Thursday, Day 0, I Have PLNs

Six new cases, totaling forty-one, thirty-five are in hospital and one is still in the ICU. So that means five people are chilling in their hotel rooms and awaiting freedom.

Beloved has received a pair of gloves they don't remember buying. Perhaps they are in lieu of the fun-sized chainsaw they ordered and still haven't received. That alone makes me less inclined to buy that fab lying-down desk I keep seeing whenever I browse Tumblr on my phone. But oh the temptation.

Nevertheless, I am going to use those gloves today to pull weeds from key areas and throw said weeds into the hole where the cement truck got bogged. Story will be late because weeds.

I have done a glancing course on these NFT's everyone's talking about and oh boy. It's probably tulips all over again, but this time it's wild west territory and anyone with the knowhow can make them.

The brief history runneth thus:

1. Artist makes digital art, posts it online
2. Some fucknuckle downloads art, reposts it elsewhere, sells for profit and doesn't share with the artist
3. Artist adds watermark to art so they can sell prints, adds signature
4. Smartarse fucknuckle invents watermark removers, crops signature
5. Artist starts hiding sig in various ways, up to and including metadata, which is functionally useless since downloading or screencapping can scrub that
6. Bitcoin is invented
7. Some bright spark comes up with a method to attach a unique identifier to art via the same mechanic as Bitcoin to stop art theft
8. Thus is born Non Fungible Tokens, or NFTs
9. Fucknuckles steal art and use it to make a killing on NFTs

::canned cheering noise::

Of course an NFT is worth more if it is endorsed by the artist, but this is tulips territory. Some people don't give a fuck. Including Elon Musk, who has stated on Twitter that no artist should ever get credit [or paid?] for anything ever. Charming. Not.

In the news:

• Cop who murdered Elizabeth Everard is facing criminal charges. Also there's a lot of outrage over how women have to act when they're going anywhere alone
• Prince Harry's finding out who his real friends are the hard way - by watching the fakes bail from associating with him
• More vaccine reactions
• Underboob dresses causing scandals 9_9
• Tina Turner bids farewell to fans after long battle with laundry list of problems including cancer
• Flood warnings for parts of Queensland
• Buy-now-pay-later edging into tulip territory
• UK's response to a cop murdering a civilian is an initiative in which more cops are scattered throughout prey zones. Someone else has their brain cell
• Chinese business owns a port in Darwin and people are panicking about that
• Tasmanian Greens leader uses C-word, sparks outrage
• Australia ships vaccines to PNG in humanitarian move that might not be for the props. Given that the extant vaccines cause bad reactions, this might be an echo of the Bad Pertussis Vaccine that left yours truly with chronic bronchial asthma¹. We shall see
• Some arsehole shoots up 3 different spas, kills eight, injures more, and blames "sex addiction" for the whole mess. No shock this dweeb has a neckbeard
• Scottish woman gets revenge on Uber Eats scammer by sending them a container full of dog poo
• Teen scam artist convinces celebrities to endorse bitcoin grift and has now been sentenced to three years' jail