LynAlden
Lyn Alden

https://www.lynalden.com/

Founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy. Partner at Ego Death Capital. Finance/Engineering blended background.

Public Key

npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a

NIP-05 Address

lyn@primal.net

NIP-57 Address

lyn@primal.net

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9uju6mpd4czuumfw3jsrqw475

Publishing to

nostr.bitcoiner.social

relay.kamp.site

relay.nostr.band

Author Public Key

npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a

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Last Notes

2024-09-21 03:23:59

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.

2024-09-21 01:11:47

What excites you the most in your life?

2024-09-20 22:20:29

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I have not played, no.

2024-09-20 22:01:49

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Success. :)

2024-09-20 21:55:57

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:
https://m.primal.net/KwDV.jpg
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:
https://m.primal.net/KwDX.jpg
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.

2024-09-20 14:44:40

Here's an anecdotal data point on Nostr.
Yesterday I asked people on both Nostr and Twitter what tropes in fiction they don't like. I have about 10x the followers on Twitter than Nostr, but I only received like 6x the number of replies on Twitter.
So Nostr had a higher relative engagement rate.

2024-09-20 03:18:37

I try not to judge Nostr clients too hard in any given month on this early basis. They're all working on novel tech to increase speed and usability. They generally raised little capital or in some cases no capital, compared to what so-called Nostr competitors raised in the crypto space. How many bitcoin companies are around from a decade ago?
I use a given app, and rotate to what is gathering momentum to see if it works better, while still using what I used before, to test things as they come and go, because rarely does one client just go away. Multiple clients develop out of that trough and keep competing. But as one app goes through a period of weakness, I don't write it off. I ask what's happening and how it could be better, or what apps should look like.
I'm happy to see so many clients pushing hard and competing. That competition is what makes Nostr more interesting than Twitter/X over time. And indeed if none of the current clients provide what you want, you can enter with your own code and/or capital.
It's open. That's what makes it beautiful. That's why we're here.

2024-09-20 00:44:02

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I'll probably post some sample chapters on Nostr somewhere. Not soon. Highlighter maybe.
Would only publish it if it's actually good.

2024-09-20 00:42:51

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I've got weak taste so I mostly don't notice the difference between 8/10 sushi and 10/10 sushi.
We have basically a 8/10 hole-in-the-wall sushi place near us, and the owner and a senior waiter know my husband and I, and so as soon as we walk in, they just bring us to our seat (they know our preferred seats) and start getting us our normal order and ask if we want any modifications to our normal order.
And then I go to NYC or London or Hong Kong top sushi restaurants for 3x the price when I'm there, and to me it's only like 1.1x as good as my local hole-in-the-wall place. The difference I notice is consistency. The tuna in my local place varies a little bit whereas the tuna at the expensive places is more consistent, but the top-ends of both are similar to me. As a result my default favorite place is honestly just my local spot so far since they're my dudes. Haven't been to Japan yet though.
Cairo is not a great sushi place, so when I live there for part of each year even at fancy places I'd put it at 6/10 or 7/10. I notice their weakness vs my preferred American local spot. Egypt is amazing at grilled fish, though. Haven't found better grilled fish outside of Alexandria and Cairo.
Steaks hit me harder in the top end than sushi for some reason. I'm more picky between 10/10 steak and 8/10 steak than 10/10 tuna and 8/10 tuna.

2024-09-20 00:06:43

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Thanks.
One of the characters I'm working on in my hobby writing has this background, but I've been trying to explore it in fresh ways. He falls into the conflict of conscience category.
Since there's nothing new under the sun, fiction in general always has some tropes, but good fiction does a given trope better than average or subverts it somewhat, or combines tropes into a fairly new combination in an interesting way.

2024-09-19 23:41:05

This is the way.
#note1j28…h20v

2024-09-19 23:29:21

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Only watched like movie in the past few months. Godzilla Minus One.
But I watched some shows. Blue Eye Samurai and Arcane.
Watch very little lately.

2024-09-19 23:27:28

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What do you dislike about that one, and what would make it better or subvert it?

2024-09-19 23:26:15

Recent vibes.
https://m.primal.net/KvJh.png

2024-09-19 22:29:27

What character tropes do you dislike the most in movies, shows, and books?

2024-09-18 00:58:44

Good evening.
In the first year after my husband and I bought our house, we kept having the security system’s smoke alarm go off, and it would auto-alert the fire department. A mess, repeatedly.
Literally the same dude would show up, sigh, and be like “you cool?” And I’d be like, “yeah, sorry.”
Eventually I was like… let’s just remove that one. It’s always the problem, it’s too close to the stove. The so-called experts installed it, but from experience it was wrong. So we outed it. Just that one.
And we did, and the problem went away forever. For us and for the firemen.
Sometimes it’s the rules that are the problem. Not the rules’ breaker. Test everything.

2024-09-17 01:56:49

What made Arcane good ultimately was that so many characters in the conflict made good decisions and tried to do smart things.
A lot of lazy writing relies on people making irrational decisions or having lots of miscommunications. This show highlighted the difficulty of the context rather than individual dumb decisions or miscommunication or one-note characters: it was about the economic and ethical backdrop of the situation, and how characters responded to it.
The visuals, music, voice acting, and all of that was great, but it was the writing that tied it together. Some of the most interesting heroes and villains.
And it's shockingly a video game adaption, which is why I didn't bother to see it until three years after it came out, now that season 2 is about to come out.

2024-09-17 01:49:54

Just finished Arcane season 1. Only nine episodes. That was some damn fine television.
Episode 3 was my favorite overall. And the last scene of the season 9 was pretty epic.
I'm definitely going to watch season 2 when it comes out, although I suspect it'll be weaker than the first one now that everyone has their video game powers.

2024-09-15 17:45:37

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That’s so punk. So edgy.

2024-09-15 17:44:04

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Tech generally moves in one direction. Musical artists feared streaming and piracy but then the economics shifted more toward concerts. I think visual art will be similar- people do want original one-of-one works.

2024-09-15 16:26:27

I’m in this camp. I think AI using people’s art as it makes its own is inevitable, and is not going away.
#note1z5r…t7h3

2024-09-15 16:24:20

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The Pentagon is super well designed structurally. Being flat and wide makes it safer. That’s why a plane hitting it didn’t cause nearly as much damage as the World Trade Center; it would basically require a nuke to destroy the whole building. And it had the five sided shape because it was originally going to be between five roads, but then Roosevelt had the location changed.

2024-09-15 14:03:23

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Government conspiracies and strange powers.
Sci-fi crime thriller, with a focus on character growth.

2024-09-15 13:40:02

https://m.primal.net/Kqmb.jpg
#note1u2g…4vxa

2024-09-15 13:39:02

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I've actually had trouble getting into games recently. I tried Baldur's Gate 3 but meh.
So I've been reading fiction again. That's my kick lately.

2024-09-15 13:37:49

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I wrote the first draft of Broken Money in about 6 months while running other aspects of my business, and that was 160,000 words or so. Things can come out really fast when you already thought a lot about what you say.
So in Broken Money's case, five years of research went into it, but it then spilled out into a solid first draft in six months, followed by a lot of editing.
In this fiction case, I had this portion of a story pretty mapped out in my head, so the words just flew out. It won't be like that consistently.

2024-09-15 12:44:29

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Well I don’t know if it’ll be good enough to publish, but this story is near-term sci fi. Cyberpunk would be closest but not quite.

2024-09-15 12:43:05

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No.
Just having that part of the story pretty well outline ahead of time, and being way into the process.

2024-09-15 12:42:03

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This pace isn’t sustainable. I had a lot of the plot outlined in my head. And it’s a rough draft of course.

2024-09-15 12:32:09

Gm.
I spent my evenings writing 30,000 words of science fiction over the past week.
Definitely fun, and the most fiction I’ve ever written. Prior to this I would write like a sample chapter, whereas this was like 8 chapters.

2024-09-15 00:10:47

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I don’t think indie published books are more likely to be mediocre. Instead, it’s just that there are *a lot* of them, and books in general. And so when there is a flood of like 3.6 out of 5 rated books, I just wonder who the audience is that goes and reads them.

2024-09-15 00:01:38

Today I learned that the new Surat Diamond Bourse in India is the biggest office building in the world in terms of square meters of floor space.
Until this was built in 2023, the Pentagon was the world’s biggest office building. More floor space than any skyscraper. Now this one is bigger.
But my first thought is, “why the hell does a diamond exchange have to be so big!?” Like, I can’t imagine what they need so much space for.
https://m.primal.net/KqKZ.jpg

2024-09-14 23:53:00

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I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita and primary Upanishads. Good stuff.

2024-09-14 14:55:15

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The Tao Te Ching has interesting commentary on ritual, and thus in context can refer to organized religion.
It places the Tao at the top (basically the source of everything), and then has a hierarchy of goodness, kindness, justice, and then ritual. Ritual is basically what's left after its drained of its depth, and people go through motions that are now quite distanced from the original purpose or context.
https://m.primal.net/KpnH.png

2024-09-14 14:48:05

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Looks amazing!

2024-09-14 14:19:13

There are so many indie-published novels with mediocre ratings on Goodreads and Amazon and such, and I always find myself thinking, “who reads these?”
Since I don’t have as much time as I’d like to read fiction, I generally end up reading just the big hits and then continue reading sequels on them.

2024-09-14 03:05:57

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Love that.

2024-09-14 02:20:11

The Harry Potter series was an example where, whenever fans voted for their favorite character, it usually wasn't Harry Potter. He'd be in the runningb but not at the top.
Fans were like, "I mean, we all like Harry. But we don't necessarily *love* him. And he's not *fucking memorable*. He's kind of boring.
Many people instead preferred Snape, Hermione, Black, Dumbledore, Dobby, etc.
-The very deep anti-hero or pseudo-villain. Highly conflicted, dark, and emotional, but sides with good. (Snape)
-The smartest one that fixes everything. (The books were read by bookish types, and Hermione was their bookish character identifier.)
-The wise mentor. Usually among the strongest, but from the prior generation. The plot has to factor him/her out. (Dumbledore)
-The chad scary seeming-villain who is actually a hero. (Sirius)
-The ultra-weak character, with charisma and talents, that manipulates things around the margins and morally *has* to fucking win. (Dobby).

2024-09-14 02:05:42

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He's a good example of someone intentionally in the middle. Hard to classify. I'd put him in the anti-hero category.

2024-09-14 01:36:22

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Do you like them?
I usually don’t.

2024-09-14 01:35:11

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I have not. Is there something about it you want to emphasize?

2024-09-14 01:31:54

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Nostr is for real shit.
I love this post, as hard as it is to read.

2024-09-14 01:31:09

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I'm DMing a custom Dragonlance campaign for my husband's party, based after the fifth edition published Dragonlance campaign which he completed as a sequel, and then me basing the story from there, partially from the books.
And indeed Raistlin's a key variable in my custom second-half story. Super interesting. Similar with Kitiara.
What details of Raistlin made him your all-time favorite hero rather than just like, a top-10? I love those types of nuances.

2024-09-14 01:27:03

This is the type of super-real post to read, amplify, and respond to.
#note1n8m…wu7t

2024-09-14 01:24:44

When it comes to all fiction you consume (books, shows, movies), do you tend to remember the villain or the hero more, many years later?
Here are some variables to consider:
-Characters and concepts that stuck with you personally, for years.
-Memorable quotes or images.
-Iconic characters. Archetypes. Things you want to replicate.
-Roles that were so fucking well-acted that it can't be topped, and thus brought out the full complexity of the character.
Clarifications prior to answering:
-Villains include very bad folks that turn good at the end (e.g. Darth Vader). Partial goodness is often part of good villain design.
-Heroes include clear anti-heroes from the first act of the story (e.g. Han Solo). Partial badness is often part of good hero design.

2024-09-14 00:33:32

Still working my way through Arcane when I get a chance.
The animation, music and overall world-building conception of their underworld is so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0XSizApO8&ab_channel=PowerSamka

2024-09-14 00:03:33

The meme-work makes the dream work.
#note1wav…90uu

2024-09-14 00:02:25

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Yeah there's a deep well of based-ness going on over there. Harsh environment.

2024-09-14 00:00:36

In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy.
As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it.
But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship.
Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/asia/china-economy-garbage-time.html

2024-09-13 20:33:04

Back when ETH did the change to its money supply algorithm to be deflationary, a lot of people correctly pointed out that they can just change it again.
And they did, so now it's back to having a similar supply distribution rate as bitcoin, but with fewer reasons for anyone to want to hold it long term relative to bitcoin, and with more competition nipping at its heels than bitcoin.
https://m.primal.net/KpBk.png
https://m.primal.net/KpBf.png

2024-09-13 13:49:34

Latin American equities have had a big stretch of underperformance vs US equities, but since December 2021 they haven’t made a lower low on a total return basis.
One of the things I’m watching in macro land is whether there is some meaningful reversal here.
The combo of 1) lots of global capital stuffed into US capital markets and 2) a US rate cutting cycle, is a potential catalyst for serious multi-year capital rotation toward more global assets.
https://m.primal.net/KomD.jpg

2024-09-12 20:51:14

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I’m a big fan of it. Really looking forward to book five.

2024-09-12 15:12:18

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Super high rated on IMDB. Some episodes are rated as high as 9.6 which is insane. And episode 3 definitely deserved it.

2024-09-12 15:11:28

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Already watched that one.

2024-09-12 13:35:27

Anybody watch the Netflix show Arcane?
I ignored it for years since video game adoptions into other media are rarely good.
But so far this is surprisingly solid.

2024-09-12 12:54:19

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They put the clip on YouTube. I threw the line in around the 3:50 minute mark.
https://youtu.be/N9PtEwH-u7s

2024-09-11 19:52:12

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Oof.

