Buckle up, cunt! This one’s gonna be a proper rollercoaster, as is customary in this blog or should I say, my life.
After dropping that last entry, I kept cruising through my life unphased – I mosty stuck to my strict work-home schedule, but also met up with that cute chick a couple of times a week. I got my full NZ driving license and the government kept extending my visa for free every 6 months due to covid. In July 2021 we also had an awesome Queenstown ski trip in the mountains of the south island.
GME kept trading up, down and sideways. No real gains so far. Nothing like I’ve imagined, but the theory of endless naked shorting still stands. So I kept my money in. Matter of fact, I even liquidated my Estonian pension fund at ATH and used it to buy more GME. I was still super over leveraged, but everything was going great so far.
Alienware Ruins Lives
Statistically every time I buy a new Alienware laptop, all hell breaks loose – I lose my job and my life goes out of balance. Almost like the universe doesn’t want me to have this one nice thing I really like. I bought my first Alienware back in Australia in 2013. A week later I got fired from my then job, cuz the previous guy who was doing that job before me (but randomly disappeared), decided to show up after a few months. My then landlord kicked me and my then girlfriend out of his house and it took me a while to recover from everything that went down that time.
That Alien had served me like a real trooper for the last 8 years. But it was now showing signs that it’s time was coming to an end. It kept restarting, had random BSOD’s and a duct taped case to keep it together after years of travels. And with my steady income I figured it was time to upgrade my setup. It’s only fitting that I order my new Alien while in NZ. I managed to cash out US$1200 from my virtual lands in the Earth2.io game with a US$400 profit and put the rest in from my wages. Alienware was having a sale and so I splurged out and got me a new NZ$4500 Alienware (originally priced over NZ$6000). The day it arrived was like Christmas came early for me. Really one of the best things I could’ve treated myself with.
“Let Us Fuck!”
Usually when life starts to fuck you, you better relax your asshole, cuz you will get properly fucked. It is known, but it’s also something I keep forgetting about. I can always sort of sense it coming. I’d had a good run up for a while and everything that goes up must come back down. And down it fucking came indeed. Full speed ahead with no brakes.
First hit was when Amazon announced they’d be moving the entire LotR production over to UK. I had just been in the talks with the local production bosses to jump over directly under the production for season 2. So trust me when I say that even they had no idea that was coming. Next up my company gave me a months notice for redundancy as expected. “It’s not the end of the world”, I thought, and promptly started looking for a new job. I got some good recommendations from my current job and got a middle management role in one of the biggest security companies in NZ.
So while I was serving out my last month with the production and getting my mindset into my new role, the NZ PM put us all into another proper 5 week lockdown. Shit. Okay, no biggie tho. My new role landed under essential services, so I was still golden. When the new lockdown began, my girlfriend moved into our house with me and my landlord. He was cool with it as her being an ex-chef meant she was always cooking up some fantastic meals for us. I managed to wrap up my old job and transfer into my new role during a lvl 4 lockdown where everyone, except essential workers, had to stay indoors. Except fate wasn’t quite done with me yet.
Over that weekend, right before my first day in the new role, my girlfriend, who’d been feeling sick for a week suddenly gave me this. I was now feeling it alright. We spent the weekend going over all the possible outcomes, discussing our lives and mostly arguing over why my pull-out game sucked so bad.
As I started my first day in my new role, we had the worst heavy rain I’d ever seen in NZ. Half of Auckland was flooded, but it was mostly concentrated to around the area I lived in. So I got up at 06am, hopped in my Merc and put my foot down to make it in time. I remember looking out the window and all I could think about was how fucked my life’s going to be if we moved forward with the baby. I looked to the right side of the road and saw the weirdest thing. It was roofs of utes sticking out of the water. I thought I was high because that looked fucking surreal.
And then I looked ahead and BOOM! The road was gone and I was now driving in water. I drove in doing about 80km/h and since I saw the water retreating a few hundred meters ahead, I figured if I put my foot down I might be able to push right through with my current speed. Here’s why I now realize how that was the most retarded idea I’d had in a long while – the car air intake went underwater first and the mass of water was so heavy that once the water went up to the windscreen, the car lost all power and speed and just died in the middle of that flooded road.
