Of Lindsay Lohan, Canine Cartels, and NFTs
Celebrities, gang references, and questionable measures of affluence are not the typical fare for a furry fandom news site. However, this trifecta from the underworld rose from the earth on the 30th of September in the year of 2021.
It all started when a celebrity known as Lindsay Lohan made a tweet prompting a pack of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called the Canine Cartel, using a dog character designed for her which is being put within this 10,000 token pack. With each of the individual tokens being put up for auction, including her own.
Reception by the fandom has mostly been negative. Some pointing out the lack of ears on the character's art, some showing agitation on having anthro characters being used to promote NFTs, others indicating that this was just a celebrity doing some arms-reach appreciation of the fandom while avoiding actually working with those in the fandom.
Today we’ll go over this event, furries' relationship with NFTs and crypto, and why this event may not be as furry as people in the fandom and media are making it out to be.
Why Furries tend to be in an uproar over crypto
It's official, I'm a Friend of The Cartel!! 🐶 It’s the first NFT the @CanineCartelNFT is minting for the collection and you've got a chance to own it!
Auction runs for 72 hours! 🔥https://t.co/k85RHYToRc
Best of luck! 🥰 pic.twitter.com/6UNsFWsQxB— Lindsay Lohan (@lindsaylohan) September 29, 2021
Non-Fungible Tokens are tied to crypto currencies. Crypto currencies are bits of code that have a dream of being used as a replacement of governmental currencies one day. At the current time, though, they have proven currently to be a bit too unstable to be a reliable form of daily transaction when compared to the currencies of most governments. This volatility has led crypto to be utilized in the same way as stocks and equities would be, without the benefit of owning any part of a company, but instead a piece of purposefully finite computer data.
Some individuals who have made billions on trading stocks over the past half century have noted their repulsion of what they deem is money chasing nothing, one such investor Charlie Munger stating:
I [do not] like just shuffling out of your extra billions of billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air. I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization
To which most crypto fans would respond to the wealthy mogul with, “Okay, Boomer.”
Furries tend to have their own misgivings over the currency. It usually has to deal with the amount of electricity generation it takes to mine for the currency in the blockchain. It also takes a nice chunk of juice to even complete a transaction using it.
According to CNET, mining for these tokens has taken up more energy than the entire country of Argentina uses over the past year. Also a single transaction using Bitcoin, the current most popular crypto, can use the same amount of energy as the average household uses in 53 days. Or perhaps, to put it more simply than CNET does, the amount that 53 average households use in a single day. Remember this is for one transaction that takes moments.
Given these environmental issues, Elon Musk, yet another billionaire, pulled back in accepting Bitcoin as a form of transaction for Tesla products until he can be assured that these currencies don’t create environmental harm. Probably after environmentally conscious investors wondered why make electric cars if you’re going to use the grid on coins instead of wheels.
Though, it must be noted, there are furries who trade in these new chains on the block, in spite of the implications and lack of popularity in the vocal fandom. Feel free to comment below if you do trade crypto as a furry and I’m sure it will end just as well as any other Flayrah comment thread does. This dry humor when talking about finance is brought to you by Patrick Boyle on YouTube, blame him for that one.
Why furries tend to be mad about NFTs in particular
If we define crypto as a sort of pseudo-currency, we can describe NFTs as a pseudo-collector’s coin of that currency. But unlike the limited edition quarters that news and shopping channels try to sell to retired grandparents, these are directed at the more technologically savvy young consumer. Whether these youngsters are more financially savvy than those older folks who just bought a $0.25 piece for $20 has yet to be seen.
But putting that aside, let’s imagine that one of these coin minters could randomly just take artwork from people without permission to sell a one of a kind collector’s coin.
This is the second strike for furries around the concept of NFTs. When the concept was introduced to the internet, there were greedy individuals stencilling crypto tokens with art and assets that did not belong to them in the first place. This was particularly a heinous act towards those artists for two reasons:
- If the artist is pro-NFT then they could not create their own token(s) to sell unabated.
