Starting with MoonBirds.

I was told of people buying them. Are they a new avian species? A mysterious bird that breeds on the lunar landscape? Or some creatures birthed from the fertile imagination of a fantasy writer?

They are actually owls. Why they are called moon birds, is anybody’s guess. In the world of NFT, what a creator labels as a species of bird, is what accounts for truth. If moon birds were crows, then they shall be crows. But they turned out to be owls.

Not the whole owl body, mind you. Just the head. Passport-sized. 10,000 of them in fact. Each head differs from the next head by a trait. And the possession of each owl’s head is a prized commodity. People would pay 192, 600 dollars for it.

Wait, did I say dollars?

In the world of the NFT, there are no dollars. There is only ETH. Otherwise known as Ethereum.

Mind-blown.

I began to understand why it’s an effort to make sense of this whole NFT business. It’s the jargon and the terminology. We are so used to calling dollars, dollars. Or cents, cents. Suddenly the mind is presented with something called Ethereum. Which, if you think about it, sounds a bit like Vibranium, the exotic alien metal that only exists in a Marvel movie. Or, Unobtanium, another rare element found on an alien planet found only in James Cameron’s Avatar movies.

All these elements ending in “nium” have one thing in common.

They are figments of the human imagination. So, when I read something like Ethereum, which has a rhyme echo with “nium”, the mind automatically relegates the term under the category known as “Fiction”. It takes a while for me to shift those mental gears.

It’s like I have been writing with feathered quills all this time and lamenting the lack of ink and then someone comes along and tells me that you can write on a thing called a tablet, and guess what, you don’t need ink to write.

Mindblown.

I’ve since learned that going “to the moon” means that your asset will reap gargantuan profits. And since owls are natural denizens of the night, and often appear when the moon is full, calling them moon birds would also imply that these particular owls of the digital variety would bless the owners with insane wealth.

The key to making sense of it all – I guess - is to compare the glossaries of terms. Under one column, the futuristic, next-level, way of labelling products and currencies and then relating them to another column which is filled with terms we are already familiar with.

Hence

Ethereum = Dollars

NFT = Any asset by a creator.

There’s an entire universe out there written in digital bits and bytes, veiled by a curtain of mystery. I will from time to time peel back a bit of the curtain and decipher some of the tapestry. As in any universe, Big questions will arise. Who created it? What’s the meaning of it all? For the NFT universe, the creators are humans. As to the question of meaning, it is a simple one.

It’s all about the creator and the fans. It’s all about liberating the imagination of the creator and having no other obligation other than to honor the fans. No need to seek approval from a Board of Corporation Suits on the validity of calling an owl a moon bird or justifying the need to create owls in the first place.  In one stroke, the suits are banished. The days when network executives blood-suck creators and force creators to insert product placements in their works of art are over.

Say hello to the Creator’s Economy, where the Creators and Fans are in charge for once.

Mindblown.

In days to come, I will dip my toes in the NFT pool. I will attempt to raise ETH funds in the creation of a novel. I have never done it before. I am game to try.

Once I get over being mind-blown.

20-year-old Valeria Shashenok’s tik tok videos documenting her life as a survivor in the on-going Ukraine war, racked up more than 60 million views on the app. “After the 24th of February, everything stopped,” Shashenok said. Many of her friends fled Ukraine but not Valeria. She chose to stay, and showed the world how she and her mother, father and her dog coped with life in a bomb shelter.

I live all the way here in Singapore and I have never heard of Valeria till recently. Just like her 60 million followers, I was drawn to her short videos.

Why though?

I did not know the girl. I have never been to Ukraine. But I knew a war had happened. I knew that this was someone who was right in the heart of stuff you only see in movies or read in history books.

What made her story relevant?

First off, she’s a relatable character. She’s Everyman. She’s you and me. She’s the man in the street, whose life has been turned upside down by forces beyond her control. She arouses our empathy because she’s going through undeserved suffering.

But does she run away? No. She stays. She stays and finds a way to survive. Her courage, in using humor as a shield and even a weapon to tame the looming beast of war makes us root for her, and earns our admiration.

It also made me think of us humans as storytelling animals. We, as a species, need stories. If you don’t believe me, just spend a few minutes imagining a world without stories.

No stories of courage to inspire us.

No stories of true grit to motivate us.

No comedic stories to teach us the absurdity of taking ourselves too seriously.

No science fiction stories to evoke our sense of awe, and spur us to great explorations.

No horror fiction stories to teach us to acknowledge and embrace the darkness in the human heart.

What a grey world we will live in. In a world without stories, I cannot imagine a greater existentialist horror. But what kind of stories should we tell? What subjects should our stories revolve around? That will depend on what you believe to be the ultimate aim of all stories.

For myself, I believe that at the end of any tale telling, the aim of a story is for us to make sense of the chaos that surround us in our daily lives. In a story about any struggle, give us a sense that hope exists, and that there is light at the end of a tunnel, and it will be enough to keep us going another mile in the road of life.

In 2020, a survey was done in Singapore, in the wake of the pandemic, on what jobs are considered essential. One result stood out. The artist was considered non-essential. And since writers and storytellers fall under the arts category, I guess we were considered non-essential as well. It raised a bit of a brouhaha in the arts community. I did not bother to reply because it did not matter to me whether or not I am considered essential.

For me, stories are oxygen to the blood of my soul.

I’m a better human being for having read a good story. Beyond the fact that a good story is entertainment, it feeds our subconscious yearning to know that all will eventually be right with the world. That good will triumph. Reading a story of courage, heroism, and the triumph of grit, is for me, fuel for getting on with the business of living. As I was inspired, so do I wish to inspire, and this is why I write and tell stories.

Which is why those of us who peddle in the craft of the written word, must carefully choose our themes. We must worry incessantly how well we tell our stories. Do we do it with sufficient skill? Sincerity? Genuine emotion?

For Valeria, she was the underdog heroine who used humor to stand up to oppression. There are elements in her story that inspire everyone regardless of culture.

Survival.

Courage.

The overcoming of great odds.

In 1950, William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize and made a speech. He talked about how “writers must overcome the fear prevalent during the Cold War; they must rise above this fear and focus on the only thing worth writing about, which is the human heart in conflict with itself”.

His words ring true to this day.

He went on to say that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Valeria possesses such a spirit.

Those who doubt what artists, storytellers, and writers do is essential, just hop over and check out this brave girl from Ukrainian telling her tik tok stories on survival in a bomb shelter.

For every writer in the world, YOU are essential.

Keep telling stories and keep humanity’s spirit loud, alive, and singing.

Final Thoughts

Be it 3 minutes, an hour, or a 120 min feature film, aim high. A story is not a story if it merely presents information. A story is only a story when it presents information in a structured manner that evokes an emotion at the end of the story journey. A story is only a story when it brings to light a truth about being human. A story on the page and a story on the screen is a spell, easily broken by bad grammar, poor logic, and false emotion.

So pay attention to your craft.

Because life is just too short to be telling bad stories.

20 year old Valeria Shashenok, a TikToker from Ukraine would know.