(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Sunflower Auction for Ukraine is now open for bidding.

* I am still following some Web3 stuff... honestly I've been following some of these trends since before the Bitcoin and some day I am going to break down and post into the void on some things I think the big name covering this are missing, like how how billions of people are cutting their teeth and learning to juggle multiple forms of currencies by playing games. Some of the worst people having been WoW diehard is no coincidence (and no reflection on WoW). But also this is why some of this trading coins for other coins and having digital assets with no real values feels not-insane to a lot of people.

Anyway, what I've mostly been following this week is billion of value being destroyed by UST. UST... got depegged. UST not being pegged is a problem. UST is struggling to get pegged. UST needs to get pegged to stop everything falling apart.

"UST struggling to get pegged" is a real headline I've seen a few times. UST no longer being pegged to the dollar is related to the Luna collapse. A LOT of the crypto market has been wiped out in the past two weeks and the NFT market has collapsed. And I'm just trying to refrain from making horrible jokes about how UST needs to get pegged.

* I just checked to see how long it's been since I actually posted a complete story and I want to scream. Holy hell I need to finish my projects.

Most of my writing this year was practice pieces from the writing books I read which isn't nothing, but damn I need to get one of these projects out the door. I feel so freaking lame realizing how long I've been working on them.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

No shame in working on things for a long while, imo.

UST NEEDS TO GET PEGGED. I saw a headline with the word "pegged" in it and did a HUGE doubletake.

Huh, I really hadn't thought about the idea of multiple currencies and exchange rates between them being normalized by games. I mean, that's standard for most silly mobile games, as well as MMORPGs - to have the easily-obtained currency + a "premium" currency that's rare or bought for cash. And the idea of certain characters/mounts/limited-edition-somethings being worth a lot despite just being an array of pixels that may or may not have a specific in-game function...
Interesting.

[olivermoss]

Before Bitcoin, some crypto currencies were traded on RMT market places, where people illegally trade in-game items and currencies outside of a game's market place. A way to make money in the mid-2000s was to leave your game idle with a farming bot on to get items to sell for either in-game gold or real world fiat currency... and in crypto you leave your computer on with an automated program to mine Etherium. Graphics cards, not raw processing power, but specifically high end graphics cards are needed to effectively mine Etherium.

Same structure, equipment, websites, lifestyle, ways to transfer into dollar bills, etc.

The biggest crypto exchange collapse (at least until recently, jury is current out on the current collapses) was Mt. Gox. If you've been following any of this or have watched the super-cringe Cryptoland commercial, you've likely heard a bunch of references to Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox is... The Magic The Gathering Online Exchange. Mt Gox was designed to allow people to invest in cards like stocks.

I could go on, a lot, but having multiple currencies seems insanely abstract to non-gamers, but is deeply part of mobile games, MMOs, live service shooters, etc. NFTs? Skins you can buy with your gems.

Now I am going to sit here stunned that Mt Gox was only in 2014. I could have sworn on my stockpile of Lorekeeper weapon skins that it was like 2004 when that happened. I swear 2016 had some weird time dilation going on.

[mistressofmuses]

I do remember the era of farming bots and such in MMOs (I guess the era never utterly went away, but I remember what A Thing it was for a bit in the mid-00s.) I hadn't really thought about how similar that is to the bitcoin mining procedure.

I have heard of Mt. Gox, and I had heard people talking about MTG having cringe crypto nonsense, but had somehow never made the connection between the two and realized that was what Mt. Gox was. Ah. Eesh.

That does make the recent-ish rise of crypto seem a little less baffling. The venn diagram between gamers and crypto-bros certainly overlapped quite a bit, and plenty of the crypto schemes have game elements to them (either creating a game for 'investors', or as a way of mining the currency), but it hadn't occurred to me that it's a more "natural" concept to people who are used to ways in which this is similar to games, including the digital asset as statement piece/bragging rights/conspicuous display of wealth.

The passage of time doesn't even make any sense any more, for real. 2016 started it, 2020 sure didn't help it... I feel like there's so much that should be recent history, and it turns out it's decades old. Wild.

[olivermoss]

I am sure there are other threads that feed into it, but the whole idea of monetizing your play time and wanting to monetize every interaction is so normalized in a a lot of MMO spaces.

There has been controversy over introducing more of a tipping culture into GW2 for leading events and providing portals. But the main people who do the leading hate that and it makes them feel bad. They don't want to be tipped like they were a freaking Uber driver. Anyway, but of a side issue but the creeping normalization of monetizing All The Things has brought that issue back. And it's like... the social damage that does will never be worth the 39 cents you'll get. It's not even one type of damage versus another, social damage creates financial damage.

[mistressofmuses]

I really do loathe the "monetize EVERYTHING" hustle culture that's been created and cultivated.

The idea that nothing should be done unless it's somehow making you money is just... awful. The only value of something being financial, the idea that you should not write, or do art, or even play games unless you can turn it into yet another side hustle is so painfully counter to finding joy in anything.

By all means, I also think art has value, and artists deserve to be paid fairly for their work, *if that's what they want to do.* But the idea that hobbies just plain shouldn't exist without being monetized is such a damaging mentality. It stifles creativity, turns things that should be enjoyable into another source of stress, damages the ability to build community, and creates tremendous social damage, like you said.

[olivermoss]

Yup, exactly. It does so much damage.

It's like MLM type thinking infecting everything. I get how the shitty economy can do people's heads in, but this all makes it worse.

[mistressofmuses]

It feels almost exactly like MLM type thinking, though I'm kind of struggling to connect them. (Other than both falling under the "hustle culture/endless grind" mentality, which I suppose is enough.)

The economy is shitty, and I know there's also a lot of disconnect between how people feel about their regular jobs. People are treated as disposable, so it's not like there's personal satisfaction there. The allure of "getting paid for something you love/something you control" is very real. It's just that it does the exact opposite of what it promises... it's almost never going to actually be "get paid for what you love". It will almost always be "turn the thing you once loved into yet another endless grind that you grow to resent and hate while still struggling to afford rent but now you also have absolutely nothing that provides enjoyment or escape".