Prettyboy Tell'em

Finally Home

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 22:17:11 +0000

A handful of weeks ago we (that is, me and my fiancé) decided that this apartment we are living in now would be the last we would ever live in. Not to say that it's bad in particular but high-density housing in general sucks. If we lived in the country and I heard voices in the ceiling I'd have myself evaluated by a pschologist immediately, but here in a 900 square-foot apartment sandwiched between the first floor and the third floor it's quite normal to hear people talking or stomping or what have you. It may have always been like this but I've really only focused on it within the past few weeks, and like a damned protagonist in a Poe short story it's become the only thing I can focus on at times though nobody else seems to notice as much.

This is all to say that since we are slated to move out of this place in May we began shopping for houses seriously about 4 weeks ago.

To buy a house you don't need much. If you have a stable job with an employer registered with the IRS and one that issues a form W-2 (which is most of them in the US anyhow) you can provide a shoestring and some pocket lint you collect as you walk into the broker's office as a down-payment and a lender will approve you for a loan of up to 49% debt-to-income ratio.

As an aside, the debt-to-income calculation is pretty simple. For a typical month add together the absolute minimum payments on any debt you are saddled with (eg student loans, credit cards, car loans) and compare this number to your gross (pre-tax) income. 49% of your income minus debt is the maximum a lender will typically allow your house payment to be. Obviously the payment varies depending on the length and type of the loan, but typically first-time homebuyers get a pretty good deal because they want you to buy a home.

(Un)fortunately for me my employer does not issue me a W-2 and is not registered with the IRS because I do not work for a US company. This itself was a lot of fun to explain to the brokers I talked to. Even better is that I am paid in cryptocurrency by way of a dollar-pegged stablecoin on Terra (the blockchain I work on). Normally when I say this the broker's eyes glaze over and s/he has already decided that my income does not qualify because I don't have a "real" job. Despite getting paid in what the lender sees as imaginary funny-money we still were able to secure a decent loan, and after shopping around with different brokers we also were offered a decent borrow rate.

The Easiest Way to 50x Your Money For Basically Free

One of the funniest things about owning a home that most people don't seem to realize is this: a loan is just free leverage. The bank is literally multiplying your money; it's an even sweeter deal when you consider that while the value of the home outpaces inflation the principal always stays the same. Effectively, the longer you wait to pay the loan the less you have to pay, because eg $500,000 God-blessed American dollars is worth far less in say 10 years than it is today. Every day the effective value that you owe is shrinking as wages rise and as the dollar inflates.

You don't even need to have the full loan amount (duh otherwise you'd just buy it in cash). If you put eg 20% as a down-payment then the bank is giving you 5x leverage only for the cost of the interest on that loan. Similarly for 10% down it is handing you 10x leverage and for a mere 2% down this is a staggering 50x leverage. As a US citizen I cannot even access 50x leveraged margin trading on Binance (thanks SEC) but will the bank give me 50x leverage on my capital for basically free? Hell yeah they will.

Speculation

With leverage in any market obviously comes risk. The risk you take by saddling yourself with debt to buy a home is in my opinion minimal. Especially relative to things like trading equities with debt; only gold-hoarding debt-averse boomers have said things to me like "just be careful because the housing bubble could burst at any time." The absolute worst thing that could happen to me is that I'm stuck in a beautiful house for 4 extra years. What a pity that would be.

Even though we do not have visibility on the other bids put on the home the seller's agent said we beat out 9(!) other buyers. It's across from a very nice school which is coincidental for us since we're not sending anyone to school any time soon but for other people I'm sure this was a selling point. It's a litle over 2.5x the size of this apartment and was built in 2018 so the chance of needing serious maintainance in the next 6 to 8 years is slim. The yard is not well-kept but hey, this at least gives me something to do. I'm inexperienced with serious yard-work but, like with my car, it is good sometimes to just throw your full weight at the problem and figure it out as you go.

The floorplan is very open downstairs, there are no walls separating the kitchen and the living room (which is nice when you're cooking and entertaining friends) while the upstairs is cozy with two bedrooms on either side of the stairs. One of the bedrooms downstairs is painted a hideous lime-green but this seems easy to remedy. The rest of the walls are quite neutral, light gray in the living room and pale teal in the master bathroom but why this room is so aggressive I'm not sure. From the staging photos I'm guessing it was an exercise room (the photo has a bike, treadmill, TV (lol) and a mini trampoline (wut)) but I'm definitely getting rid of that ugly green.

