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The last post on Blogger

T-minus 1 week until migration.

Migration plan for Easter, in two weeks.

Easter is in 2 weeks. I think I'm on track.

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Migration endgame

I'm still tinkering with Wordpress. My goal is to get the migration itself done by Easter, although there will be a ton of tweaking to be done afterwards. 

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More work on migration

The backend code for the server is pretty much done - I'm at the point where I occasionally add bells and whistles for some corner cases. The majority of my time now is spent on working with Wordpress, which is a rabbit hole just as deep as the server/hosting issue.

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Finishing up backend code

I've updated my backend code - I think I'm very close to finishing it, at least for the time being.

Much of the remaining effort will be to actually move everything into Wordpress.

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Backend code for my migration

As a part of the migration, I've been working on some backend code. Take a look!
https://github.com/naclhv/wordpress-simplified

Something to show for my backend work

I'm working on migrating my blog - here's just a proof-of-concept: https://192.53.126.26/

The process will probably continue for several weeks to come.

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Another post, from the table of contents

Continuing backend work...

I'm making good progress - I feel like I should have something to show for it by next week. 

Meanwhile, I published an old "Frozen" fanfic that I wrote back when the first movie came out, in an effort to consolidate all my works onto this blog.

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The Dividing Moment

This is a "Frozen" fanfic, which I originally published on fanfiction.net back in 2014.


The frozen blizzard was standing still in the air, allowing Anna to glance back at Kristoff one last time. But she quickly turned around, for her mind was already made up. Elsa was her sister! She was in danger! She had to go to her! Anna felt the icy curse on her heart starting to burst out. Her limbs were becoming rigid and numb. She knew she was in imminent danger of freezing completely. But none of it mattered. The choice to protect Elsa wasn't really hers to make; her heart had made the choice for her a long time ago - perhaps when their parents died, or perhaps back in their childhood.

"Elsa!" shouted Anna as she threw herself between Hans' sword and her sister's prone body. In the same second that the sword touched her raised hand, her body began to freeze, starting from her heart outwards.

Who could know what differences these milliseconds would make? And how capricious is the human heart, which turns on such small moments?

Hans' sword sliced clean through the fingers of Anna's hand. It continued on to cut through her shoulder blade, the major arteries in the upper torso, part of her right lung, and finally hit her heart, where it was stopped by the ice that was now overtaking the rest of her body. The sword was now wedged in the middle of her torso.

"Anna? Anna! No!" shouted Elsa as she rose and turned around, noticing the commotion behind her. She looked, and saw Anna's ruined body - partly made of flesh and bone, partly ice. Anna stood unsteadily while her blood flowed down to her lower body and froze as it contacted the ice there.

With her last breath, even as she continued to bleed and freeze, Anna managed to say, "Elsa... he planned all this from the beginning... He was using me the whole..." In the midst of the preternatural quietness of the frozen blizzard, her last words were weak but distinct.

Elsa turned to look at Hans, with shock on her face. He started panicking - this wasn't what was supposed to happen at all! He tried to retrieve his sword from the Anna's frozen body, but it was stuck. Elsa's shocked expression mixed with sorrow, and she approached Anna's body to touch it. But Hans became ever more desperate and started flailing wildly as he tried to pull out his sword. At last, with a loud crack, the sword came loose, even as Anna's body - now entirely made of ice - broke completely in half and fell over. It hit the ground with another cracking sound as it fractured further, and lay in pieces between Hans and Elsa. Hans took several steps back. The silence roared in Elsa's ears, as it might when one falls into a black hole.

Elsa knit her brows in distress and anger. Her stare bored down into Hans. Her eyes flashed in her cold fury, as the tears she was about to shed for Anna became ice in her eyes. "Snow Queen Elsa" began Hans, as he adjusted the grip on his sword and raised it, his expression a chaotic mixture of fear, panic, and malice. "This can… This can only end one way! You are a curse upon your kin and your kingdom! The only way…" But he was cut off by Elsa's loud cry of wrath and despair.

