In the Yi language, "Puzhehei" means a pond teeming with fish and shrimp. The summer of June is hidden in the sea of lotus flowers in Puzhehei. Dramatic limestone hills and endless lotus blossoms create a dreamlike landscape. Pink and white petals peek out between the green leaves, swaying gently in the breeze. Glide quietly into the heart of the lotus fields, the air is filled with lotus fragrance, accompanied by the gentle sound of water. You may even stumble upon a lively water fight. Flying splashes and laughter capture the simple joy of summer. From June to September, the lotus is in full bloom. Come dream among the lotus blooms. If you could drift through the lotus for a whole afternoon, who would you bring? Tag them in the comments! Travel with ease in China, and with meaning. #Puzhehei# #Yunnan# #ChinaBound# #ASnapshotOfChina#

“Republic. I like the sound of the word…Some words can give you a feeling that makes your heart warm. Republic is one of those words.” John Wayne as Colonel Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960) John Wayne didn’t just deliver a line he reminded generations what America was meant to be. A Republic founded on freedom, sustained by courage, and entrusted to every generation to protect. Some words echo through history because they speak to something timeless.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

📢 3rd Anniversary Glupy Special Live Don’t you hear it? That heart-pounding sound of a ship’s horn in the distance… It must be the Leviathan, ready to set sail for BrownDust2’s 3rd Anniversary! 🚢✨ Tomorrow, the luxury cruise finally arrives. Get ready for brand-new costumes, charming new skins, and even a very special(?) look at our beloved trio! Don’t miss the BrownDust2 live broadcast! ■ Broadcast Time: May 30, 2026, from 10:00 AM (UTC) ■ Channel: Official BrownDust2 Channel, X (Twitter) Don’t forget to subscribe🔔 and turn on notifications❗to be the first to know when we go live! Join us for the live broadcast and be part of the excitement! 😊 #GlupyLive# #3RDANNIV#

in 1990 he convinced nasa to turn voyager 1 around and photograph earth from six billion kilometers away. our planet showed up as a single pixel... he called it the pale blue dot. he wrote that every saint, every sinner, every emperor, every farmer, every dreamer you have ever heard of had lived their whole life on that one piece of dust. before that, he chaired the committee that decided what humanity should send to anyone who might find us. two voyager spacecraft. one golden record on each. music from 27 cultures, 55 greetings, the sound of a kiss. ann druyan was on his team. while sagan was traveling, she quietly had her own brain waves and her own heart sounds recorded for the disc, while specifically thinking about being in love with him. they were not a couple yet. those neural patterns are now traveling through interstellar space at thirty-six thousand miles per hour. he and ann married soon after. she is still alive. in 1985 he testified before the us senate about the greenhouse effect. thirteen years before kyoto. forty years before any of it would be a normal thing to argue about. his peers in the national academy of sciences kept refusing to elect him. they thought making the universe legible to taxi drivers and the merely curious was beneath the profession. 500 million people across sixty countries watched cosmos. he was the most famous scientist on earth and the academy still said no. he never actually said billions and billions. that line was johnny carson doing him on the tonight show. december 20, 1996. pneumonia. age 62. ann was holding his hand. if voyager 1 is ever opened, the loudest signal on the disc is a woman thinking about him. what carl sagan moment first made the universe feel real to you?

God didn’t give us a spirit of fear. Fear tells you to stay quiet. Power gives you the courage to stand. Love keeps your heart from becoming bitter. A sound mind helps you see clearly when the world is losing its mind. The enemy loves panic because panic clouds judgment. God offers something better: strength instead of weakness, love instead of hatred, and peace instead of chaos. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV

Things My Patients Taught Me — 5 of 20 He was struck by lightning — and woke up a different man. The part that still gives me chills: he didn't want the old one back. The human body is not built to survive 300 million volts. Lightning can stop a heart in an instant, cook organs, and blow out through the soles of the feet. Survival is rare. Full recovery is rarer still. So when the call came in — mid-twenties male, struck on a mountain trail, still had a pulse — I braced for the worst. They wheeled Daniel in with the fern-like burns that only lightning leaves, branching across his chest like red frost. A park ranger, caught in an open stretch when the storm rolled through. His heart was in chaos. He was unconscious, responding only to pain. For two days he hovered in that unreachable place between living and dying, and all we could do was hold the line and wait. And then, against every odd on the board, he woke up. Fully. Clear-eyed. No lasting damage any scan could find. But something had changed. "I can't explain it," he told me a few days later. "I feel different. Like I'm seeing everything for the first time. Colors are brighter. Food tastes more intense. And I feel this... connection. To everything. Like the boundary between me and the world got thinner." He looked at me carefully. "Does that sound crazy?" "Not crazy," I said. "The brain goes through enormous electrical change during a strike. These effects are usually temporary." He held my gaze. And he said something I've never forgotten. "What if I don't want it to be temporary?" He started sketching — something he swore he'd never done in his life. His bedside table filled up with drawings: the view from his window, the hands of the nurses, his own face half-covered in the lightning's mark. The day before discharge, he asked me to sit with him. "Everyone keeps saying how lucky I am to be back to normal," he said. "But what if normal wasn't enough? What if getting struck was actually a gift?" I chose my words carefully. "Medicine sorts experiences into traumatic or beneficial based on outcomes. But what it means? That's yours to decide. Only you can say what this event means for your life." He nodded slowly. "The odds of surviving a direct strike are almost nothing. What are the odds I got this second chance for no reason at all?" A year later, a letter arrived. He'd left his old job. Trained as an art therapist, working with trauma survivors. He'd held his first gallery show — drawings inspired by the very burns that had nearly killed him. And on the one-year anniversary of the strike, he'd hiked back up to the exact spot. Not to tempt fate — he checked the forecast obsessively, he promised — but out of gratitude. To close the circle. Standing there on the mountain, he wrote, I realized something I wanted to share with you. Some patients recover from their wounds. Others are transformed by them. Both are forms of healing. He'd enclosed a drawing. A mountaintop, the sky split between storm cloud and breaking sunlight. In the foreground, a tiny human figure, arms flung wide — not in fear, but in embrace of the whole vast thing. Beneath it he'd written: The lightning taught me that boundaries are illusions — between life and death, between self and world, between what breaks us and what makes us. That drawing has hung framed in my office ever since. Daniel taught me that trauma can be both a wound and a window. That my job, sometimes, is not to explain away a patient's transformation, but simply to make room for it — to hand back the authority to say what their own suffering means. He wrote one more line in his exhibition catalog that I keep beside the drawing: Maybe we're all struck by lightning in different ways — sudden flashes that change us forever. The only question is whether we recognize the strike when it comes.

