Eden Mylunsch
Eden Mylunsch
Having recently had my PhD thesis rejected by a vengeful dissertation committee (it was a dissection of the subtext underlying Professor Irwin Corey’s character and performance in “Car Wash”) I have turned to other, more weighty matters to occupy my time.
Learning of Thor’s unexpected shuffling off this mortal coil (referring, of course to “the earth,” not Wine Disorder, which I view as a moral coil) set me to thinking about the people I’ve gotten to know on this wine board over the years who are no longer correspondents, much less attending offlines. Both of the Joes, Mr. Coad, Josh R, and others spring to mind when I think about wine; each helped me construct and frame an aesthetic around the murky conceptual differences between “wine I wanna drink” and “wine I earn a living from.” That those Ayn Randian seesaw-ish oppositions are not necessarily mutually exclusive always deepens my thinking far beyond the expected parameters expected from such geekdom discussions.
Despite the departures of my unwilling mentors past their last stops on the line, it’s not like my oenollectual growth has ceased with their passing or that I’ve stopped buying wines so obscure they might as well have originated in a witness protection program in Burkina Faso or the Kyrgyz Republic. There are other amazing guides here on the board and I’m thankful to read them, but I miss the OG forum icons.
For those of us not inhabiting environs within physical proximity of say, a Brad Kane or Jeff Grossman, there can be a bit of a disconnect between an online personality and and how they materialize IRL. Do we appear better (or just different) in “print” on Wine Disorder than we might were we sitting across a table, debating the merits of Savennieres vs. a Bourgueil Chenin Blanc? There is a certain beauty offered up to the participants in the internet’s ability to host an international confab dealing with any number of anorakian topics (wine in particular) at any date or time, rather than having to fly to some trendy Nepalese pizza joint in Queens or wherever they won’t charge us corkage. The big advantage is that in person, you know you’re dealing with real people. None of this Robt Heinlein/Phil K. Dick puppetmaster possibilities. But that gets me thinking that maybe we could keep this party banging for longer than we might otherwise hope for.
Unless you’ve been stuck in a dead-end call center gig in Oman for the last decade (Oman, Oman, they drink O-Manischewitz there, right?) you’ve probably heard about artificial intelligence stuff. You’ve also probably heard about the mulcting of innocent trust funders done under the aegis of the NFT brokers. There’s also scads of digital currency wafting through the internets and even if everyone actually does remember their password, there’s always someone waiting around to mine more of the stuff. Were I some deep thinker, like for instance Elon Musk or Professor Irwin Corey, I could create a mashup of the human spirit — a beneficient mashup not a JG Ballard’s auto-erotic mashup— and we’d all be better off. Here’s the blueprint:
We’d each patent (or would it be copyright?) our online personae and reconstitute them as NFTs, which we’d take to OpenSea and put them up for sale. Part of the sale contingency is that we would be retained to maintain our personalities over the remainder of our lives, albeit at a high monthly fee payable by the NFT purchasers (not unlike a homeowner’s association maintenance fee). They’d be sold for a lot of money (we’re all pretty much the ne plus ultra of the online wine world, right?) and as the values of each NFT climbs, a portion of the sale price would revert to the original personage, like some fine artists are doing now with the sky-high auction world.
All rights and obligations would be transferred along with the tastefully and artistically custom-etched (empty) bottle of wine that accompanied the NFT. And if we die, that will likely make our NFT more valuable. At that point, we will have fed the artificial intelligence computers all of our writings so they’ll be able to continue grinding out posts that capture our person wine preferences, our critical ethos, and favorite Chinese joint in Cleveland for an offline. And we wouldn’t all feel so sad when one of us
There might be additional value added to the NFT (over and above our never seeming to leave Wine Disorder in that we could include personal mementos of us with those NFTs that could hung on the purchaser’s wall or used in some other way. I’m thinking that Brad’s roast chicken recipe should be worth a premium to someone, or maybe Don could kick in with an original oboe part from “Annie” or “Cats” or some other Broadway musical he worked on. Professor Lipton could pass along a bottle or two of whatever grape he’s growing (and Mark E a wine from Norway or Finland or wherever he is, even if it’s distilled reindeer tears or something that’d impress the pants off of René Redzepi). Or maybe Oswaldo’s got a transcription of T-Bone Walker’s soo on “Street Walking Woman?” I’d think of this sort of thing as value added, a way to generate cashflow for us to buy more wine and flesh out our individual digital presences, and foster our POVs on wine and win friends and influence people and other things (FWIW, the MAGA people reached out to me this week to become Trump’s “Secretary of Wine” when he’s installed but I told them “hell nyet!” because they only want to allow Cabernet and Chardonnay, and besides, I’ve already committed to writing descriptors for the “Kamala Harris Presidential Wine Club”)
Me, I’d sign up for the FL Jim NFT and those from Karen Goetz and Robert Dentice right off the bat. I could hope that their insight and ability to describe that insight could rub off on me in a good way. Does anyone here work on Wall Street or in digital currency or artificial intelligence or any other field that could make this a reality? Who’s in?
