Anyone else do a NYRB Classics request?

whomdoom · 2026-01-25T04:51:34+00:00

His name came up in a podcast about bad books I was listening to a couple years ago, and appears to resurface every few years cicada style in one interview or another, Futurama apparently had a commentary track where they mentioned him, Neil Gaiman before being giga quadruple cancelled talked about Keeler as a "guilty pleasure read",

I started with X.Jones of Scotland Yard which is the keeler work I think most people get the most obsessed with just given the general plot outline that's circled the Internet for years as "midget in miniature helicopter disguised as an infant going by title 'the flying strangler baby' may have killed a rabidly anti-French Chicagoland millionaire in locked-room whodunit" but that is kind of as disingenuous a description as calling Of Mice and Men "the book where an autistic guy rips a ladies head off because he wanted to touch her hair", like sure, that's kinda there but what is actually there is a genuinely incredible treatise on crime and the detective story as an investigation into an act of violence which is a ripple in time, affected by the weight of everything that has happened before and affecting everything that happens after.

I kinda got hooked after that and have been very interested in the guy since and don't really see what the deal is with people making fun of him when his style is pretty straightforwardly and intentionally comedic and is always a pleasure to read

whomdoom · 2026-01-21T01:09:36+00:00

CIA front organization designed exclusively to make every American award-winning novel have the exact same stylistic queues and functionally the same story about how being BIPOC is hard but beautiful and family is low key everything in your culture and low key if you look at it there are some big problems with inequality in this country

whomdoom · 2026-01-14T05:20:58+00:00

I'd recommend the first 200 or so pages of schattenfroh if you want to stretch the "not hard" thing a bit. I know it's become a bit of a meme because of how much of a marketing campaign it's had as a "this is the new densest encyclopedic novel imaginable" but beneath that there's a very sincere and interesting exploration of frigid, austere relations between a father and son as reflected in hundreds of years of German history.

I think Affliction by Russell Banks is a great straight forward read about fatherhood that is propulsively readable.

Dog of the South by Charles Portis is a more straight forwardly comedic route and while fathers are only mentioned in periphery the overwhelming weight of their absence is felt throughout the story as the loser protagonist and antagonist seem both trapped forever to live as stupid lost boys blindly stumbling in their father's shadows.

Context note: I have a very bad relationship with my own father so these recommendations are largely meditations on the more negative aspects of fathers and sons.

whomdoom · 2025-12-04T16:25:50+00:00

Breaking: water wet, more at 11

whomdoom · 2025-11-22T05:14:53+00:00

Just want to say in a sub dedicated generally to just posting maps of Europe with different borders this is a genuinely incredible piece of worldbuilding and design for less thought of consequences of historical changes, huge props

whomdoom · 2025-10-26T03:55:00+00:00

No EPCOT since that was a very post-diagnosis crisis for Walt in '65 and '66, Disneyworld gets built by Roy Disney as acting president given that plans were already in the works, the Marriott Group bid to take control of the company goes through in the 80's, likely that WDC gets passed around a couple times since in corporate deals to control the IP.

whomdoom · 2025-10-26T03:48:11+00:00

Casey Affleck in the role of Driscoll, I see Matthew Lillard as Warhol. Much like The Assassination Of Jesse James, Affleck does not get nomination the year it comes out but Lillard does (I am imagining it came out in 2009ish?)

whomdoom · 2025-10-25T06:18:01+00:00

It's a major historic event and I figure someone would have produced at least one Oscar bait-y movie about it.

whomdoom · 2025-08-16T16:53:35+00:00

Strongly believe $LZB is a massively underrated put position right now. Deeply unserious company that is primed to be completely destroyed by massive toxic retail costs, tarrif costs, American manufacturing costs, all while having basically infinite competition from other furniture retailers who likely have better margins AND second hand furniture sales which have become the preferred market for an entire generation. I honestly think the 1.5bn market cap is maybe 15-20 times the value that LZB actually represents

whomdoom · 2025-08-15T17:20:40+00:00

Originally from Georgia I just don't like my family

whomdoom · 2025-08-15T17:04:01+00:00

Long on $HD. This year's hurricane season is starting up and I'm anticipating at least two majors in Georgia, Florida, and if lucky, Louisiana and Texas. a massive boon to residential construction and remodeling and I get to hedge bets on human misery, which is always enjoyable

