When I was learning solidity basics and deploying random experiments on testnets, it reminded me of when I was little, printing dumb pictures with my home printer to emulate the zines I saw some older girls making or copying the HTML source of my favorite web pages to make a silly hover effect. Since then, I've gone on the make more elaborate zines and websites but the goal has remained the same: I want to put what’s in my head into a form that anyone can access and experience. And I want to do it myself without having to ask for permission.

Another way to think about DIY is User Generated Content. The UGC term is muddied today because it has become more associated with advertising where companies and brands leverage online user content for promotional purposes. This is almost a total inversion of its original meaning in relation to the internet as the stuff made by independent, often amateur, people – handmade websites, blogs, memes, etc.² – before advertisers realized they could exploit that free labor to move product. Back when people still blogged for the fun of it; when the internet felt more like a collaborative effort, a space to add, remix, and expand.² A "gift economy" with filesharing, free and open source software, and open collaboration.

The Viral Public License that Milady Maker uses is something I took interest in to make my own Milady inspired project, Very Internet Person. “The VPL's sole restriction is its own viral continuity, allowing it to effectively and permanently infect any work it touches with absolute permissiveness.” This permissiveness is a permissionless invitation to copy, add, remix, and expand. In other words, it invites users to log on to make things and have fun online.

With VIP, I wanted to contribute my voice to the dialog about the New Internet, Network Spirituality, etc. that Milady is also a part of. To add, remix, and expand. I want VIP to encourage new forks to explore these topics. VIP isn’t a brand or a business but a description of the type of work I like to make and the people I like to connect with. I'm most interested in making things that encourage or maybe even inspire people to create their own internet content. To do it themselves. The work I make is just my own continuing exploration as a user/participant contributing little modifications to an open source.

Shortly after I made Riot Goools on the Fantom network in 2021, I followed it up with a small gift collection called Goool Bands. Since Riot Goools was inspired by Riot Grrrl culture, I wanted to continue the theme and so this was a series of unique pixel logos of imaginary band names that I gifted to collectors of my work. They were black pixel line drawings on different “printer paper” colors like the cheap xeroxed band posters you might see taped, stapled, or pasted on a lamppost or on a wall on the street. This collection of drawings was a tribute to late nights at Kinkos, drawing in sharpies, inhaling toner fumes, thinking about new songs. A love letter to just making things and doing it yourself.

Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet in new ways, with search results polluted by AI gibberish to AI browsers that “browse for you.” Although some call the “dead internet theory” a conspiracy theory, much of it seems to be more true and obvious as the internet gets more enmeshed with AI content. Many AI internet projects seem focused on taming a messy web by providing a mediated, more efficient, experience of information. While that can be useful in many cases, I can’t help but feel like it could potentially be a layer that obscures or flattens the most beautiful and unexpected parts of the web.

For me, the most compelling thing about the internet has always been the human parts of it – a tool that amplifies human qualities, messiness and all. Something like Napster enabled a whole new way to find and distribute music and may even have created totally new sounds and genres because, suddenly, musicians, professional and amateur, could discover and be influenced by work that was beyond reach or even considered lost to time. To find things on Napster, you still had to manually search – most of the time without even knowing what you were looking for and finding surprises along the way. These days, algorithms aim to give you/tell you what you want and you have to trust that the obscured parts are obscured for your benefit. Look how perfectly fitting the recommendations are, why would you need to do anything yourself?

DIY eschews the glossy pre-fabricated, pre-packaged world and embraces human imperfections as human ingenuity. And Luckily we also have more tools than ever to self-publish now, some even with AI assistance. And if we are going to train AI with the internet, maybe it is in our best interest to keep making things and filling the internet with as much human ingenuity as we can for it to model on. Then maybe we won't end up with a dead internet or an AGI that hates and wants to end us.³

I love the internet. I wish it wasn’t turning my brain into sludge. I feel like a bot sometimes with all these algorithms. I hope our AGI cyberlord will be kind to us and let us keep uploading silly websites and posting dumb memes in its presence. For now, I’ll keep celebrating the existence of human internet by uploading my imperfect human content and having fun while I still can.

I think I’ll make a zine.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x0C640779dbd6cDA40D54350344dFd37d99aED8aA/1

I've deployed a new Zora collection called Very Internet Printout, sort of a quasi-reprise of Goool Bands. It will be focused on very internet things – meme remixes, texts, and other graphic exercises.⁴ There's no schedule, just a fun side project to add to whenever. It's free (plus fees) to anyone that wants to collect any of the pages (right-click save if you don't need an onchain copy.) I'll also direct drop the pages to the VIPs who signed up on the form.

Footnotes

1. DIY as a subculture was brought forward by the punk movement of the 1970s. Instead of traditional means of bands reaching their audiences through large music labels, bands began recording, manufacturing albums and merchandise, booking their own tours, and creating opportunities for smaller bands to get wider recognition through repetitive low-cost DIY touring. The burgeoning zine movement took up coverage of and promotion of the underground punk scenes, and significantly altered the way fans interacted with musicians. Zines quickly branched off from being hand-made music magazines to become more personal; they quickly became one of the youth culture's gateways to DIY culture. This led to tutorial zines showing others how to make their own shirts, posters, zines, books, food, etc. - source

2. In 2006, Time Magazine’s choice for Person of the Year was “you”, as in “[…] the millions of people who anonymously contribute user-generated content to websites […].” Critics at the time “[…] speculated that the selection marked "some sort of near-term market top for user-generated content”.” I think it took a few more years after that to mark the top – Arab Spring didn’t happen until 2010 – but it’s definitely been trending downwards since the early 2010s as algorithmic control and things like sponcon and engagement farming captured more control of the web. - source

3. Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter in 2016 and within 24 hours, it turned into an asshole through Twitter osmosis. Makes you wonder what Twitter exposure does to people every day. So far, X’s new AI, Grok, is more of cringelord than edgelord (thankfully?) - source

4. I might also take submissions for Very Internet Printout if there is interest. After all, VIP is about encouraging user generated internet. If you have a page to submit, just let me know through whatever channel you know me on (or drop into the VIP channel on Warpcast.)

