The Crazy World of NFTs

Late last year I was on TikTok when I saw a video appear in my For You page. It was from a guy who was hyping about a way that artists can finally be paid for their creative work. It’s something called Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT for short. The idea is that artists would take their digital art, convert their work into NFTs, upload them on a site like OpenSea (which is the most popular NFT sales site), have people bid on your work, and you’ll earn a decent amount of money. As time went on I began to see more and more of these TikTok videos talking about how artists can earn a living by selling their art as NFTs.

On the surface it sounds easy and it may finally provide an opportunity for artists to earn a livable income from their creative work. There are even tutorials talking about how easy the whole process is. But if you delve more into it, you’d find out that NFTs seem far more convoluted than a typical sale on eBay or Etsy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with NFTs, here’s a straightforward explanation on The Verge along with a fuller explanation on Wikipedia. I found this hilarious description on Twitter that shows how convoluted the whole NFT marketplace really is. Cracked.com also has an explainer parody video that describes NFTs in a hilarious—yet true—way.

I’ll admit that I was initially intrigued by the idea because I thought it would be cool to finally make a living at doing something that I really love to do while being able to set my own hours. Yet I decided not to jump on the bandwagon immediately because I’m very leery about spending huge amounts of money on something that is so incredibly new that I’m still trying to learn about it. I don’t want to lose large amounts of money right now, especially since I don’t have a steady job at the moment and I’m still working on getting my IT certificate. I want to educate myself first before I make any kind of forays into NFTs.

Another reason why I’m leery is that there are some unsavory aspects about NFTs that I’ve learned and I don’t know if I want to associate myself with something that could potentially be so unsavory. First, there’s the charge that many people who buy NFTs are wealthy people who are using NFT sales as some kind of a money laundering operation.

Then there is the controversy surrounding the environmental impact of NFTs due mainly to the fact that one frequently has to use the cryptocurrency Ethereum to purchase an NFT. Ethereum uses a lot of energy to mint. That’s something to really consider since there is a climate change crisis that is currently going on in the world. On top of it there are accusations (as spelled out in this long Twitter thread) that cryptocurrency is encouraging cult behavior among its advocates and it has attracted a throng of people who are Libertarian and far right-wing along with cases of cryptocurrency being used in illegal human and drug trafficking.

In addition, there are accusations that people are going on to sites like DeviantArt, downloading the art hosted on that site, minting them into NFTs, and selling them on OpenSea without knowledge or permission of the original artist. As an artist myself, I find that accusation to be the most alarming because I would be extremely pissed if someone did that to me.

Last week I found that it’s not only individual artists whose work are being ripped off by NFT speculators. I saw a series of duck-themed NFTs on Twitter where I noticed that these ducks bore a very strong resemblance to Howard the Duck. As someone who’ve done past reviews of the comic book series (I’ll admit that, even though I have more comic books that I could review, I haven’t gotten around to doing more of them lately because I’ve been busy doing other things like trying to get my IT certificate), I knew that these guys have just ripped off Marvel Comics, whose parent company, Disney, has a reputation for going to great lengths to protect its intellectual property. I even made a video of the comparisons between these NFTs and Howard the Duck that I uploaded on to TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube.

Despite the controversy more people are jumping into the NFT craze. In fact a group of people decided to create a series of NFTs known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Unlike other NFTs where you buy one and enjoy it in the privacy of your own home, with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, just purchasing one of those NFTs will gain you admission to an exclusive club that’s housed on a Discord server where you can hang out online with other Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners.

However the Bored Ape Yacht Club has its own controversy (besides the fact that you have to cough up thousands of dollars in order to purchase one of their NFTs). There are accusations that the Bored Ape Yacht Club has white power/Nazi affiliations although that racist affiliation is in dispute.

Celebrities are jumping into NFTs, especially the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Paris Hilton recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show where the two of them talked about their ownership of two of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs while Hilton spoke about the upcoming debut of her own NFT collection. Eminem spent $425,000 for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. Eminem got a bargain compared to Justin Bieber, who spent $1.3 million for a Bored Ape NFT of his very own.