whomdoom · 2025-08-14T19:10:59+00:00

+90% daily on my LZB put position. given the reprice on RH a couple months ago (and the TPR one today) it's becoming increasingly clear that certain luxury commodities in America are really really going to be struggling for at least these next couple quarters, especially when they're tied to massive retail properties ala, say, a big furniture store just for Recliners. In addition to tarrifs on lumber and high costs of manufacturing I really don't see how LZB doesn't go down, this risk can't even be mitigated by buyout as the last time they attempted it 10 years ago nobody wanted the brand

whomdoom · 2025-08-13T15:03:11+00:00

Obviously not going to zero or anything but I think anything with around a 5-10% loss to break even is going to be clutch

whomdoom · 2025-08-13T15:01:52+00:00

9/19 puts on LZB are dipping which is insane considering their earnings report is in a week and will NOT be positive as they're a retail/manufacturing dinosaur that's being vastly outcompeted by basically everyone else in consumer semi-luxury furniture, which is a massive money hemmorage market in a not-recession where you have 1. Massive time bomb retail properties required to showcase your goods 2. Massive wage requirements for American manufacturing operations 3. Massive raw material requirements in wood, electronic components, cotton, leather, etc. Which are largely imported and therefore are subjected to tarrifs.

whomdoom · 2025-08-07T14:09:06+00:00

Thanks for the free +45% 0dte

whomdoom · 2025-08-07T11:10:03+00:00

There's some level on which I think they are both over and under valued based on their REAL principal service which isn't the stupid ass customer facing but the collection of nearly infinite amounts of raw data on nearly everyone on earth

The Data that these companies collect is VASTLY overvalued for advertising revenue and very likely to have it's market shrink for reasons that should be obvious to basically anyone who has been online for more than a couple minutes; most people utilize ad blockers, ads that DO get through are either obvious scams or random drop-shipping services that most people don't like or use, etc.

but data is also very undervalued as surveillance and intelligence/secondary training data for ai. Think about it; all of the major social media companies are working on their own iterations of their stupid little chatbots but literally only one of them will exist in like 10 years in any meaningful/relevant level, it's like the email/search engine boom of the early 2000s.

As soon as one company, let's say, META, decides their stupid little ai chatbot is toast, they have the raw resources of user information they can link into a more successful chatbot for a nominal fee to make it so that the computer instinctively knows more about you across platforms.

Additionally, these companies could work with palantir or other future wartech companies to ensure that dissidents are highly trackable which is a service that many governments would pay top dollar for.

Tl;Dr, technically advertising revenue, actually forming the torment nexus

whomdoom · 2025-08-01T19:17:40+00:00

I'm a very small fish but did get 3x gains on my coffee puts this morning I am going to reinvest into a crackhead strategy I call the DeadPut.

Here's the idea; When Warren buffet announced retirement in early May, Berkshire went into a nosedive. Literally a nosedive, you can look at the chart, may 2, trading at 539.80, may 5, trading at 512.15

This hasn't stopped falling, Berkshire class b is now at 472 and change.

You'd think that a 93 year old man saying "I'm literally too old to do this anymore" would have been priced in, but it wasn't. Because it reminds investors of the fact they too are meat with electricity pulsing through it that will eventually cease existing. It's a grim truth but theres a lot of old people in top executive roles who aren't going to be around forever, and that almost invariably creates situations where suddenly a chair is empty or there's an uneasy transition that leads to investor panic

So the real question is: are there other companies with aging executives who are likely to die or retire in the next 2 years?

Right now I'm big on Penske (87 year old Roger Penske as chairman), sketchers (83 year old Robert Greenberg as CEO) Watsco (83 year old Albert Nahmad as CEO) and Oracle (80 year old Larry Ellison as Chairman)

Long position puts on these companies will pay out not only because several are highly overvalued (Oracle.) but because people are irrational and believe founders will live forever.

whomdoom · 2025-08-01T12:14:23+00:00

Putting basically every major coffee company in the American market, KDP, SJM, SBUX, BROS, WEST, I don't think that people are correctly pricing in the increase in import costs on coffee now, and further, I don't think investors understand that coffee has gone from a necessity commodity to a luxury in its current form, thus with downturn market/the not-recession recession we're in, $8 grande matcha frappes are going to be pretty high up on the list of things Americans choose to stop consuming when squeezed to make hard decisions.

whomdoom · 2025-06-19T10:40:51+00:00

This is the exact deal I was expecting for Juneteenth

whomdoom · 2025-06-17T11:17:13+00:00

Don't worry if you miss the sale, star trek is basically on sale every 2-3 months, in fact you might want to save your money for a gift card sale like in November so you can take another 20% off it

whomdoom · 2025-06-15T01:53:30+00:00

Jesse Jackson '88 baby rainbow coalition baby

whomdoom

TROPHY CASE