Jason Z. Christie's Blog, page 6

The Pot, Sex, and Gaming Coin Markets - Tough Sells

If you're relatively new to cryptocurrency/blockchain tech, you might be looking at all these shiny Kush, THC, SpankWire, SexCoin, GameWhatever coins, and be thinking, "These are huge market segments. This is a no-brainer."

That's what it is. A no-brainer. But not in a good way.

Now, I'm all for short term gains. You can throw a dart at a crypto listing and make those, this year. Great. You do you. But as a part of a long-term portfolio?

Nah.

Why? Because they are replications of replications of bigger, more functional currencies. There is no compelling reason for industry-wide adoption. In fact, those markets get more diluted every day, weakening the positions of everyone involved.

They lack the value and network size of Bitcoin, the functionality of Ethereum, and the anonymity of Monero.

Even if one of the boutique SDRR (sex, drugs, rock-n-roll) coins makes it, for some inexplicable reason, it would take years. And that would mean one of them. Good luck figuring out which, in each field, has a long-term future.

Ask Crypt0Hoe if she'd prefer TitCoin over Bitcoin.

Figure out which dispensary wants which of the many Potcoins out there.

Your only real hope in the gaming market would be something that is tied to a game that becomes wildly successful. The next World of Warcraft, Minecraft, etc. Mana or Voxels might be a possible outlier. Way too soon to tell. Probably unlikely. But it at least remains a possibility.

The idea of a universal gaming, pot, or sex token is a pipedream.

For long-term growth, you might want to go meta, and look into something like SONM, which will receive the benefit of the gaming and movie markets by providing much needed data processing services for those industries. O.G. crypto (BTC, ETH, ZCash, etc.) are already welcome almost anywhere crypto is accepted. Reinventing the wheel is most unlikely, at this point.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Brenna Sparks is the Future of Cryptocurrency

Do you know what drives technology?

Porn.

This is hardly controversial. From the invention of the camera (heck, the invention of the burnt stick) onward, technological development, particularly in the field of optics, has been driven by porn. Arguably, most development in the entire world has been driven by sex. But let’s narrow our scope, here, and leave that one to sociologists.

The camera? Porn.
Film? Porn.
Graphic displays? Porn.
VHS/Beta? Porn.
CD-Rom? Porn.
DVD? Porn.
The Internet? Porn.
Virtual Reality? Porn.
Cryptocurrency. Porn?

It’s a natural pairing, for several reasons. For one, it’s perfect for online transactions. No messy credit card charges, relative anonymity, no meddlesome third parties, cross-border payments. Like sex is a universal language, cryptocurrency is a universal, erm, currency.

Wait, people pay for porn? By some estimates, the adult film industry brings in 30% more revenue than Hollywood.

Ever hear of cam performers? Both they and escorts are perfect candidates for early adoption. Even where they operate entirely legally, they routinely have their funds seized, withdrawn, or withheld, and are forced to find alternate avenues for revenue acceptance. Not to mention being persecuted by the state and other morality police.

Cryptocurrency does away with these problems. And where performers and sex workers go, so goes the world.

What does this have to do with Brenna Sparks?

Well, everything.

Brenna (https://twitter.com/brennasparksxxx) currently straddles (rawr!) both the adult entertainment and cryptocurrency worlds. She is young, beautiful, funny, smart, sex-positive, healthy-living, goal-oriented, and heavily into finance, cryptocurrency, saving, and investing. That’s a lot of hyphens.

She’s also an advisor for Spankchain (https://spankchain.com/), a cryptocurrency project that seeks to become the mainstay for cam performers. She can legitimately be said to be spearheading adoption in the various sex-related fields. Literally, and literarily, as she has now penned an op ed piece for XBiz. (https://www.xbiz.com/features/238703/the-basics-of-crypto-blockchain-tech)

Topless cryptocurrency education videos? Yes, please!
(https://twitter.com/brennasparksxxx/status/1001301641658691584)

In short, Brenna Sparks is everything blockchain adoption needs, all wrapped up in one delicious package. She is the future of cryptocurrency.

