practicing chinese with a nice Q&A I read from Vitalik on FC. #writing #chinese

#thoughts #socialmedia

today’s lofi 🎶 has a cat reading a book with the title “meow”. Taxes are done! Really gotta’ try to start early and take breaks whenever you start to feel stressed or pressured by all the forms.

I need to motivate myself to make wood ear mushrooms more. So good, but it’s a chore/process because they are sold as the dried form. So 1) soak in cold water (my grandma specified that they need to be soaked in cold water … I didn’t think to ask why), then, 1a) pick off the hard stubby ends, 2) boil, 3) add in to some dish (cook with sauce). The whole thing takes an hour? It just takes a little extra planning.

Last night I reread the ending of A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. I had forgotten how the plot had been resolved… It was a complex braiding of different people’s feelings and their choices and actions. To put it simply, it involved Ruth in the present time, and Nao in a past time (but it also involved Nao’s great-grandma in a dream). The emotions hit differently this time for me. The last time I read this book was before my own grandma died. Reading the ending, where Nao’s great-grandma is dying, and how before she did, she encouraged Nao and her dad to live (生) … was suddenly way more emotional for me then the last time I read it. That time, years ago, I suppose the feeling was like, ‘yes, this makes sense. This is one of the puzzle pieces that resolves things.’ Sad, but satisfying. I woke up this morning with this chorus section in my head, “Hold onto hope if you got it. Don’t let it go for nobody. They say that dreaming is free. I wouldn’t care what it cost me.” I couldn’t place it at first, like ‘ooh this is a familiar song, but who is it by?’ (It’s the song ‘26’ by Hayley Williams of Paramore) Oh, I just noticed a funny connection. Towards the end of the story, Ruth and her husband Oliver have realized that currently, in their present time, Nao is not 16 anymore, but probably around 26 or 27 years old. Connecting these two works, the ‘hope’ in the song refers to how at the end of the story, even though Nao’s personal story has resolved for Ruth, she still doesn’t know what has happened with her, since Nao lived in Japan, during the year 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami happened, which then also led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. So the book ends with Ruth writing a letter back to Nao. Earlier, she and her husband had realized that somehow, by believing in Nao and what she wrote ‘to them’ in her diary, they were actually causing the diary to continue to a conclusion, rather than ending abruptly. And their belief in Nao, somehow resonated back towards themselves. So even though Ruth has no way of knowing if Nao had died along with so many others in the tsunami, she wrote her a letter, hoping that her belief in her still carries meaning.

🍓 a 2 lb. box of organic strawberries on sale for $5.99 at the store today 🥑Avocado ice cream (from a company that makes Filipino flavored ice creams) $12.99 (1.5 quarts) The organic strawberry sale was a surprise. I saw the avocado ice cream last time and was debating if I should try it despite the high price. … it’s good! And has a much lower sugar content than other ice creams. Also, for color, they used turmeric and red cabbage … surprising since it’s the mild green color of pistachio ice cream.

The coffee table and book has been outlined. Finally got the perspective decent without erasing the paper too much. The only tiny problem is that my table doesn’t really have room for the rivet details that the original one has (those little circles on the edge), but whatever, that’s okay. #theowlhouse #ink #sketch

I had to take notes watching the interview between Lyn Alden and Max DeMarco. This is from ~ the first four minutes. I really liked how she describes human history through the lens of the history of money, and also the history of technology. Specifically, the technology of information transfer + communication technologies, like the telegraph (!) and how that ties in with how people could exchange money in different types of transactions. I never thought about the ‘settlement’ part of it. I just thought, okay transaction is done, and done. But it is important to separate out the ‘settlement’ part of transactions, because … that is where the centralized authorities come in (mainly banks, but also, governments). And in this case, American centralized authorities having this … big influence over developing countries. And a lot of unfair things have happened. And so, following the 2008 global(?) financial crisis, Bitcoin was invented in 2009. The first time that not only are digital transactions possible due to internet encryption, but now also, digital settlements. So, digital transactions are the digital paperwork and records that are sent between people. Digital settlements are … actual digital money (composed of open source software code). This was a big problem because if not for this code, you’d just be sending pictures of money, which means every time you send that picture, you just copied and pasted that money amount. So I think that’s the gist of it. It took watching the video a 2nd time, played at .75x speed, and frequent pausing in the first four minutes to take notes… and also reading certain chapters of <Broken Money> beforehand, which served as a warm up to familiarize on these concepts. #Bitcoin #lynalden #maxdemarco

I was reading an article which discusses the difference(s) between Blue Sky and Nostr. And it seems the main difference is moderation. Blue Sky has moderation, and Nostr doesn’t believe in having any moderators. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me… because doesn’t this mean individuals can just use the ‘mute/block, mute convo’ options whenever they feel the need to? #asknostr #introductions