#pre-ico

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[landsoflightanddark]

Bullet points on Project Robot

So, I've decided I do plan to do a stream analyzing the trailer - however I'm not sure how soon this will be, as it will take some prep and I'm not really used to doing stuff like it (& some other reasons). I also want to wait at least a week or 2 to see if any more info or interviews come out.

But I don't just want to save all my thoughts for that so I figured I'd write some of my major ones here, and you can assume these will be elaborated on in the stream:

I've been extremely satisfied with the general audience reception to the trailer. People know Ueda's 3 games, and in the many reactions I've watched, any scoffing at "Epic Games Publishing Presents" was immediately cast aside once the "from the creator of" text appeared.

I love how much of a fan Geoff Keighley is, referring to the game as "highly anticipated" even though no one but hardcore Ueda fans would really even know it was in the works

There is a background noise at the beginning of the trailer sounds extremely similar to this oscillating sort of noise heard at the beginning and end of "You Were There."

The English, to me, is an early indication that this game will likely not be connected to the others, or will be connected very loosely as TLG was.

The first close-up shot of the character's costume - I wonder why that's there?

Could this be Ueda's first female playable character?

I love that it's a gameplay clip - I think we will be playing through a situation, or multiple, just like this in the actual game.

It's going to be a big game, Ueda's biggest yet potentially by far.

Insanely, it could be said that this is the first Ueda game to start development in the period after games began to be heavily inspired by Ico & SotC. Dev for The Last Guardian would have likely began before that happened (pre-Demon's Souls at least.) This could have impacted his desire to do something a little different.

We know Ueda does have a desire for his games to be loved by a larger audience, but I don't think that will ever compromise his games being so....him. I think it is good to keep in mind for this game though.

The animations, of course, are spot-on.

The robot is so detailed, every part rendered. The art of the robot arm was so detailed, it doesn't surprise me to see that.

It strikes me that the robot does not look friendly or like something we should get attached to. The body may be considered disposable by the main character - perhaps the head is as well? If there is a companion character in this game, it may not be the robot, per se.

I don't think we will see the girl and beast from the 2018 New Year's card at all in this.

I'm not sure there will be much combat and this may be more of an exploration game like Death Stranding.

What could have possibly caused massive explosions of mechanical detritus to be spreading across the land at regular intervals? I think they are reoccurring and will be a main obstacle in this game. It reminds me of the section of "Inside" where an extremely destructive shockwave emanates every few seconds from an unknown source.

From far away, the shockwave looks like shadow or dark magic, like in Ueda's other games. It surprised me to see that it was just a bunch of big mechanical parts.

That's all for now! If you have any thoughts or ideas feel free to comment or send an ask, I will respond.

[mariacallous]

American R&B singer Aliaune Thiam, professionally known as Akon, has long wanted to help Senegal, the country he grew up in. He started Akon Lighting Africa in 2014 to install cheap Chinese solar-powered lighting systems across the continent. He hoped to do something more significant for Senegal. But how to fund it?

The answer turned out to be the same one adopted by a growing number of governments and entrepreneurs: a mixture of cryptocurrency and urban planning. It’s a combination that offers the promise of development without any of the tricky details—and which tends to turn out to be little more than vaporware. There was Bitcoin City in El Salvador, but also Painted Rock in Nevada, Satoshi Island in Vanuatu, Cryptoland in Fiji, or the Crypto-Kingdom of Bitcointopia in Utah.

In 2018, Akon announced a new cryptocurrency, to be called “akoin.” Akoin would enable Africans to, as the singer put it at a launch event, “advance themselves independent of the government”—in some manner. Most importantly, akoin would fund the creation of Akon City, an advanced planned city to be built in Senegal. Akon announced akoin and Akon City at the Cannes Lions Festival in June 2018. Akon said in November of that year that he had “everything planned out” for the city. But both Akon City and the akoin token remained only ideas for many months.

Akon was interested by the promises of cryptocurrency—specifically, free money by some unclear mechanism—but he was not up on the details of its technical or financial issues: “I come with the concepts and let the geeks figure it out,” he said. The akoin team featured initial coin offering (ICO) entrepreneurs such as Lynn Liss of ICO Impact and Crystal Rose Pierce.

The akoin cryptocurrency was pre-sold in a 2019 crypto token offering called “token of appreciation.” Each dollar “donation” would give you up to four tokens which would convert to akoin.

Akoin had not launched in Senegal at the time, despite billboards across the country. The West African CFA franc is the only legal currency in Senegal; BCEAO, the central bank, warned that akoin could not be used as a currency in the country.

Akoin promised all manner of functionality—special akoin wallet software, direct exchange with other cryptocurrencies or with cellphone minutes, an application marketplace, various “building blocks for entrepreneurship.” None of this was ever implemented.

Akoin finally started trading on a crypto exchange in November 2020. The akoin token didn’t do anything or have any particular utility; it was just a crypto token that you could trade. Pre-sale buyers dumped their akoin immediately and the price crashed. That’s not unusual: As of 2022, 24 percent of new cryptos fell 90 percent or more in their first week.

Akon posted on social media in January 2020 that he had “finalized the agreement for AKON CITY in Senegal”—though he had previously claimed that construction had already started in March 2019. The new city would be built near the small town of Mbodiène, about 100 kilometers south of the capital, Dakar.

