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Neurological Fungal Telekinesis
that’s right, bay-bee! let’s talk about NFTs…. the brand new underground topic that no one is discussing, and not even a little bored or irritated with!
i joke, of course, i’m not all that interested in the subject myself. there’s some things to be said on the subject, to be sure, but i think i just want to muse on it for a moment. bear with me, i’ll try not to bore you.
so, on a larf, i decided to draw my own (non NFT) bored ape drawing. i have to clarify, UPFRONT, that this is NOT an NFT. just a NiFTy drawing. if anything, i’m just goofing on the whole crypto culture.
so, i decided to draw it in my sort of design style as a black and blue robot. why not? no big reason. it’s not pro, or anti anything. so i posted it on my reddit, instagram, patreon…. and something curious happened. (btw, check out those communities, like, follow, subscribe… it really helps me with the…. algorithms? i don’t know. but it’s more free content)
on reddit, it blew up. some of the people reading this might be here cause of that post. (huloooooo!) and it got an intense, and wildly varied range of responses. i’ve never seen such attention on one of my posted works before! some people were very complimentary, and thought it was a funny joke, which is all it was. some wanted me to get in on their crypto scams, others told me i was lame for being into NFTs, which is not remotely true, and some cautioned me that giving my work away for free was stupid, and i was about to be taken advantage of. which, as the artist of a 7 year old free webcomic, is HILARIOUS to me. oh no…. work for free? <shudder> buh buh buh…. ma capitalism!
that evening i was locked in, reading posts, having chats, all revolving around this doodle i did, and i’m not gonna lie, the self involved art d-bag in me was loving the attention.
then the mods of sub reddit i posted it on ‘removed’ the post. no explanation offered, though i believe it was based on the same foolish assumption that drawing something like that is tacit endorsement of it. i mean, i draw monsters and demons and crap too, but no. this robot monkey is too divisive for r/drawing. sigh.
so, anyways, the rollercoaster was over, but it got me thinking about this nft blockchain stuff. i’ve actually done a lot of free work over the years. personal stuff, stuff for friends, just practice work…. but only with this dumb monkey drawing which took very little time at all, did i draw this much warning about working for free. as though once it was a monkey, it had value i was just pissing away by letting people hit ‘save image as’. as though i was the foolish one for not assigning some random value to it, and trying to get someone to pay for the receipt of it on the blockchain ledger.
i mean, i still have the original file for it, and the skill it took to draw it. but some how, not the time, not the energy, not the laughs or anger or joy it brought to anyone had any value. no, the real value to it is being able to say, ‘see that? i own that, and it’s worth X…. to me, or whomever i sell it to’. and i think that’s the real shame. NFTs could have been used to license, or sell art from artists doing work for hire, or raise awareness of works based on a shared appreciation of them once they were discovered. i mean, it’s not great, and it’s a little too businessy for my tastes, but it could have been used for something positive. instead we had a computer randomly generating ape drawings by mixing and matching mohawks and sunglasses. artless pictures, appreciated by jimmy fallon and paris hilton as unique works, being sold as a commodity.
why are we not just buying QR codes? at least it would be honest.
Interesting that you were getting chewed out because you weren’t monetizing your NFT! My irl artworks (canvases, stained glass panels, fused glass items) have brought ne the opposite comments! “You should just give it away, because you do it because artists can’t NOT do art, they’re driven to do it!”
I ask them if they have a job. Yes, they say. Me, Do you need to work, to pay bills, to eat? They say “of course!” Me, But then you’re driven to work, therefore you should be doing it for free. Your boss would love that, I’m sure.
(They weren’t going to buy anything anyway, right?)
well, i wouldn’t say ‘chewed out’, but the hardcore capitalists only see showing an image for free as a waste, when i could have just as easily turned it into a d-bag crypto scam. call me crazy, i’d rather just do stuff and show people, and not make money off of some weird grift.
but it’s just that some people have the urge to monetize everything. that nothing you ever do should be unaccompanied with a price tag. i think it’s a sour way to look at the world, and would end up leaving one jaded and cynical. they’d have to eventually face that once their value is over, no one would care about them. that might actually be true. i hope it’s not.
I think a century from now NFTs will still be around, and people will just be used to them. Right now they are this new shiny thing. Some people react like a bird (shiny thing pretty!) and do dumb things like buying ugly non-art for real big money. Other people react like Frankenstein’s monster (shiny like fire! fire BAD!! me no like fire!!!) and do dumb things like yell at people for using any web site that even hinted it might do something with cryptocurrencies or NFTs someday.
As I understand it, an NFT is a digital certificate that proves that you own something. That’s it. There’s a similar technology that’s been around a little longer, where you have a piece of paper that proves you own something. Often it uses a thing called a “signature”, so named because it’s kind of like a digital signature but it’s not digital.
One neat thing about the digital world is that we can trivially make perfect copies. So someone can buy the NFT proving that they “own” a particular image in some way even while that image is still found everywhere on the Internet. Various memes have been sold as NFTs and the reason the NFT sold for a high price is that there are many copies of the meme out there, so this is a new interpretation of the word “own” where someone “owns” something while everyone else still has it for free.
