I like dandelions. They’re beautiful and edible. I don’t understand people who poison their soil to get rid of them. Just mow them if you don’t like them. Anyway, hope you’re having a good Friday, anon.

Watching my son throw rocks into a lake is one of the great joys in my life.

It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

I took this photo yesterday evening while @CARLA⚡️ and I watched our son blowing bubbles. We ate dinner outside with Carla’s parents and my mom. Midwest weather is finally getting nice. Everything is so green. Trees are budding and flowers are blooming. Our son laughed like crazy every time a bubble popped in my face or his. We all laughed with him. There is nothing so pure as a child’s joy. After the most abnormal week of our lives, it was wonderful to appreciate the normal. The normal felt so ecstatic… It’s easy to forget how precious those everyday moments are… so easy to let them slip by, unappreciated… but they’re everything. Feeling grateful and blessed. It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

Chopping wood is good for the body and soul.

UPDATE: we’re onto LOTR The Two Towers (Extended Edition) but sounds like discharge may be starting soon… View quoted note →

Saturday morning LOTR Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition with @CARLA⚡️ in the ICU. Hoping they release Carla to go home this afternoon… Thank you to everyone for your continued love and prayers. It means the world to us.

Feeling grateful.

Update on @CARLA⚡️ She’s still in the ICU and will be until at least Saturday or Sunday, BUT she is improving day by day. She’s been walking multiple laps of the ICU every hour with her walker (and her Walker) and doing breathing exercises. We also just got the pathology report back on her spleen and it is BENIGN, which is amazing news. It also means we still have no idea why it spontaneously ruptured… we have some theories, but that’s about it. Carla also had her abdominal drain removed today, so she’s a bit more comfortable now. Still in a lot of pain, but that’s natural when you have 40+ staples holding a giant abdominal incision together… She’s managing the pain well and continues to be tough as hell. She also just got cleared to have some broth (she’s been on sips of water-only this entire time), so this is a welcome change. But the highlight of the day was when they let her go outside in a wheelchair to get some sunshine and fresh air! (Picture below is just before we went outside) THANK YOU to everyone for sending your prayers, love, and wishes for a speedy recovery. Carla is incredibly strong, but your support makes her even stronger. She is very grateful for your love and support.

Carla did TWO FULL LAPS of the ICU this morning with her walker!! Her Walker was also there. View quoted note →

Thank you so much to everyone who has sent their love and prayers to Carla and our family. The number of people who have reached out saying “my wife and child almost died too” is truly staggering… Thank you for sharing your stories. The fact that these terrifying near-death experiences are so shockingly common (especially during pregnancy/childbirth) is a great reminder of how absolutely brutal and deadly most of human history has been… We are so fortunate to live at a time when modern medicine can save people who would have been guaranteed to die for 99.999% of human history… beyond grateful to the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved her life and the life of the baby in her belly. Carla is still in a lot of pain but she’s resting a bit now, thank god. View quoted note →

I realize I should have clarified Carla is 17 weeks pregnant. So baby is healthy but is still inside her. The surgical incision they made to remove the blood and her spleen is massive… like very massive. As top-to-bottom as an abdominal incision can be. So her scar will be healing while her belly is still growing. Docs tell us she will be fine but she will just need to take it extremely easy for the remainder of the pregnancy so she can be ready when the baby is due. The human body is incredible and Carla is tough as nails so she will get through it. View quoted note →

