New Linkin Park It's good but I wish these were longer. Feels like half a song.

Nothing stops this train. View quoted note →

This is actually one of those mind blowing things. When you look into space with a telescope, you’re seeing the way it looked when light left that area. So depending on how far out you’re looking, you’re directly seeing deeper and deeper into the past. It’s like obvious but also 🤯 View quoted note →

My current health plan is: -Eat real nutrient dense foods. -Intermittent fast for 12–16 hours per day. Vibes based. And sometimes go multi-day. -Go for long walks or bike rides in the sun daily. Touch grass and do stuff. Often you can combine this with business meetings. -Sprint a couple times per week. -Do cold plunges a couple times per week. Seriously, this seems easy to skip and it’s hard. But if you want to triple dopamine levels for the working day without later downsides, putting yourself in freezing water is the thing. -Do some squats and pushups. And then deadlift your own body weight for several reps. -Even then you’ll potentially fail. This isn’t one of those meme posts. I used to be utterly ripped in my competitive martial arts days in my late teens until my mid twenties. But then I got distracted, mainly due to a broken leg and lack of direction. Over the past several Covid years, I’ve weakened, and had trouble hiking mountains. I still have visible abs but they feel fake now. But I focus on a couple things amid my crazy work, which I have ingrained now. The first is intermittent fasting. It literally fixes all my other errors as a baseline. I can fuck up for a year and not gain weight because I only eat in 6 or 8 hour windows. Or even 10 hours. The rest of the time trains the body to burn fat. Next is I do a reasonable baseline of pushups, squats, and sprints per week. Nobody can make me choose to. It’s just my baseline. Last is I do a lot of squats and bicycling to keep my leg muscles interested, which have been mediocre. So if a new martial arts leader has a plan, I’m happy to listen.

Ears builds trust, apparently. Sometimes you gotta show both your ears. View quoted note →

There's only one picture of my husband and I online in any English-language context, and it's not labeled as such but rather is buried in a Twitter thread and just kind of put in there as one of many photos, on purpose as an easter egg. We like privacy, so we don't post many pictures. But since I already showed my left ear on Nostr (likely for the first time ever in a public picture, funnily enough), I might as well give Nostr the exclusive to my husband as well. It's technically not new, which is why I can show it, but rather I can just be more specific about it. It's a picture of us from back in 2021 at Sahl Hasheesh in Egypt that we've had quietly online for three years. As readers of Broken Money know, his name is Mohamed Badran. Mohamed is the editor of all of my long-form content, deals with the technical backend of the website, and inspires me to be better as a person every day.

I collaborated with Sam Callahan to analyze bitcoin’s correlation with global broad money supply. The result was that it had higher directional correlation to money supply than other asset classes, at 83%. We also looked at indicators for when bitcoin is more likely to deviate from liquidity. In other words, what’s usually going on in that other 17%. The answer, generally, is that the asset is coming down after major periods of extreme sentiment. You can check out the full report here:

Lyn Alden

Bitcoin: A Global Liquidity Barometer

This research piece on the correlation between measures of liquidity and the price of Bitcoin was compiled and written by Sam Callahan, and commiss...

Signing bombs is so cringe. Really near the top of the cringe scale in fact. Almost peak cringe. View quoted note →

Miyazaki films are so incredibly unique. They often focus on protagonists that don’t win through action, but rather through kindness and hard work. And many of the protagonists don’t really have much inner conflict either. The fact that this combo is going on, and yet the films are so timeless and successful, is actually kind of crazy. They should be boring, and yet they are not. There is a deep warmth to most of the films, even as they explore some of the saddest themes.

