18 or 21? Time for Florida to pick consistent gambling age

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.

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NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1.
https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html
NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%)
NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar.
https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866
NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below
https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx
Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis
!!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should.
In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase.
Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below:
https://www.playboy.com/
https://www.playboytv.com/
https://www.playboyplus.com/
https://www.iplayboy.com/
Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success.
“Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.”
https://www.scientificgames.com/
https://www.microgaming.co.uk/
“This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.”
https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/
As per their SEC filing:
“Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1
They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon.
https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era
Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea
“Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.”
“According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently:
https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae
Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress.
Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait.
https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/
Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html
Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said. https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05
Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.”
“In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.”
They are profitable across all three of their current business segments.
“Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.” https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm
This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world.
"Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.”
Also in the SEC filing, the Time Frame:
“As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn.
The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :(
He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :)
Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw.
I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003
Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this:
“Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy.
“Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative.
https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html
Y’all like that China money?
“Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.”
Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose.
I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing
“Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.”
“Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.”
Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong.
Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will.
Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way.
Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains.
TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here:
WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though
https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf
Or here:
https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx
Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.”
STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon.
Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.

As a basketball fan, it's always fun to speculate on the NBA Draft prospects. That said, I'd stress the speculate part of that statement. As an outsider with no real access to these players, it's hard to be arrogant and steadfast in our opinions. We're working with about 10% as much information as actual NBA teams. If you feel confident in your analysis based on some highlight tapes of James Wiseman dunking on South Carolina State or LaMelo Ball jacking up shots in the Australian League, god bless you. And if you want to read my amateur analysis, god bless you too. But before you do, remember to check your sodium levels and take these picks with a grain of salt.

BEST PROSPECTS in the 2019-20 NBA DRAFT

(1) SG Anthony Edwards, Georgia
Based on pure stats, Anthony Edwards would be one of the least impressive # 1 picks of all time. We're talking about a player who just averaged 19-5-3 on bad shooting splits (40-29-77) on a bad Georgia team. In fact, the Bulldogs didn't even crack .500 (finishing 16-16). All things considered, this isn't the resume of a top overall pick. It's like a kid with a 2.9 GPA applying to Harvard Law.
Still, the "eye test" helps Edwards' case in the same way it helped proud Harvard alum Elle Woods. Edwards has a powerful frame (strong and long with a 6'9" wingspan) and a scorer's mentality. He's going to be a handful for NBA wings to contend with, especially when he's going downhill. And while he hasn't shown to be a knockdown shooter, his form looks better than the results suggest. I'd project that he can become an average (35-36%) three-point shooter in time.
It may be unfair to label Edwards with the "best case scenario" comparison -- Dwyane Wade, for example -- but it may be just as unfair to liken him to "worst case scenario" comps like Dion Waiters as well. One of the reasons that Waiters is such an inefficient scorer in the NBA is that he's allergic to the free-throw line; he averages 3.1 FTA per 36 minutes. Edwards didn't live at the FT line, but he did get there 5.3 times per game. With more encouragement from an analytical front office or coaching staff, Edwards has the potential to get to the line 7-8 times a game and raise his ceiling in terms of efficiency.
The key for Edwards' career is going to be his work ethic and basketball character. As a prospect, he reminds me of Donovan Mitchell; in fact, he's ahead of where Mitchell was at the same age. That said, Mitchell is a natural leader who made a concerted effort to improve his body and his overall game. If Edwards can do the same, he has true All-Star potential. If he walks into the building thinking he's already a superstar, then he may never become one.
best fits
Anthony Edwards has some bust potential, but he also has true star potential. Given that, it'd be great to see him go to a team that's willing to feature him. Chances are he won't last this long, but he'd be a great fit for Charlotte (#3). The Hornets desperately need a signature star, and Edwards has the chance to be a 20 PPG scorer within a year or two.
worst fits
If Edwards falls in the draft, he may end up clashing with the talent on the teams in the 4-5 range. Chicago (#4) already has a scoring guard in Zach LaVine. Meanwhile, Cleveland (#5) has already doubled up on scoring guards with Collin Sexton and Darius Garland. Adding a third would be a potential headache, both offensively and defensively.
(2) C James Wiseman, Memphis
A true center? Gross! What is this, 1970?
Traditional big men tend to get treated that way these days. In some ways, they've become the "running backs" of the NBA. They once ruled the draft, but now they have to scrape and claw to climb into the top 5.
Still, let's no go overboard here. Even if centers aren't as valuable as they used to be, there's still some value here. Some of the best centers in the game (Nikola Jokic, Rudy Gobert, Joel Embiid, etc) have helped make their teams staples in the playoffs. Wiseman can potentially impact a team in the same way, especially on the defensive end. He can get beat on switches now and then, but he's about as agile as you can expect out of a kid who's 7'1" with a 7'6" wingspan. Offensively, he has an improving face-up game in addition to being a devastating lob threat.
Another reason that I'm comfortable with Wiseman in the top 3 is because he appears to be a smart kid with the will to improve his game. He intends to keep stretching out his range towards three point territory. Even if he can be a passable three-point shooter (in the 33% range), that should help make him a consistent 18-12 player and a fringe All-Star. And if not, then he'll still be a viable starting center.
best fits
We mentioned Charlotte (#3) as a great fit for Anthony Edwards, and I'd say the same for Wiseman here. His game complements the more dynamic P.J. Washington well; between the two of them, they'd have the 4-5 spot locked up for years. While Wiseman's best chance to be a star may come in Charlotte, we don't know if he truly has that type of aggressive upside. The more likely scenario is him being a pretty good starting center with an emphasis on defense. In that case, he makes some sense in Golden State (#2) and Atlanta (#6).
worst fits
Apparently James Wiseman doesn't want to go to Minnesota (#1), which makes sense given the presence of Karl-Anthony Towns. If he slips, Chicago (#4) may also be an odd fit. Wiseman is a better prospect than Wendell Carter Jr., but they're not terribly dissimilar. The new Bulls administration didn't select Carter, but it still feels too early to give up on a recent # 7 pick.
(3) PF/C Onyeka Okongwu, USC (HIGHER than most expert rankings)
Another big man? I may be showing my age here.
Still, I'm going to stick to my guns and suggest Onyeka Okongwu is a top 3 prospect in the class for some of the same reasons we ranked James Wiseman so highly. In fact, Okongwu is arguably an even better defensive prospect than Wiseman. While he doesn't have the same size (6'9" with a 7'1" wingspan), he's more switchable. He projects as a prowling, shot-blocking panther, not dissimilar to Bam Adebayo on Miami. Offensively, he flashes some solid skill here and there, although it's unlikely he'd get to Adebayo's level as a playmaker.
Another aspect that should help Okongwu is his selflessness. In high school, he played for Chino Hills alongside stars Lonzo and LaMelo Ball. While there, he blended in and did the dirty work for the LaVar Traveling Circus. It's likely that Okongwu will play a similar role in the NBA, complementing a star perimeter player.
While Okongwu may not have All-Star upside, I don't see much downside here. I'd be surprised if he's not a long-time starter at the center position (with the potential to play some PF if his shooting range improves.)
best fits
The most natural fits for Onyeka Okongwu mirror the best fits for James Wiseman. There’s a chance he may slip further than Wiseman too. Washington (#9) should be salivating if that’s the case.
worst fits
As a low-usage player, there aren't a lot of terrible fits for Okongwu on the board. However, Detroit (#7) already has Blake Griffin on a long-term deal and may re-sign Christian Wood as well. Given that, there wouldn't be much room for Okongwu barring a Griffin trade.
(4) PG LaMelo Ball, U.S./Australia. (LOWER than most expect rankings)
Every draft pick is an inherent gamble, but there's a difference between gambling in blackjack and gambling in Roulette. To me, LaMelo Ball is more of the latter.
No doubt, there's a chance that you may get lucky and "win big" with LaMelo Ball. He has great height for the position at 6'6"/6'7", and he makes some exceptional passes that illustrate a rare court vision. ESPN's Draft Express team ranks him as the # 1 prospect overall, and I take that seriously. Those guys were way ahead of the curve on calling Luka Doncic a transcendent talent at a time when most others were still skeptical.
At the same time, I'd say there is a sizable downside here as well. In fact, I'd estimate that there's a greater than 50/50 chance that Ball is a "bust" based on his current draft status.
LaMelo Ball put up good raw numbers this past season in the NBL -- 17.0 points, 7.6 rebounds, 6.8 assists -- but he was in a situation specifically designed for him to put up good numbers. The efficiency tells a different story, as his shooting splits (38-25-72) look worrisome. Yes, height helps on defense, but it doesn't matter much if you're not locked in on that end. And yes, highlight-reel passes and super-deep threes are fun to watch, but they're not a path to consistency on offense. As Ball makes the jump to the NBA, he may smack hard into a wall and crash into the water like was on Wipeout. There's a chance he'll be among the worst players (from an advanced stats perspective) as a rookie.
So what? We expect most rookies to struggle, right? That's true, but I'd be nervous about how LaMelo Ball and his camp would respond to those initial struggles. Again, I've never met the kid and have no real basis for this, but media interviews make him seem a little immature. That's totally understandable for a 19 year old, but it's not ideal for a 19 year old who's about to get handed the keys to an NBA franchise. If he struggles out of the gates, will he start to lose confidence? Will LaVar Ball start to make waves? Will the media gleefully tear him to shreds? No clue. And if I'm picking in the top 3, I'd prefer to have more confidence than question marks.
best fits
If we treat LaMelo Ball as a developmental project, then I'd prefer he land with a team like Chicago (#4). New coach Billy Donovan is a former PG himself, and spent decades working with young kids at the college level. If they slow play Ball's development, we may see the best of him down the road. Detroit (#7) also makes sense. Coach Dwane Casey has a pretty good reputation in player development himself, and he has a solid bridge PG in Derrick Rose to help buy Ball some time.
worst fits
Cleveland (#5) is an obviously wonky fit based on the current roster. I'd also assert that Charlotte (#3) is a poor fit as well. While the team desperately needs a signature star, they don't have the type of supporting cast that would be conducive to him right now. And if he struggles as a rookie, then coach James Borrego and the whole front office may be cleaned out. If that happens, a new administration would be inheriting a franchise player that they didn't pick in the first place.
(5) SF/PF Deni Avdija, Israel
The NBA tends to be reactionary when it comes to the draft, which can be particularly impactful for international prospects. Their stock tends to swing up and down more violently than a ride at Action Park. There was a ton of skepticism about Euros when Dirk Nowitzki came along. When he hit, the NBA got so excited they drafted Darko Milicic at # 2. Eventually that excitement wore off as the busts started to pile up again. But when Latvian Kristaps Porzingis looked like the real deal, it helped reverse that narrative and helped Dragan Bender go # 4 the following year.
In terms of that up-and-down timing, Deni Avdija stands to benefit. He's coming into the NBA on the heels of an incredible sophomore campaign from Luka Doncic. No one thinks that Avdija can be a superstar like Doncic, but teams aren't as wary of international wings (specifically white wings) these days. Avdija should go somewhere in the top 10 if not the top 5.
