The greatest fantasy/sci-fi series of all time are, in my humble opinion:

Lord of the Rings

Red Rising

Stormlight Archive

Hyperion Cantos

Wheel of Time

Chronicles of Narnia

CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy

Zones of Thought

Mistborn

What else would you add?

What are books that changed your life?

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.

Ok people, I need help.

What brand of washer and dryer do you hate, and which do you like/has worked for you.

I’m avoiding anything with digital screens because I’ve literally only ever heard and experienced them to be unreliable, unfixable without a “certified technician,” and annoying AF.

If anyone has any useful info or experiences with washer/dryer combo feel free to dump your advice below. #asknostr #homestr

I read, not sure where, that our perception of time is relative to our total experience of its passage. The more days you’ve had the shorter each new day appears to you. I’m not sure why that would be the case but it matches with my experience. Perhaps we filter out more of the details as our model of what is happening becomes more robust, so as we get older the brain is less attentive to the particular moments: it categorizes moments more effectively over time as a member of some set, saving resources but leading to this recognition of the time passing in that moment.

Feels right

Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history.

Read your Mill, brothers.

*The Rare Sat Lie*

Let's start with some facts.

You cannot own a satoshi (sat). You can only own a utxo, who's value is measured in sats. Just like you cannot own a "kilogram" but you can own something which weights a kilogram.

The idea that a sat can be rare is a lie, since sats don't exist.

A utxo also cannot be sold, because as soon as it is spent, a completely new utxo is created, and the creation of this new utxo makes the previous utxo (which you wanted to sell) spent. To act of spending "an unspent transaction output" (UTXO) transforms it into something fundamentally different, a "spent transaction output" (STXO) and creates a new UTXO.

The idea that a utxo can be sold is a lie, since even utxos cannot be sold.

The idea that a rare sat from a "special" utxo can be bought is thus a double lie.

*Rare Sat Sophistry*

The conmen, the useful idiots and the otherwise honest but contrarian pundits will rationalize the spreading of the "Rare Sat Lie" with sophistry and appeals to libertarian morality such as "it's a free market, people can believe whatever they want and waste their money however they wish".

Of course, this line of reasoning is meant to create strawmen arguments so that every person that is righteously indignated at the spreading of these lies can be painted as being opposed to the concept of individual freedon itself, which immediately places the TruthSeeker's outrage outside of the Overton Window (and subject to ridicule).

Let us dispell the strawman argument.

The "market" (a small niche of degenerate gamblers) can want whatever it wants, yes. But it till cannot change the reality that individual satoshis (sats) do not exist as "things" or virtual objects. This reality is not subjective.

The sophists will also rationalize that "it cannot be stopped" and thus all you can do is "cry harder" (ironic eh?) and that any and all attempts to combat the lies are futile (at best) or stupid.

It may be true all the truthseeker can do is cry and shout, but it is also true that to combat the spreading of such lies is a virtuous and noble pursuit. And it is also true that the direct result of the shouting can be to save a victim from otherwise being conned. Which is, we would all agree I hope, a moral good, if not a moral imperative.

People are free to spread the lie that such things ("rare" "sats") are real, and fraudulently sell utxos of low value presented as "rare" "sats" for utxos of higher value, but to do so by exploiting the ignorance of people and confusion around the complex technology of Bitcoin is evil according to nearly almost moral code that ancient and modern civilizations have produced.

I am the last person that would deny someone the right to be evil. But I believe if you see a fraud and you don't call out the fraud then you too are a fraud.

So, the strawman is really just straw.

*The Rare Sat Con*

Beyond it being morally bad to spread lies generally, the spreading of the lie also occurs within the context of textbook confidence trick.

Confidence tricks involve :

- the mark: the victims whose money is to be acquired fraudulently

- the roper: reels in the mark via exposure and marketing, peaking the curiosity of the mark (i.e. a conference or media organization)

- the inside man: provides a venue for the con to take place, or supplies goods and services used in the context of the scam (a mining pool or a marketplace)

- the conman: gains the confidence of the mark extracts the money (the seller of a rare sat)

- the convincer: an acolyte of the conman which gives a taste of the profits to the mark either by investing in the mark, or showing off his profits to the mark (a fellow rare sat trader)

The conman and the convincer can interchange roles. For example, conmen and convincers can publicly con each other repeatedly and alternatively, with gains and losses which compensate, with the tacit understanding that the goal is really to gain the confidence of a mark from which both convincer and conman can extract money from.

