Category: Essays

These are my non-fiction essays.

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Why NFTs Aren’t Worth It for Artists (or Humanity at Large)

At some point during this year, you might have encountered the abbreviated term “NFT” on the Internet. Most often, this is in reference to the sale of digital artwork or other images being sold and purchased online for what can be colossal amounts of money. For example, an entire series of NFTs known as the “Lazy Lions” — all of them simple cartoon depictions of lions with assorted expressions and articles of fashion — has sold for 1.93 million US dollars in total, with the statistically average price for a Lazy Lion NFT approximating $5.6 grand. Over the course of 2021, the NFT market has ballooned, with websites such as Crypto.com and OpenSea being dedicated to the selling and auctioning of these images.

On the plains of Pleistocene Africa, an early Homo sapiens woman must fend off a pride of hungry lions!

As a professional digital artist myself, it wouldn’t be honest of me if I said that I wasn’t tempted by this trend at first. Full-time artists like myself commonly struggle with earning enough income to get through life as independent citizens, in no small part because customers willing to pay for commissions or printed copies of our work can be few and far between for most of us. If people are willing to pay several grand for simple cartoon portraits of lions (or, alternatively, apes) in NFT form, then one can be forgiven for thinking that selling our works on the burgeoning NFT scene might be lucrative for themselves.

However, I have since changed my mind. I no longer think NFTs are worth it for artists like me and can in fact have undesirable consequences not only for ourselves but also all of humanity.

But first, I must explain what an NFT is.

The term “NFT” is short for “non-fungible token”. Each NFT is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data that is recorded in a sort of digital ledger known as a blockchain. Previously, blockchains have been used as a basis for special “virtual currencies” (or cryptocurrencies) like Bitcoin, which have proven particularly popular with right-wing “libertarians” as well as criminals since they operate independently of any national government. Just as people would record transactions paid with cryptocurrencies in their blockchains, now they use the same technology to record NFTs they have obtained.

How does this apply to art? Herein lies the catch. When someone buys an NFT based on a piece of digital artwork, what they are buying is not the artwork itself, but a unique digital receipt saying they own that artwork which goes into their blockchain ledger. Nothing is printed and shipped to their home, nor is any new artwork created for their use as in a commission. All they have purchased is a little note that says, “I own this.”

If you think about it, it is not only the work an artist has produced themselves that can become NFTs. One could theoretically download any image from the Internet and use it to sell NFTs, and indeed many unscrupulous individuals have profited off making NFTs out of artwork they have stolen from others. We artists already have enough of a problem with thieves using our work to sell products without permission or compensation, and yet the rise of NFTs appears to have aggravated this ill even further.

This, by itself, might not deter an artist from making NFTs of their own work, any more than earlier forms of art theft have discouraged us from sharing and selling our work. Personally, I have decided that I am more honored by people buying a physical print of my work to exhibit at home or in public, or paying me to make new artwork, than I am by someone buying a mere digital receipt for their blockchain that claims they own a work I created. But, as I said earlier, I can see why other artists might want to take advantage of the NFT market.

Sahelanthropus, the earliest-known hominin?

There is still a fundamental problem with NFTs, and anything based on blockchain technology in general, and that is that the entire process of recording transactions on blockchains consumes a shockingly high amount of electric energy due to its computational complexity. One simple transaction on a blockchain platform like Ethereum (which is one popular with NFT vendors) can consume over 180 kilowatts of energy, exceeding six days’ worth of electric consumption for the average American household. The average NFT transaction can be even higher than that, reaching up to 340 kilowatts on some websites, equating to a typical resident of the European Union’s consumption of electricity over one month. One shudders to think of the collective footprint of all the NFTs that have been sold to blockchains all over the world.

In a world where we got all our electricity from nuclear or renewable sources, this might not seem so bad. In the real world, on the other hand, we are still predominantly dependent on fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and petroleum to produce our electricity (among other technologies). This continues to flood our atmosphere with an excess of greenhouse gases at a rate unprecedented over hundreds of millennia, with disastrous effects on our global climate that kill more than 150,000 human beings every year. Mind you, most of these greenhouse gas emissions (about 71%) are coming from the activities of only a hundred major corporations rather than all the NFTs combined so far. But, considering that NFTs amount to nothing more than glorified receipts in online ledgers, they are not worth the additional wounds they inflict upon our planet.

