Eliot the Cougar in his natural habitat

 

This poor thing has decided to bloom

 

Secret of amazing soups

 

It's beef, vegetables... The broth was slowly simmering for 6 hours... About a third of the liquid is from the tomatoes... Thickened with starch... A lot of fat was on that meat – diced into fine pieces and now floating in a thick layer on top... You can get heartburn just from looking at it...

I must say, adding 1-2 tbsp of starch to a 4-5L of soup makes it so much better... Meat kissel of sorts...

Eliot's character reference sheet

Today I received my first character reference sheet from Helen San, and I'm so happy with it…

The background was made by me, using Stable Diffusion AI image generation… It's incredible what it can make from a rough sketch and a text prompt…

Also, apparently, I have a FurAffinity account… I probably created it a long time ago, and didn't use it…

In any case, this ref sheet will make it possible for me to commission some art in the future, with me in it… Yay!!! And it's my new profile picture everywhere... Yay!!!

LI-6800

This day was long and boring... At least it was spent in an air conditioned room... I've listened to a lot of podcasts while I was doing this experiment...

Lightning Network Local and Remote Reserve Balance

Another lesson learned today... If you don't have much experience with Lightning Network, you may find this behavior strange, and think that something is broken...

Imagine you have two nodes, and you open a channel from one node to the other, say 100000 sats... You have 100000 local and 0 remote... Then to test if everything is okay you send 1000 sats through the channel, and it works instantly and with 0 fee... Excellent, you think to yourself, and you try to move those 1000 sats back...

"failure reason": "FAILURE_REASON_NO_ROUTE"

What? It's connected directly... What do you mean, stupid program?..

You type payinvoice again, this time you set the output channel directly...

"failure reason": "FAILURE_REASON_INSUFFICIENT_BALANCE"

Ummm, what?.. Then you type listchannels, find the channel, and look closely...

"local_chan_reserve_sat": "1000"
"remote_chan_reserve_sat": "1000"

Yes, it will not let you do a transaction if it results in either of the ends of the channel to fall below the reserved amount (1% of the channel capacity)...

You send another 1000 sats, and try to get 1000 sats back... That should work, right?..

"failure reason": "FAILURE_REASON_INSUFFICIENT_BALANCE"

Ah, right, it also will not let the channel go below the commitment fee (that depends on current on-chain fees)... At the time it was 2005 sats...

Okay, you send 1100 sats in the same direction, it is now [96900 local - 3100 remote] and try to pay that 1000 sats invoice from the remote node again... And it finally succeeds because the resulting balance (2100) was above both the reserved amount (1000) and the commit fee (2005)...

Now the question is: what if I want to close a channel with all the funds on one side, and no leftover balance on the other side?.. Is there a way to do it?.. Is it possible to make the channel [100000 local - 0 remote] again?.. According to Lightning protocol - no...

Not until eltoo is implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVML_uQxvwg

It will also make watchtowers much simpler and cheaper, but that's another story…

Chicory

 

Desire to have a reference sheet for my fursona

You know what I think… I really want to officially develop a fursona and get a reference sheet…
I've been a generic nondescript cougar for so long… Where do I start?..

LND balance oscillates all the time

It took me a while to notice… I was refreshing the Lightning Terminal window to see if I get new routed payments through the node, and then I saw that the balance was going down steadily a couple hundred sats at a time… At first I thought "What the hell? Why does my balance steadily go down? Is there a bug that leads to me losing sats?"… Then it went up again…

Hmmmmm???

Live and learn… Apparently, LND keeps track of the average on-chain fees and adjusts the reserved amount of sats in each channel to be able to force close them in case of emergency… It works as intended, it's not a bug and it's not hacked… The state of the mempool changes with each new block mined, therefore the reserved amount changes as well… I think I even saw a "fee estimation method" setting in LND… And the more channels you have open the bigger the visible changes in your total balance will be…

I was worried for no reason…

Rowan

I promised to take a photo of something nice on my way home and post it here…Have some rowan…

Episode 2: Return of the cougar…

So… Ummm… Hi… It's been 10 years…

I didn't expect to see myself writing another post here…

I was on LiveJournal first, and on VK a little, then I moved to Google+ and Twitter, and deleted my VK account, then Google+ was gone, and only Twitter was left, then I wiped my Twitter as well…

Can I have some sort of social presence on the web, given the current situation?.. Probably, no… Maybe, if I'm extra careful…

I don't use most of the popular communication tools either, no Telegram, no WhatsApp, no Viber, no Skype, etc… I only use Google Chat for the 90% of personal communications, and Discord for the rest, mostly gaming related connections… And I avoided social networks ever since Google+ was cancelled – I have no Facebook, no Instagram, no VK… I only have Twitter that I use as a newsfeed…

I used to stream video games on Twitch, and I posted gaming videos on YouTube, but right now it's problematic… I still have those Twitch and YouTube accounts, obviously… And I still have my streaming setup…

I am still a furry… And I'm in therapy…

Dare I to return to social online life?..

If all goes well, either this blog will see more frequent updates or I will be on some other platform… If not – wait another 10 years… Either way, I think I'll hide the majority of old messages here, update and translate some stuff to English…

PS: In recent years I've switched to English almost completely in my online life… I hope it's not a problem for you…