In last week’s Mytho-Crypto, I used whale behavior as an example of ancient wisdom, lost to time, that can be—and has been—embedded in myths and legends, believed to be fiction until rediscovered by modern science.
A few days later, I read another article about whales, because the more you think about a topic, the more you tend to see it.
Apparently, there are whales in the Arctic that can live to be over 200 years old. Some whales living today survived encounters with 19th Century whaling vessels and still bear the harpoon points to prove it. Some might even have encountered a young Herman Melville on the trip that inspired him to write Moby-Dick.
Whales are highly intelligent, with a proven capacity for memory. It’s not inconceivable that, with the proper whale-to-human translation device, we could get a counter-argument to Moby-Dick from a cetacean author who met Melville and is still alive today.
The logistics of that whale author’s book tour would be a nightmare, but you know it would be a hit.
The thing I like about Moby-Dick is that it’s not a linear novel. Its narrator meanders all over the place, perhaps to contrast himself with the monomaniacal obsession of Captain Ahab. Ishmael maintains a sense of humor about himself and his surroundings, and in his description of the Pequod’s demise, the tragic loss becomes a farce.
Prompted by whales in the news, I pulled up the text of Moby-Dick on my laptop and had it in front of me when our town lost power for most of the day. It felt like the Fates were conspiring to give me a block of Internet-free time and the golden material with which to make something awesome.
And that’s how Moby-Dick became the first Cryptoversal TokenBook.
I’m floating “TokenBook” as a term because, although the Web3 Book Standards Group is hard at work, there’s still no consensus on what to call individual works on the literary blockchain.
I’m still planning to release Herland and Ourland as a major release in May, Carmella and Dracula to celebrate International Vampire Month in April, and maybe a couple of suprise books to fill out the NFT Bookstore.
The main purpose, for me, is to climb the learning curve toward creating ebooks with the absolute best reading experience in the most attractive and enduring format ever, and to share that format with the broader community of authors for their own works.
So of course, I chose a book with 136 chapters, a monster of a novel that had to be hunted down, harpooned, and wrested from a sea of data. I became singlemindedly obsessed in a way that reminded me of…something. Give me a moment, it’ll come to me.
The Moby-Dick TokenBook is tokenized, encrypted, decentralized, and authenticated. You’ll have to take my word that each of those terms adds something that’s lacking in the heritage ebook format and makes the book better.
If you have MATIC in your wallet, you can mint Moby-Dick for 1 MATIC, about 1 US Dollar, and own it, potentially, for the lifetime of a whale. Which is a very long time.
Wordler Co-Authors
All NIGHTfall Story Vignettes have become Co-Author Tokens and are immutably linked on-chain to the Token-Mediated Co-Author Licenses, granting holders stackable co-author rights in characters, locations, and timelines of the Wordler REALM. Much thanks to my tech partners at MINTangible.
Year in the Books
If you held a Year in the Books subscription token at the end-of-March snapshot, it will soon receive its monthly enhancement. Would you like your YEAR to unlock a copy of Moby-Dick? I may be able to make that happen…
Have a great weekend. See you next week.
Also this Week
The new Vagobond Magazine is out with the LitSpace section that I edit. It’s a good one. I prefer the flipbook format available through the PageDAO Readme collection, but there’s a great deal going on the Readl edition.
—The Mythoversal Cryptoversal