Now if I can just convince her to star in a (legitimate!) production of my novel Radar Love (https://steemit.com/novel/@jason-christie/radar-love-table-of-contents) as Janique Turner. Maybe with Ice-T as Tokio?

A man can dream…

The Coming Distributed Processing Market

Distributed processing, the act of pooling many computers to create supercomputing power, has always been a big market. Those trojans that slow down your computer sell your processing power. If they're not mining cryptocurrency. In many ways, it's the same process, complex floating point computations.

Black market aside, an already flourishing distributed processing market is poised for rapid growth in 2018. A.I., blockchain, and distributed computing are expected to dominate the coming decades of enterprise.

Business systems. Scientific applications. Gaming. Hosting. Animation. Virtual Reality. Genome testing.

It's becoming clear that blockchain technology and distributed processing are converging. And it makes a lot of sense. The act of mining generates the computations, which are safely stored via blockchain, in turn generating the crypto that pays the miners.

Distributed rendering is a subset highly sought after by Hollywood. As it stands, there are a ton of solutions, each of them proprietary, requiring different standards, with no unified rate system in place.

Distributed processing tokens seek to solve these problems, and more. Four crypto to consider in this field are Golem (GNT), Render (RNDR), SONM, and Elastic (XEL).

Golem (https://golem.network/) is generally considered the top project, at least in terms of development time, price, and volume/market cap. Golem Brass (https://golem.network/alpha.html) is in alpha testing, with rendering set up for Blender projects.

Elastic (https://www.elastic.pw/) is most exciting in that they've developed a frontend programming language for users to roll their own use cases. This will lead to widespread development whereby it becomes lucrative to develop processing systems for others who need data processing, without any gatekeepers or data massaging required.

SONM (https://sonm.io/) is an ERC-20 based system with a number of impressive features. And it has a module called Yandex.Cocaine.

Finally, Render (https://rendertoken.com/) aims to tackle the distributed rendering market, primarily, with coins being supplied directly to clients to avoid a bottleneck at exchanges. A second round of ICO is coming soon. https://medium.com/@rendertoken/important-updates-for-rndr-and-upcoming-community-sale-f82678518aa9

Render Vs. Golem - http://dailycryptocurrency.com/render-token-rndr-vs-golem/

Render Article in Variety - http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/otoy-blockchain-token-rndr-1202548625/

It's an exciting time for investors, programmers, and tech enthusiasts alike. Combine that with the business world's need for improved, integrated systems, and the future looks very bright indeed.

Learn more about the importance of distributed computing at the links below:

The Distributed Computing Paradigms: P2P, Grid, Cluster, Cloud, and Jungle
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.3070.pdf

The Future Is Stochastic
https://library.e.abb.com/public/618071aade474b0f9389d030a46bb56a/The%20future%20is%20stochastic_US_9AKK107045A2623_170809.pdf

Global Cloud Computing Market Size, Share, Statistics, Trends and Forecast 2022
https://marketersmedia.com/global-cloud-computing-market-size-share-statistics-trends-and-forecast-2022-by-applications-in-consumer-iot-enterprise-automation-and-industrial-iot/268143

You're So Full Of Shit About Ayn Rand, I Can Smell You From Here

So I've been listening to the Atlas Shrugged audiobook again, for the first time in 20 years or so, with a former leftist. With very little prompting from me, she realized all of her friends were totally full of shit about Ayn Rand, 100%.

In my experience, people who hate Atlas Shrugged have never read it. If they claim they have, they're usually lying. And if they did read it, they clearly can't comprehend it.

The villains in Atlas Shrugged? All elite rich and government officials.

One of the most sympathetic characters? Eddie Willers. Just an everyman. Not rich. Not stunningly capable, just competent, and honest. James Taggart's wife, also. From the hood. Merely an honest, hard-working woman of no stunning importance to the world.

Dagny Taggart's relationship with the hobo is a pretty touching little bit that flies in the face of everything you've ever been told about Ayn Rand.

Atlas Shrugged is also an amazing bit of sci-fi, for its era. If you didn't know that...you didn't read it.