In my mind, that's justified. He's 6'9", which should allow him to play either the SF or PF positions. He hasn't shown to be an excellent shooter yet, but he should eventually be solid there. He's better suited as a playmaker and passer, and he can also use his size and skill to convert on slashes around the rim. I've seen some comparisons to Lamar Odom before, although that may be optimistic. More likely, he'll be a 4th or 5th starter. His experience as a pro should help toward that end, as he's used to working hard and fitting in on a team of vets.
best fits
If you project Deni Avdija to just "fit in" and be a solid starter, then he'd make sense on a team like Golden State (#2). He could effectively play the role of Harrison Barnes or old Andre Iguodala for them. If the intention is to make him more of a featured player, then the Knicks (#8) would be interesting. In that market, he has real star potential.
worst fits
I don't love the fit for Avdija in Charlotte (#3), where he may duplicate some of P.J. Washington's talents. Atlanta (#6) and Phoenix (#10) have also invested in young SF-PFs recently, so Avdija may find himself scraping for time there.
(6) SG/SF Devin Vassell, Florida State (HIGHER than most expert rankings)
Every single NBA team needs 3+D wings. They thirst for them like a dying man in the desert. And then, when a legitimate 3+D wing comes along, they often ignore them in favor of splashier players at other positions.
Part of the issue is that low-usage 3+D wings aren't going to put up monster stats. That's certainly true of Devin Vassell, who averaged a modest 12.7 points this past year. Still, you have to go deeper than the pure numbers alone and consider the context. Florida State had a stacked and balanced team. In fact, Vassell's 12.7 PPG was the highest on the roster (and came in only 28.8 minutes.) There's more in the tank here than we've seen so far. He can hit the three (42% and 42% from deep in his two years), and he shows a good feel for the game (2:1 assist/turnover ratio.)
Vassell shows even more potential on the defensive end. He's currently listed at 6'7" with a 6'10" wingspan, but he looks even longer than that to my eye. He's tenacious and disruptive (1.4 steals, 1.0 blocks) without being out of control. Presumably, he should be a good defender at either the SG or SF spot.
In a sense, Vassell's the prototype for a 3+D wing. To be fair, I don't anticipate him being a great shooter at the next level. His FT% was iffy, and he's apparently been tweaking his shot during the draft process. Still, if he can be a viable shooting threat in the way that Josh Richardson is (an inconsistent shooter who averages around 36%), then he should be a solid starter for an NBA team. That may not sound like something worthy of a top 5 pick, but the high "floor" helps him in this case. He also appears to have a strong character and work ethic, making him feel like an even safer bet.
best fits
Devin Vassell's skill set would fit on virtually any NBA roster -- but his perceived lack of upside may keep him from going as high as my personal ranking. If he does, then Cleveland (#5) would be a nice fit given their lack of big wings and their lack of defense. Defensive-challenged Washington (#9) would also make sense; Vassell tends to be listed as a SG but he should have enough size to play the SF for them.
worst fits
You can never have too many 3+D wings, but it may be a duplication to put Devin Vassell on the same team with Mikal Bridges in Phoenix (#10).
(7) PG Tyrese Haliburton, Iowa State
One of the reasons I'd have to be specific about a fit with a player like LaMelo Ball is that he needs the ball in his hands to maximize his potential. That's true for most lead guards.
Given that, it's a nice change of pace to see a prospect like Tyrese Haliburton come along. He's listed as a PG and he can perform those duties. This past season, he averaged 15.2 points and 6.5 assists per game. But he ALSO can operate as an off-the-ball player. As a freshman, he did exactly that, effectively working as a wing player and a glue guy on offense. His three-point shot looks wonky, but he converted 43% as a freshman and 42% as a sophomore. If that translates, he can be an effective spacer as well.
Haliburton's versatility also extends to the defensive end. He's 6'5" with an incredible 7'0" wingspan, allowing him to guard either PG or SGs. Like Devin Vassell, he also puts those tools to good use. Either one is an incredible athlete, but they're disruptive and locked in on that end. I'd expect Haliburton to be one of the better guard defenders in the NBA.
All in all, you may ask: why isn't this guy ranked HIGHER? The skill set would justify that. At the end of the day I don't see elite upside here (maybe George Hill?) because he may have some trouble getting his shot off in a halfcourt offense. Still, he's one of the safer prospects overall and a kid that you'd feel good betting on.
best fits
The New York Knicks (#8) may bring in a big-name guard like Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook, but if they stick with the rebuild then Tyrese Haliburton makes loads of sense. He can share playmaking duties with R.J. Barrett, and he can help Tom Thibodeau establish a defensive culture. He'd also make sense for Detroit (#7) and even Atlanta (#6). While the Hawks have Trae Young locked in at PG, Haliburton can play enough SG to justify 30+ overall minutes.
worst fits
Obviously any team that doesn't have room for a PG OR SG would be a problem here. Cleveland (#5) and Washington (#9) are the clearest examples of that. While Haliburton could theoretically guard some SFs, it's not the best use of his talent.
(8) PG Killian Hayes, France
If NBA centers are like NFL running backs, then point guards / lead playmakers may be like quarterbacks. There's positive and negatives to that comparison. Obviously, a good lead guard can immediately boost your team. At the same time, you don't really need more than one. And if you're not "the guy," then your impact is going to be limited.
Given that, there's a high bar to being a starting PG in the NBA. You have to be really, really friggin' good. According to many experts, Killian Hayes is exactly that. Physically he's what you want in the position, with a 6'5" frame. He averaged 16.8 points and 7.8 assists per 36 playing in Germany this year for a team that had a few former pros like Zoran Dragic. The Ringer has him # 1 overall.
Personally, I haven't completely bought into that hype yet. I can't claim to have season tickets to Ratiopharm Ulm, but when I watch highlights I don't really see ELITE traits here. He's not incredibly explosive, he's not a great shooter, he's over-reliant on his left hand. I have no doubt that he has the upside to be a good starter, but I don't think we've seen enough (or at least, I haven't) to make me confident in that projection.
best fits
Chicago (#4) and Detroit (#7) appear to be the most obvious fits for a potential star guard like Killian Hayes. And while the Knicks may have been underwhelmed by a French PG before, he would make sense for them at #8 as well.
worst fits
Teams with lead guards locked in -- Golden State (#2), Cleveland (#5), for example -- would be obviously problematic fits for Hayes. While he has the size to play some shooting guard defensively, he has a ways to go before he's a sharpshooting spacer.
(9) SG/SF Aaron Nesmith, Vanderbilt (HIGHER than most expert rankings)
Back when I was single, I dated a girl who presumably viewed me as a "developmental prospect." She'd always tell me how cool I'd look if I got some new jeans. How hot I'd be if I lost some weight. After a while, reality set in. It ain't happening, honey. What you see is what you get. The whole transformation idea may have worked with Chris Pratt, but it's not going to work with schlubby ol' Zandrick Ellison.
Sometimes it feels like NBA teams view prospects in the same delusional way. Josh Jackson can be a superstar -- if he develops his shot! Isaac Okoro can be a great pick -- if he becomes a great shooter! IF IF IF. We tend to forget that it's not that easy for a leopard to change his spots or for a player to suddenly develop a shooting stroke. It may have worked with Kawhi Leonard, but it's not working with most players.
Given that, we should value players who already have developed that skill. Aaron Nesmith is one of the best shooters in the draft -- right here, right now. He shot 52% from three and 83% from the line this past season. There's a sample size issue there (he only played 14 games prior to injury), but his shooting form looks fluid and suggests that he should be a legitimate 38-40% shooter from deep. While Nesmith isn't a great athlete or defender, his 7'0" wingspan should help him hang at either the SG or SF spots. All in all, we're talking about a player who should be a starter, or at the very least a high-level rotational player.
best fits
Aaron Nesmith isn't going to put a team on his back, but he can help carry the load offensively given his shooting ability. That should make him a good fit for a team like New Orleans (#13) as they look to replace J.J. Redick down the road. He'd also be an excellent fit with Orlando (#16) as they eye more shooters/scorers.
worst fits
It's hard to find a bad fit for a good shooting wing, but there are a few teams that may not have starting positions available. Phoenix (#10) already has Devin Booker and a few solid young SFs. Sacramento (#12) already has Buddy Hield and Bogdan Bogdanovic (presuming they retain them.)
(10) PG/SG R.J. Hampton, U.S/N.Z. (HIGHER than most expert rankings)
After that rant about delusions of grandeur with development prospects, let me try and talk you into a raw developmental prospect.
Like LaMelo Ball, R.J. Hampton went to play in the NBL during his gap year after high school. They were both top 10 prospects going in, but their stocks diverged from there. LaMelo Ball put up big numbers and locked himself into top 3 status. Hampton didn't showcase much (8.8 points per game on 41-30-68 shooting splits) and may drop out of the lottery altogether. But again, I'd caution us to consider context here. LaMelo Ball went to a bad team where he could jack up shots. Hampton played on a contending team that didn't spoon-feed him minutes.
Given that limited sample, I'm falling back on the "eye test" here. No doubt, Hampton's shot is a problem. He's a poor shooter now, and it may be 2-3 years before he straightens it out. At the same time, his size and explosion jumps out at you, particularly when he's attacking the basket. He also appears to be a mature and charismatic young man. That combo -- physical talent + basketball character -- tends to be a winning formula. There's some chance Hampton turns out to be a genuine star as a scoring lead guard. There's also a sizable chance he busts. Still, it's the type of gamble that teams in the late lottery should be considering.
best fits
In a PG-rich class, it'd be bold for Detroit (#8) to reach on R.J. Hampton. Still, he would fit there, as the team could groom him behind Derrick Rose for another year or two until he's ready to take over for major minutes. Any team that can afford him the luxury of patience would be a nice landing spot, even if it means going later in the draft to places like Boston (#14, #26) or Utah (#23.)
worst fits
I'd be less bullish on R.J. Hampton in situations where he may have to play early and take his lumps. The N.Y. Knicks (#8) have struggled to develop point guards Frank Ntilkina and Dennis Smith already, and a new coaching staff doesn't make those concerns go away. Hampton would also have lower upside on teams that already have scoring guards locked in, like Sacramento (#12) or Portland (#16).
(11) PF Obi Toppin, Dayton (LOWER than most expert rankings)
When Obi Toppin sees the list of names ahead of him, he should be stewing with rage. He's arguably the most productive player on the entire board. This past season at Dayton, he averaged 20.0 points on 63% shooting from the field. He's a good athlete and dunker, and he even hit 39% of his threes. At 6'9", he's a natural PF but he could theoretically play some SF or C too if need be. What else does a guy need to do to go in the top 5??
But while Toppin checks all the boxes on paper, I'm a little more skeptical. In fact, he reminds me a lot of Arizona PF Derrick Williams, who went # 2 in the 2011 draft. Many pundits thought Williams was the best player in the class, fresh on the heels of an awesome sophomore season that saw him average 19.5 points per game on 60% shooting and 57% (!) from three. The trouble is: Williams benefited from a small sample size from 3 that year (74 total). And while he was athletic in the dunking sense, he didn't have the hip movement to guard 3s or 4s effectively.
