JoFella, chapters 2 + 3

II.

His gf was a milady, so would the gods of life bless him in this divine order of the universe, being a mifella. She had not abandoned him, not yet, despite his crippled wrists and schizo artist failure trajectory, for you see, there was a sacred bond of egirl and eboy, formed in the blossoming regions of the chain, it was he, Jofella, who had given her the milady that made her a milady. For the ethereum price of 300$ he had purchased it for her, one that reminded him of her, as visually as the neo chibi style would allow, somewhat pervertedly, to encapsulate her essence inside a jpeg that would be under his control. She did not know how to use the chain, so he, the eboy, degen and on-chain, held the milady in his wallet for her. The value of the milady grew to many thousands. And their relationship was thus strengthened, in a neo manner analogous the old strictures of bondage, social mores, marriage, economy, that would make the woman stay with the man, and the man cherish the woman, a new spiritual infrastructure had formed and trad life would flourish for these two once again in the dark regions of history. Her name was Lalaidy and she was known through the viral success of her butter milady sculpture shown in the cafe milano voxel metaverse exhibition ‘300,000 calories plus chicken and potatoes’. Who else would he be making the Beef à la Stroganov for? Now you see that Jofella really was a nice guy.

He did not mean to miss the supermarket closing time, but after his live stream he had been so distracted trying to figure out how the toji nft battle game worked. His gulf war series rocket launcher trait was worth a certain amount of kill points, and had certain damage inflicting capacity, but apparently it didn't matter as much as the artistic references and the aesthetic style, crack art, ultra realist, hyper tone advancement clashes in the sky with alcoholic folkart tranquility. The realm of art is an opaque mystery. Questions had to be settled, wars fought, history made. Teams were forming across the globe, nations, regiments, squadrons, the russians already had some cool profile pics, clearly they had some strategy in their budget for memetic design, fucked up looking jacked dudes, track pants, vodka bottles, soviet housing core, slavic glitch textures on the shading. All things follow by a natural course, art, though appearing to be free, is confined to the disc, encoded in file systems and applications, but in that structure, much could happened, especially when two art discs are placed in competition with each other on a single computer, and that computer placed in competition with other computers, and those computers against other groups of computers, and so on, the web continuously expanding through the information channels, inevitably culturally interesting scenarios will erupt, and many dead bodies of artists over drained and suffering will pile up before they find their salvation in the clashing of electrons in the beautiful sky above, so said the wizard npc before Jofella got bored and crashed his system by trying to insert his balls into the cd tray.

Jofella knew the grind. Paintings upon paintings stacked up and sprawled round his bedroom studio. Charts, all his paintings were of charts, and his current masterpiece, the ruble/usd chart through the first ukrainian invasion was still wet stinking of turpentine and thick goopy linseed oil, resins, damar, sap, earthy tinctures, like a fresh wet pine forest of elvish mythology dreams. He was hoping to be able to sell it to one of the rich Russians inhabiting the first district of vienna. Vienna, dubbed ‘the gateway to the east’ and not being a part of nato, was a preferable haunt for the oligarchs and they had their clutches on the local art market. An entire career of trying to make myself hated and underground in the local and larger scene, i decided this was where and how i wanted to sell out, fuck trying to be cool, fuck contemporary, i want rich russian money dudes to see my charts and be like ‘oh yeah i like financial markets’, then see it was the ruble getting decimated into the invasion then sky rocketting higher as all the sanctions rolled in, and think yes i need to buy this shit, fuck the western cucks. This i decided was punk. Only in my head, only in Jofella’s head. Nobody else cares.

Black chart night mode. Scraping bong resin black hash off the chart. 420 break. Still smoking. Trading and smoking, just for one more night. Need to blackout and fall asleep. Pills aren't working. “I cant sleep with you in my bed, '' he said to Lalaidy. It's just the charts, the brain, it was not nice for Lalaidy. Jofella had to be alone with his demons through the night. The only way to face the day proper. The next day it was really beginning to hit me. I was worried for my family. Deep in the north of Canada, this is why it's not strange jofella wears a hockey helmet, if he were australian he’d probably be kicking the shit out of posers with a didgeridoo. Could the russians make it through the frozen tundra down into canada. In all the movies he’d seen depicting Russians, they seemed to be quite good at building arctic base stations and trudging through the snow. But this is why he had the toji factory. He could work to earn his nfts and forget about all his own stupid thoughts. The internet never goes down, paradoxically, with the fear that it could, it is the real world which goes down often. Even his serial modem connection was pretty stable. He logged into tojio-verse. He inserted one of his favorite disc buddies into the software slot, Rothko Maker. It's true, he knew how to hold a brush, he could paint charts in real oil, full reality 3d stuff, but he was having trouble with digital charts. Think like a child, it is said. With this disc software he felt some nostalgia for the pc cyber surf the web days of youth, here could be the breaking point, why not floppy disc software assisted art. He could only play it on breaks though, which could be enough, the best ideas and creations often come from the artist in an instant blink of the eye when it's least expected. The tojiba cpu factory, rated R. Basically he had to move nfts from one portion of the contract to another, through the game fi interface, a forklift operator essentially, then he earned his $ijot which he could exchange for cigarettes or other digital items, canvas and paints being even expensive here in the toji-verse, typical how life works like that.

Lalaidy was worried. If he really wanted her not to leave him, why was he spending so much time with the Tojis. Yes, it was Jofella who had begged her to accept his flaws, the crippled wrists, the autistic obsessions, there were many miladies, true, roughly 10,000, but most of them were either old men stinking fat men, or young wagmi cringecores, and the remainder, the actual females, were mostly already groomed, so having found, or rather groomed himself, a true female milady, she was not something to let go of. Art first, art first, art first, the youthful mantra echoing in his brain, he was not without chadliness, he had that ability to do whatever the fuck he wanted and still slay, he clicked some pixels onto he canvas, for he knew his true failure, he had not yet made a worthwhile nft pfp collection. The boss was giving him shit, slacking off, the one in his head, you aint a real muther fucka unless you create and operate an nft squadron. Smoke break over, the factory conveyor belts were starting back up, time to paint, he ejected rothko maker and put in toji paint. Fuck this game. He wanted to make a chart. He wanted to paint in real time. Paint the chart as it happened. But which one? Which would be the best one to capture the invasion. Boomer markets too boring. Best to stick with the old standard. Bitcoin. The king of charts. It was born in the chart, it was the chart. His painting style did not correspond well to live action paintings, one candle by one, as the moments clicked by. His chart paintings used several or dozens of layers of various oil paint application techniques, like rembrandt and Titian but charts, glowing red and green japanese candlestick chart with night mode black background, a chart style made popular by bitcoin traders. There was no way he could possibly live paint the chart, stream it, it would be streamed, the future would be streamed, if a painting wasn't live streamed did it even exist? Satellite live streams of russians gathering around frozen siberian missile silos appeared in the chat. He would have to hurry up, or else he’d miss the invasion. I need some assistance. Perhaps toji can be of help to me, perhaps i will have to use the computer for art, could the computer paint for me? He reinserted the rothko maker disc into the :a disc drive and inserted the toji-fi-kingdoms disc into the :b drive. Connection, disc drive belts whirring, cpu fans blowing, modems singing its 128b/s song, connecting these discs into the nft battle verse arena software.

“No mom, it's fine, I can't get on a plane anyways, it's all shut down, what do you want me to do? Sail a boat back to Canada? From Lisbon!? No! I’m staying here. I can't be an artist there. I’m about to sell some paintings…It’s just a little invasion, launch a few rockets at one the french colonies, one of those fuckin islands with gay tourists. There won't be any nukes or anything around here.” The classic phone the parents, put in your time every week or two. Not so bad. By this point he was basically full cash allocation in his trading portfolio, a few hodl bags, some stray meme coin shit bags, and of course the nfts, too illiquid to trade back and forth so fast. The markets were steadily and surely curling downwards, but the big plummet had not yet occurred.

He put his tojis to work for him, one of the benefits of the nft, he could string his toji nfts together in the toji-fi-verse into a toji mainframe super computer. The tojis would make the charts. Then he could sell the charts on the open market. There would be problems with transportation and the usual logistics of trucking, bartering and exchange, but the cross-continental trader software could take care of that. He wanted to send a crate of paintings back to his parents in Canada, container ship was the cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to ship such large chart paintings. He thought they would particularly appreciate the canadian housing market average sales price chart displaying the good timing of their boomer real estate investments. The container ship would sail its cargo up the Saint Lawrence river and seaway making its way into the interior of the continent, it was the river he was born and baptized in. It would only cost 600 $IJOT in the shipping container simulator portion of the game. Therefore he would need 600 $Ijot, so he popped in his second favorite toji game, "trader". 

The twitching of the body increases. Body reacts whenever his fingers poke around buttons and boxes in the trading interface. Under the waterfall gushing bright blue white pixel waterfall beautiful nympho myth scenery of little pokemons fucking behind the waterfall. Dratini was having an amazing life, with his lover and the bliss of existence, gorging up dragon fluids within the dragon organs. Jofella felt a kinship to dratini. It was something within the mifella bloodline, when opposites attract, the soft cuddly dratini nature of its juicy spirit, slippery and cute, shiny cock and ejaculations, could tame the harsh thrash punky style of mifella, such is love, or would it serve as a vessel making him even stronger, it is impossible to predict what will happen when two such powerful natures are combined into one. All just dreaming, just dreaming, one should not put too much energy into dreaming of love, art first, love second, back to the real game. Cargoed camel silhouettes crossed the silk road horizon in the sunset. Merchants exchanged sacks full of gold for wagons of prostitutes. Prices were hand drawn into a chart table of names and figures.

Micro life strategies, get that chart on the one minute, ticking candles vibing for a minute then moving on the next shit, fuck it, the macro situation may be fucked, my portfolio may be fuccked, but i can still scrape some pennies on low time frame charts. Helmet on, tunes cranked, window open, bitch spanked, tending to Lalaidy, cooked her breakfast, she's reclined in the bed listening to zoomer podcasts with the headphones on. Time for me to trade. Two gameboy colors, pokemon red to pokemon blue link cable, the image dissolves in his memory, no not that kind of trading, gunked up game cartridge, sticker label peeling. He could download whatever battle character he wanted. But what better character than himself, beaten and bastardized everyday banging his head against himself, screaming fuck under his breath, he would fuck up all the other pussies on the trading floor. One minute candle stabs down sharp on $cuckcoin, he hesitates, cursor over the buy button, looks at his feed, #cuck is trending in the cb radio channels, fuck it, he buys. A contortion takes over his body, he leans back in his chair, rolls his head over the back, stuck in the chair, the chair falls over to the side onto the floor, crashing with the candles, he squirms, cucked again, he looks up at the computer screen from the ground and closes the position for a loss, hand still gripping the mouse, hand always gripping the mouse. Get up, try again. At least it was making good streaming material. His viewers in the chat dropped some flame emojis.

Jofella was already experiencing a phantom evolution, like a phantom pregnancy. His body was a slime goo morphing fluidity becoming solid and slippery, re-cacooning, deep long sleep in comfort, recolorization, new cute slippery body form, ready to slide into anything, or be slid into, but with the rocket launcher over his shoulder and computer augmented vision monocle over his eye, attached to his harsh noise blasting helmet headset, no one was fucking with him. He was in the Trader battlefield, Ukrainian war zone, wheat fields, tanks blasting. The Russians launch a tactical nuke at the john deere tractor storage facility, wheat prices sky rocket. How do I trade this? he thinks to himself. No idea really, he wasn't actually a good war time trader, when the skills were really needed. He was addicted, and only knew what to do when the markets calmed down and everyone else had quit, and there he would pick up the trending pieces of scrap and hodl for the next pump. But war was fun, and to compensate for a lack of skill he kept a digital trading card of his queen tucked up in his helmet. Princess Driladytini, the exotic kiss of the dragon, through her he would and could do all things, but only if she commanded him. If he did a good job, she would give him one sweet lick of her dragon goddess organ, which for any one mortal pokemon would be enough nectar to last a lifetime. With his back up against a burned out tree trunk, he fondled and fantasized over her picture, he thought of his love relaxing comfortably in the bed at home, all for Lalaidy.

In the end, he decided to sell a few freely minted milady derivatives and call it a day at the trading terminal. He just couldn't do it now. He had enough $ijot from the sale to ship the paintings to his parents. He quit the streaming program. You should always assume jofella is live streaming unless stated otherwise. He felt exposed, dirty, he logged into the router and turned off the port forwarding on his streaming ports. A little bit better. He turned around away from his desk to check on Lalaidy in the bed, but she wasn't there. She wasn’t in the apartment at all. There was an sms from her on his toji flip phone. “Joffrey you are a sick crippled faggot creep. You never pay any attention to me or care about what I am going through at all. You trade so much and you suck at it and you are on the computer so much your wrists are crippled and you can't even masturbate yourself. You are depressed and a loser now. Everyday I get messages from other guys asking me to cuck them, why do you think I should stay with you when you behave in your life like this? Haven't you realized the internet is lame, nfts are lame, stupid anime pictures, trying to impress online losers, you don't even like anime or pixels, yet the pixel is killing you. I saw your live stream just now and i was the only viewer, viewing myself in the background behind you, and i realized that i'm an even bigger loser than you since i was hoping you could create a nice life for us with your virility and trading money. But i think now you will have neither. I am not leaving you for good, i have just gone to my studio to paint, you know, real oil paintings, like a real person, in the flesh. I will come back again in one week, and I expect to see a brush in your hand, with the room full of paintings, and the stink of layers of layers of oil and turpentine, instead of the stink of failed attempts to jerk yourself with limp wrists.”

