Checked twice—this isn't AI.
It's an iridescent pileus cloud, a rare phenomenon that forms when sunlight diffracts through tiny water droplets in a thin cloud layer, painting the cloud with rainbow colors.
May this rainbow cloud bring luck to everyone who sees it. Happy weekend.
I have been quiet long enough.
This is perhaps the most important thread on X ever published.
And the most powerful and impactful comic book you will ever read.
If you want to understand the reverse carry trade, bookmark this.
Oil, Yen, Japan, and an all-star cast.
1/24🧵👇
Inception came out in 2006 for $4 million. Christopher Nolan's $160 million version arrived four years later. The original director died five weeks after Nolan's opened.
His name was Satoshi Kon. The film was called Paprika.
Same dream-sharing technology premise. Same Japanese businessman hiring the team. Same physics-defying hallways. Same elevator descending through layers of subconscious. Same dream architect character.
Kon's entire production budget was less than what Warner Bros spent on Inception trailers. The marketing campaign alone was $100 million, 25x Paprika's full production cost.
Paprika opened in two US theaters. Total overseas gross outside Japan: $944,915. Inception grossed $839 million worldwide and won four Oscars. International box office gap: roughly 890 to 1.
Kon's crew of 50 at Madhouse worked from his hand-drawn storyboards. The dream parade, the warping corridor, the character who becomes the media they consumed too much of. 30 months from planning to completion with fewer people than a modern Pixar lighting department.
The part nobody talks about: Kon was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May 2010. Inception opened July 16. He died August 24. He was 46. He made four completed features in his entire career. Perfect Blue. Millennium Actress. Tokyo Godfathers. Paprika. His follow-up Dreaming Machine was shut down permanently because his team said no one else could finish it.
Darren Aronofsky bought rights to Perfect Blue to recreate the bathtub scream shot in Requiem for a Dream. The bone structure of every serious dream-logic film made since 2000 traces back to four movies Kon finished in Tokyo on budgets Hollywood rounds off.
The industry found the storyboards. They just never paid the storyboard artist.
Plucking from "The Scientist" from Coldplay:
"Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh, take me back to the start"
List of acronyms (differs in the industry, but this is what I use)
Units
CDU = crude distillation unit (aka ADU)
VDU = vacuum distillation unit
HDS = hydrodesulphurization unit
LRCCU = long residue catalytic cracking unit
HCU = hydrocracker
FCC = fluidized catalytic cracker (aka CCU)
LOC = lube oil complex
VBU = visbreaking unit
BIT = bitumen production unit
Streams
LPG = liquified petroleum gas
Mogas = motor gasoline / petrol / gas
VLSFO = very low sulphur fuel oil (0.5% sulphur)
HSFO = high sulphur fuel oil
LSSR = low sulphur straight run fuel oil
HSSR = high sulphur straight run fuel oil
VGO = vacuum gasoil
SR = short residue
#oott
Most oil analysts are amateurs with zero oil & gas operational experience
That's why they think fixing Hormuz will solve the supply crisis.
Have them watch a flow test on a well that's been shut in for a few weeks
Or take them to a damaged plant, loading terminal or refinery
My "Roman Empire is the realization that my life is a lottery win. Somewhere in Sudan, Pålestine, iran, Afghanistan, Iraq or Congo, there is a boy smarter than me. He is more disciplined, more resilient, and holds more potential in his single finger than I do in my entire career.
The only difference? I am siting in a train and he is sting in the rubble of his dreams.
My "bad days" are his wildest dreams.
My "burnout" is a luxury he can't afford because his only job is staying alive.
It's geographical luck and it's a haunting injustice that we all refuse to acknowledge and look away
I'm in Thailand population 72m population.
They don't five a fuck about climate change or emissions.
Neither do Phillipines 110m population.
Neither do Indonesia with a population of 265m.
Why is that? Because they are too busy trying to survive.
Australia, with a population of 26m, is going to save the planet on its own by destroying its economy.
If you believe that you need help.
Right now you’re largely experiencing the economy from a time when the Strait of Hormuz was open, because it takes many weeks for oil tankers to traverse the seas. You still experience the Strait as open, even though it’s been closed for weeks. But once that reality hits…
You share 98.8% of your DNA with chimpanzees. A group of 200 of them just tore itself apart in a Ugandan rainforest, and researchers have been watching it happen for a decade.
A study came out yesterday in Science, one of the top research journals in the world. For 30 years, scientists tracked the Ngogo chimps in Uganda's Kibale National Park. This was the largest known chimp group on the planet, around 200 animals all living, hunting, and raising families together. Then around 2015, the group started splitting down the middle. Two clusters, one on the west side of the territory and one in the center, stopped spending time together. Males stopped mating with females from the other side. By 2018, they'd drawn a line through the forest and refused to cross it.
The Western chimps started raiding. Between 2018 and 2024, they killed 7 adult males and 17 babies from the Central group. They ripped infants straight off their mothers' chests. Fourteen more Central males vanished during that stretch, bodies never found, while Western's population climbed from 76 to 108. John Mitani, a University of Michigan researcher who spent over 20 years with these chimps, told NBC he believes the Central group is "doomed." He used the phrase "extinction event."
This almost never happens. DNA evidence suggests chimp communities fracture like this roughly once every 500 years. The only other time anyone saw it was in the 1970s with Jane Goodall's chimps in Tanzania, but researchers questioned that case because Goodall's team had been feeding bananas to the animals for years, which may have warped their natural behavior. Ngogo is the first split observed with zero human interference.
The cause dates back to 2014. Five males died that year, likely from disease. These weren't random chimps. They had close bonds on both sides of the group, the kind of friendships that kept 200 animals functioning as one unit. Once they were gone, a new top male seized control in 2015, a disease swept through and killed 25 more in 2017, and the two sides just kept drifting until there was nothing connecting them anymore.
One part of the paper sat with me. These chimps have no ethnicity. No religion. No political parties. The war started because friendships broke down, cliques solidified, and new group identities replaced years of cooperation. Aaron Sandel, the lead researcher from UT Austin, argued that keeping relationships alive across group lines may be the actual recipe for preventing this kind of collapse. In a species 98.8% identical to us, that recipe failed in under ten years.