Now, about how, where, when and why you’re going to exercise and expand your spiritual talents and realizations through the combination of #Shorts, NFTs and social media.
I know, it sounds bloody unlikely that you can achieve any spiritual results in a chaotic scene like social media, and you’d be right, if we approached it straight-line, but we don’t.
I’ll give you my own examples of where to start:
- “I AM NOT BANKSY” — Portraits of “Banksy”, a mysterious artist whose identity nobody really knows, and who’s reported works of art sell in the high millions. You could make videos that show your artwork in order to try to prove that you’re not Banksy. I hadn’t heard of him until someone asked me if I had been Banksy, and I of course said “No”. Just one look at his penmanship and you know it wasn’t me.
- “JIM MORRISON WAS MY NEIGHBOR” — He was, in fact, my neighbor when I lived in the Canyon behind the highway convenience store, on 8023 Roth Dell Trail. I have photos, but I can tell #Shorts stories about Jim and many other musicians of the time — I was in the room where it happened, like my photos of Grace Slick singing the vocal lead on “White Rabbit” in the RCA studio on Sunset in 1967. I was there.
- “SCENES OF THE 1960s” — I have many scrapbooks on the fifties and sixties, plus scrapbooks of my art exhibits and special shows, groups with whom I worked, and jazz greats standing in front of my giant backdrop canvases.
- “JAZZART” — My JazzArt just in general would make good short video subjects.
- “HOW TO NFT” — A whole series of #Shorts on how to do NFTs.
- “MAKE VIRAL #SHORTS” — I don’t say I can do it, but I know how it can be done, and I’ll show that in a series of shorts, of course.
- “OLDEST GAME DEVELOPER IN THE WORLD” — I know I’m not, but you’d be hard-pressed to prove it.
- “STRANGE & UNUSUAL” — A Barnum-like collection of odd things, odd facts, strange curiosities and bizarre facts.
- “I MINTED $1 MILLION IN NFTS FOR FREE” — and similar instructionals, along with instructionals on absolutely any subject, from sculpture to meditation.
Pretty much any subject can be the target of a short, but I found that I’m getting good results using my shorts as bait to lead clients to my NFT pages where they can buy the items, if they happen to have the right kind of digital wallet, and if they don’t, they’re out of luck.
Oh, it’s not that they lack information about how to go about acquiring a NFT — there’s plenty of information to go around and then some, but the information doesn’t actually help anyone who doesn’t already know their way around the social media networks, and that brings me to the subject of today’s discussion.
You Can’t Get There From Here
That old phrase from vaudeville tells the story of most of the NFT sales that are going on right now — most of the folks engaged in this sport are youngsters who are very adept in programming and virtual concepts.
Most artists hate the subject and would just as soon plunge a brush into a can of paint, thank you very much.
Okay, that’s fine for a few folks who happen to cross the line between artist and programmer — and there is a line, in spite of denials to the contrary — and that includes sales.
Oh, yes, today’s artist does self-promotion. Who has a gallery? What gallery can give an artist a continuous stream of income all year long for decades?
So there you are, on your own. Oh, maybe not at first. I had a lot of gallery exposure early on, and my work was on exhibit in some of the finest and richest galleries in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.
But eventually, all things come to an end, and about 20 years ago, I stopped promoting the art, just plain stopped. No more shows, no more exhibits, no more $10,000.00 shipping bills.
Strangely, the income from art dropped at the same time.
With the advent of the NFT, I see a new hope for young and unknown artists to get known and appreciated by a larger crowd than just their close friends and relatives.
If you’re an artist, musician or creative talent of any kind, and you have a large base of followers or subscribers, you’re in a perfect position to create and market NFTs, and #Shorts are going to do most of your work for you, plus they can now be monetized on youtube, which is a big game-changer.
You can be awarded millions for your #Shorts efforts, but they can also potentially lead clients to your NFT sales pages, if you direct them correctly. If you don’t know how to herd your viewers to your target page, you need to learn, and fast — we have regular meetings on ZOOM, where you’re welcome to voice your questions and concerns, but I don’t want to distract from the main point of this little dissertation — you have to take your client into acount, and that brings us to twinci.
Twinci is an outfit that I believe originates in England, and the main problem with it is that there is no obvious way to join them from the U.S.A.
You can’t convert U.S. currency to their currency, which is a token they call the “TWIN”, although why this is is very unclear and hard for an outsider to remember.
Twinci makes the same mistake that was made by Blizzard Entertainment when they came out with the hated “Diablo iii”. They rode over the comments by players, and delivered a game that nobody really was happy with, proven by the immanent release of “Diablo ii Resurrected”.
LINUX is not for casual users, nor really is MAC, and there are tons of things out there like servers and routers and all sorts of gadgets both mechanical and virtual that require a rocket scientist to operate them.
Kids are growing up with this stuff all programmed into their thumbs. They don’t have to think it through — they’re thoroughly integrated parts of the super-computer system.