III.

Brown Hitleresque shitstain of detritus snuff powder in the mustache stubble under his nostril. Sniffing, snorting, snarlinging, crushed Hells Angels speed pills, powdered around the console, sniffed and fallen out of the other nostril. Rheinmetall portable typewriter keyboard with the ultra-rare SS symbol on the three key instead of a hashtag and a swastika on the 8 key instead of an asterisk (must remember no hashtags when posting), picked up at the Naschmarkt flea market in Vienna, just for historical interest and my online edginess, helps really dive into the computer, wires on all the key levers jacked into an IBM keyboard ribbon connector, slows the typing down a bit but every keystroke comes with reflection and power. As long as he kept proper ergonomic sitting position with chair and desk alignment his wrist pain, even pounding the typewriter keys and springed levers, twisting and cranking carriage knobs and buttons like a dj hemingway hacker day trader was manageable. 

It was all turning there around the screen. All arousal on the screen, no, must resist the urge for internet arousal, the markets are moving, all eyes on the markets, close all distraction tabs of egirls and smut streams. His mouse was now a paintbrush, he applied painting to a sensor tablet of wherever he wanted to click, however shitty the resulting abstraction would be, he had to squeeze out every last bit of art from his activity. The candles were printing, literally, on the chart, and also from the printer, an old dot matrix thermal print head, no ink, like a from a cash register terminal. And then, the paper unrolls, all in one piece, rolling out of the printer into buckets of ink and paint, where the paper may fall, receiving its color bath randomly in red, green or black glowing liquid. Upon drying, he would then re-feed the paper into the scanner feeder and load into the toji paint pro software, assembling the trash art into proper looking charts, and coded into nfts, sending off to the Venetian Art Academy to be rendered in old master oil painting techniques, glazes, scumbles, chiaroscuros, grisailles, impasto finishes of thick lead white for the final touch of light’s most potent reflection on the canvas.

All this while the market was moving, while he was trading, alone, focused, art first, trading first, arousal second. All this while the cameras turned their auto-focus in and out on his bobbing head, caged in the helmut, freeze, static buffering the frames, 480p, 1080p, switching around, pixelated, then full hd. The bombs were flying off. All the cameras of the conflict zone were clogging the network airwaves. Everything is an explosion. Little bombs in my head when neurons fly, little bombs in the air when words are spoken. The visual data on the screen blowing bombs in my eyes. I must come up with a more efficient chart painting method, he thought. There must be a way to transfer the chart's explosion through my eyes into my head then directly from there onto the canvas without such roundabout methods. No time for that. Focus. He made sure the chart printing and scanning was feeding properly. All good. Always productive, feeling good. The military activity visible on the street out his window was increasing. The video clips on his screen were attempting to explain it. Screencast, screen sharing, close up of his face, he switches camera A to his chart painting apparatus, and camera B out the window, on his screen were updates from the Italian art academy, quickly producing his works. Bless those poor, skilled italians, they do much better work than the eastern europeans or the chinese. Still, all were faring better than the French, apparently. French people were speaking on the videos about their explosions. Russia had followed through with its threats apparently. Europe was under attack. He didn't want to jump to any conclusions just yet, should he sell everything he still had? Surely the markets would continue plummeting lower and lower, but they can't just vanish, everything always bounces and recovers at least a bit. Perhaps Europe wasn't really under attack, it was just France they were talking about, as far as he could see and hear. He looked out the window, there was no smoke over the Vienna skyline, just sirens. Safe, not part of Nato, thankfully, he was really counting on the Russian oligarchs to buy his charts of the Russian ruble during this chaotic time. Please just leave Vienna alone, he thought, the gateway to the east. It was in Vienna where the dream of connecting the east with a foot in the west was possible, charts always move along with time to the right, and to the east, it is the natural direction of history, the far right and east, but with Vienna's social support system. Heaven was here. A notification dinged off his phone informing him of an incoming bank deposit from the artist's support grant during difficult economic times. He didn't even need to apply for it.