Akon City would be a “smart city” inspired by the futuristic African nation of Wakanda from the 2018 movie Black Panther. The city would feature boldly curved skyscrapers, shopping malls, music and movie studios, “eco-friendly” tourist resorts, and a parking garage for flying cars.

Akon claimed in August 2020 that $2 billion of the $6 billion needed to build Akon City had been secured. He laid the foundation stone for the city on Aug. 31, 2020, and said that construction would start “next year,” in 2021.

Construction did not start in 2021, to the disappointment of locals. It was not clear where the $6 billion needed to build Akon City would come from. A representative for KE International, the United States-based contractor for Akon City, told AFP that more than $4 billion had been secured, with Kenyan entrepreneur Julius Mwale as lead investor, and that construction would start in October 2021—but it did not.

By 2022, Akon told the BBC that construction was “100,000 percent moving.” He said the COVID-19 pandemic was partly to blame for the delays. Akon was surprised at the “thousands of studies” that had to be done before work could even commence.

Senegal’s Society for the Development and Promotion of Coasts and Tourist Zones (SAPCO) had claimed the land by eminent domain in 2009 before offering it to Akon City in 2020. By 2023, no building work had been done at the Akon City site—though Axiome Construction insisted that geotechnical studies and environmental assessments were still under way. By this time, according to the Guardian, the only construction was a youth center nearby in Mbodiène, paid for personally by Akon—and built upon the foundation stone that he had laid in 2020.

Senegal finally lost patience with the project. Akon had missed several payments to SAPCO, and in June of this year, SAPCO sent a formal notice to Akon warning that work had to start by the end of July or SAPCO might take back almost all of the land grant.

Akon had already been looking for other opportunities to place akoin. In April 2021, he started talking to Uganda about setting up an Akon City there as well. In January 2022, the Ugandan government allocated him one square mile in Mpunge, in the Mukono district—despite objections from the National Unity Platform party and protests from Mpunge residents wanting compensation, which could not be paid before 2025.

Akon said that Akon City, Uganda, might be completed by 2036. At a 2021 news conference, he evaded questions on what the new city would cost or how it would be funded. The Forum for Democratic Change party said that the Ugandan Akon City would never happen and accused the government of granting “sweetheart deals” to developers.

Akon City was tech solutionism that leveraged the political power of celebrity. Akon wanted to launch a large project and thought that cryptocurrency, the buzzword of 2018, might fund his dream. He thought that this one weird trick would do the job.

In this case, the miracle technology was crypto. These days, such  pushes by celebrities or entrepreneurs of new projects will typically use artificial intelligence—whatever that might mean in a particular case—as the marketing hook for a “smart city.

In his 2023 book Let Them Eat Crypto, Peter Howson of Northumbria University detailed how to head off solutionism-inspired blockchain projects that were heavy on publicity but light on the necessary bureaucratic work on the ground. His approach is broadly applicable to tech solutionism in general: Pay attention to the men behind the curtain. Howson has written recently on “smart city” plans as marketing for crypto tokens.

The Akon City plan was a worked example of speculative urbanization. A project is proposed with science-fiction concept drawings and a pitch aimed at tourists rather than locals; land is allocated; something might eventually be built, but it will bear little resemblance to the brochures. Christopher Marcinkoski of the University of Pennsylvania described Akon City as just one of many such initiatives, particularly in Africa, calling it “very much a real estate play.” The important output from such projects is local political capital—even as they never work out as advertised.

Cryptocurrency was an application of speculative urbanization to money—a high concept, a pitch to financial tourists, and the only end result being a token to speculate on and a tremendous amount of fraud. The Akon City project, however good Akon’s own intentions, seems functionally to have been merely the pitch for a crypto offering that failed—leaving an empty site, disappointed locals, and an embarrassed figurehead.

By 2024, akoin had been removed from the few crypto exchanges it had been listed on; it was effectively worthless. Akon sold short videos on Cameo—but he would not do requests related to cryptocurrency.

The speculative urbanization pitch rolls on. Actor Idris Elba has recently floated plans for an “environmentally friendly smart city” on Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone.

[divorcetual]

Hi can I ask an OCs question. Does Kiss exist in the same universe as Yoki and Ishawuu or are they different settings bc they seem to have wildly different things going on

Totally different universe !!

Kiss is like modern day normal world stuff (Altho girl a+b are also technically in their world so ig theres the murders. but besides that). She also doesnt have an actual plot or anything she mosts exists for me to put her in cute outfits and make silly headcanons abt. Or I guess canon facts. Since I made her. But she does have some lore!! Mom was a fashion designer, she has a pro gamer boyfriend, etc etc

Oh!! But kinda as a joke Kiss (Or maybe a descendent of her?) does exist as a celebrity in pastex

Ishawuu and Yoki are in an entirely different world. Though theoretically it could be the same since pastex is just set in the future. Anyway, they're in a story called Pastex (Short for "Past Expiration". But I never call it that bcs im lazy) set ~500 years from now, and about 350-400 years after war that caused a nuclear winter across the world, and destroyed most habitable land. Around 80-90% of the population also died either from the initial bombs, the wildfires, or the winter. The world remains covered in ice and snow, and the sky is still black with soot. Two main areas were habitable post-bombing due to temperature, available food, etc. They're around Chile/Argentina and Australia. All the characters i've talked abt are in the Argentina/Western settlement.