Gamers are automatically elitist, and they typically make the same mistake over and over again — they assume that everyone knows what they know.
Noobs don’t have a chance in that environment, and it’s assumed that non-clan members just don’t know stuff. There has to be a remedy, or the game doesn’t survive and grow its playing population.
One example of this in Diablo ii is the infamous SOJ — the Stone of Jordan Ring.
Nobody knew what a SOJ might be, or nobody would tell you, and if you persisted, they’d kick you out of the game or all leave to a passworded server.
In that culture, if you didn’t know, you were an outsider, a “llama”, a “lamer”, and you were the butt of the text chatter underneath the game.
Now, that’s the same sort of elitism that drove the Theosophy Society and most similar groups — those in the know control the show, and most organizations thrive on the power structure created by those-in-the-know over those who are emphatically not in the know.
Problem is, elitism whether deliberate or incidental, definitely limits the potential growth of whatever it is that you’re trying to grow with the public.
Whatever it is, it HAS to be User-Friendly, and Twinci emphatically is not user-friendly — not, at least, for the Net Neanderthals like myself who just don’t understand metalanguage and cryptocurrency and all that jazz, but the people already using it just don’t dig it, they don’t get why someone like me is totally confused and at a dead end when it comes to actually getting hold of some of their TWIN cryptocurrency, so I can list my stuff on their site.
I’m very motivated as a seller to get through all these seemingly impossible barriers in order to list my stuff on Twinci, but that’s me — I’m an artist and a seller, and I have no physical presence in any galleries anymore.
I’m just an artist who wants to show my stuff, that’s all, and hopefully some folks will feel the impulse to help me survive as an artist by buying one of my works.
But what about my customers?
This is the thought I had as Barbara and I experienced a full 9 hours of total frustration trying to convert U.S. Dollars into TWIN Tokens, just that what should be “simple thing”, which turned into a multi-hour nightmare, and as I said, we’re really motivated not just to make a living but to also point the way for hundreds of student artists in our circle to find a way to sell their artwork and create more for the market.
I’m thinking about my clients, and what they’ll have to go through, and they don’t have that motivation of a seller. They’re at best casual browsers, and if it takes any effort at all to buy something, no matter what it is, they won’t rattle a chord.
In short, USER-FRIENDLY means hit the “buy” button and you’ve done it.
One way to solve this in the case of Twinci is to make it available to put it on MasterCard or PayPal.
There’s no more universal payment plan than that. Of course, you’re trying to encourage people to buy and spend your custom token currency, so you might not want to make that opportunity available.
On the other hand, if the site is for the artists’ sake, then that’s exactly what you’d want to do — make the sale as painless and stupidly simple as possible, one push of a button and that’s it.
Any more than a single push of a single button and you will lose the sale.
Now, in the case of the NFT, it satisfies all the requirements I have for the 21st century, which is: no physical item, no manufacturing cost, no packing and shipping and invoicing and no fretting and worrying over each transaction — did it get through? Did it meet or exceed the customer’s expectations?
Then, if you sell face-to-face and mano-a-mano retail, there’s all that schmoozing and coffee and donuts and wine and finger-food shows that keeps the customer satisfaction level high enough to create conditions for a sale.
None of that is my bag. I’d just as soon do something creative, even at the expense of making a living, which is why I always worked with galleries and paid the price.
I had as many as ten shows a month for a period of about 37 years. I know that this doesn’t make any sense to a non-creator, but if you’re less motivated than that, you won’t last a minute in the Creator Jungle, and that includes the Digital Jungle, and it IS a jungle out there.
There’s another angle to this Twinci thing. I happen to agree with their operating philosophy and would like to further their community, so one of the things I’m resolved to do is to bring this issue to their attention, for their general benefit.
I want to be able to say that it’s user-friendly. Now, if I overlooked the obvious and there is an easy way to get hold of TWINs, I’ll be very delighted to report that to you instantly, and we can all get on there and start making that community happen in a big way.
Also, there is the matter of my reputation. Take a moment to google me, and you’ll see why I would be a welcome addition to the artists on a NFT selling site. They need LISTED artists and celebrities to make it work and that’s what I propose to bring to the table — YOU.
I’m reminded of the marriage broker who finally persuaded the resistant town butcher — the richest man in town — to marry Princess Margaret. After months of negotiations, the butcher finally agrees.
The marriage broker walks away from the scene saying to himself, “Now all I have to do is persuade Princess Margaret to marry a butcher in a small town in Eastern Poland”.
Yeah, that’s all.
From the perspective of Magical Laws, there is no reason why a magical operation need be physical and organic. It doesn’t.
I can put things together in virtual space and achieve the same spiritual results from the virtual stimuli and environment as would be obtained in the organic version of same.
The virtual world is just as real as any other world, and all phenomena — not just some — is illusion, or are illusions, if you subscribe to the Dorothy Parker Literary Standards.
In short, relax.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby