'Raw Light Express' - Issue #6

Shining light on favorite finds and the Art of Art to calm the mind! Artists, collectibles, community, occasional deep thoughts. Welcome to issue #6!

I prefer to write about other artists occasionally in this newsletter but for once someone wrote a really great piece on me so a huge shoutout to Mintface for this and including me in his list of 100 NFT Artists. Make sure to follow Mintface he’s hugely knowledgeable if you hear him speak in Spaces and is dedicated to onboarding people into NFTs through a series of workshops and content.

Yep McD’s won the Twitterverse this week. The idea of a McRib NFT makes me feel as if I just ate one… loved it for about 30 seconds then felt disgusting after. But that’s totally on brand and in-line with the addictive behaviour of junk food and dopamine highs and not surprisingly social media has the same effect! In the same way I can’t help but going back to consume more of the replies in this tweet… it’s a journey of tear jerking hilarity and downright despair. Fries with that anyone?

Yep the hate is still strong and you have to give credit to those who take the time to get so creative with their hate. People are literally creating banners so others can campaign against NFTs it’s really hilarious how much time and energy people put into it but let’s not mention energy to them because you know where that goes… as if all NFTs were on ethereum and as if ethereum would stop if people just canned doing NFTs tomorrow.

I’m all for more efficient solutions and happily accept every burgeoning innovations needs its healthy dose of critics to be part of the conversation. Many are not even willing to have a conversation but even they play a part in applying pressuring which results in improvements. Higher profile personalities entering NFTs are more likely to choose greener solutions in part from fear of backlash. Their fans and followers have all read the media criticism on NFTs and no matter how accurately that has been reported it has created public perceptions which can’t be ignore. High profile choices influence masses and development happens where the masses migrate. So yes even the shouty, angry people have their place in the broader ecosystem… even if sometimes they feel like the weeds that won’t go away.

What cracks me up is just how stuck in the past some people prefer to be. I mean it wasn’t all that long ago people were convinced the Internet was the work of the devil (or at least Bill Gates was)… well maybe they were right too and how many of us still use Internet Explorer? 😄

I’ve heard the conversation come up a few times lately and like many I suffer from Discord Disorder… a recent affliction with symptoms ranging from fomo to fatique. The common problem is just having too many damn servers to follow. I’m in servers for individual artists, collectives and communities plus of course numerous collectibles projects. I do occasionally cull the list but I find I’m adding as many as I remove.

A simple trick I’ve employed is to set up my own private server (use the green + symbol on the bottom of the server list and follow step by step to very easily have your own private space in which you can curate content from most other servers where they allow. you to with a ‘Follow’ button on specific channels. That allows you to choose where you want to collect all those announcements and posts in your own space and you can file them all into as many separate channels as you want to set up in your own server. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do that once your server is made (don’t worry no coding is required to make a server, the name server is. very misleading… it’s plug and play with pre-existing defaults offered depending on your needs).

However on the broader future of how we manage this out of control but increasingly essential tool… I believe more community and collective servers are needed. No offense to the artists who have put time into making their own, there are some who are doing it really well with a very active following such as Parin.art & Eye Above Sky but for many of us I’m not convinced it’s the best way.

A great example is Discord.art which aside from a great community of people has a really nicely curated selection of artists in both their own dedicated channels as well as a few having their own ‘Category/Section’ with select channels gated by owning their NFTs (usually one of the advantages of having your own Discord). 

But even really popular artists in these community channels can struggle to get strong engagement unless they put in the time in to keep people checking in… such as alpha on drops, giveaways, tips and treats. 

For more reading on this subject I’d highly recommend a recent article by Sean Bonner titled “You Don’t Need Your Own Discord”