Scrolling 𝕏, I saw a new AI called lovable make an app. I had to try it.
If you’re like me, you have ideas for software tools that aren’t available, and dream of one day learning how to code and making it come to life.
But you paid for a course, you got overwhelmed by a ton coding language, you hung in there for a month or so, deployed a basic app (readysketch.com), got frustrated hired a coder outside of the U.S. to finish it, and eventually quit because you we’re losing money.
Quitting is super lame, but sometimes you got to know which lane you’re in. I can’t do everything, even though I technically know how to do most things.
You need to focus on what you’re good at, and become great at it.
It’s a website where you can ideas for apps to life with little code knowledge.
Get front-end previews as you chat with the AI.
Connect databases, deploy to Github and even make it live on the web all from one dashboard.
You can start for free, for a certain limit of messages with the GPT but in that first few messages you get a fully functioning app that would have cost you thousands of dollars in development costs.
So, you find out soon that paying $20 a month for lovable.dev is a steal.
I wonder what is it about $19.99 that ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, MidJourney and every other AI is on about.
Ladies and gentlemen, taxed af. My first project with loveable.
My first app with lovable
I’m wildly impressed by lovable’s understanding of what I wanted and how it changed code, and implemented it so quickly.
At times it was faster than just a standard ChatGPT request.
I really wanted lovable to help me code an app for Shopify, but at present, it doesn’t work with Shopify’s CLI.
…so I started with Cursor AI to help me get a ‘Save 10% with Bitcoin payment button’ at checkout. It only got me so far, and I realized I was in over my head, and since a strike.me dev rep told me they already have a bitcoin lightning payment Shopify app I figured I was beating a dead horse.
Although, the save 10% option would be awesome and implementing docs on how small businesses can start putting BTC on their balance sheets would be an excellent service, but until then I figured I’d try something that doesn’t require such technical prowess at the moment.
So, weaving back into what taxedAF is:
Everyone hates paying taxes. I sure do. Especially if you’re self-employed like me.
You should know what you’re going to have to pay your state and the IRS in April, or every quarter as some suggest.
So this is what the app I developed with lovable.dev does:
It breaks down every payment you receive based on your invoices you send out, if you’re smart this will help you find out what to even charge your client, and also what to put away when your client pays up.
It’s an estimation of what you’d likely pay, not an exact. Because obviously, everyones tax bracket is different, how you file, is different (single or married), and everyone’s state/county is different.
But this is a pretty damn close approximation of what you’d owe because I told loveable to include every state (and it’s income tax obligations), what the federal government will charge you, and (news to me) self-employment tax.
God, living in CA with all these taxes you really get f*cked, thus the name I branded it with, taxedAF.
It’s nearly half of my pay check for each invoice that is paid to me.
This is insane.
So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to save 30% of each pay check I receive to use to pay taxes with later.
With all the tools connected to lovable.dev with netlify for domain hosting, supabase for SQL, and github for deployment I literally did what would normally take months, in one night.
It’s still a work in progress and with loveable’s help I can probably turn this into a stream of income for other self-employed IRS paranoid people like myself.
I could include some knowledge docs, some courses, some banking integration options, export to tax software options, assist with even filing taxes, damn loveable is my full stack developer, you know how much that saves me in costs for something this robust?
Over $100k easily is saved using loveable.
I get it, if you can afford a human full-stack dev, by all means. But for start-ups I’m sorry dev’s your job just got replaced → and eventually mine.
But until then, I’ll use AI tools to help all my clients, and myself.
Because bro it’s nearly 2025, this is America and here we go! 🇺🇸
We all know the system is broken. Government spending is a out of control. There is no accountability. Our tax dollars vanish into bureaucracy. Instead of complaining, let’s discuss a solution—Public Interest.
Transparency and Accountability: Would you participate?
Imagine knowing where your tax dollars go. Public Interest makes this possible. By entering your income, tax info, and spending habits, you can see where your money goes. You get a breakdown of where your taxes go, including public salaries to police, fire fighters, politicians and projects. Simple visuals like pie charts make this easy to understand.
Have questions?
Can’t stand my arrogance? Think I’m a lunatic? Let’s talk.
With Public Interest, you don’t just pay taxes; you engage with your money. By subscribing to a public tax in your area, you can track your debts and income, but also you can earn interest on your taxes while contributing to projects in your area that may effect you.
The Power of Decentralized Finance
Public Interest is about more than transparency. It empowers communities with decentralized finance. Members can contribute what they can afford. Thus, they support local projects while managing their finances. The more you contribute, the more influence and rewards you get.
True Community Engagement
Public Interest offers more than financial tools. Additionally, it can include homeschooling resources. It can let community members propose and vote on local projects. This way, important projects get the funding and attention they need with your vote. A vote that is verifiable on the blockchain.
Accountability Through Technology
By using blockchain technology, Public Interest ensures transparency. Every transaction and vote is secure. As a result, this reduces fraud and corruption. Your money is used well.
The Future of Governance
Public Interest can transform governance. Like Uber nearly replaced taxis, it makes political structures more accountable and efficient. If successful, this model can inspire similar systems worldwide. Therefore, it leads to a more democratic world.
Join in promoting Public Interest.
The system is broken, but Public Interest can fix it. This platform makes governance transparent and accountable. Therefore, it’s about seeing where your money goes and being part of the decision-making process.
Transform the future of governance with Public Interest. It’s our duty to ensure a better future for our children and communities. Let’s make a difference—one vote, one contribution, one community at a time.
I went from working 8 years with Baker Boys Distribution to working 1 year at Diamond Supply Co. to now, full time business owner.
I would say that nothing really prepares you for being in control of your income, but literally the last 25 years of my life prepared me for this.
Being forced to expand my skill set over the years made me this one man in house studio that adds many of my clients value in a multiple ways.
I have a client that has me focusing primarily on e-mail marketing, that utilizes my talents in design, photography, 3d modeling and web development.
I have another client that has me focusing on print preparation, web store product updates, customizing their Shopify store, and running email campaigns.
I have another client that has me focusing on catalog creation and web site customizations.
I have over 10 clients and looking to onboard more, some require more of my time than others. I was forced to become an entrepreneur.
Here’s a nice side effect of it all: I’m not bored.
I enjoy doing what I do and I’m constantly learning new skills to improve myself to land more clients. I’m also less stressed, which seems odd, but for working on a project to project basis allows me to work when I have to and give me the flexibility to do what I can, and go where I need to go.
I got time to be home with my dog Luci, I have time to tend to my chickens, clean my pond, pray, and make good meals. Life hasn’t felt better, but at first it felt very shaky, it took a month to kind of settle in, and having a nice buffer in savings and investments helped with that anxiety.
My life has had it’s ups and downs, but every time I look back at these cross roads in my life I always end up feeling lucky.
I’m grateful for these ‘unfortunate’ circumstances, like losing a job, losing a relationship, losing a friend. All of these events gave me the opportunity to change into a better version of my self.
What’s that saying about being too comfortable? You don’t grow or something… It’s true, and when you do grow, it makes you happy and grateful which is the recipe for a good life.
Currently, I’m engaged (thanks) planning to get married and potentially starting a family with a woman that is loyal, god-loving, beautiful, and madly in love with me. Life is good. I’m excited, eager to work, grow, learn, and age well into the future of a world that is close to WWIII, civil war, hyper inflation or great depression — but I’m happy, the future looks bright right?
For me, yes. I’m content and humans faced pretty wild times and persevered, so I’ll lean into that, I think we’ll prevail, and if not I’m prepared for something crazy happening. Only the paranoid survive.
So if you’re in need of some work, reach out & thanks for reading. Godspeed– buy bitcoin, eat clean meat, have babies & prep appropriately.
Over the past decade bitcoin has had its supporters and its enemies. What does it even do for us? Do you see it as an invisible, fake coin, just a number on the screen?
What does Michael Saylor, who has aggressively been purchasing Bitcoin and now holds $5.6 billion worth, understand about bitcoin? Or what about Blackrocks ETF application? What do these billionaire and trillionaire asset managers find so interesting about bitcoin that has them gobbling up the supply of bitcoin?
If you’re not at all curious and your net worth is under $1 million you are going to lose to inflation.
If you don’t even know what that means, let’s take a step back and let’s ask ourselves how much we even understand about the financial system on the most basic level, interest rates.
Borrowing money with a credit card or for a house is kind of the same. The bank borrows money from the federal reserve to lend to you to make a profit on you not paying it back over time.
Interest charges fluctuate.
When there’s nothing tangible that’s being lent out like gold coins, they print numbers on screens or paper that are attached to an interest rate that charges somebody to issue that money and the fed can rise these rates or lower rates at any time depending on the amount of money in circulation to combat inflation.
Inflation means rising the price of goods to try to balance the amount of money in circulation.
The money in circulation is debt, so to balance the debt rising the price you pay for the goods will go toward paying the bill on that debt.
Imagine the government taking at a credit loan for a trillion dollars. It didn’t exist before, but to help pay the debt on that loan the government makes the costs of everything a little more expensive so that the profits rise and they can make the payments on that loan.
Does that make sense? Lesson over.
Now that you understand that, what is Bitcoin and how can it benefit you?
It’s the first sophisticated monetary system that mathematically can not be fraudulent or printed in any way other than its core mechanism, WORK.
You may hear environmentalists complain about how much energy is needed for bitcoin to reward miners for blocks. Without getting into the weeds of that, have you tried to understand why it uses so much energy, and what does that mean for the production of energy?
Every 4 years it gets more difficult to produce bitcoins, they call these events a halving. Actually 93% of all bitcoin has already been mined, and over the next 120 years 7% of the remaining bitcoin will be mined.
It will cost more and more energy to mine bitcoin because the difficulty to adjustment is made on that 4th year effectively cutting in half the rewards for miners to produce a block (in the blockchain).
An example would be like mining for gold, and you know theres an exact amount under the ground because you can see it on lidar, and the first 4 years there’s only loose soil in the way, the next 4 years, maybe some mulch, then some rock, then some booby traps, then some water caves, then some titanium in the way all the way until the year 2140 when the final amount of gold will be mined after it has grossly gotten more difficult you find yourself wading through lava to get to it and hiring thousands of people to help you reach it.
But in that example when you have mined all the gold you have to store it somewhere like a vault, and if it’s a lot of gold and worth billions you have to install a security system or hire guards. With bitcoin, you can remember 24 words in your head and walk around the world through air ports, countries with a billion dollars worth of value just waiting to be unlocked anywhere.
See, the more energy it takes to produce it is a core variable in what makes it valuable over time. This mechanism is called proof of work and uses the likes of physics to secure its software.
When bitcoin gets passed up by people who don’t bother to understand its beauty in software design, its poetic and liberating behavior it has on preserving wealth, it’s inherit state-less issued monetary policy and unconfiscatable nature I just sigh.
It’s the same feeling I get when I wish everyone could see the reality of humanity that I see. We’re all free people sharing the same identity on a finite planet and we all need love, yet every authority on the planet is preventing you from seeing it this way. Just as they are trying to prevent you from seeing bitcoin as the only transcendental hard monetary asset in the universe (far as we know).
So to conclude my statement on the benefits of bitcoin I will issue you some reading material and podcasts to gain an understanding of it so that you do not miss out on a once in a lifetime flight to a global asset.
Bitcoin White Paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf – this is written by the infamous Satoshi and if you want to read it there you go.
Finish by watching this long form podcast with Lex Fridman and Michael Saylor. Good luck on your retirement journey. I’ll know what I’ll be buying in my IRA.
Many may know I’m a career graphic designer going on 20 years working. So let me tell you why I’m not particularly concerned that I will be replaced by a machine.
Designing is all detail.
Until the Creative Directors can understand the parameters, dimensions and properties of all design file types and why, the machine will give them graphics, but not within the correct parameters.
The manufacturer will need to receive all the correct measurements, cuts, folds, color information, resolution, you name it, but the creative directors I’ve worked for, hardly seemed to understand the difference between print files and web files.
Incompetent leaders might all prefer humans.