- If the artist does not want to support crypto transactions, they would find their art involuntarily placed onto the currency against their wishes.
In the case of the second situation, what makes things more egregious is that not only was property stolen, but it creates a theft of agency in what the artist’s work supports.
First impressions are lasting ones, and while the tokens may not be fungible, the early crafters of NFTs were treating ownership of digital works on the internet as if they were fungible to make a quick buck. And that first taste left many a furry artist quite sour. I guess we will give the Canine Cartel that much credit, their work is… original at least.
But in the end, it actually isn’t about furries…
While it is great to see that the media has caught up on what a furry character is, it seems they are starting to play loose with the word fursona. It is important to note that neither Lindsay Lohan nor the Canine Cartel have called their tokens ‘fursonas’. This was something that the mainstream media tied together in their headlines, and yes maybe some furries did themselves no favors on our own media accounts helping the media make said connection.
However, while a furry character is indeed an animal with human characteristics, a fursona is a character that takes features that are specifically to represent the owner of the character. While the media has called this Lohan’s fursona, Lohan herself made no such statements. However, it’s not her job to correct the media when the entire point of the tweet was to bring attention to the canine tokens to begin with, and furry’s predictable Hulk-like social media outrages are easy to manipulate into free publicity.
So then what is with the dogs? Well, in the crypto world dogs have become somewhat of a staple species to use in promotion these days. This is because a joke crypto called Dogecoin which was based on a meme of a Shiba Inu using bad grammar. Just after the NFTs came around, it seemed that memes were seen as the new fashionable tulip. In April of 2021 the fools were kings. Thus the meme dog-based coin caught on fire, until it hit 69 cents per DogeCoin in early May. It was then the memes declared it was time for Doge to die, much to the chagrin of those who no doubt held and hoped for $4.20.
Why, internet, just why?
But anyway, ever since the dog based coin went up from a fraction of pennies to almost a dollar, the canine has been the choice animal to try and give hopes of bullish sentiment in crypto spaces. This is the case with these 10,000 dog tokens. They were not meant to be fursonas. They were meant to be cheap dog art to get a good profit margin by encouraging people to pump into the underlying crypto that the NFT creators are probably already invested in. Get a celebrity on board to promote the pumping of your currency of choice, and hey, even better.
Let’s just hope for those bright eyed pup collectors that this Canine Cartel isn’t as into dumping Ethereum as much as the actual Cartel is into dumping bodies (allegedly). Ethereum being the underlying currency for this particular token set. But I guess in the end, that’s just a prisoner’s dilemma, so don’t lock yourself into something without acknowledging the risks involved. Seek financial advice from an advisor before making any investment, and only risk what you are willing to lose, and other boring advice like that.
About the author
Sonious (Tantroo McNally) — read stories — contact (login required)a project coordinator and Kangaroo from CheektRoowaga, NY, interested in video games, current events, politics, writing and finance
Comments
I don't want to get the rep as the dingus who calls out proofing mistakes, but "Lindsay" is spelled as "Lindsey" in the headline and "Linsey" in the article, while there are literally multiple images in the article with the correct spelling. :) There's a couple other proofing/spelling errors, e.g., "Fungible" as "Fungable"; "Inus" instead of "Inu" (it should not be plural), and a few minor grammar nits to pick. To paraphrase columnist Mary Schmich's famous fake commencement speech,
Sorry. Partially. :)
I am not as intrinsically down on NFTs as many folks are -- an admission I am often hesitant to make -- but, concerns about energy use during generation aside, this particular use case for them, e.g., trying to create artificial scarcity of digital goods by using the NFTs as proxies for ownership, has always struck me as borderline nonsensical. The examples of "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet" show why: there's no verification that the NFT is being "minted" by anyone with a legally-recognized right to the tweet's content. If I saw some great furry art that an artist tweeted out and created a NFT for it, legally, all I have is, well, a unique token that contains a proxy to that tweet. The artist still has copyright of the artwork; the tweeter still has an implicitly-recognized copyright of the tweet's text. What I've generated is literally no more valuable than if I'd Photoshopped a receipt to the Mona Lisa; the only way I can get money out of it is to sell it someone too ignorant to understand that if they take that receipt to the Louvre and ask for their painting, they're going to have a bad time of it.