We see some of the same traits play out here with Toppin. He dominated this past season as a (22 year old) sophomore. Still, I'm doubtful that his three-point shooting is as good as the numbers suggest. I'm doubtful that his run-and-dunk athleticism translates to the defensive end, where he often looks stiff when changing direction. I can see a scenario where Toppin is a scoring big in the mold of a John Collins, but it's more likely to me that he'll be a scorer off the bench instead.
best fits
While I'm cool on Obi Toppin myself, I fully admit that I could be wrong and he may just end up being Rookie of the Year. That may happen if he plays on a team like Washington (#9) where his guards will be able to take a lot of pressure off and give him good opportunities to score. Cleveland (#5) would also make some sense if they trade Kevin Love.
worst fits
If Toppin's defense is going to be bad, then he'd be a poor fit with Atlanta (#6). I also don't see much of a fit with Sacramento (#12) given the presence of Marvin Bagley III. In the long run, both may end up being smallball 5s.
(12) SF Isaac Okoro, Auburn (LOWER than most expert rankings)
We've all had this experience before. You'll go see a movie that you hear everyone rave about and you come away... underwhelmed. It's fine. It's OK. But you just don't get all the fuss about it.
Right out of that Silver Linings Playbook comes Isaac Okoro. His stats don't jump off the page: 12.9 points, 4.4 rebounds, 0.9 steals, 0.9 blocks. He's allegedly a great defensive player, but his dimensions (6'6" with a 6'8" wingspan) don't suggest "stopper." Worse yet, he's a poor shooter from distance (29% from three, 67% from the line.) The last time I got this sense of "meh-ness" was Jarrett Culver last year. I didn't understand how he went in the top 5, and I'm not going to understand how Okoro goes in the top 10 this year.
To be clear, I don't think Okoro (or Culver) is a BAD prospect, just that they're both overrated by the community. Okoro is definitely a strong kid who is active around the rim. He's a live body. He could theoretically improve his shooting and become a starter. Still, "potential starter" is not something that I want in a top 10 pick.
best fits
While I don't love Isaac Okoro myself, I can see some good fits on the board. Washington (#9) could use some thicker wings who can play solid defense. Portland (#16) is incredibly desperate for capable wings themselves.
worst fits
With Okoro, I don't necessarily think the worst fits are a matter of skill set as much as expectation. If he goes as high as Chicago (#4) or Cleveland (#5), I suspect he'll disappoint in terms of the returns and garner some resentment from the fan base.
(13) SG/SF Josh Green, Arizona
As oddly overrated as Isaac Okoro is (in my mind), Josh Green is oddly underrated. Okoro tends to go about 10 spots higher in mock drafts, but they seem nearly identical in terms of a head-to-head comparison. In fact, I had to go back and forth about which I'd rank higher. They're both good athletes for their position and should be backend starters at the next level. Okoro is thicker and better around the rim, while Green is further along as a shooter. Overall I leaned to Okoro because he had the size to match up with bigger SFs and has a little more of a bullying scorer gene in him, but it was a close race.
In fact, you can argue that Josh Green's selflessness will actually benefit him in the NBA. He's a "team guy," with an underrated passing ability and basketball IQ. The stats don't jump off the pages in that regard (2.6 assists, 1.6 turnovers), but he was also playing with a good college PG in Nico Mannion. As he moves to the NBA, he's unlikely to have the ball much either, but he projects to be an all-around glue guy who can help on both ends.
best fits
As with Isaac Okoro, Portland (#16) could be a nice landing spot for a solid wing player. And while New Orleans (#13) has a lot of athleticism already, it never hurts to have another viable wing. They tended to play small at the SG-SF spot, which hurt their defense overall. Playing Green could help them when they slide Brandon Ingram over to the 4 and Zion Williamson at the 5.
worst fits
I don't see many "bad" fits for Josh Green on the board, but you'd prefer that he went to a team that intended to make him a part of the future. Minnesota (#17) may not be able to do that if they already have Jarrett Culver and Josh Okogie. Brooklyn (#19) may not be looking for long-term projects since they're in a "win now" mode.
(14) PG Tyrell Terry, Stanford
Tyrell Terry is rocketing up draft boards on account of his stellar shooting ability (41% from 3, 89% from the line) and his better-than-expected measurement of 6'3". It's only natural that pundits would start comparing him to stud shooters like Steph Curry.
That said, not every stud shooter is Steph Curry. Some are Seth Curry. Some are Quinn Cook. There's a slight chance Terry breaks out as a good starter, but there's a better than average chance he peaks as a rotational player instead. Still, he should be an asset to a team as a spacer, particularly if they run their offense through a playmaking forward (like a LeBron James).
And in case you're wondering, no he is NOT related to Jason Terry, although some of their skill sets do overlap as scoring guards with deep range.
best fits
If we presume that Tyrell Terry can be a Seth (not Steph) type player, then adding him to Dallas (#18) makes sense. He can develop behind Seth for a year or two as he gains weight, and then help complement Luka Doncic as a spacer after that. Similarly, he makes sense for Philadelphia (#21) as well. We'd still lock Ben Simmons into the starting PG role, but Terry could play alongside him in lineups or be used as a sparkplug off the bench.
worst fits
Teams that may be eyeing Tyrell Terry as a surefire starter will have to be careful. For example, Phoenix (#10) needs an heir apparent for Ricky Rubio, but a Terry + Devin Booker combo may be problematic on the defensive end. Some other teams -- Brooklyn (#19) and Denver (#22) -- already have sharpshooter guards, so they don't have as strong of a need for this type of player.
(15) PF Aleksej Pokusevski, Serbia
We mentioned that LaMelo Ball may be the biggest boom/bust prospect in the class, likening him to gambling on Roulette. Enter Aleksej Pokusevski. "Gambling" may not even be doing it justice. This is like risking your family fortune on a bag of magic beans.
But hey, that worked for Jack, and it could work for an NBA team as well. I have a friend who works in coaching who raved about Pokusevski and considers him a top 10 prospect overall. After all, this is a legit 7'0" player with true perimeter skills. Playing for Olympiacos' development team, he averaged 16.7 points, 12.2 rebounds, 4.8 assists, 2.0 steals, and 2.8 blocks per 36 minutes. He hasn't even turned 19 years old yet, giving him an enormous amount of upside.
Still, he scares the hell out of me. He's listed at 7'0" and 200 pounds, with narrow shoulders that make you doubt how much weight he'll be able to carry in the long term. His body type doesn't remind you of any current NBA forwards; it reminds you of two kids wearing a trenchcoat.
All in all, Pokusevski seems like a great prospect to invest in, presuming you don't have to withdraw from the bank until 2023 or 2024. To that end, teams should only consider them if they feel confident in their long-term job security.
best fits
If the goal is to send Aleksej Pokusevski to a good, stable organization, then you can't do much better than San Antonio (#11). Even if Gregg Popovich retires from coaching, R.C. Buford should be around to help the next coach (Becky Hammon? Will Hardy? R.C.'s son Chase?). And if the goal is to find a good stable GM, Sam Presti and Oklahoma City (#25) would be a great home as they prepare for a long-term rebuild.
worst fits
Orlando (#15) always values length, but they have limited space left in the frontcourt and limited leg room left on that poor charter plane.
I wasn't kidding when I said this post was "overly" long. The rest of the top 20 got cut off because of a length limit. I'll try to include them in the comment section.

Hey Guys, so I thought I'd share this letter here so you can all spam the SEC on their policies and what brokerages can get away with now that there's so much attention on the market and activity. Feel free to adjust the letter and spam to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and put the subject as day trading rules. These are what I personally feel would help, but the main thing is we should have access to the market as we see fit:
Dear Commissioners of The SEC and Chairwoman Allison Herren Lee:
I will first provide the substance of the pattern day trader rule:
Anyone who buys and sells a particular security in the same trader day (day trades), and does this four or more times in any five consecutive business day period is considered a pattern day trader. A pattern day trader is subject to special rules. The main rule is that in order to engage in pattern day trading you must maintain an equity balance of at least $25,000 in a margin account. If you are flagged as a pattern day trader and do not maintain a balance of $25,000 your account will be frozen for 90 days.
As a citizen of the United States of America, I am petitioning for the repeal or amendment of the pattern day trader rule. The rule, which is designed to protect unsophisticated investors from the high risk of day trading, is instead increasing risk by limiting the number of stop positions one can take, driving traders to more volatile markets such as futures and forex where no pattern day trader rules exist, and driving traders into offshore brokerages who do not adhere to the SEC pattern day trader regulations.
Additionally, this regulation among others is contributing to a divide in this country on who can utilize and invest in the stock market. Due to this tension the gap between the lower, middle and upper classes continues to grow as Day Traders also can utilize technology and programs to automatically buy and sell shares to secure a profit. As Americans, we should have the right to purchase and sell on the market to allow it to grow so we may also profit as desired and re-invest this profit into our economy.
Most recently on the social media platform Reddit, users gathered on this forum together to purchase shares of GameStop Corp. (GME) and caused the price of shares to grow by 3700% which allowed users to secure a profit that they will invest in the economy. While I understand the basis for this rule, it does not protect investors anymore with the evolution of communication technology. As shown recently after gaining a profit, several applications that offer free trading were forced to remove Gamestop Corp(GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings INC (AMC) and void all orders placed on the previous day. This further demonstrates that the market is not about providing investors the opportunity to grow their income by investing as multiple brokers have removed the Reddit Markets from their platform and have expressed dissatisfaction and seek to file a complaint with the SEC about users communicating on forums and purchasing shares or seeking legal action. As of now, if one user has thousands of followers and posts a stock symbol each user is free to decide if they will invest, similar to those with subscriptions to Yahoo Finance, The Motley Fool or a Bloomberg Subscription and their stock recommendations. The driving force behind this decision was to spite a hedge fund seeking to make a profit which furthers the evidence of the growing disparity between the lower, middle and upper classes.
Additionally, If I open an account on multiple brokers, the highest risk is opening a margin with an account which is what can drive an individual into debt. As of now, if I sought to gamble, I can seek out the nearest Casino or Casino Cruise in the State of Florida to secure a profit with any amount of money and there is no policy in place to prevent me aside from being over the age of 18 and nor should there be. As I have worked to earn the money, I should have the right to spend or invest the money as I see fit without restriction.
I propose the following actions to fix the problems with the current disparities in the market caused by NASD Rule 2520, create a truly fair market and address the risk to investors on the stock market.
1) Repeal Rule 2520 and allow all traders to day-trade online and if platforms offer a program for automatically trading or application programming interface (API), they must fill out a form acknowledging they understand the risks they are taking.
2) Create new federal guidelines for Margins to be treated like a credit line where rather than based on leverage such as 1:10 it will be a fixed line of credit in the account minimizing the risk determined by the financial institution and based on creditworthiness.
3) Institute a policy where brokerages cannot restrict the sale of any stock without first filing a notice to the SEC and allowing the Trade day to close and 2 business days to elapse and must publicly provide justification for removal from the market.