It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network. This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a quiet shutdown notice. First off, an immediate practical consideration for the Botanix community: please withdraw your Bitcoin and other assets before July 9th, 2026. When we started in 2022, the pitch was simple enough to say in a sentence: bring real utility to Bitcoin. What that actually meant in practice, and what we have spent nearly four years building toward, was more ambitious than that sentence made it sound. We were trying to build a Bitcoin-based blockchain that could find genuine product-market fit as a platform for Bitcoin applications, without using token incentives to drive growth, manufacture users, or simulate utility. Almost every chain that has launched in the last cycle has reached for the same playbook (issue a token without PMF, engineer the incentive surface, point at the resulting metrics), and we did not believe this route is a viable strategy in the long term. We wanted to know whether a Bitcoin chain could earn its users on the strength of what was built on top of it, the value it brings in the market with Bitcoin itself as the only meaningful economic primitive in the system. And we built it. The Spiderchain went live and stayed live, a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents on a genuinely novel cryptographic architecture. We built Dynafed, a dynamic federation that turned the Spiderchain from a static multisig set into a rotating, decentralized one, the technical milestone that most people in this space said could not be built on Bitcoin without compromising trust assumptions. Twenty-five million transactions, two hundred thousand wallets, and tens of millions of dollars in assets moved across the chain, every single number of that earned organically without a token, without airdrops, without points programs, or any of the manufactured-demand machinery. Chainlink, Morpho, GMX, Dolomite, Fireblocks, Alchemy, Galaxy, OKX Wallet, all integrated. We shipped a Bitcoin neobank with BINK on iOS and Android, with self-custodial email login for Bitcoin (something that had never existed before), native Bitcoin yield, and the lowest borrowing rates against Bitcoin anywhere in the world, all of it downstream of owning the infrastructure. The point of saying this is not to argue with our own conclusion. The protocol works, the product works, and our team and ecosystem worked in concert to do exceptional work. We have run this experiment in earnest, with a working protocol, real applications, and a serious team, for over a year on mainnet and nearly four years in total. The honest answer we have arrived at, after living inside it every day, is that it did not work, at least not in this market and not on this timeline. We want to share what we think we learned, with the caveat that some of this is conviction and some of this is still suspicion, and we would rather be transparent about the difference than pretend to have clarity we do not have. The first thing I've had to sit with is timing. Bitcoin utility, making Bitcoin programmable, productive, and integrated into real financial activity, isn't where the real world users sit right now. The conversation is still on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, on its monetary and political positioning, on base-layer conservatism. Those questions are upstream of the ones a Bitcoin L2 needs people to be asking. I still believe Bitcoin gets there, but belief in the destination is not the same as being able to predict when, and nobody can. It's also possible the destination never materialises at all, and that Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that's true, there will never be a market for what we were building, and no amount of time or capital would change that. The second is the token question. We intended to eventually launch a token. We saw it, and still see it, as a genuinely new form of equity, something closer to an IPO than an airdrop, to be done when you reach product market fit and the moment is right. That moment never came. What became clear over the last year is that the market largely stopped rewarding even the more considered versions of that playbook. Token launches across the board have broadly underperformed, and those that did go to market with tokens haven't seen the outcomes or PMF that the model is supposed to produce. The third lesson is about where DeFi demand on Bitcoin actually lives. For most use cases that exist today, lending, yield, leveraged exposure, WBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient. Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi. Decentralisation matters to people in principle and in conversation; in practice, when something cheaper and easier is in front of them, they use it. The security case for a dedicated Bitcoin L2 is real, but it only matters for a narrower band of applications than our thesis required, one of the clearer lessons this market has taught us. The fourth lesson is structural. The on-chain economy is consolidating around venues that own the user relationship: Hyperliquid, Robinhood, the major CEXes, and now TradFi participants absorbing an ever-larger share of attention, flow, and revenue. Convenience and institutional credibility win, every time, as soon as they're available. As retail participation thins, that concentration only deepens. We were, and still are, believers in decentralisation, but the current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current. We were no exception. The fifth lesson is the most concrete. Both of the above played out directly in our economics. The users we attracted were primarily using Bitcoin as a store of value for yield, a legitimate use case, but not the high-frequency transaction volume that drives fee revenue on a network like ours. BINK was our answer to that: a Bitcoin neobank designed to bring daily usage of BTC and stablecoins on-chain, driving the transaction volume the network needed. It was the right strategic instinct, and one we never got the chance to fully test. BINK only landed on both app stores in the last few weeks, a product that by its nature could only be built once the underlying infrastructure was proven and live. When users choose the convenient option and economic gravity pulls toward distribution, what's left on a decentralised infrastructure layer is a user base that costs more to serve than it generates. Infrastructure costs are what they are, and the fee income never came close to covering them. If you would like to see how we were imagining a Bitcoin future and what we have been working on since September, feel free to download BINK and give it a spin: it’s a full-fledged self-custodial Bitcoin Neobank with email login, one click borrowing, a Lightning integration and more. App store: Play store: This UX is where we think Bitcoin is ultimately heading towards although it feels too early. You can use invite code 1SD31R, but remember to remove your funds by July 9th. We could keep going. We have chosen not to, however, because continuing past the point where additional time stops producing additional learning is not conviction, it is something that looks like conviction from the outside while corroding into something else on the inside. We would rather stop now, with integrity intact and resources available to take care of the people who took a chance on us, than push the experiment past the point where it still has something to teach us. Reminder: Please withdraw all your assets by July 9th. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable. To our investors, who backed a thesis that was harder to defend than it should have been, to our partners who built alongside us and bet pieces of their own roadmaps on ours, to the developers who deployed on Spiderchain, to our users and the BINK community who showed up for something experimental and stayed, and most of all to the Botanix team who shipped a genuinely novel system with rigour and care and who made every hard day worth the difficulty: Thank you, more than the words available here can carry.