I would argue that the initial strong outcry about "NFTs stealing artwork" was largely off-base for the reasons I've described above; creating an NFT of artwork you don't have doesn't give you any legal right to the artwork. You can rightly object that it's a way for a scammer to make money off artwork that they didn't create and that this indirectly steals money from the artist, but that just makes NFTs a new spin on an old problem. (Also, I hope nobody making that objection has ever also argued "software and music piracy is fine because it it's not actually stealing anything," because if they have, there is an Inconsistent Argument Siren going off in the background.)
— Chipotle
Well, if it's sold by the artist or copyright-holder, there's usually an implicit license not to sue if you display it non-commercially. In that respect, NFTs make almost as much sense as character adopts, or commissioning [furry] art in general; plenty seem willing to shell out the cash for that. (Of course, many are of memes, which wouldn't have value if they hadn't been copied…)
Sure, but doesn't that run into the same "yes, but do you actually need an NFT for this" issue I was talking about? Not only can we commission art, do YCH auctions, or sell rights to the original Nyan Cat graphics file without involving blockchain authentication, any license -- implicit or otherwise -- exists independently of the NFT. The license/contract could incorporate the NFT by reference, of course, but in this use case the NFT is also incorporating whatever asset represents by reference; the token doesn't add any value to the transaction, it just adds an extra layer of indirection.
I don't have any problems wit NFT-based transactions like this as long as they're above board, to be clear. It just feels to me like there's a significant component of "it's awesome because we're using a blockchain" to it all, which is kind of like saying "it's awesome because we're using Dijkstra's algorithm": well done for using that computer science degree, but (a) that's an implementation detail and (b) I just want to buy that picture of a bunny girl and it sounds like this is rather overcomplicating it all.
— Chipotle
I think one factor that indirection might address is the question of provenance, which I understand to be important in art areas. Anyone can say they have a digital work, or certain rights - but this could be a way of verifying that without having to contact the artist, not consulting them on transactions - which may be impossible after they are gone. But I do not know if this is actually achieved by this particular offer.
Me pushing the publish button a bit too fast on it, that's on me.
Well, also I usually do some proofreading, but I'm pretty preoccupied with a couple things at the moment, so it was bad timing on my part. I did get some editing in on a Culturally F'd announcement we'll be posting soon.
I think the bigger issue with NFTs is the concept itself. It's an attempt to create artificial scarcity. That exists in the physical world because we need to use limited resources to create something; that puts intrinsic limitations on what can be done. With the digital world there is no such limitation (there is in terms of disk space or whatever but that's seldom a factor). We can't all have a car because there are physically limited requirements. We can all have a copy of that photo because there is no resource needed beyond electricity and space to store it. Everyone can share in the benefits. That's something good and something we should embrace, not something to work around and bring in the limitations that lead to inequality in the real world.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I think it should be pointed out Canine Cartel has been kind of a dick in their response to furry, with a kind of "furries, ew, gross" tone.
Of course, to be fair, furries have been kind of a dick in their response to Canine Cartel, with a kind of "NFTs, ew, gross" tone.
I imagine Lindsay Lohan has no idea what the fuck is happening, and to be fair, honestly, neither do I.
Well, I guess I may actually add something to the conversation other than "non-furries being meanies!" (again). From Stephen King's "Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art", the essay that opens his 2002 short story collection Everything's Eventual, on the publishing of his short story "Riding the Bullet":
I believe director Paul Schrader described Lindsay Lohan as the most unreliable actor he's ever worked with. Given that Schrader has cast actors as fickle and irascible as George C Scott, Dennis Hopper and Richard Pryor, that says a lot about Lohan, and none of it good.
