Wow. It’s amazing how oblivious the defenders of a colonial system can be, but this article about an NFT/crypto gaming system is revealing, in a horrifying way. Some Western crypto nuts created a modified version of Minecraft in which players, after paying a hefty entry fee, could earn crypto money that could be exchanged for the real thing just by playing. It was called Critterz. At first, people actually did make money playing!

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. One U.S. player, who goes by “Big Chief,” described how his team, composed largely of young people in the Philippines, gathered building materials for him. He then paid professional Minecraft builders around $10,000 in crypto to turn those materials into a lavish casino.

“At first.” Then, like most of these crypto schemes, the grifters took their profits and left the participants hanging. In addition, Minecraft announced that you can’t use their game in these NFT cons. The value is plummeting, and is heading towards zero.

But, as with Axie Infinity, once the game became more popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around 3 cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual, and many players continued playing and building.

Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs. The company laid out its position and stated in bold text that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

During its heyday, though, the mechanisms of the game were ripe for exploitation. If you had the capital, you could help poor people buy-in, and then rake in a percentage of their subsequent earnings. Sweet! Then you could sit back and do nothing in your wealthy home country, like the US, while the peons on your Minecraft plantation send you money.

It was clear from the languages used in the Critterz chat log that almost all guild members, also known as “scholars,” came from low-income countries, and, overwhelmingly, the Philippines. Many were also former players of Axie Infinity, and worked for guild owners that ran Axie guilds too.

Charles Franzis, a 19-year-old student at Bulacan State University, just north of Manila, got into Axie Infinity last October. He joined a guild called Big Chief Academy and enrolled as a scholar, hoping to earn some extra money that would support him through his studies.

Big Chief was the owner of the plantation, with a swarm of desperate poor peasants playing for him.

Big Chief, who is based in the U.S., owns around 60 Critterz NFTs, which, at their peak, were worth more than $300,000 (at the time of publication, they had reduced in value to around $5,000). At one point, he managed around 200 guild scholars in Critterz.

But hey, they liked playing the game, and he paid them a cut, so it was OK. It was OK, right? They got more than half of what they earned, the rest going into Big Chief’s pockets, instead of 100%, but that was the cost of his beneficent patronage.

Big Chief said that he split earnings 60/40 in favor of his scholars, and that, unlike other games like Axie Infinity, most of them actually enjoyed playing Minecraft. “These kids are playing Minecraft, a game that they already liked and played, and earning as much as a CPA (certified public accountant) in the Philippines,” he said.

It was a force for good! I’m sure every colonized country has heard these arguments, that being under the thumb of a paymaster has been a civilizing influence. Meanwhile, 40% of the wealth produced in their country is being siphoned off to a rich country, which is making no investment in their homeland.

Big Chief framed guilds in play-to-earn gaming as a force for good, arguing that they provide people in poorer parts of the world with an opportunity to make money. “That’s why it’s really annoying when people talk about exploitation,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what the hourly rate comes to, but I could tell you that people make very little money and the cost of living is very low in the Philippines.”

Don’t forget the patronizing attitude!

Big Chief said he felt bad for his guild members who were no longer able to make money from Critterz. “I treated a lot of these kids like they’re my kids, so it’s kind of sad now that I can’t really offer them much. Before, I was really helping a lot of these kids, giving them an opportunity to make some extra cash for their families and it just kind of sucks that I can’t really do that right now,” he said.

Aww, he was so helpful to these people he saw remotely as percentages on a spreadsheet.

Critterz is doomed, it’s already collapsing in value, and once Mojang shuts them down, it’ll be a worthless game. Poor Big Chief. He won’t be able to milk this grift for profit. But don’t you worry, the designers are dreaming big of future horizons in game development. Look at this nightmare fantasy:

But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

The big triple-A gaming companies are probably already drooling at the prospect. They could sell games at a premium to American and European customers, and then use monthly fees to buy the labor of some hungry bunch of Filipinos for a pittance, and have them do all the menial stuff of serving the valued players. Until the day the NPCs rise up in a Westworld scenario and start slaughtering the privileged players.

Nah, won’t happen. You’ve gotta keep the NPCs weak and relatively unarmed so they are helpless.

Man, this is just going to replay all the sins of the colonial powers, isn’t it?

There’s not much analysis here, but lots of numbers about people who regret their choice of a college major. An awful lot of people are regretting getting a humanities degree.

It would have been nice if they dug a little deeper and asked why they regret it, instead of making a lot of speculation. I suspect many don’t regret the actual education — four years of investment in a subject generally implies a healthy interest and respect for the ideas — but it’s more that they don’t much care for the employment opportunities and the lack of respect modern American culture has for breadth of knowledge. College is where you get your ticket for a job, don’t you know, and there must be something wrong with you if you get a degree in a subject like history or literature because you love it. Nope, the focus is all on whether you can get paid lots of money in return for your degree.

Schmidt said it’s possible that the nation’s pro-STEM campaign led many humanities graduates to regret their choice of degree in retrospect, even if a different major may not actually have improved their employment opportunities at the height of a global downtown. They were struggling, and their degree was an obvious scapegoat.

In an analysis published in the Atlantic a few years back, Schmidt noted that while culture wars and student debt didn’t explain the humanities data well — even Christian colleges and colleges with generous financial aid have seen declines — it does line up with a wave of younger millennials who, scarred by the financial crisis, are increasingly fixated on majors with better job prospects.

