Yo! I feel like I haven't chatted with you guys in a while. I recently wrote something on inpublic, and I've been doing Yards as usual. I dropped an album called Aspiring Gundam Pilot. Please check it out. Now that my little life update is out of the way, let's get to today's conversation.

tl;dr: I've released an NFT collection inspired by the late, great Virgil Abloh and the aspect of his work known as the 3% rule, which says that 3% is the amount you need to change something normal in order to make it into something unique. Check/Collect it here.

This is a Virgil Abloh stan account

For anyone who has known me over the last decade, you've known that I've been massively inspired by Virgil Abloh, the Kanye collaborator turned fashion and cultural giant who passed away a few years ago form a silent battle with cancer. On the surface, this isn't that special, I mean...he was the creative director of Louis Vuitton before he passed. Lots of folks saw him and were inspired. I am yet but another chapter in that book. Having come up a bit left of center as a Black kid in South Carolina; skateboarding, being a fan of anime, playing in punk and hardcore bands; you could count on one hand how many other Black kids I would see doing what I was doing day to day. I turned to the internet, namely tumblr, for inspiration. Black kids from tumblr run the creative world right now. Ask any Black kid who was on tumblr. Being on there led me down the path to finding so many like minded individuals, whether its the kids in Odd Future skating (among their other shenanigans), or A$AP Mob diving into streetwear and Rocky performing at ALIFE or 10DEEP (lowkey one of the few Black owned streetwear brands in that tier) hosting Kid Cudi mixtapes. You got Pharrell and Lupe and Kanye and Travi$ Scott and all of these other figures who are inspired by more than the stereotypes starting to take hold, and my singular goal as an artist to this day is to inspire kids to be who they want to the highest level, and still win. As tumblr is calming down, Virgil Abloh pops up with the Pyrex Vision video and effectively manages to connect all of the dots of the culture in short work. He's telling you how he's doing everything, breaking down the process and giving the homies the keys. Pyrex transitions into Off-White which then transitioned into a high fashion brand, and he's still telling us how to play the game, he's getting rappers on runways, he's proving you don't have to work in a single field and that your vision can go anywhere you want to take it. I'm taking in all the content, from interviews to lectures to articles to fashion shows and short films. I couldn't afford the clothes and I couldn't afford to travel much, everything was online. When I was able to move around a bit, I started to go and see the clothing and work in person. I went to 2 of the 3 Figures of Speech shows. I'm making NFTs and Virgil has a plan for how he wants to enter the field. The plans release after he passes. I'm still inspired by the legacy he's left and the impact he's had is everywhere, even years later.

That went way longer than it was supposed to. Hopefully it gives you an idea of how much I care.

3% Rule

Virgil Abloh introduced a concept known as The 3% Rule in 2019, which he says that it only takes a 3% adjustment of something to convert it into a new idea. This is apparent in his work, especially in his era of deconstructing existing silhouettes and items to give it his touch. I've always been kind of mixed on something this specific, but I do love the idea of taking something familiar and making less familiar by transforming it in some ways. Having recently learned how to export trait-based NFTs, I decided to experiment with the 3% rule.

Here's What I Did

If the belief is that it only takes 3% to turn something normal into something unique, I took a black square, divided it into 100 sections, and then changed 3 of those sections to a different color. I went ahead and cooked up a bunch of 1% sized squares, and generated randomly occurring instances that change the black square by 3%.
I created and released an NFT collection around this idea, with 333 NFTs available for 0.003 ETH (around $7) each.

Here's Why I Think It Matters

Something I think a lot about is how important it is to participate in culture as it's happening, because if you don't, then it will never come to be. I often say "I'm just making things until I have my Pyrex moment" which is just my way of saying that "the people" at large aren't taking me seriously as a creative yet. I'm going to keep working and keep creating art and music and culture and ideas, as well as sharing the playbook and my learnings. If you want to see culture proliferate, or have ever joined in on the taste discourse happening in web3 these days, go ahead and collect this one. Collect a few. Collect the rest, which the "Mint the rest" button is my favorite button on the site.

"Mint the rest"

I think that putting a "mint the rest" button should become some sort of norm or standard on mint pages. If someone is really picking up what the artist(s) is putting down, I don't see anything wrong with just making the play to buy the block, so to speak. This move gives the creators more space to do what they do, and with a fresh motivations. Sometimes we make things and while people may think they're cool, its hard to tell if it works or not in this noisy landscape that is social media. Mint the rest.

In Conclusion

By this point I feel like I've said so much. Hope you guys enjoy this experiment. I'm excited to be able to bring more ideas to the world in this format as I journey toward my Pyrex Vision.

As always, thanks for reading. Mint your 3% NFT now, c/o Black Dave.