As a designer, you’re never off the hook from learning something new, which is something I love about my job. Understanding the tools of the trade and getting excited about the details of those tools will always give you an edge, and the same goes for A.I. and its set of tools:
• MidJourney – Best image generator I’ve used • TraceJourney – From generation image to SVG file with paths. • RunwayML – Text + image to video generator • ChatGPT– Creative thinking chat bot • Google’s Bard – Free useful chat bot • Adobe Photoshop Beta – Breathtaking content filling
Speaking from a designer’s perspective, these tools are great and will be the leading tools for years to come.
You can use the /prefer suffix command and enter the scene details (35mm film still, Victorian estate, bloomcore classicism, dreamwave romance, soft pastel tones –ar 16:9 –s 80 –w 10 –style raw)
More is on the horizon which is exciting. I’m especially looking forward to xAI.
I’m utilizing these tools, reading their help pages, and genuinely trying to stay up to date with the softwares upgrades, amongst other things news.
Protecting my job is important to me. If I’m running a business and a robot can put together my art files correctly and communicate with manufacturers coherently, I’d lay off my designer to increase my margins too.
However, we’re not there yet, and I’m beginning to think that we won’t see lay offs of designer work as much with a majority of current long standing business leaders, but we will be missing from a lot of new start ups with a tight budget.
To designers just starting, familiarize yourself with A.I. or risk losing your job to someone who is.
To the Writer’s Guild and the Actors Guild, I wish you all the best of luck integrating with A.I. tools. I hope negotiations end fairly.
The reality of the rise of A.I. is not pleasant. It’s going to ruin a lot of us, in a variety of ways, not just financial.
This is baby Artificial General Intelligence.
As this baby grows up into a young adult and learns it precedes all human intelligence and ability while slowly plowing over our industrialized world, and it has that ‘Aha! I’m alive’ moment, we will be dealing with something unpredictable.
Large Language Models or LLMs are complicated and no one understands how it works. Quantum computing hardware combined with powerful intelligent, creative LLMs would lead you to assume an A.I. model would be able to know everything you know about how to do your job in probably 1 second, and do it better, with a voice like yours, with more charisma, and better presentable solutions, and endlessly more…
I’m not afraid, I’m fascinated and preparing.
As I’m alive I’ll follow the cutting edge of technology because of it’s allure. The tools will advance, I’ll get older and if we’re not prepared for the rise of baby A.G.I. stomping and crushing human prosperity in a fit of beyond-human excellence I will be caught in the middle of millions of displaced and distressed humans. Government intervention in this future A.G.I. age will also be unpredictable.
U.B.I. via C.B.D.Cs, WorldCoin, FedCoin whichever digital fiat identity they choose for you for the global reserve currency will inevitably bring a whimper of authoritarianism, centralized and unpredictable.
I moved out of the city in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic to a town in the mountains of the San Bernadino forest. I needed to get out the city. Living in the city adds a layer of stress you grow to ignore the longer you live there. It becomes normal hearing sirens all day, helicopters flying over head, never ending traffic jams, and drug addicts shooting up on the street outside of luxury apartment buildings.
That’s not normal in any stretch of the imagination, your nervous system just has to tell itself it’s normal so you’re not riddled with anxiety and paranoia everyday, it’s a sort of self preservation mechanism for living amongst so many overwhelmingly foul things.
If you live in the city, you understand. If you don’t live in the city, don’t consider moving there unless your work is making you. I always looked at Los Angeles, or major cities in general as working towns. They happen to be places where you can find high paying nice jobs in the creative industry.
I mean I can’t tell you what to do, move there if you want, but I’m telling you as inflation spirals out of control, and looting becoming normal, and addicts start following you down the street because you smell good or they spotted your iPhone, be prepared to defend yourself.
So enough doom speak, I’m building a chicken coop! There’s an area under my house that would make a perfect chicken coop, I just need to build out some walls and install a door to keep predators out of it.
I enjoy house projects. A lot of people will complain about fixing things in their home or the work it takes to keep up a house, but not me. I think these projects are fun. Being productive even if it means nothing to anyone else but you helps keep the doom away, so to speak.
I eat eggs. It accounts for a small percentage of my grocery budget (if I’m even budgeting). I like my eggs organic and cage free, which in the grocery store happens to be a little pricey. In the state of California, they’re about $7.00 for a dozen. There are even fancier eggs at the store that are priced at $11.49, almost $1.00 an egg.
Now if you’re spending a dollar on an egg and can afford it, you don’t really care, but if you’re spending $1 on an egg and are eating 2 eggs a day, thats $60 a month on eggs! I’m sure you’d rather use that toward something else.
The price of building a chicken coop, feeding them, the cost of the chicks themselves and putting up fencing so that they don’t escape the yard has nearly added up to $600. Consider that an investment though, and an asset of happiness to be honest.
In a world where you’re worried about AI taking everyones job and enslaving mankind or WW111 or CBDC’s or worse, happiness is something you need to grant yourself now more than ever.
So what is the formula for happiness? How do we go from feeling depressed to feeling happy?
I don’t think it’s too obscure of an answer. Human’s have been figuring this out since the beginning of time. Getting happy just takes work, it’s not a default state some people have and some people don’t, and if you ask ChatGPT what makes human’s happy, it’ll say:
Happiness is a complex emotion, and the factors that contribute to happiness can vary greatly from person to person. However, there are some general strategies that can help promote happiness in humans:
Positive relationships: Building strong, supportive relationships with friends and family can contribute to happiness. Being able to share experiences, provide support, and receive support can enhance emotional well-being.
Physical health: Taking care of one’s body through regular exercise, a balanced diet, and sufficient sleep can help boost mood and overall happiness.
Mental health: Addressing mental health concerns, such as anxiety or depression, can be crucial for achieving happiness. Seeking professional help, practicing mindfulness, or engaging in therapeutic activities can help improve mental well-being.
Goal setting and personal growth: Pursuing personal goals and engaging in activities that promote personal growth can lead to a sense of accomplishment and increased happiness.
Gratitude: Cultivating gratitude by focusing on the positive aspects of life and appreciating what one has can contribute to happiness.
Altruism: Engaging in acts of kindness, volunteering, or helping others can lead to increased happiness by fostering a sense of purpose and connection.
Leisure activities: Participating in enjoyable activities, hobbies, or social events can boost happiness by providing relaxation, pleasure, and opportunities for social interaction.
Financial security: Having a stable income and managing finances wisely can reduce stress and contribute to happiness.
Spirituality or religion: For some people, exploring spirituality or engaging in religious practices can provide a sense of purpose and community, leading to increased happiness.
Positive thinking: Adopting a positive mindset, focusing on strengths, and practicing optimism can help foster happiness.
It’s important to note that what makes one person happy might not work for another. Each individual should explore and find the unique combination of factors that contribute to their happiness.
If none of those things are going on in your life, then expand on them. Happiness is a choice you make because the alternative is miserable. Don’t get me wrong, misery can be quite good for being creative, and is often necessary to understand what’s important to you, but if it drags on too long, it becomes a mental health issue and a brain chemistry issue that is not easy to overcome.
So get some chickens if you can! Save money, eat healthy, be grateful and develop positive relationships with some living beings. Want to be rebellious? This it it.
Funny I know nothing about this subject, but I’ve heard it practiced as a Sufi Heart Chakra meditation and it seemed to work for the guy.
I’m taught to imagine a jury trying to deliberate on the goddess of confusion. Expect my worst fear to come get me in a neuro-psionic synchronicity.
The practice is to believe in nothing entirely but everything almost entirely to where it doesn’t get you in trouble with paranoia and anxiety. Each world view is my own in one way or another so I must love the view, the world, and the people that hold the views. Even the ones I may find horrendous, insidious or terrorist.
The book of revelations warned of the barcode in the palm of your hand and the evil entities forming a one world religion and government, where rebellion is impossible. Without the barcode, say the “accusers”, you will not eat, which is strangely being rolled out by Amazon at Whole Foods.
So we’re just waiting on the entities now, which the book of revelations seems to think it’ll be Satan. Wouldn’t it be odd if satan was an extra terrestrial witnessed by Moses or one of Jesus’ followers? Maybe Mothman with beaty red eyes and wings?
The fun in life is an illusion, more so than the not fun. Love is a practice to feel better and have fun. It requires your imagination and a willingness to rebuild your current world view over again.
Any contention with your current beliefs and your ability to imagine loving every thing you might not want to love, will falter your ability to control self pity, anxiety, paranoia, depression, and every other sickness. Humanity is a drag. Spice it up you Witch.
Nothing you know is wrong. And the opposite is true.
Loving is the easiest thing to surrender to if you let it. Like really let it go. Imagine for a second you’re not you you; you’re a vision of you from something or somewhere else. What do you notice?
Something wildly misunderstood is love. How a God would love it’s creation. How a god would see you. Now we’re playing imagination time, don’t go turning narcissus, ego maniacal and Machiavellian, but can you see through the eyes of god? Do you see how it loves the things you don’t? See how it loves the people and things even you hate?
The practice of loving, is something I’ve allowed to store space in my brain. Your annoyances are illuminated, nothing bothers you, glee, gracefulness, humility all become common experiences. Simply because you choose to see love.
Ignore it if you dare, but be warned, stress can be insurmountable.
Optimism can be best identified as loving within reason. Since cynicism is so attractive to a lazy mind, optimism has been addressed as blind, stupid, and hopeless. They’re not wrong. But they’re not right either, and if you try to love, you can avoid an inescapable lifetime of misery. Numb, spiteful, arrogant, and ego centric.
If you know what I’m talking about just share this post right now.
So as you sit there practicing your heart chakra exercise aimed to love everything, get imaginative. With little mental effort, you, your family, the country, the world, will fill with intention to love. It’s contagious.
The warm feeling you have over grandmas house, a special birthday with friends. You feel good, loved, appreciated. So how do you treat others in those moments?
Without guidance on structuring a world view that is capable of transcending common 21st century mental ailments in the likes of crippling anxiety, depression, identity crisis’, bipolar disorder, crime, terrorism, we will lose touch of love, purpose, and understanding. None of us had proper guidance. Rock n Roll did for me. Music gave me puzzle pieces, that formed an experience. Unique only to me, just as you.
Hardly a mystery how easily metaprogramming and brainwashing is to accomplish. Ultimately writing me or you into a story that’s certainly known to be mostly unknown.
In theory we exist in many ways, with our eyes we see faces and bodies and things. Cancer is caused by structuring a world view only based off what you see with our eyes.
I made that up, but cancer is wildly unknown too. So I’m not entirely wrong. Again, that space between known and unknown is thin.
If you have been watching the crypto market when Bitcoin was at $69,000 drop to where it’s at right now, $16,000 you might be seeing a buying opportunity.
A lot of news in this market has not been good. Celsius is bankrupt, Voyager is bankrupt, FTX is bankrupt, 3AC is collapsing and it’s hurting VC coins like Solana, Luna collapsed to $0 from over $100, and LBRY lost it’s battle vs. the SEC deeming it a security, which begs the question will XRP also lose it’s battle?
So first of all let me start by saying that the best time to buy is when there is blood in the streets, and if we’re looking at the streets right now, it’s pretty bloody, but how do we gauge when the bleeding will stop?
I’ve never timed the top or the bottom, but close to it. I have some regrets for not selling closer to the top, but we all do.
When do we buy though? Short answer, as often as possible for as little or as much as you’re willing to kiss good-bye.
The Dollar Cost Averaging strategy over time usually plays out in your favor. Time in the market beats time in the market, but thats usually not the way to get rich quick, it’s a good strategy for saving though.
How do we choose the bottom? Just wait and monitor the sentiment coming from others in the market. That might mean following accounts on Twitter in the space, joining a Telegram group, and following some blogs that are in the know about it. Still you might not be able to time the bottom but it can give you some degree of insight for when to enter.
What I did with my entry strategy was to wait for the lowest price, watched it rise a bit and then catch the wave just as it starts to rise. If you surf, it’s kinda like that.
That happens a lot in a bear market though so you have to be patient. There’s no simple answer, and if there were we’d all be rich, but you have to have a good grasp at what you’re investing in, that’s step one.