-Eden (a lesser bored would have been crushed by such losses, but we stand strong, the few, the proud, the Maureens)
Learning of Thor’s unexpected shuffling off this mortal coil (referring, of course to “the earth,” not Wine Disorder, which I view as a moral coil) set me to thinking about the people I’ve gotten to know on this wine board over the years who are no longer correspondents, much less attending offlines. Both of the Joes, Mr. Coad, Josh R, and others spring to mind when I think about wine; each helped me construct and frame an aesthetic around the murky conceptual differences between “wine I wanna drink” and “wine I earn a living from.” That those Ayn Randian seesaw-ish oppositions are not necessarily mutually exclusive always deepens my thinking far beyond the expected parameters expected from such geekdom discussions.
Despite the departures of my unwilling mentors past their last stops on the line, it’s not like my oenollectual growth has ceased with their passing or that I’ve stopped buying wines so obscure they might as well have originated in a witness protection program in Burkina Faso or the Kyrgyz Republic. There are other amazing guides here on the board and I’m thankful to read them, but I miss the OG forum icons.
For those of us not inhabiting environs within physical proximity of say, a Brad Kane or Jeff Grossman, there can be a bit of a disconnect between an online personality and and how they materialize IRL. Do we appear better (or just different) in “print” on Wine Disorder than we might were we sitting across a table, debating the merits of Savennieres vs. a Bourgueil Chenin Blanc? There is a certain beauty offered up to the participants in the internet’s ability to host an international confab dealing with any number of anorakian topics (wine in particular) at any date or time, rather than having to fly to some trendy Nepalese pizza joint in Queens or wherever they won’t charge us corkage. The big advantage is that in person, you know you’re dealing with real people. None of this Robt Heinlein/Phil K. Dick puppetmaster possibilities. But that gets me thinking that maybe we could keep this party banging for longer than we might otherwise hope for.
Unless you’ve been stuck in a dead-end call center gig in Oman for the last decade (Oman, Oman, they drink O-Manischewitz there, right?) you’ve probably heard about artificial intelligence stuff. You’ve also probably heard about the mulcting of innocent trust funders done under the aegis of the NFT brokers. There’s also scads of digital currency wafting through the internets and even if everyone actually does remember their password, there’s always someone waiting around to mine more of the stuff. Were I some deep thinker, like for instance Elon Musk or Professor Irwin Corey, I could create a mashup of the human spirit — a beneficient mashup not a JG Ballard’s auto-erotic mashup— and we’d all be better off. Here’s the blueprint:
We’d each patent (or would it be copyright?) our online personae and reconstitute them as NFTs, which we’d take to OpenSea and put them up for sale. Part of the sale contingency is that we would be retained to maintain our personalities over the remainder of our lives, albeit at a high monthly fee payable by the NFT purchasers (not unlike a homeowner’s association maintenance fee). They’d be sold for a lot of money (we’re all pretty much the ne plus ultra of the online wine world, right?) and as the values of each NFT climbs, a portion of the sale price would revert to the original personage, like some fine artists are doing now with the sky-high auction world.
All rights and obligations would be transferred along with the tastefully and artistically custom-etched (empty) bottle of wine that accompanied the NFT. And if we die, that will likely make our NFT more valuable. At that point, we will have fed the artificial intelligence computers all of our writings so they’ll be able to continue grinding out posts that capture our person wine preferences, our critical ethos, and favorite Chinese joint in Cleveland for an offline. And we wouldn’t all feel so sad when one of us
There might be additional value added to the NFT (over and above our never seeming to leave Wine Disorder in that we could include personal mementos of us with those NFTs that could hung on the purchaser’s wall or used in some other way. I’m thinking that Brad’s roast chicken recipe should be worth a premium to someone, or maybe Don could kick in with an original oboe part from “Annie” or “Cats” or some other Broadway musical he worked on. Professor Lipton could pass along a bottle or two of whatever grape he’s growing (and Mark E a wine from Norway or Finland or wherever he is, even if it’s distilled reindeer tears or something that’d impress the pants off of René Redzepi). Or maybe Oswaldo’s got a transcription of T-Bone Walker’s soo on “Street Walking Woman?” I’d think of this sort of thing as value added, a way to generate cashflow for us to buy more wine and flesh out our individual digital presences, and foster our POVs on wine and win friends and influence people and other things (FWIW, the MAGA people reached out to me this week to become Trump’s “Secretary of Wine” when he’s installed but I told them “hell nyet!” because they only want to allow Cabernet and Chardonnay, and besides, I’ve already committed to writing descriptors for the “Kamala Harris Presidential Wine Club”)
Me, I’d sign up for the FL Jim NFT and those from Karen Goetz and Robert Dentice right off the bat. I could hope that their insight and ability to describe that insight could rub off on me in a good way. Does anyone here work on Wall Street or in digital currency or artificial intelligence or any other field that could make this a reality? Who’s in?
-Eden (a lesser bored would have been crushed by such losses, but we stand strong, the few, the proud, the Maureens)