Yoki and Ishawuu are functionally immortal due to an implant that they (+ some others) got pre-war, developed by Koro, a powerful group that now (in pastex) serves as the government in the western settlements. At the start of the story, they're both working as social guards (Basically high ranking police) for Koro.

You may also see me talking abt Day, Ico, and The Grandmaster, who are all characters from pastex too! The Grandmaster is the currently leader of Koro, who Ishawuu and Yoki work under. His family has been leading Koro since it was still a tiny agency!!

Day is a character from a small village unincorporated into Koro until he was about 10/11 when it essentially bought them and their lives. So he hates Koro. lol. Ico was Day's younger brother who died about 10 years before the story.

[a-room-of-my-own]

A trans lobby group helped to draft NHS plans for treating children questioning their gender, The Telegraph can disclose.

Susie Green, then chairman of the charity Mermaids, was part of a task group reviewing services at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation trans clinic.

The service specification, which outlines treatment for children, included details on how “hormone blockers will now be considered for any children under 12”. The relationship between Mermaids and senior NHS employees is laid bare for the first time in documents seen by The Telegraph.

The Tavistock claimed that it did not have emails or minutes of meetings with Ms Green but after the information regulator threatened court action, it released more than 300 pages.

They show that Ms Green had a direct line to Dr Polly Carmichael, Tavistock’s director, and demanded to be regarded as a professional so she could refer ­children for treatment when their GPs refused. Ms Green, who has no known formal medical training, held an advisory role on two of the studies that the clinic was involved in on the long-term effect of gender identity.

The service specification, which is still available on the NHS England website, was due to be replaced in 2020 but was put on hold when the Government ordered the independent Cass Review into the clinic.

The Tavistock said: “Like many NHS services, GIDS [gender identity development service] works with a range of third-sector patient support groups and charities that have different views about how the service can improve.”

Mermaids said its “primary focus is to support the mental and physical wellbeing of trans and non-binary young people throughout the UK”.

Ms Green said it was “not a secret” that she was involved in the service specification”.

An NHS spokesman said: “We have started implementing advice from Dr Cass and we have held a public consultation on a new interim service specification, which will be published in the coming weeks.”

'The Tavistock were really in thrall to these activists'

They are the documents that the NHS Tavistock gender clinic claimed did not exist. More than 300 pages of emails and minutes that lay bare for the first time the extent of Mermaids’ involvement in England’s only clinic for transgender children.

The controversial transgender charity has long been named by some whistleblowers as one of the reasons why the Tavistock lost its way, with claims that activists pressured staff to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.

Now The Telegraph can reveal how Susie Green, then chairman of Mermaids, had a direct line to the clinic’s director Dr Polly Carmichael and was able to make referrals even when a child’s GP repeatedly refused.

The documents lay bare the depth of her involvement in the service, including helping to redraft the service specification and advising on a number of trials designed to inform the way they treated young patients.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust had originally refused to release the details of the meetings between 2014 and 2018, relying on an exemption under Freedom of Information law which said it would have a “disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress”.

When the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) asked them to justify that refusal, the Trust withdrew it and said that following “an extensive search of emails … the Trust does not hold the requested information”.

The ICO said that “on the balance of probabilities” it did hold the information and threatened to refer them to the High Court unless they complied with the request from a parent. The Tavistock has now released 322 pages of communications between 2014 and 2018.

They include emails between Dr Carmichael, who still works at the Tavistock, and Ms Green, who has left Mermaids and now works for an online GP which prescribes puberty blockers. In one exchange from 2016, Ms Green contacted the head of the service to question the decision of staff to refuse a referral she had made.

Upset not to be seen as a professional

Ms Green, who has no known medical training, said that she was told “that the referral was not validated or risk-assessed by a professional” and that is why it was rejected.

She added: “I can only assume from this statement that I am not seen as a professional? I am now very confused, as my understanding was that your service would accept referrals from Mermaids, but this statement appears to suggest the opposite….

“If you do NOT accept referrals from Mermaids due to the fact that I am not a professional I would like to know the reasoning behind this? Referral by a non-healthcare professional is acceptable from schools, social services etc, and my understanding has been that Mermaids referrals were accepted.

“Your admin person made it clear that immediate action was needed or this referral would be refused, so can I ask for a level of urgency to be applied to dealing with this issue?”

Dr Carmichael replied: “We do accept referrals from third sector groups and I know that you have helpfully sent in referrals in the past. This continues to be the case. Third sector groups often play a vital role in supporting young people and their families and we greatly value their involvement.”

Referrals 'unsupported by their GP'

Ms Green sent referrals for young people who were “unsupported by their GP” and in one case she sent the referral noting that the GP “has consistently refused to refer”.

The documents show that as early as 2014 she was involved in the “redraft of the service specification” for the NHS’s gender identity development service (GIDs) for children. She was one of the 10 people who attended a meeting.

Others include Dr Carmichael, who chaired the session, Rob Senior, the Trust’s medical director, Prof Gary Butler, a University College London Hospital consultant who is now the clinical lead for the children’s gender clinic, and Bernard Reed, the founder of the campaign group the Gender Identity Research and Education Society.

