latest thoughts
self-censorship
First of all, as I've written before, I need to make the premise that lately I've been engaging in a wider self-censorship and have been blocking out from this journal a good 33% of my thoughts. It sucks but I have to do it for various reasons, which I cannot mention.
Having said that, here's my latest thoughts.
hot water not running and sore throat
The hot water is not working any more and for various reasons it might not be fixed for a whole month. Or for a whole 3 months even. As a consequence of that, I've skipped work today, due to a sore throat from taking cold showers every day. It really sucks, but it's beyond my control. Now it's almost gone, but tomorrow another cold shower awaits me. Let's not start complaining by getting into the details.
mini-vacation is over
Tomorrow I will go, but I will be late probably. It will be a mini-vacation I took (2 days off, one day of vacation and one day of sickness, yesterday). I was pissed at my colleagues anyway, so it serves them right.
I am having some problems with falling asleep so I'll write here for a while.
pissed at many people for various reasons
Right now I am mad at various people, for various reasons. And all these mother ****ers put together are the reason I am awake right now and can't fall asleep.
steady progress with new systems
I've kept working on silver, copper and nasdaq systems, also sometimes finding new systems for existing futures, and today I brought my total of forward-tested systems to 95. It's a pleasure seeing my systems grow like this, and it's a pleasure trading my systems and seeing their live trades (with real money) on a daily basis. I feel like I am making things happen.
Probably the total will exceed 100 in a few days. 74 systems were producing about 12 trades per day. From now on, I will be seeing about 16 trades per day.
self-congratulations
It's a pleasure that my order and neatness make this possible. I don't know anyone, except maybe librarians, who could cram 100 systems into one excel workbook and make them work properly and without confusing the trades of one system with the trades of another.
movies
I've been watching... over 10 movies in the last few days. All great ones. I've gotten a good sense of picking movies. And I am not just saying the top 100 movies of all time, because those are always easy to pick. But, once you've seen the godfather, taxi driver and all those other 100 great movies, you need to expand and look for the other hundreds of good movies that were made, and that's when it gets harder. But it is still possible to get a good feel for it, by focusing on actors and directors. Some actors tend to star in commercial worthless movies, others star in commercial good movies, others star non-commercial crappy movies, and others star in non-commercial good movies. The same applies to directors. And this changes decade after decade.
For example, De Niro used to star in both commercial good and non-commercial good. So he took part in masterpieces. Now it changed and De Niro increased the commercial movies he was part of, and some of them weren't even good (such as Heat and many others he made in the 1990s and 2000s).
Di Caprio is a similar actor and so is Johnny Depp. They star in both commercial and non-commercial movies, and generally they are good. Of De Niro, Di Caprio and Depp, I am not sure which one chose the worst movies to be in, but they all picked some bad ones and some excellent ones.
Another example is Tom Cruise: almost 100% of the movies he makes are commercial and almost 100% are crap. The same applies to Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman and that type of actor. George Clooney is a little different and occasionally he picks a good movie to star in. But he also has a tendency for commercial crap. The same applies to Harrison Ford. Bruce Willis is the same type of commercial actor, but a little better at choosing movies he's in. But still commercial stuff with little ambition for art. Pretty much the same for Nicolas Cage, who's a great actor, but picks bad commercial movies most of the time, or at least
half of the time (which is disappointing). Johnny Depp is exactly at the threshold between commercial and non-commercial. A bit better than Nicolas Cage. I would say that they're both on our side, on my side, on the side of art. More so for Johnny Depp, by very little distance.
An actor that does not pick commercial crap is vince gallo, but then his movies are usually non-commercial crap, but they are better because at least they're original.
Then we have one of the few exceptions: Adam Sandler. An example that you can make commercial movies and good ones at the same time. His romantic comedies are good art work and yet commercial at the same time. They're looking for big audiences.
An example of how actors and directors changed in the years is De Niro and Scorsese and Pacino, too. De Niro used to never pick a bad movie to act in, and now things have changed. Scorsese, after Goodfellas but even a bit earlier, started directing commercial crap. Pacino, too, after the 1980s, made some poor choices in terms of art (not in terms of money or similar).
Actors that tend to be in good movies all the time are: Woody Harrelson, Jim Carrey, Matt Dillon, Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson.
For directors things are different. If you can make one excellent movie, then usually you tend to make a lot of other excellent ones, and viceversa. Two perfect and opposite examples.
Total commercial crap by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Emmerich
Total art by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Judge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrelly_Brothers
Another simple example is Samuel Jackson. Making great movies with great acting until he became successful with Pulp Fiction. Then mostly commercial crap.
I will now go back up, read what I wrote and add red titles for each section.