I wish I could go live there right now, but currently I am what's termed "under-contract" on this house, meaning that I've put a chunk of the down-payment into escrow which will be given to the buyer if I breach the terms of the contract. But if the transaction goes through smoothly that escrowed amount is applied to the down-payment on the home. This money is called "due-dilligence" and (only a few years ago according to my realtor) used to be a small amount like $2500 Uncle-sam Eagle dollars but recently (see: seller's market) it's inflated to basically the whole fucking down-payment. Everyone around me seems worried about this, or throws around hypotheticals like "what if the transaction doesn't go through and you lose this money." Honestly it doesn't concern me. The only person that can breach the contract is me, the buyer. And I'm not going to so there's no reason to stress over something like this. But if you're not comfortable with taking any risk then hfsp I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Everything Shii Doesn't Know

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 10:01:59 +0000

When I began writing in this diary-of-sorts on paper ( later I transcribed my writing from paper to Markdown) I never thought I'd keep writing for so long. The pages and feelings buried here span 6 years of my life; many entries only I know what was going on because they are so vague; however when I go back and read my own writing I feel so distant from the mindset woven into those pages, as if being separated by time has separated us both in some other dimension as well. Yet at the same time I don't feel like such a different person at all.

Somebody... somewhere...

The main difference, I think, is that when I look left and right the things around me have changed from the things that were around me then. I'd never tried VR before last Summer and here today I am in the ether nearly every night. I used to fanatically track my inflows / outflows in a GNUCash spreadsheet when I was on a tight college budget; now I haven't touched that sheet in over a year. I used to drive a shitty '03 Accord daily, now I drive an even shittier '97 BMW albeit I now do the routine maintainance myself.

And though the things around me have changed fundamentally I feel as the same person that whimsically shaved his head one afternoon in 2016, took a Summer job clear across the country just to get out of the apartment, studied in Japan despite how irrelevant the coursework was, and ran (what I understand is) the first college imageboard at my uni, among other things. And you, diary, will be pleased to know that I have never ceased being the jackass, risk-eater, why-the-fuck-not person I once was and will always be.

I know this because recently I left my cozy salaried job to work in a space far more uncertain and far more given to change than I was ever prepared to jump in to. Since making this decision only a year-and-a-half after I graduated college I've had people tell me I'm "making a big mistake" or "throwing away my potential as a software developer" (lol) by entering a field so new and so unfamiliar, that I could do well instead by settling in with the company I was with and finding my niche, taking flight between big-name companies when the time was right or when things looked uncertain. And had I continued to live my life proceeding-as-if and had never discovered the field I'm in now I would have upheld that tradition. And I have no problems with people who choose to do that; so long as they are happy doing so. I was not, so I left. Now I'm building the future of France and I couldn't imagine myself doing anything else.

Obviously leaving of one's own free will is luxury reserved for people who (1) have a plan and (2) can stomach the uncertainty; finances be damned so long as you are getting paid enough to live. The point is to not get comfortable for its own sake but to guard against that kind of thing. If you're cooking-in for every meal and avoiding name-brand things to save money so be it; as I was in college, as I would so-easily do again.

In addition to this change-up I've started writing under my real-name more often than here; likely this alias will phase-out over time. I may come here still to write more-raw thoughts than what I permit myself to write there. You can find that other site easily because it's hosted on the same box which hosts this site O(#￣▽￣) I also enjoy writing over there more than here because it's formatted as a wiki rather than a strictly-linear diary (to be fair I wrote the script that builds this site myself) which lets me link and group together ideas far easier.

Anyway, it's time to say our goodbyes at least for today.

