Mikal

Is Fortnite Battle Royale in an unplayable state right now? Does it feel like brainrot at the moment? The gameplay is BEYOND overstimulating it's insane! Every match has tons of balloon AR's, 1Ups and scanning items which reveal your every move to your opponent. Not to mention the OP effects of the Overrides and some of the sprites and not to mention the Tails sprite/Mega Blaster combo. AND of course SBMM just being completely thrown out the window so you're going against players 100x better than you in every match. This game is COOKED right now! I may not finish my sprite collection because I seriously can't even stomach a match right now. What do you think?

Let me tell you why I might be a genius: the player on the left is Scream Olise and he goes for 5 million coins. The player on the right is POTM Olise but I used 100 Scream tokens that gives him the exact same card design and he's literally screaming and is actually the better card because of tech +. Did I mention I got him done for under 600k? Cosmetic Fashion School discord coming soon.🎃👻💀

Hardwood Empire 3.6 is being submitted to the App Store today and should be out soon. This one adds a full coaching career, rivalries that form on their own, a rebuilt record book, custom rosters, and a big stability pass. Coaching Career
 Apply for open jobs every offseason and sit down with the AD for a real interview. Every school asks different questions, and you close by making a promise, from a win total to a conference title to a ring. The new Job Market stage shows every opening, and the Coaching Carousel shows who got fired and who got hired. Every coach's history and record is kept, and the new My Coach page tracks your whole career. Rivalries
 Rivals now form on their own from shared history, conference battles, and close games. The new Rivals page ranks them, your top 3 plus a chosen rival go active, and the ladder shifts as you play. Record Book
 Completely rebuilt. Career, single-season, and single-game highs for points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks, for your program and league-wide. Tap any record holder to pull up his card. The History screen got a full redesign too. Custom Rosters
 Load a roster pack and put whoever you want in the game, every team and every player. New Looks
 New hairstyles and facial hair, including taper curls, the mullet, light mustache, soul patch, and light goatee. Your Game, Your Way
 Opt-in Light Mode, an optional Court Backdrop in your team colors, Quick, Balanced, and Deep presets, and reorganized settings. Buy games are in too, so you can schedule guarantee games for the payout. Bug Fixes & More
 Saves and reopening are rock-solid. Class years, redshirts, and graduation stay on schedule. Recruiting odds show the true number. Injured players sit and your starters play. Ratings and growth match what happens on the court. Correct weeks and matchups after reopening. Far fewer crashes deep into long dynasties. Full patch notes:
empiresportsapps.com/patch-n… Appreciate everyone who keeps playing and pushing this game forward.

I'm building a perks page for our portfolio, so I've been digging through startup deals all week. Here are the ones you can get without any VC 👇 - @posthog: $50K credits, under 2 yrs old, under $5M raised - @mixpanel: 1 yr free startup plan, under $8M raised - @retool: 1 yr free, bootstrapped welcome - @Cloudflare: $10K in credits for self-funded - @NotionHQ: free months of Business + AI If you work at one of these (or any startup tool) and want to offer a perk to 100+ portfolio companies, DM me 🤝

indiehackers with no customers: "i can vibe code everything, its so easy!" startups with customers; "my god, we have too much to build, update, change, performance fixes, ui updates, support mcp, api"

Incredible things are happening in the world of education arguments. One thing I respect about Caplan is that he tends to be a good sport about critiques. There’s a lost-media podcast episode where the two of us hash out our disagreements—maybe it’s time for a sequel.

