Sometimes love is expressed through the teeth. #catstr

One thing about the Pacific Northwest that brings me immense pleasure is its cuisine. It is a culinary tradition with a unique dedication to local ingredients and simple preparation. There is a heavy emphasis on seafood; salmon being the most obvious ingredient (smoked, seared, raw, you name it), but also other fish like halibut, sablefish, and tuna, shellfish of various kinds (scallops are my favorite), even seaweed. Things like seaweed and raw fish also point toward an Asian influence, particularly Japanese, that carries with it flavours such as miso, wasabi, and sake. The essence of the Pacific Northwest is most keenly felt at the coast, where its majestic forests meet the vastness of the mighty Pacific Ocean. From those forests, our local cuisine finds inspiration in a broad array of wild mushrooms, eclectic edible plants like nettle, huckleberry, and fiddlehead fern, tree essences including douglas fir and spruce, and game meats such as elk and grouse. Duck, a less common commercial poultry, also features to my great satisfaction. Due to the uncommon and seasonal character of many of the ingredients, restaurants that pull off this unique style of cooking are few and expensive, but well worth it. I consider myself priveleged to live in this time and place, and to make enough money, that I can indulge in such sublime tributes to this wild land that I call home.

If it ain't one thing it's another... Sorry nostr, but I will be venting some negativity here. Skip it if you don't want that in your life, I understand. I was fortunate enough not to have my life savings stolen by invisible strangers with bot armies. I was sufficiently paranoid, and prepared. But I was complacent elsewhere. I am taking a couple of weeks off work. The death of my mother was the inciting incident, but I was at a breaking point anyways. It has been incredibly restorative to get away from the stress for a bit. But, I have recently been informed by my lead hand that our jobsite was broken into and robbed. Again. Over the past year that I have been at this site, the local crackheads have stolen company tools, personal tools (not mine, until now), and thousands of dollars worth of copper wire. This stuff was secured but locks were cut and wooden doors were smashed through. Apparently this time they hacked and smashed their way through the *steel* door to my temporary office (located in a concrete bike room in the parkade) and stole about $3000 (CAD) worth of my tools, some of my lead hand's tools (who already got robbed previously), and the company laptop that was the command center for the work that I do as foreman. Drug addiction can turn a human into a monster with freakish strength. Tool theft, in particular, is a type of theft that especially disgusts me. When one steals something of monetary value, they are stealing the time and productive energy that went into earning the money to fund that purchase. They are stealing that past portion of your life. Theft of property is partial theft of life (while murder is complete theft of life). But when someone steals your tools, they are also stealing the means by which you convert your time and productive energy into value to be spent going forward. They are attacking both your past (the money you spent on the tool) and your future (the money that tool would help you earn). It is doubly evil. Of course, questions of good and evil, and morality in general, do not factor into the equation for these guys (and occasionally girls). I have seen the photographs of the ones who got caught at my site, bent over the hood of police cars in handcuffs (we are constantly under attack; sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it). These are not rational people making informed choices. Their eyes are dead; the drugs have drained the last of what made them human and all that is left is a Gollum-like creature, forever in pursuit of its Precious, to be obtained at any cost, even as it kills them. They are past the point of reason. You may as well try to explain to a bear why it shouldn't eat you. It simply does what it must to obtain what fuels it. But at least with the bear, it sustains its own life by taking yours. The zombies who attack our site seek only to perpetuate their own degradation, and hasten their own incremental death, one hit at a time. It is the ultimate waste: the theft of one person's life in service of the destruction of another's. I must fortify our defenses. The ineffectual security guard who works the night shift is of little use to me, and the general contractor is unwilling to increase the security budget. The cops who show up an hour after the attack has begun are a porous sieve who catch only the most inept. I cannot rely on anyone but myself here. I don't know what I will do yet. What I want to do is rig our toolboxes (metal, but isolated on rubber wheels) with a serious but non-lethal voltage every night when I leave, but that's undoubtedly a crime in my jurisdiction. If someone were to smash and cut their way into a locked room and then recieve an electric shock when they tried to steal the means with which I feed myself, I would likely go to jail. I will have to pursue more neutral defenses. My city is rotting, and I want out. It's a lost cause. My plan was to wait until my bitcoin would get me a bigger down payment on a house on the coast, far away from this cesspool, but I'm starting to weigh the quality of life improvement that would come from getting away from all this versus the benefit of waiting for appreciation. I'm still half young, and I have many years of productive work ahead of me. The exchange rate of bitcoin isn't running away from us anytime soon, I've come to believe. I used to buy into the idea, pushed by certain influencers, that hyperinflation was right around the corner and my chance to stack cheaply was quickly running out, but that story is getting stale. "You're running out of time" is just high time preference in a different costume. It's just money, and its primary purpose at this point in my life is to get me out of this city and into my first home that actually belongs to me. Waiting around to time the market is feeling increasingly hollow. That said, I'm not going to do anything immediately. I intend to finish what I started at this project, which is scheduled to finish early next year. But I'm not waiting around after that, even if the dollar value of my bitcoin is the same then as it is now. If it's significantly lower, well, then maybe we're just looking at continuing to rent but somewhere more sane. But my wife and I have had enough. It's great to stand and fight, but there comes a point when it's time to just walk away, let it burn, and build a life somewhere else. I once loved this city, but it's time to let it go. It has become but the corpse of what I once knew.