The minutes show they agreed that they would act as a “task and finish work group” and that “the content of the discussions were expected to remain within the group”.

They noted the initial findings of “research into the age for hypothalamic blocker treatment” which “suggest that the blocker could be prescribed from early puberty”.

The Tavistock has not provided minutes relating to any further meetings of the group, despite notes stating that they would meet two to three times and share details of their review. As a result, Ms Green’s contributions remain unclear

Greater emphasis on medical treatment

A new service specification was published by NHS England in 2016, which placed greater emphasis on medical treatment for children.

The new specification said for the first time “that hormone blockers will now be considered for any children under the age of 12 if they are in established puberty”.

It also updated the “informed consent” section to state that: “Age alone does not determine capacity to give consent. If it is concluded that a client has sufficient autonomy and understanding of what is to be offered, plus other key eligibility and readiness criteria have been met, they can consent to treatment.”

The involvement with the service specification came as Mermaids were putting pressure on the Tavistock to lower the age for cross-sex hormones to 14, as Dr Carmichael revealed in an interview at the time.

The charity was also calling for a reduction of time that teenagers had to spend on puberty blockers before they were prescribed cross-sex hormones.

In one email chain Ms Green was involved in, her fellow campaigner Mr Reed questioned if there “are proposals to speed up” the process. He noted that children had to be on puberty blockers for six months to a year before being given cross-sex hormones, which they had to wait until they were 16 to access.

In the response in November 2016 Sally Hodges, one of the Trust’s directors, said that “the situation is rapidly changing” as the service had received more money and “Polly Carmichael is in touch with Susie to ensure that you have the most accurate and up-to-date information”.

Gender reassignment at 16

Ms Green, who now works for Gender GP, an online service which prescribes cross sex hormones, had taken her own child – who was born male – to the US for puberty blockers before their 16th birthday. On their 16th birthday she took them to Thailand for cross-sex surgery.

In one exchange she sought “clarity” from Dr Carmichael on whether the Tavistock would treat children whose parents had sought hormone blockers or cross-sex hormones privately either because of waiting lists or because the drugs were not prescribed on the NHS to under-16s.

“This would be a huge weight off parents’ minds,” she wrote. “Many want to access blockers privately for their children due to the distress caused by ongoing pubertal changes and the huge wait to be seen and assessed, but are then caught in a position of having to fund blockers indefinitely themselves.”

Dr Carmichael replied that she was “very sorry to hear that there has been confusion” and said that “individual circumstances vary widely and so it would be a case-by-case basis”.

She said if the child was already seeing an endocrinologist through the Tavistock they would be removed from their care if they started getting drugs privately, though could still have therapy. But she added that patients “may choose at a later date to be referred to the endocrine clinic, if for example they started cross-sex hormone treatment outside the service at an earlier age than the service offers”.

Charity boss invited to take part in research

In 2018, Dr Carmichael emailed Ms Green again to invite her to take part in research which was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). She wrote: “We are in the process of submitting an application to NIHR to follow younger service users. It would be great if Mermaids would be involved.”

Ms Green replied that she would be “delighted to look at working with you on the NIHR application and delivery”.

The study looking at the development of gender identity in children aged 3-14 started in 2019 and it was hoped that it would “inform health and education providers”.

Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, said: “The Tavistock were really in thrall to these activists. They were ideologically captured.”

Ms Davies-Arai, who campaigns for evidence-based healthcare, said that she had first contacted the Tavistock in 2016 amid concerns about the treatment they were offering and was told that they would welcome her input as they were keen to hear from different voices.

However, when she emailed Dr Carmichael with concerns, she got no response.

Ms Green said that it was “not a secret” that she was involved in the service specification and she applied to be involved “as the CEO of the largest UK (and probably European) charity to support transgender children, young people and their families”.

She said that she was “pleased” that the new specification “removed an arbitrary age range” for hormone blockers and agreed to consider them for children under 12.

[ao3feed-skystar]

Castle in the Mist

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/I3ZE7bM by ChaosDancer12 "The island bathes in the sun's bright rays, distant hills wear a shroud of grey, a lonely breeze whispers in the trees, sole witness to history..."   A single castle is the only beacon of hope in a misty land, where Seekers, Flyers, and Shuttles have been disappearing for eons, the sole witness to a history born from the Energon splattered in it's halls... Here, in this misty castle, is where Telepaths die... A cycle that has repeated for eons... And soon, it will claim another Telepath... Words: 904, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English Fandoms: ICO (Video Game), Transformers - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Jetfire | Skyfire (Transformers), Starscream (Transformers), Nightflower (Transformers OC), The Queen (ICO) Relationships: Jetfire | Skyfire/Starscream (Transformers) Additional Tags: Skyfire and Jetfire are not the same bot, they're brothers, Skyfire is the older one, Skyfire and Starscream are engaged, Nightflower is tiny, Nightflower needs a hug, Skyfire needs a hug, Jetfire needs a hug, Abusive Parents, Nightflower's biological parents aren't nice, Who leaves a baby to die in a castle?, Nightflower is Ico, Skyfire is Yorda, Parent Starscream (Transformers), Parent Skyfire, Starscream Needs A Hug (Transformers), Pre-Relationship, Pre-Canon, Mute Skyfire (Temporary), Nightflower is a Telepath read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/I3ZE7bM