I thank you for the time to review my email and hope you’ll consider the aforementioned actions, as this would be in the best interest of truly having a fair market while protecting our citizens and allowing them the opportunity to invest at their discretion.
Thank You, (Insert Name Here)

The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far)
Chameleons or beauties, star turns or character roles these are the performers who have outshone all others on the big screen in the last 20 years.
By Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott Nov. 25, 2020
We are in a golden age of acting — make that platinum — as we realized when we decided to select our favorite film performers of the past 20 years. There’s no formula for choosing the best (just squabbling), and this list is both necessarily subjective and possibly scandalous in its omissions. Some of these performers are new to the scene; others have been around for decades. In making our choices, we have focused on this century and looked beyond Hollywood. And while there are certainly stars in the mix and even a smattering of Oscar winners, there are also character actors and chameleons, action heroes and art-house darlings. They’re 25 reasons we still love movies, maybe more than ever.
25. Gael García Bernal
MANOHLA DARGIS When Alejandro González Iñárritu’s thriller “Amores Perros” and Alfonso Cuarón’s road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” were released in American art houses a year apart, the shocks were seismic. Their directors were soon racing toward international renown and so was Gael García Bernal, their shared star. He was gifted, held the screen and had a face you kept looking at, partly because — with his doe eyes and lantern jaw — it seamlessly fused ideals of feminine and masculine beauty.
This contrast wasn’t especially obvious in “Amores Perros” (2001), but it helps enrich the warmer “Y Tu Mamá También” (2002), a soulful coming-of-age story that opens with a whoop and ends on a sigh. García Bernal plays Julio, a working-class teenager on a journey of discovery (of the self, of others). Along with his best friend (played by Diego Luna), Julio tumbles through life heedlessly until he doesn’t. As the story’s raucousness quiets, Julio’s adolescent machismo fades, replaced by pensiveness that the actor makes so physical, you see the character retreating inside himself.
By 2004, García Bernal had appeared in Walter Salles’s “The Motorcycle Diaries” as the young Che Guevara and played a duplicitous chameleon in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bad Education.” Almodóvar put the actor in heels to play a noirish femme fatale, a role that García Bernal apparently didn’t much like doing so but that deepened his persona with a smear of lipstick and a psychological coldness that created new shocks.
A. O. SCOTT In Pablo Larraín’s “No” (2013), García Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, a hotshot young advertising creative in 1980s Chile, with his usual charm. He’s cool but not intimidatingly so; good-looking in the same measure; funny but not to the point of obnoxiousness; self-confident but not a jerk. At first, it’s easy to underestimate both Rene and García Bernal, to mistake their casual, unassuming naturalness for a lack of gravitas or craft. Rene is enlisted by a group of opposition political parties to produce television spots supporting a “no” vote on a referendum extending the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Rene’s job is to sell rejection as an upbeat choice, to acknowledge the brutality of Pinochet’s regime while focusing on the happy future without him. Though Rene believes in the cause, he also views it as a marketing challenge, and there is a bit of a “Mad Men” vibe to his wrangling with clients, colleagues and rivals.
It’s up to García Bernal to provide the dramatic link between the banalities of the media business and the terror of political repression, and he does it almost entirely with his eyes. One night, the apartment he shares with his young son is vandalized while they sleep, and in that moment Rene’s chipper resolve liquefies into pure fear. The next day he is back at work, and both he and the audience have a new and profound understanding of what the work means.
24. Sônia Braga
MANOHLA DARGIS I just recently rewatched “Aquarius” (2016) for our ode to Sônia Braga. For those who haven’t seen it: Braga stars as Clara, a writer whose apartment faces the Atlantic. Most of the story follows Clara just living her life while swatting away her landlord. Braga fits seamlessly into the director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s wonderful, unfussy realism. This time while viewing the movie, though — partly prompted by, ahem, a chapter title called “Clara’s Hair” — I noticed how Braga kept rearranging her opulent curtain of hair. And, as she swept it up and let it down, I realized that Mendonça wasn’t just presenting a character but also the legend playing her.
A. O. SCOTT It’s a reminder — subliminal and brazen at the same time — that Braga was a big deal in Brazil and beyond in the 1970s and ’80s, her nation’s answer to Sophia Loren. Her films with Mendonça (“Bacurau” this year as well “Aquarius”) draw on that history and exploit her old-school charisma. But they aren’t just late-career star turns. Clara isn’t Sonia Braga: She’s a highly specific woman with her own history of achievements, love affairs and regrets. But only a performer with Braga’s utter self-assurance, her heroic indifference to what anyone else thinks of her, could bring Clara to life.
DARGIS Yet what I found fascinating about “Aquarius” this time is that Clara is alsoBraga, in the sense that the character’s meaning is partly shaped by everything that Braga brings whenever she’s onscreen, including her history in Brazilian cinema as a woman of mixed ancestry as well as her adventures in Hollywood. There’s something fantastically liberating watching Braga play this majestic woman, who has visible wrinkles and never had breast reconstruction after her mastectomy. That’s especially true given how Braga was once slavered over as a sex star. “There is nothing else to call her,” a male critic once wrote — well, you could call her an actress.
SCOTT Her skill manifests itself in a totally different way in “Bacurau” this year, a crazily fantastical (and violent) science-fictionish allegory of Brazil in crisis that departs from the realism of Mendonça’s other films without abandoning their political passion or their humanism. Braga, part of a sprawling ensemble that includes nonprofessional actors, is essential to this. She plays Domingas, a small-town doctor with a drinking problem and a sometimes abrasive personality — a deglamorized, comical role that no one else could have managed with such depth and grace. Or as Mendonça put it, “In a symphony, she’d be the piano.”
23. Mahershala Ali
A. O. SCOTT Mahershala Ali has one of the great faces in modern movies — those sculpted cheekbones, that high, contemplative brow, those eyes tinged with melancholy. His presence on camera is magnetic, but also watchful and sly. His characters tend toward reticence, guardedness, but their reserve is its own form of eloquence, their whispers more resonant than any shout.
Ali has won two Oscars for best supporting actor. The first was for “Moonlight” (2016), in which he quietly demolished a durable Hollywood stereotype. Juan is a drug dealer, a figure of community destruction and implicit violence. What defines him, though, is his gentleness, the unconditional kindness he bestows on Chiron, the young protagonist. Juan listens to the boy; he answers his questions; in one of the film’s most moving scenes, he teaches him to swim.
And then, between the first and second acts, he vanishes. But Ali haunts the film even after his departure. He’s both its tragic, nurturing image of manhood and the first man worthy of Chiron’s love.
MANOHLA DARGIS Ali first got my attention in the Netflix series “House of Cards.” He played Remy Danton, a Washington lawyer whose knowing little smile could flicker like a warning, signaling the danger in his world. Remy entered in the second episode in a scene at a restaurant, where the lead character, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), is eating with two other power brokers. Remy doesn’t stand over the seated men, he looms. You know Underwood is bad news, but when the director David Fincher cuts to Remy’s face, Ali abruptly changes the temperature by dropping his affable facade for skin-prickling wariness, making it clear that he isn’t talking to a man but to a predator.
I was so accustomed to seeing Ali in a bespoke suit (and sometimes out) that I didn’t recognize him at first in “Moonlight.” It wasn’t simply the different wardrobes, but the precise bearing that Ali gave each man, variations in bodies, yes, but also in how those bodies move and signify. In “House of Cards,” Remy flows and there were moments when I thought I was looking at the next James Bond. In “Moonlight,” Ali creates a titanic character whose force, even after he disappears from the movie, continues to resonate. The actor creates a very dissimilar character in “Green Book” (2018, his second Oscar winner), this time with a performance — as the musician Don Shirley, whom Ali plays as a man and a defended fortress — that surpasses the movie.
SCOTT I would almost say that the performance is the opposite of the movie. Ali is graceful, witty and self-aware while “Green Book” is clumsy, jokey and blind to its own insensitivities. I’m not sure any other actor could have handled the notorious fried chicken scene with such sly dignity. That “Green Book” and “Moonlight” were both best picture winners speaks to the contradictions of our cultural moment, but it’s proof of Ali’s talent that his subtle craft and unshakable charisma can anchor two such divergent films.
22. Melissa McCarthy
MANOHLA DARGIS When critics anatomize comic performers like Melissa McCarthy, we often touch on familiar qualities like timing, grace and elastic physiognomy. But we’re also talking about acting. Since making the transition from TV to movies, McCarthy has repeatedly demonstrated her range and exhilaratingly helped demolish regressive ideas about who gets to be a film star. No movie has served her better than “Spy”(2015) in which she plays Susan, a timid C.I.A. analyst who’s sent on an outlandish mission that allows McCarthy to mince and then delightfully swagger.
Essential to the subversive fun of “Spy” is how it deploys genre conventions to showcase McCarthy’s talents while also blowing up stereotypes. Susan contains multitudes, first as self-protection (she dampens her fire) and later as an expression of her humanity. In the field, she unhappily assumes several frumpy, tragically bewigged disguises — variations on how others see her — before transforming into a sexy, trash-talking fantasy of her own design. As Susan lets down her hair and inhibitions, McCarthy cuts loose. Her voice booms, her fluttery hands ball into fists, her Kewpie-doll face goes full-on Medusa. McCarthy isn’t playing one woman — she’s all of us, with a vengeance.
A. O. SCOTT Lee Israel is funny. She shares a fast and furiously aggressive verbal wit with some of McCarthy’s other creations, like Tammy in “Tammy” (2014) and Mullins in “The Heat” (2013). But Lee was a real person, and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”(2018) isn’t exactly a comedy. It’s not quite a biopic either, but rather a highly specific slice of late-20th-century New York queer and literary life threaded through a misfit buddy picture and twisted into a caper film.
Lee is not easy to like or root for. She’s abrasive, self-absorbed and self-sabotaging. She alienates friends and maintains as tenuous a grip on ethics as on sobriety. McCarthy resists turning her story — which involves trading a faltering career as a writer for a lucrative stint as a forger of famous writers’ letters — into a parable of recovery or redemption.
It’s about how Lee and her sidekick (the wonderful Richard E. Grant) gamble on survival, rebelling against the fate that an indifferent world has prepared for them. The movie’s title poses an honest question. Maybe you can’t forgive Lee for her lapses and lies, her lack of consideration for other people’s words and feelings. But there’s no way you can forget her.
21. Catherine Deneuve
By MARJANE SATRAPI
In a lengthy career working with a who’s who of auteurs, Deneuve has stood for a certain kind of elegant Frenchwoman whether she’s playing an ordinary wife, a down-on-her-luck bistro owner or even an Iranian mother. For that last role, in the animated “Persepolis”(2007). Deneuve voiced a character based on Marjane Satrapi’s mom. We asked Satrapi, who directed the film with Vincent Paronnaud, to explain why she sought out Deneuve.
If you live in France, Catherine Deneuve is the symbol. When I was growing up, she was the dream. She always made choices that were too advanced for her time, more anarchist than bourgeois. She has always looked like a very bourgeois Parisian woman, which is absolutely not true. She is a rebel who looks like a grande dame.
