u/DemonKingSwarnn

i grew up reading books with these prologues which are set in distant history/past, and that’s precisely why my story has alot of these

My agent hates me for this and says I’ll be losing some really good deals because of my stubbornes and I feel her, I know she’s probably right but this is MY story and ik i should write it in a way my audience would like it but that’s a part of it, to me the whole point of writing is narrating a story you came up, to the world, if this makes any sense and that’s precisely the reason each of my character in mythril has their story/intro starting with something that happened in the distant past, usually it’s a reason for why and how they came to be. And I like to believe that every great story has their own versions of trope the world claims to be fed up from, on top of my head I can think of ‘the mentor who dies’ and ‘the ancient prophecy and humble origin of heroes’ and each great story like Harry Potter, Song of Ice and Fire and Aragorn have those, ik cause I’ve made a whole notion doc studying books before I started writing one myself

But ya I do get why alot of people hate the distant past trope, I believe it’s mostly cause they don’t want to start a book or story with something irrelevant (at that moment) which might either say too much and give in the entire plot or too less to keep annonying them

Still my question stands is to what trope would you support and incorporate it into your story? here to steal your ideas

my uncle was a firefighter who died saving six teenagers from a house fire and cuz of that he's kinda local legend in my family and community and I've always wanted to honor him somehow so when I started writing my story I made a fictionalized version of him one of the main inspirations for a character

he's the leader of an elite group of firefighters in my story treated more like heroes than ordinary firefighters

people who run toward disasters while everyone else runs away really made them cool the story isn't really about the firefighters tho, it's about my MC who starts out as a delinquent whos angry and reckless generally going nowhere but over the course of the story he gets involved with these firefighters and eventually what happens with them inspires him to change his life and join them. basically the whole firefighter arc is about him growing into a better person which is also why this character was such a huge tribute to me cause my uncle was one of the people who inspired me to believe being a good person isn't about what you say it's about what you do when someone actually needs help kinda cheeky but ik

so I thought I'd created this meaning ... ok scratch that, I thought i'd made a real tribute until then I wrote the fight scen

theres a misunderstanding b/w my MC's group and the firefighters both sides think the other's done something terrible things escalate and eventually my MC gets into a fight with the firefighter leader and he punches him. my uncle the fictional version of my uncle right in the face

the funny thing is narratively it actually worked really well the misunderstanding gets resolved afterward, my MC develops a ton of respect for the firefighters and the whole thing becomes one of the turning points in his character development readers loved the chapter and i thought id somehow written the perfect tribute lol

then my aunt and her kids read it they were not impressed cause apparently watching a fictional version of your dad get punched by the protagonist isn't exactly how everyone interprets a heartfelt tribute and they told me i'd ruined his image and made him look disrespectful. i tried explaining the entire point was basically the opposite, he isn't portrayed as weak or incompetent he's one of the most respected characters in the story and the fight only happens cuz of a misunderstanding, and the person who punches him eventually becomes a firefighter cause of the example he sets. still didnt help.

but here's where i realized i'd made a second even dumber mistake on top of it i know exactly what my uncle looked like but the problem is that when i was writing him i wasnt just remembering him, i was painting a character so i exaggerated a few things without meaning to made his presence bigger, changed little details, gave him slightly bluer eyes than he had and made him taller than he actually was cuase in my head it made him feel more imposing. which sounds harmless until your family reads it and immediately notices.

and the worst part i literally built systems specifically to prevent this exact thing. ive got notion obsidian and mythril all set up with notes about the character becuase apparently my brain cant be trusted to remember the details of a person im actually writing about. every time i write him im looking at the picture of my uncle in my head and trying to recreate him and somehow i still managed to change things. couldnt even make one system i had three lol

so now ive got a fictional version of my firefighter uncle who's portrayed as a legendary hero who inspires my delinquent MC to become a firefighter who also gets punched by that same MC whose appearance i accidentally altered without realizing it and a family that thinks ive somehow turned their beloved firefighter into a punching bag.

started this as a real tribute. pretty sure i accidentally wrote the most complicated family argument imaginable instead.

TL;DR: my uncle was a firefighter who died saving six teenagers. i based a heroic firefighter leader in my story on him as a tribute my delinquent MC eventually fights and punches him but the experience inspires the MC to become a firefighter and completely change his life. readers loved the chapter but my aunt hated it

when you trade forex on-chain what are you actually trading?

been trying to wrap my head around on-chain forex and think i might actually have this right, just want to check

people talk about trading EUR/USD or GBP/USD on-chain like it's the same thing as spot forexbut you're not actually buying euros or selling dollars, you're trading a perpetual that tracks the price of the pair

no currency changes hands at any point, it's cash settled the whole way through, and a funding rate mechanism is what keeps the perp price anchored to the real spot rate instead of drifting off on its own

if that's the case, does it actually matter to you as a trader. are you only after the price exposure, or does it make a real difference whether you're holding the underlying asset versus just a derivative that tracks it?