Well, if we're going to gossip about Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader, the movie in particular we're talking about is The Canyons, which was a box-office bomb and a critical failure -- but the critical consensus also seemed to be that the best thing about the movie was Lohan's performance. The "unreliable" comment was about her perceived failure to promote the film afterward, which appears to have happened when she was in rehab, although Schrader appears to have been frustrated with her on set as well.
At any rate, her "troubled teen star" story is pretty well-documented at this point, but it's also rather overshadowed the point that she appears to be a pretty decent actress when she has her act together. Also, none of this has a whole lot to do with her being roped into promoting NFT-based fauxsonas, unless the implicit argument is that it's another bad decision she made.
— Chipotle
I feel like I learned almost nothing about the incident this article is about. So much of this is fluff with far more time dedicated to NFTs and cryptocurrency than the actual overlap of Lindasy Lohan and what happened. You could cut it down by 80% and not actually lose anything.
But if we're going to talk about cryptocurrencies, it's interesting to note that China has banned them while El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal currency in the country. Two very different takes.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Given the furry community's aggressively negative response to NFTs when they became buzzworthy earlier this year, it's reasonable for that to be the focus of the story. Lindsay Lohan just happens to be the Troubled Former Child Star (tm) who's promoting this particular nonsense, but it could have been anyone. The interesting part of the story, at least from a Flayrah standpoint, is "fly-by-night company mixes minor celebrity and tech buzzword du jour to try and sell don't-call-them-furry adoptables to non-furry audience."
Whether or not NFTs are particularly useful in this context is relevant -- I don't think they are, as I discussed above -- but cryptocurrency in and of itself probably isn't, except to the degree it's being used as a marketing technique here. "Blockchain" is currently stuck with being a word marketers use as an invocation of technosorcery. Paradoxically, I don't think blockchain anything will start being truly useful until it becomes boring enough to just be an implementation detail.
— Chipotle
I think it is unreasonable to be the focus. It definitely should be a part of it but not overshadowing the story that's in the headline. I don't really feel like I learned anything I didn't already know just from seeing a single tweet about it. I still don't know what the Canine Cartel is because despite being in the headline, it's not even described.
I do think there's potential for cryptocurrency but the way it's being treated now is to strip all that potential away. The potential should be a global currency that can be used by everyone for international transactions and which preserves privacy by being anonymous. But neither of those are desired by governments that want to control and track their citizens.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Ironically crypto's transactions aren't as dark as they are advertised.
There was a incident earlier this year where a U.S. energy company was held to ransom and then in which the US government was able to cover the money paid in crypto to the ransomware runners.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1004050873/u-s-retrieves-some-of-the-colonial-pip....
As far as what the "Canine Cartel" is. It is a pack of 10,000 NFT Ethereum tokens basically that people bid on. Sure they try to highlight that its a social thing, but that in essence is all it is. One of them happens to be one made for Lindsay Lohan (though her token is up for bid too it seems. I think it would have been stronger if they had just given her one and let her be some sort of pack leader instead of letting some rando bid on her token? But what do I know...)
I think different coins are also very different in their privacy settings. At the moment my concerns are that you can't use it for much and the massive waste of electricity and computing is not appealing.
So it's not even a group or anything? That just raises more questions. Who made the tokens? And why? How did Lindsay get involved? Are they all real people? I assume they can't all be celebrities or it would've been more of a story. Who is getting the money out of it?
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Ah, now I can see, those are good questions. So I've gone looking a little bit closer and this is what I can assess of the situation. There are layers that we have to lay out here.
1) You can only buy and sell these digital assets using the currency they are traded in, which in this case is Ethereum.
2) These "Canine Cartel" 10,000 assets were sold by the group that crated them at .05 Ethereum a piece.
2a) There seems to be an indication that most of these were minted "a month ago" which at the time ETH was worth around $3,900 per 1 ETH. This means that each token cost approximately $195 a piece. This goes to the minter as "profit" however, the buyer is under the assumption that the asset will increase in value over time (an investment).
2b) This means, since they are 'sold out' that the minters made all the money they are going to make on this. Multiply that $195 by 10,000 and you have $1,950,000.
