My god, What on earth are you doing here?
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Bought the Widescreen DVD today of Matrix Reloaded and watched it twice today... so far ;)
Ok I better preface this I'm a fan of the first one and SPOILERS!
I so wanted to absolutely love this movie and actually I will give it a B+ not the A+ of the original but much better than Empire strikes back C- I felt so ripped off when I saw that. OK I'm dating myself but so what... the worst part of movie is without a doubt the rave-scene party / sex scene. I kinda dozed off during my second back to back viewing during that bit. That should have been a deleted scene IMO. Now for the parts I really liked. 1. the wraith Twins - "now were getting aggrivated" I chuckled there, the CG and Costumes, hair for them were absolutely great. 2. the execution of "backdoors", programs in "exile" "deletion" I enjoyed the evolution analogy this time from a machine perspective rather than the human perspective of the first movie. 3. Cause & Effect - Choice & Power MMMM I just ate that up. So a fair bit of foreshadowing that Merrill Lingi (sp) is one of the prior "the Ones" who possibly chose love as well? How this will play out in the final episode will be a treat I'm sure. 4. The kiss - the quick cut scene to Carrie gulping, trite but it works. (more foreshadowing of "prior the ones") 5. Well what can you say if a fair bit was good more is supposed to be better. The kung-fu fight action sequences were definately more... 6. I guess a fair bit of the budget must have been used on the freeway sequence that was over the top! So all in all to summarize I'll be one of the first to see the final installment.:) I'm most definately driving the 100 miles to go see this in the theatre!
Ashes being a relative newcomer to the HSX world. This is how I've been playing the game. Feel free to comment, razz or whatever :)
Ok you've registered and are now in control of $2M hollywood dollars. Now before you go and spend it all on the next big blockbuster coming out 2-3 years from now there are a few things you should know.
1. ROI - Return on Investment: Which would you say is the better investment? (a) $5/share in 2 days or (b) $60/share in 15 days? Answer: (a) The reasoning behind this is quite simple in example (a) your money is available quicker to invest in something else. Let's show how example (a) is much better than (b) Buying 100 shares of each priced at $10.00 sample (b) will be worth $70/share in 15 days or $7000.(a) 100 shares which in 2 days are worth $15.00 /share then are sold, net $1500. Now if you do the same thing again you can now buy 150 shares @ $10.00 then in 2 days sell for $15.00 /share net $2250 ... 6 days net $3375, 8 days net $5062.50, 10 days $7590.00 ... As you can see (although this doesn't take the dreaded 1% commission into account) the power of having your money to work for you in the short term is much better than tying it up in long term investments. So this is why (Rule 1) you should never play any stock that is more than 2 weeks away from its opening weekend.
2. Read the Glossary, read the fansites, read the strategy guides within those sites that have already been written. Honest this is what I did before spending anything... I thought I had it all figured out bet all my money on a opener and guessed wrong :/ ouch... lost $250,000 in my opening weekend. There is a nice feature to reset your account back to $2M, but only once per season (hehe I did just that). That experience led me to my other rule... never bet more than 1/2 your net worth on the openers.
3. Starbonds - This is where the other half of the portfolio is invested. Starbonds adjust on Tuesday for movies that were cashed out on Monday. Read up on TAG (Trailing Average Gross) in the glossary, proceed to hsj and hsbr for their starbond charts. Keep in mind the ROI principle... don't tie up your money for long periods of time... 1-3 weeks Maximum.
4. Options - I usually buy options Thursday just after they are unfrozen in price. If the option is rising in price I buy it, if the option is falling in price I short it. At reset (12:30am EST) or sometime within an hr or two before I reverse postions... If I'm holding it long (a buy), I’ll sell it and then short the option. If I'm holding it short I cover then buy the option. Repeat daily, then sell them on the Friday before they halt for some extra money to play the openers. This strategy seems to work quite well UNLESS the option's strike price is out of line. for example a $30 strike price and the movie stock is not priced anywhere near $80-100 /share, this is when you have to watch out... one of the options will skyrocket to well over $5.00 /share and the other one will plumment to $0.50-$1.00 though you can make a nice profit if you see it coming ;-)
5. Openers - Movie stocks of movies opening in wide release (more than 650 theatres) halt the day they open at 9pm EST. Usually Fridays, though some movies open on different days. The stock is then halted till Sunday afternoon at which time it is "adjusted" to a new price based on the weekend box office. For a typical Friday opening movie the formula is 2.9 * (Fri-Sun Gross) you may wonder how a movie can adjust before its Sunday results are in... well the studio's make a estimate and release that. ERC, Box Office Mojo, Yahoo movies, The Numbers, Lee's Movie info, Box Office Prophets are all resources for this info and should be bookmarked.
6. Penny stocks - HSBR has a great page for finding these penny stocks. What I search for is any stocks priced less than $0.14, ie the lowest possible price on the exchange... these stocks have nowhere to go but up in value :) take a flyer if it goes up 1/8 you make $6500.00 not too shabby at all.
My My, I'm back to my old habits over 1 month since I've posted anything. Lessee anything interesting... what's going on in the life of ashes, other than my usual haunts of DJ, fixing broken computers, and playing around on the net with my latest addiction, Hollywood Stock Exchange, not a damn thing :) Winter's coming, golf is over and the leaves are falling. Time for a haircut too hehe.
Amazing I'm still #53 on the richest list in Blogshares with my sum of $13.7 Billion. I would have figured more people would have passed me by now... but nope.
Yay, no more messing with <table>, <tr>, <td> tags etc. Cascading Style Sheets (css) rock my world :) Gracias to Owen Briggs, glish.com, brainjar.com, tantek.com, alistapart.com and of course www.w3.org for making it all make sense.
