Jofella - The Rise of Dratini and the Toji NFT Battle Verse expansion pack - Chapter 1
THE TRADER FICTION SAGA CONTINUES
This post begins a new volume of the Trader Fiction sage. It is in some senses a prequel to the the first volume, Windmill Pulp: 1649. They are both parts of one larger plot, but each volume can be read as a stand alone work. Nevertheless, having read both will broaden the depth of the world apparent to the reader and enrich the story. More stand alone but synchronous volumes are intended to be written following this one. I beleive it will be possible to read them in any order, or as I said, simply read any one of them. In ‘Jofella’, our charater from the first volume, Joffrey, has taken on a new form having become autisticly obsessed with an NFT collection known as Mifella, along with derivitive and related collections and all their lore.
This chapter was originally published at that1yempejji
An audio version is here included (scroll down for text):
Digging, scratching at the dirt walls, tunneling the dirt, stopping when dirt gets too hard, digging away at another spot beside, getting nowhere, then somewhere, a little dirt hole nest. A private hollowed out corner. “Cut your fingernails Jofella!” He had to cut them to stop the voice. Cleaner this way under the nails at least. But less easy to scratch and dig. So stopped digging. Simple solution. Back to the computer. Compressed air on the desk, blow out the keyboard. Keeping it dust and dirt free, but only the loose dry stuff, still a layer of grime around the system. A certain mangledness inhabits the body, the veins and tendons feel twisted and tense, preventing certain actions. Cant step out of the boundaries. Stay put and try to focus. Seraquils restocked. Snuff refreshed, a fresh silver dollar tin. Cant listen to music even. What the fuck. Brain too fried. Gotta focus. Gotta look at the charts. Fuck I hate this stuff. KIlling me. All the past year has been killing me. I am not who I am. Need to get out of this hole. Need to take a bath. Enough with these showers. As november ends december approaches, and the cold, the winter, the season of the hot bath. The only things that can get me to turn on the boiler. Energy tokens are not for the radiators, but for the bath water. This mifella had had some crypto money. At the top of the bubble he had something going on in the accounts, the dust of decimals had exploded into whole numbers and multiplied with each other creating a large index of tokens and items in his accounts. The supplies were now dwindling.
The energy token prices were on the rise and his trading group chat mates told him it would go even higher, the evidence was all there in the charts. December 2021, the pain of the charts. Bitcoin had peaked and so had the comforts of the world and the joys and happiness of the economic boom. Jofella was this fella's name in fact. A cross between his real name Joffrey and Mifella, the mercenary squandron to which he belonged, but also because he wears a Jofa branded hockey helmet, not all the time, just for all things requiring a helmet, as the world can be a dangerous place, and one who is desperate and worn down is liable to play dangerous games. It was the hockey helmet of his youth. Not so much hockey no more, he was a soldier. The fuck heads had pumped up the markets with money printing and lockdowns. Blasting fucking tracks hard out the speakers and the headphones all day, maxxing out bliss tones, double songs, eight at a time, zero doomer life living. The boomers pumped out all the bags. All the fucking crypto coins exploding prices in our pockets. Staying in his apartment all day Jofella collected the cash ordering food from an app painting oil paintings on his wall in his underwear, writing books and composing tracks. Artistic 60’s utopia confined to his mind in his hollowed out corner of the world alone alone in his room. Jalapeno flavor maxxing. Group chat living, going out at night park playing, noise chat symposium pocket phone soiled couch artists meeting. Gliding down the street concealing smiles bouncing at numbers going up. But through this all pain was the inverse coexistence of the yang. Behind every pump is a sleepless night of the crashing pull back triggering stops. Bad trades peppered in with good ones. Stressed out about the buy, goes down. Something pumps then he sells too early. Could have made a jiollion, now only thousands. Could have moved to manhattan, now stuck in Vienna.
