My harshest critic is my husband. Most people can’t honestly say that, but I can.

He’s always my final boss when trying to assert an idea. He’s super smart and usually comes at things from a different angle. And he’s my primary editor. He’s also the head of my website’s customer support center.

Unlike my social media where I shoot from the hip and fuck around, I post detailed articles on my site only after my harshest critic gives me his feedback.

And he doesn’t phrase things like a loving husband normally would. He goes over the top.

He’ll literally put comments on my drafts like “This is fucking right wing trash Lyn. I know you were raised in a trailer park so I don’t expect much, but do better. Rephrase literally all of this.”

That sounds abusive but it’s humorous in practice given our context when working.

We’re not very politically different, but I tend to lean slightly righter than him, so that’s a common source of debate. I pull him right and he pulls me left, not as people who are far apart but who are slightly apart but both opinionated and debate over every inch. It’s on an issue by issue basis.

Mostly he does those comments for humor, but partially because he wants a debate and will bring like a well-researched150 IQ argument to hold the line as I try to argue through his defenses. And I write my research for investment clients of all political views, left and right, globally, as objective as possible, and so he purposely helps keep me straight and steelmans all my arguments for clients.

We debated in the early days about the vaccine in the pandemic, for example, back in 2020 and 2021. We’re still kind of debating about it now in 2025, both granting certain details to the other.

But whenever I write something of substance that is controversial, I know he will read it and call me a retard, which I have to push through and turn into a publishable article.

My social media posts are just me, whereas my long-form posts take time and argue through him.

I often post thoughts and gather comments on Twitter/X, since a lot of tradfi financial pros are happy to discuss. Then I write a piece, and my husband looks through it. I either agree or disagree, and then publish. I get the final say, but I only publish after I’m confident after his arguments.

TLDR; My summary from this whole rambling piece is that I suggest you find a close loved one who will call you a trailer park retard while challenging you on every piece you write while loving you.

Few people will do that but it’s important.

Abu Dhabi has some of the bitcoin ETF which is kind of limp, but still.

I like the coin.

One of my approaches with them is to highlight that I’d treat them in real life like I do with them online, but they likely wouldn’t. I do my best to translate my real-world social cues into online spaces.

They tend to just double down into digital antagonism and negativity.

After many years in this space, nobody has ever said anything really mean to my face. That requires effort.

I do.

Some people fell for obvious impersonator scams, and keep harassing me as a supposed scammer who stole their money, and then when I realize that detail, I explain with evidence it wasn't me and highlight the clear fake account that they're referencing, and they actually realize it and stop. (If someone isn't well-off, doesn't have a good information filter, and looses a few thousand dollars from a scam that they think is me, it's natural that they'd devote a lot of time to harass me. So if I see that start to happen over time, I take time to examine it and clarify it, with half-decent results.)

Some other pure trolls soften *slightly* when faced with a human-to-human response, but still have a persistently negative issue. Instead of 10/10 of their comments being negative, 9/10 of their comments become negative and the other 1/10 become semi-consecutive. There are more that double-down than soften, though. And then over time they burn out, because their comments get no likes anyway.

The statistics aren't great.

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.

What do you think the world will be like 50 years from now, in the 2070s?

And specifically, what kind of tech do you think will surprise to the upside by that time, and become pretty dominant or ubiquitous? And what tech do you think will underperform expectations, and not exist at the scale that people now might’ve guessed would be common by then?

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.

I don’t think so, no.

1) What

A lot of investors would benefit from reading Stephen Mirran's November 2024 report on restructuring global trade:

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf

He is the economist that Trump nominated to chair his Council of Economic Advisors. In that report, Mirran discusses the persistent US trade deficits, their causes, and overall it aligns quite closely with what I wrote in Chapter 13 of Broken Money: Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown.