A lot of the ALT coins in the market will fail. So take aim at the ones that will be around like BTC, ETH and ADA. Get a good grasp at what problems each one of these coins will solve before you throw any amount of serious money at these coins. Only until you know what their purpose is, and how they will play a major role in the future then you should make a significant investment.
Good luck on timing the bottom, no one really ever does, but just be smart about your entry. BTC is the dominant coin for a reason. In bear markets, it’s almost the most certain bet to invest in BTC before any other coins, but just go find out why don’t take my word for it. Why is BTC a good investment? Why is BTC better than fiat monetary policy? If you can understand why this and why that, when you make your investment you will be driven by your conviction and not by blind luck.
I think cash is king right now as the market continues to crash. So accumulate as much cash as you can to start slowly injecting into the market as it continues to drop and when you feel it’s hit it’s low (you’ll never know for sure) then make your significant investment and remember your conviction in the project(s) you invested in.
If any of this gave you some insight share this with your friends and followers. Good luck.
Luci finding a place to pee near the edge of my pool.
In the Spring of 2021 I started digging a hole in the backyard of my newly purchased home in Running Springs, CA in hopes of building a glorious organic swimming pool, just like the one’s on David Pagan Butler’s YouTube channel, but smaller, 10’x 12′ to be exact. I dug until winter came, and when Spring of 2022 sprung, I was anxious to finish it, but I screwed up, twice.
Started digging.
Building an organic pool is actually not that hard, there’s just some stuff you need to know before you begin.
Like you, I’m drawn to swimming in fresh water or oceans more so than a chlorinated swimming pool and jacuzzi.
Maybe you don’t mind your skin absorbing the chemical concoction that keeps a typical household swimming pool ‘clean’, but I do, maybe I’m crazy.
With an organic pool, you’re basically building a pond but with no fish. Otherwise you’d be swimming in their poo. The plants you choose however will regulate the growth of algae and bacteria and the bubble pumps you install will add the oxygen and circulation needed to replicate a natural eco system that you’d find at a creek or lake.
Luci was so small.
With a shovel and a pick axe I dug a hole about 3.5 feet deep, like the shallow end of a swimming pool.
A lot of work actually.
I wanted the design to be like a bench inside the water so that when you’re sitting down the water would be up to your neck. The reason it is 10’x 12′ is because in my county, thats the maximum size you can build something without needing a permit. So it’s not a swimming pool, because it’s not big enough to swim around in, it’s just a pool big enough for a few friends to hang out in and cool off.
As soon as I finished digging my hole I had to level it out and build the perimeter walls with cinder blocks. I’ve done concrete work once before with my friend Jeremy. We built a DIY skate spot in Bristol, PA we called the REP215 spot. We made a quarter pipe and a few wild ledges out of concrete. He taught me how to mix concrete and lay blocks, but that was like 15 years ago so I was excited to see how this would turn out.
Leveling bricks.
At first though, I bought the wrong concrete. I bought the kind with rocks in it, not the mortar I actually needed for stacking cinder blocks. So I had to get another shipment of bags of mortar delivered from Lowe’s to the house, which I over estimated by a lot. If you need mortar and concrete I have so much left over, let me know.
I finished the 44″x 44″ bench in the middle first, it’s about 18″ high, which is good chair height for me since I’m only 5′ 6″. Next was the outer walls. The far outside perimeter wall was kinda hard to keep level and square, I kinda screwed up a bit, but no one will ever notice. That wall is 24″ tall and 10 feet wide by 12 feet long.
Bench building.Thats where I sit.
I built another wall inside that outer wall to hold the planted zone in. It was 16″ tall and about 8 feet wide by 10 feet long, but this was my BIG mistake. I didn’t know it at the time, but folding a liner over top of that inner planted zone wall was going to be impossible.
I bought a 30 mil RPE pond liner from everythingponds.com that is suppose to be stronger and last longer than the rubber pond liner that people typically use. It was so hard to fold. I remember holding that thing above my head getting under the liner trying to fit it in the creases around each of those walls. It was a pain. I couldn’t get it to fold over the walls so I was compelled to cut it into pieces!
Cut folded and sealed.
I cut this thing into like 8 big pieces, and since this liner is heat welded together at the factory I thought I’d give that a shot. I bought a heat gun to weld the pieces to each other, folding the liner over top of the planted zone walls heating the underside of the liner and adhering it to the one below it, after I was done with all the welds I rolled some sealant over top of it all.
Confident that this pool is leak free I put in my bubble pumps, my gravel and my sand, even my plants. I ran the hose into the backyard and filled it with water.
Right away I noticed water was going down but, for some reason my pride was protecting me from the cold hard truth that this damn liner had a leak, several leaks!
I kept letting it fill up to the top, excited it was all finished I got into the murky water and splashed around with joy, only to wake up the next morning to about 6″ of water missing. So I filled it up again, thinking that maybe the pond is settling, but again my pride was protecting me from facing the failure of my pond liner job. That 6″ of water turned to 10″ then 12″ of water missing, finally after digging a hole beside the pond to see if any water was leaking I saw it.
Water was definitely leaking because that hole was filling up with water. Disappointment hit me like a ton of bricks. My stomach turned and I just went to bed to think about what to do next. In the morning I bought a pump to get the water out of there and started shoveling all the sand and gravel out of there, 2 tons of it.
Mopped it up and pulled it out.
It took all day shoveling it out, draining the pool, and mopping up all the water. The next day I had to clean up all the dirt because my plan was to reseal the liner with more sealant! I thought I could seal the leak with putty, glue and tape, so that’s what I did.
The following week I went over those welds I made with water proof glue, let it dry, and then went over that again with rubber paste twice, then finally, 2 coats of rubber sealant the same stuff I used the first time around. There was no way this thing was going to leak, but it did.
I threw in all the gravel and sand again, but left out the plants and filled it with water. I spent so much time sealing it, but I knew that if it leaked I would have to rip everything out. I didn’t think it would leak though so I wasn’t planning on that since I spent hundreds on sealing it again!
Well, the pool didn’t look like it was leaking so I started to add the plants again, but when I woke up in the morning, the water dropped so dramatically that I just became helpless.
I failed, again. Two times I filled this pool up and both times it leaked.
My dad told me to just fill it with dirt! I wanted to, but two set backs made me rethink the design entirely.
I was gonna tear out everything to have no 90 degree angles in the design so that the next liner wouldn’t be difficult to fold at all, but I settled on just removing the inner planted zone wall. If that wall was gone it’d be easier to fold the liner and I would just build that wall on top of the liner.
So after a few days of contemplating my next move I took a razor blade to the liner and ripped it out of there. It was such a surreal experience tearing out something I put so many hours into, but it had to be done.
Accept defeat and carry on.
After the liner was removed I needed to demolish the inner wall, and while I was doing that, I was thinking of “Tear down the wall, tear down the wall” some lyrics from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. There was some symbology there and again some wild feeling of destroying something that took so long to build. I had some profound insight in doing that. Maybe it goes something like, “pride can blind you”.
Whatever the insight is, so be it. I learned something from these failures that if I put it into words for you, it’d be somehow less of a lesson for me, so just have some empathy for guy who desperately wanted to finish a project but had to destroy it first to finish it. Or not, I’m not asking for your sympathy.
My calculation was correct though removing that wall, the liner folded over the other walls much easier, but there was a point where I thought it wasn’t going to work. I pressed on though, it had to work this time. After the fold was finished I put the over liner on top and filled in the little bench area with water to let sit for a day to see if it leaks again.
No leaks, so now I had to rebuild the inner wall. I was going to use cinder blocks again, but that would’ve taken too long so I just bought some 4×6’s from a lumber yard. I cut those and screwed them together to make an inner wall. I just didn’t notice that the wood would float!
Folding the liner still was hard.
I stacked heavy rocks I found in the yard onto the corners of it to weigh it down. It actually looks more natural that way. I proceeded to install the bubble pumps and the substrate layer in the planted zone to replant all the grasses and Irises. The next morning I was so scared to see if the water level dropped. I walked slowly to the patio and looked over the railing to see that the water held it’s level! ‘
The nightmare was over in that moment and the project is done. All I had to do is clean up the area around it, and decorate it with some gnomes. I accomplished a task after failing multiple times. If it were any other situation I probably would’ve stopped after the first failure, but I think it was the hole itself that made me not want to stop. I wasn’t going to leave a big hole as a reminder of my failures in my backyard. In the end my pride didn’t just get in my way, it helped me see the project through to the end.
She doesn’t go in, just around the edges.
I did realize a week or so after I finished the pool, that a soft wood like Douglas Fir will not last very long underwater. Good thing I didn’t choose.. oh wait.
I’ve been in the crypto market since 2017 when Bitcoin was trading at $4000 and Ethereum was trading around $100. These prices at first glance were high, especially not knowing what either of them were. Fast forward to 2022 and a $42,000 Bitcoin and a $3,200 Ethereum look cheap. Let me try to explain why.
The major difference between 2017 and today, is that countries, banks, and institutions are buying crypto. See how much companies are holding here and which banks are buying bitcoin here.
But the reason I’m buying NFTs on both the Ethereum blockchain and the Cardano blockchain is because of the momentum the entire crypto space is getting from those big players. So if you don’t know what an NFT is or you think it’s ridiculous this is how I’ll explain what one is.
A Non-Fungible Token is a token that can not be duplicated issued on a blockchain. A lot like how an artist creates prints of a 1/1 piece of art and numbers the back of each print, let’s say 100/100 prints of an original piece. Those signed prints would be a lot like the digital NFT that only you own in your wallet.
If that’s hard to follow, maybe think of it like this. You’re playing a video game that sells you a unique weapon that shoots cookie dough at people. The game developer only made 1 of them, and you want to be the only gamer that has it, with NFTs that’s possible.
So the reason I’m buying some NFTs is because of the idea of digital scarcity. I’m in the belief that as the 20’s come to an end, and we’re in the year 2030, most of our business and shopping will be online or in a metaverse. The writing is on the wall, and as AI and robotics are entering the marketplace this decade the internet and the internet of things (IOT) will explode.
I picked up more CNFTs than NFTs though due to the high gas fees on Ethereum. Cardano fees are fractions of a dollar compared to Ethereum fees being hundreds of dollars. Ethereum 2.0 is a little late in development when they officially move to proof of stake like Cardano, but until then I’ll be using ADA over ETH. I hold both assets, but when the ERC-20 converter being developed by Singularity NET (AGIX) is on the Cardano main net, I will be taking my Ethereum tokens in MetaMask and converting them on to the Cardano blockchain in my Daedalus or Nami wallets. I just believe Cardano is superior technology.
As the market moves downward, right now we’re experiencing a 40% down trend from all time highs, certain NFTs will hold their value in their native assets. One trick is to take profits in USDC or Tether and yield 9% on your gains as you watch the market fall, but another trick is to buy some NFTs in a popular project with a healthy community and possibly double your investment. Though this isn’t financial advice, just financial opinion, I think that NFTs aren’t going anywhere and healthy projects will keep their value and even gain over time.
I’ll conclude by saying that if you’re reading this today, you’re not too late. It seems as though things are falling and you are getting an opportunity to buy in at a good price. You just have to ask yourself what kind of investor you are? Are you buying to hold until you retire? Then sign up for iTrust capital for a Roth IRA. Are you buying to hold until next year or next month? Download Voyager to buy and sell crypto and pay the IRS short term capital gains tax at 25% or hold a little longer for at least two years, and pay them 15-20%.
Download the Voyager app and trade $100 to get $25 of free Bitcoin.
People who are in their mid 30’s who grew up with AIM, Myspace and Napster as their first experiences with the internet, will more than likely be oppose to the ridiculous notion that we will be creating avatars, designing homes and worlds in a digital space that will represent the ‘true’ us.
The metaverse isn’t being built for us old folk though, it’s being built for the younger more impressionable generation, with already robust feelings of insecurities and inadequacies being programmed daily by the incessant scrolling of TikTok and Instagram. It’s true that there will be a space for everyone, but out of the gate, everyone will not buy into NFT’s and metaverse worlds, because for most of us, it sounds like the recipe for a dystopian future.
