The Flarnchain Newsletter | Flarnchain - Newsletter #141

Welcome back to the Flarnchain newsletter! Even though the format keeps changing, this is the newsletter that will always be published on Wednesday nights, each and every week, like an atomic clock.

While I do know that the newsletter will be published each week, I currently do not know who is receiving it with this new format. Actually, I didn't know who was receiving it with the old format either, but I had a hunch it was around 220 subscribers out of 230, because I had reached some sort of hard cap via gmail.

Anyways, last week I sent my first newsletter, Newletter #140, via this new platform (Paragraph) and I'm curious to know how successful it was. If anyone received that and wants to help me out (or if you receive this one), consider leaving a comment on the newsletter in paragraph or just responding to the e-mail you received, I'll receive the response in my personal inbox. Curious to know how successful this platform was at reaching all of my subscribers, and also very curious to see how effectively this platform scales.

Whelp, let's get into it shall we?

In this edition, I talk about the following:

Some quick updates about the market (Bitcoin up / everything else *meh*)
A short outline of a multimedia art project I've been working on.

So first... The Markets

The crypto markets are UP this week, by almost 2%. However, that doesn't tell the whole story. Basically Bitcoin is up and everything else is sideways or down. Seems like there was some fake news about a Bitcoin ETF launching soon, and a lot of people bought Bitcoin on the news, causing the price of Bitcoin to skyrocket for like... 30 minutes. And then once the news got out that it was a false alarm, most of those gains were lost. The key word there is most, because not all of the gains were lost. Let's take a look at a zoomed-in version of the chart:

I've pointed out the moment when the article was released. Bitcoin spiked above $29k, and then immediately dropped back down to $28k. Some intern over at the crypto publication Cointelegraph is probably gonna get fired over that. Or this was just another example of some sort of market manipulation and a bunch of people just got real rich buying before the fake news and selling the top.

So anyways, Bitcoin spiked, and then actually maintained steady price support around $28k, which is about 5% higher than it's price last week. This shows some serious resilience in the price of Bitcoin right now, but it also reveals something else that's going on that I find interesting. It doesn't appear that Ethereum or other top Altcoins are experiencing the same price action, at least for now. Typically Bitcoin seems to drive the market.

If Bitcoin is up, other coins follow suit. The lag is relatively short, perhaps a day or two, but right now there seems to be at least a temporary decoupling from this behavior. It's a bit more clear when we look at the weekly chart:

The % gains pattern of Ethereum (purple line) and Bitcoin (orange line) has been roughly the same sort of pattern during this observation period (which starts the first week of Feb 2023). This pattern has apparently shifted, as Ethereum continued sinking in September 2023, whereas Bitcoin has seemingly reversed course and is now headed back up toward the $30k psychological barrier.

Regardless of these short term market fluctuations, until something major changes in the microenvironment, we probably won't see any major increases soon. We are in an "accumulation phase" and most likely will be in that phase for quite a bit longer. I think at least middle of 2024, if not later.

Market Animal

Even though I don't think we are in a bull market, this week's market animal is a bull🐂, because the market is up almost 2% since last week, and that's gotta count for something. I think the "bull smoking a cigarette" is a good option for this week:

This will be mintable as an NFT on this platform. Consider minting it! It will be minted on the Polygon network, which is a sort of "Ethereum sidechain" characterized by its much lower fee structure at the expense of some centralization tradeoffs.

Okay, that's enough market talk for one week, moving on to an update on the stuff I'm working on. I've currently been trying to draw every day, and I've read that if you just try to draw the same thing for like 100 days straight, you can become pretty good at drawing in general, and pretty great at drawing that one thing.

Well, I'm already kind of good at drawing towers, because I am a huge skyscraper / skyline aficionado, that drawing towers seemed like the perfect idea. I've always wanted to create a coffee table book of images of skylines and tall, complex architecture. I love flipping through those types of books, so it's only natural that I want to create one too! Anyways, here's a short explanation of this idea, but with a web3 twist:

Towers

Towers is a multimedia art project that I have been working on. It consists of several facets, but the gist is that I'm trying to create a coffee book of drawings of towers. This coffee book may end up being self-published, or it might be published by the community that forms around the NFT collection that is going to go along with it. Basically, every piece of art in the NFT collection will also be displayed in the book, and there will be a digital book to go along with the whole thing.