The first time I met Catherine Deneuve was like meeting God in person. I was so impressed. And yet, I had to direct her, and I didn’t dare tell her a thing. The first two hours, I was completely paralyzed, and she calmed me down. She told me, because she’s a very generous woman: “You’re the director and I’m your actress. Tell me what to do and I will do it.” She didn’t do it in front of other people. She said, “Let’s go have a cigarette,” and she said it to me privately.
For the character of the mother, I needed to have someone who is not this eternal mother who is very lovely, because this is not my mom. My mom is a very lovely person but she is like: “You do this. You do that.” I needed somebody who had the power of a woman that wants her daughter to [make her life] better and be more emancipated. Catherine Deneuve has this way of talking that is not playful, because she doesn’t try to be likable. She’s very frank. When she talks to you, she looks straight into your eyes.
She doesn’t try to be likable. She’s very frank.
There is this scene when I come home and my mom starts yelling at me: “You know what they do with young girls in Iran? You have to get out of this country.” I remember when she played it, she was a little bit off. She tried to contain herself as she normally does. I was like, “No, Catherine, you’re really out of your mind.” She did it and she actually cried. That was extremely moving.
And still, after all these years, each time I see her, I have the heartbeat. She is like a lion. She is not loud, she does not make gestures. But even if she is behind you and you don’t see her, you feel that a feline is in the room. It feels at the same time very exciting and very dangerous. She is ferocious and she is fearless, and I love that about her. — Interview by Kathryn Shattuck
20. Rob Morgan
A. O. SCOTT The great character actors are masters of paradox, at once indelible and invisible. You don’t necessarily recognize them from one role to the next, but they leave their stamp on every film, enhancing the whole even in small parts.
If you saw “Mudbound,” “Monsters and Men,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”and “Just Mercy” — four movies released between 2017 and 2019 — you are aware of Rob Morgan, whether or not you know his name.
As a death row prisoner in “Just Mercy,” he is a notably undramatic presence, a quiet man haunted by remorse, helplessness and fear whose plight encapsulates the film’s humanist argument.
In each of the other movies, he plays a father, in the Jim Crow South and the modern urban North — a man who knows more than he chooses to say. The sons in those movies do most of the talking, but Morgan gives eloquent expression to experiences that lie outside the main story even as they ground it in a larger history. In “Last Black Man” he appears in a handful of scenes and utters just a few lines, but everything that movie is about — the pleasures and disappointments of life at the margins of an idiosyncratic, rapidly changing city — is written in his face. He listens, he chews sunflower seeds, he plays a few chords on an old pipe organ, and after a few minutes in his presence you understand exactly what you need to know.
MANOHLA DARGIS Every so often, a small movie gives an actor a chance to go bigger and hold the center, which is what Morgan does in Annie Silverstein’s “Bull” (2020). He plays Abe, a former rodeo bull rider with stiff joints, blood in his urine and a fragilely held together life. His bull riding days over, he now works on the ground as a bullfighter, helping protect fallen riders. The role of Abe, mercifully, isn’t overwritten, which allows Morgan to define the character with a persuasively embodied performance, one whose head tilts, sideways looks and withdrawn presence expresses a bruising past and the self-protecting instincts of a man in emotional retreat.
“Bull” should be only about Abe, but it instead focuses on his relationship with a white, rootless 14-year-old neighbor, Kris (Amber Havard). Their fates sourly cross after she’s caught trashing his house, and is shaped by the unearned optimism that’s foundational to American cinema. In other words, Abe and Kris save each other. What saves the movie, though, is the window Morgan opens onto the Black cowboy and how the performance complicates America’s favorite myths, including the figure of the hard, stoic loner. Abe doesn’t ride in from John Wayne territory; Abe rides in from an entirely different land that Morgan makes visceral, haunted and wholly alive.
19. Wes Studi
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Wes Studi has one of the screen’s most arresting faces — jutting and creased and anchored with the kind of penetrating eyes that insist you match their gaze. Lesser directors like to use his face as a blunt symbol of the Native American experience, as a mask of nobility, of suffering, of pain that’s unknowable only because no one has asked the man wearing it. In the right movie, though, Studi doesn’t just play with a character’s facade; he peels its layers. A master of expressive opacity, he shows you the mask and what lies beneath, both the thinking and the feeling.
He shows you the mask and what lies beneath.
Studi vaulted into cinematic consciousness as the vengeful Huron warrior in Michael Mann’s epic “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992), a character the actor conveys with powerful physicality and intensities of contempt, impatience, resentment, fury. Doing a lot with a little has been a constant in Studi’s movie career, which includes signifying roles in “The New World” (2005) and “Avatar” (2009). Like many actors, he has done his share of forgettable work, made exploitation flicks and TV fodder. Often specifically cast as a Native American, he has played Geronimo and Cochise; he might right more film wrongs if westerns were still popular. And if the industry were adventurous, he might also play more types like the supervisor of a homeless shelter in “Being Flynn” (2012), a man who doesn’t wear what Studi calls “leathers and feathers.”
Instructively, he wears neither in Scott Cooper’s “Hostiles” (2017), about life and death in late-19th-century America. Studi plays Chief Yellow Hawk, a dying Cheyenne prisoner whom the federal government has agreed to return to his ancestral lands. The movie is largely interested in his escort, a war-ruined Indian hater played by Christian Bale, the star. Once again, Studi delivers a supporting turn that complements the leading performance — his character’s indifference to the escort’s rage is a wall that can’t be breached — and helps equalize the story’s balance. Yellow Hawk has survived long enough to die on his terms, survival that Studi makes a final act of self-possession.
18. Willem Dafoe
By JULIAN SCHNABEL
The actor has been a vital presence in movies as different as “Shadow of the Vampire”(2000) and “The Florida Project” (2017), for which he received Oscar nominations. He was also nominated for playing van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018). We asked Schnabel why he turned to Dafoe.
Willem and I met more than 30 years ago. He has always lived in the neighborhood, and we had a lot of friends in common. Oliver Stone was shooting “The Doors” in New York, and we were standing around the set one night and that was the first time we really started to talk.
One thing that’s super-important is he’s a very generous actor. He cares about other people’s performances and about helping them by being available in whatever he is doing. He’s very, very loyal and very, very smart. If you’ve got somebody who’s smart, they can make it better.
He’s a very generous actor. He cares about other people’s performances.
[For “At Eternity’s Gate”] I needed somebody that would have the depth of character to play van Gogh. And it wasn’t about just looking like him. It was somebody that could have enough life experience to be that guy. People thought, well, Willem is 60 years old, van Gogh was 37 when he died. That was irrelevant to me. You just have to have a hunch about trusting somebody and thinking that they can do something. I trust Willem implicitly. And that level of trust goes both ways.
There’s stuff we shot in Arles after he arrived that we couldn’t use. He was wearing the same clothes, had the same hairdo, but he wasn’t the guy yet. Then there was a certain moment when all of a sudden he was. He was transformed, transfigured. He was somebody else.
One of my favorite scenes is where he’s talking to the young Dr. Rey, who is seeing him after he’s cut his ear off and he is guaranteeing him that he’s going to get to paint when he’s in the institution. That interaction is extraordinary, what Willem does there. He’s basically sitting at a table and there’s not a whole hell of a lot of room for movement. But what goes on in his face in his response to what the young doctor is saying to him — and also in response to whatever other thoughts seem to be traveling through his mind at that time — is a landscape of events and an interior life like foam coming to the top of a vanilla egg cream. — Interview by Kathryn Shattuck
17. Alfre Woodard
By A. O. SCOTT
In a just world, there would be a bursting roster of great performances to fill this entry, a collection of matriarchs, romantic heroines, divas and villains to reflect the full range of Alfre Woodard’s gifts. Such roles are always in short supply for Black women, but even in small parts in minor movies or television series, Woodard is an unforgettable presence, at once regal and utterly real.
The two films that have given her the most room — Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave”(2013) and Chinonye Chukwu’s “Clemency”(2019) — both place the question of justice front and center. In each, Woodard must assert her character’s dignity and ethical integrity in the face of impossibly cruel circumstances. Bernadine Williams, the prison warden in “Clemency” whose job includes supervising executions, finds her professionalism increasingly at odds with her humanity. In “12 Years,” Mistress Shaw, an enslaved woman whose relationship with a plantation owner has brought her a measure of privilege, has bargained with a system built on her dehumanization.
Woodard’s art, her commitment to truth, is what you see.
The contradictions that Bernadine and Mistress Shaw contend with are larger than any individual. What Woodard does is make them personal. Self-control is a matter of survival, and Woodard sets her face into a picture of proper decorum, impersonating the genteel Southern lady or the efficient bureaucrat that the situation requires. She doesn’t so much let the masks slip — except perhaps in the devastating final scenes of “Clemency” — as show the cost and care that go into wearing them. The characters are also performing, playing their roles for mortal stakes, and Woodard’s art, her commitment to truth, is what you see in the space between how they seem and who they are.
16. Kim Min-hee
By MANOHLA DARGIS
In Hong Sang-soo’s “Right Now, Wrong Then” (2016), a woman and man meet. They drink and drink some more and testily part ways only to meet in the movie’s second half as if for the very first time, a setup that evokes “Groundhog Day.” Once again, they go to a cafe, a studio, a restaurant. Yet while their actions generally remain the same, as does the overall arc of the evening, enough has changed — how they look at each other, the inflections in their voices — to turn this second encounter into something different.
Kim Min-hee’s exquisitely nuanced performance is at the center of the movie, and the actress herself has been at the heart of Hong’s work ever since, appearing in most of his ensuing movies. An established art-house auteur, Hong tells modestly scaled stories that are formally playful, sensitive to human imperfection and drenched in soju. Familiar things happen, sometimes unfamiliarly. Repetition is often a narrative focus, one that is grounded in life and beautifully served by Kim’s lucid expressivity.
In Hong’s minimalist canon, life is condensed in everyday moments, in conversations and the way bodies lean toward one another. The differences in the two halves of “Right Now, Wrong Then” reveal new facets of the characters and create new tensions between them. They also give free rein to Kim’s range, allowing her to play with intonation, gestures, flickering looks. Yet while the movie’s two sections feel like variations of the same story, her performance feels more like it’s coalescing as — smile by smile, with deflected and fixed gazes — Kim gathers the character into a whole.
She goes big and small, veers from monstrous to mousy.
She went for baroque in Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” (2016), her best-known movie. In this outlandish, often perversely funny drama set in Korea in the 1930s, she plays a Japanese noble who’s saved from her deviant uncle by her wiles and by another woman. The story’s flamboyant excesses and narrative twists allow Kim to use every tool in her workbox. She goes big and small, veers from monstrous to mousy, and alternately hides her character’s feelings and lets them run amok. Her body rocks and her face distorts as fear and pain give way to ecstasy and release. The character is a mystery that the movie teases but that Kim deliriously unlocks.
15. Michael B. Jordan
By RYAN COOGLER
Michael B. Jordan has played lawyers, athletes and superheroes, but even before his range became clear, the director Ryan Coogler wanted to work with him. Coogler has made three features (“Fruitvale Station,” “Creed” and “Black Panther”) and Jordan stars or co-stars in all of them. We asked the director to explain just what it is about the actor that draws us in.
