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@ Avi Burra
2025-06-14 16:38:22This is the second installment in the series "The Net Appears" where I document my journey from being in a well-established and well-paying fiat job into the unknown world of independent work in freedom tech. Will I end up finding something truly inspiring and fulfilling, while being able to support my family? We'll find out over the course of the next few weeks.
So this happened a couple of days ago:
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Let's back up a bit, because in the first installment of this series, I was still in limbo.
If you’d told me three weeks ago that corporate martyrdom could be negotiated like a farmers-market cantaloupe, I’d have laughed you off the Microsoft Teams grid. Yet there I was, video-boxed opposite my Senior Vice Priest of PowerPoint, calmly re-petitioning for a graceful guillotine.
His verdict: the guillotine is for optics only, and apparently it clashes with the brand guidelines. Laying off The AI Guy would look like we’d just unplugged the future for spare parts. Impossible. But the man did extend an olive branch the size of a bonsai: “Resign, and we’ll cash out your vacation - thirty glorious days of fiat.”
Not the three-month severance I’d fantasized about, but enough to buy time, dignity, and a respectable stack of Claude API credits. I signed before he could replace goodwill with an NDA.
And then I chose July 4 as my last day. Cue bald eagles, Sousa marches, and a slow-motion shot of me frisbee-flinging my employee badge into an erupting grill. Independence from fiat, by literal fireworks.
Space Rush
The moment rumors of my exit hit Teams, meeting invites vanished like socks in a hotel dryer. I’ve used the liberated hours to launch A Muse Stochastic, my audio-visual fever dream where generative melodies court glitch-poetry and occasionally elope with Gemini Veo video frames. The first episode is live, pulsing somewhere between synaptic Vivaldi and quantum origami. So far it has six listeners and one confused Australian-shepherd (my most honest critic).
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Meanwhile the playwright in me, neglected for months beneath sprint plannings and quarterly road-maps, finally crawled into the light. “Waiting for Satoshi,” first conceived on a warm Prague evening exactly one year ago ( nostr:nprofile1qy0hwumn8ghj7en0deehgu3dw3jhxapwdah8yetwv3jhytnrdakj7qgcwaehxw309a5hxmrpdejzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcqyzaz7w2gxdjcga0fz6qt3x8ehc83mpgpvmr2swwmuzzdqfn26m3q54mhg79 can attest to this), now wears its final coat of dialogue. Tomorrow it debuts on GitHub - Creative Commons, open-source, fork-and-prosper - perhaps the inaugural play to invite pull requests for stage directions. If anyone wishes to add a tap-dancing Lightning node, be my guest.
Prague on the Horizon
Next week I return to BTC Prague, where ghosts of last year’s epiphany still linger near the pastry stand. This time I’m lugging camera gear, not corporate slide decks. Episode Two of Finding Home will be filmed there, featuring a wanderer whose bitcoined life map reads like Odysseus riding a Lightning invoice.
Perhaps my only conference of the year, I'm looking forward to catching up with friends old and new, and catch a whiff of that infectious bitcoin hopium.
Micro-lessons from Week Three
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Severance is a mindset. One month of paid vacation feels oddly richer than three months shackled to uncertainty.
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Symbolism scales. Pick an Independence Day, any Independence Day, and watch the universe queue fireworks.
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Creative backlogs age like fine kimchi. Leave an idea in brine for a year and it returns with extra tang.
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Open source = open veins. Releasing art into the commons is terrifying until you remember blood circulates best when it moves.
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Microsoft Teams silence is golden (parachute). Each canceled stand-up funds roughly eight bars of experimental synth.
Gazing Forward
I still don’t know how mortgage, car payments, and teenage-soccer-tour fees will reconcile with my bank balance come August. Yet the dread that once clung to my ribcage has dissolved, replaced by a jittery anticipation - like the hush before a stadium crowd erupts. Every unknown now feels less like a void and more like a blank slide awaiting wild, irreverent doodles.
Next dispatch will likely come with reflections from Prague. The last two years, I was moved to unexpected tears on the final day, marveling at the sheer profundity of the human experience of the week past. Surely, that can't repeat for a third year in a row?
Until then, may your own nets appear exactly when logic insists they can’t - and may they be woven from liberated vacation days and the audible crackle of celebratory fireworks.
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