2+ years); Pro Hearthstone Coach; Board Game Tester

Awards/Honors
List all awards and honors submitted on your application.

1. 2x 1st Place Creative Writing Recognization (state-wide for religious thing). Also, same speech 2nd place in another state-wide competition.
2. 2nd Place [city] Poetry Magazine Award for my publication.
3. 1st Place (12th grade) and 2nd Place (11th grade) school/state-wide poetry competition.
4. Math Excellence (9th grade) - only 2 awarded; PSAT Excellence (11th).
5. 2nd Place Division for Math competition (regional).

Letters of Recommendation
Counselor (?/10) - new counselor for the whole grade this year so not sure how they are doing recommendations. Talked them to a few times and they really liked me.
TOK Teacher (also a professor at a local college) (8/10) - loved my poetry and we talked a lot of times outside of class. Had lots of debates and discussions with me.
English Teacher (7/10) - went to them a lot for support in writing and they loved giving me feedback. Overall, not much else except talked in class and enjoyed English.
Dance Mentor (10/10) - knew them for 10+ years and helped me with numerous dances. Saw my improvement and will perfectly support my application.
Interviews
Stanford (10/10) - pretty much as good as possible
Dartmouth (8/10) - the interviewer themself was really shy, so I kinda carried the conversation because I talk a lot. But, they said I was better than 99% of applications so there's that (yay!).
Wharton (upcoming and planned)
Essays
Personal Statement (9/10) - counselor said it was the best one they ever read. It's also kinda quirky and unique which sums up my personality really well.
Supplementals (8/10) - hit or miss. Some are really basic and some are extremely weird (I talked about the subreddit beards and its impact on my life for UMich).
Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)
Acceptances:

• University of Michigan [EA] (LSA - shooting for Ross)
• Virginia Commonwealth University [Rolling] (75% scholarship - appealing for 100%)
• University of Virginia

Waiting:

• Princeton
• Columbia
• Cornell
• Yale
• Dartmouth
• Northwestern
• Johns Hopkins
• University of Pennsylvania
• Brown
• Pomona
• Virginia Tech

Rejections:

• Stanford REA

Additional Information:
Wrote my COVID-19 essay on how my family's small business was affected greatly: decreased foot traffic, 25-30% income loss, and just overall financial burden.
Additional information section was about an upcoming internship I had planned that was canceled.
P.S. anything in [brackets] was redacted for personal reasons

I write this letter with a heavy heart & a deep sense of embarrassment. I'm old enough to know that one doesn't talk ill of the dead. And I hope you are also old enough to be in the know of my personal relationship with Late Arun Jaitley was never quite on the same page.
Let's say we weren't really cricketing buddies when he was the President of DDCA. My reservations about the choice of people he handpicked to run the day to day affairs of DDCA is well known. I remember walking out from a meeting at his residence when he was unable to throw out a rowdy element using terribly foul language. I think I was too headstrong ... too old school ... & too proud an Indian cricketer to be co-opted into the corrupt darbar of sycophants Arun Jaitley mustered at the Kotla during his stewardship.
It pains me no end to point out the far from flattering facts about DDCA's unsavoury past, but trust me it has a context. I was not raised to carry on the fight to the next generation. But I was also taught that if I firmly believe in taking a stand I must stick with it.
But sadly this is how it has unfolded. Keep in mind, these are the ills of nepotism-you get blamed for decisions you weren't part of and you can't even give the excuse of absence. As I observe now even in your leadership DDCA's court culture of fawning obeisance continues.
After the Feroze Shah Kotla was named hurriedly & most undeservingly after Late Arun Jaitley my reaction then was maybe somehow good sense might prevail to keep Kotla sacrosanct. How wrong I was.
Now I gather a statue of Late Arun Jaitley is going to be installed at the Kotla. I'm not at all enamoured with the thought of a statue of Arun Jaitley coming up at Kotla. I pride myself as a man of immense tolerance & patience ... but all that I'm afraid is running out. DDCA has truly tested me & forced me to take this drastic action. So, Mr President, I request you to remove my name from the stand named after me with immediate effect.
Also, I hereby renounce my DDCA membership. I've taken this decision with sufficient deliberations. I'm not prone to disregard the honour that was bestowed upon me. My gratitude to Justice Sen & the Committee of M/s Dr ND Puri, Dr Ravi Chaturvedi, Vijay Lokapally & Neeru Bhatia ... all people of social & professional eminence, who extended the warm gesture to Mohinder Amarnath & me, will never fade.
But as we all know with honour comes responsibility. They feted me for the total respect & integrity with which I played the game. And now I'm returning the honour just to assure them all that four decades after my retirement, I still retain those values.
A mere Google search would have helped to know that Late Arun Jaitley's tenure at DDCA was riddled with corruption. You being a lawyer should also know the cases of massive misappropriation of funds are still pending in courts. Late Arun Jaitley I'm told was an able politician. So its the parliament & not a cricket stadium which needs to remember him for posterity.
He might have been a good cricket fan too, but his diligence with cricket administration was dubious & left much to desire. This is not a rhetorical assessment but a factual appraisal of his time at DDCA.
Take my word, failures don't need to be celebrated with plaques & busts. They need to be forgotten. Mr President if ever you get to travel to the cricket stadiums around the world you will find how aesthetically challenged Kotla is and how it lacks the grandeur of a Test Centre. You need to be educated that sports administrators don't need to be self-serving. People who surround you presently will never inform you that it's WG Grace at Lord's...Sir Jack Hobbs at the Oval...Sir Donald Bradman at the SCG...Sir Garfield Sobers at Barbados & Shane Warne of recent vintage at the MCG...who adorn their cricket stadia with the Spirit of Cricket never out of place..so when the kids walk into these stadiums these majestic statues/busts enhance & enliven the inspiring stories of these past heroes that their elders tell them. Sporting arenas need sporting role models.
The place of the administrators is in their glass cabins. Since DDCA doesn't understand this Universal cricket culture, I need to walk out of it. I can't be part of a stadium which has got its priorities so grossly wrong & where administrators get precedence over the cricketers.
Please bring down my name from the stand with immediate effect. You needn't worry about me or my legacy. God Almighty has been very kind to me to keep me alive with my cricketing convictions. I don't wish my strength of character to be maligned by my silence or association with this unsporting act.
Thankfully,
Bishan Bedi

