A border crossed
a coloured bridge
and then we pass
that man-made mount.
Along this
autoroute, familiar sights.

A road well traveled, but still so many things to see. And they shape how the road is experienced as well - from interesting sights they become distance measures: if we're here, we're almost there.

What are the landmarks you encounter regularly?

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

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Poésie de la vie

When you get off the main roads, there is really so much to see. Here are some great road trips to inspire you to go and see the world:

Here we go:
another visit to
another doctor. I am so bored,
but need to keep it up
to get fixed.

I need eye surgery. I neglected my problem a little bit, so in the past few months, I was rewarded for that neglect by having to go through multiple examinations. Sometimes the same ones again to verify for another specialist, sometimes completely new ones. I did not know there were so many ways eyes can be examined. From x-rays with contrast fluids, to echographies, to I don't know what that whirring and circling machine was doing. The most annoying one, was the one where the machine spit air in my eye to measure eyeball tension. Avoid that one, if you can.

Anyway, all those tests also meant waiting in waiting rooms. The beauty is that in Paris, there is this specialised hospital, that has a whole universe of related clinics around it. So, I've been to several of those, and to the main hospital. I was in the hands of experts, and they all wanted to test just that one thing more, or again.

Okay, admittedly, this was not the best experience in my life, but it had to be done. And fortunately, I found some poetry in the waiting room boredom.

Enjoy.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Poésie de la vie

It felt a bit like I was living through groundhog day, having to go to all these waiting rooms. So, I was looking for something fun to share and found this weird thing. There must be some poetry in this, right?

muted tones
and intricate textures,
calming sound of moon moving water,
a soft wind clears my mind:
happy place

The water was still cold, but I stepped into the surf. As the water flowed over my feet, I felt a heaviness flowing out of my body I was not aware I was carrying. This is so very much my happy place: the beach, no matter the weather.

Especially in these times, we need our happy places more than in previous years. Places where we feel safe, where we feel without sorrow, where we feel light and loved.

What does your happy place look like?

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

Learn how to be happy from what seems to be the happiest place in the world: Finland. Loving this report in which some happiness hackers are interviewed.

The cold quay
welcomed a stowaway
into his new reality. Life
shifted halfway across
the planet.

The Lloydkade is a quay in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. There still are mooring bollards lining the street, but they are no longer in intensive use. Seventy-five years ago, my dad set foot on European soil right here. He had been a stowaway on the Goya, a ship sailing from the East Indies colony of The Netherlands that was soon to become Indonesia. He had left his tropical home to make a new life in the colder parts of Europe. He would never return.

My father came to The Netherlands in a time filled with uncertainties amidst a changing world that had just started healing from World War II. That healing took a long time, and had its ups and downs. It even looked for a little bit after the 1980s that we had actually managed to put dark periods like that in our past. A relic of history. Unfortunately, now again, we seem to be pulled back by people who see The Other as a threat. People who want more money, more resources, more of everything for themselves only. The Others are not the threat. The ones telling you that, are the real threat.

In the header of this issue, you can see an image of the Goya.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Poésie de la vie

My father was born in the Moluccas, an archipelago also known as the Spice Islands, because of the unique spices that natively grew there. Like nutmeg:

I don't think I've
ever taken
this line before;
the only time
I was close
to here, I rode a velib'.

Paris, like all big cities, has many faces. An many places that are worth spending time at. This week, I was in a part of the city I had not been before, and got there by riding a metro I had never taken before. New experiences, especially those that are all about discovering more about the place where you live, are very enriching: I saw a new face of Paris, and I found the poem above.

Oh, and no, it was not the line that passes the station of which you can see a fragment in the header image. But do you recognise at which station that photo is taken?

What's a cool place in your area that tourists hardly ever visit, but is very much worth going to?

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Poésie de la vie

"The absolute worst thing to do when you come to Paris is to plan too much."

Nothing needs to be added to that. I have probably shared this before, a few years ago. But this episode of one of Anthony Bourdain's travel shows has been a guide since I saw it first. I hope it helps you get more out of your travel, too.

Carefully she
selects the next
blossom to pick
pollen from - a
joyful dance;
worker becomes MVP

Spring is exploding early this year, but, as always, with verve. Croci, daffodils, blossom trees, everything is coming out of hibernation. Even though it triggers my allergies, I love it. It's beautiful. Exciting, Fresh. Days are noticeably longer. The sun is warmer. People seem to be friendlier.

