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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.
Yesterday was Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the business responsible for overseeing the preservation and protection of the late author’s legacy, announced that they were no longer going to publish six of Dr. Seuss’ books. The reason given was that those books had problematic prose and illustrations that would be considered racist today. In recent years there have been outcry from various groups over those books. Dr. Seuss Enterprises took a hard look at the affected books and decided that they were no longer going to publish them.
This ignited all kinds of public outcry. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro went on Twitter tweeting “BRB buying all the Dr. Seuss volumes for the kids before the woke book burners can get to them all.”
Fox News devoted most of yesterday to just this story while trying to manufacture viewer outrage by claiming that Dr. Seuss is the latest victim of cancel culture.
People are acting as if there will never be any more Dr. Seuss books available in bookstores and libraries due to leftist censorship. Here’s a reality check. Only six books will no longer be published. That’s just six out of the over 60 books that Dr. Seuss had published in his lifetime. Which means that roughly 54 Dr. Seuss books will still remain in print for anyone to read in the foreseeable future.
For the record, the six affected books are And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. What it means is that just those six books are no longer being published and they will go out of print. It does NOT mean that the same fate will be suffered by Dr. Seuss’ more well-known works like The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Hop on Pop, Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, or The Sneetches and Other Stories.
If you’re wondering what is so objectionable about those six books, The National Post has printed the most problematic illustrations from each of those books. They all deal with stereotypes of certain ethnic groups that would be considered racist and offensive by today’s standards.
There was a time when ethnic humor based on stereotypes of various non-white and non-Christian groups was commonly portrayed in pop culture. You can do a YouTube search on racist cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s and find old cartoons with black people depicted as stupid monkeys, Jews with giant hooked noses, Asians with severely slanted eyes carrying laundry baskets while frequently saying “Ah-so!,” and Native Americans wearing feathered headdresses and wrapped in blankets saying things like “How!” and “We smoke-um peace pipe!” While such depictions were common back in those days, it doesn’t mean that they were ever okay because it definitely wasn’t okay to the people who were the targets of such ethnic humor. (In fact, they frequently felt such portrayals to be insulting and demeaning.)
I used to frequently check Dr. Seuss books out of the library as a child. Of the affected six books, the only one I was familiar with was And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. It’s possible that I might have checked out that book at one point but if I did, I’d be hard-pressed to even remember the plot of that one. I know that Mulberry Street was the first children’s book that Dr. Seuss had published and that fact is its greatest claim to fame. But compared to his later books like The Cat in the Hat and Hop on Pop, which I still remember to this day, I have zero memories of Mulberry Street. I don’t even remember the other five affected books and I hadn’t ever heard of them before yesterday’s announcement that they were no longer being published.
Had Dr. Seuss Enterprises simply cease publication of those six books without any kind of public announcement, I probably would not have missed them at all because I was less familiar with them than The Lorax or The Sneetches and Other Stories.
Hearing all of this right-wing outcry over those six books was totally annoying and unnecessary. They scream that Dr. Seuss is being censored when, in reality, the majority of Dr. Seuss’ books will still be available to anyone who wants to read them. They scream that Dr. Seuss is the latest victim of cancel culture whose career has been adversely affected due to self-righteous social justice warriors. Never mind the fact that Dr. Seuss doesn’t care at this point because he has been dead since 1991. That’s right, this year is the 30th anniversary of Dr. Seuss’s death. As for worries about whether his immediate family would be affected, his widow Audrey died in 2018. His only immediate survivors still alive are his two step-daughters, one of whom told TMZ that she personally disagrees with Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ decision. However, neither of them are directly affected by any income loss by the six books going out of print because, since Audrey Geisel’s death, all of the profits generated from sales of those books go directly to Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
The most important fact is that allowing those six books to go out of print does NOT violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution regarding freedom of speech and freedom of the press. That amendment only says that the government cannot engage in censorship against certain authors. The “censorship” being perpetrated against those six books is being done by a private company, not the government. Dr. Seuss Enterprises is not directly controlled or funded by the government. As a private business, it has the right to decide which books it wants to keep in print and it is exercising that right. I’ve long known that fact about the First Amendment since my college days when I minored in Government and Politics. (Journalism was my major.)
While all this bellyaching about Dr. Seuss is going on, America has recently reached a grim milestone: A half a millions Americans are now dead from COVID-19. In fact, America had reached that milestone about a week or two ago. The number has since risen to 517,000. Why can’t people be more concerned about that instead of six books (out of over 60 Dr. Seuss books) going out of print?
So I’ve been doing something pretty creative involving video and four of my American Girl dolls and it’s a music video about racism. I’ve uploaded the video on to TikTok and YouTube.
A TikTok user known as Alex Engelberg had uploaded the original sound with this video showing the four singers singing about racism in a barbershop quartet style. That song took off and so many other users had used that same sound for their videos. I decided to put my own spin on this short song by using my American Girl dolls.
