Wandering Adventure Party

This flu has been relentless. I must have slept something like 15 hours today. Not consistently, mind you. Often woken up by aches and chills.

Was supposed to go to the MLS Cup watch party but I came down with the flu. It’s been brutal. I must have slept something like 15 hours yesterday. Muscles aching. Constant chills. A little bit better now but I won’t be doing a live thread today.

A console most gamers had never even heard of just outsold the PlayStation 5. The Nex Playground was the second best-selling console in the United States for the week ending November 22, right before Thanksgiving. Only the Nintendo Switch 2 sold more. So what is this thing? It’s not completely obscure. It won an Apple Design Award in 2022. But among people who identify as gamers and generally follow the industry, the Nex Playground wasn’t on anyone’s radar. At its core, it’s basically the Xbox Kinect reincarnated. A self-contained, camera-based motion system in a bright, friendly box that plugs into your TV. No controllers. No buttons. You just wave your limbs around and it tracks everything. There are no cartridges either. Everything is digital and delivered through a subscription. Which means—much to the annoyance of hardcore gamers—Microsoft was right. Camera-based motion controls are viable. There’s still an audience for this. Maybe even a massive one. And it’s been ignored for so long that a start-up simply walked in and captured it. https://www.ign.com/articles/a-box-that-looks-like-the-ouya-and-kinect-had-a-kid-outsold-the-ps5-in-the-us-the-week-before-thanksgiving

Netflix just bought Warner Bros Discovery, minus the cable division. That carve-out tracks with Netflix’s identity as a pure streaming company rather than a legacy distributor.Regulatory review is still ahead, but Amazon cleared MGM/UA without much resistance, and this deal sits in the same structural neighborhood. Hard to see it getting blocked.The implications, though, are enormous. Netflix now controls Game of Thrones and Harry Potter. They also inherit the entire DC Universe: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman. Plus the weirder gems like Preacher and Swamp Thing.And this doesn’t stop at film and TV. They become a major video-game publisher overnight.Because they now own the Midway, Atari Games, and Monolith catalogs.More concretely: Gauntlet, Paperboy, Rampage, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Blood, F.E.A.R.At this point, Netflix’s IP bench is stronger than Disney or Amazon. That matters for streaming today, but it matters even more if video games become the next competitive frontier.https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-buy-warner-bros-discoverys-131612002.html

Sometimes I get after myself for not looking shredded and still having a potbelly. But then I deadlift an obscene amount of weight. And I go, “My body doesn’t look pretty but it sure can work.”

Warner Bros Discovery is finally getting the kind of Hollywood drama it always wanted—not on screen, but in a boardroom knife fight where everyone smiles while quietly sliding cease-and-desist letters across the table. Here’s what happened: WBD opened the gates for second-round bids. Paramount, Netflix, and Comcast all marched in with chequebooks and opportunistic grins, eager to claim one of the last great legacy media bundles left in America. And suddenly Paramount begins shrieking like they just caught WBD cheating on them. They send an accusatory letter to the WBD board—which immediately leaks, naturally—complaining the entire bidding process is “myopic,” “predetermined,” and “rigged to favour a single bidder.” Translation: “WBD loves Netflix more than us and we don’t like it.” Paramount claimed WBD management was basically sweeping rose petals toward Netflix’s feet, calling a Netflix takeover a “slam dunk” while describing Paramount’s own bid as though it was a contagious disease. They even dug up a German report claiming WBD secretly warned the EU that a Paramount merger would cause “excessive media concentration,” which is lawyer-speak for: “Please don’t let these people anywhere near us.” WBD’s response? A deeply corporate, passive-aggressive kiss on the cheek: “We’ve read your letter. The board is very responsible. The board loves fiduciary duties. The board is, in fact, married to fiduciary duties.”" In other words: “Calm down. We see you. Please stop yelling.” And to be clear, the stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re watching the last war of the legacy media empires. Whoever wins gets HBO, Warner Bros Pictures, DC, Cartoon Network, CNN, HGTV, Looney Tunes, Adult Swim, the rights to all the elves in Middle-earth, and—just for flavour—the studio that makes Mortal Kombat. Plus one of the best film libraries ever assembled and a global distribution network built over decades. But here’s the real tragedy, the Greek-level heartbreak: How did a company that once launched the goddamn Atari 2600, sold the best-selling home computer of its era, merged with AOL at the peak of the internet’s deranged optimism, created HBO, conquered cable, invented half of pop culture, and owns the entire DC Universe… become a distressed asset being fought over by rival bidders like a Black Friday flatscreen? Easy: Debt, streaming, collapse. And then repeat again. Decades of megamergers and catastrophic executive decisions turned WBD into the corporate equivalent of a prizefighter who spent 20 years losing title matches but still bragging about his belt from 1978. AT&T swooped in, loaded the company with an Everest of debt, then bolted. Discovery inherited the mess, Zaslav applied austerity like a medieval surgeon, and suddenly the company that once ruled film, TV, cable, animation, news, and games can barely keep up with the cost-of-capital curve. Cable collapsed. Streaming became the world’s most expensive hobby. Every revenue engine began sputtering at once. And the simple, brutal truth emerged: WBD is too big to pivot but too small to survive. Which is why today they’re taking bids like a medieval kingdom putting itself up for auction. Netflix wants the whole thing. Comcast wants the pieces. Paramount wants a merger because without WBD they are literally running out of lifeboats. And WBD? WBD just wants someone, anyone, to fix the balance sheet before the next interest payment eats their lunch. We are watching the final consolidation battle of Hollywood. This is the last great media kingdom going to war with itself as rival empires circle overhead. And the most hilarious part? After a century of reshaping culture—after defining movies, television, cable, video games, superheroes, animation, and news—Warner Bros Discovery now finds itself in a bidding process so messy that even Paramount is standing on a chair, pointing, yelling: “HEY! THEY LIKE NETFLIX MORE THAN US!” When the history of media is written, this will be the chapter titled: A Titan Falls, and Three Other Titans Try to Pick Through the Wreckage. https://www.screendaily.com/news/wbd-lawyers-repond-to-paramount-letter-crying-foul-over-bidding-process/5211660.article