It's also primarily about anarchism. If you didn't know that...you didn't read it. Galt's Gulch is literally an anarchist community. "We have no laws here."

Rand accurately predicts Detroit's demise with Starnesville. She explains how medicine is being destroyed. You didn't listen, and here we are. She was right. You're wrong.

“They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives—from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech?”
— The Tramp

I guess some of you hate Atlas Shrugged because the heroes are all highly moral individuals. Rand doesn't celebrate the common man simply for being the common man. She celebrates...virtue. I can see why that would bother many of you amoral, grasping, tax-happy cunts.

In fact, one of the things Dagny gets across is the relative worthlessness of money dishonestly earned. Atlas Shrugged is in fact, anti-materialist.

“You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production.”
— Dagny Taggart

“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.”
— Ellis Wyatt

But you'd kinda have to...actually read it to understand that, I guess.

I mean, Atlas Shrugged is primarily a celebration of the mind. If you hate it, what does that say about you?

It's also, of course, wildly anti-authoritarian. Probably another reason you hate it. You're a bootlicker of some sort, yet also likely a huge hypocrite.

So, Ayn Rand was a fairly fucked-up person in real life. That does nothing to detract from Objectivism, which is basically...believing only things you can prove to yourself are true.

No matter how many times you tell me that taking my money and giving it to someone else is for my own good, it doesn't make it true. That is not for you to decide.

So, when Rand calls people looters, scum, parasites, worthless, incompetent, spineless subhumans, I suspect you get offended because she is talking about you.

Rand's characters are all heroic Mary Sues. But that doesn't mean genius achievers are the only people she celebrates. She celebrates rationality. Again, if you're an opponent of the rational, you're exactly the people she rightfully considered human trash.

“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man–by choice; he has to hold his life as a value–by choice; he has to learn to sustain it–by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
— John Galt

“Your mind is your only judge of truth–and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal.”
— John Galt

I guess the very idea of morality bothers some of you people. You feel everything is subjective. In other words, you live in a universe of goo. But that's not the actual universe. Many of you are running on emotions without thought.

“Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.”
— John Galt

Garbage in, Garbage Out...

Yours is a death cult, primarily concerned with the destruction of others, instead of your own achievement and value. Basically Nazis, for lack of a better word.

“Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.”
— John Galt

I guess you probably wouldn't like a writer that exposes your hypocrisy.

“If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you?... Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”
— John Galt

Clearly, if you hate Atlas Shrugged, you're a worm of some sort.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness–non-existence–as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw–the zero.”
— John Galt

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.”
— John Galt

You celebrate and cheer an out-of-control government, at the same time that you're wallowing in the offal that is the current state of the country.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence... The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
— John Galt

The chief criticism I see leveled at Rand is that she was a hypocrite for accepting the Social Security she paid into. Except that's bullshit. Atlas Shrugged has generated more in tax revenue than you will ever earn in your life. Victim-blaming, you side with oppression and totalitarianism.

Really fucking nice.

“The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.”
— John Galt

Sanction? Most of you are huge advocates of evil. Literally complaining that the corporate war machine isn't taking enough of my money. While you likely pay zero income taxes yourself.

“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
— John Galt

A celebration of the individual? Yeah, I can see why many of you would hate that. Truth, beauty, honesty? You probably don't believe in those things.

Let's also pretend that Atlas Shrugged wasn't one of the first, and greatest novels of pure feminism. After all, the protagonist is only a woman who is an extreme mover and shaker in the world of business. Written in the 40s and 50s. Ayn Rand had a greater belief in women than you do, 70 years later. Dagny needed no safe space, no affirmative action, no need to play the role of victim.

You don't want to think, you want to stop me from thinking.

“When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend.”
— John Galt

Atlas Shrugged is also one of the greatest romance novels of all time. But if flies in the face of the concept that we must love people simply because, and not because of their virtues.

So, what are you left with? Your subjective opinion.