I’ve been putting some more thought into why villains tend to be more interesting and memorable than heroes. Joker. Thanos. Vader. Hans Landa. Hans Gruber. Hannibal Lecter. And so forth. I think part of it is intentional and part is unintentional. An intentional reason is that a less dynamic hero gives the viewer or reader a simpler template in which to insert themselves, which is useful for certain types of stories, especially adventure-oriented ones. Like when we follow Luke Skywalker through the original Star Wars trilogy, in addition to following his development as his own character, the viewer is also kind of seeing the world through his eyes and thinking how cool it would be to be a jedi. Other characters with stronger personalities and screen presence are viewed more purely in external terms. An unintentional reason is perhaps that more thought goes into villains. Creators put more conscious thought these days into making sure their villain is not tropey or one-dimensional. Like, you sprinkle a touch of good in with the bad. Or you give them good intentions for bad things they do. Something like that. People also did the same to heroes, by sprinkling in some bad with the good, and those tended to be more interesting and so anti-heroes became so common as to become overdone. But if you just want a hero, not an anti-hero, it can take more work to make them interesting and it often doesn’t get done. Perhaps another -and super basic- reason could simply be average age. Heroes are often younger than villains. There’s less time and thus often less complexity for why they are the way they are. Like, Vader has just seen and done so much more than Luke. There are reasons for why Vader turned bad, but there aren’t really reasons for why Luke turned good. He just was a good kid raised by good adopted parents. Over time, he develops reasons to *stay* good, though, which is his character arc developing. By the third movie he’s older and thus a bit more complex of a character. And perhaps yet another reason is instinct. Our brains are wired to respond faster and with more magnitude to threats than to good things. And so a character that embodies a threat of some type is more noticeable. And then often the character is doing things that stand out, or wearing things that stand out, or saying things that stand out, etc. Often, it only takes one thing to make a villain interesting: just knowing why they’re the way they are. Evil is already interesting in a bad way, and so understanding why someone does evil things tends to interest us. For example, we could pick some simplistic dark lords, which is a template that is known not to be very interesting. Sauron doesn’t really stand out to me other than visually. I don’t know anything about him, don’t know why he’s so mean, etc. It never really comes up in the trilogy, although he’s explored a bit more in Tolkien’s posthumously published worldbuilding lore. How do we make that more interesting? Well for example I think Brandon Sanderson does dark lords well. In his shared literary world that a lot of his books take place in, there was a god-like entity that was killed long ago, and shattered into 16 different shards, each representing a facet of its personality and power which people can obtain and become demigods. One of the shards is called Odium, which means hatred. He is described basically as God’s anger, separated from the context that would otherwise make that anger righteous. So it’s the hatred and anger of God, separated from the rest of God’s qualities. And he goes around killing the other shards to be the only one left. So with that basic setup or “why” answered, I’m like, “okay, I see what happened here,” and it pulls me in better even though the character itself is just… furiously evil with no redeeming qualities. Anyway, part of why I’m thinking about this is because I’m thinking of more ways that creators could use to make heroes more interesting and memorable, without necessarily making them anti-heroes.