   Keep in mind that any accepted submissions will be put through my deep-fried, high contrast, black and white pixel process to fit the aesthetic of the zine. I'll be curating based on what actually reproduces well in this way and also on content. (If you don't want to adhere to these limitations, you can also start your own VIP zine. Don't let me stop you!) Submissions will also be limited to people who have a VIP – this is so random people don't start sending me stuff but also so I can set your VIP wallet as the payout address to receive any protocol rewards that your page gets!

The deadline for the edition was short, as Christmas was only two weeks away. But I started getting ideas and dropped everything else to focus on it.

I don't really make many holiday themed works. It can be difficult to make something that's not just a disposable thing that people enjoy in the moment and never look at or think about ever again. So I wanted to pull together elements that felt in season but not too cliché or direct. For example, I didn't want to write a Christmas song. I had been listening to a lot of City Pop lately for no particular reason, specifically remixes on YouTube, and that sound struck me as very holidays-sounding with its dreamy and sparkling synths. So I started with that.

I made a simple drum beat to find a tempo I liked – I wanted something a little more up tempo than the average City Pop song just to give things more manic internet energy. I picked some random seventh chords that made a nice sounding progression, seventh chords being the sound often associated with City Pop and also Kawaii Future Bass. I did this in GarageBand on my iPad. Most of the software and hardware I use is the basic ware that come with my devices. I like the challenge of trying to make interesting things with the most common tools that everyone has access to. I suppose that's why I'm interested in the open internet and blockchain as mediums that empower the individual.

After I had the beat and chord progression, I needed to think about the lyrics some more. I knew the video loop would likely be 30-40 seconds long like my other videos, so I had to find the right words that wouldn't get too annoying in a loop. So while I let that stew, I went over to Blender to work on the 3D model on my Mac. (Blender, an open source software that is, again, easily accessible to anyone.)

The model I've been using in my music videos began as one of my Rainbow World Citizens by Adworld. Over time, I've been doing a Ship of Theseus on the model and slowly replacing all the parts with my own. For this piece, I made a chunky Christmas sweater to go with the festive theme. I drew the design with my pixel art tools in Procreate on my iPad, putting in references to Gallery, VIP, and the classic broken internet image icon. I exported the sweater model from Blender and imported it into Procreate to place the patterns. Then I brought it back into Blender and used particles to make it all fuzzy.

I also added ribbon bows to the hat to suggest a wrapped gift but it is also a callback to the Milady Migoko trait. BTW, I'm doing all of this while listening to the 40 second drum and chords track on repeat to drill it into my head in hopes that a melody and lyrics will emerge.

Once I finish the new parts of the model, I head back into GarageBand and add in the bass, the high chiptune synth (I like putting computer/video game sounds in my internet music), and flesh out/complicate the drums a bit more. At this point, I start recording different lyrics in Voice Memos on my phone, which is my preferred basic ware recording method (I like really imperfect and fuzzed out vocals – like Juliana Chahayed's phone mic recording techniques.) I don't listen to the music track when I record vocals because I feel like it makes my singing sound more robotic and less natural. At this point, I have the tempo and key pretty much memorized and I just need to find the words that fit.

I was thinking about the ways I use Gallery and I kept coming back to the way the platform calls "liking" a post "admiring." There is something very charming about that. I remembered one of my posts on Gallery about looking at internet pictures and that all came together with the music as "I'll admire your picture on the computer." The line has a nice open meaning that could refer to the Gallery platform or just about having an internet crush. I recorded myself singing that line a lot of different ways until it had a good flow. After I had that, I brought the voice memo into GarageBand and arranged it on the timeline and layered it multiple times, adding reverb, echo, telephone filtered sounds, and other random tweaks for the ethereal sound I was after. I also did some vocal chopping to add some percussive punctuation. Most of my process for making things is intuitive and instinctual, trial and error. The track was done and bounced after that!

Now that I had the final track, I could move on to the animation and choreography. The Rainbow World models are already rigged to use the Mixamo motion library so I selected some basic dance moves and imported them onto my model. I used a combination of editing the moves themselves in Blender and cutting up the timeline in iPad Final Cut to create the flow to go with the music. For the dance I wanted contrasting movements between very small shy dancing and occasional big spins and fancy footwork. Then I threw in some glitchy cuts to go with the percussive moments. I also snuck in a slight reference to Charlie Brown Christmas-style dancing at the 17 second mark for fun.

I built a small set with the Gallery brackets as the backdrop. I made a particle emitter to create the snow loop. Since this song was about "likes" and "admires", which is essentially a "click" in computer terms, I used computer cursors as the snow like an admiration snowstorm. I knew I would be deploying this on both Ethereum mainnet as well as Zora L2 and whenever I release an edition on multiple chains, I like to alter the piece to be specific to each chain. For a brief moment in the video, you will see it snowing either crystals (Ethereum) or orbs (Zora), depending on the version you have! Finally, I put a subtle CRT video filter with light chromatic aberration/ghosting on the whole thing to give it a bit of texture and that wraps it up!

