Good morning. Hello. How are you? #530
Four million words. Mucking about with Crypto, sorry. Clown Town. Those last two are unrelated.
Good morning! Wednesday! How are you? What’s up? It’s cold! I’m cold! Brr! Lesseeee. What is happening what’s going on. I’m listening to the new Aeon Station single, it is great. Very sad about the Wrens, but these Aeon Station songs are great and I’m glad I don’t need to wait, like, twenty years for them.
Programming note: Please fill out this form for a holiday card!
https://www.postable.com/thewebbles
Ooo maybe we make it a button who doesn’t love buttons.
The wonderful self-journaling software 750words.com, can’t recommend it enough, sent me an email telling me that I had written over 2 million words over there. That’s pretty crazy. For good measure I fired up Scrivener and opened up the master file that contains my entire journal, from my whole life, and it has passed 4 million words. That is absurd and glorious.
Holidays are coming up. I just realized yesterday that Thanksgiving is next week. I gotta do my grocery shopping! Excited to make my annual Thanksgiving dinner. And I am taking a week off which is lovely. Then it’s just a few short weeks until the Christmas/New Year holiday, where I get another week off. And in between I am taking three days off for my supposed New York trip. Lots of time off. On my year-end holiday, I have a large to-do list that I need to get through every year: sort all my camera roll photos into folders, for example, or take the year’s journal and export it to a PDF and print it into a book, make two copies, put one on the shelf in the library and one in storage at the storage unit. I don’t know why I do this it is going to bite me in the ass someday and my daughter will end up inheriting them and being appalled at me six ways to Sunday, but it is a compulsion and I can’t stop. Diarists diarize, there’s no other option.
With the massive caveat that I am still a giant skeptic, please don’t take this as a change of heart, I was mucking about with crypto yesterday. Back in the day, I read the Bitcoin whitepaper when it came out, set up some mining software, and mined a few coins, like a hundred or so. I lost them. It sucks. I am bummed now. But anyway, I got all that, and I understand the concept of Ethereum and whatnot, but the ecosystem has gotten way more expansive and complex and my grasp on the whole thing was diminishing so I thought it was time for some brushing up. I have a little bit of crypto in my for-fun/to-understand Robinhood account, but we’re talking like $200. So I decided I was going to try and learn more. I mentioned this cryptocurrency FLOKI a while back — I heard about it from a cam girl on Twitter. I decided I would try and buy some. I also keep seeing these friends of mine put .ETH in their name in their Twitter handle, and I decide I gotta get in on that shit, and I learn it means that they have registered a handle with ENS domains. So first I set up a Coinbase account, put some money in, bought a few crypocurrencies, but you can’t buy FLOKI on there. Okay, fine. Floki is an ERC-20 token, which means it runs on the Ethereum blockchain, so I need an Ethereum-based walled. Because here’s a thing I learned. Coinbase is it’s own weird special thing where you can hold all sorts of cryptocurrencies on multiple blockchains, but most of the time you gotta have a specific wallet for each type of currency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc. So I try one, and it seems fine, nice iOS app. I try and add some money to it from Apple Pay and it just gives an error message. I try for a bank and it just gives an error message. This is not inspiring trust, so I ask a friend, pick a different wallet, seems nice, try and add money again and it gives an error message and my bank calls me with a fraud notice. I tell them it really is me, they fix it, but the error message persists.
My friend tells me to just put some Ether in there from my CoinBase wallet, that’s what he did. Okay, fine, simple enough. I move over $100 in Ether. It costs me twenty dollars to do this. I think that’s a massive amount of money. Insane. But it works. Pretty quick too! Like a few minutes. So that’s… kind of impressive! Almost as fast as Venmo! For seven times as much money.
So now I have an Ethereum wallet with some money in it and I am ready. The walled I’m using is integrated with Uniswap, a big exchange where you can buy weird-ass ERC-20 coins. So I look up Floki.
There are ten different coins called $FLOKI. It’s open! No rules! Which one is the “real” $FLOKI. Who knows! One of them has the logo that is the same on the website. Cool. That night be the real one. I look at the info on the coin in Uniswap and it gives a wallet address. Cool I can match that to the one on the official site. They do not match. But the only wallet addresses I can find on the site are the wallet of their DAO, which might be different, and their burn wallet, which is a different thing. So I gotta read all their developer docs or go on blind faith. I decide fuck it, this is an experiment, I’ll just go on blind faith and try and buy $50 USD of Floki with my $100USD of Ether.
It all works, except… the “tax” on the transaction — they call it “gas” — is two hundred dollars.
Two hundred dollars.
Okay, that’s not gonna happen.
So, off I go to accomplish my other task, get this .eth name, so I go to ens.domains and find my name and click register and connect my walled and pick three years and it’s like $15 in ETH. GREAT. Let’s do it.
Except the gas on the transaction is two hundred and twenty-eight dollars.
Madness.
Now, I know this is, like, a “temporary” situation, only lasting, oh, I don’t know, another year or so. But it is hilarious that this community known for its Libertarian tendencies is paying a tax — sorry a required, mandated fee that goes to infrastructure and maintenance — this high. It’s just insane.
I thought gas was like CPI — like every month or so some governing body or smart contract recalculates everything and says “okay this is the new gas rate.” But it turns out it’s more like Uber surge pricing: it is changing every minute. My friend says to do all your transactions in the dead of night on Sunday and I love that I am totally going to try that.
One might retort that this is all voluntary and not imposted by a governing body, except it is 100% imposed by a governing body, the body just imposed an algorithm on people. Yes, you can, you know, join up and get involved and have an influence on the body but, yeah, you can do that with government. And, of course, their vision is for this to, like, take over the world, so, you know, at that point how voluntary will it be?
Do any Fairbanksans remember the Toy Store in the Bentley Mall, Clown Town? I think about that place all the time. The way it had one of the largest stores in the mall. The way it had that, like, round chamber room in the center, it was a great layout! There is very little about Clown Town on the internet. I wish I had some photos of Clown Town. My googling for “Clown Town” and “Bentley Mall” did 1979 BLM study that has a nice section about the economic development of Fairbanks in the 50s through 1980. I learned a thing or two there. One thing I did learn was that apparently Clown Town was a chain. I can find no reference to any other clown towns, except maybe one in Montana and one in Dehli, but I suspect that one is unrelated.
My god, what I wouldn’t do for some good, hi-res photos of the inner circle of Clown Town. I feel like that is a major spot in my childhood and I have no documentation of it.
Got a psych rock mix for you today. Freak out! Woo! yeah! Very excited about the new Acid Mothers Temple Levitations Sessions LP. Levitation is also releasing, this week, a Primal Scream Live at Levitation LP and I’m excited about that, too, cuz Doug and I were at that show back, like, five years ago before we both had kids and lived in the country. Well, I think I already lived out here. But only just. And I recently acquired a vinyl copy of Helium’s Magic City and man, I forgot how gloriously proggy that record is. So good. Also thank you to Todd for alerting me to Mdou Moctor, to Damon Krukoswki for reminding me about Les Rallizes Dénudés, Julian Cope for Flower Traveling Band, and Warren Defever for Kannibal Komix. I do not actually know Damon, Julian or Warren but Warren liked one of my tweets once, that counts, right? Actually in 1994, I think, my friend Mike and I drove to Michigan to meet Warren, Mike met him but I spent that time record shopping because I was too nervous. I regret that decision. Except for the records.
Talk tomorrow!