Comcast is spinning off its cable networks into a new company called Versant. They call it a “strategic realignment.” Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe hears: “we’re offloading the losers before they embarrass the winners again.” This isn’t a media story. It’s a math story. It’s what happens when a 40-year-old model tries to compete with something built for scale and doesn’t recognize it lost until the scoreboard is taken down. Versant launches with $6.6B in revenue, $2.2B in EBITDA, and $1.4B in free cash flow. All fine numbers. But it’s also writing Comcast a $2.25B separation cheque, taking on $3B in debt, and watching profits fall 24% before its ticker even goes live. This is what “healthy” looks like in cable now, which tells you everything. And the macro backdrop is even uglier. Cable went from 96M US subscribers to roughly 69M in seven years. Pay-TV penetration fell from over 80% to the mid-30s. This is not a slow decline. This is the market moving on while the incumbents keep insisting “consumers still love the bundle.” Streaming, meanwhile, is blowing past $400B globally with double-digit growth. Every dollar of upside is there. Pay-TV has the energy of a landline—still functioning, still charged, but mostly because nobody bothered to unplug it. So Comcast did the rational thing. Broadband is ten times larger, ten times healthier, and not actively shrinking by the million every year. You keep the infrastructure business that compounds. You spin out the legacy division that doesn’t. Versant isn’t built to win anything. It’s built to extract value on the way down. It’s the corporate equivalent of palliative care: cut costs, renegotiate old contracts, dump content into FAST channels, and stretch the cash flows as far as they go. Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango are nice digital assets, but they aren’t changing the trajectory. Tech, meanwhile, quietly rebuilt the entire cable ecosystem in software and made the old moats irrelevant. Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG—all of them turned the “bundle” into a UI decision. Virtual cable services grabbed 20M+ subs without touching a coaxial line. The old bundle didn’t disappear. It simply left the infrastructure behind. Which leaves Versant in an awkward place. It’s no longer a platform. It’s inventory. Content to fill ad slots. A set of networks that still generate cash, but in a market that’s already moved on. And here’s the broader lesson: every giant eventually produces its own Versant. Google Search is slowly heading there—still enormous, still dominant, but undeniably aging into legacy mode. Amazon Retail could be next, weighing down AWS’s valuation story even as it remains essential. When a division stops compounding, the market notices. When it starts dragging on the multiple, the market demands separation. Comcast just got there now. Versant is the result: the cable era, converted into cash flows and given its own ticker so the rest of the company can move on.

@kf7ccc @TheJen Thank you for this!

