As you’ve no doubt heard if you’ve been paying any attention, crytocurrency, most notably the investment pioneer Bitcoin and the commerce-centric Ethereum, is a big deal right now. And quite recently non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have emerged as the, for lack of a better term, hottest thing in cryptocurrency and a thing for video game companies to release in lieu of anything actually fun. RationalWiki has an excellent article on cryptocurrency, and this is the most intelligent and clear treatise on NFTs I’ve been able to find.
Not surprisingly, as I am neither a starry-eyed fool or a hopeless moron, I find crypto’s very existence absolutely repugnant. The alleged purpose as a superior alternative to the rampant greed of commercial banks was lettuce-brained to begin with, not only because crypto’s very nature meant that a tiny elite would always have the vast majority of the wealth, but there already is a superior alternative to commercial banks (one of which I’ve been using for over 17 years). All the things they really get used for (Ponzi scheme, pump and dump, money laundering, crime in its own right) are morally repugnant, and that’s before you get into the little issues of rampant environmental damage and colossal waste of resources. As for NFTs, I’ve heard them compared to everything from Tulipmania to pet rocks to star registries to selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and the only thing wrong with these sad assessment is that those infamous ripoffs wasted lot less money.
But there really isn’t any discussion to be had here (right now even YouTube can’t scrape up supporters for this garbage), so I’d like to draw your attention to the one true mark of a grandly ambitious project in this modern age…allegedly humorous cartoons.
There have been a few animated works involving crypto (including a much-ridiculed Super Bowl commercial), but by far the biggest has been the Cryptoland presentation, called simply “Cryptoland”. There are actually two versions, the original and a “concise” video which has a slightly different focus and unfortunately cuts some context. Incidentally, this isn’t a joke: the creators of this video (full presentation here) really are pitching the purchase of an island for cryptobros to live out the “crypto lifestyle”. Exactly how much of chance this has is debatable, of course…personally I’m expecting it to go exactly as far as III Arms’ The Citadel or the All American Basketball Association… but there’s no question that they’re serious, or at least trying to sound like it, and all preorders will be gleefully accepted.
My thoughts? Most of the derision is from how it’s “cringe” or “low quality”. I actually think that though there were definitely rough patches (especially in the cut-down version), the quality was very good for a YouTube video (not having to pay anything usually makes me a lot more generous in my assessments), and it wasn’t any cringier than I’d expect young, naive people in that situation to be. Of course it doesn’t address just how this is going to work as a community…no idea where the energy, food, clean water, roads, or raw materials are coming from, and if there’s just that one public restroom, sanitation is going to be a colossal problem as well…but that’s understandable because it’s a promo video and they don’t want to touch all that boring icky stuff.
My big concern is that it doesn’t bother to explain what the “crypto lifestyle” even is. We see a fancy home, a flashy casino/arcade, and stuff like cars and restaurants and beaches, all of which are readily available in much more convenient locations. The original video tries to make it sound like tracking your currency’s gains in real time is really exciting when surrounded by like-minded investors (failing to mention how crushing it is when it goes the other way, of course), but again, why do you need a remote island thousands of miles away for that? Look, there’s nothing wrong with preaching to the choir…given what a massive sacrifice just taking the first step of buying a lot is going to be, only the true believers are going to bite in the first place…but you need to bring something to the table. Just pointing and shouting “Fancy car! Exclusive club! Hook ups! Other things you like!” isn’t going to sell this.
The most ludicrous part, of course, is parodying a song from 1978 in a pitch for a cutting-edge, future-thinking community. 
Good lord.
Then there’s The Red Ape Family, an NFT-themed…cartoon…short…thing that exists to…promote? Poke fun? Advertise? I honestly don’t know. The titular family and some cameos are from the Bored Ape Yacht Club series of NFTs, with a Lazy Lion and some others thrown in. Dunno about the “Season 1 Episode 1”, as the chances of this ever being anything more than a one-off is marginal. Maybe it’s part of the humor, like “History of the World Part 1”. Yeah. Going with that. 
My opinion…yuck. Yeah, it’s putrid. The “plot”, such as it exists, goes all over the place, and it throws in tons of gratuitous f-bombs and gore for seemingly no other reason than a feeble attempt at being “adult”. I recall how Matt and Mike Chapman adamantly refused to ever put bad language in any of their works precisely because it would become a cheap, lazy crutch, and you can see the hazards of that right here. Look, I’m no fainting schoolmarm prude, but there’s a way to use bad words to get the most impact out of them, and throwing them around like diarrhea is just wearisome. (And of course, that “boarding Uranus” joke completely drops a 100-megaton bomb on any adult cred it may have, thought I’m pretty sure it has the “useless obnoxious third grader” demographic nailed. 
) The voice acting on the whole is highly unpleasant to listen to, the proverbial 10 gallons of annoying stereotypes in a 5 gallon bag.
It’s a truly baffling exercise. With Cryptoland, I at least got the vibe of “This place is fun and awesome, like the thing it was created for!” The Red Ape Family makes NFTs sound like the most uncool, bizarre, disgusting things ever. Even that bit about the NFT that’s worth more than Paris, in the context of everything else, comes across as a delusion more than anything.
So what do you think? Bit of harmless fun? Bit of harmless not-all-that-fun? The only non-100% negative thing about this whole miserable phenomenon, although it’s dangerously close?