You hate the story, and her writing style. Again, you either didn't read it, or don't understand it. I suspect your criticisms, if voiced, are based upon deliberate misinterpretation. As to the writing itself, it's beautifully crisp, clear, and free of flowery prose. If the story doesn't touch your heart, stop pretending you have one. A matter of taste, I suppose, but I've written about 9 novels. Have you?

In a sense, I understand why you're so fucked in the head. The Puritan concept of wealth as a sign of virtue is largely a lost concept, now. But you probably make no distinction between wealth honestly earned, and wealth syphoned off by the corporate-government complex you worship.

In some ways, Rand was naive. No government can be run effectively unless a country consists entirely of moral individuals. At which point, you would need no government anyway. Then again, she demonstrates this concept nicely with Galt's Gulch.

So, sorry to call you out on your Salon-bleating-repetition-by-rote. You're so full of shit about Ayn Rand, I can smell you from here.

Using Steemit to Crowdsource Editing

I suck at editing. I mean, I could edit the hell out of *your* book. I edited one of Catt Dahman's novels, in fact. Titanic Q.E.D. is a delightful horror story. That's all I'm going to tell you about that book. But anyway, yeah. I like to crank it out in pen, pass it on to someone else to type up, briefly scan it, publish, and move on. That's a terrible way to go about things.

You could hire an editor, of course. But that can cost you. It's worth it, generally speaking. But it can be hard to take the leap.

What if you could crowdsource typo-squashing, at no cost to you?

If you publish on Steemit, you can get the benefit of many eyes, with no cost to you at all. Relatively speaking. I plan on making a formal offer to upvote any legitimate typos or misspellings. My books gets a little bit better, they get some Steem. Everybody wins. The same concept can be extended in other ways, like content editing and feedback. The difference being your might want to offer to send Steem directly for things that are worth more than a mere upvote.

Also, a few tips for authors new to Steemit.

Use a good graphic/cover art. Your chapters will really pop in listings if you brand them with a logo or cover.

Once you've posted all the chapters, create a post with an introduction to the novel, yourself as an author, and a table of contents linking each of your individual chapters.

Also, once the chapters are all online, go back and edit them to include a link to the table of contents, and next chapter. It probably wouldn't hurt to link your audiobook, paperback, or ebook version, if they're available for sale elsewhere.

Network with other authors. Get them to join Steemit. Reblog, upvote. Curation, it's called.

It's the dawn of a new age. Get used to trying new approaches. The ebook industry is already going the way of the dead tree industry.

Good luck, writers. The world needs you more than ever.

Blockchain as Immortality

I don't like Damien Hess as a person. I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual. But, as an artist, MC Frontalot is often intelligent and entertaining. Lately, I've been thinking about his encryption song "Secrets From The Future". It's about how, in the distant future, encryption will be like a child's bike lock. Trivial to defeat. But, we'll all probably be dead by then anyway. So there's that.

But, on the other hand, the blockchain raises the interesting possibility that our work might live on for generations. Even if the data currently being encoded into blockchain format lives on as quaint content akin to silent movies, or 8-bit abandonware, there's a pretty good chance it will live on, for hundreds of years or more. Erm, if we don't blow up the planet or something. And by then, I guess blockchain satellites will be the norm.

Some forward-thinking people are making this possible, starting now. Steemit for writers, LBRY for audio and video, and Spee.ch for photographs. And that's just the start.

If you're a huge egoist like I am, and let's face it, if you're an artist, you are, then you're going to want to vainly store all of your works in blockchain format so your great grandchildren might have a chance to view your brilliance.

There's also a lot of benefits to being early adopters, of course. When I first started promoting my metal band Gortician online in 1995 or so, the Internet was small. Consequently, our influence was all out of proportion with life in general. We out-charted Cannibal Corpse and Six Feet Under on MP3.com. With boombox recordings of practices. And the influence we had persists to this day, some fifteen years later. If you can't be first, be great.

So, get your media on the blockchain. Nurture it. Create a passive revenue stream. But most of all, preserve your work for all time, or at least the conceivable future.