[hotbunking-vacheads]

Picking and mixing in fic inconsistent pre- and post-reboot chunks of canon that makes no sense is great because I get to write stuff like this:

“I was following the warden’s orders. What was I supposed to do, tell him to go scavenge through the Destroyer himself?” “Just following orders, indeed. Like Vice-Admiral Rampart. Ever heard of that guy? The idiot who got caught with his hands in the cookie jar above Tipoca City?” “I’m surprised you know about that.” Oh, wasn’t she trying her best at keeping the tremor out of her voice. Adorable. “It was a very Navy-and-Senate kind of scandal.” “You calling me an ignorant pleb, ma’am? When I was a baby ICO, I had the honor of meeting the guy in person at the detention facility on Erebus. He spat in my face. I made his stop resembling a face.”

[findpenpalsover20]

I'm ancient, 37 at least! but somehow, still not dead. Married, works in retail, I own a cat, I'll sleep 16 hours a day when I can. I read a lot, usually books about nuclear accidents, miserable graphic novels or weird stuff featuring mushrooms. (Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville are favourites) I watch pre-code films mainly, or old talkies where the dialogue is slightly echoey and stilted. I like any old films though, and I'm a real lover of Star Trek. I think I know someone who may actually be Gul Dukat.

 I take Instax photos because they look exactly how memories do in the confines of my own head. Blurry, soft focus, more the idea of something than how it really looks. Or maybe that's because I'm terrible at taking photos, and I have a really bad memory. Anyway, I can send some to you, maybe?

 I like to knit and crochet, but it takes me years to finish anything. Also, I've long held the suspicion that purling is a hoax and Not Real.

 I have a very scruffy garden in which I pretend to grow food. This charade takes up entirely too much of my time. I basically use it as a cover - when my astroturf-gravel-and-decking neighbours look over snootily, I say, "well my garden is messy because I grow food in it, you know. It's functional, not aesthetic, darling."

 I geocache, with very limited success. The main goal of geocaching, I find, is to try and look as suspicious as you can in front of passers-by. I look a bit foreign, too, so that helps.

I play video games, especially if they're filled with moments of calm tragedy. You know: Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shadow Of The Colossus/Ico, Sable, Kentucky Route Zero, Hyper Light Drifter, the original Link's Awakening...Elden Ring, even. I like a meditative, solitary experience from my games. I rarely finish them, though. If I finish a game that means I have to say goodbye and I don't like that.

 I'm really into the idea of outsider artists at the moment. I've never created a thing in my life and have no intention of ever doing so; ADHD makes sure I have absolutely no drive. But I'm fascinated with the idea of people who decide to make a holy shrine out of tinfoil, or wear a papermache head, create an alter-ego and then get booed off at Wembley for asking who's got Betamax, or write songs about how Spiderman tried to cut them out of 70 dollars and so they felt compelled to beat him with a rubber hose. You know what I mean? These people are all around us and we don't always know they're there. (There's a man who lives near me, in my dull New Town who's covered his house, the outside that is, in his own paintings. I have a terrible urge to knock on his door and ask him what's up, but my husband has implored me not to in case he murders me and uses my skull as an ashtray.)

 I'm quite flippant and usually never serious. If you don't find me funny - which most people don't - then maybe I'm not for you. A lot of people on the internet are so normal, and my penpal attempts have usually fizzled out because these people want to talk about... Grad school, or buying a house, or working in an office... and I want to talk about the sad melancholy feeling when BBC1 used to close down at midnight in the 1990s... Your typical university educated office worker I ain't. I'm not exactly shoplifting from Londis though, either, don't worry.

contact: @rainy-walk

[ferindencadash]

10 Mutuals I'd like to know better

Tagged by @whiskynorocks Thanks! :)

Last song I listened to: The Horror and the Wild - The Amazing Devil

Favorite content to watch: anything apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic

Favorite games: Mass Effect series, Dragon Age series, Final Fantasy Series (1-12 and 14), Hellblade, pre-3D Zelda games, ICO

Favorite color: Green or hot pink

Favorite animals: Cats, rats, squirrels, crows, but all critters are good critters

Favorite food: olives, tacos, pesto

Sweet, spicy, or savory: Yes. But if I had to pick one, probably sweet because I used to be a pastry chef

Current obsessions: writing fanfic, mostly Mass Effect, mostly smutty

Last book I read: some tedious sociology text

Last thing I googled: "commander shepard hoodie"

Relationship: Freshly divorced and VERY happily single

Fun fact: a good chunk of my family grew up less than an hour away from Jonestown and at least two of my family members have joined a cult, but neither one was the Jonestown cult (thankfully).

I will tag these people, but don't feel obligated to join!