The friendly neighborhood spammer. View quoted note →

One of the things I think about a lot in terms of modern fiction is this conflict around diversity, wokeness, and so forth. Here’s a bit of a mini blog post on it. On one hand, it’s normal that people want to see elements of themselves in fiction they consume. And so to create something that appeals to a large and diverse world, one way of doing that is to have a diverse cast of characters. Unless of course the context would be inappropriate, like Saving Private Ryan or something. In addition, fiction has always been used as a form of social critique, and thus if someone has something to say about race or gender, it’s going to come up in fiction. On the other hand, I think diversity in fiction has a lot of reasonable pushback against it in the current era. Weak Mary Sue characters, an over-emphasis on race or gender compared to writing a good story with compelling characters, diversity quotas, and “creation by committee” where so many hands touch a peace that they dilute it down to nothing. These days most of the movies that win awards are not the movies most people want to watch. The last three pieces of visual fiction I consumed were Godzilla Minus One, Blue Eye Samurai, and Arcane. They had very different approaches to this topic and I think all of them handled it well. Discussed without major spoilers. Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese movie set in the 1940s, so the answer for diversify is that there isn’t any, and the topic probably didn’t even come up. Like for Saving Private Ryan. There’s diversity of personalities of course, but it’s mostly about Japanese men dealing with a monster, and then two notable female characters that are well-written in mostly non-action roles. A key theme of the movie is about life over death and the horrors of war, and so for example it explores the ethics of kamikaze pilots and the broader topic of sacrifice in a defeated Japan, which it does well. Blue Eye Samurai has a female protagonist, disguised as a man for practical purposes as she goes about revenge. So in the current era where diversity is such a big topic, there’s a lot of ways for that to be handled poorly. But her background and why she’s out for revenge isn’t particularly gender-related. And race comes up to the extent that the show explores colonialism, technological gaps between cultures, a society closing itself off to outsiders, viewing outsiders as demons, etc. Which all happened in that period. The show has a major arc that focuses on the limitations of being a woman in 1800s Japan, and I think it’s well done. All of it is in service to a good story. Arcane uses League of Legends lore, which has like 140 characters so that everyone who plays can find someone they like. Thus diversity is set into it at its core, and the gender and racial diversity in Arcane the show is at a higher than average level. But then they don’t talk about it. None of the conflicts are about race or gender. The setting has a lot of problems that the characters are sorting through, and race and gender just don’t happen to be among them, which I think is well-handled for the story they want to tell. The themes and conflicts they focus on instead are economic disparity, desire for sovereignty, technological progress vs risk, family bonds and their limits, the price of power, peace vs domination, etc. So by the end it feels like invisible diversity- diversity just kind of happened without it having been a big deal. And importantly, the diversity was not at the expense of white men- they were some of the best characters too, including probably my favorite character in the show. I’m currently reading The Lost Metal, which I’m not loving for plot and pacing reasons but am finishing it for completionist reasons for the broader story universe, and once again I think the author handles diversity well. His books, set in fantastical settings, tend to have a diverse array of characters, and it’s all in service of telling a good plot with good action and so forth that appeals to tens of millions of readers across the world. As an example, his original Mistborn book has the highest per capita fans in Taiwan of all places, even though the book isn’t set in an Asian setting. When the success of Hunger Games led to a big global trend of young adult dystopian fiction for a while, it was Mistborn that caught on in Taiwan. A good piece of fiction doesn't have to be written for a particular group, to be enjoyed by that group. So when I approach hobby-writing, that’s my focus: tell a good story with interesting characters.

Maybe it’s because I work with spreadsheets and boring finance stuff all day, but in terms of fiction I often gravitate toward more fantastical things, like fantasy and sci fi. I figure if I’m going to read or watch fiction, instead of seeing people navigate boring real life problems, I might as well go all the way and see them try to take down a magical dark lord or something. But in terms of boring real life movies, there are some amazing ones that hit me anyway despite those preferences. Like Michael Clayton was sooo good even though legal thrillers aren’t my thing. Hard to believe it’s approaching two decades old.

Whenever I fall behind on my emails, which are far too many to respond to each day, I take heart in that none of these people are up to date on their emails either.

As an update on my (probably bad) hobby sci fi book, I’m up to 45,000 words written. Very enjoyable to write. The first draft is 40% completed.

I think Arcane season 2 is going to impact me like Game of Thrones. Masterpiece earlier seasons and then messy later seasons. Except instead of 8 seasons, it’s all gonna slam hard in just two seasons.

Things which you actively dislike and disparage, are not things you don’t care about. They’re things you care about but that don’t go the way you expected.

What excites you the most in your life?