If you look closer at the flowers and blossoms, you see little workers being busy. They hop from flower to flower, collecting raw materials for honey. And as they do that, they pollinate. They ensure that the blossoms grow out into fruit. Into food.

As I watch this in a tree with vibrant pink blossoms, I am amazed. How can these little creatures play such an important role?

We all have our role to play, and maybe the role of us humans is to make sure our pollinator populations do not get decimated any furhter.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Poésie de la vie

This video is a short reminder of the importance of pollinators.

Like leaves on the
forest floor, some
are just there, some
are exquisite -
all of them
make our common soil richer.

When I was walking in a big park the other day, one that resembles a small forest, I was looking at textures. From tree trunks, from moss, and from the leaves on the ground. The last one intrigued me. It's just a pile of fallen leaves discarded by the trees and nobody cares enough about them to pick them up. But when you zoom in, you can see that each leaf is unique. With its own intricate patterns and shapes and colours. Zoom out again a little and you can see them lying there, layered on top of eachother, year after year. And these layers slowly morph into a fertile top layer of the soil. One that feeds the forest.

It reminded me of my poems. Sometimes, when I send them out in the world, it feels like I send them out like a tree letting go of its leaves. And when you see them lying on the floor, you will find they all look very similar. A bit mundane even. But if you zoom in, you'll see that each is different. Some are indeed mundane, and maybe a bit bland, but some are very intricate, and powerful, and inspiring.

All of them together, though - I hope they form a very fertile top soil for you to grow your own unique world view from.

If you like the topsoil that the poems in this weekly newsletter form, please show your enthusiasm by buying me a cup of coffee or sending me a monthly supply of three cups through my hypersub.

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

Watch this bite-sized documentary about the forest floor

In a world filled with
bland, dull tones, I prefer to
use a bright palette.

Recently I got a brand new fountain pen (the Kaweco Al Sport Piston Filler if you want to be precise), and I filled it with the blue ink that came with it. And it's a bit... mweh. So, now I'm writing a lot so that I can fill it with a brigther, more vibrant colour. One thing I wrote, is the poem above.

How are you bringing more colour into the world?

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

When playing with my new pen, I also realised I needed to clean one of my pens that I hadn't used in a while, because it didn't write that well anymore. I went looking for a video that would tell me the best way to clean, and that, in turn, drew me into a fountain pen rabbit hole. This is one of the videos I found and wanted to share with you:

Paris streets call
Duke runs with me
kids laugh behind
gold dreams ahead
poems breathe
through the city of light we go

An AI generating a poem in a poetic form you yourself have created. That in itself is fun to experience. It gets even more fun when that happens in an app that you have vibe coded yourself as well. It feels like your living in the future. Especially when people around you have not have heard the term vibe coding before. For those of you who haven't: that is creating a piece of software by using an AI assistent to write the necessary code for it.

In short: I used AI to create a piece of software that generates a poem in a form I created, based on your posts on a certain social network.

Sure, there are some ways to go with my first vibe coded app. Some things to improve. Like the ability of the AI to count syllables. But it only took me a few hours to create this app. That is how far into the future we have traveled.

How far have you traveled by now?

PS: the image in the header is, of course, generated by AI based on the poem above.

If this newsletter has ever made your day more fun, deeper, or more alive, please consider buying me a coffee or subscribing to my hypersub. It helps me keep this space thoughtful, ad-free, and sustained by readers who believe poetry still matters.

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

If you want to know a bit more about vibe coding and have a little peak into the future, watch this video with Sayangel, who inspired me to build my mini app on Farcaster:

As I weave through
the crowds, I know
I will feature
in a thousand
tourist snaps;
now I'm part of their story.

Imagine you want to visit a museum in the city you live in. To get there, you walk past a beautiful spot that has one of the best views of one of the most iconic monuments in the world. Do you see the crowds standing there? Snapping photos, selling trinkets, being tourists? Well, if you get out at the Trocadero metro stop, and walk through the Esplanade du Trocadéro to cross the Pont d'Iena, you will know what I mean. If you don't want to be in other people's pictures, don't do this. It's unavoidable. And to be fair, from that Esplanade, you have an amazing view of the Eiffel Tower. Arguably the best view.