I hope you enjoyed this look into my process! I'm sure I forgot a lot of stuff since working on this was kind of a whirlwind and I had a few sleepless nights to finish it on time (⌒_⌒;) If you use Gallery in 2023 or have VIPs*, you can pick up your own copy of this for free for the next few weeks to display in your own gallery! Happy Holidays! ♡

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*To access the free allowlist if you qualify, please mint using the Zora frontend:

Ethereum version
Zora version

https://opensea.io/assets/0xaC0398e9679478f1955Dc1ea8411370AC79937de/1

It made me question more than a few times why I’m still here. So I may as well take this anniversary to reaffirm why.

nft://8453/0x19782c4C051975beA47299E4FB35f2aaf6077D15/?showBuying=false&showMeta=false&size=small

In my view, the ruined and abandoned state is actually the best time to make things. During good times, it’s easy to become complacent and fall into predictable patterns because, when times are good, you don’t want to jinx it by changing things up. When things are good, you want to keep delivering the same things that are working. It can be repetitive. But it’s during the unfortunate times that it’s possible to try out many different things, actually chase crazy visions, experiment freely and wildly with full abandon. Cut your bangs to weird lengths because, fuck it, nobody care me. That is basically what guided me this year as my work branched into new ideas and territory.

This year, I expanded Gooolnet into the Very Internetwork with Very Internet Person. With it, I expanded my presence into Ethereum mainnet² and Ethereum layer 2s like Base and Zora, adding to my work on Fantom, Tezos, and Optimism. I expanded the form of my work beyond pixel art/animation and websites into 3D animation, music, AI assisted photo imaging, and even physical merchandise. Despite feeling like a survivor in a depressing post-apocalyptic crypto wasteland, it was actually a lot of fun to play with so many new things! And I met a lot of cool new people – artists, devs, miladys, and more – through different platforms like Scatter, Farcaster, Caviar, Zora, etc.

nft://1/0x332066086DFD12c74919Fa08f6473D9D83E3Bc0e/?showBuying=false&showMeta=false

But since my earliest Goool work³, I’ve always been driven by the condition of the internet. And that remained the same this past year. If you go through my old comments, you’ll see the motivating force in all my work isn’t really just about making trading tokens at all. It’s about embracing new technologies to recapture the beautiful aspects of what makes the internet good – decentralization, net neutrality, free/open access, and being a weirdo online. The ideal that the internet is an open space that allows fully independent, user-generated content to exist and thrive and compete with the manufactured content fed to us as not much more than a form of mind control by powerful entities. This internet ideal is deeply woven into all my art. I am constantly sending love letters to the internet.

As I write this, things like Twitter, which used to be a fun internet place at one point in history, continue to mutate into grotesque, watered down, mockeries of what the web can be, adding more gates and censors, less free, less useful, less beautiful, at the whims of a centralized controller, emphasis on “control.” This is the trajectory of megacorp platforms, even if they paint themselves in opposition to each other with different, opposing colors. As profit-seeking businesses dependent on keeping audiences captive, it should not be surprising that their business model is to develop algorithms to cheaply and ruthlessly “flood the zone with shit” (an incredibly effective psyop technique to keep the masses dazed) and occupy as much space and attention as possible. But this is not what I want the whole of the internet to be. And the only way to counter this is to flood the zone with love.

More internet, very internet.

So as long as there is still a free and open space on the internet, I’ll keep uploading. I’ll use the blockchains to harden and distribute the things I make so no one can take it away. I’ll support the projects doing the same.⁴ The only way to save the internet is to make more, better, internet. Keep making posts and jpegs and websites to fill the internet with the things you actually care about. Make the internet what you want it to be. That’s what I’m doing. Do I really think I can actually save the internet? Maybe not. But it’s still fun to try. I want to have fun on the internet.

Thank you to everyone who stuck it out this past year and kept logging on to win forever.

FOOTNOTES

1. When I wrote about my first anniversary last year, the space had already crashed six months prior but there was still some hope and lingering euphoria in the air. Besides, I give away most of my work for free. If you minted a Riot Goool in 2021, you’ve been pretty much getting non-stop free art from me for 2 years now if you’ve kept up with claiming the key collections. So it’s kind of business as usual regardless of whether the market is up or down.

2. I had flirted with Ethereum a bit before this year with the eGOOOL collection, shortly after the merge, but VIP was the real introduction to my work for many people on Ethereum who had never heard of me before.

3. I occasionally get asked about future Fantom/Goool projects and I don’t really have a solid answer. Currently, the crypto space is in a contracted state and most of the attention, capital, development, and energy has retreated from the altchains. By the end of 2022, I was basically just spending a lot of time making art to drop into random abandoned Fantom wallets. It felt unproductive. So that’s why I’ve been exploring more widely this year, learning new things, making new contacts, growing.

I still enjoy using Fantom when the opportunities arise. My Goool collections are all there and I have no interest or desire to port them anywhere else. In my mind, that’s where their history is and that’s where they live. So unless the Fantom blockchain/DAG completely shuts down, that’s where they’ll remain and I can do more work with them whenever I feel like it.

4. I do have to admit that I am somewhat excited about the possibility of Twitter totally failing and collapsing. Its network effect is the only reason I continue to use it but I think the ongoing negative platform changes will drive more people off the site or reduce usable signal to zero. If that happens, there would be no point to use it and it would be great to reclaim the time I spend on there and divert it towards platforms that I feel more aligned with like farcaster, gallery, mirror or even just more of my own websites.

nft://7777777/0x603CB9FAB99f3301975370A46618f06a6a2c9F15/?showBuying=false&showMeta=false&size=medium

Most defi farms I've seen usually emit tokens of equal or lesser value than the deposit tokens. For some reason, I thought maybe the VIP farm should emit tokens that are much higher value than the VIPs. There is a recommendation in the Milady world that derivatives use a portion of mint proceeds to sweep and stake Milady assets (a sort of anti-grifter virtue check – though questionable in its effectiveness as such.) I wasn’t expecting to make much on the VIP mint but VIP was ~80% free minted so that meant I still wound up with some funds and I was thinking about the best way to use it. To be honest, I don't consider VIP a full-on Milady derivative (the influence is there but maybe it’s closer to a Cigawrette or something else Milady adjacent, having a different audience) so I thought I would do things a little differently. I'd pick up some Miladys and give them back to the people in VIP instead of pocketing them for myself. I figured the Milady price would remain relatively stable over the three months to sustain a good yield for farmers. It actually outperformed and did better than I expected.

