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NFTs meant absolutely nothing to me until I walked into work in early February of 2022 and heard a group of my coworkers criticizing them for being an absurd waste of money. Out of curiosity, I googled NFTs and found news articles about how they were a bursting bubble interspersed among articles featuring creators who made massive amounts of money for their projects.

Why would anyone spend thousands of dollars on a picture? I was confused.

Then I found the Mfers. My confusion turned into an obsession. Those mfers were adorable. They brought me back to Sunday newspaper cartoons and the stick figure doodles I made all the time as a kid. They reminded me of the memes I used daily to communicate with my friends and family. And with a floor price of around 3 ETH ($10,000+) at the time of this writing (making it solidly out of my budget), thousands of other people saw the value in them too.

Before anyone taught me the concept of practicality--before jobs and money and responsibility were drilled into my head as what was “needed” in society—I loved to create. To a kid, there is no difference in “societal value” between a job in STEM or a job in the arts—there’s the activity, and that was it. I’d doodle in my schoolbooks, make my own music, draw cartoons for my friends, and have a blast doing it. I wasn’t necessarily amazing at it either; I did it for its own sake.

The mfes reminded me that I lost my way. There’s nothing wrong with living a stable, practical life—when you come from a place of poverty, that is the dream--but when it comes at the cost of who you are as a person; when you’ve given up doing what gives you joy, then all you’ve done was prolong a colorless existence. I was a depressed, Degen MemeQueen living in a crowd of normies, but NFTs gave me hope. NFTs were an intersection of STEM and art. This was the great equalizer—an anonymous 12-year-old could mint a collection or a piece of art, get paid for it, and people could appreciate it for what it was. Or they could flip it for a higher price. They could raise funds for a project or charity. There was a community, hype around them, and not many barriers to entry. I’d be surprised if NFTs do not play a bigger role 5 years into the future than they do already.

So, I started doodling again. I wanted to replicate the feeling I got looking at some of the NFT collections I saw. I wanted to make a collection of my own that combined a lot of the things that bring joy in my life. And I didn’t want an AI to make anything for me because I wanted to make sure I doodled at least one thing every other day.

I came up with pixelated mochi. When I went on a 3-month work trip to Japan, I practically lived off Konbini (convenience store) food. This wasn’t your typical, American 7-11 with a slushie machine and frozen taquitos that roll 10 miles a day while baking on the display. You could actually eat this food and NOT die. They sold mochi in so many flavors, colors, and types that it blew my mind. I must’ve bought a different kind of mochi every week from that konbini without buying something I’d previously tried, and by the time I left, there were still some mochi that I didn’t get around to. They were cute, simple in appearance, they weren’t an overpowering dessert, and they were a relief to eat after my 20-hour shifts at work. It was love at first bite.

I wanted my mochi to have a personality—not to be completely innocent, like a Beanie Baby, but to be mischievous, yet good natured in the same way that Sour Patch Kids were. They needed to be cute. I chose a hybrid between a pixelated art style and a cartoon one as an homage to the cartoons and video games I loved as a kid and still love today.

Each mochi is 1/1 because I want the people who buy them to feel like they have a unique companion. One who matches their vibe and reminds them not to take life too seriously. That you can exist as you are for a bit without the need to be fulfilling a practical purpose. A mochi to look at from time to time that makes them feel part of a gang of happy weirdos, connected within a strange corner of the internet where people collect .gifs and .jpgs like they’re fine art from the 1500’s. Because who’s to say they aren’t? And who cares? In the end, it’s all just a game.

As the Mochi Matron, I’d like to see this project gain traction and eventually open other creative avenues in which my mochi horde can exist. I’ve given them life digitally, but they’ve yet to unlock their full potential in both the digital space and IRL. As the Mochi army grows, so too will our potential to deploy other projects to expand the MochiVerse. But right now, we are at the genesis of Mochi Madness--and my Mochi children are living high off life, happy to exist.

TLDR: We’re all bags of meat floating on a rock and there’s no one right way to live. Just vibe with it, and remember to have fun, MochiFam.