That’s all true. Writing poetry pays diddly-squat. If your context is, “are you happy starving in a garret somewhere”, then yes, there is cause for regret. But the problem is not with the humanities, which have been a human constant for far longer than Nintendo has been hiring, but in a society that has lost the plot. We need the humanities, not necessarily because they help factories build widgets, but because they make us better people. Which doesn’t generate a number we can put on a spreadsheet.

Show me data like this, and I have other questions.

Have we become a healthier, stronger society since the numbers of humanities majors have been in decline? Correlation is not causation, of course, and I’m not blaming computer science degrees for Trump, but I don’t think it’s a good thing for us that fewer people are appreciating the joys of a deeper, wider education.

First batch into the pressure cooker.

I’m going to be seeing red all day long.

Nice long, quiet weekend, and you know what that means: an opportunity to revise a bunch of lectures. I’ve taught all the classes for this semester before, I’ve got lectures in the can, but that just means I should turn them inside out in order to make them better. Can’t settle for what just works.

On top of that, this is the time of year when Mary’s garden is exploding with ripe tomatoes, which I’m expected to cook down and get stored away for the winter. So many tomatoes…so much tomato sauce. We better love Italian, because we’re going to be swimming in the stuff.

We have to cultivate a taste for zucchini, cucumber, and squash, too.

Buzzfeed has this intriguing article where they ask women who have happy, low-stress jobs to explain what they do. It’s titled Best Low Stress, High Paying Jobs for Women. Here’s my favorite.

University professor (medieval history). I choose my schedule, the classes I teach, and my research agenda. I love what I do, so it never feels like work. I spend my summers traveling, relaxing, and enjoying my life. I don’t remember the last time I felt anything close to stress. I make a really, really good income (salary plus grant money, book royalties, and a research stipend). It is literally a dream job. It took 11 years of school (BA, MA, and a PhD), but it was worth all of it.

Oh man, if I could roll back the clock 40+ years and pick a different profession, I think I’d choose that one. “University professor.” No stress, huh? She’s got grant money and published a book and gets to spend her summers relaxing and traveling! Sign me up!

Second best option:

Self-employed housekeeper. I listen to podcasts and music, clean two or three houses a day. Rarely start before 9:30 a.m., rarely work later than 3:45 p.m. I feel productive and being of service every day. I make way more than any office job I’ve worked. Good full-time wages for way less than full-time hours.

Easy work!

Somehow, I don’t think that Buzzfeed dug very deeply into these anecdotes.

One week of the semester done, now to march on into the second. Unfortunately, every week has to have a worst day, and this semester it’s Wednesday. I’ve got back-to-back lecture and lab this afternoon, which means I’m going to have to talk non-stop for about 3 hours, and that means I plan to go home and sit in sweet silence this evening. Expect occasional imprecations hurled at Wotan in the future.

You know what else is annoying about Wednesday? We get three and even four day weekends now and then, and the workdays that get wiped out are usually a Friday or Monday, or even a Thursday (Thanksgiving!) or a Tuesday (Fall break!), but Wednesdays are always inviolate, standing alone and untouched. It’s going to be a whole semester of Wednesdays, undefeated, until 8 December.

I used to think that seeing characters make really bad, stupid decisions in horror movies (“let’s split up!” “let’s have sex in this abandoned cabin!” “let’s read this ancient curse aloud!”) broke the willing suspension of disbelief, but nowadays I think they add verisimilitude. That’s what real people do all the time. It’s what the people in charge, who are supposedly smarter than the rest of us, do. It’s how we’ve bumbled our way through a pandemic.

So this proposal is perfect.

zombie movie set at a university, administration sending emails like 'now that zombie apocalypse is endemic and we return to normal we ask no one to be judgmental about bite marks and remind you that whether or not to eat brains is a personal choice'

— Nate Holdren (@n_hold) August 29, 2022

I would watch that movie. I would tell you all that it is perfectly accurate in every detail.

(I still wear a mask at work. I feel so alone. I don’t think the Cassandra character gets to make it to Final Girl, so I’m also feeling a bit doomed. It’s official university policy.)

I don’t know which would be worse, 55,000 year old beef or the doggerel they served with it. After uncovering a frozen steppe bison in the Alaskan permafrost, this group of university people, for some unfathomable reason, decided to cut off a chunk and eat it. Then someone decide to make a poem of the meal.

The skeleton, the skin, the muscles — all in near-impeccable condition,
Guthrie named it Blue Babe, then sliced off a piece for a culinary mission.

“You know what we can do?,” he asked
Host a dinner party and with cooking the meat, I’ll be tasked.

The Blue Babe neck steak served eight,
With veggies and spices, and lots of booze they ate

Years later, writing about the taste,
Guthrie said, When thawed, one could mistake

The aroma for beef, not unpleasantly earthy.
But once in the mouth, his wife, Mary Lee Guthrie,
Told podcasters from Gimlet, it was worse than beef jerky.

Here’s what it looked like:

I would not consider for a moment the idea of putting any of that in my mouth, especially since decay and bacteria would have predigested it, and who knows what species of organisms had started breaking it down, or what byproducts had accumulated in tens of thousands of years of slow rot.

I suspect the booze was the most important ingredient in the recipe, and in the composition of the poetry.

As usual, I made 4 times as much as we needed, because I always think “family size” in the kitchen. I guess you’ll have to stop by and help finish it.