2c) I'm not sure if they pre-generated the tokens and people bought them directly (like buying an individual pokemon card directly), or if someone bought a token slot and then were given a randomly generated canine (like buying a pokemon card pack). Which would be interesting to know.
3) After the original sale occurred, each of the 10,000 token are owned by individuals and are worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. Think of each token as a stock someone bought. Each has a price history on how much people would buy it for.
3a) One of the most interesting things is that the ones who have risen to the top of the value pool are actually not canines at all but felines: https://opensea.io/collection/caninecartel?search[sortAscending]=false&search[sortBy]=LAST_SALE_PRICE
3b) Note that those prices are the last price people PAID for it, not necessarily what the general populous would think it is actually valued at. So For those in that list holding the top NFTs, if no one is willing to pay the price they paid for it, ever, then they're basically just sitting on a liability than an asset. Think of them buying a brand new car and then no one will pay full sticker price for it once it is off the lot.
The risk in this to the buyer of NFTs it two fold:
1) You are assuming your NFT will got up in demand over time
2) You are assuming the underlying Crypto currency will go up over time.
However these risks can also mitigate each other in this way:
1) If both 1 and 2 are true, big money for you.
2) If one is true and not the other, it will probably be a wash.
3) If both are false. You basically just screwed yourself twice over.
In this case, from the month these NFTs were sold, Ethereum has suffered a 12% decline in value.
This means if you spent $195 on the NFT then 12% of that taken off means that it is now worth $171.50 if you sold it at the same price in Ethereum. Oops. But if the token has appreciated to .056 ETH from .050 then you still have an item that is worth $195.
This is headache, yes, which is why most people are going to lose money on these things. It's too complicated and complexity means Dunning Krugerism is going to get you making bad investments.
As noted in the article, crypto's volatility makes it hard to buy real world goods, and if they are they are usually translated into another currency first. It would not be acceptable for me to write up a contact one month, and then the next month when I have to pay them for their services, they get 12% less value just because the value of what I pay them in is so volatile.
For the US, the changes in the value of the dollar going out of a 2% per YEAR (not month) window (1% to 3% inflationary) would be considered disastrous. We are in one of those inflationary periods now funnily enough (@5%).
A 12% curtail of purchasing power in a month would be cataclysmic for any central bank. Not in the crypto world though. Which is why it's hard for me to call these a currency at the time. They clearly operate under different rules than a traditional currency. Probably because they actually don't have people relying on their value as directly as current currencies. El Salvador did adopt it, yes. But most people there still use the USD as their backing currency when they adopted to take that one in 2001.
El Salvador's interest in Bitcoin is largely driven by their economy's reliance on remittances -- residents who go abroad for better work opportunities send money back home, usually through services like Western Union, to support family members still there. The World Bank estimates that over 24% of El Salvador's GDP in 2020 is from these remittances.
Cryptocurrency can be used as a way to bypass wire transfer fees, which can get pretty hefty. This is one of the main advantages touted by cryptocurrency enthusiasts, although if you have to pay currency conversion fees on both ends of the bitcoin transfer it can actually end up being more expensive. So, El Salvador is trying to make this more attractive by anointing Bitcoin as an actual legal tender so theoretically you don't have to pay the conversion fee once it's in their country.
This, of course, doesn't solve the volatility problem you mentioned; good currency is, well, boring, and as long as Bitcoin behaves like a meme stock, it's a better -- if obviously extremely high-risk -- investment than a currency for commonplace transactions.
— Chipotle
Okay, more random stuff, but, yes, the Lindsay Lohan ... picture is on e621. (I don't think it's still an NFT at that point?) The description reads:
I mean, yeah.
Someone in the comments is reporting a sale price of $4100 for the Lohan NFT, if you trust "someone in the comments" on e621. I'm too lazy to look it up myself. Right now, I'm just "someone in the comments" of Flayrah.
