Welp. That was fun. See you all in four more years.

🤣 I just realized that the BITCOIN Act by Senator Lummis stands for "Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act".

Hey ChatGPT, I need an acronym for the word Bitcoin 🤣

You cannot speak freely about Nazism, Francoism and Fascism because they were regimes that were against communism.

On the other hand, you can speak freely about communism and wear t-shirts with its symbol or the face of Che Guevara or Fidel Castro without any problem, despite the fact that they are the ideas that have killed the most people in history.

This gives you an idea of who won the cultural battle and who dominates the world.

Outperforming bitcoin is always the goal.

Also my goal is to own my own business which gives me more sovereignty over my life.

LightningSpore isn't exactly a bitcoin company... we sell lots of commodity products related to mushroom cultivation, grain bags, substrate, liquid culture.

Lots of people in the world grow mushrooms and buy this kind of stuff, therefore ads do work. I think I can compete in this market and do it better and cheaper.

I do a lot of bitcoin focused stuff, run our lightning node. Im trying to run a very approachable business to anyone, which also has a first-class experience for bitcoiners.

I want to run a profitable boring business (mushroom cultivation + supplies), and make good money and therefore good satoshis with it in the long term.

Been playing around with FB ads because unfortunately I cannot shitpost on here and sell products reliably.

Been doing $5 a day just to make it real. Haven’t seen much results but it is still a learning process, my product is quite ready for prime time either so it is understandable.

But when I put that advertising budget into sats, that is 6100 sats per day off into the wind.

I probably won’t cancel the ad, I gotta figure out traditional ads at some point, but consider just zapping people 6,100 sats per day here and seeing if it works any better.

I already zap most posts I enjoy and my default zap is 69 satoshis.

If you made it this far in this post, feel free to comment that you see me. I will zap anybody that comments words of encouragement, or anything interesting or productive 200 satoshis. Go!

LMFAO AT SUITS NEEDING TO WAIT FOR MARKET OPEN TO BUY THE ETFS

A bit tedious having to type ".jpg" after every Blossom image URL in noStrudel. nostr:note1qqrvqw7at7aa2eejmw2s5wjp0rqrals7mxuywtlqc6fd2h0esmksprwwfz

I messed around with Midjourney to create initial renderings of some of the main characters of my hobby sci-fi manuscript.

Would that movie poster interest you or nah?

Your ISP exchanges all data with three-letter agencies and this includes:

- your browsing history

- your cryptocurrencies

- your bank details

- your medical data

- your political affiliation

- your operating system

- your crimes

- your religion

- your sexual tastes

This data ends up reaching your government if it needs it.

Sleep easy.

gm

In fiction, the point of view from how we see the story can often color how we perceive the ethics of characters. And of course, that lesson can apply in real life as well.

If you ask most people if Neo and Trinity in the Matrix are heroes or anti-heroes, for example, they’ll probably say heroes. There is nothing particularly dark or edgy about them other than kind of a general “cool” factor. They’re pretty chill and well-meaning people in their downtime, we care about their relationship, they help their friends, they have rather pure motivations, etc.

But in the Matrix, agents can teleport themselves into any unplugged person. Which means that when Neo or Trinity attack a place, they pretty much have to slaughter everyone. Leaving survivors means that agents can teleport in. Innocent guards and stuff just get wiped out by the dozens. The stakes of humanity being enslaved by the machines are so high, that the characters don’t even really debate the ethics of this; they just accept it.

Like literally the opening scene is Trinity killing police, and the audience is like “wow cool” instead of “so, is that the antagonist?” The famous lobby scene consists of Neo and Trinity wiping out tons of guards that are just doing their job of guarding a skyscraper. In the sequel, Trinity sends a motorcycle bomb into a power station, and then murders the remaining guards as they attack her. We all basically like Trinity, and yet there are platoons of widows and orphans out there from all the guards she killed. There aren’t really even any scenes of her reflecting on that, like finding it emotionally difficult in any way to do those things or feeling in any way haunted by it.

If the Matrix story was shown from like, a detective’s point of view, these characters are terrorists and would either seem like outright villains (if you don’t know their motivation) or anti-heroes if you do (ends justify the means; mass-murder is okay and not even worth feeling bad about if it saves billions).

So, how the movie *frames* things for us makes a big difference. We closely follow Neo and Trinity so much that we’re like, “of course they’re the heroes”. The same thing happens in real life with political commentators and things like that; a cultural narrative can frame something as wholly good or wholly bad when often it’s actually kind of complex.

Therefore, it’s a useful practice whether in analyzing fiction or real life, to always ask how you could invert the framing for something.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the 'fall' of the Berlin Wall, a wonderful symbol of the absolute failure of the left.

35 years later we still do not know anyone who ran to East Berlin that night.

Can you smell the sats I am stacking!!

#bitcoin

Consensus amongst bulltards appears to be $150,000 by end of year. So that means we definitely aren't reaching $150,000 by EOY.

Watching Dennis the Menace with my boys. First time they’re watching it and the first time I’ve watched it in decades.

Pure Americana. White picket fences. Well dressed parents. Children free to explore.

We must bring it back.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is non-traditional story structures.

(Spoilers for The Matrix, Sicario, and John Wick if you haven’t seen them by now…)

A good example of a traditional story structure is The Matrix. It’s a typical three-act structure with an underdog protagonist who explores a whole new world, powers up via his mentor, and then takes down the stronger villain and gets the girl. But it’s more creative and better executed than most. Top shelf stuff.

In contrast, a movie like Sicario is less traditional. We mostly follow the story from the protagonist’s perspective. But then toward the end, she basically gets defeated and her worldview is invalidated. And then a supporting character, like a dark anti-hero type, kind of takes over as the main character for the final 20 minutes of the film. It’s quite highly rated and very good, but that kind of structure can be risky because the protagonist that we've come to care for goes through an anti-climactic and unhappy ending, with the dark/cynical side winning over the light/optimistic side. And it’s not even as simple as “villains win”, but rather, the anti-hero kind of takes over as the main character and defeats villains in the original protagonist's place, so we have partial "protagonist rotation", where a supporting character kind of ends as the main character. It’s a higher difficulty level to land that type of ending because the viewer is like, “Damn. I mean amazing too, but damn.”

A less complex example of a non-traditional structure is John Wick. It’s an action movie, one of the better ones for its genre, but the non-traditional element is that we know from the start that the protagonist John Wick is the biggest badass around. None of the villains are as strong as him individually, or even close really. The villains are the underdogs. And so to make that non-boring (“John Wick just kills everyone and wins easily”), it requires things like greater numbers of villains, and/or various schemes to surprise or outsmart the protagonist. It’s also a little harder to stick the landing because the climax can be less satisfying if you know from the start that the protagonist is stronger than the antagonist, and so it either needs emotional depth, complex situations, or other ways to make that ending satisfying.

I’ve been exploring some of these and thinking about it a lot because my novel has a number of these types of non-traditional elements, which elevates the difficulty in terms of making them satisfying despite going against the basic structure that people expect as a baseline.

Are there books, shows, or movies you like that go through rather non-traditional story structures?