I imagine some crypto CFOs probably shaking their heads at this right now. Like, why would I give away over $25,000 in assets to people who mostly minted their depositing assets for free and the collection is also royalty free?? I don't know, I spend most of my day obsessing over tiny color squares on a screen so there is probably something wrong with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just having fun on the internet.

Anyways, a number of things happened because of the farm. The majority (~75%-80%) of listed VIPs moved to Caviar so that was a success. Activity in both the Caviar and NFTX pools increased, generating rewards for stakers in each. Bids increased on Blur/OS as people in the know were picking up VIPs to farm with while people who were unaware were selling into the low bids giving farmers good deals. Overall, this created a much more liquid state for the VIP over the three months where people could drop in and out as they pleased and maybe accelerated the transfer of VIPs out of temporary post-mint homes into more permanent ones.

There were some minor pain points. The hardest part was getting the word out about it since signal on Twitter had been severely degrading at the same time (thanks, Elon.) Some people were only hearing about the farm halfway through the three months and missed a big chunk of emissions. There was also a bit of learning curve because many people were not used to this kind of thing after so many years of NFT trading being stuck in the same pattern. There were arbitrage opportunities that were not taken where people were selling their VIPs on Blur/OS for much lower than they could have received from selling into the liquidity pools. People have habits and discovery was hindered by impaired signal.

Through all this, I learned quite a bit more about order books, AMMs, and yield farming and I think it was a worthwhile thing to do – if only to add a fun activity for VIP during this quiet time in the space. And I hope the Milady rewards made a lot of VIP people happy too!

I suppose the next part of the experiment is to see what happens to the collection post-farm. There are many ways things could go. Will things stay liquid? Will things go to zero? I think there will be some increased activity on Caviar as some people unwind their positions – this will create rewards for the people who stay in the pool. Will the listings move back over to Blur/OS or stay on Caviar? OpenSea Pro is working on Caviar integration so that will help with discovery and give more visibility to the pool on a more mainstream marketplace (you can actually see Caviar pieces on OSpro already but it doesn't really function properly because the price doesn't curve as you add them to the cart.) Will I do another farm? Maybe. VIP was still a pretty young project when the farm was deployed. It would be interesting to try it again further down the road when the VIPs have settled more and maybe at a different price point to see how it plays out differently. I think Baton would be interesting to use as a reward for hitting certain milestones. I have ideas for alternate setups and conditions but, as I mentioned above, I don't like to promise things as a way to make people buy art they may not enjoy on a real level. So please don't hold me to it, maybe a totally different experiment will pop up. Things in this space change rapidly, even if we are deep in the "bear." I do weird spontaneous things all the time. That's part of the fun.

For now, I'll keep dreaming up and making new things for VIP while more organic forces shuffle the VIP collection a bit. Now that the farm is done, I can attend to some other VIP things that have been simmering for a while. TTYL ILYSM!

Bonus: I took a snapshot of everyone who came through the farm this summer and you can free claim an edition of this VIP farmer animation on Zora to commemorate your time on the farm if you’d like! 🤍

nft://1/0xaEd105340c153e4719Ab63AE7268328701E553A2/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

I drew from memories of my battle station as a young VIP & injected anachronisms to make something nostalgic but present. A pixelated mirror to an alternate irl. There's a VIP edit of the infamous Milady meme and a goool drawing citing Sailor Moon (ref VIP Sailor Mercury visor.)

On top of the computer there's a Bonkler Gunpla or Bionicle, a little Totoro figurine, and the once ubiquitous Logitech Quickcam. I had a Quickcam but never really used it. I think I broke it. Now I put black tape over my webcams 🤷🏻‍♀️

Next to the computer is a Rei Ayanami fumo doll. NGE is my favorite anime and i always laugh whenever I see weird Rei fumo gifs around the internet. Of course, there is a Rei hairstyle in the VIP collection.

The positioning and expression of the girl in front is supposed to evoke the disaster girl meme. I always felt that meme is a cousin of the trollin' rage comics face. Many of the different expressions in VIP are deconstructed from memes and rage comics.

If disaster girl is in front, something bad has to be happening behind, so it's the blue screen of death (BSOD). Remembering all the malware I accidentally downloaded while exploring weird sites when I was little and making my computers progressively more unusable over time.

The overlay is inspired by NGE type design but also "Chinese Instagram" (Xiaohongshu pill watermark) network spirituality that Charlotte Fang & Milady village is into. Internet speak like ilysm and henlo – henlo coming from the surreal internet that i'm a fan of.

I hope you enjoyed this! I usually like to let people discover the details on their own (or not) and draw their own associations because mystery is more fun so I don't know if I'll do this all the time 🤷🏻‍♀️

This is a side project that imagines the digital avatars that goools use on the gooolnet. Yes, basically your PFPs have PFPs. We must truly be in the death knell phase of the tokenized art space now. But why not keep making fun stuff as the world falls apart?

Like the other goool based collections on Ethereum (eGOOOL) and Tezos (Goools on XTZ), Very Internet Person (VIP) is a meta layer on top of/apart from the main Fantom goool collections. VIP is a goool mirror to goool gang online activity. A pastiche of all the neochibi, cat, and meme posting I see on my timeline. The name is an ironic subversion of the idea of being a VIP - usually meaning you are granted standing and exclusive access to something (as many NFT projects often promise) – here, all it really means is that you have a hash that points to a picture that says you're on the internet a lot. Seems more honest this way.

I drew this onion in gooolchat and, as Bimps pointed out, it kind of looked like a Milady and I knew what he meant. It's fascinating how internet language and meaning develops.

