Steven W. Hunt

Officially licensed 1990 Super Mario Bros. 3 stickers, featuring a miscolored Iggy Koopa.

There are too many. Our entire culture is just a web of misinformation now.

With ‘we are all lazy and unworthy of basic necessities and we must scrape by and be productive our whole life because of it’

And now there are segments of social justice culture, especially of liberal social justice culture, that want to replace that with ‘we are all guilty of climate change and systematic oppression and unworthy of compassion and we must sacrifice everything that gives us pleasure and throw ourselves fully into the fight against these systems because of it’.

The artwork for an nft is just an icon symbolizing the crypto coin you bought, so it’s just kind of a little avatar for that “coin” for the fun of it. The actual thing being purchased is so many hours of computer processing and calculation; tremendous amounts that are all recorded by basically a special web address. The processing isn’t used to make anything other than that proof of itself, which is supposed to be part of the authenticity, so people can’t just make a coin out of a bunch of existing data or data that already served an unrelated purpose.

Every Bitcoin or doggycoin or NFT is generated by a “farm” of thousands of cpu’s doing nothing else for months straight.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.