Change of Plans

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 09:04:40 +0000

This past weekend I tripped to San Francisco for Porter Robinson's "Second Sky" festival. The festival itself was held over two days; I attended Sunday which was the final day. Both days were essentially the same show, same artists, same music. Artist Time Air to Earth 11:15 — 12:05 Wavedash 12:10 — 12:55 Knower 1:10 — 1:40 Jacob Collier 1:55 — 2:40 Jon Hopkins 2:55 — 3:45 Toro Y Moi 4:05 — 4:55 Jai Wolf 5:15 — 6:15 Madeon 6:35 — 7:35 Porter Robinson 8:00 — 9:40 I flew out of RDU on Saturday afternoon wearing a Gundam hoodie, black leggings and some shorts over top. Before getting through the checkpoint the TSA agent stops me and frisks my shoulders, probably because my hoodie was bunched up around my upper arms. He takes a long look over me after patting my shoulders. "Is that Mobile Suit Gundam?" he says. "Yeah", I say. I'd planned my flight so I'd have time to catch any shows in SF on Saturday night since the people who come out for Second Sky normally set up DJ sets at various bars in the area. The first leg of my flight ended at Atlanta airport (ATL) with about an hour layover until the leg to SFO began. I read my physical copies of Black Rock Shooter: Innocent Soul to pass the time and to squeeze some Japanese practice in too. The fun really began in the airspace over Texas; 2.5 hours into the flight the pilot relayed that some radar-related equipment was malfunctioning thus making landing in the foggy weather at SFO difficult. The flight circled around for 2 hours "burning fuel" to bring the plane's weight down, then the plane spun around the land at Dallas Fort Worth airport. I thought it funny that the abbreviation of this airport has the same initials as David Foster Wallace. Because of this diversion we were made to stay the night at a very nice hotel accessible by a shuttle from the airport terminals. My fiancé and I dined at the restaurant in the hotel and lingered around the bar to help ease our nerves after a pretty stressful day. While we sat in the hotel lobby I knew the DJ set I planned to attend was happening and that I would not make it to this show, consequently not meeting the good friends I've DJ'd with before who were in attendance; this was one of the more disappointing things about this diversion. One other inconvenience was that we were promised the hotel would be covered by the airline company but the hotel did not accept the voucher provided by the airline. Luckily there were rooms open that we could afford so we footed the bill for the time being. Many people who were also promised a room were still lingering around the lobby, (relatably) refusing to pay for something they were promised would be free. The hotel room itself was massive and featured a king-sized bed flanked by two faux-mahogany bedside tables. Every switch on the wall, like the ones for lights, blinds, and fans, were all capacitive buttons that lit up after one touched them. This luxury would soon contrast with the 3-star hotel we stayed at in SF; each had its own charm though. The construction of the showers in the marbled bathrooms of this Grand Hyatt were the minimal-, glass-type showers with doors that pivoted either way on the hinge. Already I was laying plans for how I wanted the showers in my future-home to look, and picking out in my head exactly what shade of black I wanted for the floor tiling as well. The glass surrounding the shower was not arranged in a square, but rather in the shape of a quarter of a hexagon. That is to say: two panes of glass orthogonal to the wall and making 45° angles with a middle pane which also functioned as the door. We wake up, suddenly, the next morning. It's Sunday, 6:50A in Dallas and 4:50A in San Francisco. We can't walk to the correct terminal because this airport is a fucking nightmare. We catch the shuttle and eventually it lingers to the airport, though the bus took an hour to arrive and drops us off at the correct terminal only at 7:50A. We still need to go through security and we're only 10 minutes away from the flight boarding. The driver's advised me in a west-African accent that "he will unload my bags" and I promptly unload my bags myself because I'm in a mad-dash to get to the metal flying machine and I halfway-run to the security gate, my fiancé in-tow and now he's wearing my stupid Gundam jacket because it's a little warmer than my long-sleeve shirts. I unlace my Nike Air Jordans while walking briskly forward towards the 2-person line that's formed in front of the TSA agents. I've had these Jordans for 4+ years. I've taken them to Tōkyō, Münich, Austria, and with me around the US; I spend a moment to reflect on this history before placing my off-white shoes into the gray bin in front of me. My shoes and personal belongings slide forward into the fat, gray x-ray machine. Shoe-less, I walk into the metal detector. Beep Electronics he says. An agent is recalled from the front of the security gate to inspect my phone. He retrieves my Pixel 4a from the gray bin and takes it behind two doors. 30 seconds later it is returned to me. You're good to go he says. I collect my shoes into my arms and stuff my wallet and paper-printed airline tickets and keys indiscriminately into the pockets of my gray sweatpants. Stopping to rest at the single bench with my fiancé seated next to me I put one shoe on one foot and then put the other on the other and begin organizing my pockets and collecting my mind. We make it to the plane barely before it begins loading. An hour of delays. Then 4 hours in the air and we're there. The festival's already started but I'm not too mad since I accepted my fate after yesterday's diversion. At least the whole show was live-streamed. We disembark the airplane at something like 1:00PM, well-beyond the beginning of the festival but (thankfully) well-before the end. We take the BART from SFO to Powell station. I'm well-familiar with the city after working with the General Services Administration in SF for a Summer. That Summer... I actually had no reason to be in Californa except for Porter's 2019 Second Sky. Thankfully I was offered a job there that year, otherwise I would've been miserable and broke and stuck in Berkeley