Some are even selling their own NFTs. One example is Julian Lennon, who is selling NFT images of clothing and guitars that his late father, John Lennon, once owned. Anyone who bids on—let’s say—a guitar is bidding only on an image of that guitar that’s accompanied by an audio of Julian narrating his own memories of when his father had that guitar. (You can see a preview of what it would be like on this Instagram post.) The winning bidder will not receive the actual guitar at all. Last year rapper Bhad Bhabie sold NFTs based on the phrase (“Cash me outside, how bow dah?”) that she originally uttered when she was a guest on The Dr. Phil Show and it later turned into memes and it ultimately catapulted her to stardom. Chris Crocker did something similar last year when they decided to sell the video they did that became an Internet classic, LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!!, as an NFT with the proceeds from that sale going towards Chris Crocker’s gender transition surgery and care for their aging grandmother. (Chris Crocker now goes by the name Cara Cunningham.)

As for me, I haven’t completely ruled out doing an NFT but I’m still being extremely cautious about it because I have a feeling that—with all these celebrities jumping in, the climate impact controversy, and the illegal money laundering controversy surrounding NFTs in general—the whole market is heading in a bubble now. The downside of a bubble is that bubbles tend to burst and anyone who doesn’t cash out before the bubble burst tend to lose a lot of money. I’ve seen it happen before with the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble where the bubble continued to rise until it suddenly burst and many people were negatively impacted by it on the financial level. I don’t want something like that to happen to me, which is why I’m still sitting on the fence. If I decide to do an NFT I will definitely write about it in this blog.

On the other hand, I could just ignore the whole NFT fad and just mint random .jpegs on the parody site Super Fungible Token.

My Video About Jamie Lynn Spears

Today is Martin Luther King Day and we are still in the middle of a raging pandemic. This day brought back memories of when I last went to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore in 2020. It was shortly before the Coronavirus pandemic showed up and started killing people. I braved the cold because it was the one day of the year where the admission was free. It was very crowded that day because so many other people were taking advantage of the free admission. Last year was different because the museum held everything via Zoom. This year they decided to resume having free admission with free MLK-related activities but one had to reserve a ticket in order to get in (it was obviously an effort to reduce crowds so the MLK free admission day won’t become a super spreader for COVID-19) and the tickets were completely given away.

It’s just as well that I didn’t get a ticket because a combination snow/ice storm had hit the Baltimore-Washington, DC area yesterday and there are plenty of icy patches on sidewalks and roads. Since I have a hip replacement I have to be very cautious when walking around ice. (I still have memories of when the second of the two falls I went through in one week in early 2011 happened when I slipped on some ice in Annapolis. That second fall was enough to knock my hip replacement out of alignment and I had to undergo hip revision surgery in order to be able to walk without pain again.) If I had gotten a ticket I would’ve ended up cancelling so I’m not sad over not being able to go to the museum for free this year. I’m hoping that if I get a decent-paying job or some other reliable income source, I might be able to go to the museum in warmer weather and pay the normal admission fee.

This year Martin Luther King Day is a holiday weekend with a major snow-mixed-with-ice storm so my options for doing something interesting were limited. But then I was inspired to make a short video after this news story became the subject of all kinds of online gossip.

Here’s some background. Way back in early 2009 I had done a Peeps diorama for a contest that made fun of the intense media obsession with pop singer Britney Spears during the time when she began to act increasingly erratic in public and her actions became worse as time went on. It became a litany of Britney appearing in nightclubs wearing a miniskirt with no underpants on. She also shaved her head, violently struck a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella, lost custody of her children to her ex-husband due to her erratic behavior, and frequently went on late night runs to places like a gas station or convenience store or pharmacy or Starbucks while the paparazzi documented everything. At one point she had started sleeping with one of the paparazzi photographers who tailed her everywhere she went. There were even rumors of drug use.

Things had become so bad that Britney’s family had successfully convinced a judge to place her in a conservatorship that would be run by her father. At first it seemed like the right thing to do because had her family not taken action, there was a strong chance that Britney would’ve joined that infamous 27 Club. That conservatorship soon turned into a horrible idea when Britney resumed her entertainment career just months after she was placed in an involuntary 5150 psychiatric hold (which prompted the conservatorship in the first place). For the next 13 years Britney was in this bizarre situation where she was considered to be too mentally ill to take care of herself like a regular adult so she needed someone to watch over her and her finances yet she was considered mentally healthy enough to record new music and go on concert tours. This resulted in the rise of the Free Britney movement where her fans called for her conservatorship to end.