Blockchain Image Storage
https://spee.ch/@Nerdcore

Blockchain for Writers
https://steemit.com/@jason-christie

Blockchain Multimedia
https://open.lbry.io/@Nerdcore#1299d83de3401e3046542c14b74f7d836c0e91e2/ces

6 Kick-Ass Video Games You *Will* Get To Play

I read an article on Cracked not long ago about the 6 Greatest Video Games We'll Never Get To Play, and I was a little pissed off. Not that I really want to play Duke Nukem Forever or whatever. So I gave it a moment's thought, and here are six kick-ass video games you will get to play, and they're better than the ones you won't get to play.

The game changer? Augmented reality. I've been an AR researcher for more than twenty years now, and the time is finally almost here. Welcome to Japan fifteen years ago. Get your some goggles and roll your own.

Star Wars Holographic Chess - What geek of the past thirty years hasn't wanted to play this? It could even come with a little round chess board to put on the coffee table. Statistically, 68% of Star Wars fans would choose this over Slave Leia. Which is understandable, as she's like 62, now. Plus, I don't recall seeing any new releases of Battle Chess in a while. Not that I look.

Little Green Army Men - If you're old enough to have seen Star Wars the first time around, and had undescended testicles, you ordered a GIANT FOOTLOCKER of little green army men. And then you were really fucking disappointed. You could see through them, they were so thin. At least they melted easily. Still, you played with them all over the living room, and it was fun. This time around, they'll be running around on the floor in 3D, climbing up onto the coffee table, cigar stub in mouth: "Come on you fucking dogfaces! Do you want to live forever?" Which is only amusing the first twenty times they say it.

Traci, I Love You - A little tip to you about Traci Lords: she's a financial genius. She made a ton of hot underage porn by using a fake ID and birth certificate, made a ton of money, and is probably still the most famous porn star in the world. Plus she might be doing a song with Lords of Acid. Or already did. I didn't check. After her eighteenth birthday, she produced her only legal porn, which she owns the rights to. That really has nothing to do with this: Virtual/Augmented Reality will let you bang a porn star while you have sex with your significant other. Okay, maybe not a sixteen year old Traci, but the possibilities are endless, here. Make a game out of it? Sasha Grey in "Custer's Revenge".

Gunshot or Cumshot - My first piece of software uses facial recognition and iris tracking to let you walk around the mall and shoot bullets or semen. MINDBULLETS and MINDSEMEN! Cum on a dude's face, then blow his head off. Shoot some chick, then cum on her neckhole. Expect a small amount of social controversy to follow this game. I've been beta testing it for years, now.

Halo/Doom/Crysis 10 - I have to admit, I don't play games like this, but they're undeniably huge. Plus they feed babies to the war machine, so that's always a good thing. But imagine you and your jock buddies running around campus sniping each other, the spray of blood from their arm as you deliver a flesh wound before delivering your Deer Hunter headshot. Imagine getting shot for real by the campus pigs. It'll happen to someone, somewhere. And you read it here and could have prevented it. Fuckhead.

Pretty much anything - Very soon, our only limitations will be touch and gravity. Within ten years, people will have the ability to be viewed as their avatars in the real world. Cameron Diaz won't look fat, but she'll still feel fat. Assuming you're Jack Black. Was she in that? Other than flying and making fat girls skinny, this is panacea

It's going to be hell. The world is going to look like fucking Myspace, and you'll have to carry custom CSS just so your eyes don't melt. It'll be more anachronistic and fucked up than when Star Trek nerds go to RenFest. Virtual sex, virtual drugs and virtual violence, an uncrossable gulf for the poor, major social upheaval.

I can't wait.

Bitcoin is Dead - Long Live Bitcoin

If your only indication of what is going on with Bitcoin is what people on Facebook say, let me lend you a hand. Because people don't like to write about downturns. Only all-time highs, etc.

(Wildly inaccurate numbers follow)

Bitcoin is currently $13,418.80, down from somewhere between $17,000-$20,000 a few days ago, depending on where you trade. (That's right, somewhere, people are making $2000 by moving a bitcoin from one exchange to another.)

Let me tell you why that's a good thing.