for 3 months but that would've been okay too. I would've found a way to pay the bills, but this paid far above being a barista or a barback and I could actually put it on my resumé. Oh, it's not alright That one day we're all out of time I'll write you another life I'm sorry for crying.... ... It's just that I love you... ... "One day" can't be far enough So here we are; 1:30P in San Francisco; the festival's already started; "I'm afraid we won't make Jacob Collier" I say. "Unfortunate" he says. He knows why and it's entirely out of our control. There's no need to think of time... We take the BART ("Bay Area Rapid Transit" says the sign) from the end-of-the-line at SFO all the way to Powell station in downtown and disembark at Powell station, walk north for 10 minutes and we're finally at the hotel. We quickly check in and walk up 6 flights of stairs to room #601. It is quite a small room; the queen bed is on the left as we walk in, the bathroom / shower / bath on the right with very little room in between the two. There's a desk at the "far" end of the room and a metal A/C unit jammed out the window. We collapse on the bed, exhausted. Only four hours of sleep separated by 2 timezones and no time for sleep this afternoon. After dropping our luggage off at the hotel we BART to Oakland arena grounds where the festival is being held; disembarking, we walk fast with a few others and all arive at the ticket-gate. The music is far and quiet still. I was in Dallas only this morning. We breach the festival grounds during Toro y Moi's set. I meet some friends, it's a good time. It's amazing how many people are here. Madeon performing "Good Faith Forever" at Second Sky The final two sets pass quickly. I stay for all of Madeon's set, though I watch from the back because my fiancé was extremely tired and could not stand being in a crowd. The more he mentioned it the more I, also, did not enjoy being in the crowd. We watched from the back for the rest of the show. Porter Robinson's "Nurture Live" was incredible even from our vantage. Arguably it looked better from back there, away from the crowd and at a comfortable distance where I didn't need earplugs to protect my hearing. Porter Robinson performing "Nurture Live" at Second Sky Because it's a Sunday night the BART closes early. I didn't want to navigate the post-concert crowd so we left maybe 30 minutes before the set ended. We board the blue-line and head across the bay again. While we're riding towards the back of one of the train cars, a person behind us offers us a Clif bar; he's got a wholesale box. We politely decline. We disembark at Powell street station and walk north a few minutes to our hotel to collect ourselves for half an hour. It will all be okay in the end We eat our small 7-11 lunch supper. The fan's spinning violently above and it's quite hot in this tiny room. After-party I've got tickets to an after-party at the Midway featuring Porter and "special guests". My fiancé decides to sit this one out as the festival's already tired him out. After promising to be safe around San Francisco after-dark (do you know where I was for three months? ) I head to the bus-stop. The M-bus arrives quickly and whisks me away and further east then south. At first the bus is empty save for two other people and the driver. One of the passengers is at the front and installed in a wheelchair. On a whim he pulls the rope above him, signalling the bus to stop. "Driver driver, this stop right here. I gotta get some fucking McDonalds" he says; I try my hardest to stare ahead and not laugh at the abruptness of this statement. The bus stops and the wheelchair ramp extends. He exits and we continue. More people board the bus and they're obviously from the festival. They're talking loudly about the last two shows, Madeon and Porter, and I hear "The City" coming from one of their phone speakers. I sit in silence. I know that talking with the people I've somehow shared a special experience with would be easy but I decide to enjoy myself in silence. Somehow, though shared, I think our experiences are quite different, and we're in distinct places despite being confusingly so near on the same bus. We arrive at the stop closest to the venue we and all walk the common direction to the Midway. I alight the concrete steps outside and the ticket-taker looks at my paper ticket and announces "damn this guy printed his out!". "I like it better that way," I say. Paper doesn't crash or boot-loop. It's funny that the closer I get to technology the less I trust it; I've felt this same feeling working on my car. The more I take it apart the more I understand the actual fragility of the beast. There's only one cylinder firing-order that makes the car run correctly, so many mechanical pumps involved in the whole operation, and so much tubing that corrodes over the years. It's terrifying. The more I learn of it the less I trust in it. And I especially don't trust anyone to service my car correctly on my behalf. But by learning how it all fits together I feel more attuned to its natural harmonics, it's no longer a magical beast of metal and exploding fuel but a carefully-constructed machine with parts that cooperate to produce a simple effect. Anyhow that's why I print my tickets out. Shortly after meeting up with a friend who also managed to get tickets to Midway the "special guest" is introduced as Wavedash . This was a welcome surprise to me, and the music was very fun and high-tempo. We danced a lot to the songs we knew and grooved even to the ones we didn't. It'd been a while since we'd been to such an intimate DJ set. The last venue I'd been to that had the same energy was the Virtual Self show I caught in Akasaka, Tōkyō . Tonight was quite a special experience too: entirely new music (for me at least) and a very fun and lively atmosphere. To give you an idea of the vibe, the four people closest to us were shirtless and extremely sweaty and jumping up, down to the beat. Wavedash DJ Set at Midway Air to Earth After Wavedash was Porter Robinson's Air to Earth project. Air to Earth is a live-only DJ set focused on progressive house and UK garage sounds. Air to Earth reminds me of late-night WKNC , the N.C. State college radio. After midnight typically an