It all began with an innocent BRAVE ad: "Play. Earn. Connect." How could I say no to that? I remember it well because the Cryptokitties NFT's were bridged to their final retirement island not long afterwards. At that point, I had NO idea what an "nft" was, "bridging", or even "block chain" for that matter. The only thing that I knew about crypto-anything was that Bitcoin was a thing... LOL
Getting started didn't take very long and I was soon logged into the Upland.me map. The very first thing that I did was to click the location symbol on the right hand side, but I could not figure out how it worked. So I then manually zoomed out and scrolled my way over to my actual location, Chicago. For some odd reason, I could not find any properties to purchase near me. I proceeded to click random buttons until I magically zoomed all the way back to San Francisco. I repeated the steps to get back to Chicago, then zoomed back to San Francisco several times before I gave up on my location.
Once I submitted to the default SF location, I bought the very first property that I was able to buy, 218 Harold ave. for 3,900 upx. Wow, now I felt legit, Monopoly here I come! That purchase dropped my upx on hand well below what I needed for another property, so it was time for some research. How much upx did my new property earn me in interest I wondered. Clicking the property on the map, I learned that I was making 56.16 upx per month. My brain really struggled with the math here for quite some time, I thought there was a mistake. Using all of my fingers and toes, I surmised that in order for me to buy my second property, it would only take a mere.... 69.44444 months.
That is about time when I decided to join the Discord server. Something didn't add up, could it really take that long before I could make enough to buy another property? Well, instead of asking questions, I thought I would try my hand at flipping this new property. There were a few other properties for sale nearby, but for an absurd amount of upx, well over 400,000. Initially I got very excited, no way would I be that greedy, I'll offer my property for sale in Discord for the low-low price of 50,000 upx. Did I mention that this property was in the Ingleside District?!?! Hahaha, as of this writing, it STILL is not completely sold out.
Frustrating is the word that kept popping into my mind, why didn't anyone want to purchase my property for so "little"? A fellow by the name of MrMonopoly came to the rescue and walked me through a few things. With his advice, I was able to understand that those over-priced properties were there to stop low ball offers, win my first two Treasure Hunts, learned about the value of collections, found the white paper AND the roadmap, and was introduced to some awesome people like 2Stupid2win, Thankmelater, Lefthouse, Emgi, and Greenturtle among others. Honestly, I have been gaming for a VERY (Commodore 64) long time, and I NEVER experienced a community such as this one. Actual adults?! Not one single person under the age of 18, at least none that acted like it. Thankmelater and 2Stupid2win just released their second UPX podcast (before MarsUtah rapped the intro), and Lefthouse just finished his first Upland Action News broadcast. I WAS HOOKED!
Fiat-in was a phrase that I utilized heavily after that, purchasing properties all over the place. For reasons that I don't really know, a certain District named Candlestick Point became the hot topic of the moment, and that was the first place where I bought several properties next to each other. Immediately after that district sold out, I devised a plan... Little Hollywood. Just to the west of Candlestick Point resides a tiny, triangle shaped district called Little Hollywood, and there was not one property purchased here. I secretly began buying up entire blocks, surmising that if I had the most properties controlled, then I would have the biggest influence of what happens here in the future, once we can build houses/businesses, etc. Thankmelater somehow caught wind of my purchase frenzy and gave Little Hollywood and I a nice shout-out on the UPX Podcast #3, resulting in a pleasantly unanticipated hype. I ran with it and continued to push my narrative until it finally sold out by the 1st of November, 2020.
At the same time that the Little Hollywood craze was running through my veins, I was just starting to learn about this new world (to me) of nfts, and their creation. I opened my first wax cloud wallet under the account name bg3qw.wam and bombed my way through several poor collections, schemas and mints. There were not many people that had functional knowledge of the relatively new platform called Atomichub.io, the main way that non-coding type people can create and sell nft assets. Eventually I boogered my way through the mountain of learning obstacles and started to create some nice pieces of art. Later, I met two people that did give me some advice, BigMike and Ronald T Rump. I still use BigMike as a proxy for my wax voting. (ask me about that in Discord)
Conveniently, the Upland Fan Art (UFA) was born at about the same time, and it's founder, Thankmelater, gave me a personal invite to join the design team. It is an FAN-tastic group of very talented individuals, of which I am hardly worthy to be with them. Nevertheless, our collective group has put out countless numbers of great designs and artwork, and we were ranked third in Atomic Assets for quite awhile. The UFA inspired me to branch out and start my own project called 4Squared. Hopefully 4Squared will become my future Upland business, where I will sell my personal fine art photography, that I have been converting into autographed nfts. Wish me luck, I am very excited about this.
So many communities and sub communities have sprung up since then, all seamlessly interwoven into one fine silk fabric. I have been lucky to join up with the likes of Nichiren and His Pet in the Dogpatch, JunJun and Recourier in Merced Manor (after the BCH event), TDavis in Little Italy NY, and many others. If I could boil down this blog post into one main point, it would be community. Upland.me is absolutely nothing without the remarkable groups of like-minded people, all working together and helping each other out.
I also cannot neglect to mention it's awesome staff of developers. They FREQUENTLY communicate with just about anyone in Discord that reaches out to them, participate in group discussions, put together many great events and competitions, and have saint like patience with us when we are loudly voicing our disapproval about something.
Play. Earn. Connect. But it is the "connect" that holds it all together. Wow, You GOTTA try it.
-JimJuice
p.s. If you want to try Upland, here is my Referral Link https://discover.upland.me/jimjuice to gain bonus in-game currency to use how you see fit. Once you decide to try Upland, please contact myself in Discord to help you get familiarized with the game mechanics. I can also help you with the creation and minting of wax nfts.