With virtually everybody living with a camera glued to their hand these days (and then I'm not even speaking of those Ray Ban Facebook glasses), you will become part of other people's stories. There is no escaping. I don't really mind for myself. But I do not like it if my children are in it. I used to mind that less, but now that images shared on socials will inevitably become part of AI training data sets, I have more concerns. I rather not have my children's faces be inspiration for AI halucinations. Still looking to find ways to avoid that, without moving to an isolated home high up in the mountains.

Although, that doesn't even sound that bad.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

Maybe the best time to wander the streets of Paris, is right when it wakes up at 5 am.

When prosthetics
is transcribed as
prostitutes, you
know we are still
early and
have a long journey ahead.

Earlier this week, I was in a call with a charity that refurbishes used prosthetic legs and send them to a country in Africa to help people there who have lost limbs unlock mobility. They do impressive work, and we decided to direct part of our fundraising to their organisation. You can see a video of what they do in the Poésie de la vie section below.

What was a bit distraction during the call, was the transcription provided by the video call tool. This tool uses AI to convert what is being said into text. A very useful tool, if it works well. This one clearly has a way to go to become reliably useful, as some of the conversions were still very, well, wrong. Some were comical, and others were troubling. When prosthetics is consistently transcribed as prostitutes, we can conclude that this tool is proving it can be useful, but needs to improve its accuracy.

AI has proved how useful it can be, but we still need to adapt. Whether it are misinterpretations in transcriptions, hallucinations, or overvaluations of misinformation, AI still needs us very much to verify whether what has been produces is actually useable. This, I believe, underscores the need for learning methodology of not only how AI works and is trained, but also of how to do what you want the AI to do. And a thorough subject matter knowledge to spot the hallucinations.

We are on our way, but not there yet.

What's the funniest hallucination AI has presented you?

I could use your help. If you like this newsletter, please consider buying me a coffee, or support me with a monthly subscription fee. This newsletter will stay free regardless, but any support is welcome and loved.

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Poésie de la vie

Watch the story of Lamin, a welder who could continue his work thanks to a donated prosthetic leg.

Only the weak
wage wars - it takes
real strength to build
bridges and make
peace happen.
Be strong: embrace The Other.

Today, I attended a Creative Mornings meeting in Paris. Creative Mornigns is a global movement of creative people gathering on the last Friday of the month to talk around a certain theme. The theme today was chosen by the Teheran chapter: koor-soo, which means so much as "a glimmer of hope".

We were treated to an inspiring talk by Warrior of Peace Hanna Assouline. At one point, one audience member started antagonising her, by aggressively questioning her about a point he declared she had made, but of which it remained unclear when she had made that. I, personally, did not think she did, but that's beside the point. The point is, that this kind of antagonistic behaviour does not contribute to a solution, it only perpetuates the problem. The whole point of Hanna's story was that her women's movement tried to bring people together. To bridge the gaps, to bring people from both sides, in the example at hand the Israelis and the Palestinians, together to find a way towards peace.

And that's what this poem is about. Finding the strength to embrace The Other. To work towards peace. That's real strength. Only the weak wield weapons.

PS: In the header image you can see a section of the Jordan river, which partially forms the border between Israel and the Palestinian territory.

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Poésie de la vie

Above, I called Hanna Assouline a Warrior of Peace. Here's a short clip that shows what her organisation, les guerrières de la paix, does.

Monetise your posts

Social sharing with crypto rails, that is what decentralised social (DeSoc) is all about. In the beginning, there was text, of course. And quickly that evolved in to image sharing à la Insta. Zora led the way in that, and quickly others like Rodeo and Drakula entered the scene as well. The basic premise here was that you could earn from your posts, because people could collect them or tip you by liking them. Blockchain tech, especially the L2s on Ethereum, is ideal for this.

However, just like with other NFT platforms, there is a big challenge: most do not reach escape velocity, to use a popular term. What I mean by that is that only in exceptional cases did art get collected by people outside the NFT artist bubble. Most of the earnings were made from other creators who were active on the platforms. There was a certain crowd of crypto artists who would support eachother, but it was rare for 'outside' money to come in. Zora figured it was a great idea to get that larger crowd in the crypto scene to play ball. This larger crowd are the traders: people who try to make money trading coins. What if you could get these traders to trade art or content?