Mirran also goes into potential solutions for it, including the risks of performing those potential solutions. Basically, behind all the headline driven stuff, that's the intellectual version of this administration's playbook. Like, the steelman argument for what they're trying to do in theory.

Here's his executive summary:

"The desire to reform the global trading system and put American industry on fairer ground vis-à-vis the rest of the world has been a consistent theme for President Trump for decades. We may be on the cusp of generational change in the international trade and financial systems.

The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade, and this overvaluation is driven by inelastic demand for reserve assets. As global GDP grows, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the United States to finance the provision of reserve assets and the defense umbrella, as the manufacturing and tradeable sectors bear the brunt of the costs.

In this essay I attempt to catalogue some of the available tools for reshaping these systems, the tradeoffs that accompany the use of those tools, and policy options for minimizing side effects. This is not policy advocacy, but an attempt to understand the financial market consequences of potential significant changes in trade or financial policy.

Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline, and that the revenue raised improves burden sharing for reserve asset provision. Tariffs will likely be implemented in a manner deeply intertwined with national security concerns, and I discuss a variety of possible implementation schemes. I also discuss optimal tariff rates in the context of the rest of the U.S. taxation system.

Currency policy aimed at correcting the undervaluation of other nations’ currencies brings an entirely different set of tradeoffs and potential implications. Historically, the United States has pursued multilateral approaches to currency adjustments. While many analysts believe there are no tools available to unilaterally address currency misvaluation, that is not true. I describe some potential avenues for both multilateral and unilateral currency adjustment strategies, as well as means of mitigating unwanted side effects.

Finally, I discuss a variety of financial market consequences of these policy tools, and possible sequencing."

It’s mainly that their model is not geared well for big nonlinear changes. Mostly it’s exports affecting it.

The Atlanta Fed’s estimator for Q1 GDP growth, which gets updated based on various economic reports as they roll in, currently looks like a cartoon:

Currently listening:

https://youtu.be/jaYx0RfzX18

I'm happy to confirm here, with a cryptographically signed note, that I've regained control of my Twitter/X account as of the evening of March 3rd, eastern time.

I post here, so…

The Matrix was the best movie in the past generation that reached mainstream appeal and awareness.

Artsy movies didn’t reach that level.

Bigger movies weren’t as good.

You might not know what red pill vs blue pill means, and yet you’ve heard of it.

Send post.

I have said it is stand alone. Just one movie. :)

I’m kind of thinking of the same pre-description when recommending it to someone 30+ years older than me. So, the reverse.

Like, she’ll think it’s dumb and millennial and be distracted by phone calls the whole time.

On Twitter/X, yeah.

My homepage confirms the Twitter/X issue:

https://www.lynalden.com/

What’s the summary thesis?

What are your favorite guns for someone who is not a big gun enthusiast but is passionate about self defense?

Like, you aren't optimizing for a zombie apocalypse but you want your wife to be able to pick up the gun and defend the house from intruders if need be, and the gun's maintenance levels have been maybe questionable but it's reliable enough to still probably work reliably and she can wield it.

I’ll tell you ahead of time.

The watchmen are retarded. They were retarded for the Middle East. They were retarded for the Patriot act. And they’re still retarded now.

Don’t give them information. Pressure them every step of the way. Assume retardation whenever possible.

Mock them when a meme presents itself.

nostr:note1vgx9cddqa4krwpevrpkjpefnu5y0p3qyg9anxaf6r3kjh7q5qghqqeykc5

What do you disagree with?

I enjoyed Inside Out 2. I haven’t seen the first one but she filled me in with a summary, so I knew more or less what I needed!

nostr:note17lujhnzpa3x46vgvgyer0r8shp7x5583h2ml8qw66cseklxc6p6qtzfshz

My husband’s 8-year-old niece is having a birthday party with relatives and friends invited. But all seven friends declined to come, one by one, either due to getting sick or family issues or because some of them have big tests.

