Chinchilla's music keeps getting better and better. I first heard of her a couple of years ago, after an old BMX friend's post turned me on to Ren's "Hi Ren." Within a couple of days, I discovered the Rex X Chinchilla videos, "Chalk Outlines," and "I Forgot How to Be Me." Those are still my two favorite songs I've heard of hers, along with her rendition of "I Put a Spell on You" on the British version of The Voice.
I think there's a song out there with her name on it, something big and orchestrated, that will really let her show her skills as a singer and performer. When that song comes along, she will quickly blast into the ears of millions of more listeners. I'd love to hear her cover a Meatloaf song, or anything written by Jim Steinman, but that's just me. Anyhow, I clicked on to find this video with under 6,000 views, and it's my new favorite solo video of hers. It will have many, many more views by this time tomorrow. A LOT more views. Check this Chinchilla video out while it's brand new.
This event happened on the DL about a month ago, somewhere in the L.A. riverbed. This informal contest video just has a lot of damn good skating in it, and apparently was sponsored by Gorilla Energy Drink (never heard of it) and Keen Ramps. It's just a cool, solid video if you're into street skating.
I stumbled upon this video, while checking out a BMX video. This came up on the side, as things do on YouTube. As some of you may know, I worked at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions, way back in the olden days. We did a street skating video shoot back when street skating was a really new thing. It happened in an empty parking lot, right on the corner of 17th and Placentia in Costa Mesa, caddy corner to the bar that had once been the legendary Cuckoo's Nest.
In this Vision Street Wear commercial, one of the obstacles was a 4 foot high quarterpipe up against the wall of a building. You can see 3 or 4 quick shots of that shoot in this commercial. Kele Rosecrans was doing loud, wheel squealing, six foot high, front side power slides above that tiny ramp that day. It was amazing. So the quarterpipe against the wall, under the bridge, reminded me of that Vision shoot, way back in the day.
These skaters go off, and it's great vibe for the jam/contest. Check out the video.
For most people of Generation X, this location looks familiar because the L.A. River bed was where they filmed the iconic race scene for the movie Grease.
Way back in December of 2023, I tried to open up a crypto account, but was unable to, because I had a cheap Obama phone. I thought it was a good time to hop into some crypto, but couldn't open an account. So I decided to do a paper trading experiment instead. My question was:
If I had $10,000 to invest on that day (12/11/2023), what would I invest it in?
This is, and has always been a paper trading exercise. It's an imaginary investment account, making imaginary trades, based on market conditions at the time of each trade (including adding in gas fees, etc.).
I picked a handful of cryptos, and have traded in and out (again, purely imaginary- paper trades) since. In a few months, the paper trade fund was up 40%. I've traded in and out of a handful of cryptos, mostly taking profits on those that were up, and re-investing in others. As of January of 2025, this was my paper trade account:
8,685.31 Apecoin
$392.81 in cash
Right now, on August 14 2025, Apecoin is at 60 cents per coin. Total value of my paper trading account currently is:
$5,211.19 in Apecoin, plus $392.81, for a current total of $5,604.
At this point, this paper trading experiment is down 44%, over 20 months. But, my investment window, when I expected this to be a worthwhile investment, has been late 2025 or early 2026 from the start.
My bet was that this Apecoin would rise to a solid investment between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026. Yes, it's down big right now, but we're only 6 weeks into the window I was aiming for. As of right now, buying Bitcoin, Eth, or Solana over this time period would have paid off more at this point. Buying Nvidia stock would have paid off more at this point. Even buying gold or silver bullion would have paid off more at this point.
I thought gold was going to go up some in late 2023, but honestly, gold has really surprised me since. That's mostly because this whole scenario is playing out much slower than I thought it would. But it's still playing out.
Here's why I'm hanging onto the Apecoin in my imaginary paper trade account, and riding it out. I think we are dramatically overdue for a major correction in both stocks and crypto. I don't think $121,000 Bitcoin is the peak of this crypto cycle, but I think we're near the short term peak.
I believe we will see a major financial crash this year, that's already overdue. I think a huge ($5 to $10 TRILLION) bailout will follow, over the course of several many months, after a major correction, we will see a huge liquidity wave, which will send stocks and crypto back up, gold and silver down. The now expected decline of interest rates over the next year is lining up with this idea, as is the massive slowing of real estate in the parts of the U.S. that boomed over the last several years. There's also the commercial real estate collapse (see my Simulpocalypse Series on Substack for more on that). Anyhow, when the bailout money surges into financial markets, probably in the spring of 2026, we will see a prolonged surge in crypto. I think in mid to late 2026, maybe early 2027, we will see $150,000 Bitcoin, and over time, huge rises in many other cryptos. That is the scenario I was betting on from the start.