auto-DJ takes over and plays music until 6A the next morning. The auto-DJ plays a lot of the same stuff Porter played that night, and many tracks I heard there I had originally heard at 1A on WKNC while studying for tests and exams and grinding out late-night homework. I had aspirations to jockey discs at WKNC but ditched that idea to instead work at Cup a Joe in Mission Valley in between main and Centennial campuses. Air to Earth DJ Set at Midway The music was awesome. Each song reminded me of a Bushmaster house set and I realized suddenly how long we'd been DJ'ing. I scored my first controller here, in California, when I was working in San Francisco over two years ago. The pumping music washed me over with waves of nostalgia as I remember how uncertain the future was these small two years ago, a small forever in what felt like another life entirely, a school-life "balance" dominated by school and homework and stress and the vague, creeping anxiety that I'd never make it out of that institution. We're all gonna make it. The Air to Earth set ends after an hour twenty minutes and we're both fucking parched. We didn't leave our spots from the venue floor because we never could've jockeyed our way back, the crowd was dense and packed tight even in this spike. Luckily there is a spigot of extremely high-pressure water at the end of the bar nearest the exit. We drink five cups each and slowly exit the building quenched and exhausted. Bitch I'm Bussin Sitting on the sidewalk outside the venue we have a chance to breathe freely finally. The music's long-over but conversation lingers on, beyond the concrete reality around us, and slowly back again. The time is 2:40A and I decide to head to the bus stop alone as I need to get up in less than 4 hours. I've timed the bus well; five minutes after arriving at the stop I watch a bus-shaped set headlights tumble down the road from a quarter-mile away down this straight stretch of road. But I'm standing at the wrong stop and it blows by me. This is a familiar feeling. I've gotten comfortable with public transit and these are just the rules of the game. In my defense, the sign for the stop I wanted was only painted on the side of a pole 50 meters from where I was waiting, and I only thought to look around some more after being skipped over. The bus stop sign I completely missed After another half-hour I was heading back to the hotel, finally arriving a little after 4:00A. I ring the bell next to the door to be buzzed in and a sleepy-eyed girl emerges from a dark room and speaks into a microphone at the front-desk, clearly visible behind the hotel's glass doors. "What is it?" "I need to come in." "Come in then." The door was unlocked already and I felt silly for not trying the door; I laugh slowly like someone's who's been awake for a full day; I walk in and up and right then right and collapse in bed, trying my best to not wake my sleeping fiancé. He doesn't notice at all and I slip under the covers, set my alarm for 7:15A and doze off. Union Square My Casio watch rings 3 hours later and I rush to shut it off. I get out of bed, put on my best attempt at an outfit and walk out the door, scrolling through my calendar while briskly descending down the twisty hotel stairway. Because of a time-zone difference I needed to schedule this call for 7:30A PST which was 5:30P there. The other end of the phone was kind enough to talk to me a half-hour before a multi-day holiday began there. On the East-coast doing a phone call at the same time would not be much of a problem but here in California, especially after that incredible night, such a call was only warranted by its importance to me. Before we get into the real discussion the other end of the video call asks: "Is that a Gundam hoodie?" "Yep", I say. The content of the call was exciting enough that any exhaustion left my body for the time I sat in Union Square chatting. After the call I reclined on the bench, scooting deeper into the wood and metal. I breathed deeply and admired the Dewey Monument in the middle of the square painting a rough black against the blue sky over its head. The exhaustion slowly creeps back into frame, though it's a tinge more rosy this time around. The same bed I left an hour ago awaits me to crawl back in again; I slowly make my way back. That afternoon we walk to Telegraph Hill, one of my favorite outdoor spots in San Francisco. The walk up the hilly streets is brutal and lasts forever but the view is so worth it. We stop to eat at a Korean-Mexican restaurant called "Tacorea;" the name is enough to entice us. I have a bowl of spicy pork and rice; we sit outside on the street in a make-shift covered area fashioned from reinforced panels of wood with a window of glass going all the way around the box. It has three walls and sits literally on the street: parked cars are in front and behind of this thing. The food was filling and leaves me thinking that Korean and Mexican food may not be so far apart after all. Telegraph Hill, looking towards the Golden Gate Later that night we take the yellow-line to SFO. It amazes me that we were here only a day ago and in much more of a rush than we are now. Security is lazy and it's nearly 8PM. We eat a bit in the airport and grab a cup of coffee. Transferring again at ATL we take the final leg home and arrive at 8:30AM. I barely slept on the flight home, so effectively I've slept only for 8 hours in the past 72 hours. The exhaustion is a little too much for me to even do trivial things on a Tuesday so I call in sick to my work, sending a note to my manager who is interestingly only a car-ride south of the city I left just 6 hours ago. I leave my suitcase by the door, lock the apartment behind me, resume the air-conditioning and fold myself into the thick blankets on the bed. I sleep for 15 hours, eat a bite of Panera that my fiancé's picked up on his way home (he worked 4P — 8P) and resume sleeping through the night only to finally leave the bed Wednesday morning. When I woke up that Wednesday morning I felt far, far better than I had the day before. As a matter of fact, I hadn't had such an abnormal sleep schedule since the week before. I know that it will all be okay in the end. It's only a light change of plans after all.