So my big Poker revelation is huge! It’s basic math I should’ve clocked years ago: limping is a leak. A real one. The kind that quietly drains your stack like a slow puncture in a bike tire. Once you see the numbers, you can’t unsee them. You only get pocket pairs about 6% of the time. You only get two Broadway cards—J through A—about 9% of the time. And if you want them suited and Broadway, you’re down to roughly 3%. So when you limp in just to “see a flop,” you’re usually doing it with statistical junk. You’re also inviting four or five other people into the pot, all of whom now have perfectly decent chances of outdrawing you. In other words, limping isn’t caution. It’s actually charity. Poker runs on probability, but most people use that as cosplay for being “disciplined” while they quietly torch equity. Limping feels fiscally conservative. In reality, you’re paying full price for terrible implied odds. You’re giving hands like 76s, T9s and baby pairs a cheap ticket into a pot they should have to fight for. Those are exactly the hands that crack you when the board comes 6-7-8 rainbow and your top pair suddenly looks prehistoric. So I cut limping out of my game. If I’m entering a pot, I’m either folding or raising. Nothing in between. You don’t sit down like a tourist. You sit down like someone who intends to own the flop. If a hand isn’t strong enough to raise, it isn’t strong enough to play. That one rule pulled me out of the statistical swamp. It gets even better in late position. Once you accept that position is a superpower—that acting last lets you raise wider from the cutoff and button—your range opens up properly. Suddenly those marginal broadways are fine, because you’re not wandering into five-way chaos anymore. You’re the one controlling the action. You’re the one setting the terms. The part that really fried my brain: pocket aces, the golden child, win around 85% heads-up…but only about 30% of the time when eight people see a flop. Limping with aces is basically self-sabotage dressed up as patience. Raising isolates. Raising protects your equity. Raising is the job. The rule I landed on is simple, not easy: stop limping. Raise with intention. Fold with conviction. Force the math to work for you instead of against you.

for 10 years, I avoided Space Warp because it had a boring name and boring screenshots. But I’m glad I picked it up when I did because this is a wonderful physics-based arcade game that is highly addictive.

@jlin Nope. Exactly what I said: don’t underestimate the risk of limping into the flop.

@perkinsy@aus.social Yes, I know. It’s late. My brain short-circuited.

Last year, British Columbia almost elected this clown show! https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/vaughn-palmer-political-farce-victoria-bc-conservatives-left-with-duelling-leaders

@griff@loma.ml I am not an alcoholic but when my doctor told me I needed to cut out the booze due to fatty liver, I realized life is so much better without it. Now I stick to NA beer.

@pdkoenig@mstdn.social YouTube.