2024-09-11 18:39:26

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Yeah. His is the show I always go on for that channel. We did a segment on the deficits.

2024-09-11 18:24:59

Just said “nothing stops this train” on Fox Business live. ;)

2024-09-11 16:56:16

👍
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061142662

2024-09-11 14:32:26

When you read fiction of any genre, do you tend to gravitate toward authors and/or main characters of your own gender, or not really and it’s fine either way?
In my reading, it seems about 50/50. Plenty of male and female authors I like, and usually there are a lot of major characters of both genders.
Statistically, women read novels more than men, but it varies by genre, eg romance vs military fiction. I guess part of why my reading is somewhere in the middle is I don’t read pure romance books or pure military books and the like, but rather read adventure/fantasy/sci-fi books that often have one or more romantic arcs, one or more action scenes including sometimes military scenes, heists, crimes, etc.
I listened to this podcast on how to write novels that men would like out of curiosity, and it was interesting. Basically, their thesis is that too much current writing advice is geared to writing for women, so male readers kind of get left out, but then authors pick up on that and write for men, and they do a lot of volume. I think that’s largely correct. However, I also found the advice a bit black and white, like that most women want character development and details of feelings while most men want achievement and details of things.
My assumption is that the majority of men and women readers want both of those things.
So what are your thoughts? Do you tend to gravitate toward authors and characters of your gender or not really?
https://youtu.be/da3NiVM3IcQ

2024-09-11 14:17:37

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Primal. A lot of clients don’t seem to load many client numbers.

2024-09-11 14:05:01

Who knows how real either number is, but notably I crossed 70k followers here on Nostr a couple days before I touched 700k on Twitter.
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2024-09-11 01:22:18

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As a fan of this band for like two decades, that moment was shockingly good and similar to Chester.
I was like, "holy shit."

2024-09-11 01:21:02

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Was going to watch the debate live, and then at the last minute was like, "nah". Neither Trump nor Harris deserve my active time.
I'll check betting sites and listen to the replay while I'm biking or otherwise half-listening.

2024-09-11 01:19:37

Surprisingly, Chester Bennington's (RIP) replacement by Emily Armstrong fulfills the same vibe in the lineup. Her screaming vocals capture a lot of the same sound and essence of Bennington. That was a surprisingly good pick.
With Mike Shinoda still doing major vocals and most other members still onboard, Linkin Park 2.0 is surprisingly continuous with Linkin Park 1.0, in my view.
Solid revival of a major band after a six-year semi-hiatus.

2024-09-11 00:52:59

Wake up babe, new Linkin Park dropped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRXH9AbT280&ab_channel=LinkinPark

2024-09-10 21:08:21

The Social Security Administration expects their reserves to run out in 2035.
That’s a different pile of money than most other government functions, and so without either tax increases or legislation that transfers other money to it, payments going out to retirees could actually be cut after that due to not enough income flowing in.
I’m not sure what they’ll do at that point since we don’t even know what things will look like then, but basically 2035 is the next station to see if the train keeps going or not.
This drawdown will represent “intergovernmental” public debt turning into public debt held by either the private sector, foreign sector, or central bank.
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2024-09-10 19:07:44

What aspects do you enjoy most about your favorite sci fi or fantasy novels? Obviously it’s a mix of everything but what consistent themes do you find yourself returning to frequently?
To give an example, I tend to like complex and internally consistent magic systems or “hard magic” systems, eg Brandon Sanderson. He basically invents an alternative physics in a given series and there’s a whole set of stories around that.
I also put a lot of weight on complex characters, eg Game of Thrones. You know it’s good writing when someone can push a kid out of a window in the first episode and then somehow kind of make you almost like the guy later on.
If you don’t like sci fi and/or fantasy, what is it about the genre(s) that you dislike? And do you like one but not the other, or both or neither?

2024-09-08 23:53:42

Good evening.
My September newsletter is out. It's an update on the fiscal dominance view:
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https://www.lynalden.com/september-2024-newsletter/

2024-09-08 14:18:06

Okay I’m going to write it, over time, for my own enjoyment. The question is whether I’ll publish it.
Because I’m not an experienced fiction writer and would only publish it if it’s decent.
#note1e5r…fhg0

2024-09-08 05:29:47

Ya’ll want Nostr Lyn to write a sci fi novel in whatever spare time she has, or get back to finance?

2024-09-08 05:22:33

I’m glad that my legacy is that I wrote a whole ass book about money.
Money is broken, so we need a whole ass 500 page book to explain why.
#note10jy…ltjn

2024-09-08 05:14:03

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That sounds giga-based.