Fundamentally Uninterested

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 14:33:09 +0000

Decentralized Finance in the Terra Ecosystem

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 04:07:17 +0000

Here's something I don't write about normally; I've figured that taking a break from writing my usual stuff would be a nice change-of-pace :) What is Terra network? Terra is a public permisionless blockchain providing a number of algorithmic stablecoins pegged to currencies like the US Dollar . Handling Terra USD (UST) is just like handling the equivalent amount of USD; 1 UST = 1 USD, and this dollar-peg is supported by the mechanics of the Terra network. If you're further curious about how Terra achieves this peg you may find this video helpful. There are many other stablecoins pegged to the US dollar outside of the Terra ecosystem like USDC and Tether USD but both of these are only backed by promises; neither of these are algorithmic stablecoins. USDC and USDT rely on reserves held by the minter of the tokens to back the circulating supply one-to-one. Terra's USD is currently the fifth-largest stablecoin in circulation and one of the few algorithmic stablecoins available today. The Terra ecosystem offers many other stablecoins pegged to other national currencies like the Korean Won and Japanese Yen but Terra USD is the anchor of the Terra ecosystem. Generally the benefit of stablecoins is that they are digitally transferrable, unlike paper-money, and self-custodied, unlike money in a bank account . Is Terra Network Safe? Yes; of course I encourage you to always do your own research (｀・ω・´)”. Today I only want to expose you to something you may not be familiar with, especially if you've never heard of stablecoins or decentralized finance in general. This is not financial advice in any capacity. What can Terra ecosystem do for me that I can't already do on my own? One of the biggest and most exciting projects on Terra is Anchor . Anchor is a place where you can deposit UST and earn yield close to a fixed 20% APY. Anchor provides this yield by using your deposit to stake in other blockchains. Your deposit also provides capital to people willing to borrowing on Anchor with an overcollateralized loan. You can withdraw your principal + interest at any time. This is exactly how a bank uses capital in members' accounts (see: Money Market Model ). Here however Anchor provides a superior yield because its smart-contracts use captial far more effectively than a traditional bank can. As an example, the high-yield savings account at my State Employee's Credit Union has a 0.15% APY. Additionally I can only touch this account 8 times a month. In contrast the capital I put into Anchor yields over 133x that APY; this is almost a laughable difference. A $1000 deposit into a 20% APY account compounding monthly grows to $1219.39 over 12 months; the same deposit into a 0.15% APY account is $1001.50. The thought of earning $1.50 over an entire year sounds like a joke, yet this is all the interest that traditional banking affords. Furthermore your deposit on Anchor is entirely in UST; it is not exposed to the volatility of the cryptocurrency market-cycle. UST is only as risky as the USD-UST peg. Remember: 1 UST = 1 USD give-or-take fractions of a penny o(〃＾▽＾〃)o (still unsure? check the USD-UST historic price (it's 1:1)). Only 20% APY? You may be wondering: an extra $219.30 per $1000 per year is nice, but I could get more by gambling on shitcoins! You're right here; but remember that UST is not an investment. It is a stablecoin. (1) You can withdraw at any time, (2) your deposit is in a USD-pegged stablecoin so (3) you have no exposure to the cryptocurrency market. Depositing UST is the lowest-risk investment strategy on Terra ecosystem. There are many more strategies involving varying degrees of risk in the pool of possible portfolios. Many are grouped under the broad category of yield farming . Just Getting Started If you're still curious and want to self-custody your own money on Terra I'll provide a small walkthrough on how to use Terra ecosystem and Anchor below. You can run the tutorial backwards to get your money out of the Terra ecosystem as well, but remember to report your earned interest to the IRS if / when you choose to exit Terra :) On-ramps to the Terra Ecosystem I live in the US. My on-ramp to the crypto ecosystem in general is Coinbase because I can link directly with my bank account. Update: ERC-20 LUNA (wLUNA) and ERC-20 UST are listed on Coinbase! Follow these steps but use wrapped UST or wrapped LUNA in place of wrapped Mirror tokens (I wrote this article on the day UST support was announced lol) ... I assume here that you're familiar with cryptocurrency wallets. You'll need a Terra wallet (I use TerraStation for Chrome ) and an Ethereum wallet (I use MetaMask for Chrome as well). I am a