And the mom was hesitant to tell her about the last ones, including her best friend, being unable to come, since that final piece of news is devastating. So when we arrived, the niece was super happy, dressed up like a princess, showing us all the decorations and picking which colored forks each of her friends would have for the cake.

Basically, the expectations and reality couldn’t be more starkly different. It was like a comedy show setting up for a sad punchline. And eventually the mom dropped the bombshell, crying ensued, etc. The niece said this would be awful since her party would be all adults talking.

So, now I’m playing My Little Pony with her for damage control. Next, I’m going to blow up a lot of balloons to throw around with her and challenge her to see how many she can keep in the air at once. And then she wants to watch Inside Out 2 together.

How’s your day going?

Example: each parent has five siblings, for ten total aunts and uncles. Each of those aunts and uncles has an average of five kids.

50 cousins.

A lot of people look down on blue collar work, which I think is misguided. Especially for skilled blue collar work (and most type of work does benefit from skill/experience).

Basically, there’s a popular notion that it’s objectively better to be a CEO than a plumber, or an engineer than a barber, and that’s pretty off base. So it’s not that they criticize blue collar work in any overt way; it’s that they assume that that people in “lower” jobs would all want to be in “higher” roles if they had the choice. A technician would want to be an engineer. A janitor would want to be a CEO.

There are a lot of studies on job happiness and one of the most consistent correlations is that people are happier when they get more immediate feedback. Like if you cut people’s hair or fix mechanical issues or wire up electronic boxes, you often resolve things in minutes, hours, days, or weeks depending the specific task, and with progress along the way, so you get that quick feedback loop where you see the positive results of your work quickly and tangibly. Nothing lingers, unclear and vague.

And for those jobs, often when you’re outside of work hours, you’re truly out. You don’t have to think about it. You can fully devote your focus elsewhere. There’s not some major thing hanging over your head, other than sometimes financial stress or indirect things.

Now, obviously jobs with more complexity and compensation and scale give people other benefits. More material comfort and safety, more power to impact the world at scale, more public prestige, etc. and for some people that’s important for happiness, and for others it is not. And the cost is that it’s generally highly competitive, rarely if ever turns off, and usually comes with much slower and more vague feedback loops in terms of seeing or feeling whether your work is making things better or not.

There was a time in my life where wiring up electronic boxes was really satisfying. Each project had a practical purpose but then also was kind of an artform since I wanted it to look neat for aesthetic and maintainability purposes. I would work on these things like a bonsai enthusiast would sculpt bonsai. And then eventually I would design larger systems and have technicians wire them instead, but for some of the foundational starting points I’d still set up the initial core pieces to get it started right. I wasn’t thrilled when I realistically had to give that up when I moved into management for a while.

I have a housekeeper clean my house every couple weeks. She’s a true pro; she used to clean high-end hotels for years and now works for herself cleaning houses. When we travel, she can let herself in and clean our place, since we trust her.

She doesn’t speak much English, but her daughter does, and that daughter recently graduated college.

Notably, she consistently sings while she cleans. She could listen to music or podcasts but doesn’t. She just sings every time she cleans. I can tell she’s generally in a state of flow while cleaning. She’s good at what she does, and it’s kind of a meditative experience involving repetition but also experience to do it properly and efficiently and then a satisfying conclusion of leaving things better than how they were found. Turning chaos to order.

Last year she was hit by a truck while driving, and had to be out of work for a few months to recover. When she came back, we just back-paid her the normal rate for those few months as though she cleaned on schedule, so she wouldn’t have any income gap from us. Full pay despite a work gap. She was shocked when we did that. We weren’t sure her financial situation (I assume it’s pretty good actually based on her rate), but basically we just treated the situation as though she were salaried with benefits even though she works on a per-job basis. Because skilled, trustworthy, and happy people are hard to come by and worth helping and maintaining connections with.

