And lo, after these many hours of scrounging through the same areas again and exploring every area I can reach, I finally managed to get the Shadow Dragons shop to level 3 and buy Arden the Tevinter decorating theme.

I like the tables and benches and the cool news stand scroll holder things, but on the while I could do without the freaky cult statues. I think some magic neon banners would've been more suitable tbh. The creepy demon statues aren't really modern Tevinter; you only find those in the deeper, more out of the way spots.

Still, for Arden's sake, I'm happy.

Could have really gone for some of those gorgeous green and red enameled brass trays you see but can't buy in the market. Or the pretty painted trunks.

Oh man okay first of all I'm pretty sure that only MBAs truly understand private equity, and I'm so far from being an MBA that I don't even file my own taxes, but I'll try to give a really rough explanation.

At the most basic level, a private equity firm is just a business that buys up stock in companies that are not public (not on the stock exchange for people to buy public shares). In practice, these firms are massive, and in 2021 they managed close to 20% of corporate equity in the US. Importantly, that's a MUCH bigger share than it was ten years earlier, and private equity is a fast-growing part of the world market.

Why it's bad is that this sector of investing falls at the juncture of just a lot of loopholes and blind spots in government regulation, allowing these private equity firms to manage the companies they own in very predatory ways.

For example, private equity firm Golden Gate Capital killed Red Lobster. Basically, they bought the company and started stripping it for parts, because their only interest in the companies they buy is investment profit. They don't have any incentive to care about the company's long-term health. The biggest thing they did to Red Lobster was what's called a sale/leaseback. Basically, insofar as I understand it, they sold the real estate the company owned--i.e. the actual restaurants, took the profit from that, and then made Red Lobster pay them to lease the restaurants. Ultimately this proved crippling for Red Lobster, but through evil finance magic and careful corporate structuring, Golden Gate Capital gets the profit, while Red Lobster got all the debt.

Private equity firm KKR is what killed Toys R Us, again with sale/leaseback and other management methods that favor short term profit over long-term viability, like firing people until there isn't enough staff, pushing store credit cards, assorted other bullshit I barely understand.

Basically, private equity is companies that buy up businesses using leveraged funds (borrowed money) and then "strip and flip" them, squeezing as much profit out of them as possible and then dipping out to leave the company to deal with the fallout. A lot of recent major company bankruptcies besides the ones I mention above came on the heels of the company being managed by a private equity firm. JoAnn Fabrics is one of the most recent.

Yeah. That's the best I can do. Basically, it's a very fast-growing sector of vulture capitalism and it's making a small number of people very rich off killing otherwise viable companies that the rest of us plebes liked and wanted to keep.

The invisible line between the solavellan fans reblogging Trick Weekes' recent posts about Solas and his uhhh tastes and the Solas fans quietly ignoring them.

State of the garden address:

Yeah it looks like shit. So does the bigger one. I've put in some work; Jacob and Phantom have put in some work. But now it's time to really push, because the starting gun has gone off and there are now quite a few things I could be planting. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, collards, kale, kohlrabi, parsnips, peas, radishes, turnips, and beets.

I'd love to get a 3x whatever bed cleared today. I usually do 3x [width of garden] beds, rather than rows, because it's more space efficient and makes it easier not to compact the soil.

This year I'd really like to do mixed plantings within those beds to make individual beds more genetically diverse, for integrated pest management purposes. That is, if you have, say, a bunch of collards plants and they're all in a row, touching at the fullest extent of their growth like they're supposed to, then it's very easy for harlequin bugs to come along and infest the entire bed. But if the next plant over is a radish, and then a row of beets, the bugs have to work harder to get to all your collards.

Well. Here we go.

Thankful for these signs of spring.

So Jacob and I are confirmed for demonstrating a collaborative project for the upcoming local blacksmithing event. Here's a sneak peek at what we're aiming for.

Computer died, and when I reloaded, Tumblr's UI was all fucked. Is that Tumblr-side, or me-side?

Another one about my husband, because I entertained a friend of his with this fact yesterday: Phantom, the boy, me, we all have computers fully capable of playing the latest generation of video games. Jacob bought them as gifts, unasked in all cases, working with the bestie to get the best value per money on each build. The boy's graphics card came from a lottery the bestie won, during the period where you almost couldn't get the high end cards for love nor money. Jacob? Does not have a computer. He uses his shitty work laptop, and when something he needs is locked out on that, he uses my 7 year old laptop.

Shoutout also to the bestie, though, while I'm at it. Not only did he design the pc builds and provide high-end used parts whenever he upgrades his own setup, as well as gifting us various peripherals, most of our consoles up to and including the PS5 were straight-up gifts. And no, he's not rich. He works in a warehouse. He just has his priorities, same as my husband, and we're very blessed to be among them.

Neither of them can express an emotion to save their lives, and I have raised my own son to be different, but nonetheless, as the poem goes, I love the way men love.