The dust does not fail to collect. Absorbing the oily grime from the atmosphere. Weighs it down, snowballs of dust grime rolling off the keys, smacking keys hard with the fingertips, bought an old mechanical keyboard, high key travel distance and strong spring tension, smacking the keyboard so hard, the old IBM is not enough, thinking of jacking up an old remington typewriter into a usb output Im bashing these mother fucking keys, so pissed off at the market, so pissed off at language, so many thoughts, so many trades and trading ideas and things to say. It was not all good. Have to get away from the computer, completely must get away, its destroying me. Solution: type everything I wanna type on a typewriter, early to mid century aesthetic fashions, similar to the automobile, motorbikes and ceramics. Wanna go to a website, type the address in ink on the paper roll sheet, endless roll like a dot matrix printer, take pic with toji phone, auto text extract and copy to computer keyboard, ctrl V into the address bar, enter the site. This slows things down a bit. One can truly appreciate surfing the web, fall down in the foaming surf, swim back out, re-surf. Bleeding fingers into nickel rimmed glass key caps, falling face first into type bar machinery, clanking grinding metal, cutting up face, posting his dreams into the keys, evaporating his eyes by what he saw staring back at him in the screen. You wanna go somewhere else, gotta repeat the process, wanna send a message? Type it out on the typewriter and follow the toji text extraction workflow. \
The truth was, as is almost the same with any honest question to any honest person, that the times were hard, even during the aggressive pumps. Underneath the hot sexy skin of the pump the evil festers. At was cost is so much life. Robbing little boys of their crypto monnies, even grown men. Sucked into the liquidity of the graph. A milli0n ways I can't explain. I can't explain anything. I got a gf when my portfolio crossed a million. Not a coincidence and also a coincidence. We already know when the market pumps the world pumps. The grooming cults of the 1960’s and seventies knew it. We are all one holding hands into eternity. Then the chain breaks and chaos erupts. Its no coincidence that all went so well for everyone in 2021, the best year of all time. The only obstacle to human freedom is the cruel reversal of the graph as the fibonacci swirl rounds its evil corner. There is no escape but submission to a force more divine that needs no human face. We found this in trading. We thought we had found it in 2021. But we always knew we hadnt. We always felt the pain of the trade. Being in a position means being in pain. Awareness of the body, contorted from its base state into a position. Positions are against the grain. To be holding a trading position is to be suffering the contortion of the position. The awkward contortions of the sexual position do have their positive negation hidden somewhere in the sexual pursuit. And the trade has the gain from selling the top. But the drainage occurs all through the cycle. There would be no money left in the end. I have my nfts and I have my friends.
Smashing at the keys, peering deeply into the interface. Body twitching. The body has outgrown itself. A dratini appears on my right shoulder, holographic, rare, then fades, scratched, poor condition, worthless. The price begins to fall. The prices begin to fall, all the assets. 2022 appears on the horizon. So much artistic integrity. So many hours of artistic work. So many hours of work behind the charts. Sitting in the driver's seat of the video game. Sitting there bored. Remember all the hours sitting there bored, dried out skin, just looking at my wall, tilted bookshelf, 80% flawless white wall. Mifella does not evolve into drifella in an instant. And indrafella does not appear on the steppe without an invasion. All eyes were on the Russian wheat fields on the Ukrainian border. Toji battle verse nft battle game, a new cartridge, fresh in the mail. Then the eyes drifted back to the charts. Erratic pumps from sleeper coins, catching everyone off guard, inducing fomo, regret, high tension. Teeth clenching, forearm crippled from clicking the mouse, account balances slowing disintegrating with every click. Every click is a bad trade, a late buy, an early sell, missing all the moves, capturing all the loses. Nothing is making any sense. The assert valuations are not making any sense. The films are not making any sense. The conversations with friends are not making any sense. The relationships are not making any sense. Crippled and contorted in the socius, accumulating dust, weighed down, workers trudge through the world working away at their shit but the results are vague and obscured in the muddy atmosphere. Will this be another chance now? The invasion. Charts were circulating of previous market activity around prior invasions igniting prior wars. The invasion always brought on a CRASH. But the traders see it coming and start selling early, so the crash happens leading up to the invasion, everyone panics, the world panics. Little things not fitting together properly and crumbling down. So, wanting to be knowledgeable and correct and proper acting in all situations presented to us, we thought, wanted to think, dared to believe, slime of us, that it was a ‘buy the invasion’ kind of scenario.