Jofella was not right wing, not knowing what it meant, he repeated things to himself he scrolled over online, he was also scared of the east, preferring instead to weeb out over the steppe culture, the connection between the east and west, the magical race of green eyed, red haired and tan skinned horse riders. All future wars would be fought here, all nfts fighters would travel here inside pokeballs hung on belts to the arena. The other arena would be the frozen north of canada, vast unmanned spaces, only capable of virtual habitation, it was obvious these voids would be criss-crossed with wires, commanded from the city states with nft attackers. Who would breed the best designs, who would cross breed pop culture, japanese animations, pokemon and degenerate crack art into ever greater evolutions, these were the problems being worked out by the coders, codermons. Marine Le Pen, the struggling francaise politician, was speaking, she was denying the affair with Putin, Putin, however was claiming they had a sexual relationship, that he had penetrated her vigorously as he would penetrate the nation with explosive bombs, warheads. Who fucking cares, as the semen ejaculate the cock has spoken. I do understand the appeal of a powerful right wing female politician, his mistake was looking for it in the french, as was the historical weakness of the russians, I myself would have gone for the italian, the truly skilled fascists, in the political arena and the bedroom, there could be no better woman to dominate you than an italian fascist one. Marine Le Pen failed to gain power, this would be devastating to a man like Putin. All speculation of course. The french being poor pokemon players and controllers of the virtual spaces would have no place in the future. 

I didn't give a shit about Lyon either, no one did. Jofella was filled with spray paint, as a two dimensional inscription, spray paint hits across his body filled the image, the rest, the details and outlines, were pixels, his helmet was pixels with spray paint on it, soviet insignia, defender of the people. Any chart painting sent back from italy missing a certain special something could simply be hit with the spray or a few streaks of pixels. He was already composing a track, Hikkikimori Hiroshimas of Lyon, death smog of the fallen city. In his younger days he and the other fellas called it ‘jizzing it down’. Obscure the art work with a thin layer, mystify it, remove the awkwardness of the human hand. The Italians called it a glaze or a scumble, but the glaze is not cracked out enough for the aims of contemporary culture. In his track there were many such elements, one could say all the elements were jizz down layers, hits of the spray, secretions of pixels, not to say that it was entirely ambient or pure noise. Melodious and citational in his nature, any artwork in the hands of Jofella couldnt help but become a song of its time and place like a Jan Steen genre painting of everyday Dutch life in the golden age. In this case, history was humming. The putin live stream clips were a must, of course, no need for reverb, it was all already there, all of life and the world is reverb. Which us to say, his sampling methods were archaic, his computer was an older Toji model from the early 90’s, and he’d had to wire in his own sound card, hacked out of the later pocket model, the integration was not seamless.

Gun shots would be a bit too barbaric for him, he was more of a rocket launcher kinda guy, no street gangsta, however putin used a gun, so he found a solution in slowing down the clip, then in feeling it gave off a little too much of a metaphysics of the gunshot vibe, a window into the nature of the gunshot, too cinematic, he reversed it and sped it up and twisted it around. But imagine putin had used a rocket launcher, Jofella thought, imagine how cool it would be to kill yourself with a rocket launcher, it would do so much more justice to the explosive nature of the universe, evaporating your corpse back into the dust of the big bang, copulation with the stars and planets sinking into black holes burning and succumbing to gravity. Okay, first part of the track done, this is sick. Oh shit, he then realized, I forgot about the charts. There are only so many things that can make Jofella forget about the charts, two that I can think of, making art and micro fishing. He does not mind when he gets lost in the sauce of such weighty things as he knows he has truly lived the meaning of his life in these moments of divine distraction. However, once reminded of the charts and awoken from his engagement with the meaning of life slumber, he must return to the trade. He was waiting for the bottom, what he thought would be the bottom, goddam the price was sinking so so low, people were panicking hard. Why? he thought. Putin nuked one french city no one cares about then killed himself on live stream. The world is not gonna end. His plan was to go in with leverage once a healthy market structure indicating a bottom was forming. He had learned from the Covid crash not to use too much leverage, give yourself some space, with low enough leverage and enough margin in his account the price would have to go to absolute zero in order for him to get liquidated, and there's no way it could go all the way to zero.