When I was young I used to want to write, but I didn’t know enough. Then, after I knew some things I never wrote. Sometime in university, with considerable resolve, I started to write regularly. After a few years I began writing everyday, for a few years at least. I still write, just not publicly like I used to. And there is a difference, between public and non-public writing. There is also a difference in what you are able to write when publishing daily compared when you write less frequently.

Thursdays are a special day of the week. It’s not the weekend, but it’s as close as you can get to it. You’re not free, yet, but you’re also typically recovered from your case of the Mondays. There’s always exceptions. Always. But on the whole, Thursdays are fucking awesome. For the last 4 years, it’s also been the day of the week when I co-host the weekly WIP Meetup somewhere in the metaverse with my dude Rizzle. That’s made Thursdays even better, if you can believe it.

As a firm believer in enjoyment knowing no bounds, I was thinking about how I could make Thursdays even better for myself. And I thought, “Hey, why don’t I try and see if I can’t publish something regularly - and publicly - every Thursday?”

Of course my next thought was, “Well, what would I write about?” Let me tell you, not a few ideas immediately surfaced.

Strong reactions. Songs I can’t stop listening to. New crazy ideas. Top-of-mind topics. These are pretty much the categories of what I personally consider to be the best of what ends up defining any given week for me.

So, I think I’ll try to write about those things, whatever they may end up being, every Thursday evening, while listening to whatever the current song(s) I can’t stop listening to is(are) and, more likely than not, sipping a nice ale.

Since the plan is to start and finish writing while listening to (on repeat) whatever those songs may be, and before I stop finishing (however many bottles) of whatever I happen to be drinking, sharing those details with the reader could allow them to listen to and ( potentially (optionally!)) drink the same things as they enter the realm of thought I was in while I was writing. Maybe. Who knows? Does that even make sense?

Anyways, now that the genesis behind “Thursday Thoughties” is clear (hopefully), let me actually dive into this week’s Thursday Thoughties.

Listening to: “Flip It” by Levity
Drinking: Electric Sunshine (Summery Sour - Fruity) by Little Beast (Clackamas, OR)

A little earlier, while relishing an aged A5 Miyazaki Wagyu steak (mid-rare) and fully loaded baked potato that was just swimming in butter at El Gaucho in downtown Portland, I scrolled across the following tweet by a dank digital artist known as Crashblossom aka James Bloom. (Check out Burner, their long-form 256 work collection of living art).

This is a semi-frequent critique I’ve seen levied at the cryptoart space over the past 5 or so years, with increasing regularity over the last 1~1.5 years in particular.

Every time I see it, however, I always wonder, "What sort of critical debate do folks want to have, but feel they can't?"

This is probably a hot take, but part of me thinks that I never see any real "critical debate" because now pretty much without exception, thanks to NFTs and crypto, everyone and anyone who wants to can collect any work of digital art, or not.

That last bit, the “or not,” is actually kind of revolutionary in my opinion.

What I mean is that ‘non-collecting’ or intentionally not collecting something or some artist is, in and of itself, the strongest critique one can have today. And if you can say everything you need to say by not collecting something or someone, is there any real reason to say more?

To me, I feel like the role of an art critic and “critical debate” is really only necessary if collecting art is something that not everyone can do and something that happens in private. The actions of “real collectors” and what they collect need to be parsed and interpreted for non-collectors and collectors alike to help “inform” them of what’s good, or not.

Now that I can see what everyone else is collecting (or not), I don’t need some art critic performing “critical debate.” I may be curious what others see in certain works by certain artists, but I can just reach out and ask them. Thank you internet. No need for some third party intermediary to get in between.

That said, part of me also really wants to hear and read what folks really think about certain works of art and their artists. Thankfully, I’m hearing and reading more of that days, however, I am not sure if that's even considered "critical debate."

• Not sure if I’m an outlier here, but it’s been hard af to identify one neutral, fact-based and on-point Israel-Hamas War observer; until yesterday when I came across Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia (with the ENS handle smc.eth in their username), so if you’re looking for someone to cut through the noise to feel like you at least have a little bit of a sense of what’s happening in that part of the world, I highly recommend you give them a follow

• There are a few collectors that I keep a look out for whenever they have anything to say, and BSY is one of them. A few days ago I caught a thought provoking morsel of a tweet of theirs that contained a snippet from a recent Stratechery post by Ben Thompson that they shared on X about the potential powerhouse use case of crypto (specifically the globally legible application of self-sovereign identity and attestation) in a future awash with AI-generated content

• Is mixed-reality the future? Will the mundane looking AR-enabled glasses (e.g. those Raybans that I think Meta is making) make this a common (and less [redacted] looking) experience? Check out the video on X

Cover Image: Thursday #4/7 (2021) by Paul Milinski