I met Mike in 2012 when I was doing research and working on the script for “Fruitvale.” He was who I decided would be best for the role before I met him, based on the other work that I’d seen him do — a couple of movies that year, “Red Tails” and “Chronicle,” and a bunch of stuff in the TV space. But I thought that he could play Oscar. He looked like him, but also what I saw was this ability to make you empathize with him. Not all actors have this thing, when you immediately care about somebody right offhand and that triggers an empathetic reaction. He had that. He also has a very advanced tool kit as an actor.
What I saw was this ability to make you empathize with him.
He’s been in all the feature films I’ve done. And I keep casting him because he’s the best person for the job. “Creed” [2015] had another character I thought he could play well. Before Mike was an actor, he was an athlete, back in elementary school and high school. He had played athletes on TV, the most famous being on “Friday Night Lights,” so some of the things we knew his character would have to do in “Creed,” Mike felt right for it. It was a part of him that wasn’t a big reach.
And [in] “Black Panther” [2018], with him and Chadwick facing off and going toe to toe, it felt like an event. Their stars were rising. They were both leading men by the time we shot that movie.
Now, what’s exciting about us getting older in the industry is getting to work together in different capacities. He’s doing a lot of stuff behind the camera now. And we have some opportunities to work together beyond actor and director.
He’s very ambitious in a way that’s endearing. He always wants to push and challenge himself further. And that comes across in his performances, but also in the business sense. That ambition keeps him open-minded. He watches everything and doesn’t want to cut himself off from certain genres or opportunities. So I think the sky’s the limit for him and his career. — Interview by Mekado Murphy
14. Oscar Isaac
A. O. SCOTT While I can take or leave the recent “Star Wars” movies, I do have a fondness for some of the characters, in particular Poe Dameron, the resistance flyboy who is the third trilogy’s designated charmer. As Poe, Oscar Isaac is an appealing, easygoing presence in those movies, a guy who seems to know what he’s doing.
His characters aren’t always as lucky, or as sure of themselves, but the man himself operates with the precision of someone who is confident enough in his skills to push himself into risky new territory. The summer before “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013) was released, Joel and Ethan Coen told us that they had originally wanted to cast a well-known musician in the title role. Instead, they found Isaac, who told them (according to Joel) that “most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they’ll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they’ve owned a guitar for 20 years.” Isaac could actually play. When I think about what makes him so credible as an actor, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. Not because it’s such a big deal to play guitar, but because whatever Isaac is pretending to do onscreen — selling heating oil (in the underrated “A Most Violent Year,” (2014); inventing sexy robots (in “Ex Machina”); flying X-wing fighters — I always believe that he really knows how to do it, and that I’m watching some kind of authentic mastery in action.
MANOHLA DARGIS When actors make a profound first impression, they sometimes get bound up with your ideas about what they can do. After “Llewyn Davis,” I associated Isaac with soulful defeat, with an undercurrent of grudging resentment. A few other roles shored up this idea of his innate mournfulness, including his performance as a besieged mayor in the HBO series “Show Me a Hero” (2015). This partly has to do with his broody, romantic looks and how his brows frame his luxuriously lashed eyes. And then there’s his voice, its pretty sound but also how its resonance creates intimacy. Even when he puts nasal in it, his voice retains a quality of closeness, one reason it often feels, sounds, like Llewyn is singing more for himself than the audience. Isaac’s voice also softens his beauty, drawing you in. Sometimes, though, as in “Ex Machina,” he uses that intimacy for something insinuating, sinister.
Isaac has a supporting role in “Ex Machina” (2015), but he’s vital to its vibe and power. He plays Nathan, a Dr. Frankenstein-like tech billionaire involved in artificial intelligence who’s building (and destroying) beautiful female androids. A savagely critical stand-in for today’s masters of the digital universe, Nathan could easily have dominated the movie. Isaac instead keeps his own charm in check, letting the character’s creepiness poison the air. Nathan’s mercurial moods and surprising looks — his shaved head and full beard, eyeglasses and cut muscles — make it difficult to get a bead on him. But when he suddenly boogies down, executing an amazing dance, Isaac lays bare all you need to know about Nathan in the geometric precision of his choreographed moves and the madness in his eyes. It’s 30 seconds of pure genius.
13. Tilda Swinton
MANOHLA DARGIS The woman of a thousand otherworldly faces, Tilda Swinton has created enough personas — with untold wigs, costumes and accents — to have become a roster of one. She’s a star, a character actor, a performance artist, an extraterrestrial, a trickster. Her pale, sharply planed face is an ideal canvas for paint and prosthetics, and capable of unnerving stillness. You want to read her but can’t. That helps make her a terrific villain, whether she’s playing a demon, a queen or a corporate lawyer. In “Julia” (2009), she drops that wall to play an out-of-control alcoholic and child-snatcher, giving a full-throttled performance that is so visceral and transparent that you can see the character’s thoughts furiously at work, like little parasites moving under the skin.
A. O. SCOTT We like to praise actors for “range,” but that’s an almost laughably inadequate word for the radical shape-shifting that Swinton accomplishes. Just look at one strand of her career: her work with Luca Guadagnino, a filmmaker who shares her delight in self-reinvention. In “I Am Love” (2010) she played the Russian wife of an Italian aristocratic, giving a performance in two languages and in the key of pure melodramatic heartbreak. In “A Bigger Splash” (2016) she had barely any language at all: She decided that it would be interesting if her glam-rock diva character had been struck mute by throat surgery. In “Suspiria” (2018) she executed one of her many self-doublings, appearing as a member of a balletomaniac coven of witches and also as an elderly male Holocaust survivor.
DARGIS That doubling shapes her most androgynous performances, where she effortlessly blurs gender, confirming (yet again) the inadequacy of categories like “man” and “woman.” She’s both; she’s neither. A different doubling happens when she plays twins, in the 2016 “Hail, Caesar!”(as rival gossip columnists) and in “Okja”the next year (as visually distinct very cruel captains of industry). In each, Swinton shows us two sides of the same person, much as she does in “Michael Clayton” (2007) when her lawyer rehearses a duplicitous spiel in front of a mirror. As the lawyer talks, pauses and drops her smile, you see her desperately trying to control a reflection that is already cracking.
SCOTT Those roles can be theatrical, but they almost never feel gimmicky. Swinton has roots in an avant-garde tradition — earlier in her career, she worked with Derek Jarman and Sally Potter — that emphasizes the mutability of identity and the blurred boundaries between artifice and authenticity. Over the past 20 years she has brought some of the intellectual rigor and conceptual daring of that work to Hollywood and beyond. She’s not only a uniquely exciting performer, but also one of the great living theorists of performance.
12. Joaquin Phoenix
By JAMES GRAY
Joaquin Phoenix has appeared in four of the director James Gray’s movies, starting with “The Yards” in 2000 and including “We Own the Night” (2007), “Two Lovers” (2009) and “The Immigrant” (2014). We asked Gray to explain how the actor has expanded — and improved — on his own vision.
When I saw “To Die For,” I said, “That actor” — I didn’t even know his name yet — “is unbelievably good at conveying his internal life without dialogue.” That’s a really important thing in cinema, because the camera reveals everything. Here was an actor who had so much going on and you could tell. I thought, “That’s a very interesting actor. I’d love to meet him.” And I did.
We were on the same wavelength, instantly. We liked the same things. We thought about things the same way. And I just immediately liked him. He had that dimensionality to him. The first film we did together [“The Yards”], I’m sure that I pissed him off a lot. I have a very direct way. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not so good. I’m better at it now. Let’s just say that I wasn’t always willing to say, “Yeah, that’s interesting, but let’s try this.” I was more into, “Joaq, what are you doing? That sucks, try another one.” And I know I would frustrate him because his talent was so vast.
He has a limitless ability to surprise you in the best ways and inspire you to move in a direction that you haven’t thought of originally, better than what you have in mind, and expands the idea. He’s extremely inventive. He’s always thinking and actually has gotten more so over the years. I’ve never said, “I want my vision on the screen.” I want something better than that. You want to lay down the parameters of what it is you have in mind, and then surround yourself with people who will make it all more beautiful. Not different, necessarily, but more intense, more vivid.
He has a limitless ability to surprise you in the best ways.
You want the actor to surprise you, and to do so in a way that seems consistent with the character but also very interesting. Joaquin was absolutely fantastic at that. That’s inspiring. You don’t know what to expect in the best sense. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. If I have any regret at all, it would be that he’s not in every single movie I made. — Interview by Candice Frederick
11. Julianne Moore
A. O. SCOTT The unhappy American housewife — smiling to keep up appearances in the face of domestic tragedy and inner turmoil — is a durable movie archetype. It’s one that Julianne Moore has both explored and exploded, in “The Hours” (2002) and especially in her collaborations with Todd Haynes like “Far From Heaven” (2002).
That film is set in Connecticut in the 1950s, but it’s a pointedly stylized landscape, evocative of the Hollywood melodramas of that period. Cathy and Frank Whitaker (Moore and Dennis Quaid) are each pulled away from their stifling marriage by forbidden desires: Frank for other men, Cathy for Raymond Deagan, a Black landscaper (Dennis Haysbert). These transgressions aren’t symmetrical or intersectional. In their heartbreak, humiliation and longing, Frank and Cathy have no consolation to offer each other.
Moore could have placed Cathy’s anguish in quotation marks, evoking the suffering divas of ’50s cinema while winking at a modern audience contemplating the bad old days from a safe aesthetic distance. Instead, she goes all the way in, staring out from the soul of a woman who is rooted in her time and absolutely modern, trapped by rules and appearances and also — terrifyingly and thrillingly — free.
MANOHLA DARGIS Unhappy or not, wives can be dead ends for actresses and for too many there comes that time when they’ve been forever banished to the kitchen. Moore has played plenty of wives and mothers, but hers are sometimes more complex and surprising than her movies, an index of her sensitivities and talent. One reason she lifts her characters out of stereotype is that she plays with codes of realism, whether she’s delivering a naturalistic performance (“Still Alice,” the 2014 melodrama about a professor with Alzheimer’s) or a hyperbolic one (David Cronenberg’s 2015 satire “Maps to the Stars,” where she’s a Hollywood hyena). Moore can externalize a character’s interior state beautifully, so you see feelings surface on her skin. But she’s an artist of extremes, and she and Cronenberg have fun playing with her gargoyle faces.
For the most part, her work in “Gloria Bell”(2019) is in a realist key. She plays the title character, a generous-hearted divorced insurance worker with two adult children, an ex she doesn’t hate and an achingly lonely apartment. The movie itself is modest, intimate, thoughtful and rich in human detail. Gloria starts an affair with a man. It goes badly, they break up. Not much happens in ordinary movie terms, yet everything happens because Gloria loves and is loved in turn. It’s a story that could have led to buckets of snot and empty showboating. But Moore and the director Sebastián Lelio transcend obviousness. They don’t merely create a story about a woman’s feelings — and being — as she falls in love; they create a landscape of emotions, the texture and shape of a sensibility. Moore’s Gloria doesn’t cry and laugh; she shows you what love looks like from the inside. It’s a miracle of a performance.

