Hey all, just a quick update tonight. I was taking a walk earlier on sore legs from my long swim yesterday and wondering how I could be productive. It dawned on me that I hadn't written a blog post in some time, and that some of the high-level direction that seems to be emerging is really pretty cool.

I'll go ahead and share that life has been emotional turmoil for about the past 3 years more or less nonstop, but in addition to caring for familial elders and building PageDAO and getting the Ph.D, I've also managed to get myself into decent shape! So things are going wonderfully. The outward appearance of messiness is common during periods of intensive growth - let's get to the good stuff!

Evermark's beta launched at https://evermarks.net several months ago and has endured a few different phases along the way. At first it was just the silly idea being built in public, but then it became a mini-app that people saw some reason to use. It ran, poorly, but well enough to justify the effort to build a real, production-grade application here. My roots are more or less the ethos that if it's worth building, it's worth building in a decentralized way, so that was the initial approach to Evermark and that was a wonderful, low-cost way to become very familiar with all of the problems the application faces and attempts to solve.

Currently, I'm working on the project in a behind-the-scenes way, doing a research project on what they call the "Refinding Problem" in human factors psychology. It turns out, the Evermark application idea that I had: "make it very easy to go back to that article I read last week" is a sort of chimera that has haunted users since the beginning of the internet. Decades of research have gone into various facets of this, and in the present day it seems that the major social media players know about the refinding problem but are using it against their users to make them spend more time on-platform. I haven't been a consumer of mainstream social media in years and probably won't be again until Farcaster counts, but suffice it to say that a full scientific treatment of the problem, including UX issues I aim to solve with the Evermark application, is on the way.

Currently, a mainnet Evermark version exists, but it is stuck in the cracks between the old, GUI web interface and the new, streamlined LLM-based version. We'll have to see what ends up happening to the codebase as I work to streamline it and ensure that it is scalable enough to justify the large airdrop and various user campaigns that are ultimately in the works to get it in front of more people when it's ready.

ABC_DAO is a minimalist DAO. Ultimately, it's a protocol that runs on Farcaster and Neynar and has a token on Base Mainnet that people earn for creating commits on GitHub repositories. To add a repo, one should become a member, which costs .002 $ETH, but once one is a member, one earns $ABC for working on repos that have been added. So the project grows by both membership signups (which also net you a sweet Membership NFT moving forward) and by trading fees, which are directed to the @abc-dao-dev Farcaster account to be paid out over time to $ABC stakers.

This has been my main focus lately, as when it is running correctly it should function as a sort of amplifier for my work. It grows by being inclusive of other devs as well, so the hope here is to build a community of people who like to build little Web3 projects.

Ever since I missed the original $DEGEN airdrop, I've wanted to have a bag of tokens staked to give me tokens to tip other users on Farcaster. I watched @kompreni build @tipn a while later, and that experience was extremely exciting for me because it worked! $TIPN trended, and the Tip'n'Earn mini-app trended, and it was a stellar thing to behold. SteakNStake pays homage to $TIPN and $DEGEN by combining their mechanisms. The actual smart contract users use to stake $TIPN has served as the starting point for the $STEAK staking contract, and the $DEGEN tipping allowance mechanism is visible in the way the application handles stakes. Users need fear no unlocks or skullduggery, as $STEAK is a standard clanker deployed with the standard features. Fees are collected exclusively in $ETH, and directed to the ABC_DAO treasury. Buybacks of $STEAK provide a continual source of tokens to provide users who wish to stake $STEAK to tip $STEAK.

The lab has been exciting lately, too! It looks like I have a few opportunities to develop publishable Methods papers from the applications I've had to write to get this experiment ready to go, and I'm working on a novel solution to the problem of showing a user their real-time digital force readout from a handgrip dynamometer in a specific location on the computer screen. Check the GitHub links at https://epicdylan.com for more information, I'm a little early to be sharing much right now but you can review the codebases if you like because they're public.

PageDAO's former website is also being replaced. More info on that shortly.

That's right! This is the sixth and final project of this quick bloggish update. I spoke with my friend Jose not long ago and we decided to put together a miniapp that he's interested in using to help people give better birthday gifts! I won't say too much more about this one right now either, except that I'm excited.

Okay, fam. That's a wrap! Another exciting day is winding down and now it's time to rest up for a big weekend. Cheers!!!