And as soon as Affinity Publisher has a footnote function I’m with you. Unfortunately it is entirely useless to me without it.
(I already paid for the whole suite, gotta support a good product at a fair price. But I really can’t use Publisher because everything I write has footnotes)
Let this other old man try and break it down for you: It’s both bullshit, and a scam.
It’s bullshit because it’s a combination of that energy-wasting boondoggle Blockchain (which, of itself isn’t that bad in theory, it’s just that in practice it’s almost always the wrong solution), and the “appealing to monkey-brains” boondoggle Art Collection.
People with too much money like to feel important because they own something that no-one else owns but everyone else wants. That doesn’t mean they want to look at it, or know where it is, or even be entirely certain that it exists. They just want the basal ganglia of their amygdala to be flooded with the certainty that they own it and you don’t. (People without too much money will go into debt for the feeling of being a person with too much money.) Digital files, of course, break that whole model, because you can copy it losslessly forever. There is no inherent limit on supply.
So some genius/s decided to invent an “inherent limit on supply” (by taking a hash of the file and putting it into a blockchain, and then treating it like a bitcoin so that you can assign “ownership” of it in that blockchain.). This “limit” is entirely imaginary, and the whole thing make less sense than fiat currency while working on the same principle: that something is worth something if everyone involved believes that it does.
And something so perfectly, platonically, dodgy naturally attracted the people who are naturally attracted to these sorts of things.
Summary:
It doesn’t do that at all. It just ads a lot of buzzwords and a false imprimatur of authority, but no actual vetting of whether the person selling the NFT owns any rights to the IP they purport to be selling. All the block chain does is memorialize a transaction at a ridiculously high energy cost. It has the exact same legal authority as me scrawling “I sell you all copywrighte to Disney Micky Mouse for ten USD Dollars” in Sharpie on a paper napkin.
It is super interesting and something worthy thought, discussion, and work. It is also something that NFTs don’t do. I can create an NFT of the Google logo and it conveys no proof that I own it in any sense of the word. It fails for provenance for similar reasons. There are multiple identity systems that different people can register a bit identical NFT of the logo, to say nothing of registering images that are similar, but not bit identical.
Turns out there are a variety of alternatives to Adobe’s Creative Suite (and even more in the comments):
I used to use Photoshop (7) years ago, when it was a one-time payment, but since I’m more of a hobbyist than a professional I don’t ever see myself going back. There’s enough free or low-cost options to do whatever strikes my fancy without relying on Adobe (though I could wish for more Android art apps.)
I started using GIMP when they moved it to the cloud so people don’t pirate it, but I’m not a professional shitposter, just an enthusiastic and prolific one.
You have n problems.
“I know, I’ll use AI to solve this!”
You now have n² problems.
Yep, because the Affinity updates are not constant. Pretty much every day the little Adobe leech in the menu bar was alerting me to something needing updating.
Okay, bear with me here as I think I sort of understand NFTs. Let’s say I have a hilarious picture of myself igniting my own flatulence, let’s call it epicfirefart.jpg, that has become super popular on the internet. I could make an NFT, which would act as a sort of digital receipt (correct?). Okay, so, somehow I con someone into paying actual real money for the NFT (or convert their actual real money into Bitcoin or whatever and use that to buy the NFT). Woo-hoo, I sold a picture of myself farting!
But wait. I sold a glorified receipt for the picture. I still have the picture on my camera roll and my computer. I can still edit, crop, and otherwise manipulate the picture. Anyone who laughed at the picture and downloaded it has a copy of the picture too, and any one of them could edit the picture.
So what’s the benefit of the NFT here? What does the guy who paid for the NFT actually have that no one else has, and why is it worth paying for?
The chemicals bathing his amygdala telling him that he owns this thing. It’s unique, because there can only ever be one hash value, and he owns it. You don’t own it. He owns it.
If you discount the hoarder reflex of mine mine mine all mine!, it has no value whatsoever.
At least with tulip bulbs, you could plant them and get a pretty flower.
An NFT has zero inherent value, whether through utility or through beauty. It is “worth” exactly as much as some other sucker is willing to pay for it, and for the energy and computational resources expended in transferring ownership (which expand as it changes hands and the blockchain it’s on and don’t forget that just as you have as many types of “bitcoin” as you have blockchains to put them on, can have an NFT on as many different NFT blockchains as you want).
If every NFT blockchain were deleted right now, nothing of value would be lost. Some people would be down by massive amounts of money, but that’s just redistribution.
I’ll just hang onto my CS4 disks, thanks.
Even presently being a member of an institution that provides me free Adobe software, I find the CC stuff feels slow and bloated, and still more often spin up my old versions that I actually own, or freeware alternatives, to get day to day creative work done.
This is just one more reason why I don’t think I’ll feel the need to subscribe to Adobe even if I’m no longer working with an institution that has a license.
sounds like you understand it perfectly
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