2024-09-08 04:42:33

The professional side of me is fully focused on finance. It’s tiring, but I’m there every day.
The Nostr Lyn side of me keeps broadening her timeframe and keeps getting pulled to write a science fiction or fantasy novel, at this point, with all sorts of character arcs and cultural symbolism tied in. Which is almost too long of a time preference.
I wonder if a side hobby is what is needed to keep me focused on my main work. I used to have hobbies years ago, but the extreme environment of 2020-2022 kind of killed them as things went crazy and I did nothing but work. During 2023 and 2024 I explored if I should have hobbies again, but I kept focused on work, and here now I’ve determined that I should explore more.
I boosted my exercise, traveled the world, and re-explored video games. But the video games didn’t stick. Re-exploring my older writing is sticking.
Lately I’ve been trying to explore hobbies, to replicate a normal human. And writing weird sci fi or fantasy is what keeps me engaged.
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2024-09-06 03:22:17

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Brad was always cool, for a long time.
But as he gets into public D&D, he’s even cooler in my view. What he’s doing here is amazing.

2024-09-04 15:55:38

I've been doing consistent long walks in the sun around my neighborhood while the weather's nice. Doing some business calls while walking, or listening to a podcast while walking.
I mostly blame @npub1dvu…0pwx for getting me into this trend.
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2024-09-03 18:28:31

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I think it’s very unlikely that ETFs are lying at this stage. Instead, there have been plenty of long-term holders selling bitcoin on exchanges, offsetting a lot of those ETF inflows. Many of them are even selling and then buying into the ETFs. My main concern with the ETFs is mainly that 1) wanting to leave them and move into bitcoin is a taxable event and 2) the US government could prevent future withdraws of real bitcoin from this whole financialized stack.

2024-09-03 14:03:29

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For me it feels right when it’s small. Fewer people will see it, so it’s easier to be open. And at the same time it adds exclusivity to Nostr in the form of Nostr-only personal content. Once it gets big, I don’t think I’ll share as much, and I’ll already have shared a lot, so the baton passes.

2024-09-03 13:51:24

This story is wild.
#note1zca…lpkr

2024-09-03 13:45:50

The Nostr devs continue to astound me with how fast they move.
Driven by passion.
#note1ulv…cgnw

2024-09-03 04:38:04

For everyone who says they don’t work out because it’s hard to get to the gym, this is your final boss:
#note1v0z…plw5

2024-09-03 04:28:29

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Yep.

2024-09-03 03:44:43

A good way to sell books, imo:
#note1q7l…vcae

2024-09-03 03:30:20

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She actually was taking motorcycle lessons, but it wasn't why she wasn't home all day. It got weird.

2024-09-03 03:18:20

When I was growing up in middle school and high school, I had a next door neighbor trailer park friend named Jordan, who is quite a character and has showed up in detail in some of my long-form Nostr posts from a while ago. He ran a series of sand-pit fights in his backyard that I participated in.
Sadly, he had the most broken and crazy home, like him and his younger sister were often alone and figuring out life for themselves, with their mom coming back like every other day barely, but Jordan was so charismatic and funny and smart that I hung out with him and his sister a lot at home and at the bus stop. Their trailer was an absolute mess, but it had a chaotic warmth to it from the people there. Jordan basically ran the place. When his absentee single mother came home from time to time after work and whatever else she was up to, she'd be like, "Oh Lyn, hi! I've been out today due to motorcycle lessons. (???) Do you want a bagel? I've got bagels. Jordan, you should be more like Lyn, she's polite. She always says thank you. Stay as long as you want Lyn, sorry for the mess." And I'd be like, "uhmm, thanks!"
Jordan, who was two years older than me, taught me to play Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and got me into anime via Trigun and Cowboy Beebop; all sorts of nerd stuff at a time when I was kind of otherwise aimless. I was living alone with my 60+ year old single father at the time.
We then became a funny duo as teenagers; him as the charismatic outlandish guy who usually got into trouble, taught me all sorts of nerd stuff, got his girlfriend pregnant at age18 and started a family with her, barely got out of high school, and me as the total opposite introverted bookish polite one next door that would play Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons with his friends group, and that he'd trick his friends into fighting in his sand pit as a joke since they didn't know what they were getting into, but that was like clean as a whistle in terms of schoolwork and relationships.
Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that I first watched Fight Club in the best possible setting. I went over to Jordan's house one evening, and we started watching it. But then his mother called him and said to come to help with some shit she was dealing with, so he was like, "hey I got to go Lyn, but you can keep watching it, no problem." So I was there at night, in his messy trailer alone (???), watching Fight Club. The place was a mess, I felt weird that I was the only one in their home despite not living there, and Jordan was basically a more benign equivalent of Tyler Durden. So actually the movie hit a bit harder because I was both enjoying it but also constantly on edge because I was in a weird environment that didn't quite feel right, and yet felt oddly on-brand for the movie.
Can't really replicate that. And it's burned into my memory better than most movies.
#note1h5x…9jrw