Every artist wants to profit from their work, but nobody wants to live in an overcooked world. So, while we are still dependent on destructive fossil fuels for our electrical needs, I would not recommend bothering with NFTs at all.

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An Artist’s Guide to Growing Your Style

Oshun, the Yoruba orisha of love and beauty, takes a bath in the Nigerian river that bears her name.

Once you begin a career in the visual arts — whether your chosen path is drawing, painting, sculpting, 3D modeling, or anything else — one of the questions that may be on your mind is, “How can I develop my own art style?”

Mind you, not every artist out there sets out with the goal of developing a unique style for themselves. Some are perfectly comfortable emulating other art styles that they admire. A lot of Japanese animation and comic books, for example, look similar enough in their visual style that we can speak of a distinctive “anime” style with everyone understanding what we mean. For that matter, many artistic traditions around the world and throughout time have artists producing works with shared stylistic traits to the degree that we can recognize which culture produced what artform. We all know what ancient Egyptian art generally looks like, for example, even though their vast corpus of work was produced by generations of different artisans over the course of multiple centuries.

Nonetheless, I believe there is a certain honor to be found in developing an individual style that viewers can recognize as the artist’s own. In democratic societies like ours that place value on personal autonomy and freedom, it’s a commonplace sentiment to want to stand out from the crowd in one way or another, and having your own style is one way of accomplishing that. Furthermore, a recognizable style can go a long way in “building your own brand” if you want to profit from your work, as well as cultivating a loyal following of fans and patrons.

So just how do you get your own art style, anyway?

I cannot speak for all artists who have developed a style, but I can speak for myself. So, what I will tell you is the story of how my own style evolved.

I’ve been drawing since my kindergarten years, but it was in my high school years when I got more serious about it and set out to improve. The way I went about this, in the beginning, was to consult various art instruction books for guidance on drawing techniques as well as references for human and animal anatomy, poses, clothing, and weaponry, among many others. Particularly important was a series of books published by Watson-Guptill, with authors and artists such as Steve Miller and Bryan Baugh, that showed you how to draw subject matter such as dinosaurs and other creatures, martial artists, fantasy characters, and soldiers and military equipment. But I had many others as well, including works by Tom Nguyen, Christopher Hart, and even Marvel giants such as Stan Lee and John Buscema.

Antony and Cleopatra embrace along the shoreline of Alexandria, Egypt in 40 BC.

A lot of these instructional books had a comic-book theme, in that they said they would teach you how to draw Western-style comics, and the artists whose works were featured in them often had a background in comics, cartooning, or animation. So it is likely that I picked up a certain comic-book aesthetic from these artists. It wasn’t that I set out to draw my own comics specifically, but rather that I learned my way of drawing from comic-book artists.

However, these artists would not have been my only influence. Another would have been the animated movies I grew up watching, such as those produced by Disney and Dreamworks during the 1990s to 2000s. Probably the most important for me was Disney’s Tarzan, which I maintain is the most beautiful hand-drawn animated movie they have ever done, but I think there is a little bit of The Prince of Egypt bleeding into my depictions of ancient Egyptian people and culture as well. If my style seems cartoony to some viewers, those influences from Western animation are probably why.

As much as I may have been influenced by the media I consumed in my youth, I believe that, for the most part, my personal art style was something I developed not immediately but over time as I kept drawing. By far the most crucial ingredients in my artistic growth over the years have been regular practice, studying from life and references, and taking into account constructive feedback I have received from others. Without those, I would have never gotten to the level I am at today. The style I currently draw in is the result of an arduous journey that has lasted over thirteen years as of this writing.

I would advise any beginning artists to take the same route that I did if they want to develop their own style. Keep practicing your craft, with the aid of accurate references and feedback, and your style will develop on its own. In the beginning, your approach will be influenced by the media you take in, as happens to all artists. But, over time, the style of your work will become its own thing which you can call your own. Styles are not invented, they are grown.