I took Addy Walker and Melody Ellison with me to Baltimore (along with a 1/6 scale Volks Dollfie Plus that I customized as an angel) when I visited my parents’ grave in Baltimore along with visiting the nearby places that my mother and her family use to go to when she was growing up in the Mount Clare neighborhood back in the 1940s and 1950s. Once I was done with visiting these places I went back to my mom’s old neighborhood on South Stricker Street where I went on a decrepit side street with boarded up townhouses and briefly filmed Addy and Melody then drove out of the city.
The following day I went to the Pasadena Toy Expo and I packed Julie Albright and Courtney Moore. Once I was done with visiting that expo I drove to the neighborhood in Glen Burnie where I grew up. I originally planned on shooting footage outside of the home I grew up in but the next door neighbor was either throwing some kind of a family get-together in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic or working on some kind of a major home improvement project. There were cars parked on that street and people walking to and from the next door neighbor’s home. Instead I drove further down the street until I found a random home and convenient street parking so I shot footage featuring Julie and Courtney.
For the grand finale I went to a covered picnic table at Buddy Attick Park in Greenbelt where I filmed all four of them without any kind of incident.
Brutal facts about Arkansas’ Elaine Massacre.
Largest eagles in the world are so big that their talons are bigger than bear claws.
The Devil’s Punchbowl—an American concentration camp so horrific that it was erased from history.
What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?
Huge cat found etched in desert among Nazca Lines in Peru.
NASA releases stunning hi-res photos of Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere.
Step inside The Museum of Obsolete Library Science.
Artist creates giant wood sculptures and hides them in Copenhagen forests.
Mini trucks in Japan are being transformed into enchanting tiny gardens.
Playful pastry chef turns ordinary desserts into delightful mini scenes.
A look at the men behind QAnon.
The “forgotten tribe” in West Virginia: Why America’s white working class feels left behind.
The hospital that the Nazis could never find.
How to safely and ethically film police misconduct.
Meet the new Grumpy Cat called Kitzia that looks even angrier than her late predecessor.
This tiny model of a big IBM 1401 computer from 1959 is so great.
Mom gets disowned by class parents for buying white daughter a black American Girl doll.
This person used grated wax crayons to make a melted crayon table.
For the past three years I’ve participated in Inktober, the annual art challenge where every day from October 1-31 you are expected to make one new ink drawing per day then share it online while using the hashtags #inktober and #inktober2020 (or whatever year you are participating in Inktober).
For this year I was sitting on the fence as to whether I even want to take part in Inktober again. I still have memories of burning out on doing one new ink drawing per day for an entire month. I also felt frustrated by the fact that my Inktober drawings haven’t received much attention in the three years I’ve participated and it’s due in large part to having so many artists also take part. I feel like my drawings have gotten lost in the shuffle of so many other Inktober drawings.
Also, after succeeding in completing one new drawing each day during the 31 days of Inktober for the last three years in a row, I no longer feel the need to prove to myself that I can do something like this. I now know that I capable of creating and finishing one new drawing per day for one month if I put my mind to it. I just don’t need to prove it to myself year after year. I also want to go back to the pre-Inktober days when I used to actually enjoy the Halloween season and working on Inktober had definitely cut into that.
Of course with the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, I seriously doubt that there will be any kind of large-scale Halloween celebrations this year. I’ve heard parents online expressing their reluctance to send their children out trick or treating because of fears they could catch that virus. Practically all of the fall and Halloween festivals, parties, and other kinds of events in my area have been cancelled due to the pandemic.
I think the pandemic, along with the death of my mother back in February, have definitely opened my eyes to the realization that there are times when I should just sit back, savor the quiet moments, and just enjoy the little things in life—like the changing fall leaves and the arrival of the milder weather where the outdoors are less hot and humid. I’m starting to think that life is too precious to spend time sweating over making one new drawing every day for one month just to satisfy some online event where I haven’t even gotten recognition for my past work.
At one point I had thought about taking part in Inktober again but cutting back on the number of drawings. Instead of churning out one new drawing every day, I thought about doing one new drawing each week during Inktober. The big issue is the fact that, unlike the last three years, I have less free time this year. I was accepted into a program that’s designed to get adults into jobs faster and it’s designed to prevent long-term unemployment and underemployment. I’m attending online workshops via Zoom four days a week plus there are additional readings and activities that I’m supposed to be working on. I’m not even sure if I have the time necessary to participate in Inktober even on a weekly basis.
Then there are the actions of Inktober’s founder, Jake Parker, who have alienated the artist community in general. Jake Parker originally created Inktober as an online artist community event where people would create and share their art. In time Inktober has become a big name as it has attracted more and more artists from around the world.
