A Time Haiku

 

A Time Haiku

time ticks, time flows on
time tocks, the weekend is gone
art’s done; not laundry

©M. LaFreniere, 2022

I am getting my ai artwork done — you’d think it’d be fast, but I keep tweaking & tweaking with words, colors, shapes and images. Do a render, tweak some more, render again and again and again until finally I like a result.

Sometimes the AI pops out something with no eyes or nose or mouth. Seriously, you’d think I’d have nightmares because I’ve only seen that in horror movies. Still I get at least two a day I’m happy with each day: one cat a day for my cat blog Cactus Catz and one a day for my haiku instagram. The instagram has two daily AI art challenges I participate in.  As one is a color prompt and the other is a noun/concept prompt, I usually combine the two.

I’m a little too into making art at the moment. This weekend, I shopped for food, picked up my library holds and grabbed a bite to eat. I didn’t manage to get my laundry done, mop or sweep. I did however get my two a day art done.

I also did some reading. Someone brought up art for nfts to me so I read a little on it. It seems complicated.I don’t know anyone doing it. I looked at the NFT art on OpenSeas and it seems to be all over the place from an artist perspective — from simple little pixelated things to extremely short videos like 10 seconds. Mostly they ranged on the cute anime/cartoon side. Honestly nothing that I would consider special. I don’t get it. Nothing I’ve learned about art seems to apply.

An article suggested that the successful artists create a fanbase before they release. I can’t even get my laundry done. How does someone have time to do discord, facebook and twitter to create a fanbase to chat with and encourage people to become their fans if they’re spending all their time making AI art? I work fulltime so work cuts into my free time. I didn’t even get much housework done. Some dishes, some watering. Shopping for food and a room heater. It’s getting cole and I can’t find my furnace manual to find out how to open the damn thing to relight the pilot. I didn’t get my laundry done so it’s a bit piled up at the moment but at least the garbage was taken out. And I’m supposed to figure out how to get fans? I don’t think so.  NFT doesn’t seem likely for me.

Apparently there is a division in the NFT world. From the beginning, NFTs honored the creators of the NFT contracts, so after you published and sold your NFT, you would thereafter receive a 5%-10% royalty payment anytime the collectible item was resold. The OpenSeas auction house is sticking with giving the creators their royalty payment (mostly because there was a furor when they threatened to stop) but other auction houses no longer do. It’s becoming like the nondigital world where the artists/creators sell their creations once but unlike authors are not part of the royalty process. The only way to stop this trend is for the all artists to refuse to deal with auction houses that don’t protect the royalty process for artists. Do the newer auction houses keep that creator 5% for themselves? because I doubt it’s being refunded to the buyers.

I do think it’s a great way, especially with the royalty system, for artists to find another way to create income.  However, it does remind me a bit of the Dutch tulip bulbs. Since it’s new, it will take time to see if NFTs will last or to see what they evolve into. The idea of the underlying international cryptocurrencies is likely to be here for good. Even Paypal let’s you buy cryptocurrency and spend it where it’s the currency of choice.

This NFT world is intriguing but I haven’t dabbled in it yet. Have you?