Tyrannosaurus rex is smelling the air for breakfast on a foggy Late Cretaceous morning.
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“King Kong” as a Horror Film for the Imperialist Age

King Kong battles a Tyrannosaurus rex in the rainforests of Skull Island

In the book Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), author Danny Peary declares the 1933 film King Kong “the greatest of all horror films” with “masterly special effects”. To modern audiences, even those that appreciate the original King Kong as an important landmark in the history of cinema, this might appear a hyperbolic assertion that sorts it into the wrong genre. While the film has more than its fair share of violence, bloodshed, and screaming characters, its almost non-stop action and bold fanfare score could not differ more from the eerie, quieter style of today’s entries in the horror genre.

Nonetheless, there can be no dispute that moviegoers back in the 1930s found it pretty scary. For example, one critic from the Los Angeles Times called it a “first class nightmare” and warned prospective viewers that “some of the horrors, it must be said, are a little strong.” (Morton 2005).

So what was it about King Kong that made it a horror film in the eyes of 1930s audiences? I will argue that this original perception is rooted in the film’s presentation of subject matter that the generation that created and consumed it, most especially Europeans and Americans of European heritage, would have generally perceived as horrific as a product of the imperialist culture they had partaken in.

First there is the subject of Kong himself, who for all intents and purposes is a gorilla that has evolved to gigantic proportions. Back when the film was made, few if any people in the European cultural sphere understood gorillas as the relatively peaceful, primarily vegetarian relatives of humanity studied by Dian Fossey (1983) and other primatologists. Beginning in the 19th century, the common European stereotype of gorillas was one of violent brutes prone to abducting women and attacking hunters in the Central African rainforest (Brightwell 2014). Such portrayals of course had less in common with these animals’ actual behavior than the Victorian-era appetite for exotic sensationalism and prejudices about how “subhuman” beings (including non-European people, as will be explained later) would act.

The character of Kong is nothing if not a scaled-up, one-dimensional embodiment of these originally Victorian myths about gorillas. His oversized fangs and bug-eyed glare, especially when contrasted with the dark coloring of his body in the black-and-white film, convey an appearance of predatory and inhuman menace further supported by his homicidal behavior towards almost every living thing he comes across. Not only does he kill every prehistoric beast that challenges him on the island, but he tramples and slaughters some of the local population and their dwellings after breaking through their gate, not to mention the equivalent carnage he causes when he escapes in New York City.

The only living creature he does not treat with violence on first impulse is the character of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), which he carries off after the islanders offer her as a sacrificial “bride”. However, given that the gorilla myth that Kong represents stated that they were prone to abducting women from “higher” races, it is doubtful that Kong’s treatment of Darrow was meant to be sympathetic or endearing. At most it embodies the film’s explicitly stated theme that beauty has a way of taming and even killing the beast within men.

For all the terror that he causes, Kong is by no means the only character in the film that audiences in the 1930s would have regarded as scary. He shares his jungle island with a variety of oversized dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that surpass even him in scale. These menace both Ann Darrow when she is in Kong’s possession and the team of rescuers that pursue her during the middle act of the film. It is not only the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex which Kong defeats in battle that poses a threat either, for even supposed plant-eaters like the Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus are seen attacking the human characters without apparent provocation. The wanton aggression of all these animals, whether flesh- or plant-eating, reinforces the theme that the island’s jungle is a particularly dangerous and uncivilized place even if one subtracts the brutality of Kong himself from the picture.

And then there is the matter of the island’s human inhabitants. Although the island itself is said to be located off the western coast of Sumatra in Southeast Asia, the islanders are all played by African-American actors and so are depicted as having dark skin and tightly curled hair. I consider it most likely that they are meant to represent a population of Melanesian or Negrito affinity. Regardless, they too were probably intended to be objects of horror for the film’s contemporary audience when you consider how they treat the character of Ann Darrow.

In the 1930s, the archetype of “subhuman” males lusting after women from “higher races” would have been forced not only onto gorillas and other non-human primates, but onto men from darker-skinned racial groups. The racist belief that men of African descent in particular found European women more desirable than their own and so pursued them aggressively was a major source of paranoia among European-Americans (Pilgrim 2000). Even black men who so much as whistled after white women could be savagely lynched.

