Yes I know you mistrust the banks, milord, and I don't blame you, but their Vault Wizards are specially trained to prevent dragons from detecting large amounts of gold. I cannot emphasize enough that it's a full-time job employing multiple specialists, I'm not trying to be humble here but it's not something that just the court magician and I can set up a couple wards for on the weekends and call it good.
It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.
No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---
Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.
The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?
No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.
Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.
Though it will grieve the court magician and I to leave your service, perhaps this is a sign that retirement is overdue. So I'll just... be moving further away from the big pile of gold... in the opulent, dome-shaped building with the crystal skylight... best wishes.
For decades the line has written itself: "Bowie the eternal chameleon, an artist the money men never understood." The money men bought him in a single block. In 1997 he sold $55 million of bonds backed by his own future royalties, ten-year paper yielding 7.9%, and Prudential Insurance took the entire issue. Two years later Napster arrived and torched the exact revenue stream he had just cashed out of. By 2004, Moody's had cut the bonds to near junk. He kept the fifty-five million. The costume changes run on the same math, because every persona was a bet on a distribution channel, priced and timed, and the catalogue sale in 2022 is the same trade run by his estate.
So the number everyone fixated on was the quarter-billion, and fine, it's a big number, but the thing nobody bothers to ask is why a song catalogue is worth a quarter billion dollars in 2022 specifically and not, say, 1995.
Because it isn't about the songs.
I mean it's partly about the songs, "Heroes" is a great song, but the valuation is a bet on a revenue stream, and the revenue stream is what changed, and to see what changed you have to go back to the thing Bowie himself did in 1997 that basically everybody got wrong at the time and that turns out to be the only prophetic move in his entire career, which is saying something for a guy who built a career on pretending to be from the future.
Bowie Bonds.
Right, so in 1997 David Bowie securitized himself — sold $55 million in bonds backed by the future royalties of his pre-1990 catalogue, 25 albums, ten-year term, 7.9% annual yield, the whole thing underwritten by a guy named David Pullman and bought, famously, by Prudential Insurance in a single block. And the way this gets told is always as this charming eccentric-genius thing, oh Bowie the art-rock magpie also invented a financial instrument, isn't he clever, and that's not wrong but it buries the lede, which is that he did it because he needed the cash NOW and he correctly read that recorded-music income was about to become a much weirder and less reliable animal than it had been.
Napster was two years out. He could smell it.
The bonds got downgraded — Moody's took them from A3 down to near junk in 2004, and the reason was exactly the thing he'd cashed out ahead of: the file-sharing era torched the underlying revenue, CD sales cratered, the royalty stream backing the paper thinned out, and the bondholders ate it while Bowie sat on his fifty-five million from 1997. He shorted his own future and his own future obliged him by collapsing. That's not eccentricity. That's a man who understood that the asset and the cash flow it throws off are two different things and that the gap between them is where you get paid or get killed.
Now hold that, because the catalogue sales of the last few years run the same logic in reverse and that's the whole point.
The thing about feudalism — no, stay with me —
Because when I say the catalogue is a revenue stream I want to be literal about what kind, the way Marx is literal about the landlord just being the liege relocated to the city, collecting the same rent off the same labor under a new name. A song catalogue is a piece of property that produces income without anyone doing any work, in perpetuity, every time the thing gets played, and for most of the recorded-music century the "getting played" was bottlenecked — radio paid, sync paid, the physical record paid once at purchase and then went silent on a shelf forever. You owned the song but the song mostly sat there. A field you couldn't reliably harvest.
Streaming uncapped the harvest.
That's the actual mechanism nobody says out loud when they report these deals as nostalgia plays — Springsteen, Dylan, Bob Marley's estate, Bowie, the whole 2020-2022 gold rush of legacy catalogues moving for hundreds of millions to Hipgnosis and Primary Wave and the majors — it reads in the press as boomers cashing out and rich funds buying memories, and there's some of that, but the financial reality is that a back catalogue stopped being a depreciating shelf-asset and became a high-yield perpetual rent-roll, because every play on Spotify is a micro-payment, and the long tail that used to be dead weight is now a tiny faucet that never turns off, and you can model that.
And once you can model it you can lend against it, and once you can lend against it the funds show up with the cheap pandemic-era money and bid the price of the underlying up to where a Bowie catalogue clears at a quarter billion.