As Elsa screamed she channeled all her powers and emotions into a piercing beam of cold, driven by all the winds of the frozen blizzard that had been standing still until this moment. She struck Hans through with it. He was no match for Elsa. His body froze and shattered instantly, but Elsa continued to scream and continued to channel her power to where he had stood, with the blizzard funneled through that spot in ever-increasing gale-force winds. She kept going and going - her blizzard's flurry obscured all of Arendelle in mere moments, but her growing storm continued to rage on and on, and Elsa kept pouring forth her full power. It is said that she did not stop until every molecule of water in Hans' body was part of a different snowflake. By then, her screams were taken up into the howling of the wind, and her body had started turning into ice - for her own heart had been frozen in the midst of her cataclysmic loss and release of her powers.


Now, Elsa the Snow Queen wanders the frozen northern lands, bringing her perpetual storm to wherever she goes. Her icy power continually flows forth from her uncontrollably. Her frozen heart and slowly freezing body doesn't bother her. The places she wonders upon are cursed to an eternal winter, since in her current state, all that she's ever frozen can never be thawed or melted. But she continues travelling. She searches for the only thing that may give her any comfort or closure - the remains of her sister Anna, which were blown away into the storm when she killed Hans. She believes that her powers would recognize the ice pieces that were once a part of Anna if she ever comes across them. It is a forlorn hope, but it is also her only hope, the only way she might find any measure of peace.

So Elsa walks upon the face of the earth, looking for her sister's frozen pieces, with her frozen tears still in her eyes - not knowing that alone among her terrible works, her sister's body was the only thing to ever thaw. For Anna alone had the true love in her heart that was capable of melting Elsa's ice. So Anna and her remains are gone now - thawed out and decayed and disappeared in the manner of all flesh - and forever separated from Elsa and her increasingly frozen heart, body, and soul.

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Doing still more backend work...

A good deal of my time last week was spent on the "gamestonk" situation, which I wrote a post about. That does mean that the backend work got pushed back. But I've made some good progress!

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What's going on with Gamestop: a simple explanation

Standard disclaimer: this is not financial advice. I'm just some guy. What I say here is massively oversimplified, and there's many parts of it that I don't fully understand. If you have any corrections to what I say below, please let me know.


So, it all started when some hedge funds borrowed some stock that wasn't theirs, and sold it for a quick buck.

"Wait, that's allowed?" 

Yes. It's called "short selling", and it's not even the most ridiculous part of the story. Read on.

They did this so much, that they borrowed more than all the stock that was available on the market.

"Wait, THAT'S allowed? And how is that even possible?"

Yes, it's allowed. And it's possible, because they sometimes borrowed the same stock more than once. Meaning, they borrowed a stock, sold it, then borrowed it back, and sold it again. In the end, the number of stocks they borrowed was around 130% of the total number floating around in the market.

"Okay, but the stock was only borrowed, right? So it has to be returned eventually?

Yes. The stock has to be returned, so the hedge funds have to buy them back eventually. But they weren't too worried, because the stock was for Gamestop, which they thought was a bad company whose stock was going to decrease in value. So their plan was to buy it back cheap when they had to return it.

But some investors on reddit, on r/wallstreetbets, got a wind of this situation.

"So what did they do?"

They liked the stock, because they thought Gamestop wasn't such a bad company. They also saw that the hedge funds HAD to buy back a ton of stock eventually, which would increase its future demand. So, they decided to buy up as much as possible.

"What happened then?"

Their massive buy-in caused a corresponding increase in the stock price. On top of that, the hedge funds were running around trying to buy back the stock, because they had to return what they borrowed. This is called a short squeeze, and it can cause the price of the stock to increase dramatically.

And remember, these hedge funds borrowed more stock than the total amount available in the market. Meaning, they'd have to buy back the same stock twice, just like they had initially sold the same stock twice. Imagine having to doing that: you go to a stockholder, and beg him to sell it to you at an inflated price. After you finally buy it, you return it back to him, then beg him AGAIN to sell it to you a SECOND time, probably at an even higher price.