If I were to guess, I honestly think she is a happier person than I am on a day to day basis. It’s not that I’m unhappy; it’s that I think whatever percentage I might be on the subjective mood scale, she is visibly higher. I experience a state of flow in my work, and my type of work gives me a more frequent state of flow than other work I could do, but I think her work gives her an even higher ratio of flow.

Anyway, my point is that optionality is important. While it’s true that some jobs suck and some jobs are awesome, and financial security matters a lot, for the most part it’s more about how suited you are for a particular type of work at a particular phase in your life. And you’re not defined by your work; it’s just one facet of who you are among several facets.

Find what gives you a good state of flow, pays your bills, lets you save a surplus, and lets you express yourself in one way or another.

Gm.

One of the cool things about the oldest area of Cairo (which has both medieval and Ottoman era architecture) is that historically and artistically relevant areas are directly mixed with life as usual where people live and work.

For example, this alley has a bunch of local art students making sketches of old architecture, while there are also active businesses in the area like a home accessories shop.

My upcoming client report is the hardest one I’ve ever written, since Wind and Truth just came out today and all I want to do is read that. All 1300 pages of that.

😭

;)

One time I went with a bunch of friends to a famous old mosque, known for its rich history and architecture. It’s built on top of Saladin’s fortress.

Women have to cover their heads with scarves in mosques, so I bought one of those out front.

The problem was, I was wearing my prescription sunglasses, and had lost my normal eyeglasses. So I kept my sunglasses on to see properly inside, and the combo made me look like some wannabe discount rapper or something.

Anyway, gm.

One of the polymarket order books is whether or not the US will confirm aliens exist in 2024.

Earlier this year the odds were 8%, now down to 3%.

https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-us-confirm-that-aliens-exist-in-2024

I’ve been thinking a lot about fight scenes in media lately, and how to make them not suck.

While there are many amazing ones, the majority bore me. Basically, something like 10% of fight scenes are so good that I can remember their details a decade later, and the other 90% are borderline unwatchable and I forget them soon after watching. Sometimes it’s about choreography, but usually it’s deeper than that. But it’s not just emotions either.

It’s generally a blend of choreography with emotions. It’s the full creative spectrum. Many weak fight scenes hit one or the other, but the real great ones hit both and in a way that synergizes to make 1+1=3.

Here’s a fun thread, using Arcane fight scenes as examples. With some spoilers of course. Even if you don’t care about the show, I’ll give context and links for the examples even if you won’t get the same emotional impact as watching the full show itself.

Arcane, the highest-budget and one of the most well-rated animated shows ever, is 15 episodes in now, as it approaches its finale next week. It has a tremendous number of good fight scenes.

But despite a rather hard selection since so many are amazing, I can quickly list my top two as of this time. My two favorite fight scenes from among the many great ones. And they’re complete opposites of each other, because they nail different concepts well. And I’m about 80% confident that none of the fight scenes from the final act will surpass these in my view, but it’s possible. And that’s partially because simplicity goes a long way to making a fight scene amazing, and the final ones are likely to be more complex.

My first top fight scene is Ekko vs Jinx on the bridge in season 1. This is one of the most creative fight designs I’ve ever seen, and this view is very popular so I’m not alone on this in terms of how good it was. Ekko is the hero here, and Jinx is an anti-hero that has been rampaging over everyone else without being checked sufficiently this season, including killing multiple of Ekko’s gang members whenever they attacked her. So, in most viewers’ minds, even though many of us might appreciate Jinx, the Ekko win feels very right here and it’s his side, along with his good allies, that we’re supposed to be on.