My assessment may be completely wrong, of course. It's already running somewhat behind the timeline I had in mind, but I'm sticking with this overall assessment. So I don't care that I'm all in on Apecoin when it's at 60 cents a coin. This time next year, we'll know if my $10,000 Investment challenge was sound thinking or not.
Checking this today, I decided to write a post, even though it's down, and I'm making no changes, because I should show when things are not going well, as well as when they are going well.
Bond market expert and economic content creator, Steven Van Metre dives into the most recent large value drop on a huge office building. Most of the investors in the $277 million bond on this building will be wiped out, and even investors in the highest and safest tranche will take big losses. He cites a report about the Wells Fargo "Cash Register" building in Denver.
Reminder: Recessions are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost no one wants to buy
OK, officially we are not in recession, but... Here are a few of the big commercial discount sales in recent years.
I actually worked in this complex for a short time in the 1990's, it sits next to the 55 freeway in Santa Ana, not too far from Irvine and John Wayne (Orange County) airport.
These are just a few of the biggest properties that have sold at massive discounts in recent years, along with empty stores and dead malls before that. These sales are intentionally being kept out of the major media and search engines, to keep the "Economy is fine" narrative going, apparently.
Most of these types of sales, the bigger ones anyhow, are reported in local TV newscasts, local newspaper sites, or local business journal newspapers and websites. You need to subscribe to many of these sites to read the whole story. If you started digging, you could find many more similar sales. The point here is to simply show that quite a few sales with losses in the tens of million dollars are happening, and thousands more buildings are still under used with high vacancy rates, or sitting vacant, maybe completely abandoned, in some cases.
SOMEONE, banks, investors, REIT's, or major corporations, are taking huge losses on these sales. They are also going to a lot of trouble in the media/social media works to keep all of this out of the public eye.
Blogger's note- 8/11/2025- In an amazing little bit of synchronicity, the Los Angeles Times newspaper, this morning, has a front page, above the fold story about an L.A. skyscraper building that's in the planning process to be renovated into "deluxe" apartments. I've heard that there are a lot of structural issues to overcome doing that type of conversion, but that's great, if the developer can make it happen. I have a feeling they may run into some funding issues in the next 2-4 years, but time will tell. The "LA Graffiti Towers" are a project that lost funding, twice, and they now sit partially built, and abandoned. Click the link to learn their story.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform specifically designed for writers. Check out the companion post, "Simulpocalypse- Post #8" that goes with this blog post. Or check the main page here:
Meteorologist Bill Martin explains the Pacific Subduction Zone, and shows some great graphics to help visualize what's happening in the Pacific Ring of Fire lately. He also repeatedly says to just "be calm" during an earthquake, and just act intelligently. The majority of the time, very few people are injured in earthquakes, even large ones.
Over the last few weeks, I started having videos pop up on YouTube about earthquakes and volcanoes around the Pacific Ring of Fire. I didn't think much about it. I watched a video about the earthquake swarm around Mount Rainier in early July and thought, "Hey, maybe the Ring of Fire is waking up a bit." The big earthquakes since in Alaska and Kamchatka, and Kamchatka region tsunami, along with other quakes, make it seem like we're heading into a more active period around the Pacific Ring of Fire.
For any who don't know, the Pacific Ring of Fire is the name for the line of tectonic plate seams that go up the west coast of South America, through Central America, up the American and Canadian west coast, along the southern Alaska coast, peninsula, Aleutian Island chain, over to the Russian east coast, down through the east coast of China, Japan, through Indonesia, and through the western Pacific islands to New Zealand.
Because of all these major and minor plates of the earth grinding together, this Ring has lots of earthquakes and lots of volcanoes. Watch the 15 minute video above for a good explanation of why these earthquakes are happening in these areas, why some volcanoes are a bit more active, and what this means for us here in California, and along the North American Pacific Coast. Don't believe the crazy hype videos. This group of plate seams and faults seams to be getting more active, but that doesn't mean "The Big One" is coming next week, or that "California's going to fall into the ocean,"as so many people across the U.S. think. California is not going to fall into the ocean. The area west of the San Andreas fault will, in 30 or 40 million years, slowly carve away and become a big, 400 mile long island, off the shore of mainland California. That's millions of years away.
