I'm feeling unusually optimistic this week.

We may finally be exiting the dark ages of startup culture (defined as "ever since people have been able to get funding for writing Facebook apps"):
http://blog.samaltman.com/new-rfs-breakthrough-technologies
YCombinator is looking to take all that excess investor money and apply it to actual worthwhile things (aka moonshots).  Good for them.  Maybe someday it won't be only Google (plus Amazon delivery drones) competing in the moonshot space.

Next up, Chris Roberts, the director of the original Wing Commander 1 and 2 (my favourite video games of all time), did a ridiculously ambitious $2 million kickstarter back in 2012 to finance a remake.  Okay, I guess if you want to just redo Wing Commander with a bit of updated modern technology, you could probably do a pretty good job for $2 million.  And they actually hit that goal?  Neat.  But I checked in again yesterday to see how it's going, and the stretch goal is now... uhh... $41 million.  Because they ALREADY HIT $40 MILLION.  https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals  That's, say, 400,000 people at $100 each preordering a game that doesn't exist and may never exist.  Even if it all goes down in flames, this sort of concept is inspiring.  You can now finance $40 million projects with people's pocket change, no VCs required.  Why not even more?

Also, speaking of questionable uses for money, last week my employer paid me to sit around for several hours writing an essay about how awesome I am. And this week it gets sent around to other people who will get paid to write additional mini-essays about how awesome I am.  (Or, strictly speaking, how awesome I am not.  But I don't have to worry about those people for at least a month.)

And the wifi driver has been strangely non-crashy.

So yeah, good times.