Jinx and Ekko were childhood friends, but Ekko went on a lighter path and Jinx went on a darker path, and they’ve been enemies ever since despite both having reasonable path dependencies for how they came to their views. Jinx is trying to get back a very important crystal and already killed a ton of soldiers with a butterfly bomb attack on the bridge, while Ekko is trying to stop her from getting that important crystal back after almost everyone else is down due to that attack. They already had a mini-skirmish where Jinx broke Ekko’s hoverboard, and now they are about to fight for the final stakes directly.

https://youtu.be/OkscEokV238

The challenge from a writers’ perspective is that Jinx is a ranged fighter; she builds novel guns and bombs that are advanced for her world, and uses them in creative ways. Ekko is a melee fighter and very fast, including building hoverboards, but Jinx already broke his hoverboard in their earlier skirmish so he’s limited now. This *entire fight* is going to basically be done in 5 seconds from this point and is very binary; either Jinx shoots him before he can close the distance, or Ekko is badass enough to close the distance and win. So how do we make this interesting?

As the fight is about to occur, Ekko takes the initiative and signals to Jinx. She is stuck in the past, whereas he focuses on improvement. When they were little kids, they often had duels, her paintball gun vs his play sword, and Jinx would usually win vs Ekko. Ekko remembers those, and remembers how Jinx shot. But it’s been a very long time.

So, we get this animated flashback of them play-fighting as kid friends. This 1) reinforces the emotional aspect that these are two young adults are fighting to the death for high stakes despite being childhood friends and 2) that Ekko remembers their fights well, and improved on them whereas Jinx sticks to her patterns.

Ekko replays the animated scenario in his mind where he loses to Jinx’s paintballs, and then, in the present, he makes sure to avoid the same mistakes. She shoots very similarly to how she did back then, whereas he incorporates new moves that he didn’t have back then. He dodges her shots, gets close to her, and beats the ever living fuck out of her in those five seconds.

But after he does that, and she’s utterly defeated, he sees her bloody face while on top of her and hesitates. He sees the childhood friend that he used to have. Vulnerable. Bloody. A girl. So, he pauses. He’s a good person. It’s not easy to beat a woman to death that he knew as a child.

But she uses that moment to unpin one of her grenades to kamikaze with him. Because in reality, she’s *not* the girl he used to know; she’s a violent woman that is willing to open a grenade right next to herself to kamikaze rather than lose. Ekko tries to run at the last second.

The explosion goes off, and at the end of the episode we don’t see the immediate result. The spoiler result in the next episode is that Jinx is mortally wounded by her own grenade while Ekko is less wounded due to jumping out of the way, but Jinx got the crystal back, holding it in her hand as she is dying on the bridge while her father’s forces come to intervene, and that’s very relevant for the season climax.

The overall result is less important than the fight itself. The writers went with the creative path here; how to prolong a ranger vs melee fight, and how to make it interesting. Their Ekko mental replay animation did that amazingly well.

And as a third point, it foreshadows that Ekko will eventually get time-altering powers based on the game lore. In that fight he just mentally used those powers by remembering the past well and doing better than he would have done in the past, but in the future his character will literally get the ability to briefly go back and time and fix things, which is what he did here already. And by extension, it kind of shows why he deserves those powers.

The second top-tier fight scene is Jinx vs the Beast in season 2, which unlike the first one, most people probably wouldn't list as a top fight scene. But I think it is.

By this point, Jinx is quite different. After to her mortal wound in the Ekko fight, her father had his mad scientist pump her full of chemicals to save her life, so she has limited super speed and durability in addition to her pre-existing gun/bomb making skills and overall scheming. She got a buff, in other words. And then she basically won season 1 since she ultimately kept the crystal vs Ekko and used it to deadly effect, but didn’t know what to do after that win since it’s a dark win, went through a major character arc, and is now doing something that the viewer would likely agree with.

She’s trying to bust her adopted child out of prison, along with a bunch of other oppressed people out of prison. She succeeds. But then for details that I won’t go too far into, a giant beast attacks the prison, coming after one of the prisoners that summoned it.

This beast has been built up for like five episodes at this point, and has insane regenerative powers. As every episode ends, we see that this scientist is building some beast. And in this episode, he *finally* unleashes it to come and bust him out of prison, not knowing that Jinx is already coming to bust him and others out of prison.

