When Julio Rodriguez was a young boy, he remembers fondly the Sunday dinners that his mother would prepare.
Coming back from soccer practice on a Sunday afternoon, Rodriguez would be greeted with the familiar aroma of his mother’s asado.
The son of a college professor, Rodriguez remembers growing up fairly well off, and what most would consider, decidedly middle class.
But by the mid-1970s, Rodriguez, who was just starting elementary school started noticing that things in his family were changing.
Instead of the prime cuts of asado that his mother would prepare on Sunday evenings, off cuts were used.
Instead…
At the reading of the last will and testament of Timothy Calderon Smith (a.k.a toophunkcypher) in the year 2104, his descendants listened disinterested as the estate lawyer rattled off a list of possessions that Smith had acquired throughout his long life.
“One, painting by Picasso, entitled Girl before a mirror, I bequeath to…”
the lawyer droned on.
Until finally, he came to the part that everyone sat up for,
“And for my holdings of cryptocurrencies, 10,045.4678 Bitcoin I bequeath to…”
There were audible gasps in the lawyer’s office.
At the back of the room, one of Smith’s great-granddaughters had fainted…
For years, Thomas Rosemont had finished off every Friday evening with a pint of IPA at a local bar and his favorite pizza off their “home style” menu.
And for years Rosemont had raved about the bar’s pizza, claiming that it was the best pizza in town and he couldn’t understand why no one else seemed to like it as much.
The flaky, doughy, perfectly crisp crust, just the right amount of pepperoni and cheese, and a thick, luscious rich marinara sauce made it the perfect greasy accompaniment to be washed down with the cool bubbly-sweet bitterness of his favorite…
To Meghan Reid, her college application strategy made absolute sense — after all, hadn’t her Mom told her not to put all her eggs in one basket? So rather than have her hopes and dreams dashed by not being able to get into her top choice college, Reid, a senior at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School used a complex algorithm to determine how best to stretch her limited college application resources as far as possible.
Instead of focusing her efforts on writing one inspired college admissions letter, she would build a generic template and then tailor specific points for…
Samantha Reid was holding her phone and tapping away to ensure that the QR code that was her ticket to see her favorite black metal band didn’t disappear from her phone.
As Reid made her way towards the concert hall, which was an old college theater, she realized that many like her were also making their way to the venue.
Around the block a steady stream of bodies was lining up to see the band “Saltpeter” live in concert.
Right away, Reid noticed that part of the reason the line kept growing was that there was only one entrance into…
It was easy for Samantha Reid to ignore the signs at first — a tracking cookie on her computer (who didn’t have those?) and the sense that someone was following her after she knocked off work.
But she dismissed those fears, convinced that they were always bigger in her mind than they were in her reality.
It wasn’t until whoever was stalking her started leaving more overt signs that she began to grow slightly more concerned.
And when whoever it was that had taken an unhealthy interest in her had started leaving notes outside her apartment, she seriously started…
For all intents and purposes, Tony Chung led a privileged life. Chauffeured to school in his own Daimler, his afternoons were spent whiling his time away at the Singapore Cricket Club.
Throughout the 1930s, Chung’s father ran a prosperous business, supplying the British troops that were garrisoned in the island fortress of Singapore with the creature comforts of home, Chung senior had made his family fabulously wealthy in the process.
But even before the ink had dried on the documents of surrender, as the British, who were thought to be undefeatable, ceded control over Singapore to the invading Japanese…
Anzio Ancelotti didn’t notice anything amiss right away. It was subtle things at first. Perhaps a credit card transaction that would take longer than everyone else’s to clear, or a bank loan that wouldn’t be approved.
Then his paychecks would bounce at his bank, but clear on reissue. Eventually, the bank closed his account and refused him banking services altogether.
And then one day, while walking home from work, an unmarked van pulled up and a two barrel-chested men bundled him into the back gruffly.
Panicked, Ancelotti tried to shout, but a gloved hand clasped firmly around his mouth…
Samantha Heywood thought she could change him after they got married. Like so many other women, she thought that given time, her then-boyfriend now husband, would perhaps change his ways.
And for the longest time there were plenty of signs to indicate that that could happen.
After all, hadn’t he thrown her a surprise birthday party and wasn’t he tender with her when no one else was looking?
Yet as she washed the matted blood out of her hair, Samantha was starting to wonder if Doug would ever change, or whether she’d be dead well before he did.
Thinking…
Sal Billings felt parched. Thirsting for nothing other than a cold one, Billings thought twice about heading to the local bar.
Out here in the outskirts of Broome, Western Australia, the only beer available cost US$20 and you had no choice of brew — by way of comparison, the equivalent beer would only cost US$5 in downtown Perth, over 1,200 miles away.
As a surveyor, Billings made, well, good billings, as the mining industry of Western Australia boomed in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
But part of the reason that workers were so well-paid in the industry was…
CEO of Novum Alpha, an all-weather digital asset trading firm that uses Deep Learning tools to deliver dollar-returns in all market conditions.