u/Fast-Cut-2752

I’m an industrial electrician apprentice. I landed my first job last November and was assigned to work at a factory, where I stayed until the end of January. During that time, I agreed to and completed all requests for overtime. My boss told me and another new hire that our contracts had ended and that, due to a “slowdown,” we would need to wait two months before returning to work.

At the time, I thought this was completely understandable, because in the final few weeks I saw that the factory was staffed entirely by temporary workers; on the very last day, there were even ten people manning a position meant for just two. I guess I’m new here, so it’s only natural to go home first in this situation, and two months isn’t that long anyway.

But after two full months had passed and I hadn’t been told to return to work, my boss explained that he was also waiting for further notice, though the likelihood of returning to work was high. It wasn’t until the beginning of this month that he said the slowdown was more severe than he had anticipated, and that several of his long-time employees had also been asked to stay home.

I'm not sure if this counts as a form of firing. However, I really love this job, and it’s actually very hard to find an apprenticeship. My boss signed me up for an apprenticeship during my second week on the job, and I’m so grateful to him that I don’t want to jump ship to another company just because of a layoff.

This situation has really left me feeling very confused.

I’ve been using AI for writing for about two years now, though I’ve always treated it as a hobby. Three years ago, when AI-generated images were still pretty terrible, I tried setting up a local image-generation program, but my computer wasn’t powerful enough, so I quickly gave up on it.

Lately, I’ve seen people using AI to create short videos, and the character consistency and camera work are actually pretty good. I tried using AI to write a script and generate a video, and the results were promising, but since I’m using the free version, I can’t test it multiple times.

Is anyone else doing the same thing? Turning their own novels into AI video series? How did you do it?

I’ve been wanting to improve my writing skills lately, so I’m looking for a few books to study narrative pacing and style.

In my personal experience, I’ve found that The Lord of the Rings seems to be the best-written book I’ve ever read. In particular, I’ve noticed that a significant portion of the original text is actually devoted to directly describing the world-building. But as I was reading, I didn’t find anything particularly clunky; the plot development and background explanations all flowed very smoothly.

The other book is One Hundred Years of Solitude, though I always seem to forget it as soon as I finish reading it. I think the way the timeline unfolds in the first half of the book is a truly masterful writing technique; I feel the balance between detail and brevity is just right, and the use of white space is perfectly executed.

For me, Neuromancer was the hardest to get into. I felt completely lost the whole time I was reading it, and on my first read-through, I didn’t even understand what the story was about. Even though I’m a huge fan of cyberpunk, so I’m familiar with most of the lore.

I started trading in January, and so far I’ve lost more than I’ve gained. At first, I traded purely on instinct, but later I started picking up bits and pieces of different things, very basic PA, ICT, and SMC. I know my understanding is probably limited to the videos I’ve watched, and in practice, I sometimes make money and sometimes lose it, I can’t even tell if it’s the method that’s working or just luck.

I once made a small profit using a breakout strategy, but a few weeks later I lost it all in a market where bullish and bearish candles were overlapping. Later, I tried to figure out a reverse strategy. I ran the strategy through a program, and the backtest data looked pretty good at the time, but since last week, this approach seems to have stopped working.

I’m eager to develop a trading system that works for me. I realize my knowledge and experience are far from sufficient, so I definitely need to keep learning. But I also want to document both my successful and unsuccessful trades to try to identify some patterns.

After trying it out, I’ve found that few ideas work sometimes but not others. When they do work, I always feel like my analysis is just hindsight or luck. So I’m hoping to get some help. How do you all go about reviewing your trades to develop a logical trading system and confirm that you’re on the right track?