"But how could the stock for Gamestop be worth so much? Fundamentally, isn't it just a small, struggling company?

That's right. Based just on the business fundamentals, the stock is probably only worth about $20. But there's a huge additional value, coming from the fact that these hedge funds are legally required to buy up every available stock, and then some more. At that point, it doesn't matter what the "stock" is. Any commodity, no matter how worthless, will increase in value under these conditions.

"But isn't this just a bubble? A pyramid scheme? A pump-and-dump?"

Not quite. There is real solid demand underneath it, in the form of those hedge funds that have to buy back the stock. They're legally required to return what they borrowed. That's about as real as it gets.

But yeah, a lot of it is just people piling on to a skyrocketing stock. So that part is like a bubble.

"So people are piling on?"

Oh, absolutely. This first started as just some market maneuvering around a rising stock, but quickly became much more. It became a story of David vs. Goliath, of little individual investors taking on the big hedge funds. It attracted an international audience and became mainstream news. People spoke of taking on the corrupt financial systems, and discussed the powers and dangers of social media like reddit. Politicians and industry titans got involved. All this attention brought on new stock buyers, driving its price even higher.

"So the hedge funds are just gonna have to pay out and buy these high-priced stocks?"

They're trying very, very hard not to. They want to bring down the price by any means necessary. Some of their tactics may have been incredibly shady: the stock trading app Robinhood restricted people from buying (but not selling) shares of Gamestop, which caused a huge uproar. Many suspected market manipulation, and there's lawsuits flying around.

The hedge funds are also delaying the return of these stocks, by just re-borrowing them again. But borrowing isn't free: they have to pay interest to borrow, which is going to be expensive because the stocks are expensive. Still, they're hoping to delay the actual, permanent returning of the stocks until the prices go back down.

So as of right now (2021-01-28), it's kinda like a game of chicken between the hedge funds and the individual investors on reddit. The hedge funds want to delay buying the stock, while doing everything possible to make the price drop. They lose by giving in, accepting their losses, and buying the high-priced stocks. This will drive the price even higher, because of the sheer volume of the stock they have to buy back. For the reddit investors, that's the outcome they want. They lose by selling out earlier, which would drive the price down and let the hedge funds off easily.

"So how will this all end?"

Nobody knows for sure, of course. But it can't go on forever. As the prices continue to increase, the hedge funds are more likely to just accept that they have to buy, because they can't delay forever. The redditors, too, will become more tempted to sell at the higher prices. So, I do think that the "short squeeze" will work to some extent, and there will be a net transfer of wealth from the hedge funds to the redditors. And after a furry of sales, the price will eventually drop back down to the neighborhood of $20.

Make no mistake: some people will buy in at the very top, and lose a lot of money when the price drops. In fact, I think this is probably the likeliest outcome for any individual investor. So it's risky, in that lots of people are going to lose a lot of money. But it's also sensible, in that on average, if you get in cheap enough, you'll be taking some real money from the hedge funds. It's a strange gamble.

"Where do you fit in all this?"

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll say that I hold a decent amount of Gamestop stocks, but also some long-term put options. This is in accordance with what I think will happen, as I described above. And for these stocks, I have no illusions about it being a sure bet that'll go to the moon. I recognize that there's a very good chance that I'll lose most of it, but I do think that overall, the net expectation value is positive.

But in any case, the next week or so will be very interesting, and this story will be one for the history books.

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Another post, from the table of contents

Doing some more backend work...

Still working on the backend. I fell into some pretty good rabbit holes. It may take a couple of weeks before I get back to regular posting.

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Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection
Another post, from the table of contents

Love your enemies

Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken or we shall be plunged in to the dark abyss of annihilation.

- Martin Luther King Jr., in the sermon "Loving Your Enemies"

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Doing some backend work...

I've been thinking about doing more with my blog for some time now - no real post today, as I'll be working mostly on some backend work to make this possible.

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A record of the total solar eclipse on 2020-12-14 (edit 3)

I'm done with my record of the 2020 solar eclipse. I added pictures.

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Another post, from the table of contents