In the meantime Britney has a younger sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, who has her own entertainment career (even though it’s clear that Britney is the more popular sister). For years I’ve seen pictures of the two sisters together where they seemed happy and close. Compared with her parents, Jamie Lynn has kept a relatively low profile when it came to her sister’s conservatorship. In 2020 there was news about Jamie Lynn being one of the trustees handling Britney’s fortune under the conservatorship. Jamie Lynn had even defended her sister’s mental health situation on social media. On the surface it seemed like something that Jamie Lynn did for her sister out of love.

But then Britney gave this explosive testimony in court about how the conservatorship had seriously traumatized her and she not only wanted it to end but she also wants those responsible to go to jail, including members of her own family. Her testimony was enough to begin to cast doubt on whether Jamie Lynn is really helping her sister with this conservatorship. Soon afterwards this online feud between the sisters began to heat up on social media, which further cast doubts on whether Jamie Lynn really has her sister’s best interests in mind when it comes to being one of the conservatorship trustees.

The shit really began to hit the fan when Jamie Lynn announced that she was coming out with a new memoir with the title I Must Confess. That led to further outcry because the words “I must confess” also happens to be in the lyrics to the chorus of Britney’s first major hit, “…Baby One More Time,” which led to accusations that Jamie Lynn is trying to profit off of her big sister. The book title was soon changed to Things I Should Have Said but it still hasn’t hushed accusations that the book is just a cash grab at the expense of Britney.

The conservatorship ended for Britney back in November but Jamie Lynn still decided to forge ahead with her book and get it released as soon as possible. Meanwhile the rift between Britney and Jamie Lynn continues to grow with each new social media post.

The issue isn’t whether Jamie Lynn has the right to write her memoirs. The issue is the timing of this book’s release and, as the old saying goes, “Timing is everything.” The book is scheduled to be released tomorrow and it’s so convenient that Jamie Lynn has timed her book’s release soon after Britney’s conservatorship has ended and on the heels of the recent online feud between the two sisters. That release date just happens to fall on the day after the Martin Luther King holiday, which falls on a Monday this year, so Jamie Lynn had the opportunity to do some weekend publicity for her upcoming book while many people (a.k.a. potential buyers and readers of Things I Could Have Said) were off from work due to the holiday. In addition, Jamie Lynn is currently in the cast of the Netflix series Steel Magnolias and the second season is going to start streaming on that platform on February 4, less than two weeks after her book’s release so there is some kind of a marketing synergy between her book and her Steel Magnolias series.

Had Jamie Lynn decided to release her book five or ten years (or even longer) after the end of her sister’s conservatorship, there would’ve been less of a public backlash against her. But the timing has many people suspecting that she is trying for a quick cash grab since she no longer has that conservatorship trustee position. And her recent interview on ABC’s Good Morning America ended up being widely-panned because it didn’t do anything to alter the perception that she’s only profiting off of her sister.

Now Jamie Lynn is begging Britney for an online cease-fire because their feud is embarrassing. Maybe she should have thought about the long-term consequences of how she timed the release of her book before she did what she did.

I still had the short song by Carter Vail called “Shut the Fuck Up” bookmarked on my TikTok account even though I had already used it for another video. I thought it would be perfect for my new short video showing why Jamie Lynn Spears should just simply shut the fuck up. I uploaded it on to TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube over the past weekend.

I’ve even spliced in a short excerpt from Chris Crocker’s Leave Britney Alone! video, which was originally posted online in 2007 back when Britney had her initial troubles that led to the creation of that whole conservatorship in the first place. That video has since become pretty legendary with its simple yet very passionate message that everyone should just leave Britney alone. By the way, the original creator of Leave Britney Alone! has come out as a transgender woman, has changed her name to Cara Cunningham, and is now in the process of beginning feminizing hormone therapy.

