samjones1

Even with the best intentions, it seems like some people just find their way to open windows ripe for defenestration. Let’s hope Harry isn’t one of them else my prediction will come true. Nobody wants that… Meanwhile, it’s not often one sees HIV in the same dialogue as “classy.” 😂

It’s been a while since the clan has executed anyone. Should be an interesting time ahead!

Two months after the date of the lecture and around 20 miles away from Harvard, I started underwriting the sort of mortgages that Stefan was talking about in his comments: Alt-A paper. Not the bottom of the barrel subprime loans, but loans where the borrowers had documented income but less-than A credit ratings or slightly too high debt-to-income ratios. The issues weren’t just the underwriting (even for people like me who did their best to be diligent in their underwriting). It was the fraud among buyers to inflate the values of the homes, selling borrowers variable rate mortgages with huge balloon payments after 5 years, lying brokers with fraudulent claims of multiple bids to drive up prices, and lenders lending 100% of the value of the purchase: 80% on a first mortgage at market rate and the other 20% at the maximum legal rate (almost 13% in MA). Those were crazy times, and the fall afterward felt like a years long hangover. Of course, investors couldn’t get enough of the high interest rates and wanted to buy those loans from us. $2-2.5 billion worth every month, just from one company of underwriters throughout the US. I enjoyed reminiscing about past financial downturns so much I almost forgot to mention Will sucks. Great writing indeed!

Don’t get me wrong…Will is a dick. We all know this. However…even he will be hesitant to encourage Travis to do what he needs to for his career, say he will be understanding, and then snap at the first moment of inconvenience. It will take a few more moments of inconvenience at least.

Thankfully, I can absolutely answer Jeremy without any hesitation. He’s got snarky comments! At least Jeremy intermittently knows his behavior is shitty…Will always behaves as if what he thinks and wants is right. Who needs a sanctimonious friend? I won’t pretend that my preferences in people aren’t idiosyncratic, however. 🤷‍♂️

Maybe this is fundamentally my problem with Will. I don’t like big dick. I much prefer boyfriend dick…enough to get tot he uvula, but not enough to bruise it. I’ll need to think this over…

It’s important to keep perspective on things when it comes to random internet commenters. Most of them are just out for a bit of fun for themselves. @rjostlie, perhaps you should also keep in mind that even people who disagree with you care enough to read and react to your comments. How hostile can they really be toward your contributions? We all take our licks when it comes to this community. Back when all this was on a Yahoo message board, Mark once replied to a comment of mine by saying I was the sort of person who would complain anout an orgasm after having one. By far the funniest line he’s ever written, in my humble opinion. 😂

100% on the money. I spent a long time teaching in the Ivy League…these sorts of people are all over the place there. If you think Will is bad now, you all should see some of the more recent brand of tech money children. Absolutely insufferable lot!

But…but…he has a big dick! How can he be boring? 🙄

It’s hard to tell from this chapter whether Jeremy is simply struggling with his emotions, having put himself out there with Will and gotten a cautious reply, or whether he’s actually a great manipulator/actor and Mark Arbour is simply softening us up in preparation for Jeremy to be murdered. Either way, I don’t like it one bit. Will and Brad continue to ignore any part they have played in Jeremy’s feelings of alienation from the family, which reeks of their general douchebaggery! My only solace is the possibility for a story character who recognizes what a prick Will is and publicly calls him out for it. Alas…we wait in hope!

For the record, I’m just taking easy pot shots at Will because he’s a prick. I also get a kick out of seeing little angry bomb emotes on my comments. 😂 I 100% get the distinction in standards of consent between then and now (having been approximately Wade’s age at the time this story is set), and I get the poetic license taken in presenting Thor’s “get out” as relatively feeble.

I mean…clearly it’s ok because Thor actually wanted it, right? And because it’s Will, of course. 🤷‍♂️

You mean the part where will sexually assaults Thor after he says no three times?

Yet again, Brad chooses to parent through money rather than through any actual parenting. Having spent the last month binging Billions, however, I now realize this is just how wealthy people behave. They use money as a solution to everything - money and manipulation through money. Additionally, Will still sucks.

I’ll be back in a few chapters and see if this crapstorm has passed…my heart can’t take it. This is exactly why I completely set aside CAP for 3 years and just read about Captain Granger. ::crawls into a hole and hides::

Unless you’re killing main characters, that is. 🧐

That would be novel, seeing Brad play an important role in parenting his kids. Darius is the only decent person among the three kids, and I blame Robbie for that. Will is a smug prick and JJ is a bratty snob. Both kids experienced abuse due to familial neglect. It’s easy to forget that Will had his own experiences with sexual assault, albeit over a shorter period than JJ. Brad’s over a decade late at trying to fix the situation. The idea that any of his kids would listen to him about anything is sort of silly. 😂 I can’t help but feel, on the few occasions I think about such things, that the readers of this story equate dick size and/or sexual prowess with “goodness.” It’s the only thing I can think of to explain why Brad and Will are so popular.