Meanwhile "lindsay lohan (fursona)" has 7 "pieces" on e621, which is 4 more than just "lindsay lohan" (which, I guess makes sense, though you think the first would be a subset of the second); "canine cartel," which is listed as a "copyright", not an "artist", also has (the exact same) 7 pieces. Apparently, nobody gives a shit about the 9,999 other tokens. All furry drawn, uh, "fanart" features ears. Besides the "original", there is only one "clean" picture, with two "questionables"; the rest are "explicit" (and they're all basically NSFW).
I would like to point out this description appears on two "pieces":
As a wise man once said (actually, it was some other "someone in the comments" from way back in Portal of Evil that stuck with me), "Try not to mix your stupid with the stupid, son." The "Patreon exclusive" of the same digital picture of same character in the same pose but different outfits (or lack thereof) and other such accoutrements is kind of the furry equivalent of an NFT scam, isn't it?
So here is what I can see. The Lohan one is actual not part of the Canine Cartel 10,000 set. It is a solitary item in a set called "Friends of the Cartel"
https://opensea.io/collection/friends-of-the-cartel
It was minted 6 days ago as opposed to the set, which was a month ago.
It was sold on Oct-02-2021 04:32:07 PM +UTC for 1.3 NFT.
According to the receipt it seem that ETH was at $3,389.48 / ETH at time of sale.
- https://etherscan.io/tx/0x447d54ab7fa7acceec17b98f4c11e07c37156c43941663db253b68...
This means it cost them $4,406.32 at the time of purchase*
I must note here once again the volatility of crypto. You'll notice in the screenshot linked below that at the very moment the purchase of the NFT was made, ETH cost so much more than when the bidding was going on:
https://www.flayrah.com/sites/default/files/u/Sonious/Etherium.jpg
When the tweet was made by Ms. Lohan ETH was at $2,843.83 per ETH. So if they paid without doing the whole auction thing at the time that the tweet was made it would have cost a person $3,412.59 in USD. A difference of $993.73 USD!
*But the truth is that the actual cost of how much the individual pays for something in a crypto currency is actually *not* based upon what the crypto costs at the time they make a purchase. Rather how much the 1.3 crytos cost when they changed their currency into the crypto currency.
For example if the owner of the Lohan NFT got the 1.3 ETH a year ago and just so happened to already have the Crypto, then the Lohan NFT cost them $352.42 /ETH, so they effectively 'paid' $458.15 (2020 USD) for it.
...I'm probably spending way too much time on this.
I don't know what the difference between when the bid was made and when it was paid for. If you just so happen to have bought the Lindsay NFT, please let us know when the bid was put in versus when you paid the 1.3 ETH for it.
Now, let's actually go to the auction and see what's up.
Okay, first of all, this is the description of the collection:
Okay, fuck you.
Anyway, wow, that is some really generic character design. (They, unlike Lohan, at least have ears.) But, maybe, there's some good stuff; this is the most favorited "token" of the collection. Uh, not feeling it myself (and if I had to guess, the real reason it's so "popular" is because he has 69 on his shirt). The second most favorited is okay; I mean, this would be a perfectly acceptable background Khajiit character in "modernized" Elder Scrolls spinoff game.
Speaking of "perfectly acceptable video game character design", I note that there is apparently a grand total of one female body/face design for the dogs. However, when looking at "highest last sale", I guess there is also a fairly rare female cat design, as the record holder is this calico cat with heterochromia and a dress color scheme that conspires to make her appear nude (so much for the Cartel's protestation that this isn't about sexualizing animal characters like those nasty furries). Ironically, our friend Perfectly Acceptable Background Khajiit ranks second, again, the poor guy. And, as Sonious notes, the top three most valuable "canines" are all, in fact, feline, with another cat coming in fifth to make four of the top five feline.
All in all, I mean, on one hand, this basically looks like someone made a generic fursona generator like they used to make in Flash and hit randomize 10,000 times (then unsuccessfully tried to draw Lindsay Lohan as a dog). On the other hand, I will say, looking at the "highest last sale", the buyers, even if they are just craven investors, are picking the tokens where the randomization process seems to have actually created a character you can kind of, maybe, if you turn your head just right and squint, actually see some sort of, well characterization.