REBECCA & ME by MJW PROLOGUE The Life Between the First Hello and the Last Goodbye I tried to bring my wife back to life. At 9:45 on the morning of March 5, 2026, I pressed my hands against Rebecca's chest and begged her heart to beat again. It didn't. She was the girl I had loved since I was thirteen. Decades of whispered promises, arguments, and ordinary miracles ended in a room too quiet to hold them. Outside, the world kept moving. Sunlight entered our home as though nothing had happened. I wanted to tell the sun it had made a terrible mistake. At seventy, I did not know who I was without her. In television, I knew what to do in a crisis. Change the angle. Rewrite the script. Find another way. Death offers no second take. But this is not simply a book about death. It is about the heartbreaking, astonishing business of being alive. I grew up poor, with a mother working double shifts, an absent father, a stutter, dyslexia, and anxiety like a stone in my pocket. Baseball gave me a place to feel fearless. Losing my mother when I was twenty-two taught me how suddenly a life can divide into before and after. Somehow that boy found his way into television. At HBO Sports, I helped tell stories watched by millions. Later, I helped build The Golf Channel. I traveled the world, met extraordinary people, and collected awards. From a distance, it looked like success. Up close, there were battles with bipolar disorder, careers that ended and began again, financial uncertainty, and cancers that kept returning. I discovered that a man can look confident under studio lights while quietly wondering whether he will make it through another night. Rebecca knew that man, too. She was my first reader, my truest critic, my north star. She chose my clothes, teased me when they didn't match, and laughed helplessly when I danced like an idiot. Together we rescued animals others had abandoned, filling our home with small, beating hearts that asked for little and gave everything. Then Parkinson's disease came for her. It took her balance, independence, and much of the world she recognized. I became her caregiver: her hands, her memory, her shelter. My days were no longer measured in broadcasts and deadlines, but in medications, clean sheets, spoonfuls of water, and the fragile blessing of a peaceful night. I promised Rebecca she would stay home. She did. I thought loving her so fiercely would prepare me to let her go. It didn't. Now I am seventy, and my mind is not quite as sharp as it was twenty years ago. Names slip away. Dates wander. Memories arrive out of order, like photographs from a shoebox. Fortunately, much of this memoir has been waiting patiently in my attic, where dozens of old books, notebooks, and journals have gathered dust for decades. Their pages hold stories, forgotten conversations, and intimate memories. They are the scattered footprints of a lifetime, waiting for the man who lived them to return. But the heart remembers, too. I still hear my mother's footsteps after work, the hush before a live broadcast, and Rebecca's laughter moving through our rooms. I can close my eyes and revisit places that no longer exist, embrace people who are no longer here, and briefly inhabit moments that time has carried beyond my reach. I have gathered these stories as faithfully as I can. There will be adventures, mistakes, remarkable people, impossible odds, unexpected laughter, and unbearable grief. You may laugh. You may cry. You may wonder whether it all happened to one person. Believe me, sometimes I wonder the same thing. So sit back, relax, and come along. Forgive a wandering memory or a detour. After seventy years, I have learned that the most beautiful journeys rarely follow a straight road. I've spent a lifetime living this extraordinary, imperfect story, never imagining that one day I would be sitting alone, trying to find the words to tell it. It would mean the world to me to have you beside me as I do.

Very few podcasts will actually make you smarter AND make you laugh. No politics, no egos, just tech. The biggest news this week: - Anthropic Files S1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO - Instinct's Rumoured $30BN Fundraise - Microsoft Lays off 27,000 While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95BN Capex Spending Spree My notes with @jasonlk and @rodriscoll 1. Analysis of Anthropic S1 Anthropic's S1 beat expectations on margins and operating income, even after stock-based compensation, leaving the burden of proof on the naysayers. It also looked strong on customer concentration, compute efficiency and cash. Some questions remain, including the undisclosed Q3 revenue number. 2. Is the Value Extraction Requirement From the Latest Models a Benefit or a Curse of Anthropic? Eighty percent of Anthropic's revenue comes from models less than six months old, and 70 to 80% of compute costs go to training. Models are expensive to build and highly profitable to serve, but only for six to twelve months. Few companies can write a $10 to 12BN compute check, so this short shelf life can favour Anthropic if it stays aggressive. 3. Brutal Reality Is Microsoft Have Just Admitted They Don't Want 27% of Their Workforce Whatever gets said on LinkedIn, Microsoft's move says it does not want 27% of its people. That is a worse scarlet letter than a pure layoff, because the company has told these employees they do not meet its minimum bar. 4. Chinese Open-Source Models Have Peaked and Will Decline From Here Chinese open-weight models are close to finished in the US, and this is the beginning of the end for them. Despite DeepSeek's latest raise, it is starting to be banned across all federal agencies. 5. Why No CIO Will Take a Chance on a Chinese Model Even if confidential data reaches Alibaba servers in Asia only one time in 100,000, without consent, no CIO or CISO will approve the model. If it keeps happening and Alibaba stays silent, anyone using these models will lose their job. 6. Why OpenAI Is an Underappreciated Asset to Invest in Today OpenAI is mispriced at the $1.25 TN round. Brief market panic has created a dislocation like Anthropic's round at around $183BN, even though OpenAI has closed all its competitive gaps. 7. What Is the Upside of OpenAI at $1.25 Trillion? OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to become $10 to 20TN companies. Anthropic takes only 0.1% of Fortune 500 budgets today, and even conservative estimates put that at 2 to 3%. Because OpenAI is not priced to perfection, the worst case is doubling the money. (links in comments)