@cat-shepard @serendipitys-teapot @westernlarch @acciokaidanalenko @clericofshadows @sugarandstories @urrone @malikafuckingcadash @eavangeek @souls-that-have-senses

[444namesplus]

abl aci acr age aid aki ala all als alt ami ana ann ant ape arc are arm ato aun aur aut avi awa axi bab bac bai bak bal ban bar bas bat bea bec bee bel ben bes bet bia bik bil bin bir bit ble blo blu boa bod boi bol bom bon boo bor bos bot bou bow bra bre bro buc bul bum bur bus but buz caf cag cak cal cam can cap car cas cav cel cen cha che chi cho cit cla cli clu coa coc cod coi cok col com con coo cop cor cos cou cov cra cre cro cub cul cur cut dal dam dar das dat daw day dea deb dec dee del dem den des dia dic die dir dis div doc doe dol dom don doo dos dov dow dra dre dro dru dua duc duf duk dul dum dus dut eac ear eas eat ech edg edi els env epi eur eve evi exa exi exp eye fac fad fai fak fal fam far fas fat fea fee fel fil fin fir fis fiv fla fle fli flo flu foa foi fol fon foo for fou fre fro fuc fue ful fun fur fus gai gal gam gan gat gav gaz gea gen gif gil gir giv gla gle glo glu goa goe gol gon goo gor gow gra gre gri gro gul gur hai hal han har hat hau hav haw hea hee hei hel her hid hig hik hil hin hir hol hom hoo hop hor hos hou hug hul hun hur hyp ico ide idl ido inc inf int iri iro isl ite jac jai jak jan jav jaz jea jee jil joe joh joi jok jos jum jun jur jus kee kem ken kep kha kic kil kin kir kis kit kne kni kno koh kyl lac lad lai lak lam lan las lat lav law laz lea lef len les lev lie lif lik lil lim lin lio lis liv loa loc lof log lon loo lor los lou lov luc lum lun lur lus mad mai mak mal mam man mar mas mat may maz mea mee meg mel mem men mer mes mic mik mil min mis moc mod mol mon moo mor mos mov muc mus myt nai nam nav nea nec nee nes new nex nic nin nod non noo nor nos not nov nud nut oat obe odd odo oka onc onl ont ope ora ott our ova ove pac pag pai pal pap par pas pat pea pec pee pes pic pie pik pil pin pip pit pla ple plo plu poe pol pon poo pop por pos pou pra pre pro pul pum pun pur pus qui rac rag rai ram ran rap rar ras rat rav rea ree rel ren res ric rid rin rio rip ris rit roa roc rod rol roo rop ros rub rud rui rul rus rut sac saf sag sai sak sal sam san sav sca sco sea see sel sem sen sep sex sha she shi sho shu sic sid sig sil sin sit siz ski sla sli slo sna sno soa sod sof soi sol som son soo sor sou spa spi spo spu sta ste sti sto suc sui sun sur swa swi tac tai tak tal tan tap tas tax tea tec tee tel ten ter tes tex tha the thi tho thu tic tid tie til tim tin tir tob tol tom ton too top tor tos tou tow tra tre tri tro tru tub tuc tun tur twi typ ugl uni upo urg use vai var vas vei ver ves vet vic vie vin vis voi vot wad wag wai wak wal wan war was wat wav way wea wee wel wen wer wes wha whe whi who wid wif wil win wip wir wis wit wok wol woo wor wra yan yar yea you yua zer zin zon zoo

[kustas]

im curious if videogames are a type of media you enjoy & if so, what titles do you like?

I do like video games a lot but I'm not that much of a gamer, so a lot of my enjoyment comes from analyzing how games are made and watching others play them. Following this, there's two types of games I really like.

The first type are simple games who revolve around a single mechanic that could not be achieved without the medium. The video game equivalent of something like UNO who's so damn simple and fun you learn it fast and can play it for ages. Some titles (in bold for those I've played):

Katamari

Donut County

Fruit Ninja

Suika/2048

Tetris

Zuma

etc

All these games rely on one mechanic you just couldn't do physically and need a computer and screen for, and are both simple to learn and hard to master. Imo, it takes a genius to come up with stuff like this.

Second type of games I adore ties more in my appreciation for fantasy and stories and it's games who rely on exploring a made up world more or less organically as part of their point. This is kinda vague, but types I really enjoy are either pre-written stories which involve a strong setting OR role-playing games where you can play as any character with the game responding to your choices and letting you fuck around and find out, and nothing in between. That second sort is what I've played most I think, but are increasingly hard to find.

Linear stories in cool world titles:

Darkest Dungeon

JSR+F

Anything Fumito Ueda, by far my favorite game designer. Shadow of the Colossus is his most famous, I've played ICO and Last Guardian in parts

Good ass RPGs:

Fallout New Vegas

Fallen London

Morrowind

There's some misc other series/titles I enjoy but that don't fit those categories: MGS 1 2 3 5, Bayonetta 1&2, Monster Hunter World, Minecraft and various VS fighters coming to mind

[sionisjaune]

Thanks @onadarklingplain @kritischetheologie and @powerful-owl for the tag!

Rules: Post the first lines of your last 10 fics posted to AO3. (Sort by date posted.) If you have less than 10 fics posted, post what you have.

i think you like it, laughed when you came down

The yacht bobs on the calm waters of the Mediterranean, yawing side to side at the behest of gentle waves.

on golden sands

Seb’s apartment isn’t empty.

got a mood about me but no one to love me

Christian is a little bit drunk.

those who miss each other

Charles reviews the video: On the small box of his phone, he is framed from chest up, with the Ferrari shield blazing brightly behind him.

soul as sweet as blood-red jam

Carlos doesn’t take vacations, as far as Lando knows.

feedback on low latency

Lewis lets the whole world know during a preseason press conference.

soft rock star

“I’m going to propose.”

