Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.

A cross-platform, customizable science fiction terminal emulator with advanced monitoring & touchscreen support.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

The most powerful tool for world-building is layering in references to past events left unexplained. And the biggest disease franchises now suffer from is the compulsive urge to explain EVERY. FUCKING. THING.

"One more thing: Raspberry Pis can be a bit unstable when running over long periods of time, with the repeated writing to the SD cards eventually breaking them. I am running them in read-only mode using OverlayFS, kind of like groundhog day for computers
Beaver"

"This means that you can pull the plug at any moment without the risk of damaging the file systems. We run the whole setup on a simple timer switch. The downside is that if something goes wrong, you can only view the logs until the system is rebooted."

"Session is an end-to-end encrypted
messenger that minimises sensitive
metadata, designed and built for people
who want absolute privacy and freedom
from any form of surveillance."

Seeing a lot of NFT folks building a straw man version of the traditional art world that describes it as solely a provider of financial investments for rich collectors. This is profoundly wrong and feels defensive and self-justifying. A thread.

Since at least the 60s a lot of artists have explored various approaches to making work that resist or question the commodity value of art objects. Conceptual art, land art, installation art, and performance art all produced work that had no obvious way of being sold at the time.

More recent generations have taken these ideas even further with social practice, relational aesthetics, net art, and various threads of contemporary feminist art amongst other movements that exist in parallel to the exploding art market.

These types of artists tend to have a complex and evolving relationship to the art market — sometimes explicitly resisting it, sometimes adapting to it and manipulating it to their own ends, sometimes being exploited by it or selling out to it.

And while there has definitely been a huge influx of investment cash into the art market in the last few decades a number of other institutions that are less completely commercial have also arisen: contemporary museums, the biennial system, residencies, artist collectives, etc

Ironically this type of art gets attacked and dismissed as “elitist” by the general public much more than the work that is actually being sold for millions and treated as investments by financial elites, which is primarily traditional painting and sculpture.

Like a lot of “anti-elitist” rhetoric, many NFT proponents’ attacks on the art world are not truly populist but instead fighting against one elite (the art world) on behalf of another elite (the tech world).

So far NFTs don’t provide anything other than new tools for treating art as commodities. They don’t do anything for improving access or creating context for critical or reflective work — though I’m hopeful we’ll see more moves in these directions in the future.

But, until then, I think the whole NFT scene would benefit from a big dose of humility in relationship to the traditional art world. There are deep cultural traditions and knowledge there. Dismissing that is reactionary and culturally destructive not creative and forward looking.

(also an interesting approach so site search)

redbean makes it possible to share web applications that run offline as a single-file