Firefox-fanboy at heart but I use Chrome almost exclusively for my hot crypto wallets for this reason. Once you've got these two wallets installed you can begin to move capital from the exchange of your choice into the Terra ecosystem. Because it is listed on Coinbase I prefer to move funds into Terra via the ERC-20 Mirror token (MIR). Mirror is a native asset on the Terra blockchain and a version of it is sold on Coinbase. Coinbase sells the "wrapped" Ethereum version (ERC-20 version) of the token. To "unwrap" these ERC-20 "wrapped" tokens you need to use the Terra bridge . The bridge supports transfers from the Ethereum, BSC and Harmony blockchains; I know that a Solana integration is coming very soon as well. After you buy ERC-20 MIR tokens on Coinbase and withdraw it to your own Ethereum / MetaMask wallet you can swap it on the Terra bridge for native MIR tokens which are deposited to your TerraStation wallet. With the native MIR token you can swap those on TerraSwap for UST. ... quite a complex process |･ω･｀) For reference I use the following workflow to on-ramp to the Terra network: Deposit USD onto Coinbase using my linked bank account Buy ERC-20 Mirror ( MIR ) with the deposited USD Withdraw the purchased ERC-20 MIR to my own, self-custodied Ethereum wallet (I use MetaMask for this) On Coinbase I need to wait a few days for the initial bank transfer to clear Swap the ERC-20 MIR in my Ethereum wallet for native MIR (deposited to my Terra wallet) via the Terra bridge . Exchange my native MIR tokens for UST on Terraswap . ... if your exchange doesn't offer ERC-20 MIR you may need to buy Ethereum and use Uniswap to exchange Ethereum for ERC-20 UST . Here's how I go from Ethereum to Terra-native UST. Example changing $100 in ETH to $90 in UST This can then be converted to native UST with the same Terra bridge as above. Swapping ERC-20 UST into native UST ... after you exchange ERC-20 UST for native UST you should see it in your Terra wallet! Exchanging ERC-20 UST to native Terra UST After completing step (3) your money is entirely self-custodied ヽ(*≧ω≦)ﾉ... this is one of my favorite features about cryptocurrency in general! It means I have instant and unfiltered access to my own money. Remember that from here on it is your own responsibility to safeguard the private keys to your own wallet; this can be scary at first but the freedom it permits is unmatched by anything else in legacy finance: I can do anything with this money because it is mine and nobody has any say otherwise. Also, all transactions on the Terra network are processed in mere seconds. In contrast my bank may take several days to settle payments from my own account. Deposit to Anchor With the UST deposited into your wallet it is trivial to deposit this to Anchor and to realize your 20% APY. Simply use the Anchor dApp to deposit UST. UST deposited into Anchor After deposit you will receive an amount of aUST (see above) which represents your deposit. This aUST appreciates with time according to a constant rate; when you do choose to withdraw your UST it will have appreciated with roughly 20% APY. The current APY is listed on the front page . Current APY Other Opportunities in the Terra Economy There are many opportunities to farm yields in the Terra ecosystem. These often produce far more than 20% APR, however many tactics will assume a certain tolerance for risk. Using Mirror you could realize excess of a 40% yield while assuming only USD-UST risk. By providing liquidity on Terraswap, Terra's front-running DEX, you could realize quite pleasant APRs as well. An example of APR yields for providing liquidity on TerraSwap Providing liquidity of course comes with the possibility of impermanent loss so make sure you understand the risks! Opportunities with High-volatility Assets on Terra If you can assume more short-term risk than just holding stablecoins you may choose to buy-and-hold LUNA , the Terra asset which absorbs market volatility to help UST maintain its dollar-peg. If you choose to hold LUNA I'd advise you stake it with a trusted validator to increase your LUNA holdings and to receive Terra ecosystem airdrops. Unlike Anchor deposits, LUNA stakers are rewarded with LUNA and Terra ecosystem airdrops. Finally, the highest opportunity of risk-to-reward is betting on the new projects building on the Terra network that launch on Terra's Pylon launchpad . If your investments here pay off you may find yourself with more UST than you know what to do with... in that case, stake stake stake! Redeem Your Principal + Yield If you choose to withdraw from Terra instead of investing your yield then you can simply reverse this workflow! Remember that cashing out is a taxable event (at least here in the US (｀・ω・´)”) so make sure you at least understand the reporting implications of moving money back into your bank account. Stay safe and have fun!