A Hollywood Actress Speaks Out on Teens and Social Media

I came across this interesting article regarding teens and social media on—of all places—the gossip site Dlisted.com. Hollywood actress Megan Fox recently had this to say about teens using social media.

“I think it’s really toxic for our youth culture. There is a hierarchy in schools of who’s the cool kid based on who has the most followers and who has the most likes. It’s a really terrible message to wake up every day and have your kids going, ‘Who liked my photo?’ and ‘Who’s following me?’”

Fox went on to say:

“When I was on Twitter for five days, I would have 12 and 13-year-old kids going, ‘If you don’t follow me back, I am going to kill myself.’ I was like this is fucking awful. Parents should pay attention to that and have your kids off of it. You’re not ready for that shit when you’re a teenager. You need to be an adult before you can start messing around with that. It’s irresponsible and it’s dangerous.”

I have to say that I agree with her 100 percent. I know that all of the major social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) have 13 as the minimum age requirement. I’ve long been uncomfortable with 13 being the minimum age because 13-year-olds are at that age where they are still naive and vulnerable. I’ve witnessed enough crazy drama among adults online (including flaming wars, cyberbullying, etc.) that I would not want a young teen exposed to. Frankly, I think 17 or 18 should be the minimum age to be on social media because older teens tend to start being more mature and level-headed. But they should be given such access to social media only after taking a semester-long course in high school on Internet safety and the “do’s” and “don’ts” when it comes to how to behave online. This course would include real-life examples of teens who were cyberbullied to the point of suicide, teens who met a stranger they knew from the Internet in real life only to be raped and/or murdered, and other such real-life cautionary tales.

A few months ago I wrote another post about a 14-year-old girl who has an Instagram account who has been sharing too much about her personal life, including her struggles with depression and self-mutilation. Her account is still online and she’s still posting selfies amongst her numerous photos of her doll collection while leaving posts about her personal information online. If that’s not enough, she has gone on to posting videos about herself on her YouTube channel.

I’m not the only one who’s uneasy with the idea of young teens being allowed on social media. Nearly all of the comments to that Dlisted.com post were unanimous in agreeing with Fox regarding young teens and social media.

The issue of whether to allow kids under 16 to go online without little or no adult supervision has been around for many years—dating as far back as the early 2000’s when a 13-year-old girl named Katherine Tarbox left home to meet a man she knew from an online chat room only to find that the guy was a convicted pedophile who sexually assaulted her.

Several years later a young teenage girl began to post photos and videos of herself on MySpace and YouTube under the name Kiki Kannibal, which attracted numerous attention from older men and she became a victim of statutory rape when, at the tender age of 14, she began a sexual relationship with a much older man. In addition, as this Rolling Stone article documents, she became a target of cyberstalkers and cyberbullies.

Around the same time that Kiki Kannibal began posting photos and videos online, another teenage girl named Megan Meier committed suicide as a result of what happened to her when she was allowed to be online with little parental supervision. She was 13 when she started a friendship on MySpace with a boy who later turned out to be a fictional person whose account was created by a former friend and her mother as a “joke.” It quickly turned into something that the ex-friend, her mother, and other people who knew the mother and daughter used to cyberbully Megan.

Despite these cautionary tales surrounding Katherine Tarbox, Kiki Kannibal, and Megan Meier, there are far too many parents who allow kids under 16 to go on social media with little or no supervision and these kids are so vulnerable to experiencing the worst of adult impulses before they are fully mature enough to handle any negative feedback.

Not only did that 14-year-old girl’s aforementioned Instagram account have me feeling uneasy, a few months ago there was a 13-year-old boy who became a celebrity of sorts that made me feel equally queasy.

C.J. Pearson became an overnight sensation for a series of videos he posted on YouTube criticizing President Obama. He soon became the darling of the right wing activists, especially given the fact that he was an African American boy criticizing an African American president while spouting conservative views. While the media was gushing over that kid, I found myself thinking “Where are his parents and why are they letting him post YouTube videos unsupervised?”

C.J. Pearson has since announced that he has renounced his Republican views and is now supporting Bernie Sanders for president. While it’s nice to know that he has evolved in his thinking, I still think that it was wrong for his parents to allow him to post those YouTube videos in the first place. The kid would’ve been better off had he espoused his political views only to his friends and family in real life instead of posting them online on YouTube for the entire world to see.

