I’ve written before about Riot Grrrl culture being a big influence on the way I think about and relate to the internet. Riot Grrrl and the World Wide Web happened around the same moment in the 1990s when DIY self-publishing was big in the Zeitgeist with zine culture and desktop/hypermedia publishing. Decades later, onchain technologies, as an evolution of open internet ideals, have provided even more democratized and decentralized tools for DIY production,¹ making creation, reproduction, and distribution even more accessible and permissionless. The Do-It-Yourself ethic in Riot Grrrl and WWW is what draws me to them. This is why the tagline for my first blockchain project, Riot Goools, is “Just some morose rebel goools looking to start some ghoul bands and to print some zines.”

When Gallery asked if I wanted to make a Very Internet Person special edition piece for them to gift to users for the holidays, I, of course, said yes. I love Gallery because of the focus on displaying, discovering, and posting art, which is an underserved area in blockchain related media as most of the tools are focused on trading. Gallery is sort the social art sharing platform I've wished for since I got into the space (hopefully, one day, I'll also be able to display my Goool work from Fantom on there too!)

I made i through another year of making internet blockchain art or whatever this is. I’m not going to lie, this second year was rough. Not because of the obvious reason of the whole space crashing in valuation – I’ve spent my life as a NEET in creative fields where I’m accustomed to living in minimalist squalor anyways so my practice wasn’t really too disrupted by the market conditions¹ – no, the tough part was seeing so many people and projects around me drop off and disappear as soon as the money and attention dried up. I won’t hold it against anyone who needed to shift their priorities for their livelihood but it was still disheartening.

The Very Internet Person farm season on Baton has concluded! Four Miladys have been successfully emitted and distributed to farmers. Thank you to everyone that participated in this three month long farming experiment to take my Miladys away (๑˃ᴗ˂๑) and thanks to Caviar and Baton for inviting me to try out the platform. Now, I want to write a little review on how things went; the goals, the results, the surprises. As a more art focused "project", I had never done much with NFTfi. Even though I started out on Fantom, a defi heavy chain, I didn't really delve too deeply into the financialization of NFTs. The focus of my art practice has mainly been on making things that resonate with people on some level – aesthetically, intellectually, memetically, etc. (ie. vibes.) It's why I never really pay much attention to where the floor is or encourage many of the manufactured hype behaviors that have (unfortunately) become the standard fare. I would rather people collect the things I make because they like the art and not because of coercion through outsized promises of utility and returns. And if the art isn't for them, then they don't have to mint/buy it. But I am aware that NFTs are a developing form and a technology that can allow for things to be much more interesting than just being a simple digital art shop that makes you pay with internet money. And, in terms of my broader creative practice, I believe a big part of making art is also experimenting with the medium and form and this is intertwined with my practice as an internet person learning about/experimenting with internet technology. One of the reasons I deployed Very Internet Person on Ethereum was to play with the wider array of NFTfi tools that were becoming available. I already had a habit of doing things like randomly distributing funds generated from sales and royalties to people who collected my Goool collections. But it was done in a manual, mostly offchain way, just using Disperse to send tokens to addresses I compiled in a spreadsheet. Not very efficient, especially when I have art projects to do. The Caviar VIP pool had been going for a while when Tamagoyaki from Caviar asked me if I wanted to try out a new NFT yield farming platform called Baton that was being built on top of Caviar and introduced me to the founder, Sapijiju. It sounded very interesting to me and I started thinking about what I could do with it. As I thought about how the space has evolved and where it was at, I had been wanting to move some more VIP trade activity away from the standard order book marketplaces to the Caviar pool. This would enable people to do things like directly swap for their desired VIPs without having to go through sell/buy and also earn rewards from the trading activity (stakers receive the trading fees whereas the fees on things like OpenSea go to the marketplace platform.) I like how this system benefits the people who enjoy being a part of the project whereas the traditional marketplaces can sometimes feel like a PVP funnel to get out of projects at the expense of someone else. The typical order book marketplaces make more sense for specific pieces that one might want to sell far above floor price. Given the current state of the space, it feels like a good time to try different models. But with Caviar being relatively newer on the scene itself, many people had not used it before and so I thought doing a Baton farm would be a good way to incentivize checking it out. Like I said, I also wanted to experiment.

I've been enjoying Sprite's Bonkler breakdowns and Pixelady's wiki entries so I thought I’d do a little guided tour of this Very Internet Poster.

Not a derivative nor an expansion but a secret third thing

The Riot Goools website (I refer to it as gooolOS) takes many aesthetic cues from the early world wide web and the computers of that period. More specifically, it draws a lot from the design of the first Macintosh OS GUIs and the work of early Apple icon designer, Susan Kare, who is a big influence on me as a pixel artist. My first interaction with computers was in elementary school where there was a dusty old Apple computer tucked away in the corner of the library that was mostly used for playing Oregon Trail (we all thought it was just an Oregon Trail machine.) I think staring at those little pixelated images flashing on the screen likely started my obsession with making drawings out of little squares and turning those drawings into little worlds with meaning.

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.

One day, Metamorph and I began chatting because of our shared interest in Neon Genesis Evangelion, art direction, and design...