\*This article is part of our editorial series, Gallery Selects, where we showcase the diverse artists, collectors, and curators who are creating and sharing their NFTs on Gallery.

Sometimes artists join the web3/crypto space and do what they’ve been doing elsewhere, only in a new place for a little while. Usually their art practice is pretty advanced and they make a few digital pieces for one marketplace or another. The next leg up towards being a participant involves a few things: expanding beyond the first marketplace they understand how to use, and finding a voice and way of being in social media that doesn’t make them frustrated to the point of quitting. The fact that the social media aspect is so key annoys some people - but honestly that’s just the toughest of noogies - you can’t expect to have a digital presence without intentional action: you do not exist in virtual spaces automatically the way your body and art exists in the real world without showing it to people.

I’ll begin by saying - obviously, there’s good in crypto. Indeed, I have written over 150 blog posts over the last 3 years about them (and plenty more with previous pseudonyms), and making the best of crypto and related tech. But none of that matters right now - things have swung too far away to the bad side. (Addendum: just for more clarity,

\*This conversation is part of our new editorial series, Gallery Selects, where we showcase the diverse artists, collectors, and curators who are creating and sharing their NFTs on Gallery.

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!)

Shoutout to Jesse Pollak & Jacob Horne for killing the hyphen.

In this issue of the monthly newsletter we're looking into the future.

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.