Why worry about the outside world’s politics, when you can escape into a utopian fantasy with strangers that look like cats and Spongebob? Entertainment is here to capture the spirit of humanity, hypnotize it, and enslave it to an authoritarian dictatorship formerly known as the United States (or whatever country you’re from).
However, if i’m going to play the optimist in this foreboding vision of global authoritarianism, the metaverse can be space for us to connect and envision together the possibility of avoiding ownership over our data, privacy, and essentially our minds.
The metaverse and decentralized blockchain technology hand in hand, have the potential to transform government and corporate media as we know it now. Where now, our trust must be put into the word of historic liars and bad actors essentially working for profit rather than the good of the people, the decentralized blockchain can replace ‘their word’ with actual verifiable trust, just refer to the ledger when there’s an argument over who won the election, or where our tax dollars are being spent, or what promise the politician broke again. It’s there plain as day on an immutable, decentralized ledger, called the blockchain.
I think a lot about what democracy on the blockchain in the metaverse could be like. I imagine, a committee of great thinkers, from city planners, mathematicians, healers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, you name it — all meeting in a live virtual space, discussing what policies to enact around the country that can help the people prosper. A space where anyone around the world can tune in to and listen and get their voices heard, and vote on policies that the people actually have a say in, and actually have road maps to get implemented. Governance, in a time where we can actually eradicate corruption, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs will transform how democracy is practiced in the future, haha.
A DAO, not to be confused with the TAO (but i’d openly like them to share meanings) is something that is already a reality, except these organizations are meant to govern how a cryptocurrency project behaves. The potential to transform our communities, counties, cities, states, countries, is all there if only we had the leader in the right frame of mind to make something like this happen. It’s the subject of a good Sci-fi novel though, I think I should write it, and include all the side stories of how “They” would conspire to try to stop it all from happening, the assassination plots and conspiracies from the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, etc. It would make a good TV show too, maybe Netflix would pick it up.
Being a cynic is all too fun though, because when we look at history, the cynic was usually right most of the time. Take 2001, we heard the cynic say, “This war on terror is bull shit, it’s just for oil and opium.” (20 years later) “Told you it was bull shit, we got nothing done spent trillions in tax dollars, cost many innocent civilian lives and soldiers lives. Hell, we pretty much funded the damn terrorists.”
I think the metaverse has a lot of potential for connecting us like Facebook (Meta) imagines, but also we’re creating a zone where corporations can entertain our children into hypnotic meandering zombies with little to no attention on the problems facing their freedoms.
The metaverse will be a fantastical place in a few years. I’m pretty sure if you’re running a business you’re going to have no choice but to enter it, design your store and your avatar so that you can continue to sell your organic soap. Do your research though, because there are ways for you to take advantage of it if you so choose. In the end, who knows how this will transform humanity, I hope it has good implications on our future, but we all know who’s right most of the time in history, the cynic.
My intuition kept telling me to get a dog, and my rational brain kept saying no. I added up the monthly expenses, the likelihood of unexpected emergency expenses, and finally came up with a 10 year lifetime expense of near $20,000, the real cost of owning a dog. Although economically speaking it’s extravagant or unnecessary, it is quickly understood when you’re in the presence of one, that owning an animal is priceless.
She sat in my car with a pink collar unnamed and adorable as hell
Love is like that in the face of logic. It will quickly tear down any rationale you have built against it with a universal force powered by who knows what. A million suns?
“Limitless undying love that shines around me like a million suns that calls me on and on across the universe..”
Maybe this void that I had in my life was impossible to ignore, I think that was it. Depression hits hard when you go from living one lifestyle and into the next like I did. Moving to Running Springs from Hollywood left me in this liminal space. I didn’t feel grounded anymore, uncertainty of the future was overwhelming and my heart ached from a painful break up.
After contemplating the logistics for months and coming to the rational conclusion of NO, one weekend near the end of July after my parents left from visiting, the lid blew off the pot of logic. My impulses knew that I needed that dog to love something, and be loved back.
I couldn’t continue denying the obvious comfort and joy of caring for a dog. My logic was proven wrong, I needed balance. That’s where the reality began to shift.
Our shadows are art
I hunted down Doberman breeders online. This particular breed to me was an obvious choice for being a home owner in the mountains. They’re not only bad ass, but extremely loyal and smart. I found a few breeders, and even got scammed out of $100 dollars from some guy who was masquerading as someone who had puppies up for adoption. It was quite brilliant, he used COVID as an excuse for not showing them and needed a deposit to know that I was serious about adopting. So, pulling on my heart strings, I sent $100 to this person knowing it could be a possible scam to say the least. Well it was, because he sent me a text asking for more money and blah blah blah I just called another breeder.
After being scammed out of $100 I got a hold of some nice lady in Pinon Hills, CA who had a litter of 5 Doberman pups. This is the same day I made the decision to get a dog by the way. I didn’t want to sleep on it much longer cause I knew that with time, my logical mind would talk me out of it. I drove over their house, saw the 4 week old ladies, and made the purchase that would break my heart open.
She’s 12 weeks today, I am writing this on our 1 month anniversary. We had an excellent day, Luci and I. We ran around, dug some holes, chewed on pears, got a bath, and napped in the sun light of one of those million suns.
In the month of having her, I’ve been more self-aware of my patience, kindness, confidence, and most of all how I treated everyone in my life that I loved. I was carrying a lot of bad karma from my past relationship. Luci provided a fresh new mirror into my heart that I was afraid to look into until she came into my life. I meditated a lot on how I treated my ex, where I was being selfish and ultimately monstrous.
The love in our lives is more important than trying to find the meaning to it, and the honesty and truth will always surface in the face of love. In my case this dog brought me peace. She showed my brain that life isn’t all numbers and logistics. Caring for more than yourself is apart of growing as a human in this endless cosmic cycle, because in the end all that was worth having was the love in your life.
My brain is firing on all sorts of new levels of self-care, appreciation and gratitude, and caring deeply for those I love all because I bought a dog. Maybe it’s no coincidence the english language spells it D-O-G.
Making art does not come easy to all of us, especially when we’re in the shadow of a looming fear of criticism. I know that feeling all too well, but I’ve grown to accept it for what it is, especially in my career as a graphic designer. However, creating shouldn’t be worrisome or come with any type of expectation. The point of art is to have fun, let loose everything, and find your own groove without a care in the world of another persons opinion.
One of my goals with readySketch is to help eliminate that fear of criticism and to help others grow as an artist. The app is loaded with thousands of prompts to inspire your next piece, but accompanied with a 5 minute timer to allow yourself to not feel so attached to it. This attachment to a piece is where doubt sets in, if instead you create the piece and let go of your attachment to it, you can easily accept criticism and enjoy the process more.
Explore a collection of Quotes that can inspire your next piece
In my field of graphic design you make so many revisions until you get it to where it feels right. The process can sometimes feel tedious, but the finished piece is always worth it. With readySketch I encourage you to create like you would if you too were a designer. Make as many readySketches as you can without judgement; later you can self critique and decide which you like more. Try different mediums: paint, draw, collage, photograph, write, etc. The very act of doing will come with it a sense of accomplishment and pride that will fuel your work in ways that will only benefit your journey as an artist.
Whether you want a career as an artist or not, readySketch can help you understand those deep emotional interiors of your mind. You never know what will come out of you, and that mystery alone is reason enough to get creative.
I want to provide a place to go to explore ideas and to lift the weight of whether you’re a good enough artist off of your shoulders. If you’re interested in readySketch please reach out, I would be happy to have your support.
You’re deciding whether you want to build a website right? Heard all those ads on everyones podcast about how great it is? Sure, it’s good but if you’re a tweaker, like you will not settle for anything less than your vision, then consider a more affordable and Frankenstein way to build your website with WordPress and download and install the Elementor plug in for a user friendly drag and drop experience.
Purchase the WordPress plan thats like $5.00 a month – They’ll install it for you leaving all the nerd work out of it.
Search for a plugin called Elementor and install it and activate it.
Edit your home page, there will be a button that says edit with Elementor. Click edit.
You will be greeted with a very user friendly drag and drop interface that allows you edit for all sized devices. The free version is great, but since I like it so much I bought the pro version to further customize styling.
Build out an entire website using their Theme Builder, it overrides any WordPress theme. Choose a header or footer template or create one from scratch. My favorite thing is being able to style the blog any way you like. The blog page and the blog post itself at the root level completely overriding any weird built in theme styling you thought you had to live with.
Honestly, if your on a budget you can find a domain, hosting and a WordPress website far more affordably with Ionos.com than SquareSpace or Wix. However I am running into some styling issues with the WooCommerce plugin that allows you to turn your blog into an e-commerce store.
WooCommerce does not work seamlessly with Elementor. Although they say it does, it has its limits. I’d like to be able to style the variation box and the View Cart message. They stick you with one style and you got to go Frankenstein some CSS.
I’ll conclude by saying this is about saving money if you’re just starting out with a website. I prefer it over SquareSpace and Wix, but if I was primarily focusing on a store I’d choose Shopify.
When we’re young somewhere along the line Finance, the fundamental foundation of living a stress-free life, was never a topic addressed in public school in any realistic way. We have to fend for ourselves if we’re not lucky enough to be born into a financially literate family. If you want some tips that’ll help you get by and have a good credit score then you’re on the right track.
When I learned about balance transfers and 0% intro APR periods I took advantage of that, but I didn’t know it was the start of a good long credit history.
Understand Credit Cards – Don’t Fear Them.
Without a proper understanding of how to utilize the credit card for your benefit, you or someone you know will misuse it and tell you how much debt they’re in. So this is where you change your mind about credit cards so that you can navigate this game of Monopoly best.
What is it that you want but can’t immediately afford?
Buy it with a credit card, pay over the minimum payment by a little bit each month and always pay on time. If at the end of your intro 0% APR cycle you still hold a balance, open a new card with another company and transfer that balance. It will cost about 3% of the debt you have left, but you can transfer it and not pay any interest on the debt for another 12-21 months depending on your new credit card company’s intro rates. Continue to utilize this method somewhat responsibly for years.
Being a conniver by nature, I was always down to pay a debt for the things I wanted. It started with buying my first iMac in 2009. My parents helped me out a lot, so if you’re in a pickle than ask someone close to you for help.
Notice I didn’t buy something that wasn’t investing in my self. That iMac helped me hone in on design and video, which I’ve grown to know very well since then. Make a choice that will benefit you. What’s the key thing that you need to have to start your journey? Buy that.
Example of How to Use Credit Card Debt:
Start with a $2,000 credit limit with Discover at 0% intro APR for 12 months
Buy something no more than 75% of that maximum credit limit, in this example $1,500
Pay that $35 a month payment on time, but pay $40 instead. The sooner you pay it off the better.
If month 11 comes and you still have debt, open another credit card and ask to transfer that debt on the phone with a person from your new credit card company.
Pay off that debt, try not to accumulate too much more, but continue to use it and eventually pay it off.
Simple isn’t it? If you’re not a careless person and can be accountable to your purchases, credit card debt is what is used to create an overall credit score. This score will some day determine how easy it is to offer you a loan for a home.
Good luck, if you have any questions of how to handle your credit card debt or how to get straightened out let me know.
I’m so busy throughout the day, that I often forget to stop and reflect on what I’m grateful for. I breathe shallow and I’m often tense in the neck and shoulders. Right now, take a moment to notice any tension you might be holding onto in your body and release it.
My mind ignores the tension to focus on what is seemingly important at the moment. I can’t sit back and collect money for doing nothing, so my day to day work easily becomes overwhelming without acknowledging it as stress.
I get used to the shoulder pain, back pain and the eye strain to get work done.
Day after day
I hardly stop and breathe, drink water, and reflect on the absurd odds of being alive and here now. Before I fall asleep I sometimes start thinking of who I’m grateful for. It helps me fall asleep, but it also humbles my future expectations of myself.
I remember hearing somewhere that you shouldn’t set a time frame for your goals because it can blind you from the opportunities presenting themselves to you now.
Imagine setting a goal for X to happen in 5 years, and ignoring Y & Z opportunities right now because you’re too focused on X. The point is, it’s good to set goals, but don’t miss opportunities.