Yesterday was the worst day of my life and then the best day of my life… Worst because I thought I might lose my pregnant wife. Best because Carla and the baby survived and are stable. Thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and prayers for Carla. It’s been an insane 24 hours… @CARLA⚡️ is stable now and both she and the baby are okay, but it got really fucking bad really fast… Scariest day/night of my life… Carla is an absolute badass and at the beginning of the slow road to recovery, and I am so damn thankful. Posting this here for those who’ve been asking what happened: Carla started feeling weird yesterday afternoon after a nap. We were up all night with our son and had to take him to urgent care in the morning, so we were all resting before going to meet up with the family for Easter Sunday. When Carla woke up she had some back pain and was very clammy. She was a bit disoriented but still totally coherent. Within 10 minutes she was almost completely unresponsive. Barely conscious. Crazy disoriented. Hardly able to respond even with single words. Zero control of her body. Totally limp in my arms. Vomited. I called 911 immediately. Paramedics arrived and she was still barely responding and could barely open her eyes. When she did open her eyes she said she couldn’t see, her vision was black. They got her in an ambulance to the hospital. Her BP was insanely low in initial readings, like 55/38… got her to the hospital and BP remained dangerously low. About an hour she appeared to improve a little after multiple rounds of fluids. BP still super low but higher than before. She became lucid and ER staff thought she was stabilizing. She was shivering from the IV and had a bit of back and abdominal pain but it was manageable. They said we’d have to stay the night for monitoring but would be fine to go home tomorrow. But then she started having severe abdominal and back pain around her shoulder blades. Pain got to the point where she was screaming like crazy. “Worst pain of my life” (and she has an extremely high baseline pain tolerance). I’ve never seen her in such unrelenting agony like that… The pain kept getting worse and they did additional scans. The ultrasound showed a lot of fluid in her abdomen, likely blood. They started giving her massive blood transfusions and shortly said she needed surgery immediately. They thought it might be a ruptured ovarian cyst but wouldn’t know for sure until they opened her up. Got her into the OR about an hour after that. Doctor said surgery would take an hour… 2.5 hours in the OR the later the doctor finally came out and said Carla and baby were both OK, thank god… longest 2.5 hours of my life... It turns out they had to do a giant incision down her entire abdomen from too to bottom to find the source of the bleeding (because it was NOT her ovaries or uterus) and bring in a third surgeon who was on call. They removed **2+ liters** of blood from her abdominal cavity. For context, the average adult woman has about 4.5 liters of blood in their entire body… They had to remove her spleen because it had ruptured and was the source of the bleeding… the doctors described it as “battlefield medicine” because of the amount of blood in and out and how dicey things got… but thank god both she and the baby are ok. The doctor’s still don’t know why the spleen ruptured… it was a “non-traumatic” rupture, meaning there was no physical injury to the spleen which caused the rupture (~1 cm). It was a “spontaneous” rupture, which is quite rare apparently. They did note that the spleen was slightly enlarged but also not sure why yet. Waiting for pathology to see if that provides any answers. May have been contributing physiological/mechanical factors from pregnancy but we just don’t know yet. The reason her shoulder blades were in such intense pain was because blood from the spleen was pooling under her diaphragm, blood is an irritant, and apparently that triggers the phrenic nerve which the brain interprets as pain between and around the shoulder blades. Multiple surgeons said she was “this close”…thank god we didn’t waste any time. When one of the surgeons checked in on her today, he said she would have been “dead by midnight” without the emergency surgery and splenectomy… The doctors also all said this combination of circumstances is very rare. Spleens obviously burst all the time, but usually it’s directly related to intense trauma, which was absent here. They said this case is probably going to be in medical journals because it’s so strange. Carla is still in a lot of pain (we’re not even 24 hours out from the end of the surgery yet), but she’s handling it like an absolute champ. She was sedated and intubated with a ventilator until about 5AM this morning. This afternoon she was already able to get up and go walking multiple times. The pain is really bad, but should hopefully start lessening with each passing day. It’s going to be a long road to recovery, especially with pregnancy on top of it, but she and the baby are both OK and right now that’s all that matters. One step at a time. In typical Carla fashion, she’s already been cracking jokes and trying to bribe the nurses. She even fired off a post while still a bit loopy from the sedatives, but now she’s just trying to manage the pain and hopefully get some sleep soon. Thankful for the great doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved her life and our baby. Thanks again to everyone who has reached out and sent their thoughts and prayers. I’m passing along your messages to Carla and they’re very much appreciated. This still doesn’t seem real. A normal day turned into a nightmare so damn fast… Hug your loved ones tight. Life is a gift. Don’t take it for granted.

If you see this stick and say “fuck yeah” we are kindred spirits.

Fountain: Podcasts & Music

THE Bitcoin Podcast • Nostr + Bitcoin vs AI Slop: The Fight for a Human Internet | Paul Keating • Watch on Fountain

Walker sits down with Paul Keating from Primal to talk about where Nostr is three years after Nostrica, why adoption has been slower than the early...

View quoted note →

Nostr: just wanted to let you know that @CARLA⚡️ and I are VERY close to finishing the narration for The Stolguard Incident by @Lyn Alden I’m currently editing some of the final chapters before sending it off for mastering, but we’re essentially done with recording. In the meantime, go get yourself a PHYSICAL copy of the book. It’s excellent. Like really fucking good. If you’ve avoided fiction for a while, this is a great book to get yourself back into it. I used to read shitloads of sci-fi and fantasy, then went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and only read Austrian economics, Bitcoin books, monetary theory, etc for a while. I got back into fiction in the last couple years, and I’m so glad I did. I had forgotten that the greatest lessons often come from worlds that do not exist (or don’t exist *yet*). Anyway, back to editing. Go pick up a copy and we’ll let you know when the audiobook is ready.

Lyn Alden

New Book: The Stolguard Incident

An overview of The Stolguard Incident by Lyn Alden- 2026's hot new upmarket sci fi thriller.

If you could only recommend *one* book that everyone should read, which will fundamentally alter the way they see the world, what would it be? #asknostr

Whenever I watch legacy media I immediately think “my podcast is so much better than this shit.” (Not just my podcast, to clarify. MANY podcasts)

LIVE NOW COME HANG View quoted note →