I had a great uncle named Hugh. When he turned 18 in 1943, he decided to enlist in the military and go fight Nazis in WW2. As one does. In early 1944, he found himself as the radioman on a B-17 bomber, as the Americans upped their bombing raids on Berlin. Their bomber was attacked by German pilots, heavily damaged, and the pilot said they gotta parachute out, it's going down. So, Hugh funds himself parachuting over German countryside from a destroyed bomber. Early in the war, it was relatively uncommon for American/British/German pilots to shoot at enemy parachuting pilots. It was considered dishonorable. However, when the Americans/British really upped the bombing over Germany, and the war was increasingly turning against Germany, the German pilots increased their rate of shooting at parachuting American/British pilots. Their cities had been disastrously struck, some of them lost friends/family in the bombings, so they were more likely to just finish off downed enemy pilots. Hugh, as he parachuted down, was terrified at that thought, expecting that the German pilot who destroyed his bomber would finish him off. He watched as the pilot performed a wide arc and come back around, and he's like, "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit," but then the German pilot flew by him and saluted, and left. Trolled him but let him live, basically. Showed him he could've done it, but didn't. So Hugh lands in a tree in German farmland. He cut the parachute and fell to the ground, fracturing three vertebrae. So he's 19, injured, and realizes he doesn't know shit about geography, but decides he'll try to make his way in the general direction of Switzerland. He spends a week sneaking around the farmland, injured, and eventually gets severely dehydrated. So he sneaks up to a well to get a drink, and comes across a 10-year old German girl, who stares at him wide-eyed since he's a disheveled soldier-looking foreigner. He panics, and has absolutely no idea how Germans greet each other. So he does an enthusiastic Nazi salute and yells "Sieg Heil!" which of course is *not* how most Germans greet each other. The girl screams and runs away, so he's like, "oh shit" and goes to hide in a tool shed. The townsfolk come out and find him, capture him, and turn him over to the authorities. He gets sent to a prisoner of war camp for the next 16 months. Him and his fellow detainees circulated a newsletter within the camp at one point, and formed a music band out of like discarded cans and pots and stuff. Toward the end it got trough, because as Allied forces took more and more land, the outer prison camps would do forced marches where the prisoners would have to walk to a deeper camp, while malnourished, and if they got exhausted and couldn't go on, they'd be shot. So he had to do two of those forced walks, but eventually got rescued by Allied forces. Came back to the US, used his GI bill to go to college, and became a social worker at a hospital. Really quiet, calm guy. Most people didn't know he had this crazy story arc. Anyway, that's the post.

-You’ve got to fly somewhere, but the only flight available that day leaves at 6am. You begrudgingly book it anyway. -Then the day before, you get an email from the airline saying “we regret to inform you that your flight has been delayed by two hours” to a far more reasonable 8am.

My half-hour animated Broken Money video now has 500k views on YouTube. Coming up on its two-year anniversary:

Here's a Nostr exclusive: the alternative cover of The Stolguard Incident. During the design process, I had two artists design covers, and went with Kim Dingwall's cover. The other one by Joshua Griffin was cool too, but it had "movie poster" vibes and many readers prefer to picture characters the way they want rather than be shown them, so we kept that one as concept art. Still, Joshua's work deserves people to see it. Ava, Stallard, and the Jade-Eyed Witch appear alongside Asim on this version.

I brought out Nostr Lyn a bit in the second half of this chat. Talking macro on BTC Sessions w/ Luke Gromen:

A couple weeks back I was at the New York Stock Exchange for some meetings/events, and they were like "let's update your formal pic that you use for things, that's from 2022". So we do the classic "let's take a slick pic under the NYSE bell, the literal heart of capitalism" photo. Because that'll make it all professional and such. The problem is, whenever I smile, I inherently look like I'm trolling. Regardless of the setting, it looks like I'm just there for the lolz. So the pic seems kind of unusable for formal stuff. Fun for Nostr, though.

One of the few things *not* breaking these past few weeks is liquidity, actually. The Fed’s standing repo facility isn’t being used, the Fed’s swap lines aren’t being used, and the SOFR-IORB spread is only mildly elevated. #macro

Wow that sounds nuts, someone should write a book on that.

Almost nothing in macro currently matters until the Strait of Hormuz opens. That’s the macro. It’s a binary analysis similar to Covid 19.

Whenever I’m asked about private credit lately. On Fox Business, on podcasts, at conferences:

Really not looking forward to flying today.

Unfortunately, Chuck Norris was the only person who could stop this train.

The Stolguard Incident was ranked the top new release in Amazon this weekend for both the cyberpunk and technothriller genres. (It’s also currently the best seller in the space marine category, despite a distinct lack of space marines. Which, I mean, okay.) Thanks everyone for checking it out! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GNS9MYB5

Last night when I finished work and joined my husband for movie night, he instead showed me a video about Newcomb’s paradox and we spent two hours debating it until bed. Anyway how is everyone’s weekend going?

My novel, The Stolguard Incident, is now available! Amazon (print and ebook): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GNS9MYB5/ Barnes & Noble (print only):

Barnes & Noble

The Stolguard Incident

Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for books, NOOK ebooks & magazines. Shop music, movies, toys & games, too. Receive free shipping with your Barn...

Here’s the premise: “In the late 21st century, society is more fractured than ever. Billions satisfy their every whim in virtual worlds, leaving those in power free to tighten their grip on the real one. When a terrorist with strange abilities begins a campaign of violence, military investigator Asim Rahal is thrust into a race against time to find and stop her. But each step of his pursuit reveals the threat to be far worse than he could have imagined, and uncovering it may cost him everything. Truth has always come with a price. Every hero asks themselves what’s worth dying for. The harder question is: what’s worth killing for?” You can check out more info here: https://www.lynalden.com/the-stolguard-incident

That feeling when the year is 2026, you haven’t gone to the post office to mail anything for years, and you partially forget what you’re even supposed to do as you walk up to the counter.

Making a movie that is both scary and funny is extremely rare. Usually if it's funny, that significantly reduces how scary it is. And if it's truly scary, it's unlikely to be funny. Anyway, here's a review of Deadstream (2022) which managed to be both scary and funny. I'm personally not much of a horror film fan, but my husband loves them. So we watch them semi-regularly. Jump scares freak me out, along with the tension leading up to potential jump scares, so I'm that cliche person watching the tv like "nope, nope, don't go in there, nope, why would you do this" while clinging to my husband's arm or something. There's a big ecosystem of low-budget horror films that are made with a lot of care and attention, and this is one of them. It was made by a husband and wife team, and the husband also starred in it. I watched some behind-the-scenes info about it, and the detail that went in was pretty crazy. The non-spoiler premise is that there is a famous streamer who does all sorts of wacky stunts for his audience, but he messed up and got demonetized and cancelled for a while. He's trying to make a comeback now, so he is facing his biggest fear: spending a night alone in a haunted house while livestreaming it. This premise is smart, since it lets them face a lot of horror tropes head-on. Often, horror films are frustrating because characters make stupid decisions like splitting up, or checking on something creepy when they clearly shouldn't, etc. But since this is an influencer doing everything for money and audience, he has rules set up that he *has* to check anything creepy out or he will forfeit the stream's sponsor money, and he has to do certain other things that purposely make it scarier or riskier. It's not an elevated, thematic film at all. Instead, it's a well-executed satirical B-movie that fully owns what it is. Was pleasantly surprised.