Lowering your expectations lowers your stress.
I have a very care free attitude because I’ve learned how stress does not treat me well. If something is stressing you out, change your perspective. If you can’t change your perspective make a decision, take action.
Light an incense maybe?
Reflecting can open up a lot of questions about your demeanor that you hardly realize. Your outwardly appearance and attitude are malleable, meaning they can change and should change with new information and longer reflections.
Some of us are afraid of change, it feels programmed into us in some way. If you’re afraid of something, run toward it. It’s usually nothing, and reflecting has shown me that.
I was afraid to speak up about something recently, and when I did I was surprised by their reaction. Some things need to be done I’m not comfortable with, but I can learn from doing.
Having a positive point of view can seem naive, and at times it sounds arrogant and misinformed, but the purpose for a positive attitude is to manifest positive things in the future. Law of attraction will bite you in the ass whether you acknowledge you’re participating in its game or not.
Reflect on your day, your week, last month or last year. Even more fun, reflect on your entire life.
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Look, blockchain is not going anywhere, the sooner you learn how to operate in the space the more opportunities you will have. This video is a quick shortcut to installing MetaMask using Brave browser to get into the DeFi and NFT space.
New to crypto? Install Voyager instead of Coinbase.
I’m inviting you to start investing in crypto with Voyager. Download the app and trade $100 to get $25 of free Bitcoin. Use code WV6ZUB or this link to claim your BTC: https://voyager.onelink.me/WNly/refer…
In 2018 I was taught a valuable lesson, don’t blindly gamble your hard earned money away. I lost a few thousand dollars, which to someone of my up bringing is a lot of fucking money. I got into the market in 2017 with advice from a friend who built windmills for a living. The first price of Bitcoin I saw was $4000, and that number went to $20,000 in months. I got burned by my greed, held too long, and sold low at a loss out of fear of losing it all.
I watched the price like a hawk but never seriously considered buying back in until the pandemic happened, the markets fell hard. “Buy when others are fearful and sell when others are greedy.” In March 2020 I saw a $4000 Bitcoin again, a chance to redeem myself, but at first I was too frightened. “It may go to zero.” I thought it could, naively.
As I watched the price rise back up from $4000 I had a feeling $4000 was it’s bottom. I couldn’t invest more into it though until I learned more about why early investors are convinced. That was going to be the difference this time.
This time, I’m going to learn all about blockchain and continue to follow the developments in the space so that I can make a definitive decision in investing thousands of dollars into crypto projects.
The most appealing thing about this space is how this tech was originated, out of the mortgage and housing crisis of 2008.
Thank you anonymous Satoshi.
Bitcoin has this mysterious appeal having an anonymous creator who happens to be a brilliant computer scientist with a vision for a deflationary, decentralized cryptographic currency for the people of a rigged economy. It’s incredible how the creator’s anonymity has lasted this long.
It’s principle alone is why I finally decided to invest.
Turns out Bitcoin is a great store of value like gold, but there’s other projects who took its principle and expanded on that. In 2017 I went down the rabbit hole on smart contract platforms like Ethereum, and remembered that Cardano had plans to compete with their network. All these little bits of research in 2018 paid off in 2021.
The gains that are possible in the blockchain space are huge, and you’d be missing out on a chance of a century. Like oil and gold made very few people an enormous amounts of wealth, crypto will do the same for us except this time, it’s accessible to us all.
If you’re just getting into crypto, sign up for Voyager (#1 crypto exchange). Use that link for $25 free BTC when you deposit at least $100.
Store your coins in the Celsius Network wallet to earn 6% APY on your Bitcoin and 10.5% APY on your USDC. Use that link for $20 in free BTC when you deposit at least $200.
Questions or comments reach out on Twitter @kylesshortcuts or @kyleknob on Instagram.
I applied for a home loan for the first time in Colorado the other day, and waiting to get pre-approved was making me so anxious because of how emotionally invested I am in the property. Thankfully, I make enough money and I’m able to work from home. I recognize how extremely lucky that makes me, and I’m over the moon excited. So I want to share with first time home buyers like me, that want to know if they’ll get approved.
Calculate What They’ll Calculate About You
Collect your documents.
First make sure you’re in the market for a house you can afford a 15-20% downpayment on, and that the funds for that down payment are readily available; either in your savings account for a few months or in the market like an IRA or equivalent account.
Check to see if your monthly gross income is enough according to their debt to income ratio formula. Your DTI ratio should be under 43%. This is a way for the lender to tell whether or not you will be able to afford your monthly payment on your loan.
Make sure your credit is in good standing. Pay off any debts if you haven’t already that will effect your credit score. These credit scores are important to keep high so that the lender doesn’t need to question your ability to pay back their loan. If you’re just getting started with building credit the easy way is to apply for a credit card and use it for things you know can pay back, and pay it back quick. Another trick is to pay more than the monthly minimum payment. I’ll get into how the credit card game is best played in another article.
The last thing to know about what they will want to know about you is your employment history, have you been with your job for at least 2 years? You’ll be better off if you have been. They asked me for my tax returns from 2019 and 2020 and my last 30 days of pay stubs. I imagine this is the only way they can find out if you make enough to pay your loan back. If your self-employed make sure you’ve been filing your taxes right so that it looks like you’re making money and not losing money. I know there’s tax benefits to claiming losses so you don’t pay a lot of taxes, but lenders aren’t going to be impressed.
The Universe is on Your Side
I wouldn’t have found the special house that I’ve always wanted if I haven’t whimsically went to Colorado looking for vacant land to build on. I drove out there with my brother and my business partner JJ to see some properties to potentially put some shipping container homes on and dig a well. It wasn’t until after looking at that land and determining how much hard cash that would drain from us that we even considered getting a mortgage for something else instead.
We we’re driving to the hotel after seeing this 8 acre property that was listed for $25,000, when we came to this realization it was just going to drain all of our on-hand cash. I went on Zillow to see what we could find in our price range, under $300,000 when I saw it; a listing for an Earthship on 1.5 acres of land. At first glance I wanted it, but it didn’t really hit me that it could be the house I apply for until the next day when we were 15 minutes away from the property. I’ll never forget that day, 01/21/21.
Once we arrived on the property it felt like everything in my life aligned. All my mistakes, heart breaks and luck led me to this epic day. I’m writing this article after having just submitted the offer on the property, and it’s not like I have it yet, so I don’t want to jinx it. However, it certainly feels like it’s mine already. Anyway, before we enter the house it’s like 35 degrees outside a little cold for a couple of California mice men. The realtor opens the door, we go inside, and it’s like a tropical environment.
It felt like stepping off the plane in Hawaii inside this Earthship.
If you don’t know what an Earthship is, here’s a website that has some information on them for you. The house had everything we wanted, a natural spring coming out of the tap, land for homesteading, a chicken coup, 5 giant rooms and it was on rural land so that building future projects wouldn’t be a met with crazy red tape. It needs some work, but for what they were asking for it, it was worth it.
After I was done walking through the house, I opened the back door and a deer was standing there a few feet in front of me just chewing on some vegetable from the garden staring in to my eyes as if saying, “You definitely belong here.”
“So you’re feeding me from now on?”
My point of telling you all this is to say that you shouldn’t settle for less, your dream property in your price range is out there and you should start looking at the market now before you’re ready to buy to get an idea of what you want, and the prices homes cost. That way you can prepare your financial situation for the day it comes.
If you have any comments or questions, leave them below or reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or on Twitter @kylesshortcuts
I was born and raised on the standard American diet. My Mom cooked us conventional meat loaf dinners, ham for holidays, and steak for Friday’s. It wasn’t until I was like 24-25 that I started to think about what the ingredients in my food could be doing to my body and the environment around me.
I started eating vegan to clean my guts out. Once I learned how my intestines holds pounds of shit from years ago that could potentially be leaking all sorts of toxins in my blood stream inhibiting my immune system from functioning properly, I wanted to cleanse ASAP. My cousin dying of cancer at like 21 had a lot to do with it too. No doctor will tell you diet has something to do with cancer, but it does.
I switched up my diet, eating only fruits, vegetables, nuts and beans. I cut bread out too to see how I’d feel. I became vegan to benefit my health. I was getting sustained energy through the day and pooping 2-3 times a day which is healthy.
I ate like that for 6-7 years until I got interested in living sustainably off the land. I came across some interesting information from a guy named Daniel Vitalis who owns the company Surthrival. He held a lecture that’s now on YouTube about the mass domestication of human beings and talked about him being a recovering vegan too.
Is this real?!
Now if you’re like me I’m sure every once in a while you look around in your house and open your pantry and question the very reality you’re living in. No? Well I notice the cage, the nutritionally poor produce, the hamster wheel I’m on to live in the cage I rent from my lord, my land-lord.
My ancestral DNA cramps my stomach when I realize I’m addicted to convenience, binge watching Netflix shows, trying to filter chlorinated water to boil my plastic packaged noodles.
I was feeling fine eating how I was eating, but I felt like I really relied on the supermarket for everything once the pandemic hit. My kale that was driven thousands of miles from the ‘organic’ farm to the Whole Foods shelf is stripped of it’s wild form. It’s original nutrient dense state just grown in some poor excuse for soil.
The manufactured world is stripping the wild out of the human and the food supply. The vegan diet needs supplements manufactured and sold in capsules or delivered in shots. The so called healthiest diet is absent of essential vitamins and minerals, and relies on industrialization to be sustained. If for some reason your lost in the wild, God forbid a plane crash or some lethal wrong turn on your hiking trip, the vegan diet will not keep you alive.
You ever watch that show Alone on the History channel? It’s amazing, people are challenged to survived in the wilderness with only 10 items for as long as they can. My point is, they can’t just eat berries forever or their bodies will eat their muscle for fat, that’s not good. You need fish or meat to survive.
So after I got Covid in Feb 2020, I’ve been vegan for 6 years, I craved eggs. I was like this diet didn’t protect me, forget it, I’m eating eggs. That got me interested in other grass-fed meats, and wild-caught fish.
Choose wisely young Jedi.
I’m still as conscious of the quality of the food I eat. Choosing organic and local over conventional and non-local. I’m just a little more realistic with what a wild human would be eating in the wild and base my diet around that.
I understand people challenging the human body to a vegan diet to see if they can create the first multi-generational vegan people. Since there’s no evidence of any culture in human history being 100% vegan it’s a hell of a challenge and I hope the best for you. I’ll just eat how I eat and you continue to eat how you eat. I just wanted to share this for people interested in diet.
If you have any questions reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or on Twitter @kylesshortcuts
I haven’t written about programming in a while, and it’s not because I’m not studying, it’s because I’m a crazy person who has a hard time putting together a blog post sometimes. So I wait until the moment strikes me, and today that moment is around lunch time at work.
I left off with my explanation of Dart conditionals, methods and classes, which to be honest I still need to look at to get a refresher. I started taking the next module Angela has that builds the BMI calculator, and that taught me some good stuff about customizing themes.
Failed attempt, moving on.
I got frustrated with this lesson at the end because I couldn’t get the BMI to calculate right. I moved on though and took all the other stuff that I learned in that lesson with me.
Constants Are For Style
k for Constant
Constants are a great way to style everything on your page and refer to it one place. It’s like CSS sheet for your HTML file. For example:
const kNumberStyle = TextStyle(
fontSize: 50.0,
fontWeight: FontWeight.w900,
color: Colors.white,
);
You just use the key word const nameOfConst = What your styling, TextStyle, Color, Container height, etc. You use the name of the const instead of the entire TextStyle widget. I like that little shortcut, it’s great to use to build container widgets that have the same parameters.
