Not to mention the confusion you’re creating among buyers. Spend your money on whatever you like, but if the seller says the meme will be gone forever to attract buyers and eyeballs, they’re setting certain expectations, and when you change the rules last minute it leads to chaos and confusion and grumpy editors.

Charlie and his brother are really cute (or were in 2007), but this isn’t even one of the most clever or interesting memes on the internet if we’re being brutally honest. We try to accept that things change and opinions shift and nothing is forever, but we have to lay down some rules about NFTs, in my humble Gen X opinion. If you (understandably) still have questions, you can read through our NFT FAQ. There’s also a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and environmental impacts of NFTs. NFTs have been making headlines lately, some selling for millions of dollars, with high-profile memes like Nyan Cat and the “deal with it” sunglasses being put up for auction. An NFT can either be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. But according to Quartz, there’s another surprise twist: Howard Davies-Carr, the father of the children in the 14-year-old clip, which sold for about $761,000, says it will stay on YouTube after all. We wrote about the Charlie Bit Me NFT auction because it had a twist the others did not: the seller said it would be leaving the internet “forever,” deleted from YouTube where it currently has more than 880 million views once the auction ended. Despite our attempts to be judicious and write about newsworthy topics, we can’t win them all.

But most NFTs aren’t all that noteworthy, and we can’t possibly write about every single one (despite this sentence, my inbox will now be flooded with NFT pitches for the next two months). Disaster Girl sold for around $500,000, Keyboard Cat went for about $64,400, and Nyan Cat brought in around $590,000. It’s hard to describe the absolute chaos around NFTs (non-fungible tokens) right now tech reporters’ inboxes are flooded with the latest and stupidest additions to this trend of digital certificates for memes and other pieces of digital memorabilia.

Internet keeps me up meme