ChatGPT can’t be all that smart, since it keeps trying to show my left ear.

Also titled as, me trying and failing to be productive today.

Whenever someone emails the Lyn Alden support email, this is who they are dealing with.

He’s judging you for your bad technical decisions.*

*And then afterward will tell me my choice of backend software is retarded.

I asked #ChatGPT to tell me something deeply profound. I love the answer I got.

One of the things I find most challenging in fiction lately is over-editing.

Like, I managed to write my thing, but no I’m not stephen king; so I’m always looking for areas to improve.

Under-editing would risk plot holes or other major issues. I would only publish something I put a ton of thought into.

Over-editing risks detracting from author voice.

I send drafts to my husband, since we’re currently apart due to a construction project, and he’s one of the few people that amuses me because he’ll literally comment on my manuscript with brutal inside jokes like “I know you were raised poor and you don’t know better, but this change would be retarded, you should revert” or “I get what you’re doing here, but ultimately you should respect the reader. This edit would be incorrect. Go out and touch grass instead of propose bad changes like this.”

I get a ton of questions about my husband. As a somewhat public figure I suck at privacy, while he is a privacy maxi.

He’s my main editor, oversees support on my website, and yet quietly is like “nah, don’t want any attention.”

In 2021 when I went to a dinner/meeting at Saylor’s house, my husband dropped me off and then picked me up as my personal ride. To Saylor’s credit, he came out personally at night to make sure I was safe while I waited on the curb for a ride, as his only female guest that night and Miami at night can be challenging.

The next day my husband dropped me off at some VC event and my friend Elizabeth Stark was aware enough to be like “you got out of the front seat of that uber. It wasn’t an uber, was it?”

And I was like “No, that was my husband, lol.” He dropped me off at every similar event event that year (Ubers were hard to hire in 2021, amid pandemic constraints, so he rented a Camaro, since normal utility cars were sold out, and he drove me around in it to my various events and then wouldn’t enter them even though he could.

For years since then he does stuff like this. Touches events but purposely won’t attend.

We have a ton of pictures, but he doesn’t like them to be public, and allowed a 2022 vacation post, which I still use. Adding a second one here as a Nostr exclusive. The second ever public pic of him.

His first name is Mohamed, the most popular first name in the world, and yet hardly anyone knows his last name. Which is how he wants it.

He had dinner with Peter McCormack in Manhattan once, and then the only side event I ever got him to show up at was in Bedford at Peter’s CheatCode event. So Mohamed met Natalie Brunell, Preston Pysh, and a few other people there. And then went dark again.

In 2022 amid the bitcoin bear market capitulation depths while I was buying, he was like “So, how many do we have? Okay thanks for the breakdown, add way more here.” It’s up 500% since then.

When family members ask me about. Bitcoin, I’m like “well it’s this open source people can…” and then Mohamed intervenes and is like “She’s being polite. And also kind of her robotic retard self. You should buy a lot of it, here’s why.” Then proceeds to orange pill the entire extended family.

He watches some of my podcasts and knows a ton of people in both the bitcoin space and macro space, and then quietly is like “I’ll literally drive you there but then I’ll stay away, privately.”

He’s the GOAT at not drawing attention.

He also lies Nostr but doesn’t post here; or anywhere. He likes hearing updates though.

He unintentionally made himself as a meme by not posting publicly and being private. And yet if he saw it, embed be like “it’s ephemeral. Building a fitness facility is her gets direct sun. Need your input on whether it will meet our goals, since you optimize all these details.”

My favorite bitcoiner, who isn’t a bitcoiner.

My mom texted that she's fed up with politics and is watching The Matrix for the first time.

So, there's that.

The type of scene I never get tired of is when some badass protagonist is going through a movie or other story and taking all sorts of people out, but then runs into some random unexpected guy they can’t beat.

Like some guard or middle manager happens to spend all his time on martial arts as his obsession, has a fifth degree black belt, and just rekts the protagonist out of nowhere.

The way I see it, I want to be intentional with each decision. There are some sentences that I think are better in passive, to give more texture to the prose. Especially if they're next to an actively phrased sentence.

But I don't want to overuse words unintentionally.

Spending a few hours tonight going through my fiction writing and seeming where I can change passive voice to active voice, like removing was/were wherever possible. A bunch of tiny little sentence tweaks to tighten up the prose.

One of my early run-throughs was to search for "ly" and see what percentage of adverbs I could eliminate by using stronger or more precise verbs. And now this run through is meant to increase the ratio of active voice.

As a benchmark comparison, Brandon Sanderson used the word "was" as about 1.2% of his words or less in the Mistborn trilogy, whereas I found it to be 1.5% of my fiction writing.

