q4 earnings statement 2025

aight gentlemen, time for the q4 business report. apologies in the late submission, i’ve been making major money moves, and, well, life sometimes gets quite busy without one noticing. missed you all terribly, and truth be told, i worried this blog would be one of the projects i take up for a few months before i quietly forget about it, silently vowing to make another entry. never doing so. but alas! my pride is too venomous to allow such a thing it seems. the shareholders require profit margins! i feel a distinct need to type into the void. i know for a fact some people read my blog, and i hope that those who i might regrettably not be in contact with consistently are about to use this as a window into my life. you may not believe me, but i do think of you often. yes, you. i promise. let me know how you are.

anyway. these halls are for business, money, and portfolios. so, shall we? please hold any questions until after the presentation. feel free to have anything from the very caucasian nibbles on the table.

i brought myself to the brink of burnout over basically nothing; and out of context, it looks rather silly, but i’ll try my best to explain.

i mentioned somewhere in a previous earnings statement that i work for a diy electronics shop. naturally, it’s something i have an interest in, to a certain degree. as i was studying music technology at university, one of my subjects was on prototyping music devices, typically with an arduino on a breadboard. i got vaguely familiar with some basic componentry. potentiometers, switches, leds, resistors, capacitors ect. after uni, i continued to do the occasional bit of work here and there in electronics. mostly fixing my own devices from time to time. it’s nice to feel semi-resourceful i suppose. that, and my grandparents grew up in the great depression, which imbued a compulsion to be self-reliant into my bloodline, continuing with my dad becoming a paragon of diy, and myself avoiding replacing items when practically repairable, almost perversely against spending money unwisely. that’s the romantic version of my psychology anyway. all this is to say, the staff discount at my job is comparable to amphetamines in how it suddenly gives one the motivation to take up a bunch of projects.

in the last month and then some, i took up the following:

simple enough, right?

i’m here to report back that no. these very mundane projects completely took over my life for a month.

in my first draft of this earnings statement, i went on for multiple pages trying to communicate the many layers of frustration that i encountered in these projects. it certainly did communicate a slog. but too much of one. so, let me summarise the amount of hurdles i faced by saying i was scammed on ebay, spent night after night trying to brute force linux into cooperation (which if you know linux, is both incredibly frustrating and impossible), had multiple warranty returns to make, started from scratch more than once, and spent hours and hours reading guides only to realise they were massively outdated.

by itself, this is uninteresting. but, i have a chronic tendency to place undue importance on whatever i’m doing in my life and let certain projects utterly consume me. this was such an undertaking. i was so desperate to get it done, to move on with my life, to be able to focus on something else that all of my energy went into it. i was eating like shit, staying up so i could have just one more hour to grind away, not seeing friends, allowing myself no downtime or break between work, where i sold nerdy stuff, and went home to do more nerdy stuff. i stare into the void of a debian terminal. tux stares back, his eyes soulless and his smile permanently fixed, knowing his will is absolute and i cannot kill him in a way that matters.

this was married with the existential stress that i never wanted my life to be dominated by technology. that i might be wasting my time, that i should be seeing friends, or engaging with art. i never wanted this for myself. i studied music for christ’s sake. i don’t want to be reduced to spending all day behind a computer. above all thought, there was the unyielding feeling that if i gave up, i’d be proverbially throwing a tantrum, and all the time i’d spent would've been for nothing, and lord knows i have a lot of ideas that i’d discarded already. partly, i wanted to prove to myself that i was capable of actually finishing something, trying something new, showing resilience, show some of my nerdy friends i too have tussled with the advanced package tool. meanwhile, i was secluding myself trying to brute force solutions to problems i barely understood. not seeing my friends, neglecting all my relationships. but it was okay, because it would prove one thing: i am nick. i am capable. i have projects that give my life narrative structure. i actually try to do things with my time. please believe me. fuck.

it’s almost as if i have a neurology prone to being overwhelmed and hyperfixations. i think there’s a name for that. hmmmmm…

lost in the sauce!

that’s right. i knew i’d remember.

in all, i got it done, but not without it being all i focussed on for a few weeks, and sometimes feeling incredibly stupid for not being able to replicate results from a step-by-step youtube video. but it was done. i went through the overly dramatic metamorphosis i deluded myself into. i could relax for a bit.

a few days later i was embarking on my first solo trip to melbourne.

while planning my trip over there, i was in the midst of a mad dash to finish off the media server and left all my planning a bit late. for reasons i see no need to disclose here, i wanted to avoid flying over there as much as possible. and so, i spent the week leading up to it scrunching up my mind into a ball of stress at the prospect of catching a greyhound bus from one city to another, spending days trapped in a metal tube with potentially hygienically subversive creatures, knowing my psp could only entertain me for so long, that i was nearly finished with the book i was reading before i left (and hate juggling media of the same format simultaneously). even worse, the prospect of not going was looming with each day that got closer to the leave i’d already booked out, that i’d throw in the towel and refute the opportunity presented.

something i’ve picked up about myself semi-recently has been that i can be an intensely risk-averse person. a true creature of habit. much like a hobbit, i can be quite content in the mundanity of a familiar way home. a detour of one street, and my sense of adventure is in full swing. i may as well be sir douglas mawson should i go to a new bar or find myself in a foreign suburb. so, as one could imagine, the idea of stranding myself in a new city without the economically predatory luxury of an uber home was well outside of my shire. as much as i can appreciate my natural sense of adventure spurred with nothing more than a few misplaced footsteps, i understand the developmental constraints of not being able to make such decisions and take such opportunities.

in the days leading up however, my dearest friend hannah had a bright idea, as they usually do.