First of all, it was a much needed correction in price. Pressure relief. Guess what? Anytime you see a bloody straight vertical line, something's going to give. Meh, I held. And lots and lots of people held. And more bought. And some of them held.

Now the people that made whatever ungodly amount they did have reaped profit, or put directly into the plunging alt coin market. Or bought more, as likely as not. We're seeing the effects of that now, with a nice new surge in prices, with the benefit of a cheaper bitcoin differential.

What else? Well, not to be too obvious, but unless you think cryptocurrency won't remain a thing, erm. I know what I'd be doing with $14,000. Or $1000. Or $100. But I'm silly with it.

The new all-time highs (and not just bitcoin. Basically everything, in terms of USD) also brought a lot of attention in the media, right in time for Wall Street to roll out the first bitcoin investment funds, which are surprisingly mild in their handling of the fledgling new currency. Shorting doesn't look to be the problem we suspected (that is, manipulating the market to profit from a short, and indeed have it both ways) it might be.

Afterall, as a lot of us know, you can short bitcoin all day long already. And, when things dip like they just have, a short correctly placed and timed would net the same as if you had sold a bitcoin.

A lot of people got burned on this bull run, to be sure. And the FOMO people that bought at $18,000? Well, they'll just have to sit on it, and hopefully not sell at a loss for no good reason. This is not a short term investment, or a get rich scheme. Cryptocurrency is as much a lifestyle choice as it is a means of trade.

So, aha, a positive bitcoin article anyway. Surprise. And, hey, if you actively think this is some sort of fad, pyramid scheme, then you can in fact profit from its demise. I'll take that bet, thank you.Don't look at cryptocurrency as an investment. That's your first mistake. It's basically something like email or fax machines that you'll have to learn to deal with eventually anyway.

I do ask you to think about this article on February 1st, 2018. I will definitely see you there. But after January first, consider me a paid consultant.

Coinbase
https://www.coinbase.com/join/53476ad1648b69e77f000013

Binance
https://www.binance.com/?ref=11500825

Steemit - A Penny Per Word

A penny a word. That is roughly what Charles Dickens used to earn. Yes, Charles Dickens, cranking out artisan, hand-made sentences, letter by letter, word by word. He was literally mining money. Which is why he was so verbose.

If you're a good, entertaining, insightful, intelligent author (or you just find some shortcut to pandering to the masses), you stand to make significantly more. How does a dollar a word sound? Look around for some popular authors on Steemit. You'll find some of them are making significantly more than that, and getting paid in a currency that increases in value over time.

This applies more to bloggers than novelists. For now. But, as someone with some 600,000 published words on Amazon (my estimate), yeah, I'd like a piece of that. Steemit is a sort of put-your-money-where-your-mouth is site for writers. Put your stuff out there. If people like it, you win. No one is asking you to purchase a book on good faith, in the hopes you like it.

Heck, I see people generating income via good comments alone.

All of which makes for an interesting ecosystem of meritocracy. And that is something any competent writer should be enthused about. Better yet, if you've accumulated years of content, you can post your pieces to Steemit at a rate of one every five minutes. This is sort of like the Google Adsense Hustle, in which people churned out 1000s of webpages in order to gain Adsense revenue.

Except this time, well-written content is king.

I've already decided that I have absolutely nothing to lose in publishing my novels on Steemit, and plenty to gain. Even if that gain is merely an increased readership. Which is what I think most writers secretly want more than money in the first place.

Confession: I Was a Nerdcore Rapper

 

Do you like tragedy? I do. It’s funny.

Once I failed a drug test for pot, and got fired. Occupational hazard. They were begging me to come back within three weeks. But during my time off, I pursued a few projects with typical obsessive aplomb.

The first of which was pitching my Augmented Reality developments to the industry. You can read about it in the paper Toward Ultimate Reality. In a nutshell, I designed a theater that would allow five hundred people to watch five hundred movies on the same big screen at the same time. Walk in at any time, select your movie, and go. Pause, rewind, etc.

This is important, as the theater industry is dying a slow death. With this arrangement, you could re-release every movie ever made. I can watch Star Wars next to a person watching Gone with the Wind. Suddenly, a new revenue stream for both Hollywood and theater owners.