Market sentiment has shifted from “we’re in an AI bubble” to “I really wish we were in an AI bubble”. What people actually miss is the pre-AI world. Markets felt slower. More predictable. Valuations moved in familiar ranges. You could pretend you understood the cycle. That stability was mostly an illusion, but it felt real enough that people now want it back. Vancouver real estate is the cleanest example I have, and I live here, so I watched it in real time. Through the 2010s and early 2020s, Vancouver became one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada. In March 2024, the average home price in Vancouver was around $1.18M, the highest in the country. By October 2025, the benchmark home price in Metro Vancouver was about $1.13M. That is only about 10% below the all-time high of roughly $1.26M. That is a softening, not a crash. The whole time, people kept calling it a bubble. For more than a decade, locals said “this has to crash.” They wanted a reset to some earlier, more “normal” price level. Talk of a bubble did not pop anything. What actually changed the market was policy. In 2016, British Columbia added a 15% property transfer tax on foreign buyers of residential property in Metro Vancouver. The city then layered on an Empty Homes Tax. It started at 1% of assessed value in 2017 and is now 3% from 2021 onward. On top of that, the province added a Speculation and Vacancy Tax starting in 2018, aimed at under-used homes in key urban markets. Academic work on the foreign buyers tax found that targeted neighbourhoods dropped about 6% more in price than less-exposed areas after the tax. That is a material hit, but it is not a collapse. Put differently. You had one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. You had years of people yelling “bubble.” You had multiple layers of taxes aimed directly at speculation and under-used properties. After all of that, prices dipped, then plateaued near record territory. They did not revert to any comforting “old normal.” That is the part people miss about sentiment. Constant caution does not necessarily kill a bubble. It can help it grind on. When everyone expects a crash, they hedge. Sellers hold. Buyers wait for deals. Governments step in to “cool” things without triggering a full-on panic. You end up with a long, expensive plateau instead of a dramatic blow-off top followed by a clean reset. The anxiety stretches the cycle instead of ending it. Now apply that thinking to AI. Right now, the big AI-levered names are expensive, but the data does not look like peak dot-com. During the 2000 tech bubble, the four leading tech stocks of that era traded near 70 times 2-year forward earnings at the top. Today, the major AI datacenter spenders like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta trade at an average 2-year forward P/E around 26. That is rich, but it is nowhere near 70. If you zoom in on the so-called Magnificent 7, you see the same pattern. Recent data for 2025 forward P/E has names like Alphabet around 20, Meta around 28, Apple around 30, Nvidia around 24 and Microsoft around 38. Tesla is the outlier at roughly 180. So yes, valuations are stretched. The broader S&P 500 sits above its long-run forward P/E average, and tech is even pricier. Recent work from RBC, for example, puts the S&P 500 forward P/E in the low 20s versus a long-term norm in the high teens. But this is not an environment where the whole AI complex is trading at triple-digit forward multiples as a rule. It is a mix of high multiples, very high capex, and real earnings growth, wrapped in a big argument about how durable those earnings will be. On top of that, sentiment is noisy and often skeptical. You have major investors and central banks warning about AI over-investment. You have pieces arguing that AI valuations are “not cheap but far from dot-com extremes.” You also see direct evidence of hesitation on the demand side. For example, recent reporting on Microsoft highlighted customer resistance to some AI add-ons and weaker than expected uptake in certain enterprise products. That is not the mood of a classic mania. That is a market that is nervous even as it spends. But you see, that is the trap. Speculation runs on sentiment. To get a true bubble, you need more than high prices. You need people to believe. Robert Shiller’s work on “irrational exuberance” and narrative economics makes this point over and over. Bubbles form when optimistic stories about a new era spread faster than doubt, and when those stories feed back into price rises, which then reinforce the story. Right now, the AI story is powerful, but it is not pure. The optimistic narrative is constantly interrupted by warnings, regulation talk and “this is a bubble” discourse. That caution tempers the multiple. It keeps valuations high, but below the full escape velocity you saw in 1999 or in the hottest phases of some housing markets. If you ever get to a world where AI-exposed names routinely trade at forward P/E above 100 across the sector, and where the dominant story is “this can only go up,” that is when you are in obvious bubble territory. We are not there yet. The numbers and the mood both say so. Until then, what you have is exactly what it feels like. Ambition with a bit of helium. Not a full-blown dot-com rerun. FURTHER READING: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/microsoft-stock-msft-customer-resistance-ai-software/ https://www.kelownarealestate.com/blog-posts/how-the-foreign-buyer-tax-and-speculation-tax-have-shaped-bcs-real-estate-market https://ca.rbcwealthmanagement.com/michael.shaw/blog/4607379-A-market-that-costs-a-pretty-penny

I watched Sean Combs: The Reckoning. The biggest surprise is how restrained it is. The whole docu-series is delivered in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. They don’t even wade into the most salacious parts of Diddy’s life. Not that much about those infamous “freak-offs”, for instance. But it still drops a few moments that made me go, “Wait, what?!” One example: Diddy didn’t pay for Biggie’s funeral. He billed Biggie’s estate. That isn’t cold. That’s despicable. And somehow, nowhere close to the worst thing he’s done. I hope he never gets a comeback. But given American culture’s track record, he absolutely could.

Indigenous creators in Canada are doing remarkable work with XR. One of the leaders is award-winning director Loretta Sarah Todd, who helped establish the IM4 Media Lab. Alongside other artists on the lands and territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations—what most people call Vancouver—they’re building immersive projects that are already drawing attention and recognition. I’m genuinely excited to see the stories this tech will unlock. https://im4lab.com

You’d think that, one of these days, economists would understand that they’re a descriptive social science, and not a predictive hard science. Some day, maybe.

@konej But you see, that’s the trap. Speculation runs on sentiment. If you want a real bubble—not this half-caffeinated market we’ve got right now—you need full-blown irrational exuberance. You need people chanting “everything goes up forever” like it’s a spiritual awakening. And we’re nowhere close. Everyone’s too self-aware, too hedged, too busy tweeting about risks to actually create the conditions for a proper detonation.And yes, the numbers look big. But market cap isn’t the important metric. It’s just a vibes signal. The real tell is P/E. When every AI company has a forward P/E north of 100, then congratulations—you’re living in a bona fide bubble. Until then, it’s just ambition with a bit of helium.