And thus, the content coin was born and the CoinAge launched into being. The idea is simple: let trader play their casino games with content, so creators earn money from outside their own bubble. Other platform teams liked this idea and followed suit. You can trade this article, for example, as also Paragraph decided to switch from NFTs to coins. And on TBA, or The Base App, the social corner of Coinbase that runs on the Farcaster protocol, every post you make is a tradable coin, if you switch that on.

There be challenges

The mechanics are that if you create a post, you create a coin and you get an initial supply of that coin as a reward. The more people buying your coin, the more that coin is worth. With that, your share is worth more. If you manage to sell that. There are some challenges there, though. Traders don't like it if the creator of a coin sells off supply. Dumping is frowned upon, so the increased value of your coins can not be exchanged without reputation cost for actual value you can pay your rent with. The risk is that traders stop trading in your coins if you don't hodl. Secondly, value is determined by an algorithm. If your coin does not take off, the algo overestimates the value of the coin, and you cannot actually trade it, because there is not enough liquidity in the market to sell off your supply.

I have created several content coins to experiment, including posts on TBA. The earnings I had from that last platform were exclusively creator rewards, a bonus you get for posting there. As for my coins on Zora, of which there are several, I think I had a few that earned me a bit, but most earnings were from trading fees: the small reward you get on trades made with a coin you created.

The content coins I created that made the most sense to me are the cocreated language coins I wrote about last week, and my Poésies éphémères collection of poems, where the volatility of tradable assets is part of the art, as I am juxtaposing the immutability of blockchain tech with the ephemeral nature of the medium (paper, sand, snow for example) I create the poems on and the fleeting nature of the moment I record with these poems. But that has not yet resulted in big earnings.

Have you created content coins? Share in the comments how that works for you.

From the church,
walk up to the cemetery.
Don't go into the town center,
there's nothing there. Maybe the inn,
but it's too touristy.

No, go back down by the field,
that is where he painted that picture
with the crows.

The light there...
it's magical.

Off the beaten track, like a local. Travel is most fun when you get to the parts everybody wants to see, and then go beyond to the parts most people generally skip. A great source for tips on that, are locals. If you get an insider's tip, you get just that bit more from a travel experience.

That's what this poem, a free verse one this time, is about: celebrating travel beyond the tourist traps. And finding people who are willing to share their tips with you. We found this one is a local epicerie, where the owner happened to live in the town where Vincent van Gogh spent his last months.

What's the thing travelers to your town/city/region/country should know about but travel guides - and instafluencers - stay silent about?

Travel with this newsletter, and support us via hypersub or buy me a coffee:

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Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Poésie de la vie

A master of traveling with intent and a keen interest in the real world, Anthony Bourdain shared his love for food and travel with the world through his books and tv shows. He is greatly missed. Below, some of his most memorable meals

For every coin you create via Zora, a total supply of 1 billion coins is created. As the creator, you are automatically rewarded 10 million (1%) of that supply. This is makes it ideal for cocreated content, and with that for my "Languages of Farcaster" project. In this project I ask my Farcaster social graph to share the word for a certain thing (a train, fireworks, a sunflower). The responses I project on a piece of pixel art I make on a 12 x 12 canvas, which I then use to create a coin on Zora.

I'm experimenting with coins to see how they can become part of the income stream stack for onchain poets (and other artists). In this 5 part series, I am sharing about these experiments, to help you decide whether it's something you might want to experiment with as well. This week, I talk about a project of uniting farcasters through their languages.

Now begins the fun part: from the 10M supply of that coin, I redistribute 9M to the participants. Yes, that means that if there are less than 9 participants, they actually get more per person then I hold myself. That way, everybody has actual ownership in the project, and in the unlikely scenario that the coin takes off, we even have a potential monetary gain.

The benefit of the coining of content on Zora is that as a creator, you get rewarded for any trade made with that coin. But, that does not really happen for most of us. So, for now, these cocreated language coin are more about symbolic value and collective ownership of the creation. Besides, it simply is a very fun project.

When Zora made the move to coining all posts, they were also referred to as content coins. Every post on Zora is a coin, and now, if you use The Base App, every post you create there is a coin as well. Even this very article you are reading now is a coin, as Paragraph has also embraced the era of the coin craze. Obviously, I have created a couple of content coins. In the next part of this journey into Coincrazia, I will dive a bit deeper into content coins.