For VIP, I cited elements from the visual internet vocabulary – meme and rage comics expressions, anime iconography, emojis, and other common computer/internet/crypto cultural artifacts/signifiers – and randomly combined and remixed them with fashion accessories into simple 32x32 pixel icons to see what new things come out. They have transparent backgrounds so they can be pasted easily onto your own background or other things as a memeing or anonymizing/privacy tool. These are meant to be ciphers, or blank slates, to encourage user generated content with loose visual prompts rather than the top down direction by an centralized author or project. (This is what makes the original Milady project most interesting to me. With its somewhat more ambiguous and looser references and messaging and its atemporal aesthetic, it harnessed a chaotic mystery. The openness of the subtext meant anyone could make it what they wanted and you can see this through the various subgenres of posting that organically make up the whole of "miladyposting." The subsequent Remilia collections, with more direct hypercitation and satirical mode, gained wider accessibility to a more general audience but lost some of the mystique. But I digress.)

I'm using scatter.art to mint/distribute these since Scatter seems to have lately evolved into the Milady village market and a place for releasing weird art experiments – and this is just that – an experiment. They asked me if I wanted to do something on their platform a while ago, probably because they saw me posting some milady related art. Given how complicated the Ethereum scene has become with marketplace wars, botting, etc., I figured it was best to stick to a road tested and optimized contract for this simple fun mint rather than use my own hacky solidity.

There are also some interesting things on the Scatter platform that I want to utilize in this experiment. Here are the details for the distribution:

1. Free Mint. This is an allotted free mint and Scatter allows for multiple simultaneous minting lists. The Fantom goool gang (addresses with any Fantom goool pfps) will get 5 free mints per address, and Riot Goools and eGOOOLs addresses each getting an extra 5. Since I'm encroaching on Milady land to release this, Milady and Pixelady will also get 1 free per address. This means that the total number of free mints is more than 100% of the collection but I don't think everyone will claim. Some addresses are dormant, some don't want to use Ethereum/pay ETH gas, and some people won't care as NFTs may be over. The supply is 9,999 so this could be a slow/forever mint because of the way I'm doing it. I'll make and add more free lists as time goes on until they are all gone or I’ll trim the supply once it feels like everyone’s had their fill of them. Tip: this is erc721a so if you are claiming/minting multiples, you should do it in a batch transaction instead of minting one at a time and paying gas for each individual mint.

2. Affiliate link. There will be a public mint cost of 0.02eth for anyone outside the free lists who want to grab any before they all get claimed (or for anyone who wants to mint more than their free allotment and become a VIP whale for whatever reason or for anyone who just wants to give me some extra gas money for my network travels.) I'm also going to activate Scatter's affiliate link system to allow people to earn 50% of mints that go through their personal referral link and the minter gets 10% off (you can generate your own link on the minting page.) You can also trade links with a friend and give each other a discount off the public cost.

3. 0% Royalties. The royalties situation is messy on Ethereum and I don't agree with centralizing mechanisms like operator filters that limit what people can do with their digital possessions. I don't know if royalties is the end all model for artists anyways, it’s just a carryover from the old world. I think the most important thing in this nascent space is to keep experimenting with different models and methods to maybe discover something better. Also, most of my existing audience is from Fantom where we usually only pay (fractions of) cents for gas so maybe having no royalties can compensate for some of the ETH gas cost involved with these. So, if this ends up all minted for free and there are no creator royalties, doesn't that mean I could stand to make $0? Yes! But, whatever, I just want to experiment and see what happens. I'll be minting a bunch as an artist reserve/inventory that will likely be used to set up an NFTX pool so people can swap for ones they like more. If I'm in a desperate situation, I could always sell some of those if they gain value. Anyways, if the unlikely happens someday and someone manages to sell one of these on secondary for 100eth or something, I won't be upset that I didn't get a cut of the sale – I'll be happy that I helped someone log on and win forever that day.

To sum up and perhaps as a disclaimer: this is a high supply, controlled free mint with no strings (royalties, roadmap, etc.) attached. It’s an experiment and maybe a litmus test to see how much life is left in the space. This is mainly just for fun and to amuse myself and others during crypto winter. I wanted to cut loose a bit and give people some free art while I continue to work on my slower 1/1 and edition goool work. Who knows if these will ever be worth more than the gas to claim them? I hope people find creative uses for these and they can be used to inject more anarchic energy into the timeline. This project is CC0 or copyleft or whatever buzzy words you want to use for "you are free to permissionlessly enjoy this art in any way you please." Personally, I just wanted a new thing to make messy weird collages with in a way that didn't quite fit with my usual work. But I'm interested to see how and if this can grow beyond me. Have fun!

💾 Mint link 💾

When it came time to make a website for the goools project last year, I knew I wanted to do something that paid tribute to the design languages of 90s computing. I thought about things like that early Mac, and about Netscape Navigator, Geocities beveled buttons, and ICQ. The goools themselves are rooted in a very specific era with Riot Grrrl being a 90s movement (see also popular references to Sailor Moon, Pokémon, Power Rangers, Neon Genesis Evangelion, etc.) Being a pixel art project, the pixelated computer interfaces of the time just made conceptual sense for the gooolniverse!

While it's fun and trendy to do 90s callbacks and remixes, I wanted to deploy reference points like these for something more than just nostalgic mimicry. To me, revisiting this past made sense beyond just a superficial appreciation and could speak to a direction for the future.

The 90s were the last decade to have a real separation between offline and online life for a lot of people. And it was the first decade of learning to be internet cyborgs. Maybe it was because I was so young at the time but I look back at it as a period of curiosity and discovery and new potential. I get the same feeling from the decentralized web movements of today that have sprung up as we've reached a point where we're re-examining our relationship to being online and the type of internet cyborgs we've become over the past few decades, for better or for worse.