What is Red Light Holland Corp?

• Red Light Holland engages in the production, cultivation, and sale of magic truffles to the legal recreational market in the Netherlands. It sells its products under the iMicrodose brand name through smart shops operators and an advanced e-commerce platform, iMicrodose.nl
• In accordance with the highest standards, in compliance with all applicable laws.
• Red Light Holland is strategically based in the Netherlands, an area with a long-standing, established legal magic truffles market.

​
What sets Red Light Holland apart from competition?

• Unique approach of recreational market first, medicinal after. The medicinal route requires large amounts of capital and time to acquire the data needed for an FDA approval. Red Light Holland plans to be IN STORES and is currently generating revenue with their iMicrodose product online and in smart shops in Netherlands.
• EU GMP Facility Red Light Holland is starting to build out its potential EU-GMP facility which aims to pioneer and lead EU-GMP in the naturally occurring PSILOCYBIN category with the strictest legal compliance measures.
  • a proposed plan to seek a EU-GMP certification for its production facility in the Netherlands in order to also produce and supply medical grade, EU-GMP certified premium magic truffles within the Netherlands (in addition to a non-EU-GMP grade of premium magic truffles), in a clean room facility.
  • This is the beginning of entering into the medicinal side of things.
• Red Light Holland ‘s management and advisory members are comprised of a core group of highly skilled individuals with the wealth of combined knowledge and experience (relating to growing, mass-producing, compliance, distributing, marketing and managing, etc.) necessary to help fix Red Light Holland as a leader in this early-stage, emerging field.
  • Todd Shapiro (CEO)
    • after being a top rated Radio Show host & a brilliant Marketing Entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, he has recently moved on from mainstream media to concentrate his efforts on being the CEO of Red Light Holland.
    • Shapiro also has an incredible history as one of North America's most professional & effective Brand Ambassadors and Influencers having worked with Canopy Growth, Samsung, Canada Goose, Canadian Tire & Boveda Inc.
  • Russell Peters (CCO)
    • Russell Peters was recently named as one of Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Comics of All Time. He started doing stand-up at the age of nineteen at open mics in his native Toronto, and spent the next fifteen years honing his craft at clubs across Canada and the UK. In 2004, Peters gained critical and global recognition for his CTV “Comedy Now!” special and soon became the first comedian to sell-out Toronto’s Air Canada Centre in 2007. Peters went on to set attendance records at venues from Madison Square Garden to the Sydney Opera House to London’s O2 Arena – where he broke the UK attendance record for highest number of tickets sold for an individual comedy show.
    • Peters has been awarded Gemini, Peabody, Emmy and Canadian Screen Awards for his hosting, producing and acting talents. His last TV series, the Indian Detective set a Canadian viewership record for Bell Media /CTV in 2017 and was released globally on Netflix.
  • Hans Derix (President)
    • Hans is a certified Substance Abuse therapist (APCB) and member of the Association of Addiction Professionals (NAADAC) with over a decade of experience in the field of addiction treatment. He is the founder and managing director of Sensum, Asia’s first and only addiction treatment provider specialized in round-the-clock, one on one, in-home rehab services.
    • As a founding member of the New Life Foundation and former, senior member of Asia’s largest rehab center the Cabin, Hans has been instrumental in promoting third wave, mindfulness based therapies to the field of addiction recovery in Asia. Hans recognizes the huge potential of natural remedies, including magic truffles, in treating individuals suffering from mental health disorders such as addiction. He is a strong advocate of further, clinical research and his aim is to achieve such with Red Light Holland.
    • Hans was born and raised in the south of Holland in an area known for its mushroom production. He is very well connected within the Netherlands psychedelia community.
  • Bruce Linton (Chair of Advisory Board)
    • Founder & former Chairman, CEO and Co-CEO of Canopy Growth Corporation (CGC) formerly Tweed Marijuana Incorporated, a cannabis company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario, Canada. Bruce founded Tweed in 2013 and renamed it Canopy Growth Corporation in 2015. Canopy Growth Corporation was the first cannabis company in North America to be listed on a major stock exchange (TSX-V in April 2014 and TSX in July 2016) and to be included on a major stock index (S&P/TSX Composite Index in March 2017). Bruce led CGC from a TSX-V listed start-up company with an $80 million market cap to a NYSE/TSX listed company (S&P/TSX60) including more than 30 M&A activities. Ranking number one on the TSX30 with a market cap of over $20 billion by the summer of 2019.
    • Bruce’s experience as a founder, CEO, and board member across a diversity of sectors was a huge influence for the success of CGC. Earning market support for capital raises of over $6 billion in public capital markets and private placements, the company funded capacity growth and opened new markets, including a $5 billion CAD investment by Fortune 500 beverage company, Constellation Brands (NYSE:STZ).