Have you done something similar? Please share your experience in the comments.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Floods will come.
Are you the one who has
to rebuild everything, or will you
be the one who just is
well prepared?

Growing up in a country that is for a large part below sea level gives you a certain mindset: you always have a tendency to be prepared for water flooding in. You make sure you, and people around you, learn how to swim, for example. The way your surroundings are designed make sure you never forget: dunes, dykes, locks, storm surge barriers, they are all abundantly present. Even overflow areas near rivers.

With the effects of our changing climate manifesting themselves more and more seriously, being prepared is not a bad idea. Out on my runs here in France, an overflow basin for the Seine is part of my route. Well, I run around it. And on one of these runs, I found the poem above.

What kind of person are you: a rebuilder or a preparer?

PS: the poem above is a tritriplicata poem that is also minted as an NFT in my Mis en Seine collection. You can collect it here.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

https://hypersub.xyz

Poésie de la vie

One of the ways the Dutch are prepared for flooding is the Oosterschelde stormvloedkering (storm surge barrier), explained in this video:

That resonated with me. Don't follow. Don't do what others do, be yourself, you are enough, you are a star. Be your own guru.

I knew it immediately: this was going to be my culture coin. My second coin launch, one that was all about an attitude. I named it bonj, after the opening greeting mister Hamlet uses in his videos.

Bonj was a lot of fun. It resonated. It took off for a bit. Just not enough to make me rich. Which, to be fair, was also very much not the point. It inspired me to create quite a bit of memes and other content, it travelled for a bit, and people outside of my own network started using Bonj' as a greeting, in stead of the ingrained GM that people in crypto use. We found the croissant as a brand image: the rich, joyful, common french breakfast item. Perfect for the coin, and fuelled by another video, this time shared by Anemale.

But I mostly pulled it alone. To really make it work, I should have designed a way for others to take it on as well. More than the wonderful few that did. So, it leveled out, and the coin does not do much now. I am using it for tipping on Farcaster. Every like, reply or recast by me on a post you share earns you some $bonj. I am not letting it go. I love it still. So, if you have any suggestions for making it go to $1, a suggestion that aligns with the values of $bonj (be yourself, embrace your weird, don't just follow others, enjoy life's simple things) is welcome in the comments. As are any memes you can make about $bonj.

I'm experimenting with coins to see how they can become part of the income stream stack for onchain poets (and other artists). In this 5 part series, I am sharing about these experiments, to help you decide whether it's something you might want to experiment with as well. This is the second article. The first one is about community coin $hopje.

Suddenly
we live in a postcard
reminiscent of the images
Anton Pieck drew of
winter fun.

"That's a typical Anton Pieck picture", or "een typisch Anton Pieck plaatje" in Dutch. Snow does that to the Dutch mind. It makes the world look beautiful, and people play in the snow and skate on the ice. Anton Pieck drew that. Or how it must have looked in the old days. His drawings are etched in the collective memory of the Dutch. So, whenever snow covers the land, the ponds, canals and ditches freeze over, we recognise our familiar surroundings as an Anton Pieck plaatje. Then, we go out and have fun in that postcard-picture.

This week, we had some snow. Not as much as the Dutch got, but still enough for us to play in. We even stood on the frozen over park pond. We were not alone. The park was full of people playing, building snowmen, making snow angels, throwing snowballs. Fresh snow brings out our playful side. We can use that in times like these.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

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Poésie de la vie

Dark ice, nature, and the sound of skates. There's poetry in that. Look for yourself:

I'm experimenting with coins to see how they can become part of the income stream stack for onchain poets (and other artists). In this 5 part series, I am sharing about these experiments, to help you decide whether it's something you might want to experiment with as well.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I am starting, as promised recently, a series on (meme)coins (see glossary below). Not because I like to talk about memecoins, but because I have experimented with the phenomenon to see how poets and other artists can use them to add to their income stream stack. I want to start the series with the first coin I launched: the $hopje. I named the coin after my hometown's signature candy, of course, in my journey to serendipitously find ways to make them work.