Posting this on a few subs because I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve reached my breaking point.
Im so tired. I’m so tired of existing. I’m so tired of being mad. I’m so tired of being tired. It’s pathetic. I’m a 25 year old adult who’s stuck living at home with my family. I can feel myself falling apart and I’m reaching the point where I’m finally just going to take myself out of this shitty game called life, or I’m going to end up cutting ties all together with my family, which is where I’ll probably sink. If it’s sink or swim out in the big world.
I am holding on to so many grudges. From so many years. That I clearly can’t cope with in a healthy way. My heart hurts so much but I’m such a glutton for punishment that I can’t bring myself to stop carrying around all this hate. And it is absolutely one hundred percent consuming me alive. I’ll try and use brackets to section off my thoughts since I doubt anybody cares enough to actually read this all the way through.
{My thoughts on my father}
{{{{As an adult now. I realize that I spent probably the first 18 years of my life. Living in literal fear of my pseudo racist father. I still remember being 6 years old or so and hearing my mother scream for my brother because my father was choking her in their bedroom. Was a big steroid fan back in the day. I spent most of my middle school and high school career grounded from one semester to the next one because I frequently got C’s in school which my parents would ground us for. Even one C on the report card and it was grounded for the rest of the semester. I still remember getting in trouble so badly for lying about doing my homework, not even so much for not doing my homework. But it was distinctly about lying about it. My father was beating me in our dining room and at one point was physically choking me against the wall, and I remember my mother saying “well Don’t choke him (insert name)” and him looking straight at her with his hands around my neck saying “I’m not choking him” I still remember that same night him having to come in my room to change my ice packs on my swollen face and how petrified I was that the gameboy sp I was playing was flung off the bed in a room with no carpet because I was certain I was going to get beat again. I remember going to school the next and having to tell my teachers (because all six of them forced me to stay after class and talk about it) that I was playing football with my brother and fell on a sprinkler. Funny how their response to me lying about homework was to in turn go to school and lie about why half of my face was swollen and black. I remember the first time i was ever caught shoplifting (was obviously my last time doing it too) when my dad came to pick me up, he was already so nasty to me before leaving the store that the police threatened to not let me leave because he was already trying to hit me in front of them.
But you know. Now that I’m an adult and have been jumped literally just because of my sexuality. If I’m going to get my ass beat I’m going to get my ass beat. I’m just not living in fear anymore. }}}}
{my thoughts on my brother}
{{{{Which brings me to my brother. Who as of lately might as well be dead to me. We have not currently spoken since April, and as far as I’m concerned we probably won’t ever speak again. Let’s start with me saying I feel like my brothers relationship with me has always been from the start. Me bailing him out when he needs it. I remember being in elementary school and him getting to go back to sleep after my mother woke us up for breakfast and would leave for work, because it was my job to “wake him up after rugrats” when he was about 12 or 13 he got mixed up with a bad neighborhood kid and ended up almost lighting an entire house on fire in our neighborhood. The police officers were nice enough to offer him the deal that if you stay out of trouble until you’re 18 this will be completely removed off your record with no trace of it ever even happening. Sure enough he starts smoking weed in high school (which is back when it was HIGHLY frowned upon) and guess who had to take every single drug test for his four years of high school. My dumb ass. Bailing him out again. Until finally he got caught coming back late from lunch (upper class men were at the time allowed to leave campus for lunch) and he came back with a hotboxed car and didn’t air it out. So when the principle stopped him to ask why he was late she was literally hit with a cloud of smoke. My brother was the sole reason my high school was no longer allowed to leave campus for lunch. My brother and father have always had an awful relationship too obviously all this places even more tension on it, and eventually lead to him either being kicked out or leaving. I don’t remember which. Being on the streets on his own he was arrested more times for carrying stupid large amounts of weed on him because he sells it, and eventually got charged I think with robbery. Then to top it all off, a few years ago my brother got mixed up in the flocka epidemic. And of course there’s my dumbass bailing him out again being forced to put two stolen bikes in my car and drive him to Miami. When I first started realizing how much I hated him was I think my senior year of high school. My parents had gone out of town leaving him in charge. I remember distinctly it was the night before vans warped tour he’s in a huge fight with his at the time girlfriend, because he was literally hitting either her, or her and/or her kid. And I remember he stormed into my room flinging open the door trying to use me as an excuse “isn’t this okay because it’s what dad used to do to us. “ of course having a criminal record he couldn’t find a job and was on probation at my parents house and because nobody wanted to hire somebody with his record they literally gave him a fucking job at the company my father works for. This job is 15$ an hour, gets benefit and vacation days. I on the other hand spent years being treated like shit in jobs. Two years ago I worked for quiksilver over the course of about a year, finally left because they told me and a coworker that we were the ones being considered for management and yet they brought in two outside hires after the second one the other coworker had the sense to leave. My dumb ass stayed thinking well now that she’s gone it’ll look better on me. Which is when they brought in another outside hire. Who I was eventually cool with. I just stopped offering to do the management work for sales associate pay. Until I finally got so fed up that I transferred to GameStop because they were willing to start me as a keyholder since I already had basic management training. So two years trying to work for a manager only to be shit on by my parents because it’s not full time and “at your age your brother worked full time” at my age y’all gave him a fucking career because nobody wanted to hire a literal criminal. Anything I do It’s just never going to be good enough.
Let me talk about our most recent altercation, because it’s a fantastic transition into my mother, as of last April I was unfortunately unemployed thanks to this whole virus outbreak, and of course that sets off my family members because I sleep all day while they work. So my mother asked me on April 20th the day before my birthday (a day that I was operating on approximately 2 hours of sleep because I’m always up all night) if I could go help my brother in the warehouse where he works because he really needs it. I have already had altercations with my brother there from helping him a previous time. It was so bad that they sent me home early. So being there in general makes me uncomfortable. Even when I go in to help my dads department. So of course I didn’t want to help which wasn’t an acceptable answer to my mother and after about the 5th time of her saying something obviously I snapped and agreed to which she responded “forget it” and slammed my door shut. (It should be noted that in my mother’s defense I’m a nightmare to wake up because of how little I sleep. There are times I wake up and am in a fight with my mother because she apparently tried to wake me up and I was nasty, meanwhile I have literally no recollection of even speaking to her ) so my dumb ass trying to bite the bullet agrees to go work for eight hours in a hot sweaty warehouse with barely any ac on my birthday of all days. I woke up that morning still mad about the fight I had with my mother the day prior because I feel like as a grown ass adult I should be allowed to say no I don’t want to do something.
Get to the warehouse work the shift, I leave at five, which apparently was a mistake because I wasnt supposed to leave until 5:30 which I thought was fine because 1) I genuinely thought they left at 5 every day and 2) I didn’t take a lunch break because I was hoping if we happened to get everything done early we would just be able to leave. Obviously that was wrong and I got a shitty passive aggressive text message from my brother.
Having already been in a bad mood from my fight with my mother the day before partnered with my brother annoying me after I had left I stopped by aunts house to vent because I was literally seeing red. Wasn’t even planning on going home for my birthday because I just didn’t want to be around any of them.
The next day comes and I don’t show up because not only did I not want to be there, but when I had gotten there the day before another employee of that company said “we don’t know if we’ll need you tomorrow or not yet” so I just didn’t bother to show up because if y’all needed me you should have worked that into your text message when you were being an asshole in my opinion. So of course my petty ass isn’t going to show up. My brother comes home through the door doesn’t even put his shit down and is in my face screaming at me for not showing up “why should I have to explain to my boss why you didn’t come” “why do you get to sleep all day while we work I’m sick of it” turning to my mother “I’m sick of him aren’t y’all sick of him” (to which she agrees probably just trying to get him to calm down, but I won’t ever for a second forget you just said you were sick of me. ) and of course I’m running my mouth back in return, which is when he decided to put his hands on me, shoving me literally to the floor. And this is about where I Black out with anger because I had my Nintendo switch in my hand. The limited edition no longer in production animal crossing themed one at that. So obviously I’m pissed and yank his PlayStation out of the wall and slam it on the ground. You can skip the next parentheses part if you don’t care about why a stupid video game console made me so upset.
(A detour to mention about these video game consoles. My brother and I used to exclusively use Xbox but I made the transition to the PS4 when it came out. My brother didn’t. I had been asking for a PlayStation 4 since they came out for both my birthday and Christmas for I think like two years. Until the year my brother spent Christmas in jail because he was addicted to flocka. When my mom finally bailed him out because she felt like he was actually clean, he got a PlayStation 4. When I asked why he got one and I didn’t despite it literally being the only thing I asked for as a Christmas gift, she said “well he wasn’t here for Christmas so I had to make it special.” I think I eventually got the PlayStation for my birthday the following year. But this fucking switch man. I swore up and down when I was a GameStop employee that they were going to make an animal crossing version and they all laughed at me said if it was going to happen it would have already and talked me into buying just a standard switch instead. Low and behold a few weeks later the animal crossing one is announced and I’m lowkey heartbroken that I just spent a majority of my money on the standard one. I eventually get myself so worked up over it that I asked my mom to front me the money to buy the new system, and I will give her 200 when I sell my switch and the rest from my next paycheck. She’s talking some I can’t I don’t have that kind of money, which would have been totally fine. I was just embarrassed that I not only put my pride away to ask for money, but was also upset enough about not getting the animal crossing one to even be in this situation. So whatever whatever we end up agreeing on if I sell the console first and give her the two hundred she will give me the rest. Where as I was only asking her for the front because I didn’t want to risk selling my console before the new one came out and risk then not having a console at all. Especially since I had already missed like two years of the switches lifespan. So obviously I’m super thankful to my mom and I literally spent like two days thanking her and talking to her about it, only for me to find out that she had given me my own money. I don’t know what it was for, possibly my unemployment since the console came out around the time the virus was starting to flare. And at that point all I can keep thinking is wow. You really kept my own money from me, made me gamble on being able to find a limited edition console without a preorder. And told me you couldn’t loan me anything. That makes me so mad. How are you going to lie about my own damn money. Serves me right I guess for not being adult enough to stop using our joint bank account.)
Anyway. I slam his PlayStation on the ground after he put his hand on me the first time we get into a screaming match in his room to which I say something along the lines of “you’re allowed to knock my switch out of my hand so why should you expect any different of your PlayStation” to which he responds (talking out of his ass) “well you didn’t pay for it mom did!” Jokes on you asshole not only did I pay for it entirely with my money but our mother literally withheld my own money from me and made it more difficult for me to get an already difficult to get console. This ends up with him coming back into my room because everyone in my family (myself included) has to have the last word in argument. Which leads to him putting his hands on me a second time except this time since there’s not a 400$ gaming system in my hand I pull his disgusting ass down with me.}}}}}
This whole fight somehow ends with me being kicked out of my house by my mother.