There is a less romantic version of this story, and it's partially true and the romanticism of the feudal-rent reading can obscure it. The catalogue gold rush of 2020-2022 was not primarily a bet on streaming economics. It was an interest-rate trade. When the federal funds rate sat near zero and ten-year Treasury yields were paying 1.5%, a song catalogue throwing off 8-10% annual royalty yield looked like free money, and the funds that showed up — Hipgnosis, Primary Wave, Round Hill — were raising cheap pandemic-era capital and buying yield.
The tax angle was structural too: a songwriter selling a catalogue could book the proceeds as a capital gain (taxed at 20%) rather than collecting royalties year by year as ordinary income (taxed at 37%). The entire boom was arbitrage dressed up as a cultural moment. And when rates rose — when the Fed moved from zero to five percent in eighteen months — the arbitrage collapsed. Hipgnosis Song Fund's share price dropped 40%. Suddenly a catalogue yielding 8% wasn't competing with Treasuries at 1.5%, it was competing with Treasuries at 5%, and the math stopped working. The songs didn't change. The plumbing didn't even change. The *cost of money* changed, and the whole thesis deflated.
The royalty got financialized. Again.
The difference — and this is the axis where the rhyme breaks, because '97 and 2022 are the same act pointed opposite directions — is that in 1997 Bowie was selling because he saw the stream about to dry up, and in 2022 the estate is selling because the buyers see the stream about to gush, and both of them are right, and the asset is the exact same set of master recordings and publishing rights, the songs didn't change a note. What changed both times was the distribution technology and therefore the shape of the money the songs throw off. The art is a constant. The plumbing is the variable. And the price is a bet on the plumbing.
Which, honestly, Bowie of all people would have found funny.
Because the guy spent his whole life being a brilliant reader of distribution — that's the unglamorous version of what "reinvention" actually was. Ziggy Stardust is what you do when glam-rock theater + a new color-TV culture + the Top of the Pops broadcast slot are the channel. The Berlin trilogy is what you do when you've burned out the persona machine and the album-as-art-statement still has prestige rent left in it.
"Let's Dance" is him reading MTV — Nile Rodgers, big clean production, the video as the actual product, 1983, the most cynical and most commercially correct record of his life, and he knew it, he basically said it, he called that period a kind of trap of his own making. He kept the songwriting more or less steady and re-platformed it onto whatever channel was paying. The reinvention was always partly an arbitrage.
So of course he securitized the catalogue. It was the same move at one more remove.
And there's a detail I love here, which is that the BowieNet thing — he launched his own internet service provider in 1998, an ISP, full dial-up access with bowie.com branding — gets filed under "lol weird vanity project," and it kind of was, it didn't last, but the instinct under it was identical to the bonds: he understood before almost anyone with a guitar that the relationship between the artist and the audience was about to be re-intermediated by a pipe, and he wanted to own a piece of the pipe rather than just pour product down someone else's. He was trying to be the platform.
He was early and it didn't work and the majors and then the tech companies took the pipe instead, the way they always do, but he saw the shape of it.
He just couldn't capture it. Wrong scale. You needed Daniel Ek money, not rock-star money.
And that's the part that actually closes the loop, because the reason the catalogue is worth a quarter billion in 2022 is that the platform Bowie failed to build got built by other people, and those people — Spotify, the majors who own the back-end — extract the value at the chokepoint, and what they hand back down to the rights-holder is a per-stream fraction of a cent, and the whole catalogue-sale boom is really just rights-holders deciding they'd rather take a lump sum today than keep collecting a thinned-down rent from a faucet someone else controls and can re-price on them whenever Spotify renegotiates its payout structure. Which Spotify does. Constantly.
So it's 1997 again.
The estate is doing in 2022 the exact thing Bowie did in '97 — cashing the future stream into a present number, betting that the institution sitting between the song and the listener will keep clawing more of the margin, and getting out at the top while a fund takes the long-tail risk. Prudential then, Warner Chappell now. Different buyer, same trade: a guy who made the songs handing the rent-roll to an institution that didn't, because the institution can squeeze more out of the same dead field than the maker ever could, and would rather own the field than the song.
The comprador never makes the thing. He just stands at the dock.
And the funny bit, the thing that'd make Bowie laugh because it's the most him outcome imaginable, is that the songs about alienation and artifice and the manufactured self — "Fame," which is literally a song he co-wrote with Lennon about fame as a hollow industrial product that gets you "what you need" but mostly just gets used — those songs are now themselves a securitized asset class, a tradable instrument, the alienation valorized and packaged and sold to a pension fund's structured-credit desk, so that somewhere right now a retiree's modest monthly check is partly being paid out of the per-stream micropayments generated every time a teenager who's never heard the name plays "Let's Dance" off an algorithm-built playlist called something like Chill Indie Sad Hours.