(This is less than 10 because I'm choosing not to post pre-F1 fic.)

Tagging @vegasgrandprix @cuetheviolins @jenseclaren @colors-of-feeling and @n-ico-ando if they want to do the same!

[aixxriston]

Biswap (BSW), Terra Classic (LUNC) Holders Buy More Chronoly (CRNO) As It Launches on 6 October

The highly volatile crypto market still boasts of a token like Chronoly (CRNO) that has managed to weather the crypto waves without losing its value. The duo of Biswap (BSW) and Terra Classic (LUNC) have witnessed massive dumps by their holders in recent times due to the bearish posture of the crypto market. These two projects are backed by reputable individuals and influencers and offer exciting use cases.

Since the market is highly volatile, it is a no-brainer for investors to jump ship in search of projects that can beat the bear market, and that's why they are purchasing more Chronoly (CRNO), even as the latter's pre-sale has completely sold out.

Read on to find out the reason behind the ship jumping and other developments on the market.

Will Biswap (BSW) Get The Momentum Back?

The constant crypto crashes have taken a toll on not only Bitcoin, but also on smaller projects like Biswap (BSW). The market downturn has made token holders dump the project for a viable alternative like Chronoly (CRNO). However, the developmental team is working round the clock to reverse the narrative. First, it has partnered with reputable influencers to promote the brand and generate more younger leads/investors. Secondly, the team plans to list the native token, BSW, on multiple decentralized exchanges. The essence of the listing is to encourage massive adoption by investors from across the world.

At its core, Biswap (BSW) is a decentralized exchange that's built on the Binance Smart Chain to help crypto users easily swap tokens. Biswap (BSW) has a low crypto trading fee of 0.1%. As of the time of writing this piece, Biswap (BSW) trades for $0.263081 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $5,945,816 USD.

Can Terra Classic (LUNC) Reach $1 By 2023?

Terra Classic (LUNC) experienced a boost from new users in the first quarter of 2022, and then the bear market struck the global crypto market. As with Biswap (BSW), Terra Classic (LUNC) holders have also joined investors jumping ship to join the Chronoly (CRNO) bandwagon. The reason for this may not be unconnected to the massive growth experienced by Chronoly.

Luna Classic (LUNC) is the original Terra Luna coin left behind following the launch of a new Terra chain after the recent UST/Luna collapse. Despite the move by Terra Classic (LUNC) holders, the project's CEO has assured the remaining investors still in the network that the bear market is temporary and that LUNC token will recover once the market breaks support.

At press time, Terra Classic trades for $0.000297 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $286,803,165 USD.

Chronoly (CRNO) Launches On October 6 After a Successful ICO

Despite the dip in the global crypto market, Chronoly (CRNO) has been more successful than the duo of Biswap (BSW) and Terra Classic (LUNC). The reason for the success is not far-fetched: Chronoly (CRNO) is a project that is backed by real assets. Timepieces or luxury watches have been proven to be a hedge against inflation.

Timepieces usually shine during government upheaval and war, and the Chronoly team decided to invest in this space. Chronoly (CRNO) is an Ethereum-powered marketplace that's scheduled to launch on October 6. The marketplace will allow traders and investors can buy, sell, and trade in rare luxury watches from popular brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Richard Mille, and Audemars Piguet, with as low as $10.

Since its inception, Chronoly (CRNO) has grown by over 690%, attracting the attention of both institutional and retail investors from across the world. The Chronoly team recently completed and sold out its ICO. With the milestone recorded in the just concluded ICO, the Chronoly team will redouble its efforts to provide users with the opportunity to earn membership benefits and lottery prizes.

[almostfuzzyluminary]

A Quick Overview of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Their Relevance to Crypto Investors

Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of cryptocurrency, one term that mostly pops up is "Initial Coin Offerings," or ICOs for brief. But what’s the tremendous deal about them? This article targets to present a complete support on A Quick Overview of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Their Relevance to Crypto Investors. With cryptocurrencies gaining traction globally, awareness ICOs shall be pivotal for someone looking to dive into the crypto international.

What is Crypto?

Cryptocurrency, in many instances cited simply as "crypto," is a virtual or virtual variety of foreign money that utilizes cryptography for safety. Unlike common currencies issued by way of governments (like the US buck), cryptocurrencies perform on know-how called blockchain.

The Birth of Cryptocurrency: A Brief History

Bitcoin, created in 2009 by an nameless determine is known as Satoshi Nakamoto, marked the start of the cryptocurrency technology. Initially perceived BTC OTC as a novelty, Bitcoin has grown into a respectable fiscal asset with billions in marketplace capitalization.

How Does Cryptocurrency Work?

At its core, cryptocurrency is based on decentralized expertise—a network of pcs (nodes) that continue a shared ledger. Each transaction is recorded in blocks and linked jointly in chronological order, forming a blockchain.

Types of Cryptocurrencies

While Bitcoin is the maximum trendy cryptocurrency, there are 1000s of others like Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin. Each https://vbotc.com/buy-usdt.html serves diversified reasons and has targeted characteristics.

Understanding ICOs: The Basics

So, what precisely are ICOs? An Initial Coin Offering is a fundraising mechanism in which new initiatives promote their underlying crypto tokens in substitute for favourite cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

How Do ICOs Work?

