I told my mother about bitcoin for years and she was like “yeah, cool, nah.” She’s in her 70s. And then I was like “The HRF eg @gladstein is doing cool shit for human rights with bitcoin.” And once I showed her some examples, she was like “holy shit” and joined their newsletter and is like 110% onboard with their mission. She reads their newsletters more than me now, and asks me questions about them, so I have to catch up on them to answer her stuff. She still doesn’t own Bitcoin but is like, reading every HRF email and asking me about them and totally onboard.

A rare podcast episode where I don’t focus on finance much, with Max Webster. Includes a discussion about Nostr, but then a host of other random stuff like bio hacking and so forth: View quoted note →

I appreciate people across the political spectrum, and have friends in multiple worldview camps. Especially since they are often from different countries with different contexts. My friends do tend to cluster in certain areas due to our shared interests (i.e. I am freedom-oriented in general), but there are people who consider themselves to be anarcho-capitalists and others that consider themselves to be aware progressives, for whom I would invite them to my home and stay in our guest area. But I have a visceral disgust toward people who I perceive to be playing a role or being consciously fake. I'm not against people playing an actual obvious caricature for satire of course. But in the modern era, there is a tremendous amount of audience capture, gaslighting, fake social media influence that is meant to come off as genuine, and influencers and politicians treating their audience as though they are literally retarded. Once I perceive someone as fundamentally fake and consciously playing a false role that they pretend is real to their audience, they're done to me. This behavior has been on an enormous uptrend in the past few years, much to my provocation. It's an acceleration of cynicism. Those that do this are intelligent but cynical toward their audience, manipulating them either for personal gain or for their political purpose. Be aware of this trend.

When I ate a lot of carbohydrates, no matter how thoroughly I brushed and floshed my teeth every day, my dentist would be like, “eh you could do better.” When I sharply reduced my carbohydrates, even when I was a bit less thorough in brushing, my dentist would be like, “it all looks great, good job.” Just my multi-year experience. I don’t claim to say it’s universal.

I’ve been watching Jon Stewart for 25 years now, and he is still a shockingly good comedian and commentator.

Glad to see people like the coin again today.

I showed the first three chapters of my hobby sci fi manuscript to my husband as an alpha reader. He's a really thorough film critic, and I told him to be brutal with his feedback. He really liked them. He highlighted a few things to tweak for improvement, but otherwise loved it. Pretty genuinely I think. He particularly liked the first glimpse of one of the antagonists. There was a balance there between them being horrible but also kind of likable and intriguing, and so that delicate balance seems to have struck correctly. So I'm going to show him the first 15 chapters that, in the current draft, make up Act 1 of the story, and get his further thoughts.

"There are people who hold bonds. We call them poor."

Enjoyed having a chat about bitcoin, macro, etc: View quoted note →

This might be a dumb question since I haven't been following NIPs lately, but wouldn't it be cool if there was an edit feature to tell clients to replace an old note with a new note on their user interface? It wouldn't *actually* delete or edit the original note of course but if many clients listen to that then at least in terms of what most users will see, the note will have been edited. Or, clients could show the edited version and then also have a small "show original" button to see the original version. Can anyone chime in and say why this wouldn't work or why it's way more complicated than this description to do in practice? I'm curious.

Taxes be like: View quoted note →

It has become so weird that the US Right supports Israel’s war on Palestine while the US Left supports Ukraine’s defense against Russia. Political sides dig in. The wars become associated with culture. There is so little voice today from those who oppose aggression. Those who support Jews but are not onboard with Israel’s actions against Palestinians. Those who support Ukrainian independence but don’t want to commit unlimited troops for border regions that literally speak Russian amid a complicated history. More people die in Sudan and Cambodia than Israel/Palestine, but we are all focused on Israel/Palestine because it’s a conflict of cultures. Religious cultures but also western imperialism vs the global south. The focus of it all. That occupies our attention even as bigger massacres occur elsewhere that aren’t directly across these massive fault lines. I refuse to engage in attention whoring. I support peace in most instances globally, other than total war against someone’s existence where it becomes right to fight back. People have a right to self-defense. And those who have power over others have a responsibility to hold back on using it fully. Keep in mind that at any moment, tons of violence is occurring globally. The media directs you to a subset of it that is geographically, economically, or culturally relevant for their purposes. You ignore or are unaware of the rest, and get emotional about what is fed to you. That’s how most people act, anyway.

Tonight's editing music.

I have a mixed view on the whole Mission Impossible franchise (depends on the movie, etc) but one of my absolute favorite scenes in the series is the bathroom fight scene in Mission Impossible: Fallout. The main protagonist Ethan Hunt, along with a badass guy played by Henry Cavill, try to capture a guy to scan his face. This guy isn't some big bad final villain; he's just a random mid-tier bad guy. Scanning his face is meant to be a fairly straightforward part of their bigger plan. But what they didn't account for was that this random guy is like a god-tier fighter. He just absolutely rekts them 2v1 no matter how hard they try. One of the aspects of unbelievability of the broader series is like, "how many times is Ethan Hunt going to save the world?" And there are some movies where they're literally like, "We need to send in Ethan Hunt for this; he's the *only* one who can do it." So this scene helps in kind of humbling the abilities of the otherwise OP protagonist. I have a scene in my hobby manuscript where someone gets into what should be an easy fight and is surprised to see that it's harder than they expected, and I think this Fallout scene kind of inspired it. Because when you have that scenario, there's a potential mix of 1) truly good tension as the stakes are high but also 2) some minor level of comedy and 3) the sense of surprise that this really isn't going as expected.

Be safe out there. DMs asking you for money are scams. They are all fraud impersonators. This is happening:

Some people say that when you die, you have a life review and see how your actions impacted others. That’s like the real-world version: View quoted note →

Spent three hours today round-trip driving into Philadelphia and listened to music the whole way. Figured out a few of my mid-act 3 plot points. View quoted note →