To audiences of European descent watching King Kong in 1933, the scene where the islanders’ chieftain (Noble Johnson) offers six of his own population’s women in exchange for Ann Darrow must have appeared as ominous foreshadowing. And once a troop of the islanders climbs onto the boat to abduct Ann Darrow, wrapping their dark-skinned and bracelet-adorned arms around her, we can imagine how these same viewers’ racial fears would have been titillated. Of course, that the islanders bang drums interpreted by the European-American visitors as ominous, dress in stereotypical tribal attire such as loincloths and face-paint, and have a tradition of sacrificing young women to Kong further plays into European perceptions of dark-skinned peoples as uncomfortably foreign, superstitious, and barbaric. As symbols of faraway savagery, they would have counted as another element of horror in King Kong.

To understand why giant gorillas, dinosaurs, and Melanesian “savages” would have all been understood as horrifying, we need to consider the cultural context that begat the film King Kong. In the 1930s, European countries still controlled large swathes of tropical regions such as Africa and southern Asia which they had conquered over the course of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries. To justify their exploitative imperial projects, Europeans exaggerated the inherent savagery of the human and animal inhabitants in these regions, saying it was the “white man’s burden” to civilize them. Africa for example was stereotyped as a “Dark Continent” populated by cannibalistic natives and monstrous wildlife. Associated with this was the perception that tropical areas of the world represented a throwback to an earlier and more “primitive” era, with the indigenous people even claimed to represent an evolutionary “missing link” between Europeans and non-human primates.

The island setting of King Kong is the perfect realization of this imperialist vision of the tropical world. The presence of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic fauna creates the impression that the island is an anachronistic relic from a bygone era, a message reinforced by the Melanesian population with their barbarous and superstitious customs. The character of Kong himself, a subhuman brute who abducts women and brutalizes everyone else in his path, is a classic example of how post-Victorian Europeans and European-Americans envisioned gorillas and other creatures of the African wilderness. It is as if all the beliefs these audiences would have held about distant tropical countries have been rolled into one place that exemplifies their supposed worst attributes.

This is the reason King Kong counts as a horror film. The perception of horror in the film would have depended on the prejudices that Europeans and European-Americans would have developed and nurtured about the tropical areas they had conquered and exploited. By portraying the targets of European imperialism as innately dangerous and uncivilized, the film would have both aroused feelings of terror in its intended audience and rationalized the imperial projects that benefited them. It was very much an experience of horror for the age of imperialism.

Works Cited

Brightwell, Eric. “Gorillasploitation — Giant Gorilla Movies.” Amoeblog. July 8, 2014. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2014/07/eric-s-blog/gorillasploitation-giant-gorilla-movies.html.

Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Shoedsack. King Kong. RKO Pictures, 1933.

Fossey, Dian. Gorillas in the Mist. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983.

Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2005.

Peary, Danny. Guide for the Film Fanatic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Pilgrim, David. “The Brute Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum. November 2000. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/.

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Why Tyrannosaurs Probably Didn’t Have Feathers After All

Artwork by Michael W. Skrepnick, showing a mother T. rex with its downy hatchling

I admit it, nine-year-old me would have cried at the idea of Tyrannosaurus rex, my all-time favorite dinosaur, sporting a coat of feathers like a bird.

I first encountered the above illustration in an issue of National Geographic back at that tender age. The issue had a whole article on then-recent discoveries of dinosaur fossils sporting impressions of feathers from China, with numerous model reconstructions and other artwork depicting how the animals would have looked in life. Mind you, I was already aware that some theropod (or “meat-eating”) dinosaurs were close relatives of modern-day birds, and that the “first bird” Archaeopteryx demonstrated a visible link between the two groups. What the new Chinese fossils demonstrated was that the prevalence of feathers among theropods went beyond Archaeopteryx and its immediate ancestors and covered groups once thought to be scaled like other dinosaurs, such as dromaeosaurids (“raptors” such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus), oviraptorosaurs (Oviraptor), and compsognathids (a family including, well, the tiny Compsognathus).