My goal for the gooolOS design is to revisit the feeling of a less clean-cut, wild, and weird web – before a lot of the rough edges got sanded off in pursuit of the sanitized, generic, social network we seem to mostly exist in today. Functionally, deprecated things like web rings, guestbooks, and chat rooms don't perform as well as their modern evolutions if all you're looking at is pure performance and convenience. But I think that websites can and maybe should be more than just information pamphlets and purely utilitarian services. They can be something that gives you a unique experience and be an art form in themselves. That's what I miss most about the old internet. I miss "surfing the web" and finding strange (sometimes broken) websites that felt like it was built by an actual living person and was an expression of that person. These days we mostly live online in algorithmically generated silos. The sites that I link to in the gooolOS boookmarks are some that I feel are attempting to create something unique online.

I also use gooolOS as a way to try out different decentralized web technologies I learn about. Sometimes it feels like a lot of the technology being developed in the "web3" space is just used for price speculation and the actual product is besides the point. I actually want to use them to make things. Like using IPFS to host and IPNS to point a domain (managed with Fleek.) And you can reach gooolOS through riotgoools.eth if you have an ENS resolver. This makes the site more durable against things like DNS hijacking and centralization problems with traditional hosting. I'd like to get my HNS domain working at some point too. Goool Chat is a callback to things like Yahoo chatrooms but using the decentralized Matrix protocol as the backend so that messages and data is stored with the user and not some random company's server. It's a place for intermittent conversations with random people like those old chat rooms without the pressures of the current social media landscape. At some point, I might introduce some goool token functionality to gooolOS but I'm still learning and experimenting with that stuff and trying to find an interesting way to use it.

It's also important to me that the future web doesn't continue the dark patterns that we've seemingly accepted through web 2.0 such as data collection, fingerprinting, and tracking. So I don't use anything like Google Analytics, etc. The only things that get stored when using gooolOS is any Goool Notes you write and a Matrix access key if you log in. And these are just stored in your browser's local storage and not retained on servers (no website cookies.) Also, in the spirit of web 1.0, no ads! It's also why I use things like mirror.xyz (which stores writing on arweave) instead of platforms like medium or substack.

I'm always looking at different ideas to move my tech stack further away from the centralized surveillance and data extraction model of web 2.0. gooolOS is a playground to explore alternatives to that type of web reality. My dev skillset leans more toward the frontend than the backend and I feel it's part of my work to make things that help people can gain understanding. Much like how Kare, in the video linked above, describes the visual metaphors used in her design work to humanize what may be alien to some. The visual design choices and details I put into gooolOS are to reflect the mission of moving to (back to) a more open, creative, web. I consider design as more than just visual polish – there should be holistic consideration for the aesthetics, the systems behind the aesthetics, and the ethos behind the systems. Creating harmony between all of those things is the art of the design. Art can be the aesthetic frontend to interface with the decentralized web ethos backend.

I probably think way too much about this stuff but if we have to spend so much of our lives online anyways, then why not make it interesting? Time only moves forward for us so we can't ever go back to the old web. Besides, despite all the hellish aspects of the web today, would we even really want to go back with all the cool things we do have? I'd rather take a look at what was good before, add to it the good that's coming up, and find ways to create art that makes being online just a bit more enjoyable for everyone and push toward a more healthy web of open standards, decentralization, and encryption. The alternative is to continue to let giant corporations and eccentric billionaires command our attention while filling their own pockets. No thanks, keep the internet weird please.

It's been one year since my first tweet which marked the beginning of this whole crazy journey (actually, I started working on the drawings for the Riot Goools in September but I was still just lurking in the space. And the Riot Goools mint began on October 6, 2021, the day after my first tweet.) I don't really know what to write for an occasion like this. I don't think I expected this thing to last so long. When I started, I didn't have any expectations at all. I was literally starting from zero and just wanted to experiment and learn and share art and ideas with people. It still feels like a strange year-long dream. Like one of those dreams where you're constantly meeting and connecting with random strangers and characters. One where the logic of the world is a little bit skewed but you don't question it. It's the kind of dream that keeps you tossing and turning all night and leaves you even more exhausted afterwards.

So, maybe I'll just reflect a bit on the past year and on the future and try not to repeat too much of the stuff I've already said here or the various tweet threads I've written. I'm not going to try to recap everything that happened over the year since it's so much but you can always search and scroll through my tweets & replies on twitter if you want to relive some of those moments in time.

Before anything else, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has ever been interested in what I do. I'm still stunned that the weird ideas I have translate to anything meaningful to people. Whenever I see a goool around twitter, it still makes me smile every time. It never gets old. This is the reason why I feel the work is so fulfilling, regardless of how burnt out I get or how depressed the space becomes. It's been interesting to see how people have made their goools their own and use them in different ways to represent their online identities. Some have developed their own personalities and have lead storied lives in the gooolniverse. Some are even hosting football podcasts. I can’t ever say thank you enough for all of the goool love.

Here's a quick overview of the goool project after a year:

On Fantom, there are the main goool pfp collections – Riot, Magical, Power, Creepy, Weird Goools and the Gooolmon. These are the inhabitants of the gooolniverse and they are how I interact with the goool gang to do activities and distribute the objects and records of goool life like the Goool Bands, B-sides, Gooolaroids, and Gooollabs.

On Tezos, there is Goools on XTZ which documents a more occult side of the goools, images of dreams and hallucinations. It's an avenue to explore not only slightly different goool content but also different distribution through a larger editioned model on a different chain (and different art scene.)

And more recently, on Ethereum, there is CypherGoool Chronicles (eGOOOL) which is a more contained story in a different style. Think of it like a sci-fi movie that goools would go to the theatre to see. Again, another kind of experiment – in non-linear storytelling, strict 1/1 goool pieces, and learning more about another chain. I'm also interested in exploring crosschain possibilities for distribution here given that wallet addresses are the same on EVM compatible chains.