maybe i'm overthinking it, but wondering how people here actually think about this distinction in practice and if it’s even okay to do so

honest OrqAi review after around 5 months in production, from someone who tried the others first

thought id write this up since i couldnt find a real OrqAi review anywhere when we were evaluating, just marketing pages and listicles. so here's the actual experience from a small product team running genai features for real users.

quick backstory so you know where im coming from. we had the classic mess. prompts scattered across code and notion, no versioning, routing hacked together, and every model update would quietly break something and wed hear about it from a customer. tried the piecemeal route first, Langfuse for traces, a homegrown eval script, LiteLLM in the middle. all fine tools but nobody owned the full picture and our PM couldnt change anything without an engineer.

looked at Langfuse (strong for tracing and evals, open source), LangSmith (fine if youre already on Langchain, we werent), Braintrust (evals focused), Portkey and Helicone (gateway-first if thats your main pain). ended up going with OrqAi about 4 months in now.

whats actually good:

~ does the whole loop in one place. prompts with versioning, routing across a lot of models, evals, monitoring, without gluing separate tools together. main reason we switched, and its delivered ~ non-engineers can edit and test prompts themselves now. sounds minor. completely changed our iteration speed. PM ships prompt tweaks without a deploy ~ compliance was the sealer for us. EU custoers, so GDPR and the EU ai Act stuff isn't optional and Orq had SOC2, and GDPR and EU data residency covered, which knocked out most of our shortlist ~ routing with fallbacks and retries has quietly saved us during provider outages more than once

whats not perfect:

~ newer company, so way less random community content, fewer stackoverflow threads. you lean on their docs and their team. support was responsive for us, your mileage may vary ~ the prepopulated models carry a surcharge. if youre bringing your own API keys its a non-issue but worth knowing going in ~ if youre still prototyping one feature, its probably more platform than you need. the value showed up once we were past the toy stage and drowning in prompts and compliance requests

would i recommend it? for our situation yeah. specifically if youre past the prototype phase, tired of duct-taping tools together, and especially if you have any EU or regulated compliance needs. if you only need one narrow slice the focused tools are cheaper and often free, no shame in that

BTC went from 58k to 64k in like a week and I keep seeing should I buy now posts so here's context instead of an answer not going to tell anyone what to do with their money, but the actual sequence for context: dropped to a 21 month low around 58,188 right around July 1st. weak jobs report came out days later (57k jobs added vs 100k+ expected), which shifted rate cut expectations under the new Fed chair, and that's most of what pushed it back up toward 64k

separately, apparently over a billion in leveraged shorts got wiped out on the way down, which added its own bounce on the way back up. so part of this move is genuinely just forced buying, not new conviction point being, the news driving this is mostly a macro data print and a liquidation cascade, not some new bull case. worth knowing what's actually behind a move before reacting to the number itself

fling dropped this morning and they sold 3,588 btc for $216 million,purpose being funding dividends on strategy's digital credit securities ,which are five series of perpetual preferred stock with combined annual obligations of $750-800 million.

In may the 32 BTC sale was framed as inoculation meaning to sell a symbolic amount to prove the mechanism works, maintain capital market confidence and keep issuing equity and debt to buy more btc. The logic held when MSTR traded at a premium to its btc NAV. Investors paid extra for saylor's conviction and the leveraged exposure.

MSTR now trades below the value of its btc holdings and the premium that made the model work has flipped to a discount so raising fresh equity at a disc to NAV is dilutive and raising fresh debt when btc is below avg cost basis of $75,699 is expensive which leaves selling btc to service the preferred dividends as the path of least resistance and exactly what this morning's filing shows.

The preferred dividend structure doesnt care about bitcoin's price trajectory or saylor's $21 million long-term target,it pays quarterly regardless and at $750-800 million annually thats roughly $187-200M per quarter in obligations so today's 216 million sale covered approximately one quarter's worth.

This will become a recurring event unless btc recovers significantly above the avg cost basis or strategy finds cheaper financing.

For eu investors holding MSTR or considering it through platforms like bitpanda or traderrepublic as a bitcoin proxy ,the gap between direct btc exposure and leveraged corporate exposure is $216 million wide this morning and getting wider

Is the preferred dividend structure fixable without a significant btc recovery or is this now a quarterly liquidation story?

July 1 MiCA deadline passed and the actual number of fully-licensed platforms in the EU is smaller than most people think

def not a hot take, just a fact check on something I've seen misquoted a few times this week.

transition period for MiCA ended July 1. Full CASP (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) licensing is now mandatory to legally serve EU retail customers, not optional, not "in progress," fully required.

number of platforms holding full authorization across the bloc is still a fairly short list.

tho bitpanda got its BaFin MiCAR approval back in January 2025, so it's been operating under the new framework longer than most competitors.

What I haven't seen discussed enough: what happens to user funds on platforms that are still mid-application or in wind-down mode post-deadline

And now I've finished all the released chapters. Bruh, now I have the same problem as what made me read the manga. 😭

We are back to square one