Bill Martin explains in the video above why a large earthquake off the coast of the far north part of California is our biggest threat. That could lead to tsunami damage in the Bay Area, and maybe to the L.A. area, to a small extent. Maybe. But down here in Southern California, that's not a major threat. Again, watch that video for a better understanding of what this recent activity in around the Ring of Fire does and does not mean. Below are videos about the larger earthquakes and volcanic activity this year, to learn more, if you're interested.
Five of the eight earthquakes over 7.0 in 2025 have been around the Pacific Ring of Fire
My tweet from July 17-" #ringoffire firing up? Or just getting a bit restless?" That was a day after the big quake off of Alaska, and after I had watched the video about the Mount Ranier mini-quake swarms, and a short video about the Axias Seamount underwater volcano off Oregon, which had been in the news. It seemed like a potential trend, by that point. I tweeted this before the 7.4 and 8.8 Kamchatka quakes. Yep, Kamchatka seems to have answered that question.
Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein, the visual book by Lita Judge, is an incredible work of art. It's a visual take on the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote one of the most classic horror tales of all time, Frankenstein. This book kept catching my eye at the local library, where I work every day. Finally I picked it up and absorbed it. I didn't just read it, it has over 300 incredible paintings, every page a full bleed to the edges. I spent time checking out all the images that Lita Judge spent five years painting. Mary's Monster is a haunting take on the tragic, yet incredible, life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
"At 17 I am already the mother of bones and daughter to a ghost."
-Mary Shelley, quoted in Mary's Monster
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley saw far more than her share of tragedy in her life. She was also a very intelligent young woman, and incredibly well read for a woman in the early 1800's. Have any of you read Dante's Inferno? I haven't. But Mary Shelley read it, and other classics, as a teenager. She wrote the novel, Frankenstein- or The Modern Prometheus, when she was only 18 and 19-years-old.
Not only did she, as a young woman, write a novel that invented the concept of science fiction, it was a deep and brutal look at humanity, a brilliant social commentary that still stands up today. She also created a fictional creature, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, that is still iconic today, 207 years later. Frankenstein, her first novel, has been in print for the entire time since, over 200 years.
After going through Mary's Monster twice, I realized that I needed to read the original Frankenstein. It was not the book I thought it was, not even close. We all have our pictures of the monster, big blocky head, bolts coming out of his neck, but those are from the endless series of movie, TV show, and Halloween versions of Frankenstein's monster. The monster in Shelley's novel is much different, and highly intelligent. Frankenstein, over 200 years later, is a brilliant novel, and it's a story of revenge and tragedy, but in a much different way than I thought. I realized that, probably like many people, I didn't really know the story of Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster, at all.
I've never been a big comic book or graphic novel reader. Super heroes didn't do it for me as a kid. No super hero was around when I could have used one as a kid, so I never got really into comics. I was a nerd, but not a comic book nerd.
Around age 30, though, I worked for a small furniture moving company in Huntington Beach, California. Our moving company office was at a very unique shopping center called Sea Cliff, and there was a small comic book shop in the shopping center, a couple doors away. On days when we finished up working early, I started going to the comic shop, and just browsing all the comics out then. That was in 1996 and 1997. I saw a bunch of comic series that were more interesting to me, stories that were not just super heroes in spandex with extraordinary powers. There were much more complex and interesting stories being told in comics and graphic novels. During that era, I read two Alan Moore classics, Watchmenand V for Vendetta, I read Neil Gaiman's TheSandmanlater on, someSpawn issues, and bought a few issues of Sin City, which had really cool black and white art. There was one comic that I really loved, Seekers into the Mystery, written by J.M. DeMatteis. I bought and read every single issue of that series. That was is the best comic series I've read, personally. I didn't get into any other graphic novels after that, but I'd check them out from time to time, to see if there were any other stories that interested me.
Mary's Monster is not really a traditional graphic novel, it's a story told through a collection of paintings and a small amount of verse. I'm not going to go into any more detail, but if this post interested you at all, find a copy of Mary's Monster, and check it out. It's a great work of art telling an amazing true story. You may get drawn into the tragic story of Mary Shelley, and maybe you'll wind up reading the actual novel, Frankenstein, like I did.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers, check it out:
Peacefully waiting, just to the north, Canada knows Trump and MAGA will continue to destroy the U.S. economy, then American society. At some point Canadians will be able to take over, clean up the mess, and create a functional country out of what is now the United States. It's only a matter of time.