I think the third link was supposed to go to this one: https://opensea.io/assets/0x23c54ac322cba66eddcf95c5697b53fc3a8a608c/230
A note on that one is that it was bought at $3,952.33 / ETH for 21 ETH when the sale was made.
That's right, that calico cat was paid for with $82,998.93 worth of Crypto.
Think of the
fursuit... down payment on a house you could make with that.I really hope they converted to the 21 ETH long ago and its burning a hole in their pocket. If so it probably would have been better to cash out some of it instead of sticking it into an NFT.
I mean, just on the loss of value of the underlying crypto right now the item they "paid" $82,998.93 is now only worth $70,675.50 a month later. I guess that's why the name of the buyer was "GirlOnFire", if only she bought a dog it would tell her "this is fine".
Of course, who know where it will be a year from now, so hold and pope I guess.
Well, Perfectly Acceptable Background Khajiit has got to win somehow ...
But, while you're here explaining things, I have another question:
Which one of you jokers added the cryptozoology tag?
...I was waiting for someone to notice that...
Apparently me misspelling Lindsay's name was the perfect distraction.
The Green Reaper strikes again! *tosses a cheese wedge and vanishes in a cloud of Cheddar-scented green smoke*
Me from about a half a year later, the cat is now at about $42,420 worth of cryto.
Blaze it.
Linsey Lohan's is at $2,626.
Volume in the Cartel is dead quiet with hardly any buys or sells since Sept 2021...
Hello, Sonious here from a year and a half into the future. The heterochrome cat in question was indeed sold again on October 5th, 2022 for .05 ETH, down from its previous said of 21 ETH. A 99.8% loss.
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x23c54ac322cba66eddcf95c5697b53fc3a8a608c/230
But wait, that's not all! ETH was at $1353.33 on that day it sold for .05 ETH when before ETH was at $3,952.33 a 65.76% loss in the underlying currency.
This means our grand loss comes to...
Girl on Fire bought for $82,998.93
Girl on Fire sold for $67.67
Total lost $82,931.26 (99.92% loss).
I have to say, that is... very impressive to do without using any form of debt...
It kinda looks like a seal in a wig
When I look in your eyes, I see the deepness of the sea.
"Furies tend to be..."
[Citacion needed]
"Tend to be" is a weasel word, which should be a bit obvious to any educated reader. Though "Vocal Twitter Furries Tend to be..." would probably be more accurate.
It is mostly in response to the mainstream press saying "Furries hate Lohan's NFT Fursona." which I'm sure you asked them for citation as well, yeah?
If reacting to social media reactions can be done by the mainstream press without questioning its ethics, then I am flattered you are holding me to a higher standard then the Rolling Stone, The Verge, and The Observer (as screenshot it the top of the article).
The sections in question were to try and give context to the frustration of those vocal sassy furs on social media, because those furs tend to think that everyone knows why they are upset about something and goes into passive aggressive mode quite quickly which to people outside of their groups can deem confusing and perplexing if they are not given that context of contention.
After reading your body of work I do assume that sentiments written by you as a collaborator to this news site, about people, are mostly based on what you read on social media. Not to my liking, but when such is the case, other articles make a stronger effort to source the social media comments.
I do hold you to a higher standard. I don't read the garbage mainstream media you named. I do read this site from time to time.
Fair enough, thank you for the feedback.
The original tweet that was nested in the article has been deleted by Lindsay Lohan.
The Canine Cartel is still a thing though. Given another Token group called "Evil Monkey" recently had their entire token set disappear out from under their original owners, I thought maybe this happened to the Cartel group as well.
So the tweet was probably just deleted to remove the lightning rod it no doubtedly became for the actress. Or maybe she saw what happened with Evil Monkey and decided to get out before the canines follow suit? Something to keep an eye on for sure.
It looks like the tokens are more fungible than originally believed...
In retrospect, maybe they shouldn't have named it after an evil monkey.
I will correct the above in the following:
>>The scam NFT token set was called "Evolved Apes" not "Evil Monkey"
>>The runner of the scam was named "Evil Ape"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-...