Aaaa

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:53:15 +0000

In my last diary entry, here at least, I said:

Where I am during the day, it's an excessively comfy place to be, but I'm perpetually tired from writing and designing and coding until very very late at night most weeknights.

... this has not changed o(〃＾▽＾〃)o I am every-day tired yet I am consistently learning new things even after the hours of my daily regiment of work .

I'm right: 24 is still quite young.

Still, I feel I should be farther along than I am in both my work and hobbies. I cannot find an immediate solution which makes time for all my interests. Some days my work suffers because I'm thinking of Japanese or P2P or Solidity or any number of other things. Other days all of these things overwhelm me and nothing gets done. No amount of coffee can fix this feeling.

It all takes its toll too. Yesterday I fell asleep suddenly at 3P and woke up at 7P. Some days I don't feel like talking to anyone. I'm not very confident in my work. I think my anti-depressants have helped but they're certainly not magic, and some days the best I feel I can do is not make a fool of myself.

I still intend to take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) at the N2 level in December. Originally I wanted to study for N1 but it's clear I have no time to study that much. N2 is a useless accolade for me now but I hope it can find some use in the future.

I'm not sure how people do this. I'm not sure I'm in the right place.

Arcadia of my Youth

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 10:09:14 +0000

Recently I've felt keenly aware of something that's only vaguely haunted me for years. It's terrifying to know of and simply knowing the fact has paralyzed me more than I like to say. But dually, the idea is inspiring, just the notion that it can be achieved at all. I'm sure many people suffer from this, too, but I do not open up so much to many people so I'm not sure how widely it's felt. By title I'm a software engineer, or something close. I was trained though to be an electrical / computer engineer in school; from a young age I fell in love with computers and electronics. In the 7th grade (that's age ~13) I was first exposed to the TI-84, a scientific graphing calculator that supports a very minimal programming language called TI-BASIC in an algebra class I was enrolled in at the time. This calculator became my obsession for months; there was never an hour in that class where my nose was not buried in this 84, programming the hell out of it and exploring the boundaries where I could cause this computer to break, either via infinitely recursive loops or by throwing very large numbers at it or by inputting very, very long strings. The little chip in this TI-84 captured my imagination and I dreamt day and night of all the possibilities of TI-BASIC. Through this calculator and the modding community around it I learned of the z80 assembly language that TI-BASIC was interpreted to and began playing, after some weeks, with the raw opcodes on the calculator. This caused many soft crashes and many "oh fuck, I think I bricked the whole thing" moments. I gradually scaled back my experiemnts on this expensive little calculator for fear of retribution from the people who bought it for me but I continued to program more and more complex things in BASIC on that 84 The little thing was still fascinating to me. Eventually I graduated to high-school and, somewhere around the same time, to x86 opcodes. In x86 one of the most concrete things I accomplished was writing a real-mode program on a floppy disk to sing Daisy on the PC speaker when the device was booted from BIOS. Bootsector "Daisy" diskette This exploration into the lower-level of "regular computers" led me to learn C during the empty hours of my high-school classes. My exposure to C, then, led me to look into colleges that offered robust computer / electrical engineering courses. N.C. State, Virginia Tech and UM-W among the ones I was considering at the time. My edgy teenage-brand angst obliged me to scorn computer science and software engineering in general in favor of "hard" engineering like computer / electrical so, when the time came to select a major in college, I never even gave "computer science as a major" a single thought. 60. Name: The taste of summer : 2013-07-08 02:13 Yesterday I woke up around 1:00PM and studied Hiragana. Then went outside from some archery practice. It was so nice out I brought out a blanket, a pillow, and some tea and sat in the sun to read my friends linguistics textbook. Got sunburned. Then I drove my scooter to the river for a swim. There was a bunch of kids there on the other side of the river. One kid was sitting in a tree over the river and was being made fun of for not wanting to go in the water because he saw a snapping turtle. I sat down next to him and told him the snapping turtles don't come after humans unless you hurt them, and that even then he does not have to go in the water if he does not want to, that it was his choice. Even given my long-held interest in these things, still, I have never produced something bigger than myself. Many of the people who inspire me to try new things and to get better at the things I'm good at have all created very notable protocols or programs or whitepapers by the time they were my age. It's an unfortunate thing to realize but something I've realized nonetheless. 24 is still quite young, but I know many people much older who are much younger than me. And it bothers me every day that I've not produced a magnum-opus or anything I'd consider even close. I've tried before, with RalEE but I grew so jaded about the platform (that is, textboard culture) before it even came to fruition that I stopped as soon as I had a minimum viable product. And sure, with my typical work it's great to work on something cute with a group of people but some days I want to be a person of remotely relevant consequence, with at least a body of work to stand behind me. Now and despite what I've done in my free moments I'm still quite small. When I hold up a ruler and measure my height against the people I find inspiration in I always come up short. And it bothers me a lot. It makes me question myself a lot. Am I doing what I want to do most? Am I happy where I am? Am I limiting my own self-actualization? These are the questions that make me uncomfortable the most. Many people never seem bothered by this problem. Is it not a problem at all? Surely if everyone had these thoughts then we'd all show them somehow. But the people I enounter everyday, from friends to strangers to people I meet at the supermarket seem complacent where they are. Maybe not complacent, but at the very least not hopelessly frustrated, feeling mired and stuck like this. Anti-depression On the contrary, I've had conversations with friends who do feel stuck. Some days I feel the same, that no matter how hard I slam on the accelerator I never even so much as spin out. It's a sad and depressing place to be. When these thoughts get in my head I tend to do nothing, I tend to surrender myself to whatever happens in the coming moments and hide out in my house for a few days until the heavy feelings pass. Recently I've taken medication to counter these feelings so instead of being depressed in these slumps I'm just, simply, not doing anything. That's its own brand of depressing, though arguably better than being so completely depressed as I was before. And when the things I work on during the day don't line-up with the things I'm programming at night I'm not sure even which way I should go to get "un-stuck." Where I am during the day, it's an excessively comfy place to be, but I'm perpetually tired from writing and designing and coding until very very late at night most weeknights. There are people who have their priorities straight but I, clearly, am not one of them. Dwarf Fortress When I was in high-school one of my favorite games was Dwarf Fortress. This game, brutal with its application of ANSI graphics, conveys the lives of hundreds of dwarves in a fictional colony fending off hoardes of goblin and demonic invaders entirely through text and its own system of rudimentary graphics. In the game, dogs are represented with the lowercase "d", dwarves are very small smiley-faces and goblins are represented with "g". Though you can manage tasks in the fortress, you cannot directly control what each dwarf does. And sometimes dwarves simply do not do the tasks you lay out for the fortress. One of the most notable instances of this is when a dwarf is posessed by a "strange mood". When this text flashes across the screen, the dwarf will do absolutely nothing else except work on his / her profession with unreal devotion, day and night, crafting a masterwork creation after working for days on end. For instance, if a jeweler is undertaken by a strange mood s/he may make an emerald-encrusted masterwork necklace that is more beautiful and more valuable than anything in the entire fortress. If a weaponsmith is taken by the same mood s/he may forge an impossibly sharp and nearly unbreakable sword for a soldier to wield in battle. For me, the me who's met with this frustration, I've found inspiration in the notion that, since I've not yet made my life's work, that's upset me so much that I can't think of anything else. It's enveloped me and some days all I can think of is: how can I get there? Am I limiting myself? Am I happy where I am? etc. etc. I already have the idea; I've spent the last 6 months plotting out the details. All I can do now is not fuck it up.