When I was a kid, an older relative had this big rubber band ball, about the size of a softball, and I thought it was so cool, that I started my own rubber band ball.

So for years, I had this subplot of adding to my rubber band ball. It eventually became bigger than a basketball, and extremely heavy since it was dense rubber. Only unusually large rubber bands could go on it, and so tracking down hyper-sized rubber bands became a task in its own right (this was largely pre-ecommerce, 1990s, thus shopping was like hunting and gathering rather than searching and clicking). Various relatives would surprise me with like $5 packs of specialized rubber bands that they happened to run into and for me that was like an A+ gift.

I try to always focus on rekindling and/or being open to that basic sense of wonder and joy in things. A kid and her large rubber bands.

Anyway, happy Sunday.

Sometimes, when I notice I have persistent trolls over months, I take a couple tries to reach out and talk to them.

I try to directly address their issues, and ask what their problem is, or who hurt them.

Like someone who is clearly a human but posts anti-Bitcoin stuff on my threads 193 times. Or who makes fun of my voice 65 times.

Thus far, it has almost never worked out. They just keep going until they burn out. Their views and comments tend to be near-zero anyway. It’s a mental illness issue. And I’m not equipped to handle it.

Kind of like how people throw poop in certain cities, there are people who digitally just parasitically can’t stop clutching to others negatively.

I invite them to do better, hope they recover, but I increasingly learn that dealing with them rationally doesn’t work and I’m not the right one to help with that sort of mental illness.

Sometimes, when I notice I have persistent trolls over months, I take a couple tries to reach out and talk to them.

I try to directly address their issues, and ask what their problem is, or who hurt them.

Like someone who is clearly a human but posts anti-Bitcoin stuff on my threads 193 times. Or who makes fun of my voice 65 times.

Thus far, it has almost never worked out. They just keep going until they burn out. Their views and comments tend to be near-zero anyway. It’s a mental illness issue. And I’m not equipped to handle it.

Kind of like how people throw poop in certain cities, there are people who digitally just parasitically can’t stop clutching to others negatively.

I invite them to do better, hope they recover, but I increasingly learn that dealing with them rationally doesn’t work and I’m not the right one to help with that sort of mental illness.

If people ever debate or ask what your title is, just pick the funniest and most humble one.

Some people say you should be cheerful and constructive all the time.

Others say you should be more blunt and reactionary, pushing back on every imperfect detail.

I like a blend of both approaches, and try to embody it. A polite revolutionary, tailored to the environment.

I think we are in a moment where details matter. Send a big Lightning transaction to someone. Have an active he Nostr account.

That’s all relevant.

So, I had this science fiction story in my mind for over a decade, but never had time to write it due to everything else I had to work on. It was always on my long-term to-do list.

When AI started to take off a bit over the past few years, I was like, "Jeez, I don't know if it'll be any good, but If I don't write this thing, it might turn into historical fiction rather than science fiction." More realistically, I'd have to keep adjusting it every five years because the future is now.

But things have a tendency to align. Or maybe I just look on the bright side. Because another big component of the story is about social media causing increased social isolation if we're not careful with it, etc.

Since we're doing some large construction work in Egypt over this past year, my husband and I have had to spend more time apart than ever (he's managing the project there, while I have to manage our obligations here, and we travel to each other when we can).

I work from home. So, sometimes during this period I have days where I wake up, go for a walk, work, do an interview about finance online, exercise, go back to work, then go to sleep, and never speak to someone in person. Just me in the house and being the weirdo trying to get 10k steps in the sun around the neighborhood.

That both gave me insight into how that type of isolation can affect people (luckily temporarily in my case), and also ironically gave me time to finally write the thing, which helped me deal with the aforementioned isolation.

Fun first day in China 🇨🇳

As long as you ignore the constant cameras it’s lovely.

Everywhere you look there’s something intriguing ☺️

During interviews, I get a lot of questions about the potential for a strategic bitcoin reserve and how it may affect price.

I typically answer by talking about how I tend to take the 'under' on the prospect for a bitcoin reserve. In other words, as a base case they might recategorize currently-held bitcoin, might add a bit, etc. My lesser case is that they go and actually buy a lot, which would positively affect price, sure. I then go on about how, my long-term bullishness of bitcoin is not dependent on that, and I'd rather structure my view to assume a baseline and potentially be surprised to the upside on price within a given period, rather than focus on singular bullish catalysts and then be surprised to the downside if those specific things don't materialize.

That's Lyn Speak for "I find this question really boring, please stop asking me it."