I realized this mis-memory when I tried googling said Evil Monkey and all I got was the monkey finger.
Various news sites seem to have covered this, but I liked a piece from The Stranger, featuring Dr. Courtney "Nuka" Plante, who explained why the idea of "furries as trading cards" might not appeal to fans (though to be fair, we do have adopts...).
Probably part of why it's worth linking is that the author seems to have asked fans what they thought of the topic.
I mean, to be fair, you rarely have to ask people's opinions these days since they share them so openly to the ether.
His article seemed to miss the item where artists were soured on NFTs because of the whole stolen property thing. Given that artists hold a good amount of clout in furry dialog, a institution that burns artists is no doubt going to have some prominent voices speaking against it.
An excellent display of why social media is especially inaccurate as a source of general aggregate opinion. Through-the-roof voluntary response bias. Their demographics don't even begin to approach general population.
You're intentionally favoring use-of-the-"ether", your choice of "ether". Personally I give a lot more weight to the opinion of introverts who don't give away constant unsolicited advice. These kinds of people tend to not use the social media that's popular with the journalists.
1) I would argue that if anything is left out of random online message boards it is the opinion of extroverts who spend more time with in person interactions than the using a computer screen as a social supplement, of which introverts do all the time (speaking from personal experience here).
2) While I would agree that there is a bias when you just use Twitter and that there should be more of a push to utilize resources outside of it. I must note that the platform that Matt Blume asked his questions on was, in fact, Twitter. So if anything the same underlying source was used here.
This would mean that while he went and asked people on Twitter what their opinions were (an extravertive action), and I just scanned what people were saying out loud on their own feeds unprompted (an introvertive action), the platform bias is the same.
I would have gleaned what furries were saying on Facebook, but it was down.
You don’t proffer any hypothesis as to either (1) why the opinion of “extroverts” is preferable in this context to that of “introverts”, or perhaps more importantly, (2) why you conclude that people who use social media are intrinsically more extroverted than those that do not. This has, at least, not been my experience, and I’ve been on Twitter since 2008. It’s not that introverts are more likely to be on social media, but rather that there doesn’t seem to be any particular correlation. Some extroverts don’t care much about social media, while some introverts find screaming into the void to be less threatening than in-person interaction.
— Chipotle
It's not a hypothesis that I personally give a lot more weight to the opinion of people who 'introverts' + 'don't give away constant unsolicited advice'. It is a statement of fact.
You've responded to a straw man.
You know, for a guy who doesn't like people who give away constant unsolicited advice, you've sure given out a lot of unsolicited advice recently.
Well, I guess this was inevitable.
Been seeing ads on e621 for this occasionally; I still don't really understand this at all, so I think a comment's about as far as I'm willing to go with this. Furries actually seem to be responsible for this one, this time. But, as furry art goes, honestly, I think I prefer Canine Cartels.
And, sure while we're here and also on e621, hey, congratulations, Canine Cartel, you got your first furry fanart of something other than the Lindsay Lohan ... thing. One of the female ... models? I hesitate to even call them "characters". I think they're supposed to be based on a Pomeranian?
Anyway, it's porn. In case you were wondering.
There was an article basically calling for people to make porn of it due to them basically trying to distance themselves from the furries in order to try and co-opt the google results.
Well, that wasn't very effective if e621 only has 9 total pieces, porn or otherwise.
For the record, if porn is made, I would rather it be of random Pomeranians than Lohan; there's some consent issues there that are very iffy when we're talking about a representation of a real person, no matter what anyone's feelings about there status as a celebrity is.
There's consent issues on everything
Of course, now Shiba Inu is an actual coin. When will the madness end?
According to the "Big Short" guy, Shiba Inu is mostly just setting itself to be a pumpy and dumpy coin. The reason it's so cheap compared to other of the cryptos is that there are Quadrillions of coins available off the get go.
I wonder if that means they don't have to expend so much energy on the whole "mining" thing.
With a name like that, who'd have thought it's a expensive, dirty, time-consuming and unreliable way to make money?
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