I think this will just reinforce what JJ (I refuse to use that name Jays…complete nonsense) already believes about his family: that they don’t love him and never did. There’s no defense for JJ’s behavior, but neither should Will be celebrated here. A physical attack is pretty low rent…if he’s going to be the golden child, he needs to act like it. I’ve decided I’m going to focus my attention on how Brad’s main concern seems to be avoiding guilt and criticism over his shitty parenting. That part of the chapter was neither surprising nor flattering to Brad.

Do you think 10 chapters is enough to come back to some semblance of a resolution? 15? I can’t even bring myself to call Will a smug prick like I usually do. This chapter left me feeling terrible. 😔

Don’t you have classes to teach or something? Let JJ off the hook and pick on some other character…you know, like JP. He hasn’t had much drama recently.

This definitely has the potential of going very wrong very fast. On the one hand, JJ definitely feels like his family doesn’t love him and even openly attacks him in various ways. Readers know that’s not really true, but we’re talking about JJ‘s perceptions of things here. Thus, any retaliation he gets from the family for his outburst is going to serve as confirmation of what he already believes to be true. Then he’ll dig in, blah blah blah. On the other hand. Will and Brad (and everyone else) are right to be deeply hurt by JJ’s lashing out…if a family member suddenly said we aren’t actually family, I’d be absolutely crushed. Retaliation out of pain and hurt is understandable under such circumstances. The worst case scenario here is that they try to screw with his life in New York in retaliation. We wouldn’t want to see this end up in a Billy situation, yet I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to end up there because the adults in his life don’t remember the lessons of that period. Also, Will is a smug prick who I don’t wish to see hurt so badly as Brad was back then. edit: forgot the other hand. 😖

Jesus! I got me a shout out from the author and can’t even enjoy it because of the carnage from the chapter. Will’s still a smug prick (the word smarmy has been murdered by Dr. Arbour so I’ll stop using it), but he didn’t deserve that. Neither did Brad, however absent a father he may have been. My hope now is that this train wreck finally leads to some true reconciliation and healing for everyone, particularly JJ. He’s been aggrieved for years and clearly feels justified in what he perceives as maltreatment from his family, especially Brad and Will. Now things have gotten worse in his mind because he has a reason for that maltreatment: they aren’t actually related. As bad as his behavior was in this chapter, I doubt that’s all the vitriol he is prepared to dish out over this “final straw.” JJ has finally poured acid on the family’s proverbial Porsches and Ferraris…let’s see if the family gets his message as well as they did when Will did so literally. Not today, though…maybe around Christmas. Let it stew for a while! Edit: I somehow deleted the name of the murder doctor, so I added it.

I’m all for propping up JJ, but let’s not be too charitable here. The chapter is littered with evidence that JJ is simultaneously being self-absorbed and forcing himself to be supportive. If he weren’t so emotional, I would wonder if he were some sort of psychopath with the way he had to practice his “supportive face.”

I agree with your observation about JJ. He’s clearly quite smart in that his inner monologue is simultaneously prissy and introspective. I was particularly struck by this tidbit: “I didn’t share his optimism, because I’d seen how these people could operate, but I appreciated the sentiment.” It’s almost as if the Machiavellian antics of his family have made JJ wary of trusting his family. The way he views simple pranks (like the jump scare) as further proof of their untrustworthiness is also very interesting. Of course, the readers know and understand much more of the context of these antics and rightfully view JJ’s observations of his family as mostly misguided. Nevertheless, it’s very interesting to observe that, rather than causing JJ to crumble, this situation with Kris has allowed us to see how logical and rational JJ’s feelings about his family truly are. I mean logical and rational in terms of their being supported with a lifetime of observable facts (e.g. my familY hate me so much they rewarded someone who intentionally scared me), not in terms of the correctness of the conclusions drawn. JJ knows what he’s about, and his family are so far away from him in their perceptions of their relationships with JJ that, absent some kind of intervention, they may never fully recover. Somebody else made a comment questioning why JJ might expect Will to give him a report in a foreign language. Given JJ’s logical observations in this chapter, and knowing what a smarmy prick Will is more generally, why would JJ expect anything else?

Interesting how the Will supporters don’t seem to want to give that same Grace to JJ. 🤷‍♂️ BTW, all this disagreement simply confirms the quality of the writing and character development. These people feel real to me…JJ was easy to write off until I got a sense of his inner dialogue, at which point he became a very, very recognizable person with comprehensible motivations. It’s a testament to Mark’s writing talents that any of us care at all about Will or JJ or any of these other fictional people 🥰