Grilled octopus, ahi tuna tartare, and oysters (out of frame). The sea delivereth its divine bounty.

Nevermind enemies, I'm looking out for anemones.

My god, this world is beautiful. At least, that's easy to say on days like these, these precious few. 350 days a year, my life is concrete, and rebar, and traffic, and chores. But days like these remind me why I do it.

There are mountain people, and plains people, and city people, people of all sorts. My spirit draws life force from the sea. May I never find myself far from it.

Juat read this article for the sake of studying history in the making. Dude's talking about 256-bit entropy seeds being leaked across an airgap by "electromagnetic, acoustic, optical, thermal, and other covert channels." Bro, priorities. Thay said, not everything in this article is complete bullshit, and I believe in reading opposing takes from people I disagree with. Worth a read if you can tolerate hearing that fucking voice in your head. View article →

"Tremendous influx" of people trying to buy pre-assembled SeedSigners. We've just learned a hard lesson about not trusting software (because that's what the CC vulnerability was, not a hardware issue). That's great. All wallet software (including SeedSigner's) is now being subjected to a viscious probing by AI and when that's done we can all sleep a little easier. But it need not stop there. Almost none of us are qualified to audit hardware, even generic Raspberry Pi components, but building it yourself is a step in the right direction if you're serious about minimizing trust.

If we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that stolen coins that are able to be recovered by law enforcement will probably just get pocketed by governments for their Stolen Bitcoin Reserves. Even if culprits are caught, I wouldn't anticipate a return of funds. It's just too juicy an opportunity to further centralize the ledger in the hands of the state.

There are some who, after "upgrading," held onto Ledger devices as "expensive paperweights." Tucked away in boxes and junk drawers, unused, collecting dust, possibly for years. In the last 72 hours those broadly (and deservedly) panned devices were, for some people, unexpectedly critical lifelines that rescued life savings, retirements, inheritances. Let's be frank: Ledgers blow. The company sucks. But they saved more than a few asses when "good enough" was all that mattered. Most of you are done with Coldcard forever. It's hard to imagine why anyone would ever use one again. But before you go about burning, or shooting, or smashing yours with a hammer, consider just tucking it away in a box somewhere, if you can stand to still have the thing in your possession. It may feel like inviting your rapist into your house and giving them free room and board, but consider it nonetheless. Because you never know when, or how, something shitty and undeserving of trust might save your ass. Unknown unknowns.

The arrogance and dismissive contempt for others always irked me, but I set that aside in the spirit of "separating the art from the artist." In retrospect, someone who is that brashly confident in themself is perhaps less likely to take seriously the possibility of their own failure, to question their own assumptions, to seek to disprove their own results. We've seen it in science, now we see it in engineering. I am recalibrating how I assess people who build things. Humility doesn't merely make someone more pleasant to deal with, I now believe. Self-doubt, so long as it is not crippling, is a virtue of the utmost importance.

MK4's, MK5's, and Q's starting to get cracked. The attack continues...