The field is still the field. The liege just has a Bloomberg terminal now and calls it an asset-backed security.
life pro tip: if you happen to be considering purchasing an LG TV or monitor, you possibly want to pick something else! and if you have an LG monitor that has not been plugged into anything in a while, you might want to leave it that way!
if you already have an LG monitor or TV or intend to buy one, you probably want to watch this video and keep an eye on gamers nexus for updates (or anyone else covering the LG spying situation):
posted july 16 2026
LG is doing some bad things. how bad? well. here are some very brief bullet points. I am not an expert, gamers nexus is, see the video for more information than this:
LG monitors (brand new and years old, cheap and expensive) auto-install LG's own adware-spyware called LG Monitor App onto windows 10 and 11 computers. you plug in an LG monitor for video output and this gets installed automatically. no hitting OK, no confirmation, no toggles, NOTHING.
the auto-installed LG Monitor App auto-grants itself access to your internet connection and ALL computer resources. the LG Monitor App has the ability to collect: geolocation data, device data, personal information, online activity data, contact data, and more!
...and it shows pop-up ads! because fuck you
on some affected versions of windows, auto-installed shitware like the LG Monitor App can be prevented by navigating to gpedit.msc -> computer configuration -> administrative templates -> system -> device installation -> prevent automatic download of applications associated with metadata
...but, if your LG monitor already installed the LG Monitor App, this is like closing the barn door after the horse got out. and that horse has the logs of everything you were doing on your computer! someone stop that fucking horse!!!
unrelated to the LG Monitor App, many LG TV owners are now required to tell all household members and guests that their LG TV is recording and processing ALL nearby voices. or else they may be in violation of local eavesdropping and wiretapping laws. for owning a fucking LG TV.
plus, how many businesses, workplaces, public spaces use LG TVs?
allegedly the microphone spying can be turned off by disabling microphone features, but LG has been caught disregarding opt-out settings before.
LG TVs can record everything that happens on the TV, including the video output of connected devices like phones, computers, gaming consoles, anything that happens on the TV screen.
LG was sued for their spying, and as a result of that spying suit, now shows pop-ups saying oops! they got caught spying and intend to continue spying. thanks for buying LG!
as of when the video was posted, there was no list of every spying LG monitor or TV. but this stuff is getting rolled out to more and more LG devices, including those purchased years ago.
and that is the shortest summary I can make of this situation without just summarizing more of the gamers nexus video.
Update: We are working on a follow-up to the LG story and have some disturbing findings re: LG's products. It will take us a while to parse
⬆️posted july 23 2026
gamers nexus is fairly respected in technology journalism. they fly around the world investigating companies that fuck people over and have pressured major companies to make major changes over the years.
so for gamers nexus to say that this LG spying situation is both unprecedented in how uniquely bad it is in this era of spying, and that it gets even worse than their video where they already say to stop buying and using LG products while recanting every prior recommendation for LG products?
When I lived in London there was a murder of crows that lived near me. I fed them often, they brought me presents (shiny rubbish and cigarette butts they found on the floor to thank me.)
When I moved, I’m certain they understood I was leaving because I had all my stuff and gave them lots of food and compliments.
But, they chased down my friend who lived in the next burrough over. They had recognised that friend with me several times and followed them to their house when they couldn’t find me.
They adopted my friend and it was now my friend’s job to bring them snacks and receive the presents.
This was maybe 6-7 years ago.
I visited London last year. Went to see my friend. The crows all not only recognised me, they tracked me down. We got into my friend’s flat and not twenty minutes later there was chaos on the balcony.
We open the curtains, the entire fucking murder is there shouting because they wanted to see me.
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence.
But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.
So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.
So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.
These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.
anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect
ifixit also makes kits and instruction for nearly every part for consoles, computers, phones, tablets, just about anything. We’ve replaced multiple parts on our old 3Dses at this point. It’s not nearly as hard as you might assume and very worth it to learn how to repair your own electronics.
Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.
I'm currently writing a guide to secure AI adoption in small business environments (which is, shockingly, mostly about using other automation alternatives to AI) and I should just become an absolute nightmare on linkedin and convince people to pay me to provide human-centered security training for their organization.
