Happy New Year Nostr!

I partied hard last night with zero alcohol, cannabis, or any other intoxicants. This year I’m sober, aging in reverse, and expanding my business.

What are you doing this year?

The IRS has conferences every year and one of the things they talk about is the idea of a tax revolt (they are rightly freaked out about it), their method for dealing with this is to audit and investigate influencers who encourage tax revolts.

So when you post like this you increase your audit risk tremendously, but hey maybe you really do start a movement and collapse the government 🤷🏻‍♂️

The problem is most people get a refund every year. So the odds of getting a critical mass of Americans to opt out is low.

What's absolutely wild is that NOBODY wants to pay them, but everyone does, and nobody stops because of fear of retaliation.

If we all stopped overnight, there would be nothing they could do to stop us, it's in our hands but nobody wants to be "That guy"

Oh no no, I wouldn't assume 😇

Thanks to all the trans lobby stuff, you can also suck a girl's dick now 😂

100% straight™ ✋😌

Getting a foot massage. Therapist says my muscles are tense and that I must not go often (no surprise, massages are expensive in the US).

I pay 138 RMB($20)/hour but he only gets 35 RMB ($5). He works 10am–midnight, 365 days a year, zero days off, for 7,000 RMB a month (~$1,000)

Sucking your own dick feels more like sucking a dick than getting your dick sucked...

So... Depends on what your looking for 😅

Usually disconnected on these trips, but sometimes you have to be on a call. This setup works very well. Anywhere.

Leaving X or Bluesky to join Nostr is like quitting McDonald's to eat at a vegan co-op that only serves one dish and everyone agrees it's the best dish ever invented.

Some people thrive in the cold and are sharpened by it, they tend to get sluggish in heat.

I’m warm blooded. Give me 32-35 celsius + 75% humidity and I’ll be full of energy, I’m sluggish in the cold.

Damn straight

Hey man don’t take this the wrong way if you’re from there but most Canadians are scammers. Idk what it is but every Canadian I meet has some type of low level fraud going on 😂

My wife, who is a wheelchair-bound black lesbian transexual, and who has recently appeared in the latest netflix period drama as Henry the 8th, doesn't believe that another nostr user will pay this invoice of fifty million billion sats....plus vat. Let's prove it wrong.....

This had been tried many times before. And I would say most have failed. Ecovillages, Intentional community's, and commun. They are difficult because human are difficult and ever changing. I live on one at this moment, as a renter. In someway it failed and some ways it's successful. Wish you luck.👍

Remember, I want that picture setting too, but with car parts spread all over the lawn. And you can't tell me otherwise. Abd there lies the problem. Haha

The average IQ on Bitcoin nostr has to be at least 20 points higher than Bitcoin twitter

What if humanity could find some alien tech and thus greatly accelerate its own technological progress? But what if that tech was hoarded by a small group of people?

Anyway, here's a review of Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. It's a 22nd century hard science space opera set in our solar system, written by a retired engineer. One of the more successful indie sci fi books in recent years. It's also one of the most successful books to have bitcoin in it; it's a small background role, but bitcoin is one of the leading types of money in the solar system.

Marcus, an indebted down-on-his-luck asteroid miner (and secretly, a bit of a space pirate as of late, given how bad things have gotten) finds his ship taken over by a wealthy genetically modified corporate heiress named Miranda. She has bought his defaulting debt contract that his ship collateralizes, and has gained admin access over his ship's computer. And she knows he is secretly a space pirate, which altogether gives her multiple types of leverage over him. She wants him to take her on a mission to the edge of the solar system to do something she won't say, involving unimaginable treasure, and he has little choice but to go along with it. Secretly, however, he plots how to regain control of his ship as they go, because he recognizes how much of a suicide mission it is because of who guards the space out there.

Pros:

-The hard scientific realism in the book is great. The type that basically takes an engineer to write. No wonder he has endorsements from like, the co-founder of Autocad and such. It's also a smooth read, all from Marcus's perspective.

-Although the story mostly takes place on one ship with a few characters, the worldbuilding is a solid start. I assume it'll be expanded later in the series. The technological situation and structure of society are very fleshed out relative to how little we actually see, given the tight setting. The world feels realistic and lived-in.

-High nostalgia factor. Fans of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, and more recently the Expanse, and all sorts of classic sci fi literature over decades, will find a lot of references or similarities in a good way. The author is very well-read on the genre.

-The audiobook is pretty unique and great. Unlike most audiobooks, it has a full-cast production, meaning that each line of dialogue sounds like the person speaking it, rather than just one person reading a given chapter's narration and dialogue. I listened to this one rather than read it. You can only buy the audiobook on the author's website though, not Amazon/Audible. (Amazon/Audible have been kind of shitty to authors lately.) The other version of the book are available on Amazon.

-AI gets a really good treatment here, and the third main character, an AI, is my favorite character in the book.

-There's a lot of suspense throughout. Most of it is not really predictable how it's going to end since it doesn't follow a basic tropey structure. Even if you don't particularly like some of the characters (and indeed they're designed to be rather unlikable), you're likely to find yourself reading further to see what happens.

Cons:

-The book is about 500 pages, and I think 50+ could have been cut out of the middle to make it stronger. The dialogue between Marcus and Miranda gets rather repetitive after a while. And because of the limited setting (mostly on one ship), most of the worldbuilding is done via exposition by Marcus. So if readers hate "info dumps", they'll probably get annoyed at this. I personally don't really mind exposition as long as it's good, so this wasn't a dealbreaker for me (the "don't do exposition!" advice to authors is overdone in my view). I just think the middle could have used a trim. And although most of the book is not predictable, one aspect imo very much is, and that's where a lot of the repetition is.

-There are some unnerving aspects/scenes in it. I can't really say what they are without spoilers. Let's just say being in Marcus's head for 500 pages isn't, uh, my cup of tea. The book is self-aware about it, though. It's an intentional choice to have put these unnerving aspects in, so it's not a con per se but it's more something that will put off some readers. And it's a little more understandable by the end.

Overall, a unique story. And for the audiobook, I do think that over time more audiobooks will be made with this more complete type of cast. Audiobooks used to be very expensive and a small piece of the market, and only in recent years have they become very popular. As they become a bigger and bigger share of the fiction market up to some substantial percentage, I think more work will go into their quality and details.

I came here to say “nigger” freely

LOOOOOOOSER

I don’t know why i’m here

#introductions

Probably because most people don’t get paid in bitcoin. It’s something they have to buy then deposit into their hot wallet. Too many barriers.

If you got paid in bitcoin it would be easier.

Gm nostr, why don’t you zap more?

For hundreds of years people used to believe in witches and demons. Thousands were killed. People were basically insane.