2024-09-03 02:46:06

Of the four Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, the first one was great (Goldeneye, so good), the second one was decent (Tomorrow Never Dies actually has a lot of relevance today, as it's about the control of corporate media with misinformation, which is rather prescient for 1997), and the final two were bad.
Of the five Daniel Craig Bond movies, I differ a bit from the consensus. The consensus is that the first (Casino Royale) and third (Skyfall) were great, but that the second, Quantum of Solace, was the worst and the others were okay.
However, while I do think the first Craig movie (Casino Royale) was great, and Skyfall was the second best, I think Quantum of Solace as the second movie was underwhelming but not bad. It was kind of that middle-of-trilogy vibe. I rate it above the consensus. The true catastrophe of this series, which I rate below the consensus, was actually the fourth movie Spectre. Utterly awful in terms of plot, especially given Bond's greatest villain Blofeld played by Waltz, which is such a strong casting. They fucked the whole story up and it made no sense. Bond literally walked into the evil headquarters with no plan, and got captured. And then when the villain is drilling into his head to erase his memories, it just randomly didn't work, and he broke free via bad narrative. Made absolutely no sense. People were too accepting of it because they liked Waltz on screen and he distracts them from how weak his character was and how bad the plot was. And Blofeld was way too obsessive with Bond. Cool villains aren't as obsessive as that. And then the fifth one was solid and partially salvaged the catastrophe that was Spectre. Kind of mediocre like Quantum of Solace, but with a solid and surprising climax to the series, which elevated and completed it.

2024-09-03 01:50:37

I’m reading my first fiction book in four years, since Rhythm of War.
It’s called The Lost Metal and it came out a couple years ago but I’m behind on my fiction, since my financial work engulfed me ever since the pandemic.
Both of these are like deep sequels into stories I’ve been reading for a decade from Brandon Sanderson.
If anyone is interested in his universe, imo the best place to start is Mistborn.

2024-09-03 01:08:11

For those that want to buy Broken Money with bitcoin, the best place is Saif House.
https://thesaifhouse.com/
In addition to the ebook and audio versions, they uniquely have the cloth hardcover dusk jacket version, which is the most premium form of the physical book. It’s available in fiat there as well.
And for 10+ copy wholesale orders, like for bookstores or events, whether in fiat or bitcoin, Saif House is the best option. They beat Amazon on both cost and delivery speed for wholesale.
Like when I gave my Broken Money talk at Princeton University earlier this year and they handed out books, they bought those through Saif House.
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2024-09-02 20:26:55

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Yes music in theory is logical and mathematical, but it feels like an encrypted language to me. Like I know the logic is there but I can’t begin to see it. And other people see it intuitively without training. I’m bad at learning other languages in general.
I do like auditory information, but so far not for fiction. I like to read fiction and listen to nonfiction.

2024-09-02 19:46:01

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Yeah that blows my mind too. It’s part of the broader music confusion I have. Like when Hans Zimmer starts a new soundtrack for a movie, I don’t even know where he begins.

2024-09-02 19:28:06

What are some skills that you don’t understand at all?
For me music is at the top of the list. My husband can hear a tune and then with a few tries he can play the tune on the piano.
He barely had any music lessons but can somehow do that. I had guitar lessons, and my teacher tried to get me to do that, but I was terrible. So not only can’t I do it, I don’t really even know where I’d begin. The inability to even see the next step.
Like if I see a pro athlete do something, I know I can’t do it, but I get the basic idea of what they did to get to that stage on kind of a step by step basis. But when someone can hear music and then just play the melody, my mind is blown.

2024-09-02 18:49:30

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As hobbyists maybe. We used it in a professional context and the team was about 2/3rds male and 1/3rd female. Similar to many engineering units.

2024-09-02 18:28:16

100 squats a day til 100k.
The 58k gang is going to get us in shape.

2024-09-02 18:11:42

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Why do you call that a guy story? It’s about flight simulators.
Sounds kind of sexist.

2024-09-02 18:03:06

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We used X Plane and Microsoft Slight Sim sometimes, and plugins, in addition to high-end Rockwell stuff which was orders of magnitude more expensive. It was fun seeing the evolution of these various products over a decade.