The first season of Arcane was a masterclass on how to write interesting villains. The heroes are fine, but the villains Silco and Jinx are very well done, and went through more full character arcs than the heroes, which was an interesting creative choice. It’s instructive for writing decent fiction, so I’ll put my longform blog-like thoughts here on what they did right compared to most fiction I’ve seen recently, which could be useful to someone whether or not they’ve seen the show. It’ll have major spoilers though. Silco Villain Analysis: Silco is first shown as a tropey crime lord. He’s cruel, power-hungry, and has a damaged eye and a scar. His philosophy is that power is held not by those who are born with it, but by those who will do anything to take it. But then we see his backstory. Silco grew up in the undercity, in a literal fissure in the ground where the air and water are polluted by the rich city state Pilthover that rules over them and literally sits above them. As he became a leader of the undercity, he fought for its sovereign independence from Pilthover, including to the point of promoting violent uprisings. He was then betrayed by his best friend and co-leader Vander, since Vander decided to make peace with Pilthover so that the warring and violence would stop. Basically, Vander had less of a stomach for the violence after seeing so much of it, whereas Silco remained radical for his goal of independence. And so Vander tried to kill Silco to make peace. And then Silco, while he was being betrayed, cut, and drowned, narrated that he could just die and have his troubles go away, or he could fight with everything he had, and he did the latter and managed to escape death. As Vander ruled the undercity in peace (but still oppressed and polluted by Pilthover), Silco partnered with a scientist that was making a new weapon: a mutant serum called shimmer. Years later in the show, Silco used the power of shimmer to overthrew Vander and become the boss of the undercity. Unlike many cliché villains, Silco respects Vander, had gotten over his hatred for Vander for betraying him, and is even thankful for Vander’s betrayal since he views the life or death moment as having helped him find the strength that he was previously lacking, but he wants to go on his more dangerous path of gaining independence for the undercity, which means replacing Vander. And that’s where his villainous streak gets bad: he’s willing to kill Vander, and even Vander’s adopted children to eliminate witnesses when they try to rescue Vander. The youngest child, however, embraces him, and so instead he adopts her as his daughter and truly cares for her, but by doing so corrupts her to be more like him as she becomes an adult. Throughout the show after that, he makes plans, sometimes has to adjust those plans based on new things happening, reads other peoples’ emotions very well and communicates to them effectively to move forward with his goals, etc. He uses intimidation, science, and economics where possible, and violence more rarely as needed. There are no bad plot arcs based on obvious miscommunications and so forth. He’s a dynamic, competent, and realistic character that is impacting and reacting to the plot. He focuses on the development of shimmer to grow his undercity’s power so that if or when war for independence breaks out, his side will have a chance against Pilthover. But then, toward the end… as the situation gets messier, he chooses a path of peace with Pilthover while getting what he wants. His years of production of shimmer along with his adopted daughter’s theft of Pilthover’s key technology enhanced the underworld’s power enough that the council leadership of Pilthover agreed to let the undercity have its independence. Silco proposes to cease the production of shimmer and give back Pilthover’s stolen tech, thereby depowering himself in exchange for everything he has ever wanted: sovereign independence for his undercity which will be called Zaun, along with trade and economic deals between Zaun and Pilthover. And now he understands the late Vander better. Politics over violence. But then Pilthover gives Silco a curveball- he has to give up his adopted daughter to be arrested for her crimes as part of the peace deal, which he contemplates doing and is leaning toward doing, but is torn up about it. He ends up being killed by his adopted daughter, and loving her anyway as he dies, siding with her at the end. A tragic ending for him, but he’s at peace with it. Similar to how he views Vander’s betrayal of him all those years ago as having helped him find his own strength, power, and agency, Silco views that he has now passed on those traits to his adopted daughter. Jinx Villain Analysis: In League of Legends, Jinx is basically a Harley Quinn knock-off. Little depth. That’s what the show had to work with, and they filled it in so that she’s a better character than recent depictions of Harley. There are so many ways to mess this trope up and they avoided most of them. Jinx starts off as an impoverished kid thief from the undercity; a physically weak tinkerer trying to make little smoke bombs and stuff to help her older sister and her two adopted brothers. Her parents were killed by Pilthover’s soldiers/police in a failed uprising, and so she is raised by Vander, who doesn’t have much in common with her and instead focuses on raising Jinx’s older sister who he has a lot in common with. And so Jinx ultimately is raised mainly by her older sister, which is who she has her primary emotional bond with. Her adopted brothers view her as weak, and it’s always her sister that sticks up for her. In an attempt to help her sister and adopted brothers save Vander from Silco’s overthrow of Vander and prove she is not weak, Jinx accidentally messes everything up. One of her creations, a bomb, accidentally kills her adopted brothers directly and ultimately leads to Vander’s death indirectly. And then from her perspective, she is abandoned by her older sister due to her disastrous bomb