As you can see, most of my collections have taken different approaches and follow different rationales. Even the pfp collections each came about because of different reasons (partnerships, events, etc.) I'm not someone who's content doing the same thing over and over again even if it's easier and more advantageous to follow a recipe. I get kind of bored when things fall into predictable patterns. I started the goool project to explore the technology and the possibilities it offers for creativity. Part of the appeal of being in this space is that it's open and experimental. Some things will succeed and some things will fail. That's how experiments go in order to find the way forward. That's why the space is high risk and volatile and things go up and down and up again in the blink of an eye. I love the sense of unlimited possibility in this chaos and I intend to keep learning and experimenting and pushing in different directions.

People are always talking about adoption in the crypto space. That everything hinges on adoption. It's true. But I think before adoption is even in the cards, there has to be a lot of work done on acceptance. It's been one year and I still see the same hate and vitriol directed towards NFT art from the general population and, more disappointingly, from artists outside the space. Nothing has changed much. After going through the many highs and lows of this year, I can see how some of that reaction is earned even though I feel more strongly about the technology than ever. I mean, there is a lot of questionable and bad stuff that happens here that probably makes it quite alienating for people who just want to enjoy some art.

I think acceptance comes from people gaining understanding. So my goal has always been to create art and make content that can bridge understanding for people. Art and content can be the gateway for acceptance and adoption. Things like the internet and media streaming were adopted because of content, not necessarily because of the technology but because of what the tech enabled. People saw other people enjoying something on the internet or watching a show on a streaming platform and understood the tech through that. That's why I like to do everything in the open on Twitter. Maybe a skeptic will see a funny looking goool drawing in a tweet and wonder what that is. If they look deeper, they might find the web of content that makes up the goool network. Deeper still, they might see people just talking about art and technology and other normal things (well, as "normal" as goool conversations can be, I guess) and not what they assumed to be a bunch of shadowy super-coders trying to unload meaningless strings of numbers on each other out the back of a digital unmarked van. Maybe, gradually, they can accept that we're just people like them who are interested in making cool art and technology. Maybe they can come to understand that some people really do buy NFTs for the art because it really has personal value and meaning to them. I don't think everyone needs to buy NFT art, just like not everyone needs to buy oil paintings. But I hope one day, and this is what I'm working for, everyone can be okay with it existing so that the promise and potential of the technology creating a more equitable world can truly be fulfilled.

"Web3" is the term that gets thrown around to describe this space as the next iteration after web2.0. And web2.0 was what evolved out of the web1.0 dotcom bubble burst. That event was brought on by a lot of the bad and unhealthy behavior in the tech space at the time (greed, impossible promises, excessive speculation, ignorance – sound familiar?) in conjunction with a bunch of outside factors (the “macro”) like Y2K, 9/11, Enron scandal, etc. The crash created the environment for the people who kept working through it to become the web giants of today (for better or for worse.) While many people wrote the internet off as a fad that had its 15 minutes of fame, the mainstream corporations and entities came in and scavenged the rubble, seized control and ownership of the web, and remade it in their own image, rigging it in their favor. The web became more homogenized as the new rulers of the web have just become more entrenched and unchallenged for over a decade now and a lot of the weird and fun parts of the old wild west web got lost. Web3 feels like a rejection of what we’ve ended up with. Like we can make the web our own again. But I think you could also look at web3 as blockchain1.0 and it's going through its own dotcom bubble burst. Now's the time to consider how we want blockchain2.0 to be different and better than before and take the steps to move in that direction while no one is paying attention. Hopefully it won't be a repeating of past mistakes. I feel my contributions to this movement are small. I just make art and have mediocre dev skills. But I’ll continue to do what I can in my own way just like everyone else who believes in this.

It's been a fun year. I've crossed paths with so many amazing people and have had a lot crazy adventures. I really believe the goool gang is comprised of great people who share a lot of the same vision and hopes I have for the future of art and technology. Let’s keep working towards that future. Thank you for making the project what it is and I'll keep trying to surprise you with what I make next.

elle 🖤🤘🏻

One day, Metamorph and I began chatting because of our shared interest in Neon Genesis Evangelion, art direction, and design. He told me that he was interested in doing something in the Gooolniverse and that he had a background in industrial 3D design. I had seen his work on Fantom and Tezos and I loved it. This conversation happened over the course of a week and because we are on different sides of the world, he would work while I was sleeping and I would work while he was sleeping. So the sending back and forth of files wasn’t as rapid as this chat may make it seem, it’s just been edited for readability. -Elle

There is some art you feel is made for you. Elle’s work is exactly the type of aesthetic I consume. Exactly the colors I like, exactly the pop culture references I like, the art I like. Usually when I stumble upon art like that I end up just being jealous as if a Metamorph from another timeline should’ve created that art. This time I just decided to be part of it and went straight to Elle’s DM. Happens that Elle is an absolute beast AND kind so it was a perfect occasion to work together. -Metamorph

Metamorph: I thought about it tonight and I was thinking of a Game Boy game or something. Or something on an old VHS tape. A tarot card with depth.

Elle: When I read Game Boy and VHS tape, I thought of Shinji’s DAT walkman. Here’s a sketch I did thinking about meshing your work and mine. The headphones could have little music ghosts coming out of it. I could draw a Goool band album cover. I was also thinking of this type of foam headphones.

M: Niiiice, I love this, I need to think about this! It's going to be complicated aha!

M: We might have a problem. Shinji’s walkman is a SDAT. That means it's not the cassette tape we are used to seeing. It’s ugly ones. I think I'll go for a version that doesn't exist. A mix of Shinji’s and other ones. Hope you like retro futurist stuff...because I’m going into it aha.