The NFTs themselves will be drawings of towers that are currently being drawn in a nondistinctive multimedia notebook that I purchased at Target. It has relatively thickish white paper, and is roughly the dimensions of letter paper, but slightly bigger. This notebook is the first stage of the project. Once the notebook is completely filled (all 110 pages), I will scan all of 110 pages (front and back) and process those images into pieces of digital art that will be in the Towers NFT collection.

Here's a draft of a logo or perhaps the cover page. I'm not sure if the book would look better in landscape or portrait format. I think landscape would be a lot of fun, in which case this could be a mock-up of the cover. The authors of the book would include myself, but also anyone else who wants to submit art to be included in the book will be considered. Also anyone who drew any towers in the physical copy of the notebook will be credited as an author. So if you ever see me walking around with a thick black notebook, you are 100% free to draw in it. the only rule is that you draw 1 (or more) towers. well actually 2 rules. You gotta put your name on the back of the page and sign page 1 of the book.

Anyways... here's the general beak down of the categories of images that will be included in this coffee table book, and also that will also exist in their digital forms as immutable digital copies on the Stargaze blockchain.

Pages (working title)

These will include the front, and back of each page, so there will only be 110 NFTs in this subcollection. When someone mints one of these, there will be some sort of mechanism that allows the holder of this nft to redeem another NFT that, when burned, activates a sequence of events where a framed, original version, of that page is shipped to the address of that person's request. Basically, think of these like the "golden ticket" from Willy Wonka, but instead of a trip to a chocolate factory, you get a framed piece of original art.

This is the actual page 6 from the notebook. This image would be the NFT, but there would be more than just this image. the back of the page will be included in the metadata of the NFT, as well as some important attributes. Also, holders of these particular NFTs would receive portions of all minting and trading fees associated with the sub-towers contained on that page. For example, there are 5 other NFTs on this page that will be mintable in the collection. A portion of proceeds from those mintings (and any trading fees) will flow to the wallet address that holds this particular NFT.

Genesis Towers

This collection will consist of each individual tower drawing. Some pages only have 1 drawing on them, but others have as many as 20 towers each. Each of those towers will be a single NFT in this collection, and will have distinctive traits as well as inherited traits from the Pages collection since each of these towers comes from a specific page.

So here's a genesis tower. You can see it's the same as #27 up in the page above

Derivative Towers

This collection will consist of derivatives of the Genesis towers. There will be a lot of different subtypes of derivatives, but each derivative will inherit the traits from Genesis Towers and Pages. Some derivatives will be run through post-processing effects, such as filters, shaders, or other digital manipulation of the images. Others will undergo substantial transformation through creative coding, with shaders applied to them and additional code applied. Some of these towers could have pretty interesting and unique attributes since code is the limit. I would like to implement some functionality with them, similar to what the folks over at Pixel Wizards are doing.

I first ran the image through a "png to SVG" converter that I wrote myself in Python. this converter uses the `imageio` library to convert any jpeg or png image into a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG). Because many of these will be SVGs, they will have a whole different level of interactivity that can be added, because SVG files are just code, and you can run code on code to make it do things!

Generated Towers

This collection will follow the PFP approach and will be a wholly digital experience. There will be a bunch of basic forms selected as the main types, and then various traits will be interchangeably and randomly mixed up to create a variety of rarities resulting in a 10,000 piece PFP collection. This project will use the Hashlips art engine.

I cropped the top right portion of the tower from above, and then used the pixel art tool Aesprite to add some color and draw that cute little sun. I could pick the 100 coolest towers and zoom in and create templates, and then use a variety of scenarios to apply to those templates for a truly web3 generated art experience. The images themselves will be completely unknown to even me before the mint, because they will be generated based on a whole bunch of layers that can be randomly stacked on top of each other. Think Bored Ape Yacht Club or similar projects, where every 10th ape has a cigarette in their mouth or whatever.

Wow, that was a long one! I didn't expect to write so much about this project tonight, but it's something I'm incredibly excited about. I like the fact that I currently have a tangible goal for this project right now which is simply: to fill up this notebook with drawings of towers. I'm already on page 75 of 107, so I'm more than halfway there. I'm currently building the image processing and image management pipeline, as I'm anticipating that this will need to be systematic and well organized to even be possible. I'm also excited to design and build some custom tools to manipulate the images and generate metadata files (in JSON format, JSON stands for Javascript Object Notation, and it's the way nft metadata is typically stored on a blockchain).

Okay then. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Consider minting a bull smoking a cigarette to add to your NFT collection.

Thanks for reading!

-Flarnules

🤘🤘🤘🤘

Flarnchain - Newsletter #141 - Towers

An ocean of knowledge, one inch deep

flarnrules