I just sat there for a minute soaking it all in, as the water was pushing through the gaps in the doors. I called the fire service who came by for a looksie and basically wished me good luck with that. I figured I wasn’t gonna make it for my first shift in the new role, so I sent my boss an email with a few pictures saying “Sorry, I’m going to be super late as I turned my car into a submarine”. Luckily my flatmate was able to come out and bring me back to the house. He laughed all the way home. I still managed to sell the car to the wreckers for $400. They picked it up from the same place a few hours later. When I went to hand over the keys, a guy from the company whose utes all drowned said “You guys should have seen the guy who sank this Merc here in the morning. He must have hit the water doing about a hundred.” I just went like “Yeah that was me mate. Figured I’d find out if the Merc floats or not.” At that moment my life was a complete mess. My girl was pregnant, I’d lost my car, I was broke because I’d kept myself over leveraged for a while and I had to keep up appearances and start performing at my new job.
Failure Is Not An Option
I kept pushing forward though. Borrowed my girl’s car for the job while looking for another ride. Stumbled upon this beauty. I used my entire payout from my last job to get it. I was still heavily overleveraged, but I finally had some wheels again.
My girl and I figured out that we were going to move forward with the baby. I think a lot of it was my landlord telling her she’ll regret it later in life if she doesn’t go through with it. But also that we were both at the end of our 20s, so the timing was kind of fitting as well. From there we started planning on how we were gonna do it. She was just in the process of selling her investment property in a small NZ town. She managed to take out a healthy profit from that and use it as a down payment for an average suburbian house in Auckland. The next few months were spent furnishing that property, so we were both constantly broke. Luckily we had my Estralian mates move into our spare bedroom and help us out with a lot of the things.
For all this time leading up to the pregnancy, I’d been keeping my Estonian apartment as a fallback base for myself. I was always expecting to go back once I ran out of my free visa extensions, so I’d been slowly buying items I’d use when I got back. But now the deck of cards I’d been playing with, had suddenly been replaced with a whole new deck. I couldn’t leave any more. So I started looking into new visa options and selling my condo. These days you really can do everything over the internet. I managed to sell my condo in December 2021 for a healthy profit. Looking at the market now I’d say I pretty much timed the top with that move. Starting a family requires stability. So I used some of those profits to clear my CC debt. I even closed my credit cards to avoid any future temptation. I also set up a small home gym/gaming station for myself in the garage and had my parents ship over most of my stuff from Estonia. Suddenly life wasn’t looking too bad any more.
Wen Lambo
After making all my well thought out shopping ideas a reality, I decided I have to do something smart with the rest of my money. So I did the only thing I know will pay me handsomely in the future – I put a lot of it into GME, again. Upped my position to a total of 218 shares. Because I’m an idiot, I also bought the top again with an average of ~US$180 per share. A month later it dropped do $80. It’s all good tho, we’ve been through these ups and downs countless of times now. I’ve now become a zen ape. A scared man never fucked the fair lady. At the time of writing this post, the GameStop shares have just been through a 1:4 split dividend, which has turned my 218 shares into 872 and divided the price down to US$34 per share (US$136 pre-split). The apes have now Direct Registered (link) over 50% of the entire float in about a years time. Most of mine are also DRS’d. No one knows what happens when we reach 100%, as it’s never been done before, but realistically we’ll probably be looking at some fireworks. Thinking about the 2008 VW short squeeze when Porsche bought most of the available shares.
At the end of April 2022 we welcomed our son Max into this World. He’s an Estonian-Chinese mix and a NZ citizen. A one of a kind mix, I’d say. In order to help my girl cope with all of it, I’ve changed my job again, this time for a less time demanding one. I now patrol the streets of some classy Auckland suburbs a few days a week, looking like wannabe police while keeping the peace. The rest of my time is spent with my new family and training/gaming. Visa wise I’m now on a path to New Zealand residency. It hasn’t come easy, but my life’s done a complete 180° in the last year. I bet even you didn’t expect this story to get here. I’ve YOLO’d this far and at this stage who knows what comes next. Anything really is possible in this life…
