Me walking into a new crypto community.

Do you love reading? NFTs? No? Well how about the Hunger Games?

We covered Mirror.xyz — the blockchain answer to Medium — briefly in our previous issue. But we forgot the best thing about it, which also happens to be the worst thing to happen to writers since fan fiction. Every week, Mirror holds the $WRITE RACE. Basically, you write a paragraph about how you plan to use the platform, then the existing users vote up their favorite ones. The top 10 use cases are given a $WRITE token to redeem for membership, a custom domain, and ‘future benefits’ — presumably a bow and arrow or some sweet poison mushrooms.

The rest are thrown back to the Muttations.

Look. I’m all for slaughter of children as long as it generates entertainment. And I’m all for competition among artists as long as it generates great art. (Without the best of both worlds, we’d never have gotten The Story of Adidon.) But so far, the gems coming out of the $WRITE RACE are not inspiring much confidence:

• ‘We are making the best magazine ever.’ (Sure. Like Girls & Corpses doesn’t already exist.)

• ‘Article on why hype is bad for consumer startups.’ (Ever heard of Muck Rack?)

• ‘I want to write about NFT art from an art perspective, vs. a crypto perspective!’ (Yeah okay buddy. Join the club.)

• ‘Yeah I want to use Mirror write something.’ (Nice! Honesty for once.)

• ‘Please free me from this hell. My family misses me.’

Never mind. That last one’s actually pretty great. I take it all back. The future of writing is in safe hands.