Rewarding creativity

After launching the coin, I had to find a way to make it work for me. Just creating it, and cashing in on the sniper fees (see glossary below), is already a bit of fun, but it's rather meaningless. So, coming down from the high of creating my first coin, I was thinking about a way to use it. I settled on making it a community coin. Not sure if that is a thing, but it made sense to me calling it that. I had gathered a community of poets and other creative spirits around me on Farcaster, and I wanted to use this coin to inspire them to create. The first step was to create a token gate (see glossary below) to the trpplffct channel on Farcaster. If you want to become a member there, you have to hold a certain amount of the $hopje coin. And only members could cast in the channel. Then, I organised a weekly creativity prompt in the channel, asking people to share their results in the channel. They did. Then, I would distribute 1M of the coin to the participants using a now sunset tool called rounds. It was a nice setup, and even though there was no real monetary value to be gained, people liked the idea of being rewarded with some kind of points. Even though there was nothing to be done with the points.

I hoped that by implementing the gate, people would have an urge to buy the coin, which would help it not only increase in value and so help the holders, but it would also mean that I would earn some trading fees. The popularity of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster was never immense, and that value flow did not materialise. But we had some fun, and the value of $hopje has been relatively stable. I still believe this could work, but the buy-incentive must be attractive enough. Even though the creative prompts had a loyal crowd, it needed a bigger crowd for this use of the coin to succeed.

Later I have created another community coin, $calliope, named after the muse of poetry. I launched it without mentioning it much and  use it to reward contributors to the poetry channel on Farcaster.

Have you done something similar? Share your experiences in the comments, please.

PS: The image in the header is AI generated, using the same prompt as I used to generate the image I used for the $hopje coin.

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

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Glossary

memecoin

"The ERC-20 introduces a standard for Fungible Tokens, in other words, they have a property that makes each Token be exactly the same (in type and value) as another Token. For example, an ERC-20 Token acts just like the ETH, meaning that 1 Token is and will always be equal to all the other Tokens."

From the ethereum.org website

The ERC-20 standard is used on Ethereum-based blockchains for creating coins. They follow the standard, and are very similar in that respect, but they are not always used in the same way. They tend to be called memecoins, or shitcoins. In this series of posts, I will use terms such as community coin, culture coin, content coin, art coin, creator coin, and so on, based on the way I use them. But they are all ERC-20 tokens.

sniper fee

When you launch a coin, there are traders that are betting on you at launch. They buy up some of your coin, in the hope it goes up and they get rich. To make that work, they have to do that in the first seconds of your coin's existence. In the crypto world, these people are called snipers, and you can set an elevated buying fee for them. As you get a fee for each trade of your coin, you will also get it for the trades the snipers make, and as their fee is elevated, you can earn a bit more. I've earned in between 75 and 200 Euro per coin launch in sniper fees. I am not sure how this works, but I don't think it is the same for everyone, and snipers have their algorithms for buying in or not.

token gate

If you limit access to something online or onchain, such as a community, a blog post, a book, you can use any type of token (an NFT, a coin, etcetera) to serve as key to that gate. For example, if you hold 500.000 $hopje, you can become a member of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster and cast into that channel.

The tram is filled
with groen en geel -
more than last year,
now we're winning.
We're here, too,
ready to support our team.

Supporting your hometown football team is not always easy. Well, it is, but when it's a team that's not always winning, you need to find joy in the small moments. I did, for quite a while. Even now we've been in the second tier of Dutch professional football for a while again.

A few years ago, I started going to matches again. With my son. Whenever we are in town and there's a home game. We saw our team draw spectacularly, we saw them lose. There's a good life lesson in there: you support a team, because you love it, not because they are winning. And in the not successful days, they need your support the most.

But this season, so far, it is going quite well. So now we seeing them win, too. That translates into everything on match days. We take the tram to the stadium, and this year it's is more crowded than last year. More people with the green and yellow (groen and geel in Dutch) club colours, and less empty seats in the stadium. It's a good season.

That is my wish for all of you. Not so much a good season for my hometown team, but that 2026 is a good season for all of us, in all our glorious diversity.

Happy new year.

You can support me by wearing my club colours or by buying me coffee and subscribing to my Hypersub Trpplr:

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

https://hypersub.xyz

Poésie de la vie

To celebrate the new year with some fireworks, here are the most beautiful goals per team of this season's first half in the Dutch second tier Keukenkampioen Divisie.