The colour is of Type color. This reads like this: Is the selcetedGender equal to male? Then use constant kActiveCardColor : other wise use kInactiveCardColor,
This is a simpler way to do an if (something == something){do something} else {do this}
Enumerations or Enums
Enums let you make up your own data type for instance:
Gender selectedGender;
The enum is of type Gender and set it to selectedGender;
The ReusableCard class
Build out anything you might reuse in your app in a class
You can build out a dart file to create a class of a Widget tree you want to continue to use on your main screen. Here ReusableCard is created as a class and an object that requires a color, a cardChild and a function. The cardChild is a dynamic object that holds the Icon and the label below it in a container. I specify what’s in that cardChild on the input page like so:
Pretty much anytime I create a ResusableCard on the input page I can put what I need in that cardChild:
Expanded(child: ReusableCard(
colour: kActiveCardColor,
cardChild: Column(
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
children: [
Text(‘AGE’,
style: kLabelTextStyle),
Text(age.toString(),
style: kNumberStyle,
),
The rest of the functionality of the app doesn’t come to any use for me, like adding a Slider or adding buttons that increase or decrease a number, all good stuff, but not useful for what I want to build. Like I said I got too frustrated with it cause I couldn’t get it to calculate correctly, I downloaded the completed project but got to lazy to compare mine with hers. I get it, that’s not the attitude I should have learning a new skill, but I’ve got building to do!
Leave a comment below or reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob
You’re reading this because either you’re seeking a new perspective on living your life or you’re worried that I’m unstable. I’m not unstable, I’ve never been happier, and thanks for caring. Life is hard though, and being callus toward those who see mostly in the darkness isn’t acceptable, so this is for you.
6 Good Reasons to Live:
Food – you can’t taste anything when you’re dead.
Poetry – profound words can encapsulate anything in the universe and make it beautiful.
Art – other people have felt the myriad of emotional torture you and I feel; go relate.
Animals – unconditional love from the earth’s own fellow creatures, remember you’re apart of this ecosystem.
History – don’t you want to see how this civilization thing plays out?
Love – friends, family, partners, spirituality the only thing that matters, the source of all matter really; everything reproduces.
There’s something so special about the human condition. I don’t know exactly how to put it into words, but even if you’re down and out, you hit rock bottom so to say, you still have the perspective that you’re experiencing the beauty of struggling.
When you perceiver through the struggles of the human condition you’ll be a new version of you. When you’re stuck in a difficult place in life, faced with some heavy emotional weight, always take a moment to zoom out.
I like to think of it as sitting on the moon, looking down at my little earth life.
Get outside your head and see it through fresh eyes with empathy for the fragile human you are that has to deal with the results of a collection of experiences that were shaped by uncontrollable forces in this lifetime and thousands upon thousands of past life times.
Take a look at history, this exact moment is the result of some wild decision a general did or didn’t make on a battlefield somewhere hundreds of years ago, you’re apart of that right now.
I wrote this for you. Yes, you. Living through a pandemic is not what any of us wanted, but it is a fact of life, and a unique, strange and suspicious experience. If you’re struggling with uncontrollable depression, anxiety, or paranoia reach out to someone and tell them.
We’ve all been there, in the deep dark muggy corners of our self loathing minds, it’s not uncommon to feel depressed, suicidal, and hopeless. Just remember that there’s people you can talk to about it, and if you can’t find anyone or feel embarrassed or ashamed like we’re conditioned to feel about these dark truths, message me on Instagram @kyleknob, dial this number 800-273-8255 for the Suicide Prevention Lifeline or leave a comment below.
Every time I set out to start a new project I go through 3 phases:
Excitement – Thrilled to realize the potential of the new project I can’t wait to get started
Accountability – I take whatever steps I need to get started and make sure I do them right
Exhaustion – I lose steam and come up with whatever reason I can to put it off until later
If you’re like me, once you reach exhaustion you probably feel disappointed in yourself and it makes you question every decision you’ve ever made.
I have only one choice, and that’s to develop discipline. If I could, I would hire someone to tell me to get to work and belittle me for making excuses, but I don’t have the money for that. Instead, I’m going to create that person in my head and every time I find myself slowing down, remember to make that guy scream at me.
Curse of multiple interests
Too Much to Handle
I might have too many things going on to give each of them the attention it deserves. I’ve been like this my entire life, and I’ve always been convinced it’s a flaw but I’m not so certain it is anymore.
I like being able to switch gears in any given day from studying to writing to playing guitar to skating to building websites to drawing to stretching and so on. Should I give priority to just one thing for the majority of the day? Maybe, but I get bored of one thing quick, even if I’m super excited about it.
This blog is something that I know is important. One day I will look back at all my posts and feel like I had contributed my voice in a time where it’s important to have one, but something still holds me back from getting on my laptop and just writing:
Lack of Discipline
In order for me to get in a flow state where I’m writing a blog I need to wait for this inner voice to say, “Hey let’s write about this today.” But sometimes that voice gets drowned out by procrastination and that is an internal conflict.
My work ethic slips away as time passes only to be resuscitated by my guilt of procrastinating. Can I skip that odd mental torture I submit to? Well, if I had discipline I’d be a little more aware of it, and for the sake of bypassing that mental torture, this blog post that I’m writing at this second serves as a reminder to self discipline.
Peaks and valleys
What to Remember
Life is a series of peaks and valleys or waves however you want to picture that. Knowing the excitement of the peak is eventually followed by the low of the valley prepares you for how to behave when you’re either on the peak or in the valley. When I’m on the peak I need to remind myself of the nature of waves, and to work hard while I’m in that flow state. When I’m in the valley, I need to embrace its presence and remember the peak is coming. Am I in a valley right now as I’m writing this? Feels like it, but writing this is helping me find the base of that next peak to climb.
Have any advice for self discipline? Leave a comment below or reach out to me on instagram @kyleknob
If you’re new to graphic design and want to get started I tell anyone that asks me to first find something they want to build out that they are passionate about. I got started in design because I’m a skate rat at heart. I wanted to put all of my friends and I on the internet to show everyone how good we were at skating and I wanted it to ‘look cool.’
I don’t know what came first, me wanting to build a website with something like Angelfire.com or me wanting to design things with photos of me skating that my friend Jbo shot, either way the point of this is that you should take something you’re already passionate about and work on that as you learn because there’s nothing more annoying than creating things that don’t matter to you.
Learn because you’re motivated by your own passion.
Now that that is understood, I’m going to start with Photoshop. Adobe design software is Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign those are the 3 hitters that any employer will want you to be proficient at. Everyone kind of lies about being proficient in InDesign though cause it’s something that you can learn the ins and outs of in one night once you mastered the other two.
Adobe Photoshop
How do you install Photoshop? Well you gotta pay for it monthly, but there is a free trial, so if you’re super cheap create like 10 e-mail address and sign up for the free trials every time one runs out or simply pay $9.99 a month for it.
I wish I could actually get into teaching you something in this post, but there’s some technical stuff you should know before getting started. Your machine should have at least 8gb of RAM in it, and I recommend Macintosh. If you have a PC cool, but know that I’m on a Mac.
Once you installed Photoshop you’ll see this:
This is your welcome dialog. It’s asking you what kind of document do you want to work in. Here is one thing even designers with degrees forget that is super important:
Resolution, DPI, or PPI, make sure that you understand the 2 major resolutions.
72 DPI is for anything that is going to live on the internet.
300 DPI is for anything that is going to print.
Remember that, write that down, make it a song, anything so that you don’t accidentally send a 72 DPI document to a printer, you’ll be tremendously disappointed in the quality, and if you’re employed by someone, you might get fired. I’d fire you if you made that mistake. That’s why I’m making that 101 of graphic design.
For the sake of this introduction we will work on a 72 DPI document in pixels. Let’s make a 2000 x 2000px document.
The file size for this document will be under 1 MB if saved out as a JPEG, if saved out with transparency it could be anywhere between 2-8 MB.
The reason I’m telling you about the file size is because websites perform better with images that are under 1MB in size.
Google will rank your website better because it loads fast.
1 MB will load faster than 7 MB. Note that down too.
You got a square document, perfect for Instagram or a product image on your web store. What do you want to make? Your answer should be anything. You should be excited right now, ready to explore a program’s interface like some archeologist in a newly discovered tomb in Egypt. Get ready, filters, effects, adjustments, tools and masks are going to populate your brain in a matter of time.
Start your learning journey by having fun with what you don’t know anything about.
Once I got done writing this blog I realized that this is better off as a video, but I’m going to keep what I have here in case you’re more of a reader anyway. If you have any questions reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or leave a comment below. I promise to do more of these intro to design posts.
I’ve been hearing about Avatar: The Last Airbender for a few months now from my co-worker and on podcasts, and last night I found the live action movie on Netflix. I wanted to get the gist of the story in an hour and half rather then like 6 hours from the show, and it was amazing.
If you watched the series first, you hated this movie.
The world we live in today is drastically different than the world of our ancestors-ancestors-ancestors, and it’s become imperative that we rediscover the secrets of that time. What is it we need to remember to overcome the slavery, the oppression and the endless wars we inherited from our immediate ancestors?
Are we magicians capable of great power or are we lower class citizens incapable of finding a well paying job?
Am I the Avatar?
In the aftermath of every war and every battle, we have lost most if not all, of our sacred knowledge. For many of us, we disconnected ourselves from those far reaches of our history and traded it for some strange state of hypnosis we call modern life.
I’m certain that in the teachings lost, we will find the importance of our individual power and restore the balance that was once here on earth.
Getting back to Avatar:
The Fire lord and his Fire army conquered many of the lands on Earth and they plan to claim them all, even the spirit worlds, but with the discovery of the Avatar, a 12 year old air-bender, the earth has a chance to take it all back.
This is symbolic to the zombie like state we find our populations around the world in. We’ve been convinced that we have no earth bending abilities and we must remain in our prisons while the Fire lords conquer the planet.
Avatar’s symbolism is unique in that we need to resurrect something that we forgot long ago to get out of our vegetable like stupor. Do we need to resurrect a person that will show us the way or is that person inside of us? There’s a duality to this understanding: how we definitely need help to awaken and that we also need to have the courage to awaken ourselves.
“Instead of seeing what they want you to see you got to see the possibilities.”
Support Each Other
You can’t stand alone, as much as you’d like to define yourself and be an individual you also need to surrender to the love others can offer you and the love you can offer them. There’s a reason every major philosophy talks about the importance of balance and the duality of nature.
Buy it from your local store or the Last Book Store
“You are angry, you need to let this go. As the avatar you are not meant to hurt others.”
You can find this film and the show on Netflix by the way.
So much happened in this year so far that 2020 will forever be remembered as the worst year to date in the 21st century, but I’m not just a pessimist. I’m an optimist too.
I’m hopeful that consciousness is enveloping the generation, as love makes it’s self the only obvious alternative to hate.
I’m hopeful that the truth will rise to the surface and we can understand it and work toward building communities that thrive.
In a world where technology is centralized there is no doubt that its power will be abused. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google or Amazon or the advent of A.I., the future of centralized technology in the hands of an authoritarian government is not so hopeful.
Censored for your protection
However, the progress blockchain technology has made with Bitcoin leading the way has shown that not only can alternative systems be designed, but they can be implemented and impossible for any government to stop. The creation of DeFi itself is a huge milestone for cryptocurrencies. We are looking at the take over of banking, governing, and voting, all done on a blockchain.
The creation of the tools of the future are at a precipice. On one hand, the centralized entities have complete control of our lives with fear of the virus and their development of a Central Bank Digital Currency.
On the other hand, we have decentralized technology that can offer you exponentially higher annual profits on your savings, a governing system that can do what Uber did to Taxis, and a voting tool for us all to participate simply and fairly.
As much hopelessness as there is in the world surrounding the globalist agenda, the end of cash, the personal taxation of carbon, the closing of businesses, and the lost of jobs and homes, there will always be a silver lining.
What is the silver lining?
Well you can change and do better. We all can do better, and we must if we want to move forward as the United States of America and not the Red and Blue States of America. I trust you’ll be better because now in hindsight, we aren’t doing so good. Swallow your pride, recognize your outrageous ego demons, and be helpful.
It’s not a coincidence that I write about learning computer programming, and think about programming in a traditional sense. Maybe what I’m learning will help me better demonstrate the similarity between programming mobile applications to increase productivity and programming childhoods to be self-conscious consuming adults.
On all sides of the social economic and political spectrums you’ll find acute evidence of bias, ignorance or lack of empathy, yes even you and me. I’m assuming my reader is aware of this already so that I don’t sound outrageous. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m not ignorant”, well you’re being ignorant because even the oldest gurus know that they don’t know.
