I have spent days trying to give the NFT artist community the benefit of the doubt, reading their twitter feeds and blogs and the way they speak to one another and come to the simple conclusion that they absolutely have no idea what an NFT is beyond "magic pay-me box"
"NFT" also gets used liberally as an aesthetic shorthand to describe short, abstract animations. Many of the artists are simply excited that literally anyone is paying attention to these types of artworks in the first place.
And to a degree the willingness to ignore the details is understandable. The details of NFTs, how they function, what they really are, is boring AF and deeply stupid. Short, abstract animation is basically impossible to monetize outside of direct patronage.
There's an incentive structure in place to make it really easy to focus on the pitch: this is a channel to sell your otherwise intangible art. There is an incentive to ignore that you are surrounded by scammers and your buyers are all talking about your art as an "asset class."
And, of course, once you've bought in, since you need to buy crypto to mint your pieces in the first place, there's a HUGE incentive to overlook the flaws, to ignore the possibility that this is all just a scheme to pump the value of crypto by making it spendable on something.
It's also worth noting that there's two other significantly identifiable clusters: public figures like Edward Snowden using NFT as an abstract fundraising channel, and people who went viral in Reddit memes ten years ago.
Where it starts to get *really* funky is when you realize that a bunch of the high profile "capitalize on your meme status" stories from recent days are all the doing of one guy, Farzin Fardin Fard, who has spent tens of thousands of Eth on hundreds of NFTs.
So, like, I don't want to say definitively there's a bubble being pumped entirely by a few stakeholders who stand to make more by cashing out their holdings in a gold rush, but, you know, it deffo looks that way.
Oh, and also if you browse Foundation you can pretty easily find transactions that, come on, that's money laundering, right? Like, we can see you. You didn't spend $115,000 on Trollface to give your buddy an Etherium hash as a birthday present.
(For clarity: this isn't a sleight on 'Disaster Girl'. Farzin Fardin Fard was the $500,000 purchaser of the NFT in addition to NFTs attached to Overly Attached Girlfriend, Creepy Chan, and Nyan Cat.)
I was looking this up because I was looking up Ethereum benchmarks and got a banner ad for a cryptocasino, which I decided to poke around, and found their live Megaball game, where the biggest payout was 702.35 mETH, which from what I can work out is about 3¢?
I'm not confident in that because it's either a fractional value of Ethereum, or it's a completely separate crypto "backed by interest-generating real-world assets which initially include car equity loans." (kill me)
The Biden COVID task force is particularly interesting to me because it suggests that the Biden/Harris transition team are just going to immediately start operating like the Executive branch in any capacity that they can.
And, thing is, they probably can get away with a lot?
And this creates a weird situation because the current executive is 1) dysfunctional, 2) only likely to become more so over the next couple months, and 3) when not dysfunctional actively evil.
So "it's not official yet, but let's just listen to the new guy" is REAL appealing.
But does that then create a precedent for new admins to basically start soft-governing before the EC has even met, or does everyone just go "no, that was a 2020 thing, it was a strange year"?
"If you manually place your ad breaks, avoid placing breaks at disruptive points
Ah, yes, because the auto-place system is so good at choosing non-disruptive moments like <squints> 44 seconds into the video.
Seriously @TeamYouTube, I can't tell which I hate worse, the midrolls less than a minute into a video or the midrolls immediately before the credits, but both have to go.
What's happening is so many creators like to have a cold open, then play a small title card, and that creates exactly the kind of pause that the auto-placement looks for. But the system isn't considering how users actually use the system.
Okay, so, I was re-watching some of James Randi's debunkings and I got to his encounter with James Hydrick and, wait, something's off about this... he's not... is he...?
Oh no.
Oh no.
Oh nooooooooo.
Now, maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing in the life of this convicted child molester, but, yes, James Hydrick used to goose his psychic act by putting on "oriental" makeup.
Between the original production, promotion, reshoots, distribution, Snyder Cut, and god knows what else, this is going to have cost WB almost $600 million.
Parent AT&T is already over-leveraged AF and getting desperate, so definitely nothing good.