Whitepaper Creation: It all starts offevolved with a whitepaper—a file outlining the assignment’s function, know-how, and roadmap.

Token Generation: The task staff creates tokens by way of blockchain technology.

Pre-Sale/ICO Launch: Investors can buy those tokens until now they grow to be publicly possible.

Exchange Listing: After the ICO concludes, tokens may be indexed on numerous crypto exchanges.

Why Are ICOs Important?

ICOs have emerged as an replacement funding resource for startups missing get admission to to standard undertaking capitalists. They democratize funding opportunities and permit small traders to take part in promising initiatives early on.

Benefits of Participating in ICOs

Investing in an ICO can be offering countless reward:

High Potential Returns

Early investors ordinarily see impressive returns if the project succeeds—feel Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Access to Innovative Projects

Many ICOs signify groundbreaking applied sciences that could amendment industries—from finance to healthcare.

Community Engagement

Investing in an ICO aas a rule potential joining a community obsessed with the mission’s assignment.

Risks

[dietplanssite]

Analysts say Solana and Rollblock are poised to outperform Chainlink in this bull run

Rollblock ($) recently celebrated the impressive milestone of seeing over 35,000 registrants customize this GambleFi gem as it raced through its pre-sale launch. Rollblock is currently in Phase 9 of its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and has raised over $7.3 million in market prices in its incredible disruptive potential to disrupt the $450 billion online gambling industry. Every immersive gaming…

[crypto-marketing]

How to Participate in Multiple Upcoming Token Sales

The cryptocurrency space continues to evolve, offering numerous opportunities for investors to engage in token sales. These sales, ranging from Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs), have become a popular way for projects to raise funds and for investors to support innovative ideas. If you’re looking to participate in multiple upcoming token sales, this guide will help you navigate the process effectively and maximize your investment potential.

Understanding Token Sales

Token sales are fundraising events where new cryptocurrency projects sell their tokens to early investors. These sales come in various formats, including:

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs): A traditional fundraising method where investors purchase tokens using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs): Tokens are sold through a centralized exchange, which acts as an intermediary, ensuring a secure process.

Airdrops: Free distribution of tokens to promote new projects and attract users.

Understanding these formats is key to making informed investment decisions in the Upcoming crypto market.

How to Research Upcoming Token Sales

Before participating in a token sale, it’s essential to gather reliable information and conduct thorough research.

Monitor ICO Calendars

Stay updated on token sales by using platforms like ICO Calendar, which list upcoming ICOs and IDOs.

Engage with Crypto Communities

Join forums and communities on Telegram, Discord, and Reddit. These platforms are excellent for discovering insights about new cryptocurrency projects and sales.

Analyze Project Whitepapers

Carefully reviewing this document will help you evaluate the project’s potential.

Evaluate the Team Behind the Project

Research the credentials and track records of the team members. A strong team often indicates higher chances of success.

Review Ratings and Feedback

Look for reviews and ratings on cryptocurrency research websites to validate the credibility of a project.

Preparing Your Wallet

A cryptocurrency wallet is essential for participating in token sales. Here’s how to set up and secure your wallet:

Choose the Right Wallet

Select a wallet like MetaMask or Trust Wallet, which supports ERC-20 tokens and other blockchain standards.

Fund Your Wallet

Purchase Ethereum (ETH) or other required cryptocurrencies that will be used to buy tokens during the sale.

Secure Your Wallet

Use strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication to safeguard your wallet.

Steps to Participate in Token Sales

Once your wallet is ready and you’ve done your research, follow these steps to participate in a token sale:

Register for the Token Sale

Many projects require pre-registration. Visit the official website or launchpad platform for registration instructions.

Complete KYC Verification

Some token sales require Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance. Submit the necessary documents to verify your identity.

Purchase Tokens

During the sale, transfer the required cryptocurrency amount to the designated wallet address provided by the project.

Claim Your Tokens

After the token sale ends, tokens are usually distributed to your wallet based on the project’s timeline.

Managing Multiple Token Sales

Participating in multiple token sales can be challenging, but staying organized is key. Here are some tips:

Use Tracking Tools

Platforms like CoinMarketCap and ICO trackers help you monitor various token sales and manage your investments efficiently.

Set Calendar Alerts

Use calendar apps to track important dates for ICOs, IDOs, and token distribution events.

Stay Updated on Airdrops

Watch for free token distribution events to diversify your portfolio without additional costs.

Best Practices for Token Sales Participation

To optimize your investments, follow these best practices:

Stay Informed About Market Trends

Keep an eye on trending cryptocurrencies and market conditions that may influence token performance.

Verify Project Legitimacy

Beware of scams by thoroughly researching projects before investing. Only trust official channels and avoid deals that sound too good to be true.

Take Advantage of Airdrops

Airdrops can provide additional tokens at no cost, complementing your investment strategy.

Conclusion

Engaging in multiple upcoming token sales can be a rewarding experience if approached strategically. By conducting in-depth research, securing your wallet, and staying organized, you can maximize your chances of success in the cryptocurrency space. Always remember to diversify your portfolio and stay vigilant to avoid potential scams. With diligence and preparation, token sales can become an essential part of your investment journey in the dynamic world of crypto