4th February 2022
This week has been a bit of a wild ride, especially now that I know that NFTs aren’t cracked up to be. At most, they’re just a scam, not to mention that they seriously harm the environment, and to be honest, they’re not worth damaging the environment for, in fact, nothing is worth damaging the environment for. The reason behind this is because the blockchain is an insanely complex technology, and naturally, it requires a lot of energy as well as data mining, although I’d have to look at this in more detail, so “minting” an NFT (basically uploading it to the blockchain) isn’t worth it, and this is something that I’ve realised a bit of the hard way. They’re practically impossible to upload, and the fact that it takes at least 5 minutes (even with a good internet connection) for it to go onto the blockchain isn’t good at all, not to mention literally having to pay to have it on there, which to me, raises a lot of red flags, but I guess it’s like that when it comes to selling things online in general.
However, I’ve decided to stop doing NFTs because I obviously care about the world around me. I don’t care if NFTs are the future or whatever, they’re just an unethical get-rich-quick scam in my eyes, especially with the idea that people are literally paying thousands (although in cryptocurrency, it’s deceptively cheap) just to get a jpeg of literally the ugliest thing ever (especially those stupid ape pictures, and if I see another one, I’m going to scream), despite the fact that digital images are freely available, not to mention the world’s biggest loophole where people can just screenshot those images that some fools have had to get a mortgage for just to say they own it, although they don’t own the actual image, they basically just own a glorified receipt with a URL linking to that image that they supposedly own.
Honestly I could go on about this all day, especially now when non-profits (of all companies and people) decide to dabble in NFTs, causing people to lose trust in those organisations in virtually a blink of an eye, which to me seems like the exact opposite of greenwashing. At least with greenwashing, companies are trying to redeem themselves in order to stay in business, which I somewhat understand, although I’m still a bit wary of greenwashing. But the opposite? That’s just even worse, especially when these non-profits essentially throw their values, principles, reputations, and everything that they stand for, out of the window, just to follow some stupid trend which I hope dies out in a year or two, not to mention that NFTs themselves sound dystopian, with most people creating them in order to find an easy way out by being able to practically become a millionaire overnight, although the odds of that actually happening are very slim, so it’s mainly about luck in this case. That, and I just find the NFT community (especially on Twitter) to be completely insufferable, to the point where I just can’t stand them at all.
Anyway, that’s my mini rant on NFTs, but whilst we’re at it, I also find the metaverse a bit problematic as well, since it’d require an extremely ridiculous amount of time, money, and energy just to be able to replicate the real world and beyond, essentially monetising everyone’s imaginations and fantasies, but only doing it so it favours them (the ones who have created the metaverse, in all of its forms, such as Zuck) instead of average people, just so that the billionaires can become even more richer, which I find to be really pointless since they already have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it, whilst others are struggling to get by, especially with the rise in prices for literally everything ever apart from wages (which sounds really counterintuitive, but the billionaires are too rich to even understand that), not to mention that the metaverse seems to be a bit of a pointless pursuit. Why recreate another world to escape into when you can just live in this one and make the most of it in a good way? It doesn’t make sense.
I’m all for playing games in virtual worlds, and having an avatar which I could play as, which is what most people used to do when they were younger, specifically the ones born in the late 90’s onwards, but forcing the entire world to be a part of a virtual world in which they cannot escape, since everyone and everything is on there, is a completely different story, and a very dystopian one at that. In fact, I saw an article for it (specifically one about dressing up in the metaverse) come up on LinkedIn news the other day (on LinkedIn, they’ve got a sidebar with a few headlines of things), and I felt really compelled to share my two cents on the matter, which I did.
So I shared it, without expecting it to ever take off, because at most, I thought it was only going to get a handful of views, like most of my posts normally get, but this post really took off. At the time of writing this, that post has got about 10,000 views, with some of those views coming from people who work at Big Tech companies (even a few people from LinkedIn itself saw it, so that must say something), so it seems to be a fairly big deal, although I’m trying my best to avoid the metrics since they’re just numbers, especially knowing that I’ve swayed the tech industry a little bit with my little opinion about the metaverse, although the metaverse is still just a bit of a pipe dream which I hope never takes off.
I don’t know how I feel at the fact that at least 10,000 people have seen that post, because that is a large amount of people to begin with, and is something that I never thought would have happened, but it has. At first, I found it scary, but now, I’ve just become used to it, trying not to obsess over the numbers that much.
I also managed to find another one of my strengths this week. In fact, it was right in front of me all along, but I failed to see it, and that strength is writing. I only really took it into account this week after acknowledging the fact that I can just write for hours on end, without realising that that much time has passed at all. It’s a plus for me because it well and truly goes hand in hand with illustration as well, so I guess I could become a writer along with being an illustrator, and it’d be rude not to.
For the writing front, I’m deciding to share my work on as much platforms as possible, just so that the work is accessible to others, although I’d have to be mindful on how many platforms I decide to publish on, so I think for now, I’d focus on no more than 5 platforms in total. The plan is to use the POSSE method (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), where I first publish the work onto my own site, so that I know for certain that I own that content, and I then publish copies of that work onto other sites, where the syndicated copies will be the same as the original one, but those syndicated ones will have a link referring back to my own site, which seems to be a decent model, just so that I’m not publishing my work to the void (which is pretty much what I’m doing with these weekly reflections), and just so that my work isn’t constantly at the mercy of third party platforms.
This seems to be the sweet spot between the two, and if I use this method, I could potentially create some forms of passive income (although the money isn’t really that important, but it’d be nice to have), as well as gaining the opportunity to start out as a freelance writer and/or illustrator for other publications so that others know that I exist, although as an introvert, this seems really paradoxical since I’d like to be known, but not known at the same time, so I guess I have to overcome that fear at some point.
So, that’s been my week so far, and now, I need to refine my business plan a bit more, although it won’t happen just yet, but I need to get an idea of what my business (or what I’m planning on doing now as a freelancer-to-be) is actually about so that I can actually pitch it instead of avoiding it, as well as actually having a blogging platform which I can call my own (because in the long run, having links to PDFs of my work isn’t going to cut it), so that it can be easier to link to, as well as setting up shop on a few other blogging platforms in order to syndicate my work along with potentially getting people to read what I have to say about things instead of just hiding away somewhere on my own, because as lovely as it is, it’s starting to get tiring, and I can only post into the void for so long before it becomes a pointless pursuit.