decision, and so instead Jinx embraces Silco and joins him. Silco replaces Jinx’s sister as the one directly raising Jinx, and for whom Jinx has her main emotional bond with as her father figure. When she grows up, Jinx becomes a mentally unwell weapon maker and combatant, supporting Silco’s undercity’s accumulation of power against both Pilthover and rival gangs. Harley Quinn’s “craziness” as depicted in Suicide Squad movies and so forth, is pretty shallow. It’s played most of the time for humor and aesthetics, and if one were to describe in what specific ways she is crazy, it would be hard for many to do so. It does have a name though: it's called histrionic personality disorder, and in her case it's combined with what is basically sociopathy I guess. Jinx’s mentally ill aspects are more specific. And she suffers for it; it’s not depicted as funny. The two adopted brothers she accidentally killed are now voices in her head and visions in her eyes. She is emotionally stunted, stuck with the personality of a child despite possessing the intelligence of an adult engineer and schemer. She is emotionally over-dependent, first on her older sister and then on Silco as her adopted father. She is obsessive-compulsive, which makes her a good engineer and schemer but also stresses her mentally. She is self-absorbed. She lacks empathy for others except those she latches onto. As her sister returns after seven years, Jinx is forced to confront the violent person she has become, and has an identity crisis over it. She wonders if she could go back to being a more normal person after all that she’s done, accepted by society, or if should she remain in her more violent line of work of empowering Silco and the undercity. Despite her mental issues, she’s among the most proactive and competent characters in the season and all of her actions combine into a specific purpose rather than being random. She builds a variety of dangerous weapons and traps. She uses them to kill rival gang members that try to attack Silco’s shimmer operations. In a world where Pilthover’s soldiers/police killed her parents and most of them are corrupt, Jinx kills soldiers with bombs in order to sneak into Pilthover’s academy to steal a sample of their most powerful technology, successfully reverse-engineers it, and makes it into a powerful new weapon to potentially use against them. When her sister returns after seven years and Silco is hiding that fact from her, Jinx correctly senses something is being hidden due to Silco’s gang acting differently, captures and interrogates Silco’s underboss in order to find out that her sister is back, leaves that underboss unharmed, and then actively reaches out to her sister to try to reconnect with her. She is angry at Silco for lying to her but goes to him to learn why he did, and is convinced to remain on his side. When Pilthover’s technology is stolen back from her, she goes after it, kills more corrupt soldiers to do so, fights one of her childhood friends who leads a rival gang now, and successfully retrieves it before it gets back to Pilthover, nearly dying in the process and then going through an agonizing recovery. So she’s not quite sociopathic up to that point- she mercilessly kills those who she sees as enemy combatants rather than civilians, and for specific goals. She has outright schizophrenia and a growing identity crisis, but mostly functions around it. It's not the "tragic backstory therefore I kill everyone" weak trope. But then that’s where her mental illness starts to go off the rails and screw everything up for everyone. Her sister gets a girlfriend who is a Pilthover soldier (who wants to get Pilthover’s stolen technology back from Jinx), and Jinx views that girlfriend, of the enemy side, as having replaced Jinx as her sister’s closest emotional bond, and Jinx visibly sees schizophrenic delusions of that girlfriend laughing at her. She is given shimmer serum by Silco to save her life from injuries at one point, which makes her stronger but likely deteriorates her mental state further. And then, as Silco agrees to peace with Pilthover, Pilthover’s leaders demand that Jinx be given to them and imprisoned as part of the deal, putting Silco in a tough position to choose between the undercity’s peaceful independence or his adopted daughter’s freedom. So Jinx feels betrayed by both her sister and by Silco. She successfully captures Silco, her sister, and her sister’s girlfriend, to talk to them and figure out what her decisions will be. Mainly at that point she wants her sister to side back with her. In the end, she kills Silco to prevent him from killing her sister, and spares the life of her sister’s girlfriend when she could have killed her. As Silco dies (which Jinx is heartbroken over), he tells Jinx he would never have gone through with giving her over to Pilthover, would give up everything else for her, and tells her to be herself. She then resolves her identity crisis, and decides to fully embrace herself as a war criminal against Pilthover, remembering what Silco told her years ago: “we will show them all”. She could turn herself in to Pilthover for life imprisonment in terrible conditions in exchange for her undercity’s peaceful independence, but she chooses not to make that type of sacrifice. Instead, she chooses to “show them all”, and launches that new weapon, which she made from the tech she stole from Pilthover, straight at Pilthover’s council chamber, killing most or all of Pilthover’s seven corrupt council leaders and triggering outright war for the undercity's independence. And that’s an actual set of character arcs for villains. One can see from their perspective why they're the protagonist of their own stories. And a chain of cause-and-effect actions went from the economic and cultural situation of Pilthover and its undercity, to Silco, and then to Jinx, and then disastrously back to Pilthover’s leaders, with certain decision points along the way to either continue the cycle or break it with a more selfless decision.