I just spent *way* more time looking up dyson spheres than I care to admit.

A bought a filter that improves the water quality for my house, including water softness, and it’s a total game changer. Didn’t realize how shitty my water was. -Reduced the chlorine and iron, which were measurably bad. -The softer water makes hair and skin feel so much better after a shower. Not dry.

My May 2025 newsletter is out now. It focuses on global trade, along with an assessment of this attempt to rebalance it, along with various investment implications of it. https://www.lynalden.com/may-2025-newsletter/

I caught a cold in May. How the hell do you catch a cold in May?

GM My too-big-to-fail bank has been locked out of doing wires today due to some vendor technical issue. Meanwhile, magical internet money continues to flow.

Broken Money has now sold over 100,000 copies. The readership demographic is really broad as far as I can tell. Many sales are individuals, in many countries. But for example there is a big tradfi institutional money manager that has given out dozens of copies to his money manager friends, and there is a big CEO that gives out dozens of copies to his CEO friends and members of Congress and stuff. Throughout this year more translations will come out. I think my foreign rights agent has like 7 languages out so far, and another 13+ are in the pipeline.

Real GDP for Q1 2025 contracted for the first time in three years.

Remind me again why people are so up in arms about spam on the timechain?

My husband discovered Baldur’s Gate 3, and I think he has become one with his computer now.

A single human cell is more complex than any machine humanity knows how to build yet. Only our greatest processors are even getting close. The human body consists of trillions of these cells, specialized into tasks. A being of marvelous, monstrous complexity. And yet we forget where we put our phone.

It seems we like the coin again.

One of the challenges of fiction is to balance pacing between action and downtime. My draft sci fi novel is relatively fast-paced, but doesn't push it to the limit as some of those non-stop action stories do. There are moments where characters have more "slice of life" days, or moments of emotion or contemplation, etc. Periods for the characters and reader to catch their breath before something big happens. However, one thing I try to do is make it so that each of those slower moments serves a *double purpose*. When reading those chapters, the reader's initial takeaway is that it was for character building and so forth, and is potentially skippable. But then later in the novel, some character aspect or worldbuilding aspect revealed in each of those chapters ends up being more important than they realized at the time. Like playing chess against someone and a few of their moves seem random or unneeded, but then it comes together into a surprise checkmate where each move was indeed deliberate to help set it up. That's the goal, anyway. One of the first-wave beta readers of my sci fi manuscript noticed this, and it was one of my favorite pieces of feedback so far. He felt some of the slower moments could be trimmed in the moment and wrote those moments down, but by the end was basically like, "nevermind, I see now, keep literally all of those."

After driving my Hyundai for 16 years, it’s finally starting to fail. So I’m going to join the rich life now… and get a Toyota. Here’s to the next 16.

What are the main pros and cons between Nostr and Pubky under the hood?

The biggest “productivity hack” I have is just not watching television. What little I watch is very intentional. In the second half of 2024, I watched Blue Eye Samurai (8 episodes) and Arcane (18 episodes). In 2025 I watched the first season of Invincible (8 episodes). Usually during lunch, on my computer. One thing I realized is that since coming back from Egypt three months ago, I didn’t turn on any of our televisions. They were off for the three months I was in Egypt as well. So when my husband came back he’s like “…why the hell are all the televisions messed up, all apps logged out of, remotes basically dead?” Last night we got one of the televisions working and watched Deadpool and Wolverine, lol.

My husband is flying back to the U.S. today after having been stuck in Egypt managing a big construction project for a while. He hates long flights, so to amp himself up he randomly decided to stop in Dublin for two days. Just because he hadn’t been there before. So he just went there by himself for no particular reason, stayed in a literal castle hotel, ate steak, drank beer, spent hours walking around seeing all sorts of delightful churches and parks and homes, and then left.

Went shopping at Target today and took a moment to look at the book section. The adult fiction section was like 85% romance (including romantasy), 14% thriller, and then Wind and Truth.

While I have nothing against short fiction, the reason I’m not drawn to it is that I want to get to know the characters. That takes time. My sweet spot tends to be a long stand-alone novel or a duology/trilogy. When you go longer than that, into some epic series, I’m skeptical. By default I view it as someone writing for a career rather than to tell their optimal story, with *very* limited exceptions.