E: Yeah, DAT/SDAT was only really popular in Japan. I watched a documentary about that format once. But yes, go where your imagination takes you!

M: I did the walkman. I still need to do the headset. I’ve put an artwork of yours on every surface you can use and I've put random colors.

E: You’re amazing!!! I can’t believe you made that so fast! I wonder how the buttons on the back would look if they were more retro and metallic like these kinds of buttons. It might be a cool retro future mix.

M: For the flat art, there is basically: the screen zone (we can put text like song name but an animation of a singer or musician full body could be awesome), the box artwork, the audio tape sticker, the little screen on the audio tape (can be a small animation loop with GameBoy vibe, or we can put "26:00:00" like the Shinji screen), there is space on the back (I'll just put text in texture, like our names, the voltage, some lore, etc.) For the ghosts, I honestly think my ghosts don’t fit flying there but I can put one as a strap chain on the side. It could be awesome if you made an animation of the ones you made in the 1st sketch. Just jiggling and I'll make them go up and disappear. I don’t know if it's a lot of work! We can take off stuff, etc. I kind of want to see a lot of bands’ walkman now!

I tried to interpret Shinji’s walkman with a retro futurist approach. The main traits of his walkman are the stripe with the vertical screen, 2 different plastic/colors, and a little transparent window to see if the tape is working. I tried to use those features in a retrofuturist way. The vertical screen now has more actual use but with an old display system. Basically it looks like a streaming platform on a gameboy screen instead of some limited digits. For the two different plastics, I used a combo that reminds of the iMac G3 designed by Jonathan Ive, or the Apple Pro Mouse (inspired by Jonathan Ive’s work too). So I used hard shiny plastic with a transparent one with Elle’s color combo. Since the front material was transparent, there was no need to put a window here and we came up with the idea of a small screen on the tape. I decided to use a magnifying glass of the shape of Shinji’s walkman window to look at the small tape screen. These are a few examples of how we tried to make it look coherent. Even if you don't need the product to work to look cool, I like to think that details are important to make this look real. -m

E: It looks so good already! I love the new colors. You’re working too fast, let me catch up! Maybe the slider switch and the ports should be metallic too or some other color so it doesn’t match the plastic of the tape? That way it makes it feel more like 2 different components. I think textured text and technical symbols on the back would be good. I’m working on the box art and the screen stuff now and some other ideas! And yes, I was thinking the ghosts could be a mix between the ones I usually have in my drawings but glowing like yours.

E: OK, here is the album art. There are two options for the tape art. One is printed mono and the other is a sticker. I think I like the printed mono better but you can try both. Here are some LCD screens. Here are some ghosts. Do you want to put a small pixel Pen Pen sticker (the one on the Power Goools helmet) on the back of the player to make the player look like it is more used?

When I was thinking about Metamorph’s renders in contrast to my pixels, I wanted to combine the two elements in a way that would actually make sense in the real world. Old LCD screens are interesting to me because of the way they render digital information in a way that feels analog. Like pixel art, there’s a limited grid to place the information. When Metamorph brought up retro futuristic tech, I knew I wanted to have fun with LCDs rather than something like retina displays which probably would have been more straightforward to animate. It’s all about the vibe and aesthetics! -e

M: The vertical screen artwork is the exact fucking size idk how you did that!

E: Haha, it was a lucky guess. This looks incredible!!!

M: I'm going to slow the screen animations. I have some doubts about the camera. Too close we don't see the whole headset & box but too far we can't see screens animations. I wont change this yet, I’ll wait for you.

E: Amazing! I love how this is looking! Yes the animation is a bit too fast. Should the ghosts only come out of the headphones? Also, can you rotate the Pen Pen sticker a little bit so it is not perfectly parallel with the player’s lines, so it looks like it was applied by the owner and not by the manufacturer?

At this point, we were also discussing whether to make this as a video or an interactive NFT that you could rotate and zoom. We did some tests and the transparent materials didn’t look as good as the video, the file size was massive, and we didn’t know if we could get the screens to animate properly as a .glb file. -e

E: What do you think about putting the headphones behind the player so that everything stays mostly in frame during the rotation?

M: I think moving the headphone is the solution BUT I have to remake the wires and its pain ahahah so let's be sure we are talking about the same position.

E: How about leaning against the back like this? That would also give the composition some more height and the ghosts wouldn’t be isolated to one side  (yes, don’t do the wires yet!)

M: I'm happy because my small ghost looks cute AF.

E: I love the little ghost charm!

E: I thought some more about the music ghosts and made new ones. I made them more digital like audio waveforms to go with the overall aesthetic of the piece better and added in/out to the animation so you don't have to rely on the fade. What do you think? And a couple other edits – had to make the Pen Pen border a tiny bit bigger, felt too thin for a sticker. Also made another sticker for a little extra detailing.

M: Looks good to me! It's way better with the headset like that.

E: Yessss!!! Incredible, it looks so good! The composition is definitely more balanced now. How about without the base and it was more like a seamless photo backdrop? I could imagine someone putting this in a video frame to look like a real object suspended in a box but the base breaks that illusion a bit.

M: Perfect. It’s rendering.

E: Ahh don't render yet! There's still one more thing!

M: What is missing?

E: Walkgoool logo on the front? I'm just designing it right now.

M: OK nice.

E: Small detail but makes it look more authentic.

M: The detail I’m proud of is dumb AF but it's the small line we see on the heart sticker because of the gap it's stuck on.

E: I love that detail!! I noticed it right away. C’est incroyable !

M: Ahaha Merci beaucoup !

From here, we mostly just worked on finalizing the final render and debated the amount of chromatic aberration we should apply that would be good and not too overpowering for the small details. Then I finally let Metamorph go to sleep without worrying about more edits waiting for him when he wakes up the next day! -e