This was the first draft of my MEMOIR. REBECCA & ME by Michael Whelan The Extraordinary Life We Lived. The Love That Survived Everything. Table of Contents PROLOGUE The Empty Side of the Bed The unbearable silence of a home once filled with laughter, companionship, and love, and the private rituals of grief. PART ONE — THE BOY, THE DREAMS, THE GIRL Chapter 1 — The Boy Who Had Nothing but Dreams Childhood poverty, my parents' divorce, my mother's illness, my famous father, dyslexia, anxiety, and the fierce determination to build a different future and become someone my younger self could scarcely imagine. Chapter 2 — The Girl Who Changed Everything Meeting Rebecca at thirteen, falling in love, growing up together, and beginning a relationship that would last more than half a century. Chapter 3 — Baseball, College, and the Road Not Taken Athletic ambitions, baseball scholarship, college, early setbacks, the dreams I had to surrender along the way, and the unlikely path that eventually led me into television. Chapter 4 — Behind the Camera, Beyond My Dreams My years at CBS, NBC, and HBO Sports: extraordinary productions, relentless pressure, exhilarating triumphs, awards, and television history. Chapter 5 — Famous Faces, Unforgettable Encounters Celebrities, legendary athletes, unexpected friendships, hilarious encounters, and what knowing famous people taught me about human nature. PART TWO — BUILDING A LIFE, FIGHTING INVISIBLE WARS Chapter 6 — Betting Everything on Orlando Our move to Florida, helping create The Golf Channel, enormous professional risks, and the beautiful new life Rebecca and I built. Chapter 7 — Reinventing Myself When the Applause Stopped Leaving television, rebuilding my career, discovering new opportunities, and learning how difficult starting over can be. Chapter 8 — The War Inside My Mind Lifelong anxiety, panic, bipolar disorder, insomnia, and the invisible battles behind my public achievements, mistakes I've made with Rebecca always beside me. Chapter 9 — The Thousands of Lives We Saved Together Rebecca's boundless compassion, our animal rescue work, beloved companions, and the thousands of abandoned animals given another chance. Chapter 10 — The Day Our Future Began to Change Rebecca's first Parkinson's symptoms in 2018, the fear of diagnosis, and the slow, painful transformation of our marriage. PART THREE — WHEN LIFE DEMANDED EVERYTHING Chapter 11 — When the World Stopped Turning COVID-19, lost professional security, financial upheaval, isolation, and Rebecca's worsening illness as our familiar world disappeared. Chapter 12 — My Body Became a Battlefield Prostate cancer in 2010, Head, Neck & Tounge cancer in 2022, treatments, surgeries, complications, and fighting to survive while caring for Rebecca. Chapter 13 — Love Without Applause Full-time caregiving, sleepless nights, exhaustion, anticipatory grief, and the fierce intimacy of caring for my increasingly vulnerable wife. Renewing our vows before the clock runs out. Chapter 14 — The Morning Forever Ended Hospice, our final days, my promise never to place Rebecca in a facility, and her death at home on March 5, 2026. Chapter 15 — I Am Still Her Husband Loneliness at seventy, our home, our animals, writing, an uncertain future, and learning to live with a love that remains.

NEW Screenshots from the Ringside Pass Season 6 DLC releasing today #WWE2K26

My thoughts on my #GearsofWar Marathon DAY 4 Gears of War 4 XBOX ONE (2016) New generation, new Gears, and the visual upgrade was just jaw dropping. Again! The devs are flexing with their talent here. Gameplay also evolved and added some fantastic additions. JD is great! I really liked the guy. (and not just because he got his middle name after Dom) Kait was cute, and I really enjoyed her company. I knew there was gonna be more about her because she's on the cover of Gears 5. I was worried about JD the time because I thought they will kill him off so there was a tension in me at every cutscene.. And Del is just DELightful to have around. (See what I did there?) But more on Del in my Gears 5 post. Marcus with a beard looks even more badass. No wonder the other GoW franchise took inspiration from him and gave Kratos a cool beard too. It was good to have Marcus around, but I wish we got to enjoy his company more. I understand why they did what they did, though. They probably wanted to give the new cast a chance to shine, and that's hard to do when Marcus Fenix is in the room. I loved this one too, and it immediately made me want to boot up Gears 5. So I did. Thank God I didn't have to wait years for a new one. #GearsOfWar | #XBOX | #GearsMarathon

Things that are NOT a tax write off as a xxx creator (sorry don’t fight me) -Gym -Meal prep -Massages & Facials -Botox/filler/cosmetic procedures *** MAYBE if you’re fet!$h content but I wouldn’t do it***** -Your entire rent -Civilian clothes for content -all your DoorDash -personal vacations As always there are more, it varies in your niche. This is just a list to get your wheels turning about how to move like an entrepreneur. See my previous posts on what you CAN write off SW friendly tax help Accepting clients in all 50 states