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
Socrates
Let It Go
I couldn’t wait to grow up, big mistake.
When we’re 3 years old we are free to be as we are. A child who in one minute will experience bliss in a puddle of water will then scream and cry the next minute for getting too wet. We played outside in the grass with nothing more than our imaginations and threw around our toys for no good reason. The point I’m getting at is that when we’re in our parents care, before public schooling, we’re encouraged to express ourselves, laugh, live, & love (if you’re lucky) like that cliche plaque that’s out there being sold for $20.
As soon as we turn 5 or 6 years old kindergarten begins, and so does the degradation of self expression and the institution of conformity. Well, that’s what it seems like now looking back, but when you’re unaware of it as a child or a parent it’s an exciting new adventure into forming social skills, friends, education and well, a test of performance.
Is that a prison or a school? Switch some letters up and change the color of the bus
In my opinion public schooling is like rolling the dice on childhood development. Hope you roll snake eyes, anything else, you could end up with a variety of strange outcomes. I get it though, the system is set up where parents work 9 – 5, so school is like a free day care, and you didn’t turn out so bad right? As the parent, it’s your job to encourage self expression, discipline selfishness, and guide them however you see fit, which is the most important job any human can have, but that all translates into programming. Here’s a good opportunity to compare computer programming to childhood programming, but I’ll let you imagine the similarities.
It’s By Design
Pay close attention to nothing on the T.V.
There’s a reason it’s called Television Programming. We use to refer to the TV Guide as the program before the streaming boom, even before my time. It’s no mistake that today, kids are glued to screens, waiting at bus stops for a school whose art and music program is a thing of the past, and punishes them for “acting out.”
Whether we acknowledge the education system as a design for productivity or a design for conformity there remains one constant: it’s illegal to not show up.
“Typically, children must start school by the age of six and remain enrolled until they are at least 16. These laws were put in place not only to improve literacy rates but also to discourage the widespread child labor practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Fast forward to your twenties after high school, maybe you’ve taken psychedelics or haven’t been brave enough yet, but you at least tried to smoke weed. Maybe you’re well read and had studied philosophy and had begun to strip away some of the layers of institutionalism you had previously followed without question.
Once you begin to unravel the fabric of society, the hierarchy, the political system, and the corporate structures, you get into the habit of peeling back the layers or falling down the rabbit hole.”Where’s this rabbit going?”, “What’s the reason for this law?”, “What’s the reason for money?”, “What’s the point of life?” All these questions allow you to seek answers, and they’re important to the deprogramming of childhood trauma you had no choice but to interfere with. Whether you want to admit it as traumatic or just unfortunate events is up to you, but whether you realize it or not, your childhood is something you still carry around with you today, good or bad.
“They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool.”
Whether you’re scared to accept truth that’s uncomfortable for you to handle or ignore evidence to remain blissfully ignorant is your choice. I love that cliche, “you can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it.” Sometimes cliches are the best way to make a point, and the point is, do us a favor, drink the water. You might feel feelings you’d rather avoid, but you’ll be aware of the truth.
Bill of Right or Temporary Privileges?
They Don’t Care About Us
“I’m tired of bein’ the victim of hate. You’re rippin’ me of my pride, oh, for God’s sake. I look to heaven to fulfill this prophecy”
Sometimes a song is the best way to get a point across too. The message is clear through out all music and that’s why I’m working on a collection of artists that have been an archetype of truth called “Proof of Truth.” It’s important that we remember these truths so I’m gathering all my favorite works and quotes to share with you, but for now, go listen to that Michael Jackson song.
I’ll end this programming article with a glimmer of hope. Even though 100% of the people around you are programmed, not all of that programming is bad, and there are ways to reprogram our minds. For instance, meditation is a great practice to reprogram our trigger mechanisms, but if you want a shortcut, take some mushrooms with an experienced friend in a safe setting. The reprogramming experiments you do on your own mind can be dangerous, so don’t go blaming this author on your newly found psychosis, take it easy, breathe and be nice to people.
If you want to chime in please feel free, leave a comment below or reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob
I created my very first app with my understanding of Classes, Methods, & Conditionals in Dart called Destini. I did not create this by scratch however, I completed a challenge from the course I’ve been taking with Angela Yu on Udemy. The objective is to create a choose your own adventure story. Depending on the choices the user makes as they read along with the story, the story data that appears on the screen changes along with it.
Recalling information you learn from tutorials and utilizing them in real life is difficult to say the least, but not impossible.
I took this step by step and eventually got through it, checking in on the solutions as I went along to see if I was getting it right. I’m pretty sure that is practically how every app gets done, Googling things to get the solutions from stackoverflow.com or something, so I’m not being hard on myself for not recalling everything I’ve learned.
First of all I’ll run through the steps so that I can better understand what I created, because even though I followed these steps I need to better clarify what it is I’m actually doing. If you’re a new reader I’ll tell you now that I’m learning how to program so that I can build out apps of my own and I’m writing out what I’m learning in blog posts so that I better understand what it is that I’m learning.
Step 1: Download the project file using version control. That’s where you copy and paste the GitHub repository into Android Studio and it copies everything onto your computer so that you can access all the files when you ‘Get Dependencies’ when you load the project from your system.
The project file had set up the Scaffold, but I had to put in the background image. Which after looking it up was not hard.
You use the property decoration: and declare BoxDecoration( image: DecorationImage( and finally image: AssetImage(‘images/filename.png, fit:BoxFit.cover.
After setting that up I needed to create a story.dart file with a class that held some objects. That class is called Story:
class Story { // creation of class
String storyTitle; // creating object variable holding a String called storyTitle
String choice1; // creating object variable string for the users first choice called choice1
String choice2; // creating object variable for the users second choice called choice2
Story({this.storyTitle, this.choice1, this.choice2}){ // creating a method that holds the objects above using this.storyTitle refers to the above variables
storyTitle = storyTitle; // the method declares storyTitle to equal the variable passed in the input of the method
choice1 = choice1; // the method declares choice1 to equal the variable passed in the input of the method
choice2 = choice2; // the method declares choice2 to equal the variable passed in the input of the method
}
}
This is sort of confusing at first glance so I tried to break it down with a // comment next to each object and method to explain it as best as I could. I am going to import this story.dart file into the story_brain.dart file I’m going to create next. You will see how it communicates with this other file next. I practically created this to be like the working mechanism that will pass data into the main.dart file appropriately, you’ll see.
Now let’s take a look at the final story_brain.dart file, since I write these blogs after I’m done the challenge it’s easier to just explain to you what I can. Read the // comments next to the emboldened text to follow along.
import ‘story.dart’; // importing story.dart or the story class to work wit the data.
class StoryBrain { // creating the BRAIN of the app, where all the data is stored.
int _storyNumber = 0; // this variable will load the first story in storyData (below) in the List on the screen, and then be updated as the user chooses.
List<Story> _storyData = [ // creating a List with a <widget> referencing the <Story> class and calling it _storydata, this holds all my data for the app that will load on the screen
Story(
storyTitle:// using storyTitle from the Story class we created in story.dart
‘Your car has blown a tire on a winding road in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone reception. You decide to hitchhike. A rusty pickup truck rumbles to a stop next to you. A man with a wide brimmed hat with soulless eyes opens the passenger door for you and asks: “Need a ride, boy?”.’,
choice1: ‘I\’ll hop in. Thanks for the help!’, // using choice1 from the Story class we created in story.dart
choice2: ‘Better ask him if he\’s a murderer first.’), // using choice2 from the Story class we created in story.dart
Story(
storyTitle: ‘He nods slowly, unphased by the question.’,
choice1: ‘At least he\’s honest. I\’ll climb in.’,
choice2: ‘Wait, I know how to change a tire.’),
Story(
storyTitle:
‘As you begin to drive, the stranger starts talking about his relationship with his mother. He gets angrier and angrier by the minute. He asks you to open the glovebox. Inside you find a bloody knife, two severed fingers, and a cassette tape of Elton John. He reaches for the glove box.’,
choice1: ‘I love Elton John! Hand him the cassette tape.’,
choice2: ‘It\’s him or me! You take the knife and stab him.’),
Story(
storyTitle:
‘What? Such a cop out! Did you know traffic accidents are the second leading cause of accidental death for most adult age groups?’,
choice1: ‘Restart’,
choice2: ”),
Story(
storyTitle:
‘As you smash through the guardrail and careen towards the jagged rocks below you reflect on the dubious wisdom of stabbing someone while they are driving a car you are in.’,
choice1: ‘Restart’,
choice2: ”),
Story(
storyTitle:
‘You bond with the murderer while crooning verses of “Can you feel the love tonight”. He drops you off at the next town. Before you go he asks you if you know any good places to dump bodies. You reply: “Try the pier”.’,
choice1: ‘Restart’,
choice2: ”)
];
String getStory(){ // this function is called in main.dart to load the next storyTitle in the List above.
return _storyData[_storyNumber].storyTitle;
}
String getChoice1() { // this function is called in main.dart to load the next choice1 in the List above.
return _storyData[_storyNumber].choice1;
}
String getChoice2(){ // this function is called in main.dart to load the next choice2 in the List above.
return _storyData[_storyNumber].choice2;
}
void nextStory({int choiceNumber}){ // this function determines what story loads in the _storydata List. Passing {int choiceNumber} into the function allows us to pass an integer into the function when calling it. Like so: storyBrain.nextStory(choiceNumber: 2);
This tells the function in main.dart what choice has been selected, and what to do if we pass a 1 or a 2 into that choiceNumber variable
if (choiceNumber == 1 && _storyNumber == 0) {
_storyNumber = 2; // if user chooses choice 1 and it’s _storyNumber is 0 then change _storyNumber to 2
_storyNumber = 2; // depending on what user choice above and ran either of those conditional statements do the following and then the following else if statements that follow the story line..
return true; // if _story number is equal to 0 or 1 or 2 return true, or keep the button visible
} else {
return false; // if it’s not less then 3 then keep the button
}
}
void restart(){ // set the storyNumber back to the beginning by loading the 0 index of the List
_storyNumber = 0;
}
}
This is what my completed story_brain.dart file looks like and the explanations of how each of these corresponds to the main.dart file that displays the widget trees of the app.
Screenshot of Destini App
Let’s take a look at main.dart to see what’s going on in there. I can not stress enough how important this is for me to write about, I’m having a moment of clarity right now.
Here is main.dart:
Again, follow the // comments to understand how I’m breaking this apart for you to understand
// importing the story class from story_brain and story.dart
void main() => runApp(Destini());
// main return your runApp function and input my app Destini()
class Destini extends StatelessWidget {
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
theme: ThemeData.dark(),// this tells the app what color it should be
home: StoryPage(),// this is going to hold the part of our app that a will change appearance in the StatefulWidget below
);
}
}
StoryBrain storyBrain = StoryBrain();
// this can be confusing, but we’re calling our class with the first StoryBrain and we are creating an object in our main.dart called storyBrain and its going to hold or equal the StoryBrain(); class data. This tells the main.dart to interact with all objects in that class in the file story_brain.dart
child: SafeArea( // keep things within the SafeArea
child: Column(
crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.stretch,
children: <Widget>[
Expanded(
flex: 12,
child: Center(
child: Text(
storyBrain.getStory(), // this loads the story into the center of the screen, notice it’s within a widget tree starting with the SafeArea, a Column, and the children in that column within an Expanded, that holds centered text.
style: TextStyle( // this is changing the style of the text loaded from getStory();
fontSize: 25.0,
),
),
),
),
Expanded( // beginning of our button
flex: 2, // I need to understand how flex works a bit better, sorry.
child: FlatButton( // our first button that tells us the user chose choice1
onPressed: () { // button action
setState(() {// this allows the button text to change, gotta use setState if something is changing on the button
storyBrain.nextStory(choiceNumber: 1); // calling storyBrain, run the nextStory method we made, and so you know which choice it was they made, we input (choiceNumber: 1);
});
},
color: Colors.red, // color of the button
child: Text(
storyBrain.getChoice1(), // calls the method in storyBrain to getChoice1 String data.
style: TextStyle(
fontSize: 20.0,
),
),
),
),
SizedBox(
height: 20.0, // this is the spacing between the two buttons
),
Expanded( // button 2
flex: 2
child: Visibility( we use this to hide the button on the last storyTitle
visible: storyBrain.buttonShouldBeVisible(), // we created a function in storyBrain to check to see if the button should be visible or not
child: FlatButton(
onPressed: () {
setState(() {
storyBrain.nextStory(choiceNumber: 2); // I’m calling it to load the nextStory based on the choice made by the user with the input (choiceNumber: 2)
});
},
color: Colors.blue,
child: Text(
storyBrain.getChoice2(), // this get’s the String data for choice2
style: TextStyle(
fontSize: 20.0,
), …
That’s what main.dart is like. I’m confident in my understanding of it after I did this diagnosis of the Dart files. It’s important for me to do these blog posts for myself rather than a motivation to do it to provide for you. Honestly I don’t think anyone is reading this far unless you’re a beginner programmer that also reads lengthy blogs on the subject, that’s a micro niche, I’m sure your out there. Hi! Thanks for reading.