I know someone who has bought original cels from animated movies he likes. With projects being done on computers, we don’t have artifacts like that to collect. But if someone made a new movie or cartoon I really love, and sold an NFT of some digital asset used to make it, I could imagine buying such an NFT. After all, I use Patreon to send money to some comics creators and I don’t even “own” anything as a result.
I think NFTs will still be around in a hundred years. But if you want to laugh at the early adopters who spent millions to “buy” meme images, go right ahead. (Maybe they will have the last laugh and their early-adopter NFTs will appreciate in value… but I’m very dubious.)
i don’t know if nfts will be around in any sort of long term way. i think you’re right about the early adopters though, and this is just the way that the block chain technology makes it’s first appearance alongside cryptocurrency. i think the tech is interesting. if i had one major criticism, it’s just such a waste to apply it to something so silly. maybe in the future we’ll find something better to do with it. but i’m not sure the animation cels analogy is apt. i have an aeon flux cel. love that show. you could take a picture of it, and enjoy it ever bit as i enjoy mine, but unlike a digital copy, mine was the one that was part of the production.
That makes sense. Thank you.
And yes, there is something off about crypto and all that, beyond the speculative mania. I’ll know Greens are seriously scared when they start pushing nuclear power, capturing methane, supporting scientific agriculture and banning stuff like that instead of banning nukes and pipelines and focusing on cars and windmills. So many green groups get money from Gazprom and other parts of neo-Muscovy’s petro-extraction industrial complex that they would worry me even if they didn’t generally hate nukes.
always happy to help clarify!
i’m not aware of any link between environmentalism and cryptocurrency, other than i’ve heard it takes a lot of power to run the computers to do the mining for tokens. hard to see how something like that is going to ‘save the world’. i remain skeptical.
I love your bored ape, but forget NFTs. When are you coming up with your own cryptocurrency? I wanna be an early adopter of BitAggie! To the [unspecified light source in what passes for night wherever this comic is]!!!
hahah, awesome! that’s a great name for it too! well, i don’t see myself doing either, but if i did, BitAggie would be the name. took me a sec to realize what you were talking about with ‘too the X’. i forget that these people have their own lingo. it’s quite a weird subculture.
i was thinking a line of nfts would be fun, if it wasn’t for money. like, what if all the characters were like on cards, like a roster, with scenes, or things you collect…. and then i realized i reinvented trading cards.
Dogecoin started as a joke, so … there’s precedent.
Oklahomans might buy lots and lots of “BitAggies”. You could have a Sooner biting an Aggie as one half of the symbol and the other half Black & Blue …
well, it’s a fun dream that we might just have to leave alone. i think i’m best focusing on my doodling. leave the big tech startups to the eggheads in silicon valley.
Interesting relationship. Was she already a junkie, then?
no, i’ve tried to imply that that has has only come to pass after ‘an event’ which left her on pain killers. at this point in the past, she’s just a criminal.
The whole NFT thing makes no sense to me. I’ll just do what I usually do in these situations: sit back, let the world roll by, and wait for the next new distraction. Love your little social experiment, though!
i didn’t MEAN for it to turn into a social experiment, i thought i was doing something funny, but other people saw it as quite divisive.
it’s probably a wise approach to not getting involved. if you weren’t in on the ground floor, it’s not going to make you rich at this point, i don’t think. right now, it’s just slow gambling. i do like the idea of a de centralized currency, and what that could mean with how we view capitalism. but it’s less like banking, and more like stock trading, and the energy that goes along with that seems even more toxic and d-baggy.
Monkey for president! (Old Flash-based animation, it was funny, maybe it still is)
The term “tempest in a teapot” springs to mind, but this is far less of a tempest than the crap that usually is thrown up against the virtual walls of the
asylumweb. I’ve also noted that some “moderators” are random, so there’s no point in taking their (non-lethal) actions too personally.People tend to get religious about stuff. It doesn’t matter if they are “atheist” or not. NFTs are “god” right now, so there’s a lot of fresh, smelly crap going on about what amounts to blinky lights taped to a dog turd.
My take: “we will give you a free, pretty, tulip bulb with every NFT you buy”.
that’s not a bad way of looking at it. i mean, if you get to own the tulip, but anyone walking by your house can look at it whenever they want.
it’s great analogy when you consider that speculative trading actually started with tulips. where people would buy actual tulips before they sprouted, so they could own the rights to them, before they were worth anything. very clever, mr linimon!
you’re not wrong. there’s a religiosity to it all. especially when you consider that nfts and cryptocurrency only derive value from people believing it has value. which could explain why the crypto bros have such a zealot approach when discussing it. any doubt they are doing the wrong thing will reduce confidence in the value of their assets, and it all falls apart.
Love the hat.
yeah, i’d like to bring fedoras back, but i’m afraid they have become beyond saving by the neck beards.