​
Why are a radios show host and comedian starting a psychedelic company?
Im sure many are wondering why Todd Shapiro and Russell Peters are important factors and why they are management of a psychedelic focused company. The simple answer is they are marketing geniuses. Both Todd and Russell have built a brand out of themselves and have incredible expertise in marketing. Russell Peters has 4M twitter followers, an absolute massive following. Todd has had an extensive career in the radio show business and has his own SiriusXM show.
They are targeting the adult recreational market with a small, legal micro dose kit. Marketing this kit will be essential to their success as it needs to be appealing and gain traction within the public audience. Having outside-the-box thinking heads working together to create a uniquely special niche product will prove to be a game changer.
"Red Light Holland’s goal is to, over time, help make the relatively unknown ‘magic truffle’ a familiar name across the world. We are currently setting up to grow, distribute and market a premium brand of magic truffles to the legal, recreational market within the Netherlands, and we can't wait to shift the existing paradigm to direct further attention to the legal and responsible use of magic truffles.“ -Todd Shapiro CEO, Red Light Holland
​
Red Light Holland Verticals and Products

• Red Light Holland intends to, in the future, establish Scarlette Lillie Science and Innovation, a business segment to supplement its core business. Scarlette Lillie Science and Innovation's goal will be to supply the medical market, with naturally occurring, nonsynthetic psilocybin as current research shows clinical trials are using a synthetic pro-drug compound. Red Light Holland hopes to explore the entourage effect of whole fungi medicine and to establish itself as a pioneering company with the capability to grow medical grade truffles which will potentially help discover more about the entire psilocybin Truffle.
• Red Light Holland has developed iMicrodose, a non-synthetic premium truffle microdosing kit to promote responsible use. Microdosing involves taking a much smaller dose on a scheduled routine, compared to that of a recreational dose. The magic truffles are sold in their natural, raw and unprocessed form, and need to be refrigerated prior to use. the iMicrodose kits are currently only available for purchase in the Netherlands.
• Red Light Holland has released a line of custom merchandise for supporters and fans to enjoy globally. Merch includes Red Light Holland branded; Toques, fitted hats, trucker hats and baseball jerseys. Most merch items are printed with the company logo, name and ticker symbol ($TRIP) and will be available fo purchase through the company website .
  • Why is merch important? INSTANT REVENUE. Selling something as simple as merch is an easy stream of income for a company looking to expand. This is something unique about Red Light Holland that almost all other psychedelic comapanies have not done yet.

Financials

• Total Common Shares Outstanding (Fully Diluted): 289,923,964
• Float: 192.09M
• Market Capitalization: $92.37M
• Share Price: $0.41

​
Future Growth
The legal psilocybin market is expected to reach$7 billion by 2027. I personally think this is a rather conservative estimate and as we advance in research, we will begin to see the full potential psychedelics could provide to the medical field (PTSD, addiction disorders, anxiety, eating disorders, depression, ADD/ADHD, migraines, etc.)
Microdosing is a popular trend and is continuing to gain traction.

• Psychedelics for Breakfast: The rise of microdosing
• Psychedelic Microdose benefits and challenges
• Microdosing’s Micromoment Consuming crumb-size amounts of psychedelics — not to get high but to feel more focused and creative and present — has moved a tiny bit mainstream.
• Microdosing is trendy, but does it work?

​
Risks
The fate of this company lies in the hands of governments around the world to create a legal, recreational marketplace for adult psychedelic use. Although this subject is gaining traction everyday, it will take time and science to prove the worthiness. Luckily, Netherlands recreational truffle market is already legal and operating currently.
I have not been able to find the balance sheet and do not know current debt, revenue, or cash-on-hand numbers. As soon as i find that information I plan to add it in an edit.
Recent News

1. The first-ever psychedelics ETF will launch next week, backed by a Canadian fund manager
2. Red Light Holland Engages Graham Pechenik, Respected Patent and IP Lawyer and Editor-at-Large of Psilocybin Alpha, as Senior Advisor to Advisory Board
3. Red Light Holland To Make Groundbreaking Investment in St. Vincent and the Grenadines' Plant-Based Wellness and Psychedelics Industry
4. Red Light Holland Commences Growing 1,000,000 Grams of Magic Truffles

Conclusion
With Red Light Holland beginning operations in an already legal market, this gives them the ability to establish their brand before going global since their isn't a global market, YET... and Unlike most psychedelic stocks, Red Light Holland does not have to burn cash like crazy up front to fund pre-clinical/clinical trials to acquire the data needed for FDA Approval. Their capital goes directly into marketing their iMicrodose Kit, expanding production capabilities, and potential M&A possibilities. The unique approach this company is taking, along with the strategic assembly of the management and advisory board is why I plan to hold a small position long term 5-10% of my portfolio.
My position: 2250 shares @ $0.37
​
This is not financial advice. Penny stocks are extremely volatile and risky. Only risk what you are willing to lose! Please do not use this DD as conviction, do your own research!