Season 2 has a “Big Bad”, and she happens to be inspecting the prison at this time, and this beast literally knocks her to the side like a joke. She’s an utter badass but this beast is like “gtfo here”. So we get the setup that this thing is unstoppable even comparable to other badasses.

So Jinx, her right-hand woman Sevika, her adopted child Isha, and this prisoner that summoned the beast to him, are all at the bottom of this prison dealing with guards after everyone else escaped thanks to Jinx, and this unstoppable hyper-beast comes down ready to kill everyone.

https://youtu.be/YHrF7gbBB6w

The guards turn their attention from Jinx to the beast as he breaks through literally everything. Jinx herself focuses on the beast too. As he breaks down to that bottom floor, his first strike killing guards initiates heavy metal music. So, we get a well-synced audio change that fully amplifies the sheer magnitude of this problem relative to prior threats in the show. He busts through all the guards like a joke.

Jinx shoots the beast with her magical weapon that would insta-kill most things, but he heals from it instantly. She gets that “oh shit” look on her face, and immediately tells her right-hand Sevika to get her adopted kid Isha out of here, while she hangs back to deal with this insane beast to distract him.

Jinx at this point has been actively declining to be any sort of hero, saying she’s not fit for it. She’s instead been trying to be an adopted mother to this orphan kid Isha that she saved, which directly conflicted with her other path of being a violent hero, since being that violent hero would make it harder to raise her adopted kid.

But in this moment, both paths converge. She came here to save her adopted kid Isha, but to be a mother for her and keep her safe she needs to be a violent hero in this moment, so she focuses everything on holding the line and basically sacrificing herself against this hyper-beast.

As Sevika brings Isha out, Jinx fights the hyper-beast all-out. And at this point, she has super speed and durability vs when she fought Ekko, along with her better weapons, so she’s going all-out against this thing physically and technically in a way that most others could not. But she’s constantly on the defensive since he’s so damn unstoppable even against her magic weapons and chemical durability/speed.

We get scenes back and forth between Jinx fighting the beast, and Sevika bringing Jinx’s kid Isha out (Isha’s perspective is desperately worried for her adopted mother Jinx). And then importantly, one of the later scenes is that Sevika brings Isha out of the prison, and we see the front gates. It’s an utter bloodbath; this beast just sheer broke through the main front gate uncontested against their forces. It re-affirms the sheer magnitude of what Jinx is dealing with down there even more than we saw prior, even as she’s already losing gradually.

And then as it ends, the beast beats Jinx, and she pulls herself against the wall. She accepts the defeat, saying “you got me hairball”, and she tries to kamikaze with a grenade toward him like she did with Ekko. But the beast even stops that (and probably would have survived it anyway). So, Jinx is defeated even in her kamikaze attempt, is frightened, and readies herself for a painful death, but was successful at getting her right-hand and adopted kid out.

There are spoilers beyond that which I won’t go into. What’s notable about this fight is that it’s not particularly creative like the other one was. Some unstoppable hyper-beast vs an agile, badass, ranged, underdog character we want to survive. As the plot later reveals, this beast has a ton of plot implications, but we don’t even know those at the time, and yet it’s *still* an amazing fight for a few reasons.

The first reason is that’s well-telegraphed. The show didn’t fuck around with telling us ahead of time how unstoppable this thing would be. They built him up from late season 1 into season 2 in various end-credit scenes, for like 5+ episodes. So even for those that didn’t know the video game lore, when he was finally released, we knew this thing wouldn’t fuck around.

The second reason is that it was well-choreographed within the episode. The beast literally flings the season’s later Big Bad away like a joke. The Big Bad might be more impactful overall since she has armies and all sorts of political machinations in addition to her physical badassary, but in a direct fight nothing stops this thing, nor is it close. And then he busts through down to the prison, through every single defense. And we get escalating scenes of just how bad this is, like toward the end we see that he literally just bloodily massacred the entire front defense and pushed in. And his attacks are timed with heavy metal music to boost the impact. He was amplified perfectly to the viewer. Those details matter in terms of execution.

