Throughout the day I’ve been trying to note things I would like to write updates about at the end of the day. The end of the day is approaching and I’ve selected a few topics. Today felt rather long. I somehow stuffed a ton of work/project progress into today. I guess I woke on the right side of the bed.
I somehow woke up fully rested at 5:30am and gave up on snoozing. I wanted to get some jars boiling asap to sterilize so I could can a few more jars of pickles. I got six more canned and now I’m running low on jars. Did you know jars become scarce around this time of year? I should have seen this coming haha… Well I have lost count of how many jars of pickles I’ve canned thus far. But it’s more than 30. I really hope they taste good. The first batch I made last week will be ready to try in five more weeks.
In the meantime after those finished cooling off I headed out to the garden and worked on the cucumber plants. I have been wanting to remove all of their lower foliage to make it difficult for squash bugs to hide down there. Also it’s easier to find the cucumbers this way. I will be waiting a little while to resume the pruning because I want to make sure it handles what I cleared out today. I did a similar job on the tomato plants a few weeks ago.
After I got too hot sitting in the sun selectively cutting off cucumber leaves I made my way inside and switched to working through the arduino lessons. I only got a few more today. There were a few light controlling circuits/scripts that let you press one button to power an LED and another button to cut its power. The next lesson was making a little alarm sound following a programmable pattern at varying speeds. And the last one was similar but the alarm could play variable frequencies so it played a scale.
It’s been interesting working through these lessons. I know I barely understand what I’m doing. I suppose my hope is that as I work through each lesson and then later on experiment with the lessons to make what I’ve learned do different stuff I’ll hopefully increase my understanding. Thankfully if I ever get stuck I will be cheating and using ChatGPT. My pinecone collecting robot isn’t going to build itself after all.
After I spent too much time on that I switched to making a rough screen frame to attempt to make paper on. I want to see if I can process pine needles, pulp them, and make paper from them. At the moment I just want to see if it can be done. If it can I might have to make a stack of them for my mom to try her calligraphy skills on. I’m not certain I can make paper nice enough for her to use but it’s a potential goal.
Because of all the canning I’ve been doing I have considered possibly stuffing a few cans full of pine needles and pressure canning them to really break them down. Then doing the normal paper making process and see how it compares to the traditional plant processing procedures.
Okay the last thing on my mind is Web 3.0. As I’ve been learning more about bitcoin and taking some time to reminisce about the “early days” of NFTs (from my perspective) vs the current state of them, I am struck by this feeling of bait and switch Ethereum has left in my mouth.
It was the start of 2021, GaryVee had been talking about how it would behoove us to spend 50 hours researching this crypto stuff. At that point I had been messing around with the Robinhood investing app, putting spare change here and there in these random dividend stocks, thinking that maybe one day I would have such a large portfolio of dividends stocks that they could pay my bills for me.
Because I was on Robinhood I saw they had crypto so I bought a little bit of a few random ones. This was all before Gary was talking about researching it. I was just dabbling with five dollars here and there. It wasn’t really anything significant. But five dollars on Dogecoin suddenly became several hundred dollars and that happened within weeks of Gary telling people “we needed to research this stuff. It’s important to research this.” So my attention had been grabbed. Seriously someone says check this out and then a five dollar ‘whatever’ becomes something worth noting? It gets you to pay attention.
I began watching tons of videos by the Coin Bureau. A few years ago most of their content was overviews of various crypto projects, how to acquire and test them out yourself, and some of their research about how those projects were doing. These days they mostly seem to report on news and the state of the global… well, the dumpster fire.
I haven’t been watching as much recently. But back when I started I would watch their content religiously. Every morning I’d wake up and watch their most recent videos before my kids would wake up. I’d hop into a twitter space about nft’s and listen to the latest going on’s. I’d go through the discords of the nft projects I’d collected and observe what they were working on, if anything.
It has been an interesting few years down this rabbit hole. But like I said, I feel there’s been a bait and switch. When I first found my way into NFT’s I was led to believe if you minted a piece of your art as an nft that your work would for one, be immutably distributed forever on the internet, you would receive royalties if your digital work was ever resold, and that if you wanted to grow an organic and invested community this technology was going to be a great catalyst for this to occur.
That last one I’m still hopeful for. The first one I think I needed to spend a great deal of time in the space to learn that if you did get a custom contract set up for your art you didn’t technically have your art on the ethereum blockchain, but often another distributed hosting solution like arweave or ipfs (interplanetary file system), where your content would be stored in a distributed fashion but not exactly as a creator might have expected, directly on the chain they wanted their work featured, so as to not have potential future failure in infrastructure resulting in their art disappearing from the internet.
That was easy enough to ignore initially. I figured as this medium grew people would find ways to bring file hosting into the Ethereum virtual machine itself. A phrase I don’t truly understand. My vague idea of what it is would be a distributed virtual computer that can be simulated by volunteers around the globe who chose to run the software required for the network to exist.
The disillusionment occurred mainly when it became apparent that marketplaces on this network not only had found ways to subvert the creator royalties but were competing amongst one another to do so. At the beginning I and so many others were told and educated that in this system a creator could mint a piece of their work, assign a perpetual royalty and various contractual things to the piece (like intellectual property rights or the right to display the piece wherever you chose to), essentially digitizing the old school systems around music, video, photography, art, and so much more and making them incredibly better from my limited perspective at that time.
It was when the marketplaces began showing they had found ways around royalty enforcement and then when larger names in the industry voiced their opinion that “though it sucked that these loopholes had been discovered it seemed impossible to patch them” that I began to withdraw from this new frontier I had been so enthralled with. I also recently deleted all of my social network accounts except for YouTube and Nostr, which I’m not really sure how to use anyways.
I’m rambling. The point of all of this is I believed something about NFT’s that on Ethereum they aren’t seemingly able to deliver to creatives at the moment. But what I was able to witness with ordinals (the Bitcoin equivalent of NFTs) showed me the OG network has the ability to potentially deliver the dream I was sold when I came to Ethereum. I could be wrong, maybe it’s just digital gold. But I think there’s something deeper to it. I need to figure out how to explore those avenues again, now that they’re mainly cut off from me.
Alrighty, that’s enough of a novel for today. It was a lot of day to fit into 24 hours. I’m getting rather tired, so I’ll be adding the pictures to this and posting it shortly. I hope you’re all doing well, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you’re up to or ask me about what I’m up to. Hell, send suggestions. 🙂 Take care!