I go to NYC several times per year for one reason or another. For work, for friends, etc.

Part of me likes it, but part of me gets fucking frustrated multiple times per day every time I am here. (Sorry, this is a Nostr Lyn post).

There are plenty of neat things in NYC that I can’t do at the same scale/quality elsewhere in the world due to the network effects around the city (broadway shows, financial district, etc), and yet after a day or two all I want to do is leave. It feels claustrophobic on multiple fronts.

People all have different vibes but for me, major cities are fun to visit but smaller secondary cities or suburbs around cities are so much smoother to live in. I can’t imagine living all the time in a major city.

The same applies to Cairo, to which I have been in far more total days than NYC. I like Cairo’s satellite cities but not Cairo itself other than going briefly.

Every time I am in a major city I am immediately reminded of the luxury of space, nature, quiet, parking spaces, and chillness of not being in a city. Everything I take for granted normally is now a luxury to fight for in a city.

Even politics are largely correlated to urbanization. If you live in rural or suburban areas, you likely drive around in your own car, you might have some land, etc. Your interaction with the local government exists in a moderate sense. The potential weakness is that you are more likely to always be around those who are similar to you, which minimizes your worldliness.

In contrast to all that, in major cities, everything is so tightly packed, and people rely on public transportation, and even a momentary lapse of government services (eg trash collection) becomes an acute catastrophe. But on the beneficial side, people are around those who are different than them more often, which breeds worldliness.

That’s why I tend to like the zone between rural and major cities. I like secondary cities or suburbs of major cities, because I get a bit of both worlds. The density and interconnectedness of major cities briefly, and the space and self-autonomy outside of them most of the time.

And yet I was born and raised in that sort of inbetween state, and so maybe it is just my upbringing.

What about you? Can anyone sell me the idea of NYC or other major cities that I am missing, especially in the remote work era? I see glimpses of how it could be attractive if you are used to it and know every detail of your neighborhood, but it really does feel limiting to me.

The quality of your days depends on the quality of your thoughts.

It seems that this is a Universal Law.

I’ve been reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and I’ve just started the book of Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich.

Both books talk about how it is important to control your thoughts.

Could you tell to anyone what are you thinking right now (honestly) without feeling shame?

If you watch anything today, watch this.

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GOOD MORNING NOSTR, APPRECIATE YOU ALL 🫡

The COPA vs Craig Wright trial begins tomorrow.

Finally, after all these years, a UK judge will rule on whether or not Craig is Satoshi and whether or not he is a fraud.

Quite absurd that it’s taken this long to legally establish something so glaringly obvious.

Welcome to law.

The first major snowfall in two years at my place.

She was seriously gorgeous… WTF possesses people to do this to themselves.

She is legit ugly now. She paid serious money to get ugly… nostr:note14gvjy44m3tue4trs7e6nk3ervx6u40ek9ddzv8f0vz672y33kwlqgndjvc

My friend likes to add a bit of French vanilla non-dairy creamer to her coffee and asked me to look at the ingredients to see if it’s healthy or not.

Creamer is an ounce-for-ounce contender for the worst food on the planet.

The ingredients are: sugar water, water, sugar, seed oil, isolated milk protein, and chemicals.

One of my least favorite routine things about modern society is how comically bad our food is. People look back at how bad it was having cocaine in Coca Cola and stuff like that, but when you add all processed food together in a typical person’s daily consumption, it’s arguably worse than that.

That moment when its time to debate dinner plans, and I want sushi while he wants burritos.

Losing someone young, or losing an older person while you are young, is always hard.

When my father passed away from cancer while I was in my early twenties, it wasn't surprising at all. This fact had been coming for two years, slowly. But when it came, it hurt just as bad. And till this day it still hurts.

I was at work and got a call; it was a hospital. They said my father had been suddenly transferred to hospice, and it wasn't looking good. He probably had a week at most. He was in another state. The doctor transferred my father to me on the phone and my father was weakly like, "hey...." and I said hello, and I said I'm coming now. He said, "No don't... uhh.... don't worry... you are far and have work... I'm fine...." I asked then why was he transferred to hospice if things were fine. He was like, "uh well... well you know.... uh.... it's fine...." And I was like, "holy shit I'm coming right now."

So I went to my boss and looked at him. I had previously told him that there might be a moment where I would have to just immediately leave without notice, no matter how important the meetings and such, because of my father. So in this moment I literally just looked at him in the middle of a busy day and was like, "I gotta go" and he was like "of course". So I drove there, two hours away and went straight there. My father weakly said on the phone not to go, but he never sounded like that, so I went immediately.

I got there, and my father was in a hospital in the death ward, and the guy who greeted me was a pastor rather than a nurse, which was not a great sign. I asked what was going on and he told me straight up that this was not good, that my father was likely dying within a week. So he brings me to my father. My father is barely awake. His memories and statements are all over the place, but I just hold his hand and tell him that it's fine and I love him. I'm just there. He kept fading out and I was like, "it's okay, just relax". He could see me and talk in a rough sentence or two and thanked me for coming, but started to fade away.

And then after like 30 minutes, he went fully unconscious. He was still roughly gripping and shaking the bed headboard and so forth but wasn't conscious (and I was like, "Are you all giving him the right pain medicines, this doesn't look good", and even the pastor was like, "yes I have seen many and this is not comfortable" and I was like an angry 23-year-old so I went out in the center area like, "what do all of you even fucking do here?! He is shaking the bedframe and looks in pain, and even the pastor agrees. Holy shit." So I went and got medical attention to deal with this, but felt slow and ineffective at this. They gave him more morphine and it calmed him down, but while it relaxed him, he ultimately didn't wake up again.

I spent the next couple hours there, and then left and called various family members for my second round when he was unmoving. I said if they want to see him, come now, in the next day or two.

But a little while later after I left, I got a call and was told he had died. Only I (and the nurses) saw him while he was still briefly conscious.

During that call itself, I was stoic. I was like, "Yes, I understand. Okay." and then hung up. And then I sat there for like five minutes in silence... and then cried. I got over it quickly and we did the funeral in the following days. My father had been struggling with cancer for years, so this wasn't fully surprising.

But what lingered was the memory. It has been 13 years now, and yet whenever I am in my depths I still think of my father. The memory never gets weaker. I think of his love, or I think of how attentive he was, or how accepting he was, or what he would say about my current problems.

People we love, live on through us. We remember them so vividly, and we are inspired by them.

If he was a lame father, he wouldn't have so many direct memories 13 years later. But because he was a good and close father, he does.

All of those memories are gifts. All of them are ways of keeping aspects of that person alive in our world. It's how we remember them in the decades that follow. Their victories, their losses, and everything in between. Virtues they quietly did that you find out later. Virtues you realize only in hindsight how big they were.

I see a lot of posts about Thanksgiving discussions on bitcoin. It’s usually from the American-style perspective, like trying to convince your normie drunk uncle and aunt, and they often don’t see the demand since they have top-tier money and their downsides are subtle. They are like, “why the fuck does someone need a BitCoin?”

Meanwhile, my husband’s equivalent Thanksgiving discussion will be far easier, since he is in Egypt with our family managing a new property build-out for nine people that we are doing, and their bank just blocked my payments to them for the next capital infusion for no stated reason. So now we have to do a bunch of janky high-fee remittance workarounds for a time-sensitive payment (like making your mortgage) and then expend our human capital to go to the bank in the US and figure out where this got blocked (our bank didn’t specify, but implied on Egypt’s side). Every bank sucks here. None of them were clear, which means the customer has to investigate.

The idea of self-custodial global open-source money would be inherently interesting to my family’s dinner if it catches on and starts to have more liquidity points in Egypt like it has in Argentina, Turkey, and Nigeria.

Meanwhile drunk Americans will be like, “What does a BitCoin do, lol?”

Walker with the hot take. nostr:note12j4n0dce98qvu7ezf88akm8j3gkshqsstzcdda4y2exqrqzfurlsngcwh6

Quoting my post here to give my answers, as an older millennial:

-My defining movies, given the idea that things that define people usually occur as kids, are the top Disney movies like Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tangled, and Treasure Planet (even though that one is not as popular). Disney movies were pretty based back then. The Matrix (my all-time favorite), Fight Club (I have critiques for it, but it had to be made), The Dark Knight overall trilogy, Training Day, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle. And then a host of random stuff. Jurassic Park, The Departed, Constantine, a whole host of 1990s and 2000s stuff, etc. Many others. Movies made in the 2010s or thereafter tend to fall flat for me. I watched the Marvel series from Iron man to Endgame and grew tired of superhero movies, but liked the Russo Brothers versions of it that advanced the core plot (Winter Soldier, Infinity War, Endgame, etc, with Infinity War being the high point). Every Marvel movie after Endgame doesn't interest me since I already stuck through it and finished the arc I started with Iron Man in 2008.