Everyone except benefits in this zero sum game, except obviously the mark.

In the end, the mark was never forced to give up his money. He willingly parted ways with his funds, deceived by the confidence trick.

Selling "rare sats" for utxos of higher sat value is without doubt a confidence trick.

I will let it up to your imagination who you think plays which role in the rare sat con.

The thing about the stability of systems, is it has absolutely nothing to do with ossification and everything to do with adaptability. People misunderstand this to their peril. In all domains: politics, economics, and yes: bitcoin.

He’s definitely one of the most important people of the century, though I suspect (hope?) that the future looks back on him long after his death as we do the robber barons of the 19th century.

sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. nostr:note1ygxp5lkvkd9gycv8kpjtesyj2djqym2jvtaa5sl98dad9kgq69vsadv3xs

The majority of people have a strong tendency to want to be part of something that is bigger than themselves. It is why they not just get up in the morning, but why they are *energized* to get up in the morning.

Clans and religions were among the earliest bigger things. People know that they will die, and so they invest into their descendants, honor their ancestors, and contemplate metaphysics and the nature of life. Many people will willingly sacrifice themselves for their children or for their highest ideals because of this.

In the modern era of printing presses and telecommunication systems, there is also a broader set of choices for people to group together around, either combined with those other ones or sometimes instead of them. Sometimes they choose nationalism. Sometimes they fight for a political ideology that transcends borders. Sometimes it is a professional guild or professional recognition. Sometimes it is the environment. Right or left or anywhere in between, you can often tell what someone adheres to as their highest ideal.

A powerful exercise is to 1) identify what you feel a part of in the bigger sense (it could be a few things) and 2) whenever someone’s behavior confuses you, stop and think about what they likely feel a part of in a bigger sense, if anything. You might feel that what they associate with is fucking retarded, but if you can at least identify it, then that is the first step toward successful communication and debate and rebuttal.

Using myself as an example, my professional experience is in a combination of engineering and finance. Separately, my ethical philosophy is grounded in virtue ethics (that’s a whole other longwinded topic), and as a result, what I feel a part of in a bigger sense is various social movements and protocols that utilize technology to bring financial autonomy to people. That’s where I put my time and capital toward.

Successful commerce involves the combination of value and communication. Therefore, I want people to be able to communicate freely and transfer value freely. As such, I strongly associate with the leading technologies in those fields, such as Bitcoin and Nostr.

If I thought they were weak, I would sympathize with them but not invest in them or have much hope for them. That was my view for a while. But if I view them as technically capable and achieving of network effects, then my rationality combines with my sympathy and becomes full support.

I don’t care what peoples’ race, sex, orientation, ethnicity, or nationality is. Instead, what I care about is doing whatever tiny part I can to bring technologies to people that allow them to transfer value and information to others, or to educate people on those technologies, etc. That is where my time and capital is focused on. Outside of family, that is what makes me energized in the morning to work toward.

What is yours?

Sorry for being snarky. I hate the man vehemently. I live in a country that borders Russia and falls squarely within their imperialist ambitions. Were it not for us getting into NATO two decades ago, I might be in a trench right now. Or dead already. So that inevitably colors my attitude towards him.

I get your point, but how else to frame him really?

He is detached from reality, and he demonstrates it clearly in this interview too. If he wasn’t, he would’ve never started the full scale invasion. No rational actor would.

Which part did you like more, the part where he explains how Hitler was just compelled to start the war by attacking Poland, because Poland just wouldn't give Gdańsk away, or the part where he describes how Zelensky's father who was born in 1947 fought in WWII?

He's not a madman, but he is a KGB-man. Which means he has trained to lie and deceive professionally.

Anyone listening to what Putin has to say without keeping this in mind is doing themselves a huge disservice, and risks becoming a useful idiot.

Like Bush Jr. believing he was able to get a sense of Putin's soul.

People are all up in arms over this Tucker-Putin interview.

I’m all for free journalism but I am also busy this week. For people who have seen it, is it worth spending two hours to watch it or does Tucker get cucked by Putin the whole time?

all dance music, however good, is just a noble attempt to live up to Every Time We Touch by Cascada.

fight me.