Read full story: medium.com/verasity
On the 4th of February, we hosted an AMA with Verasity Founder R J Mark. Thank you to everyone who joined, we answered a lot of community questions in depth (39 in total!). If you missed it, below is the complete transcript. Exciting information in this, make sure to read it all. 👀
Hello Verasians. I am Bhav, the marketing manager at Verasity and I’m joined by R J Mark, the founder of Verasity. Thank you for joining us for this AMA! :smile:
Mark: Hello everyone.
We will be answering all of the pertinent questions that the community have sent in throughout the week. Once these questions have been answered, I will open up the chat so you can ask further (non-repetitive please) questions, the chat will then close once more for Mark to answer. The transcript of this AMA will then be posted on our Medium.
Let’s get straight into it!
Q1) There will be no deadline on the swap so there is no rush and no fear of losing your tokens. They can be swapped at any time. Is that right?
Absolutely right. There is no deadline on the swap For more details read:
VRA Token & PoV update
Q2) Regarding the ERC777 Token Swap, you don’t need to withdraw to VeraWallet on the day of swap? Can I do it later?
Correct, take your time, there is no rush. You can do it at any time. There is no deadline or end date for the swap. We are making this as seamless and easy as possible for everyone.
Seamless and easy. That’s the way forward ✅Q3) Will we see more movements from the Foundation wallet. What is this about? The Swap?
That is correct. In anticipation of the swap company wallets’ tokens are being swapped via VeraWallet. See the article about this:
VRA Token & PoV update
New Foundation wallets will be created to replace the old ones.
Q4) Any plans to keep staking beyond the 31/12/2021 deadline?
We have not made a decision yet but liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We will announce mid-year.
Q5) All the tournaments are free to join. How does that help the company to generate revenue? Is there a place or example where users/players are actually using the VRA token to get a product/service?
_Great question!_The tournaments are free to join since we are focusing on adoption and scaling the number of users we have globally. Bringing as many people to the platform is our priority right now. As we expand and offer user-generated prize pools we will take a commission on the total jackpots as a revenue stream. In addition, other revenue flows will become available to us as we build our user base and launch our video player this Q1.
We will monetize our esports content through our video player within Esports Fight Club by serving ads from our ad partners:
Advertiser Partnership Update
Esports Fight Club will require players to use VRA to purchase subscriptions via several payment systems: VeraWallet, PayPal and Credit Cards (although some tournaments are free for promotional purposes). Winners receive VRA for winning tournaments. Soon players will also be rewarded VRA for watching ads. Verasity profits from the purchase of game credits, subscriptions, tournament prize pools and ads. This is an entire ecosystem all within Verasity.
See our revenue forecast here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Adoption and scale are key to the success of Esports Fight Club. We’ve made a lot of progress on the platform and are confident we will continue to see further growth in terms of users and a ton more exposure to the platform, and our token $VRA.Talking about adoption and scale… the next question will answer that!~Q6) What is the current Marketing Strategy? How do we differ from other tournament websites?
After creating mass-scale events around the world, we are focusing on adoption and community this year. Spending $10,000 on a big one-time prize pool to attract 1000 teams sounds good in theory. But, after careful planning, forecasting and testing, the results show that the best way is to spread the tournaments out so we reach a larger number of audiences. This consistency and large reach will attract much more than just 1000 teams over a period of time. The best place to do this is by sponsoring streamers and influencers, who each have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fans.
For the past week, for example, we’ve been running a Valorant Community Tournament with Esports Fight Club’s first partnered streamer, Mika Daime. The turnout has been massive! Qualifier 1 was filled up with the max slots so quickly, that we had to create a Qualifier 2 just to fit all the teams in.

1. Most streamers we aim to partner with can easily bring in 64 or 256 teams to a community tournament hosted by Esports Fight Club, for a fraction of the price
2. With the same budget as a big tournament, of the $10,000 we would have spent on a single tournament, we can obtain approximately 540% more users by repurposing that budget for the influencer and streamer tournaments.