-Defining TV shows for me were fewer. Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, The Last Airbender, Legend of Kora, and the DC Animated Universe (1992-2006). And then others were later recommended to me at a point where they were no longer defining for me since they were in hindsight, but were interesting. Sopranos was good but nihilistic. Succession was good but nihilistic. Game of Thrones was great but out-ran its material and didn't stick the landing. Scrubs was amazing. Breaking Bad was fucking awesome but I don't know how to relate to anyone there and don't know what I took from the series other than don't cook meth. I plan to finish Attack on Titan in the next couple months, but so far I like that.

For books I like Mistborn series, Stormlight Archives series, Gentleman Bastards series, The Blade Itself series, etc. I might like the Kingkiller series if the author ever finishes it.

I'm very particular about my fiction. I clearly trend toward speculative fiction, either sci-fi or fantasy. Because I spend like 70 hours per week analyzing current financial markets and stuff like that, and so in my fiction I don't want boring pretentious emo dramas in our real world, I want unique stuff. I want things that give me new worlds, new rulesets, and build heroic stories from there. If something happens in our boring real world, it better be top 10% material. Like Michael Clayton or Training Day or something of that drama caliber. Every time someone tries to make a drama that is not as good as those, I couldn't bother to care.

Often someone recommends something that is supposed to be deep but it's just pretentious instead. Most modern deepness is just pretentiousness, imo. I often find myself liking more straightforward plots but with outstanding top-tier execution for their genre, like don't give me bad philosophy and virtue-signaling, but give me some good struggles and a plot that doesn't contradict itself and that is well-acted and well-filmed. The sheriff in a western, but 100% well executed. The hero in a fantasy, but 100% well executed. The hero in a sci-fi, but 100% well executed. The drama that is 100% well-acted and isn't emo. I like the very top-tier of each drama, quality over quantity, especially with a heroic aspect or otherwise some non-emo stuff going on.

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What movies, TV shows, or books, defined you?

Along with your answers, state your approximate generation. GenZ, Millennial, GenX, Boomer, older, etc.

I watched a ton of Japanese anime and US animation growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. And I occasionally still watch a modern one like Attack on Titan although I rarely watch any series anymore. It’s just the occasional movie or book now.

But one thing that always provoked me, even as a kid, was when they made the hero in a dark story too kiddie. As a kid, I wanted to see teenagers or adults, not kids. And now as an adult that occasionally watches a show with younger family members, naturally I don’t just want to see kids now either.

I’m happy to rewatch old Disney movies because they don’t suck. People die. Shit gets real, and quickly. And yet these are kids movies.

Like, Kora blows Aang away in terms of realism in terms of how serious the surrounding context was. Aang’s story plot was deep and involved combatting genocide, for example. His entire ethnicity was rendered extinct (“The Last Airbender”) and it was about to happen to others, and there were deep plots on ethics, and yet this is the kid we have to watch for sixty episodes. It was a story about genocide for children, involving children. Couldn’t we have made him a teenager at least, so that when he fights men it is more believable? Meanwhile Kora was far more interesting and realistic, because she had a similarly severe set of surroundings including political intrigue, war, murder, torture, suicide, etc, but she was aged appropriately for that context to not be utterly distracting in terms of (even magical) realism.

I am getting close to giving a more detailed assessment on Israel/Hamas, as it drags on.

And it will probably be Nostr-only since other platforms can’t handle it. It is too polarized. Everyone is tunnel-visioned.

My husband is currently in Cairo dealing with some property work we are doing for our extended family. They are only 250 miles from the problem, and Egypt’s acute currency crisis brings it closer to home if military or refugee shit hits the fan. Most of my extended family is geopolitically or financially close to the Israel/Gaza issue and is Muslim. I am thus both close and far from the issue. And I grew up in the US in a diverse region with Jewish and Muslim peers, but more-so Jewish overall.

Suffice to say, I don’t want civilians on either side to suffer or die. I am pro-humanity first and foremost.

Before I give my eventual analysis, I am happy to see Nostr comments on the issue. What are your thoughts and questions on the topic? What would you like to see addressed from a diverse or as non-biased source as possible?