My cat Provolone has a specific vendetta against my Peloton, sitting directly on the console the second I start pedaling, and I didn't understand the pattern until my husband pointed it out from the couch. "He only does it when you're actually trying," he said. "Watch, do an easy ride." I did an easy ride. Provolone stayed on the windowsill, unbothered, barely glancing over. I switched to an interval class the next morning, out of spite mostly, wanting to prove him wrong. Forty seconds into the first sprint, Provolone was already crossing the room at a dead sprint of his own, launching onto the console and sitting directly on the resistance display like he was personally vetoing the effort. "He thinks you're in danger," my husband said, entirely serious. "Cats read heavy breathing and fast heart rates as distress. You sound like you're being chased by something. He's coming to check." I didn't believe that until I found an actual study confirming something close to it — cats responding to labored human breathing as a potential emergency, especially cats bonded closely enough to notice a baseline. I've started narrating my workouts out loud now, mid-sprint, just to reassure him. "I'm fine, buddy, this is on purpose." He doesn't seem convinced. He still comes every single time, sits on the display, waits out the interval like a tiny, disapproving lifeguard. My husband finds this hilarious. I've started doing easy rides more often than I probably should, mostly just for the peace.

Let's consult the historical record to see what the Aztec society was up to when the Spanish conquered it. First, from Cortes: “They have a most horrid and abominable custom which truly ought to be punished and which until now we have seen in no other part, and this is that, whenever they wish to ask something of the idols, in order that their plea may find more acceptance, they take many girls and boys and even adults, and in the presence of the idols they open their chests while they are still alive and take out their hearts and entrails and burn them before the idols, offering the smoke as sacrifice. Some of us have seen this, and they say it is the most terrible and frightful thing they have ever witnessed… not one year passes in which they do not kill and sacrifice some fifty persons in each temple; and this is done and held as customary… not one year has passed… in which three or four thousand souls have not been sacrificed in this manner.” And now Bernal Diaz del Castillo: “The dismal drum of Huichilobos sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue [temple] from which it came we saw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced the papas [priests] laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them.” ... “Every day we saw sacrificed before us three, four or five Indians whose hearts were offered to the idols and their blood plastered on the walls, and their feet, arms and legs of the victims were cut off and eaten… Every wall of this chapel and the whole floor, had become almost black with human blood, and… the stench was worse than in a Spanish slaughter-house.” ... “When we arrived at the great market place, called Tlaltelolco, we were astounded at the number of people and the quantity of merchandise that it contained… Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones, feathers, mantles, and embroidered goods. Then there were other wares consisting of Indian slaves both men and women; and I say that they bring as many of them to that great market for sale as the Portuguese bring negroes from Guinea…. They brought some of them tied to long poles by means of collars around their necks so they would not escape, and others left loose.” ~~ This is what the Spanish conquered in the name of Christendom - a Stone-Age society consumed with ritualistic human sacrifice, cannibalism and slavery.