For a full list of upcoming features such as the Marketplace and VoD section read our full Marketing and Adoption post:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
It’s key for people to understand what we aim to do with the tournaments in terms of marketing. We read a lot of comments about the “low prize pool” when we announced the Mika Daime tournament, hopefully the answer Mark provided sheds light on that!Everything we do at Verasity is calculated. 😊Do check this out if you wanted a full read on our Marketing and Adoption post for 2021. 👍🏼If you think you’re good at some of the games we have available on Esports Fight Club, join in! The partnered streamers we have will be hosting a lot of community tournaments, such as Mika Daime!Q7) How often shall the revenue estimates (status update) be updated and is there any new estimation?
We will update the community every six months on revenue forecasts. There are no updates from our last announcement which can be found here
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter with notifications turned on, so you can get all the updates as they come through!https://twitter.com/verasitytech
Q8) Have you changed your business model? Because at the beginning it was mainly about publishers.
Our fundamental model has not changed: Video publishers attract audiences to watch video content and ads. Users are rewarded for it, thereby increasing engagement and monetization.
This model has not changed. What has changed is the type of video publisher we are pursuing. Prior to COVID-19, we pursued traditional publishers. With COVID-19, we saw the opportunity to pursue gaming publishers and more specifically esports publishers. More importantly, we created our own tournament platform: esportsfightclub.com. This allows us to control our own environment, launch our own proprietary video player, own our video content, run ads on our player, and charge subscription fees as well as take tournament fees.
But actually publishers and content are publishers and content whether it’s gaming or news.
It’s great to see how Esports Fight Club will have it’s own video content up on the website so that users will be able to watch the content to earn $VRA by using our own video technology, then use the $VRA to join tournaments, or buy hardware from trusted partners 👀Exciting stuff!Q9) Where can I find info about the Founders token unlock schedule?
Tokenomics and Founders token unlock schedule can be found here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q10) Does VeraWallet speed handling withdraws scale up painlessly when user amounts boom? And shall there be enhancements to user experience if we for example have tens or hundreds of small reward withdraws daily?
We are adding automated withdrawals for small amounts to the roadmap but first have to complete the swap and add the security protocols. We won’t risk our users’ investments.
We simply don't want to risk our secure environment.
Q11) Are there any plans for compounding rewards for the VeraWallet staking?
No, absolutely not. The simple interest we are paying now is already high.
Q12) Bit confused about the VeraWallet staking rate after March. Can you clarify?
The staking reward rate is 0.1% per day (36.5% per annum) until 31 March 2021 when it becomes 0.07% daily (25.55% pa) until 31 December 2021.
Q13) When can I instant stake with BTC?
Good news, BTC is already available in VeraWallet for Instant Stake together with ETH, BNB and USDT.
Try Instant Buy and Stake out for yourself here:
VeraWallet - Official VRA Wallet
Instant Buy and Stake has been a really popular update to VeraWallet. Great to see the community loving it. 👍🏼Q14) With the recent developments on Cardano, and the ease in which ERC-20 tokens can migrate to this superior to Ehereum platform, are you considering following suit of great projects like Celsius to move VRA over to Cardano? I know we are still a bit hurt with Binance VRAB. I understand it is not an easy decision. Just interested in what you think about the future on Ethereum.
We gave this a lot of thought and investigation and as the community knows we have experience with token migrations :)
Please see our latest update on the VRA token swap to ERC777 and Proof of View:
VRA Token & PoV update
As to Cardano — the liquidity is really small compared to ETH alts. For example on Kucoin it’s volume is less than $2m per day. Even on OKEX it’s only $3m. 50% of Celsius’ volume is on Uniswap which is the majority of the liquidity and is not on any Tier 1 exchanges. Aside from the lack of features that we need for PoV, after our last experience, we are very reluctant to join with mainnets that are generally illiquid. Celsius’s solution is to provide the liquidity themselves through Uniswap which is limiting in our view. We believe sticking with Ethereum is the right way to go and the market seems to agree with this as well.
Q15) The new VOD platform, when is it going to be finished and in use?
We are working on it now and expect it to meet the roadmap target of Q1: see verasity.io for the roadmap.
Can’t wait for it to be released! 🚀> Yes, this is a huge milestone for us and opens us up to so many possibilities.Q16) Is liquidity mining still in play? Will this replace the staking rewards after December 2021?
Good question. Yes, liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We have not made that decision yet but will announce as soon as we do.
Q17) Are there new partners/publishers in the trend of gaming for the ad stack?
Yes, FB, Google and others. Please see:
Advertiser Partnership Update
In total 17, many specializing in gaming.
I don’t think today there are many ad networks that are not into gaming. It's such a huge audience sitting at home during Covid.
Q18) Micro tournaments: could you arrange tournaments yourself, like a national tournament for example?
The Esports Fight Club platform is fully self-managed, so yes, you could set up large tournaments and be the admin and sponsor. We would definitely like to see this happen by our community members. This quarter, our admins and developers are focused on A/B testing different tournaments with multiple communities to see if we are missing any critical features demanded by gamers. An article will be coming next week about micro and partnered tournaments. We will explain how these increase platform adoption which benefits both influencers and Esports Fight Club.
If anyone does host some tournaments, message me! I’d be happy to join a few… dust off my skills. I heard Rob (Our Finance Director) was a bit of Counterstrike wizard in his day… 😂Q19) Why are the tokens bought via the instant buy taken from a pool which dilutes the total supply? This is like raising new capital for $VRA at every buy instead of us token holders getting a price increase.
These are not purchased from a pool. If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. I think this is really clear.
Q20) Asking about the “Instant buy and stake feature”. If someone buys $VRA using this system, there is no transaction on the blockchain. You say you buy directly on exchanges but no proof.
Buy backs of VRA do not happen instantly and we don’t announce buy backs in advance to avoid speculation. We don’t share our VeraWallet addresses as we have stated before. We are not going to provide speculators with tools to make a margin on each purchase.
Q21) Do we stay on the Ethereum network?
Yes, see the article:
VRA Token & PoV update
We are swapping our current ERC20 tokens to ERC777 which is essentially an upgrade to a more modern and fuller feature set Ethereum token.
For anyone just joining the chat, make sure you read the article above! Tons of important and exciting information.Q22) From the Foundation wallet tokens have been unlocked in the last 50 days and added to the circulating supply. How is our token deflationary?
If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Foundation tokens are not locked and the article clearly states they are unlocked. In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. We specifically provide for ALL Foundation tokens, allocated and unallocated, as part of the current circulating supply so this is NOT adding to the circulating supply.
Q23) Asking about adoption figures. You claim to have had 8M people looking at your gaming videos (mostly fakes views as the counter earned millions in hours).
The adoption figures were not fake or exaggerated, it is important to understand that this number is a combination of different metrics, all of which ensure one thing: People viewed our live tournament page. This number includes:

• Unique gaming viewers landing on our page to be able to find the stream in their native language (English, Korean, Hindi, Mandarin and Nepali)
• Social media followers and curious gamers who landed on our page after subscribing to our contests, looking for airdrops or just by following our different marketing campaigns. These account for the steady and regular growth of our landing page as we ran these campaigns all-around the globe and 24/7 at the end of the tournament. The livestream was embedded onto the homepage of the website, so everyone who visited our website was also able to watch the tournament
• Lastly, the contestants, productions and influencer’s traffic from sharing our streams was what mostly caused big traffic, especially during the play-off and later stages of the tournament.

Although it was difficult to collate all the viewer statistics we believe them to be accurate and fair.
To see the full statistics of Ultimate Warrior Showdown 1, read here:
Ultimate Warrior Showdown Tournament Round-Up and Adoption
Hope that clears up some FUD! 👍🏼Q24) Asking about partnerships. You say you have partnerships with
Stripe, Tencent Games, PayPal. The truth is any website can integrate these payment/connexion modules without partnership. You just need to read their website and implement it on your website.
Of course, you can add Stripe and PayPal to any website, but try adding them to a crypto-based website and see how far you get. There are no crypto products websites or related services (other than specific financial services) that are supported by Stripe and PayPal because they are not allowed. To obtain these payment services, you need to have special permission and follow a rigid protocol. And Stripe expressed interest in working with Esports Fight Club to reach out to video publishers with EFC to give us access to video publishers worldwide.
As to TencentGames, you need to get their specific permission for certain tournament events and follow their rules. We would be unable to use their logo and name in our marketing material without this. It’s not simply signing up for them. So yes we consider this a partnership because they plan on additional events with us which they now support.
Working with major brands including PUBGM, Tencent, Athena Gaming and Warmania gave us the clout to include major esport teams in our tournaments who will participate in future tournaments as well: FaZe Clan, Orange, T1, Elementrix, Nova, Onic and others. And now because of the history, Blizzard is prepared to provide licenses for all their major games.
We are also in discussion with peripheral manufacturers to support our marketplace launch later this year. As soon as agreements are reached, we will jointly announce sponsored product peripherals that will be rewarded in our tournaments.
Q25) Some things on your roadmap get pushed forward. Why did do you do this?
Our development team has been together doing projects for over ten years. This is normal in large scale development projects. For example, we decided after the large Esports Fight Club tournaments we put on that we needed to finalize and launch the Video sharing platform prior to some other features on the roadmap because without it we would not be able to take advantage of many opportunities including monetization opportunities of the exclusive VOD content that only we could re-publish and add ads to. This pushed certain product features into Q2. Another example is PoV. Initially we thought we would go with proprietary blockchain because there was no other solution that would allow us to support PoV. That changed with the release by Ethereum of ERC777. As a result PoV timeline targets changed so that it corresponds to the release of ERC777 as well as the ability to use it for the Video sharing platform. So in effect, the video-sharing platform came in _much earlier than expected_which pushed out other features/products to accommodate this change. Business decisions and external events impact on the roadmap and it would do Verasity and the community an injustice if we just blindly followed a roadmap that becomes slightly outdated every quarter and greatly outdated every year. It is this flexibility that allows Verasity to take advantage of new information and technologies in real-time. And to push out new products earlier in the roadmap such as the video-sharing platform.
Q26) Proof-of-View™️ so nice!
When will it be a Patented POV?
The average time for a patent to be granted is 3 years. We’ve just started our third year as a pending application so we hope it will be in 2021, however our patent lawyers have told us to expect further delays due to covid. Fortunately this won’t stop the release of Proof of View which can go ahead with ‘patent pending’ protection.
Update: The patent was granted a few minutes after the AMA ended!
— @verasitytech
Q27) Will there be an app for download on your phone soon? For Staking. Feeling a little insecure have it online on your website
Actually, our mweb and web applications are much more secure than a mobile app. Mobile apps are much easier to hack. Although we have not been hacked, some users have been hacked via their mobile phones but because we have a manual delay, we were able to stop the loss of tokens. The good news is that now with the swap to ERC777 we can disable any wallets that have stolen VRA and return the VRA to the original user. We do have mobile apps on the roadmap but won’t likely support staking because of the security issue and it is not a priority for us.
Q28) Not try to fud here, but would like to get an answer in AMA to suppress all fud in the future 😁
Financial status company. There have been coins sold for listing on an exchange (still to come?). Was this something that was not planned (like extra opportunity to get listed) or are funds becoming empty?
Current resources held by Verasity fund the project roadmap for the next 12 months. We forecast reaching profitability in 2021 which will finance the continuing runway thereafter. As you point out not all listing opportunities were included in the forecast and we stated that: “In the future, additional listings and expenses may require sales of VRA from the Foundation Reserve”. See the funding update here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q29) The VoD update is a little bit unclear for me. Maybe you can tell some more about it. To the looks of it, it is a mix between YouTube and twitch but with PoV to earn $VRA.
PoV on VODs is a key feature for us and for our large ad-stack network. While we are growing our partnerships with community tournaments and adding more games and influencers on EsportsFightClub: we want our reruns to be monetized, available at all times on our proprietary platform and browsing page. Think of it the way Twitch highlights previous streamer’s lives automatically but on a larger and customizable library for viewers to earn VRA and for Verasity to monetize via its ad stack.
And we own several terabytes of gaming and esports video content which will launch with the new video platform in Q1. This is actually massive, because on launch we will have a ton of video content to monetize!
Q30) You seem to have many products but I don’t understand how they work together?