Anyway, I actually made some progress. Dreamworks, of all people, told me to send them a formal proposal, which was to be a concept theater project. I already had the engineers lined up. Amazing people from Newtek, Commodore, 3DO, etc.

So, yay me.

Then I added myself to the Wikipedia page on nerdcore rappers. I’ve been an MC since, oh, 1988. And I’m pretty much a huge nerd, even when I rap.

I was summarily deleted as ‘not notable’. Okay, fair enough, I guess. This was also happening with other nerdcore rappers at the time. There were about eight listed on Wikipedia. So I read up on the notability requirements, and decided I would play along. I’d do whatever it took to meet the requirements, and get back on Wikipedia.

And I worked out how to do it. It would even enable others to do the same. Win/win. I created nerdcorehiphop.org and rhymetorrents.com, and started looking for other nerdcore rappers. Rhyme Torrents was to be the first ever nerdcore compilation album. NCHH.org was also the first nerdcore website.

Things went amazingly well. So well that I forgot all about Dreamworks. Announcements were published on Boingboing.net and Slashdot.org. Suddenly, I had found fifty-three nerdcore MCs. And we had four CDs worth of material.

Then the media became interested. We were mentioned in Wired, in a hugely disappointing article. My website was mentioned in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek (penned by none other than a member of Commodore 64), and newspapers as far away as England and South America. The Guardian ran an article on nerdcore.

Two documentaries were being filmed on the subject, Nerdcore for Life and Nerdcore Rising. I was featured heavily in one, and filmed for the second, although I didn’t end up in the actual release. In fact, the filmmakers actually DELETED ALL REFERENCES TO THE SHOW. It shows them skipping Baton Rouge, which is where we performed at the Spanish Moon.

Divx contacted me. They gave me a bunch of money ($3500? Not sure.) and told me to bring whoever I wanted to Las Vegas to perform at the 30th anniversary of the consumer electronics show. I somehow got about fifteen other rappers there with that budget. I managed to book a second show in Vegas, where I famously rapped blacked-out drunk. Epic.

Oh, man, we had high hopes. Even though the Wired article was terrible, there was international interest in what we were doing. I foolishly, optimistically predicted a few MCs would get record deals.

That never happened, of course. But we fostered a scene that grew, for a while, exponentially. Lives were changed. People actually hooked up and married through the nerdcore scene. Tons of people moved to Orlando and Washington state, the twin capitals of the genre.

A concert/festival, Nerdapalooza, was launched. I even got to perform, and did one of the best shows ever. But the next year…

I was called by a promoter of the second Nerdapalooza. He said he needed a marketing whiz to blow it up, and I was the only one he knew capable of doing it. He wanted me to work behind the scenes, so he could have ‘plausible deniability’ in case I, I don’t know, marketed too hard.

Meh, whatever. I won’t get into the details, but it was extremely corrupt. So after doing tons of work for the show, in which I was promised the closing slot on the next day I was…dropped from the bill.

I went berserk, as I am prone to do from time to time, when slighted. But that was pretty much the end of my involvement with nerdcore. I deleted the sites, stopped promoting, and watched the scene dwindle back into obscurity. It still exists, but if you check Google trends, 2006-2008, when I was promoting, was when there was the most interest . Thankfully, the scene continues on without me, and still has a lot of exciting aspects.

I did meet some cool people, heard a lot of great new music, and had a lot of fun. Something to be said for that, I guess. I also learned that nerds are pretty much the same as anyone else. Lots of pettiness, jealousy, backstabbing, etc. For some reason, I expected more out of them.

And the Dreamworks thing? I never got back to it.

Wikipedia? I’m on there. Sort of. Still not considered notable enough for my own page, for some reason, despite having met the requirements.

Oh, well. I broke a new genre of hip-hop to an international audience. How many people can make that claim?

Edit:

Woah! Apparently the Rhyme Torrents board and movement have been resurrected. Volume ten is in the works...

http://www.rhymetorrents.org/index.php