And then the third reason is we have a character development, narrow win condition, and emotional stakes. Jinx, deciding to stay here and distract this unstoppable thing to get her right-hand and kid out, is a hero move, which she has been rejecting. Previously, she rejected being a hero because 1) she literally thought she’s a jinx, bad luck, that nothing good comes from what she does and nobody should follow her and 2) after moving beyond that view, she felt that protecting her new adopted child meant forgoing her previously violent self that she has slowly accepted herself as being.

This moment, however, required embracing her violence to protect her child, and she gladly did so. So she made the choice to embrace her violent self and likely die fighting this thing so her right hand and adopted child could get out. She decided to be a hero, for her child.

There was nothing uniquely creative about it. Instead, it was just perfectly executed. We are signaled ahead of time how unstoppable this thing will be, when it’s unleashed we are increasingly shown that it’s as unstoppable as we suspected it was in terms of narrative and well-synced music, and then when it impacts the people we care about, we see character decisions to try to interact with it to save others, which gives us emotional stakes amid a well-choreographed fight.

So, while I’d say the Ekko vs Jinx fight maximizes the combo of creativity and emotion, the Jinx vs Beast fight emphasizes amplification and character. Very different. But both amazing. Both perfectly executed.

There were many other amazing fights in Arcane, but I think those two were the best.

The show presents some fights that are *supposed* to impact me more than some of these, but for me they don't fully capture it. Since Violet and Jinx are the two main characters, when they fight in early season 2 that should be the best fight ever. And while it's decent, I don't think it's the best. It feels too much like the writers wrote it. Like it's structured as a scene, that we've been expecting. When I watch it, I am thinking, "what are the writers going to do here?"

When writers do their best, we don't see their handiwork. We just feel like it was character decisions. When writers err, we can more easily see their hand at play. The Jinx vs Violet fight, as epic as it was, had too much of the writers' hand at play for me to call it a top fight of the show.

That's part of why I'm pretty specific about these other fights. Ekko vs Jinx. Jinx vs the Beast. They feel organic from the characters' own decisions, the writers hands' were hidden, and there was amazing creativity, amplification, emotion, character, and/or execution.

Part of me hopes that we drop to $85k and chop around there for a few months and establish an $85k gang.

Just for meme potential.

I'd guess that her character would surprise people the most.

Fair.

Part of the OP is a joke. It’s just four of the main character portrait drafts in AI in a quadrant, not an *actual* trailer of any substance. It’s just that when you put four characters together it looks a bit like a trailer, was kind of my joke.

Mainly interested to see vibes of how people feel about each one visually, ignoring the fact that they’re obvious AI for the most part.

For context, my draft is up to chapter 38, reaching into 80% draft completion, and the third act is the hardest. I’m moving forward but this is some tough shit.

101 on how gold was confiscated:

You had to turn it in for dollars by a deadline prior to dollar devaluation, and there were massive prison consequences for not turning it in, but little resources in terms of investigating who didn’t turn it in. That would be expensive. So it was fear based. Focusing on illegality and tail risks on edge cases more than enforcement on average.

Institutions had to comply immediately, since it’s all visible. So the government broke liquidity in the domestic gold market, which was enough for their purposes. Gold became a hard-to-trade illegal relic for those that held it.

If a small family hodled some extra bars for 40 years until it became legal again, they did okay.

But can the government track bitcoin in the 2020s better or worse than gold in 1930s for enforcement purposes? That’s the right question.

And don’t just think of confiscation. Think of 70% selective taxes and things like that. Far more within the current rule of law. That’s the sophisticated approach. Don’t take it. Selectively tax it by a lot.

Those are the politics to push against from a bitcoin perspective.