• The Esports Fight Club platform — lots of features already available including global and tournament chats, user created tournaments, detailed tournament customization options
• Proprietary video player — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Proprietary ad stack — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Our own esports content — all the content rights from the tournaments and other gaming content owned by EFC &Verasity — this VOD will be monetized on launch of the video platform in Q1
• Our belief that we can drive large streaming numbers via esports tournaments
• Rewarded Video for these users to watch our content and ads on Esports Fight Club and not on YouTube or other platforms by utilizing VRA to engage and monetize
• A large number of ad networksthat include Google AdMob — Signed on
• Proof of View smart contract view verification (on-chain) — now a reality with the swap of ERC777 to fully build out PoV with all its features on the network.
• VeraWallet as a payment system (together with Stripe &PayPal) throughout the Verasity network.
• In Q1’2021, we will put many of these parts together to start scaling our own video player with our ad stack, producing ad revenues in addition to our other revenue streams.

Q31) What games does Esports Fight Club support now?
PUBG mobile, Free Fire, Counter-Strike GO, Valorant, PUBG and Ludo is about to be launched.
🚀🚀🚀 Great game selection, so far.Q32) Any near-future plans to expand your marketing?
At Verasity, we have a large marketing team that devotes itself behind the scenes to increase our awareness in the cryptocurrency community and reach as many people as possible.
Although we have community groups in more than 10 languages, our local group managers translate all the news, updates into their own languages and publish them in local forums and groups in real time. Thus, we significantly increase our chances of reaching communities that do not speak English. Verasity Spanish, Verasity Korea & Verasity India are already large groups and growing.
We will continue to use media sites, influencers, and all other advertising sources to spread our news in the future as in the past. Gamification marketing opportunities are very important to us as can be seen in LunarCrush.
In return for these efforts, we have gained a great community support that grew slowly but surely. Our marketing efforts will continue to scale. Our goal in this regard is to continue without stopping until every individual in the cryptocurrency community speaks about Verasity.
Our social media metrics have seen a consistent and phenomenal increase over the past year due to our marketing efforts, read here to find out more in detail:
Verasity Social and Adoption Metrics
For us the most important metrics to see how we are doing in socials is LunarCrush:
VRA - VERAsity Insights | LunarCRUSH
LunarCrush Altrank is the best stats measure of Alts social marketing success out of 2100 popular Alts. We tested many marketing ploys to rank highly. When something works, it’s clear in LunarCrush. Competitions like AltWars simply work. This is the meaning of crypto exposure when the Altrank increases in LunarCrush which measures all social volume, % change per 24 hours, and social score. Even with our volume which only ranks 550 out of 2100 Alts, our Social Volume pushes us in front of much bigger tokens such as OMG, DOT, LINK, CHSB and others. Clearly our marketing is working.
The community support has been phenomenal. It’s been great to see how supportive the Verasians have been. We wouldn’t be anywhere without you guys! So thank you from the team.Especially during the AltWars contest recently… we owned! 👍🏼 Power of the Verasians. 🤝Q33)Have you heard about gaming projects Exeedme and Crowns and how can you compare them to Verasity?
We did! Exeedme is an exciting project revolving around gamers personal skill and players betting against themselves (user-centric) that is just at its very inception. They are not competitors as our model (Community, content and tournament centered) has broader purpose and we dont and wont support betting because it will be rejected by many of our partners.
Crowns Token, from Seascape, is a DeFi economy blockchain made for developers building their own online games but who cannot/don’t want to focus on the technical transactional side. Although they are very promising for simple browser and other types of games, they are just not targeting the Esports market and offer, at best, support for upcoming indie-browser games studios.
We would not be able to partner with Exeedme because of betting restrictions but Crowns could be interesting if the games developed are popular with our viewers.
Q34) Are there any plans in the near future (next several months) to list on an exchange that allows full KYC trading for US citizens (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Binance US, etc.)?
This is hard for us. The regulatory environment in the US is not friendly. Since we are not regulated in the US, the risk of listing on a US exchange and the SEC bringing a claim is quite high. At this time we are avoiding this. Lets see what happens with the new SEC Chair who is quite familiar with blockchain. Should he articulate straight forward rules that can be followed and which will not be changed every couple of months, we will consider it then.
Q35) What is:
1. Business structure
2. Marketing plan for next year
3. Customer acquisition costs
4. Execution plan on tech side to deliver
Business structure of Verasity:
Development team structure is flat with these functions:
Blockchain developers, Backend developers, highload & security developers, Full stack Developers, web/mobile frontend developers, mobile only devs, Testing & QA, Finance.