Jofella strapped on his red Jofa hockey helmet preparing for war. When the invasion starts the fun starts. When the invasion starts, all our low points, all our stress, all our confusions begin to clear up and slowly improve, but not without difficulty, nothing in this life without difficulty. At first it is a sharp high improvement, we are eager to speculate on happiness, optimism, collectively held by all us actors, help each other up, the negative liquidity from the invasion sellers dries up, no more negative energy around here, get the fuck out with that shit, but us positive forward thinking ones inevitably leave some soldiers behind in the bottom of the muddy ditch. In fact, a piece of everyone is always left behind in these muddy ditch conditions. Maybe you caught the bottom a little bit but it doesnt negate the losses, and you will make more bad moves in the false euphoria of the bounce. All eyes on the eurasian steppe. The ancient cultural zone of unknown human activities. Suddenly Russian culture seemed 5 degrees cooler. Perhaps even cheeseburgers originated on the steppe, tenderizing meat into a pulp under the saddle of horse back rides, riding primitively stirrupped horses hard across steppe. Shut the fuck up. Whatever. Jofella was cool as shit. When I told him this in a slip of the tongue he felt embarrassed for me and stopped feeling chill around me. I need to regain his friendship by being chill around him and not sucking his dick. But he is a sexy little guy so it's difficult.
Suddenly Jofella was feeling a little more Russian. He wired some headphones into his helmet and blasted GDR techno to the max. He booted his USSR synthesizer into his laptop fuzzified some social housing dystopia aesthetic beats. He’d gleaned that Russia has trad life and beautiful women. The uglier the man, the more beautiful his wife, the more disgusting and drunk the man, the more charming and kind the wife. It was too late for those thoughts, he was too lazy to move out of his apartment and go to war. The war would have to come to him. And it would soon enough. All cool action leads to war. He was doing many cool things and inevitably would encounter fierce resistance, enemies, sabotage attempts, haters. He was already evolving, his body was changing. Damage points incurred, distress level rises, wrist pain. Jackerz wrist they called it at the doctors. Too much usage of the wrists. Pain in the tendons all through his arms, hands and fingers. Even the back. Into the spine. You must capture the spine, his art teacher told him. The spine is the structural essence. His spine was now failing him. He was imobile, could do almost nothing with his hands. His gf, Lalaidy, gave him a pity handjob before making herself nearly scarce, a beautiful slow crescendo handjob from an angel of the nft verse he would remember for the rest of his life. He had been doing too much, too much trading, too much scrolling, too much painting, and writing too many manifestos. “Nicht so viel Manifestos schreiben,” his greco-austro doktor advised him. I must now help him in writing his manifesto as he has evolved beyond this universe into the seismic realms of his artistic quest, didn’t he little Dratini? (His young daughter, still with us, but she has his mifella eyes)
As his bodily health deteriorated, his crypto balance continued to decline. Yes he had bought the Ukrainian invasion, but that was over, new market traps had been snaring him at every possible land mine in the muddy spring fields. The war was no joke now. Reports came in from train stations and farmers fields, tik tok war correspondents. We knew when we saw the tanks rolling down the street below my window in Vienna 6th district, the same neighborhood hitler lived in while the city radicalized him. Images circulating of soldiers crowding train stations all across the vienna-berlin line, government vehicles and personnel occupying street corners. Excavators hoarding across farmers fields like deer. This was fun. Jofella hadnt felt this cool since the march 2020 covid market crash when we thought shit was really gonna go down. Stalled out, another buy the invasion scenario. Gotta develop a strategy, how to play the market dynamics, a chance to make back all the past years losses in one trade. He made sure the helmet was strapped on tight. Rocket launcher trait on the nft, scroll the the traits, designing new traits. There is a satisfaction when one has accomplished a slight amount of artistic work in a day, when waking up eternally groggy, and brain jackings seem so far away, but pushed through, managing to compose an image or some imaginings into something tangible, such a joy Jofella felt, looking at his newly produced gulf war signature series rocket propelled grenade launcher, over the shoulder, looking into the eye of eternity and the minefield of art and life, the war was coming.
His nft collection was growing, now that i mention them, the haterz will hate, but as the usd value of his wallet plummeted, the jpg quantity continued to increase in quantity and quality, the mints were getting cheaper, often even free for owning a milady, yeche or toji. He looked at his wallet often, he tracked collection sales and prices of ones he owned like the weather, it was a good market like the weather, only needed to check the prices at most once a day, not like the coins where one needed to be aware of the prices at all times. Trading is not an easy life, but like Gauguin with his tarpaulins, isaac newton in the south sea bubble, artists can now support themselves trading, the true punk artists, all vanity is sucked into trading, all need for money sucked into trading, all clout. And the rest is free to leave it all in the stall. Jofella had that. All things negative in his being were occupied by the charts, and all things positive occupied by the arts. And the rest into himself, an angel of being, the divine boy, in his better moments. We know nfts are gay (or lame to be more polite) but he would also say the art world gay if it wasn't for the fact that most the times he’d gotten laid was after art world openings. It was true, he’d never gotten laid because of an nft. But it didnt matter, all things cool are called gay in the beginning, and he sure as hell was not gay, aside from regrettable in sobriety situations, his cock was kinda nice, and it is easy for a penis like that to find itself in all sorts of situations.