2024-09-02 17:34:40

The electronic project that I am most proud of from my engineering days, was also the most useless thing I ever built. I was reminded of it amid all the censorship in Brazil, because it’s about Embraer avionics, which are Brazilian.
A short story.
The background context was that I never considered myself to be a great engineer. I was more interested in finance but had gone into engineering instead, and basically what makes someone great in a field is whether they have the passion to do it in their spare time or not. The best engineers, after school or after work, go home and do more hobbyist engineering stuff. Like, they just live in it. I spent my spare time on financial research instead. I liked my engineering work, but was only a design engineer when I had to be, basically. My passion was elsewhere. So I knew I'd likely eventually go into engineering finance/management in that kind of hybrid role.
I went to work in an aviation simulation facility after college. Rather than being used for training new pilots as most airplane simulators are, this facility was used by corporate, academic, and government researchers to test new technologies and procedures with experienced pilots. So the simulators were more customizable than training simulators, but were less polished. They were always these cool work-in-progress machines.
We had Airbus, Boeing, and Cessna models in the early days. And we had a half-finished Embraer, simply because the manager of the simulation facility just wanted an Embraer due how cool and different they are. His higher-ups in the broader parent organization told him there wasn’t enough market demand for testing in Embraers and wouldn’t give him a budget for it, but he kept finding ways to gradually accumulate the parts anyway. Eventually he had the simulator shell, and genuine avionics, but still had to put it all together. The Embraer avionics and flight controls were just so much more interesting and sleek than the other types.
In our Boeing and Airbus simulators, we had genuine avionics, but interfaced them into industrial automation control logic and PCs, rather than what they normally connect to in the field. And it wasn’t hard because they used some standard communication protocols like RS-422 or RS-485. All the buttons and dials were easy to connect to automation control systems, and the serial communications were things you could buy a PC card for.
But the Embraer sat unfinished for years partially because there was no budget for it, and partially because it didn’t use those standard serial protocols. The serial communications coming from their flight panel and throttle were some custom method that none of our equipment could read. You could just rip it open and re-do the insides to talk to a PC more easily, but the manager forbade that; he wanted the Embraer avionics to remain pristine. We had incomplete documentation, and virtually no budget or labor to put into it beyond the pieces we already had. It was this hacky project. We didn’t even really have electronic design software other than a lapsed PSpice license, since we rarely did any sort of custom circuits and instead would interface various devices into automation systems.
So, getting the Embraer up and running was always on the manager’s pet project to-do list but not making much progress. He would occasionally put an entry level or intermediate level engineer on it for a few months and they’d eventually give up, leave the organization, or go back to something more economically relevant. It went on like that for years; it became the Kobayashi Maru for electronic engineers in this facility.
After my first couple years working there on the Boeing, Airbus, and Cessna, the manager was eventually like, “alright, I want you to see if you can get that Embraer flight panel connected.” Little budget, just me in the lab with an oscillator and multimeter. I knew this would happen one day- the Embraer avionics were always kind of looming in the lab, next to half-finished failed creations of my predecessors that tried to interface with it, knowing that eventually I’d be put to work on this thing. And I still had other duties to do, so this was like a budget-less side project I had to spend part of each week on, with insufficient equipment and documentation and with the knowledge that the Embraer simulator might not even be used if I somehow succeeded.
So I dove into it. The Embraer flight panel had a series of buttons, but unlike our other flight panels, they all went through a parallel-in serial-out (PISO) shift register. So they came out of the device in a fast custom serial communication stream. An external device had to give the flight panel a clock signal, and give another CLR signal that would be low for 24 milliseconds and high for 1 millisecond, and during that 1 millisecond there would be 256 clock signals, and the flight panel would output all of its current states of button and knobs within those 256 clock signals within the millisecond, every 25 milliseconds. And the CLR signal had to be shifted some microseconds away from the clock signal so that the signal edges of their square waves don’t occur simultaneously, which would cause reliability issues. The incomplete documentation we had only roughly outlined this; I had to iterate a bunch of oscillator tests to see what successfully worked as an input, and then more fully document where every button and dial showed up on the output data stream once I got it flowing.
And then once I figured out how it worked, I had to figure out how to connect it to a PC and/or our standard industrial automation interface.
At first I tried one of our 2 year old microcontrollers that we had on hand, which as of this writing are now nearly 15 years old so not the current generation stuff. I looked to see if I could program it to send in these signals and then read the signals coming from it, but it wasn’t nearly fast and precise enough. This project needed lower-level design than something software-based.
I wasn’t sure if FPGAs of the day would be fast enough, I hadn't worked on them before, and and we didn’t have any anyway. So I went the raw logic route instead which would be annoying but cheap and guaranteed to work. I researched crystal oscillators, logic gates, counters, flip-flops, and serial-in parallel-out (SIPO) shift registers. I then used them to build this whole digital clockwork circuit from scratch to basically reverse everything that the flight panel was doing. It would use a crystal oscillator as the initial frequency, and from that would generate the clock signal and the CLR signal to send to the flight panel, and would run the timing for a bunch of SIPO shift registers so that this stream of serial data coming out of the flight panel would load into the shift registers, then get frozen in place for 24 milliseconds which was fast enough for our slower industrial automation interface to read the data which was now in parallel form.
Then I bought all the cheap logic pieces, soldered together test circuits, troubleshooted it, and got the thing working. I came in alone on the weekends to do it since I had little time in the week; I was just caught in the flow of making this work. Rather than viewing it as annoying as I did early on, I now viewed it as something I had to beat.
And then the Embraer throttles were the second difficult piece. Rather than a normal position output as our other simulator throttles did, the Embraer throttles basically outputted sign waves, and as you moved the throttle, which was really well-crafted and smooth, the two sign waves would overlap to varying degrees. So I had to map that all out, build a circuit to read these sign waves and send that position data to the slower industrial automation interface in a way that it could read it. I then soldered together the circuits, and got that working too.
I then wired up all the more standard electronics in the Embraer which were not that different than the other simulators. And so, I was finally able to go the manager and say, “the Embraer’s flight controls and avionics are all connected now! ^_^”.
I remember being so proud, like, “oh shit, maybe I could actually be decent at this.” And the custom circuit interfaces indeed worked for the next decade and counting without maintenance, perfectly reliable. We then got the rest of the simulator fully set up.
But… the Embraer simulator was only used like one time, barely. No research teams wanted to test new technologies and procedures on Embraers; they would always test things on the Airbus and Boeing simulators. So this awesome simulator, with so much work poured into it, was a complete waste of time, which is what the managers’ higher-ups had told him from the beginning.
I went on to do a bunch of other projects including a business jet simulator and a helicopter simulator and an upgraded redesign of our Cessna before I went into management and out of design engineering, but nothing was quite as hacky as that Embraer simulator, so it was always the one I would look at fondly and be like, “I can’t believe this useless thing is still running.”
Rather than feeling sad that the work was wasted, I instead always kind of had a “journey before destination” mindset to it, like it was the most frustrating project that I had brute-force succeeded at, from research to design to physically putting it all together to troubleshooting, and gave me a bigger sense of achievement and got me into a higher state of flow than other engineering projects I had done. To this day, I always think of Embraer planes warmly.