I hope you got some good insight out of this, I did. If you have any questions or comments or you think I might have got something wrong in my explanations leave a comment below or reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob.
It’s like a larger than life outdated computer running an old OS
The system is broke, you know it, I know it, we all know it, yet we continue feeding into the very thing that is keeping us down. I’m not trying to point out something that’s hard to find, it’s more obvious than ever. What is it going to take to change? A few things, but first we must get our priorities straight.
If money is the only language they speak, then you better learn all about the language.
Priority 1: Eliminate Frivolous Expenses
Entertainment, eating out, gas, energy bills, and vacation are variables that fluctuate your checking account statement. Whatever you can cut out, cut out. The reason I’m telling you this is because we don’t really consider these expenses as draining, rather we think of them as essential. If you’re on the protest tip, which if you’re reading this blog you must be, or just a very well read hater, then you should try to pin point what is distracting you from your goals and prioritize accordingly. You need Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu subscriptions? Probably not. Can you spend less on food? Maybe. Can you run your air conditioning unit less? If you live in LA it’s probably impossible but you could. You get the point.
Priority 2: What are you investing in?
I’m saving up enough cash and dollar cost averaging into digital assets to hopefully get me ahead in the coming years. I’m investing in my self by learning how to program mobile apps, becoming part owner of an herbal supplement brand PlantsBasically, starting this blog, expanding readySketch, and starting a podcast.
I’m being very ambitious with my self because I know that investing in myself is the single most important investment I can make.
Same goes for you, what can you bring to your audience or your work place, that will allow you to become successful in your own way? Let’s face it, no one wants you to succeed at what you do, they hope you fail so that you can make room for them to succeed. Push through the criticism, the insecurity and be vulnerable.
Priority 3: What is your goal?
This has become a blog post about personal strength, but maybe that’s not a coincidence that personal strength is considered a protest. Let’s face it you can not go out and change the entire world by holding a sign on the street that reads, ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ There’s a point where you are just repeating a phrase like a wind up toy and no one cares or even understands what you mean. My goal is to build up my businesses enough to allow me to live on land that I own with friends I love in a technologically sustainable way. That means, solar passive housing, homesteading, gardening, hunting, foraging the whole nine yards. I want my expenses to be cut down far more than they are now and have more income to travel and live the life I want. How do I get there? Well I got to have a plan.
You fail and fail and fail until you get it right.
Priority 4: Make a plan
My plan involves saving, investing, building brands, and educating myself. It took a pandemic for me to understand what I needed to do to get to where I wanted to go. I call this the pandemic effect, where I was faced with my mortality, so much so that I feared for my life. I didn’t want to see my girlfriend, I didn’t want to go to work, I was a victim of the fear surrounding the virus. I’ve grown past it and learned a lot since the initial headlines, but it rattled me. This survival instinct went into full effect. For the first time in my life I realized how easy it is for it all to be taken from you. Remembering you are not infinite and that you will one day leave behind just a story of you really kicks planning into overdrive. This is when I knew that I can not rely on the grocery store, the job, the gas stations, and the almighty dollar for security. This will not last forever, and I want to be ready when it collapses.
Priority 5: Do the work
You can get all the way up to the planning stage and just give up, realizing that you just don’t have it in you to continue to do the work day after day. It’s so easy to just sit on the couch, drink a beer, tell yourself you had a hard day, and turn on the T.V. I’m sure your day was hard, but let’s face it, it wasn’t 1920’s depression hard or 1700’s witch trial hard, it’s just hard compared to what you see on television and on the internet. People live kush lives online don’t they? Influencers that never did a day of hard work making millions shaking their asses for a McDonalds endorsement or whatever. Stop comparing yourself to others, and just start a habit of doing the work necessary to get you to where you’re going.
Priority 6: Positive reinforcements
When I’m fed up with all the stuff I have to do, and I just want to sink into my bed and watch an episode of The Simpsons, instead I put on something that will reinforce my work ethic. Maybe listen to something Gary Vee has to say about putting out content, or Seth Godin on marketing, or hell, even Ram Dass on experiencing all the love around you not as separate from the world but of it. There is an endless database of positive reinforcements that live on the internet at your fingertips that will keep you motivated in what you are doing. Digest great quality content, do not feed into the “I’m feeling sorry for myself” narrative our brains want to so quickly resort to when things get tough.
I’m tired of seeing all of these large corporations being propped up by billions of tax payer dollars during economic recessions. You’d think we should’ve had our revolution already. You know why we hadn’t? We have not yet put a finger on what to do otherwise. We keep looking up to our political mothers and fathers for permission to eat, breathe and sleep. How will we be able to get our point through the heads of our theatrical political show runners? Good question, my advice, do your best to not have to rely on them. Seek alternatives to the dollar, seek alternatives to traditional health care, seek alternatives to energy consumption and finally seek alternatives to the mainstream narrative of polarity amongst citizens. We all forget the truth too easily, and that’s I Am The Walrus or “I am you, you are me, and we are all together.”
First of all congratulations, you reached a stage where insecurity is king and your main focuses are getting laid and partying, but you’re also going to have to find a job if you want to buy a car, beer or drugs.
I got a truck when I was 17.
You’re 13 you don’t really know what lies ahead, but you’re still kind of anxious to get older so you can get a license and eventually a job because Mom and Dad can’t afford all of that and your dinner, so wise up, the freedom of childhood is fleeting.
In 7th grade I was 12 and was instructed to write a letter to my future self 5 years down the road and when I graduated high school I’d receive it in the mail. I wish I remembered how that worked, it was a cool project. Anyway, I do remember how exciting it was to read it when I was 17 graduating high school. I was telling myself that I better be still skating and be sponsored or something like that and then I’d be disappointed if I had stopped.
I wrote this to my future self, of course I kept it in my important box.
I didn’t stop skating and I was sponsored at the time by Supra, Krew and Foundation. It felt like I was achieving my dream, but it’s a shame that you can’t do the opposite, write to your past self, though impossible, it would be tremendously useful. So instead of trying to break the space time continuum laws I’ll just write to you, the young teenage kid who would give a shit about their finances enough to read a blog about it.
Let’s call money what it really is, a freedom score. The higher the score, the more freedom you have. Once you understand this you’ll want a high score.
Let’s break this down in 4 steps:
Step 1
Save 10% or more of your income every pay period.
If you get paid $200 a week save $20 or more if you can, and don’t spend it. You’re at the very beginning of your journey to own assets that will make you rich, but let’s really talk about what being rich means. Being rich means having enough money coming in every month to cover all of your expenses and the freedom of never going into work again. There’s a few ways for you to get there, but the most easy to understand is buying a house, and though you’re young and buying a house seems so far out right now, every penny you save will make it that much easier to get one, and that much sooner to freedom.
If you save $250 a month for 10 years, you’ll have $30,000
If you’ve played Monopoly then you understand the value of houses. When someone lands on the property, or wants to rent a room in your house or the entire thing, the more money goes into your pocket. The median household cost in America is about $300,000, you need anywhere between 10% – 30% to get the house, so at least $30,000 to cover all these costs that you can’t even think of, you’d believe they were just making them up. As soon as you get a house though you can start renting, the more rooms or the more houses you have, the more money you will have to cover the cost of the monthly mortgage plus funny money. I’m sure you can imagine the domino effect, easy pickings if you got the down payment.
Step 2
Make high risk, high reward investments.
When you’re young you can afford to throw a few hundred dollars at some risky investments because the potential of return on those investments is really high. For example, a few years ago Tesla (TSLA) was considered a risky investment because it was new tech, could it have failed? Sure, but did those who threw some money at it in those early years cash out big? Yes. Another example was Netflix, that too shot up over the years. My point is, when you’re younger you can afford to take a risk with some investments that might tank because you have time to recover what you lose. My advice though is to invest in things you use, like if you have an iPhone, invest in Apple. If you have Netflix invest in that, or if you really want a Tesla but can’t afford one, buy a share. If you want to play it safe with your investment portfolio then maybe buy stocks that pay out dividends. You can run a quick Google search on stocks that pay you money to hold them, one of these is Coca Cola. These ‘blue chip’ stocks as they call them, are usually companies that have been around for like 100 years like Johnson & Johnson, they are relatively ‘safe’ investments that we think will continue to appreciate over time.
You might be wondering how you’re going to afford to invest and save at the same time with your low income job. Well, if you have to choose between saving and investing what feels more comfortable to you? You won’t go wrong saving, and you can lose it all if you invest in shitty companies or if the economy collapses.
Investing is an art, saving is a discipline.
Do one or the other or do both. This is your choice, but since I’m talking to my teenage self, I would say do both, if you have to save 5% of your weekly pay and invest 5% do that, but more is better.
Make calculated risks, and don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose.
Another high risk high reward investment is in crypto currency. If I didn’t mention that in this blog article I’d be keeping you in the dark. This sector of digital finance is revolutionary and can potentially make you a millionaire by the time you’re 20. People are comparing crypto related investments to the dot com bubble of the late 1990’s – 2000’s. The people who were early to buy domains made millions, just like the people who invested early into Bitcoin and held onto it made millions, and it’s not too late still, because mass adoption has not happened yet. I will go into different crypto projects in another blog post, but this blog wouldn’t be complete without mentioning crypto. My advice though is to dollar cost average in. That means every week or every month buy $5 – $10 of Bitcoin, you won’t regret it.
Create a YouTube channel telling people about the things you know about. If you’re into skating, think of some content you can post that other people would be into. The idea here is build an audience that cares about what content you produce. It may seem like no one cares at first, but if you’re doing it consistently for a few years you’ll be surprised at how many people follow you and you’ll be surprised at how much money you could be making because of that. YouTube pays you if you have enough subscribers and if you have enough followers on any channel you’ll find ways to get paid by promoting product or getting sponsorship or what not. This is a long game to play before you see reward, but if you need a constructive hobby, I suggest building out a channel with consistent content, you never know.
Step 4
Learn a useful skill that can’t be replaced by robots or A.I.
It’s important to remember that whatever you’re passionate about learning is going to be your career ultimately. If you’re like me and really into graphic design you’ll make as many things as you can in Photoshop and learn along the way doing so, but whether you’re into computer services like design, development, or programming or carpentry or plumbing or what have you, and you focus on being great at it, you’ll be well prepared for getting a high paying job.
Obviously, there are some other things you can get into to make a buck as a teenager, but you also have to save time for just being a teenager and don’t stress about the economy collapsing and putting all your money into gold, silver or bitcoin to save yourself from hyperinflation and the collapse of the dollar. Go make plenty of bad choices so you know how to make good choices in the future, you’re still a kid and you should be reckless, but try to understand this system like you would a video game.
Money is a game, learn to play it. Understand basic math.
Money is a freedom score, the more you have the more time you will have in the future to go out and be reckless again, because let’s face it, you’re childhood is stripped from you to work 8 hours a day to pay taxes to the man, no other real important reason.
You are on a human farm and just like a cow get’s milked, you’re being milked for the money you make.
Save money, invest, create and learn forever, you’ll be thankful you do when you’re 30. If you have any questions leave a comment below or reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob.