He did not intend for his mind to go there, it was simply easier for jofella to approach things through the gaytalk humor of his early teens to give himself a little lighter of an approach in his treatment of value judgments, the truth is all between the lines and obscured as ever. But he did have his nfts, that was a fact, and they made him happy, gay. You cannot look into the eyes of my fella and want his happiness to be taken away. Maybe it wasn't happiness, true happiness, straight elevation, but they were quantified in happiness points, granted by the factory boss. He earned $ijot at the computer factory, and so the boss told them, one $ijot was one unit of happiness, a dollar earned, a smiled shared, a cigarette or nickel in his future daughter’s education fund. You can play games with nfts, being digital entities, they are already installed on the computer, no cd-rom required, furthermore, the toji 1000 had dual floppy drives, should you need to easily transfer any data, swap your fellas with a friend without needing to go on chain. He realized there, in thinking about this, that he had lots of nfts he could send off the battle in the coming war, around 50-60 mifellas and many, many disc buddies, for the wars of the future, according to the description on the toji nft battle verse game packaging, will be fought with computers, software discs, infected with viruses, disc buddy virus infectors to the rescue, and inevitably, pokemon or pokemon like creatures controlled by testosterone boosted teens on their toji pocket 3s, expansion pack, infrared connection dongles, nft warrior mons.
All distractions aside, the news broadcasts were somewhat troubling to him, not that he watched the news, rather the news clips managing to make their way into the sidebar of his nft appreciation interface. Sometimes he had to disable adblocker for a moment to click pop ups giving him access to rare virus infected nfts, safely sealed in wrapper contracts by the toji wallet. He really would need to get his shit together, asset prices were dropping across the board, the french had gone too far this time, provoking the russians like that, but i do understand, a little nostalgia for the pre-white palace days when all things french were appreciated through and through, on the tongue of speech and the palate of caviar, down the into the imperial cellars stacked high with champagne. Jofella decided he would cook a pot of beef stroganov for dinner to accentuate the historical moment. That is, if he could even get through the grocery store, with all the hoards of people scrambling through the streets and crowding the aisles, stocking up on all their insecurities and fixations in product format.
Not yet being the approach of supper time, he turned up the music and turned on the webcams, remaining at his battle station. Merzbow live set busting the speakers, black flag six pack pushing him to crush a few beers, Burzum the holy nordic god for the icy soul… Of course his neighbors through the paper thin walls thought it sounded fucked, but even most his friends thought it sounded like shit. He cranked it louder. He was jittering now, arms twitching, head gently nodding to the possible rhythm. He turned the brightness up on his screen, he put his face closer to it, music related tabs, trading tabs, chats, obs live streaming software. He was live streaming two cameras to videos embedded in his webpage, one was from a usb webcam pointed out his window at the street below, the other was built into the computer and pointed at his swaying upper body and face. Live streaming his trading in a small window. Popped in the Toji nft battle verse disc. Shit rolled down the screen. Sirens whipping off with blue and red flashing lights on the street, droning noise music swirling off in his room and bleeding out the window, all the sound and video was streaming and being recorded with screen caps and mics, feedback and all. He had to assemble an army. His little nft guys had to battle. He was reading the pixels. Other armies were forming, other nfts, the russians had nfts, the chinese had nfts, even other mercenary groups, allies. He checked the viewer count on the streams, 3 viewers, one of those possibly included himself, but there were some comments, fire in the chat. He was making it, he had finally made it. Police officer voices from the loud speakers, they piss him off, he shuts the window, minding the webcam, maintaining the stream. 5 viewers now. The battle was drawing near. He informed the fellas in the chat, they had to arm themselves, they had to pop in this disc, not necessarily with weapons, but with cracked art. He was making cracked art. He was more than just a streamer. 6 viewers. All in a day's work. I am an artist, he thought to himself, taking off his tendonitis wrist splints, pretty much, pretty much as good as everyone said it would be.
-Earl16o1
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...the saga continues. Stay tuned for more adventures
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artwork by Drifella himself