Now here's a thread about the novels I started but did not finish in college ranked from least favorite to most.
Nobodies Understand You was my Fight Club take. It was about an office worker in New York who sees a staged fight between homeless people and gets radicalized, ends up joining a group of faux superhero vigilantes and it goes badly.

Cover photo: homeless guy on shopping cart.
Inclusive Biography of Jesus Christ was my 1st novel idea after I finished Better Than Church in high school, worked on Freshman year, delusional homeschooled guy thinks he went back in time with a "chrono trigger" to mentor Jesus from ages 13 to 30, starts a cult, gets executed.
An American Vampire In America was my post-modern novel that I abandoned the best of these to work on late sophomore year, finally gave up early jr. year when Marty Beckerman gave me middling feedback on drafts. It was very dark. I researched energy vampires and f'd up my Chi.
In addition to being a bad move for my literary career, really best case scenario you have an interesting po-mo novel that 2000 people read and a blog fan base of total weirdos and you maybe do a little tour of college towns meeting weirdos, best case!

Post-modern is weak -
In addition to that I think my obsession with energy vampirism researching and channeling shadow energy to write sections, it hurt my health. I had a prolonged health crisis of chronic symptoms. Shouldn't have fed on the chi of trees. I'm telling you.
The cover image was from a Newsweek article that graph mapped out the sexual relationship history of people in a school and there is a big super-graph with a hole in the middle, kinda looks like a dragon,

So header like:

An American
Vampire

[in]

<in graph hole>

(America)
Pat Rhodes who works in REITs now asked me what novel I was working on over the summer and I said: "An American Vampire IN AMERICA" and he laughed.
My favorite novel prototype from then was Swords to Satanists, and it's a dang shame I didn't have the discipline to finish it. This would have been some fun Harry Potter meets Naruto vibes with MCR soundtrack, Thank You For the Venom, Finn MacCool vs. shotgun Paladins - yes yes?
It had a sort of two dimensional love story, a buddy cop relationship with the Paladin-turned vampire who teams up with Finn, a redemption arc, epic magic battles, Naruto level tactics and strategy in the fights, a lot of fun. It had *structure*, it had pacing, build up, climax.
Seriously my life would have gone very differently if I had followed through from world building to completion. I would have been a minor lit. celeb and young, playing that Finn Mac energy, I would have made the videogame franchise with outside funding.
Moral of the story: make a good product, post-modernism is super lame, don't feed off people's chi or anything weird like that, you want blue magick.

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More from @duganist

26 Mar
I imagine some of my audience enjoys the bespoke content so here is a list of my short stories from college ranked from worst to best - no you can't read them, I have no access, they live only in memory and now twitter. But anyway here's the Buzzfeed listicle:
Desymposium - Freshman year

I guess I was trying to do Plato's Symposium around my friend's divorce and a story he told me about characters who he had Thanksgiving with. Meh.
Post-Modern Beowulf - 2nd Semester Sophomore

A school shooting story where there's a cool kid who beats the school shooter to death thus saving people and he is widely lionized. I think I missed an opportunity here climaxing on the fight, should have dwelled on the adulation.
Read 8 tweets
26 Mar
Therefore all banks that have big scale and big M2 deposit cycling are like Facebook or a mutual credit network: they're graphs with a certain velocity. Facebook has retargeting to reduce churn and drive ad interactions, banks have account velocity, mutual credit has the same.
If the next Facebook (improving the utility of online advertising, massive B2C interface) were to apply what works about fractional reserve banking it could create a mutual credit network between the small/.med. sized biz using it.

Large corps+banks have done it for centuries!
This anchors on hard money/austrian economics by giving us a valued moat for the security of the ledger, *but*, we can also apply the network effects of fiat corporatism down stream to a decentralized grain that means everyday people are on similar business footing.
Read 6 tweets
24 Mar
A lot of the things about the BitMex swap that came to be copied widely were based on historical accidents. The Bitfinex hack caused them to adopt the round number of 1 bps per 8 hrs. Before they had a formula. They simply chose +/- 5 as well, it was a round number bias.
Now I don't dispute that those were good product design moves in 2016. This was first in class. But now there is a whole industry of perp. arbers. We're smart and we like edges. So I wanted to give people edges structurally the way Deribit did, but from a new angle.
My idea is that the base rate is based on relative interest rates like BitMex did. This will have to be an unlocked feature for the long-term future and not the default version. Once we have margin lending tx we can benchmark how people are loaning synthetic BTCs and USDs.
Read 8 tweets
3 Mar
Newcoiners:

1) you have enough fiat from your career/business to buy in a HODL stake like 0.1337 BTC or more (currently almost 7k USD)

2) you risk your $1000 accumulated over years of savings buying 6x lvg. futures - can lose on a pullback

3) Call spreads

Here's the problem:
0.1 min. size on Deribit means you have to shell out fully $400 to buy 1 contract ATM for March.

That's not an advisable bet unless you're planning on catching a move fast - theta is very high - higher than many people's daily wage.

Need 25k to get portfolio margin on Deribit.
Maybe they lower that back to 0.1 BTC so it's like it was in 2019. Still more than people have. Deribit's margining system will close out a further out-of-the-money sold call with liquidation because the profits of the more expensive call don't settle as realized until sold.
Read 10 tweets
29 Dec 20
Listening to these Saylor podcasts, first off:

1) This man is having a manic episode

2) He's not wrong

3) Tracy Alloway could barely get a word in edgewise and it's funny

4) Saylor has invented Bitcoin Volization, it's beautiful let's explore the process:
Step 1) Put Corporate EBIT History in a box

Step 2) Cut a low-interest coupon out of that box

Step 3) Put a 5 year call option in that coupon

Everyone wants to arb off 5 years of low theta volatility
You're getting paid to hold an option for 5 years.

You're *getting paid* to hold an option... for *5 years!*

60 monthly call premiums, plus 4.75% in total interest.

Or 5 Annual Call Premiums

$113 for a 510 call on MSTR. That's a 30% annualized return.
Read 10 tweets
30 Aug 20
Seeing the massive success of Yearn I can't help but contemplate on the eve of the war, what the right ratio of liquidity reward inflation vs. founder reward is. Obviously its a question laden with sunk costs. But here is my scientific approach to really learning from this:
1) The RC build we're releasing is tokens trading + KYC whitelists, featuring Trade Channel LTC trades for tokens that are fast. Vesting Tokens of Founder Reward begin accruing past 1000 LTC, the first ALLs are going to my trading desk and early investors, hmm. LTC/USD spot arb.
2) The subsequent Oracle build, which may be released relatively quickly *possibly* in time for simultaneous activation, depending on how merge issues go this week, will enable BTC/USD swaps/futures arb. It's a no-frills, closely held ALL at this point, pure fee competition.
Read 19 tweets

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