For more about the Verasity business model and forecast see:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Marketing plan for next year can be found here:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
Customer acquisition costs
We will provide CAC when we are profitable.
Execution plan
See the roadmap on verasity.io
And finally. the last question on the list…🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁Q36) Do you have an update on exchanges? The one that was hinted end of last year and more to come?
Very important issue for us and the community. We fully appreciate the necessity for additional volume and liquidity. After the last exchange hack and issues with OKEX, we were thrown off balance but had expected to list on a new exchange by now. Mistakenly we announced prematurely and then ran into the necessity of completing the VRA token swap before we list on a new exchange. Obviously, we want to now avoid having to swap tokens on a new exchange. So right after the majority of the current exchanges we are listed on complete the swap (this month), we will continue with our listing plans. We are well on the way with 2 exchanges but don’t think it’s prudent to provide more information until they announce the listing themselves. The expectation is still for at least one exchange in Q1. Please bear with us on this. We will get there.
Been a great AMA so far. Cleared up a lot of questions and hopefully made you all as excited for the future as we are. Tons of great new updates to Esports Fight Club coming this year and a prosperous year for Verasity is definitely ahead.Thank you Mark!Will be now opening the chat for the Verasians to ask some additional questions.Will be closing the chat shortly after and we can get some more answers out. The gates are opening! 😁
Additional questions
Q37) When the Verasity Game Jackpot price will be held again? We are waiting for so long.
New jackpots are coming onto the platform but for upcoming games like Ludo which will be announced later this month.
Q38) Is it possible to create something like a create your own tournament where I can play a 1vs1(or 2v2 5vs5) against another player(s) in any game anytime (like in 30 minutes) and where I can set for example a winning price of 100k VRA. and both players have to send 50k before the game to a smart contract and afterward it automatically gets sent to the winner?
Esports Fight Club allows users to create their own tournaments choosing from the available games list. We are constantly working on expanding the list of available games and are open for suggestions. The players deposit VRA to the Esports Fight Club account and use these funds to send money to the prize pool. It's quite simple to set up and you can do it for any amount and any number of players and as admin, you have complete control of the size of the pot, how it is shared in % for winners when to start, etc. Its a fully self managed platform that works now. Just go in and set it up today!
Q39) Hi Mark, regarding the plans for in-game advertising and in-game rewards this year, could you describe your vision on this? Is Verasity currently discussing this topic with certain game companies, and how exactly would it work in practice once achieved? Any details you can share with us would be highly appreciated!
The way we view in-game ads is our ability to provide our logo or some other image that would be part of the game interface, such as the floor or walls. This already exists and is popular. We are in discussions now with game developers to add Verasity/VRA. This is a high powered marketing tool that will get our name into many gamers’ faces. These are native images in effect. For advertisers that want to use native images inside our broadcasts or VOD, they get stitched into the ad server in parallel to the stream and we get paid for the ad inventory. In-game rewards are still in development but the vision is for users to be able to click on an object in the game and get rewarded for doing so, not dissimilar to clicking on an add and getting a higher CPM.
About Verasity.tv
REWARDS BASED PLATFORM FOR ESPORTS, GAMING AND VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT
Verasity provides proprietary technology uniquely rewarding gamers, viewers and publishers. Verasity is a crypto-based platform with the VRA token that aims to revolutionise the online advertising business. With its innovative Proof of View system, advertisers are able to guarantee their video ads are seen and not ignored thanks to smart contracts on the Ethereum chain, while viewers are able to earn VRA simply by watching the content they already consume. Verasity has a focus on gaming publishers and esports.

• The first platform to provide user-generated esports and prize pool tournaments supported by both Fiat &Digital Tokens.
• Video gaming content monetized by Verasity Ad Stackand Proof of View (PoV)
• Enables tokenized rewards(VRA) as well as loyalty schemes within the video player VeraWallet
• Supports over 2 million video publishers with our SDK products(overlay on video players) to increase engagement and revenues by 35%. See example publishersand videos here.

Verasity revenue streams include:
Game subscriptions, prize pool commissions and video ad revenues. Read about the tokenomics, forecast, buy back and burn here.
📖 Read our latest adoption metrics and one page overview
📈 Find where VRA (ticker) is trading onCoinMarketCap
VRA can be staked for 36.5% annual interest at https://verawallet.tv.
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AMA with Verasity Founder, R J Mark was originally published in Verasity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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