Seeing Velociraptor, the intimidating antagonists of Jurassic Park, portrayed as feathered like birds was already enough to ruffle my feathers (pun very much chosen with intent). But the most offensive illustration in that issue by far, in my juvenile eyes anyway, was the one suggesting that Tyrannosaurus and its cousins in the tyrannosaurid family would have possessed a feathery coat as well. It didn’t matter that the illustration contrasted a downy hatchling with its scaled adult. The very idea of my favorite dinosaur, lord of the jungle of Late Cretaceous North America, ever having the telltale body covering of a lowly, cowardly bird seemed a major downgrade. It was heretical enough to put me off the idea that any dinosaurs evolved into birds at all.

Twenty years have passed, and I have matured enough to recognize that some so-called “non-avian” dinosaurs did, indeed, have feathers, and that all of today’s birds represent an offshoot of these dinosaurs. The preponderance of evidence so far does suggest that, contra the Jurassic Park movies, that dromaeosaurids like Velociraptor would have been feathered by default, as would the flock of Gallimimus seen in the first film’s stampede scene (at least as shown by new fossils of its cousin Ornithomimus). I cannot dispute this, nor do I even mind it anymore.

My feelings about feathered tyrannosaurs, on the other hand, have come full circle. Beginning in the early 2010s, I have warmed up to the idea and was eagerly drawing full feathered coats on them between 2012 and 2013. It was after that period of my life that my skepticism of the concept returned. In the years since, I have lost any remaining love for it and, if anything, have grown even more sick of it than I ever was as a child.

This time, however, I have good reason to believe that neither Tyrannosaurus rex nor the other members of the family Tyrannosauridae ever had feathers. And not only because they look better without them.

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The Case for African-American Reparations

This was originally a paper I wrote for a Sociology course over at UCSD back in 2012. Even after the passage of several years, I still consider what I articulate in this paper to be representative of my current views on the topic.

Are Black Americans owed reparations for the oppression they have suffered throughout American history? Many if not most White Americans would say no, whereas many if not most Black Americans would say yes. The question of reparations is a racially polarizing one, and since Whites form the demographic majority and socioeconomically dominant ethnic group in America, this has meant that reparations have never been paid. This payment is long overdue. Since Black Americans have suffered from and continue to suffer today an ancient legacy of racial oppression, a reparations program for them is long overdue.

The most commonly cited objections to reparations for African-Americans’ suffering are that slavery ended too long ago and that many White Americans’ ancestors never owned slaves, therefore absolving Whites as a collective of any responsibility over the issue. The former argument would be valid if slavery was the only historical crime against Black Americans and if modern Blacks did not suffer from its effects, but neither of these conditions have been met. The oppression and unfavorable treatment that Blacks received continued even after slavery was formally abolished and still affects the modern Black experience. As for the second argument, while Whites as a whole may not have been guilty of slavery, they have benefited from a racist social hierarchy that favored them over Blacks. This is not a question of making White people feel guilty about what a few of their ancestors did over 150 years ago. The fundamental issue is one of healing a larger legacy of racism that elevated Whites about Blacks.

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Why Europeans are Almost 1/3 African

Did you know that European people can attribute almost a third of their ancestry to additional migrations out of Africa?

It should be common knowledge by now that human beings in their modern form, Homo sapiens, first evolved in Africa. Exactly when we emerged on the scene remains uncertain (recent fossil discoveries suggest it may have happened over 300,000 years ago, a hundred millennia earlier than we originally thought), but whenever it was, most of our species’s history of existence would have played out on the so-called “Dark Continent”. It would have been no earlier than 70,000 years ago — and possibly as soon as 55,000 years ago — when the ancestors of all people outside of Africa would wander out of the continent and colonize the rest of the habitable world.

This would not have been the first dispersal of hominin apes out of Africa, mind you. Much in the press has been made of the fact that between 1–7% of modern human ancestry outside our ancestral continent comes from the descendants of earlier emigrants such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. What may not be so widely publicized, however, is that the famous “Out of Africa” migration between 70–55,000 years ago would not have been the last movement of Homo sapiens from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, either. There is, in fact, a plethora of compelling evidence that humans from Africa continued to venture out and leave a permanent genetic mark on the ancestry of their Eurasian kin— even the “white” peoples of Europe.

I don’t mean a light dash, either. Almost one third of European ancestry descends from African admixture within the last 55,000 years.

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