First there was the growing corporate sponsorship to the point where there are now official Inktober drawing supplies, which drew complaints from more cash-poor artists who complained online about how they couldn’t afford to purchase these higher-end official drawing supplies. In the past I didn’t let the lack of funds stop me from participating in Inktober and I even made a video last year showing how a cash-strapped artist could still participate in Inktober by using cheaper art supplies instead of buying the official Inktober ones.
But then Jake Parker decided to file a trademark on the Inktober name, which really pissed off the participants who have long assumed that they were involved in a non-commercial online community art event. I’ve read complaints online that Jake Parker had used that trademark to go after individual artists who decided to sell the work they’ve generated during Inktober online (at places like Etsy and eBay) if they use the word “Inktober” while selling it.
Jake Parker has also attacked artists who decided to participate in Inktober by drawing digital sketches using various computer graphics programs instead of the traditional ink and paper. He strongly feels that one can only take part in Inktober by using ink on paper. (He only allows pencil for underdrawings but they have to be finished in ink.) He has even stated that he strongly prefers black ink only although I have used ink in other colors in my Inktober drawings.
I’ve also read accusations on Twitter that Jake Parker had a series of web courses where he allegedly pulled examples from Pinterest without crediting the original artists.
But then Jake Parker decides to come out with a book of his own titled Inktober All Year Long. Naturally the artist community is bristling at the title because it dredges up memories of the fact that Parker trademarked the name Inktober and had gone after any artists who were selling their Inktober work using the Inktober name.
The book hasn’t been released yet but one artist named Alphonso Dunn had downloaded an excerpt of that book of that book from Amazon and noticed some similarities between Parker’s book and Dunn’s own book called Pen & Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide. He became suspicious but, since the book hasn’t been released yet, he can’t look through the book to see how similar it is to his own book. It was when Jake Parker had gotten an advanced copy of his book and he posted a short video on Instagram of himself quickly flipping through his book that Dunn decided to make a screencast video of Parker’s Instagram video then slowed down the video enough so Dunn could get at least a superficial peek at what is in the book. He found numerous similarities to his book throughout Parker’s book. Dunn made this YouTube video where he outlines his accusation that Parker had plagiarized parts of Dunn’s book.
I understand where Dunn is coming from, especially where he speaks about how much work it is to write a book because I’ve written a book myself. I can only imagine the emotions that Dunn felt when he saw the similarities between his book and Parker’s book.
But, then again, I have to remember that Parker’s book hasn’t been released yet. Dunn’s accusation is based mainly on a short excerpt from that book and an Instagram video. I’ve heard the defense that, naturally, there are similarities between the two books because there are only so many different ways that one can teach art. But the bottom line is that Dunn has made a pretty convincing case for his contention that Parker had plagiarized portions of his book. Anyway, to be fair, here are two other videos about the controversy that you may want to take a look at.
In any case there have already been fallout from this controversy. DeviantArt was going to host the 2020 Inktober Awards but it has decided to withdraw entirely from that event.
Then there is also the racial aspect as well. Parker is white while Dunn is black. With the brutal police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the more recent police shooting of Jacob Blake, which resulted in renewed protests by Black Lives Matter activists, people have been taking a hard look at how African Americans have been treated by whites. In the arts there have been African American artists who have complained about having their work plagiarized by larger companies owned by whites.
Here’s one such example: A few months ago an African American social media influencer known as Studio Mucci has accused MGA Entertainment, the company behind the popular Bratz and LOL Surpise doll lines, of creating a LOL Surprise doll named Rainbow Raver that had brown skin and wore a similar hairstyle and clothes to what Studio Mucci wore at the time that this doll was released. In response Issac Larian, the white CEO of MGA Entertainment had issued a series of since-deleted tweets where he basically attacked her in a way that was unprofessional for a corporate CEO.
So the accusation of a white creator like Jake Parker plagiarizing a black creator like Alphonso Dunn in the year of civil unrest due to racism is definitely not good optics for Parker or even Inktober.
With both the name Inktober being trademarked and the plagiarism accusation against Parker, there are calls on Twitter to boycott Inktober this year. Some artists have decided not to participate at all while others are coming up with Inktober alternatives (such as Drawlloween, Artober, Drawtober, and OCtober—the latter being that you draw your own original characters during October, which explains why the first two letters are capitalized).
Last night I saw on Twitter that there are calls for another kind of protest. Jake Parker has already released his official Inktober prompt list for 2020. The prompt word for October 11 is “disgusting.” Some artists are calling for devoting October 11 to making drawings of Jake Parker himself then using the #Inktober and #Inktober2020 hashtags.
Given the controversy and the lack of time in my personal life, I’m starting to lean towards skipping Inktober and its alternatives this year. I think I want to focus more on longer creative projects where I can schedule working on them around that employment program that I’m currently enrolled in while leisurely spending my time doing the best work that I can without having to adhere to some artificial “one new drawing per day” deadline.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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