so I did that thing where I didn't have any beers all week, and then last night I had three... so my sleep got interrupted

so I woke up in the middle of the night

so I did that thing where I reached for my phone right away, because I just woke up and that's what sometimes happens

so Stacker.News wouldn't load.. all I got was a black screen.

so I nuked the app, and then got the yellow screen on re-opening it.

so then Amethyst would only show me my own posts.. presumably sitting on my phone's citrine router.

so now it's middle-of-the-night:am, just wondering why the internet's not working

aha, I said to myself, when I opened up Mullvad's app which promptly reported the circumstance which resulted in my apparent disconnectivity... I'd run out of prepaid Mullvad VPN

so I then had to make a decision: continue paying them amounts of the corn that will eventually probably in all likelihood be much more valuable to me in the future... or pay with a boring old credit card... or just start raw-dogging the open web again

... anyway, I knew I had a change-UTXO from some time I paid them several months ago

so I could just use that, and regret the use of sats when I'm old

so then I was out of bed, walked to the office... suited up like it was my birthday for some late night computing

so I and pulled the blinds for the neighbors benefit

so I disconnected the VPN on my laptop (because you can't use that shit if you don't pay for it) and cracked open a new private tab in LibreWolf to get a payment address from Mullvad's website... where you can, pay... onchain

... so I could sit there like a chud in my birthday suit, for however long it takes, for the network to find a block, where my not-so-private, acyclically connected on-chain UTXO would get noticed by their node, and flip a bit somewhere in their god-knows-where-istan server farm and then Mullvad would turn back on and I could finally start computing in comfort again

and then I noticed it

Mullvad has a LN payment button now. and 10% off, they offer if you pay that way.

well, heck I thought to myself, 10% is nothing to shake a stick at.

so I had Zeus on my phone from that trip I took to El Salvador last year... and I have that LN node running on Alby from that hair I got up my ass before I went... because I was recently told by the wallet of satoshi folks that they wouldn't serve me because my president and his administration were a bunch of asses and so I had to run my own node if I wanted to have the ability to spend sats on the LN network and so I saw that Alby was giving away their free tier of service if you wanted to try it out for a while and they gave me a bunch of hands-on type support and eventually I got setup so I could go to elsalvador with my sats and meet all the cool Salvadorans and be in this cool country and spend sats like a cool guy in el salvador (where they don't want your fucking bitcoin by the way, all that shit about it's the land of bitcoin is a fat lie, maybe it will change, but I think it was just a marketing scam by a country whose president got a hair up his ass to push the needle in the direction of good shit for his people, but they don't even like it and really resisted bitcoin, from my perspective... and don't get it twisted because I'm telling you I went there and nobody wanted my bitcoin and the girl who was paid to stand around the Chivo machine and make sure it worked for other people didn't even have any bitcoin of her own! and the grocery store where they had checkout lanes assigned to bitcoin transactions had those lanes closed and then nobody wanted bitcoin except some places were able to use it in zonte and bérlin)

so anyway, I have a LN node running all the time even though I hardly ever use it since I hardly ever buy stuff, and when I do it's not from vendors who want bitcoin, and even if they did I probably wouldn't spend my precious sats on stuff

so I clicked the button, they gave me a little notice on the screen about how their channel capacity isn't what it could be and so maybe if the shit doesn't work that's something that we'll have to figure out on the side, but sometimes it does work and if I really wanted to get an invoice I had to click a different button but I could do it and they would turn back on my VPN if I did.

so I clicked the button. the invoice popped up. I scanned it with zeus like that QR code was gonna go out of style in an hour if I didn't pay it.

an BOOM

just like that... quick as a whistle, my invoice was paid

and my VPN turned back on lickety-split.

((

so anyway, I didn't know where to put this and thought about ~bitcoin, or ~bitcoin-beginners... but those were all sorta expensive to post in ... and then I saw ~freedom-tech and I was like "duh". obviously that's the place for this sort of writing. that's the place where i want to be noticed at early-in-the-morning by a bunch of Saturday morning stackers... while I'm sleeping off this polyphasic rant.

freedom-tech... yah. that's the shit I'm here for. and it's only 10 sats to post!!!!

))