{my thoughts on my mother}
{{{{Fun fact. Maybe about a week before this my mother was begging me to stop going out despite taking precautions with a mask and specially made sanitizer consisting of primarily alcohol. Because they had a friend in critical condition from covid. This is the same woman who threw her kid out into streets during the first peak of this epidemic. (I’m in Florida so it is at this moment higher than that first peak because Floridians are trash) so I spend the next three or four day sleeping in my car doing whatever trying to manage on my own, spending what little money I had fixing the joycon drift on my switch that was non existent until my brother attacked me with it in my hand. One thing leads to another and I eventually end up back home. I asked my mom if we could start family therapy because I’m literally holding onto grudges that I don’t know how to let go of. She says when all of this is over but I’m positive she’s forgotten about it and it might very well be what causes me to cut her out all together.
A few days ago me and my mother got into a huge arguement because she woke me up to ask me to take her to firestone to pick up her car(I’m exhausted but totally not a problem to me at all) so I get right up get dressed grab my keys and when I walk out of my room she goes “are you ready now I’m not in a rush or anything” I was a little annoyed by the stupid question I’ll admit, like you just two minutes ago came into my room to wake me up and ask me to take you. Yes I’m ready to go lol. Otherwise I’d still be asleep. She of course takes my flat response (a slight mixture of both my annoyance and exhaustion) as me being in a bad mood. So we get into my car and she’s overreacting because my car is a little shaky (which I’m almost positive is just because I need air in my tires) talking some oh my god we have to pull over what if you have a flat. Like we definitely would know if we were driving on a flat tire. It’s been doing this since like the second week I got this car. So I’m just sitting there trying to get to the destination as fast as possible trying to hold my tongue and not cause a fight when she sets me off and says something along the lines of “you’re in a bad mood because I asked you to take me” my response being “oh what I’m in a bad mood because I got right up to do something you asked me to do???” which fucking infuriated me and caused a screaming match in my car. I don’t understand why she has this god complex where she thinks she gets to tell other people how they feel about something. She did it to me on my birthday too which I forgot to mention and am now too lazy to go back and add in. But like it drives me crazy. I don’t care if they’re right wrong or somewhere in between. Nobody has the right to decide how somebody feels about something except for that person. So when I sit there and tell you I’m not mad and you tell me “yes you are mad that’s why you’re being shitty” that’s a self fulfilling prophecy right there. Of course that shits going to make me mad. If you’re just going to decide I’m in a bad mood for me then shit I guess I’m in a bad fucking mood then.
So this screaming match in my car leads to her saying “I hope something happens to your car, and when it does DONT call me”. I will never ever in a million years forget she said that to me. I hope that when something does happen to my car, I’m inside of it, I hope it’s something fatal, and I hope she has to live with it for the rest of her life. And then of course after our screaming match she sends me a passive aggressive text message (because apparently my family is famous for doing that shit) talking some I won’t be screamed at in a car that I bought you, you are SO disrespectful the next time you talk to me like that you can find a new place to live! (As if she didn’t kick me out when I was 16, and 18, and 23. Like clearly I can manage in my car bitch try me. I would rather starve to death on the streets than feel like I need help from someone who treats me like shit) Skip the parentheses if you don’t care about context with my car history
(Both me and my brother were fortunate enough to get cars for our 16th birthday. The difference between us is my brother has wrecked I think 2 cars my parents bought him, one car they gave him because my mom got a new car (which that one he wasn’t at fault for but still it’s a car to add to your tally) and ruined one of my dads trucks that he was using for whatever reason one day. I on the other hand drove the same car that I had since I was 16 until literally this year when I turned 25 and was given a new one. But honestly my parents had been trying to buy me another one for a few years I just fought them on it because I didn’t want a new car which I will explain why later. )
And then now just today, we are in another arguement because I think last night, my brother walked out our back gate to go sell drugs in our mailbox because he thinks he’s cool and tough and can handle jail as if he isn’t literally crying “mommy bail me out” when he’s in there. As he’s going out he knocks over the ashtray I had been using over there (which was admittedly in the walkway but only because that particular night I was in a hurry to relocate under my backyard awning because it was raining and I had all my technology on me) but when he walks back he has the nerve to say to me “your ashtray is knocked over “ as if i wasn’t outside and heard him kick it over like I’m supposed to lean up after him. Despite us having literally not a said a word to eachother since April. So I hid the ashtray that he normally uses with the mindset of “if he needs an ashtray he’ll have to go over and clean up the one he kicked over.” Only for me to find that my mother ended up being the one to clean up his mess. Which of course infuriated me. And then she had the nerve to defend him in a text message after we got into an arguement about it. “Well it is your ashtray...” okay did I kick over my ashtray or did my brother. Because that’s the person who should have cleaned it up was who knocked it over.
In regards to my mother specifically it hurts me the most. Because I often at times feels like she’s the only one out of the 3 of my immediately family that I could have a relationship with or that I actively want to have a relationship with and that bridge is so close to being burnt to a crips. I don’t want to appear ungrateful because as a mother she does go above and beyond. I’ve been spoiled sure. But my problem with it is, I feel like my mother only gives as much as she gives so that she has ammunition to hold over peoples head. I fought her for YEARS about getting a new because I knew she would just hold it over my head. Which obviously I was right about. I remember being kicked out when I was 18 because I wasn’t working and i had just gotten kicked out of college and she said leave your keys pack your stuff and find somewhere to live. So I did set off with no car no money no nothing ended up being taken in by my best friends family. Spent a year or two there, and I literally did not get my car back (the same one she had given me at 16) until the girl I was living with literally called her in tears asking if we could just borrow it so we could go see her mother who was in the hospital because she needed brain surgery. LITERAL BRAIN SURGERY was the only reason I got my car back. And it still took my friend like two or three times of asking my mother for her to let me use my car just to take her to see her mother.
My father has always babied me and let me get away with more than he lets my brother get away with I can admit that. The problem with it is, that because I don’t feel the same type of yearning for a relationship about my father that I do about my mother I don’t really care about him favoring me. And because my dad tends to let me get away with more my mom feels like she has to let my brother get away with more, which in turn causes me to always just feel like I’m chasing my mother’s approval or some shit. }}}}
{thoughts on my own disgusting self}
It’s only been recently that I’m starting to come around to my father and that’s only because I think I’m starting to hate my mother.
I know I probably sound ungrateful and entitled. And I can see why. But I am truly thankful for how privilege I’ve been and all that I’ve been given. But I don’t know how to not feel the way that I feel about these things.
And that’s not to say I’m perfect either. I’ve caused plenty of problem for my family. So let me just skip to all my flaws now.
When I was a kid like before I could even start kindergarten I was literally already sucking dick. My next door neighbor ( my brothers age at the time) used to make me do it to him and I used to agree because he was considerably nicer to me when I do would so. He was already a problem child too but that’s neither here nor there. I was pretty much only sucking him off because my brother always hated when I would hang out with him and his friends, and the neighbor always let me hang around (for obvious reasons) distinctly remember my brother catching us a few times but I guess nothing was ever done about it. Not even sure if my parents know about it.
But as an adult I can see that’s where I started getting fucked up. Idk if I necessarily blame my neighbor for me being gay, because I do firmly as a gay man believe that it’s just who you are and can’t be changed, but I feel like there will literally always be a part of me that questions it. Like what if I wasn’t sucking dick at five years old, would I be interested in girls? I remember having a crush on at least two different girls before i met (what I now as an adult realize was probably my first boy crush) like looking back on my child hood I vividly remember playing “doctor” with other kids or truth or dare that always ended sexual and I realize like damn. That’s fucking gross we were all kids.
Fast forward to me being in I think middle school, and I was caught sexually experimenting with my cousin. I was definitely old enough to know better so I take fault there, but I also wasn’t ever the one initiating it. You know. I was letting him suck me off for longer than I can remember honestly, but I also distinctly remember I wasn’t the one initiating it. I still remember the first night at his house when he asked me to go pornhub and grilling him about how he even knows about that. I don’t remember when I started letting him do stuff to me, but I know that I shouldn’t have. I remember well enough that when he would come sleepover there were times I would opt to stay up late with my father in hopes that he would fall asleep waiting for me to come in. I remember one time I was up late and he comes walking out like 2 hours after being put to bed because he was trying to get me to come in to bed with him. But again I was the older kid in that situation. So that’s my fuck up. Obviously when we got caught it put a wedge between that side of our family. I can see why, but in hindsight I always wonder. Would you have still distanced yourself if you knew it was your son who had been initiating it? Because he was younger all the blame was pushed onto me. And I can see why. Again I should have known better.
That’s probably around the time I started getting fat. By high school at one point I was over 300 pounds and openly gay. Never had a serious relationship. Never even had someone interested in a relationship with me. I can see why. Not only was I cringey in high school but I was literally disgusting. It wasn’t till about my senior year I finally got back under 300 pounds and started losing some weight and gaining some confidence.
But here’s the kicker. Before I started losing the weight I had become a literal serial catfisher. And I’m talking like anybody you wanted to see naked I would go out of my way to target. Friends, friends boyfriends. Nobody was off limits to me. It makes me sick thinking about the hundreds of people I’ve catfished because I was horny and lonely. Catfishing even basically got me kicked out of my college ( granted I was surprisingly innocent at that time but because the kid found out about me being a catfish he refused to believe it wasn’t me, despite me literally having to show my catfish accounts to the dean and them not matching up to whoever he was talking to. The college only realized their mistake a semester or two later because the kid was immediately put on academic probation the semester following my suspension, and then got caught trying to do the same thing to another gay student the semester after that. Which is when they were like wow we were wrong we’re so sorry don’t even worry about the requirements we gave you for coming back you can just come back never did though.)
It wasn’t only until I hit maybe 22 or 23 that it like clicked with how awful what I was doing was. And started making an active effort to stop it. And I feel like I was only even willing to because I fell in genuine love with somebody I was catfishing. When I finally told him, we were fine for a few days. He told me he didn’t care that I was a guy because he fell in love with the person behind a screen. But all of that quickly crumbled to ashes. That’s another one that’s my own fault. Not only was I doing something shitty but I was also in too deep. I think I still to this day get texted from somebody I started catfishing when I was about 15 or 16 that I just am too afraid to finally tell the truth to.
But since the recent heart break I’ve thankfully been able to almost entirely remove catfishing from life save for the one guy I was in too deep with, and the old catfish accounts that I occasionally log into when I’m desperately alone/horny/whatever it may be.
I’m tired of feeling alone. I just want to be loved. I want someone to want me. To care about me.
I’m starting to realize this world is awful. Almost every thing and everyone in it is bleak. Some people genuinely want to live long happy lives, me personally, I don’t think I can make it doing this shit for another 25 years. Self deprecating jokes and suicidal humor are my biggest weapons. Because I feel like if I don’t turn them into jokes. I’ll let them overcome me. Too many people in this world are awful. I don’t want to be one anymore.
I doubt any of you will actually care enough to read this through. But if you for some unknown reason did, then I thank you. Because I could really use a friend.
TLDR; I’m a scumbag. I’m starting to think my family is scumbags, and I’m genuinely losing my will to live. I’ve been holding on to grudges that are literally consuming me and transforming me into a being of hatred and it makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t know how much longer I can do this, but god I would absolutely love to just be taken out by a bus tomorrow.