2024-08-31 23:53:22

And somewhere in there I'd say there's a fourth decision: When you decide to change your status signaling from things like beauty, power, and material achievement, to things like integrity, competence, and helpfulness.
Almost everyone is geared toward signaling. As social creatures we're deeply wired to signal value to others.
But there's a lot of flexibility in how we signal that.
-We can signal it with shallower things like beauty, lambos, hierarchical dominance, etc. The details will vary between men and women but they have a similar short time preference that few old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
-Or we can signal it with deeper things like integrity, honesty, helpfulness, friendliness, generosity, providing unique thoughts, or providing wisdom. The details will vary based on profession and skillset but they also have a similar long time preference that most old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
#note1fjp…l820

2024-08-31 23:37:20

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I generally agree with that. And @npub1cn4…3vle highlighted it on the his episode of WBD by pointing out that the finitude of life is what gives it urgency to get shit done now rather than later or never.
To any extent that I have success now in my mid-career, I point a lot of it to my early constraints which were outside of my control. Was homeless as a kid, then grew up in a trailer park, then financed my education through student loans with no family bailout if things go sour. So I had a lot of good things qualitatively (love, support, good values, family and friend experiences, etc), but also a lot of financial uncertainty quantitatively. It was all numbers and constraints by the time I hit college.
So I had to be super serious about college performance, super serious about doing side jobs to pay for it and gain new skills in doing so, super serious about landing good internships and succeeding at them, super serious about my post-college full-time employment, and super-serious about building side hustles alongside my career, which eventually became all of the financial research that I do now.
What I do today in all likelihood would not exist if I were more comfortable and free when I was younger. Those initial constraints were a huge boost. Like an initial cold plunge into life.
It wasn't so extreme that I was like, doomed and without lifelines. Instead it was the right amount of constrained of being shot out of a cannon, but with with like a parachute and a map on where to land.
Can't replicate that. Just have to be thankful for it. Being given the right blend of freedom and responsibility goes a very long way. If tilted too far in either direction, it can become restrictive.
I think we just have to lean into our constraints and try to be thankful for them and learn from them, and also lean into our freedoms and try to be thankful for them and learn from them.

2024-08-31 17:34:40

Lol, Brazilians are heavily searching for "VPN" right now according to Google. One does love to see it:
https://m.primal.net/KXYI.png