Imagine a book that sells a million copies about a detective with perfect memory, and it’s somehow bad? Anyway, here’s a review of Memory Man. First of all, I listened to the audio, and it just made me even more impressed by @walker and @CARLA⚡️ narrating and editing Stolguard. Because this Memory Man audiobook, despite being a best seller, is just so weakly produced in comparison. It uses a similar structure where all dialog is voiced by the male and female narrators, but the acting range is bad and the audio is clearly “spliced in” pretty haphazardly. In contrast, not only did Walker and Carla do a great range of voice-acting, their editing was stellar too. Now the writing. Every character just exists to stand around and say how smart the main detective is. They do nothing. They’re just soundboards. The main character is alright. The pacing and mystery started out good, like I finished this relatively quickly because I wanted to hear what was going on. But ultimately the killer’s motive was just so thin and wacky that it made no sense at all. I read this because my latest manuscript is about a detective with perfect memory trying to stop a serial killer, and so it helps to read and be aware of comparable titles or “comps”. But oh boy.

New poster for The Stolguard Incident featuring Jade. A bunch of sci fi newsletters are promoting it this week so we put together some cool little posters.

I wrote another sci fi novel, during my summer in Egypt. It’s a thriller about surveillance, set in the same world as The Stolguard Incident. I have a sickness now, it seems.

Currently in Port Said, the industrial town where the Suez Canal connects with the Mediterranean. At an old-school Lebanese restaurant. Really low time preference setting, lots of wood, intricate windows, traditional place with great food. On the wall is a tv. The tv is playing the movie Twilight.

GM. Private equity funds generally aim to buy a business, cut costs, and resell it in 4-7 years with an indebted, hollowed-out balance sheet. It’s an important source of liquidity for business owners but has some well-deserved criticism. Companies that recently exited from PE have higher bankruptcy rates. As an alternative, we’ve started a company called Orange Juice that seeks to buy private businesses, optimize where helpful, and hold them indefinitely. Instead of hollowing out their balance sheets out with, we will back them up with a bitcoin treasury. https://www.lynalden.com/orange-juice/

Gm. One of my favorite places to have my morning cappuccino is in my father in law’s office. The vibes are just so cool and the chairs don’t get sat in enough. So I just come here and appreciate the place and plan my day.

Gm. Some Amazon products ship to the U.S. and not to Egypt. So, my friend bought three philosophy books, shipped them to my place, and I brought them to Egypt in my bag when I came. One of them, however, was a crazy misprinting. Inside the philosophy cover was a book on witchcraft. Apart from being funny, it’s actually slightly dangerous. Some countries including the UAE have laws against sorcery. Imagine flying in there, get a random baggage check, and you unknowingly have a witchcraft book with a philosophy cover on it, as though you are sneaking it in. Like, what do you even say in that situation.

Now that Fable is back on the market, I did an apples-to-apples test with it. While I purposely avoided using any AI to write Stolguard, I did feed the finished manuscript into ChatGPT and Claude prior to publication and asked them to analyze the characters, plot, themes, prose, genre, and overall thoughts. Like a robot beta reader among my myriad human beta readers. They did a half-decent job, like a smart high-schooler who read it but skimmed certain parts, made a few objective errors (including a big one involving all the nuance around Jade and what she’s up to and why, across the two interwoven timelines, iykyk), but otherwise got the gist of the book with some random inconsistencies. I did that with Fable now. Just gave it the text and asked it to analyze it along those same areas. Its overall analysis conclusions were quite similar, but it avoided making those objective mix-ups around the most complex parts. It understood the interwoven timelines fully. Only with some follow-up questions did it start to slip a bit with some clear mistaking of one character for another or forgetting about certain scenes as its context window failed to keep up. Definitely a step up in accuracy, based on a text I know well.

That feeling when I spend Friday and Saturday writing about the implications of the US/Iran MOU for my Sunday report, and they end up not even keeping the peace through Sunday.

My canonical headphones broke a couple days ago. End of an era. Replaced them with the nextgen version of the same thing. Stronger than ever. Most youtube viewers won't notice, but I had to say it somewhere. Might as well say it here on the edge realms. Hurts, man.

GM, doing a refresh of some of my giga-long macro charts. Figured I'd post my favorite one here on Nostr first. Readers of Broken Money will recognize the 1920-2022 version of this from that book, which is now extended through 2025. (Digging into this data super deeply back in 2018/2019, along with a bunch of related datasets, is how I came to see that nothing stops this train.)

Ratings are starting to come in for the audiobook version of Stolguard. Glad to see people are appreciating Walker and Carla’s performance as much as I did! The voices they provided and their attention to detail really helped make it come to life. https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Stolguard-Incident/dp/B0H29Y33PQ