“i hear the trains quite nice”

“ah,” nick thought, as he sometimes did.

the train seemed like quite the idea. after all, what could be less intimidating than a mode of transport i relied on daily for 3 years of my life. yes. it would be like that. instead of spending half an hour, i’d spend 10 hours instead. it would be like 20 train rides, one after the other, without any pesky platform changes. marvelous.

and i’m here to report back and say: thank you hannah. very much. it was quite nice. a bit long mind you, but i was able to comfortably relax, enjoy a scent not unlike an oilskin coat, read murakami, play crash bandicoot, listen to eden and have a butter chicken that was oddly competent for what is essentially in-flight food. after arriving in southern cross station, scarfing down the cigarettes of which i had been deprived, i was picked up by my friend phillip who i was staying with.

allow me to shamelessly steal a descriptor of travelling interstate that one of the gentlemen i was staying with relayed to me. it’s a surprising amount of waiting. allow me further to speed through this section of my report, as i have other assets in my portfolio for this presentation, and i think the lucky cat chinese restaurant secret society has this room booked at 4pm.

the flight home was a very smooth experience, aside from being pulled by security for unknowingly keeping scissors in my first-aid kit and having to abandon my mcdonalds order in fear of being late for departure.

a list of short other tidbits.

consooming

while i was in melbourne, i found myself listening to toe, a japanese instrumental rock band i had a passing familiarity with due to cultural osmosis and a song featured in sonny boy. particularly, listening to new moon at 456am smoking a cigarette on a dew-laden porch after engaging in much debauchery felt like a great come down to a trip. calm enough that it instills a sense of tranquility, complex enough it gives your racing mind enough to content itself, getting lost in all the countermelodies and polyrhythmic drumming. the more i delved into their discog, the more it cemented itself as a “can’t go wrong” kinda vibe. you could put it on at any hour of the day really and focus or ignore as much of it as you’d like.

eden released the deluxe edition of dark, ddaarrkk. it became all i listened to for a month straight pretty much. really interesting to see songs either previously released in a demo album or leaked on youtube in finished form. spotify wrapped gifted me with the knowledge that i’m in 0.08 percent of listeners world wide, which if you know your maths is less than 4 percent - wow!!! A BLADE BETWEEN THE RIBS, I'LL COUNT YOU DOWN FROM TEN.

recently i’ve gotten back into sifu. i beat this game about a year and a half ago, and simply let it go after. recently though, i had the desire to play sekiro again but struggled with the fact sekiro isn’t a game you can really play in bite sized chunks. it’s one of my favourite games probably, but it really doesn’t translate to pick up and play when the zones are so seamlessly integrated without the bosses of the main story to act as capstones. sifu however is much more geared towards that casual engagement with its levels, arena challenges, set pieces, the various arena challenges and gameplay modifiers allow twists on familiar mechanics making experimentation the name of the game. sekiro is definitely the better game, it has a more engrossing plot, world, mechanics, and freeform combat, but sifu utterly smashes it in replayability.

i mentioned many moons ago i was reading haruki murakami's colourless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage. well! i’ve finished it. honestly incredibly moving, peppered with vignettes of the many odd experiences and idiosyncratic thoughts being alive entails. deeply sentimental.

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he walked along the main street to tokyo station, passed through the yaesu entrance, and sat down on a bench on the yamanote line platform. he spent over an hour watching as, almost every minute, another line of green train cars pulled up to the platform, disembarking hordes of people and hurriedly swallowing up countless more. his mind was a blank as he watched, absorbed in the scene. the view didn’t soothe the pain in his heart, but the endless repetition enthralled him as always and, at the very least, numbed his sense of time. unceasing crowds of people arrived out of nowhere, automatically formed lines, boarded trains in order, and were carried off somewhere. tsukuru was moved by how many people actuallyactually existed in the world. and he was likewise moved by the sheer number of green train cars. it was surely a miracle, he thought - how so many people in so many railroad cars, are systematically transported, as if it were nothing. how all those people have places to go, places to return to. as the rush hour surge finally receded, tsukuru tazaki slowly got to his feet, boarded one of the cars, and went home. the pain was still there, but now he knew there was something he had to do.

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alright chaps. that’s my report. i know i said there was time for questions, but i unapologetically end this meeting here. i could tell you a bahamian racoon was elected cfo by our board of directors (comprised of me, myself and i) and you’d still invest 1.2 trillion. none of this shit matters. my receptionist will hand out cards for all the nibbles you’ve eaten today. please fill in how much you ate and what. you will be billed accordingly. take care.