In case you’re wondering, his political views have absolutely nothing to do with my uneasiness with the way that he was allowed to post videos of himself at a very young age with little or no parental supervision. I would feel the same way had he shared the exact same political beliefs as I do. It’s more about the fact that he was doing this as a 13-year-old boy than the political beliefs he espoused in his videos.

I’ve said and done stupid things myself when I was 13. The big difference is that the Internet as we know it wasn’t around at the time so I was able to make those mistakes without me or anyone else documenting it then posting it online to continue haunting me for decades. Even if C.J. Pearson takes those earlier YouTube videos criticizing President Obama offline, chances are that the same videos will be archived elsewhere on the Internet (such as other people’s YouTube accounts, other websites, other social media accounts, etc.) so he will have a very difficult time scrubbing the existence of those videos from the Internet. In other words, the stupid things C.J. Pearson said when he was 13 has been enshrined for all time.

Don’t believe me when I say that what you post on the Internet lasts forever? Well consider this. A few years ago a man named Chris Crocker gained fame when he posted a video titled “Leave Britney Alone” where he passionately defended Britney Spears when she was publicly going through severe mental health issues from around 2006-2008. He soon became famous himself and he was known as the Leave Britney Alone Guy for many years after posting that video. A few months ago Chris Crocker decided to delete his entire YouTube channel including the video that catapulted him to the public eye because he grew tired of the abuse he received from various people over the years. Despite that deletion, someone had managed to snag a copy of that video before Crocker deleted it and has re-uploaded it. And I’m sure that there are other copies of that video still floating around the Internet that had been uploaded by people other than Chris Crocker.

At least Chris Crocker was a young adult when he made that video. But if Chris Crocker has a hard time with scrubbing the Internet completely of that “Leave Britney Alone” video, you can imagine a young kid like C.J. Pearson will never be able to put those previous anti-Obama videos behind him.

This is why I think Megan Fox was spot on about her views regarding young teens and social media. I think 13 is too young to be hanging around anywhere online without parental supervision and I think the minimum age that one can become members of Facebook and other social media sites should be raised to at least 16 (although I personally prefer 17 or 18 but I’m willing to live with 16 as a compromise since that’s the age when teens can legally get a driver’s license).

Life After Starring in a Viral Video

I got this off Dlisted.com last week. Remember Chris Crocker, the man who starred in this video he posted on YouTube that went viral? If not, then maybe this video will jiggle your memory.

Chris Crocker made that video defending Britney Spears when she attracted lots of media attention after she seemed to be suffering from mental instability during the time between 2006-2008. That period finally ended when her family convinced the courts in California to place her under a conservatorship with her father in charge. Since then Britney has gone on to make more hit singles and, as of this writing, she continues to be under the legal conservatorship that’s headed by her father.

In the years since Chris Crocker posted that “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” video online, he attempted a pop career of his own by releasing some of his music on iTunes. He has also released other videos on his YouTube channel and he’s currently on Twitter. Despite those efforts, he still remains best known as the “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” guy.

More recently he has been maintaining a Tumblr account that is definitely NSFW. That’s because he has been posting nude photos of himself as well as very sexually explicit photos of himself engaging in various gay sex acts.

Okay I understand he wants to be known as more than just the “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” guy. I also understand that he wants other people to see that he’s capable of doing so much more than making videos defending Britney Spears. I get that. But posting online photos of himself having sex is definitely NOT the way to go—unless his ultimate big amibition is to become a major gay porn star.

It seems like making videos that end up going viral is great for getting exposure in the short term but it leads to a dead end in terms of long-term steady career prospects—especially ones that involve being in the public eye in any way (i.e. actor, broadcaster, model, etc.). If being known as the “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” guy has led to Chris Crocker posting gay porn pics of himself online just a few years after his video went viral, I can only imagine the future prospects of other viral video stars and the results won’t always be pretty. I’m especially talking about you, “Double Rainbow” guy…

…and you, nuttymadam3575…

…and you, Ms. “I’m Not a Crazy Person, I’m a Very Well Educated Person”.