Well it’s been a few days since I gave in and decided to check out the world of NFTs. It feels like a few months. Figured I’d just post some thoughts and observations.

What I thought

I think my biggest confusion when I started this whole thing was, why the hell are people buying NFTs.

Initially I thought there was some kind of confusion going on where buyers thought they were actually buying rights to the artwork in some way whereas in fact, buying an NFT by itself gives you no rights to the original work. But as I talked to people I discovered that while people generally understood this, nobody really cared. It’s not like people were buying NFTs in order to use them in their corporate marketing campaigns or something. They just wanted to “collect” the art.

This just caused more confusion for me. Surely there is no inherent value in buying them, I thought. They’re either buying them as investments or buying them to support artists they like.

While I assumed that people paying thousands of dollars (or even millions of dollars) for big name NFTs are doing it as investments of some sort, I did not believe that the average hic et nunc user wasn’t doing that.

So it had to be about supporting artists, which I thought was nice, but frustrating because I’ve had a donation link up for ages and I get $5 or $10 a couple of times a year. So why were people so happy to support artists via NFTs, but not directly?

I was wrong

Just about everything I thought was wrong.

1. People do find (massive) inherent value in buying NFTs.
2. People do use NFTs as short/mid-term investments.
3. The whole supporting-the-artist thing exists, but it’s a pretty minor aspect.

Value

Yeah, people are crazy about collecting NFTs. Especially from some known artist. Honestly it’s been a bit of an ego trip because people seem to know who I am in this community (getting a shout out from my old friend Mario Klingemann does not hurt either). Feeling a bit of a taste of the (very low level) rock star vibes I had in the 00’s and early ’10s on the Flash conference speaking tour. It’s nice.

Anyway, yeah, everything I’ve put up on hic et nunc has sold out in minutes. I’ve just been experimenting with prices and amounts and it doesn’t matter, it just goes like that. But it goes beyond that. People are DMing me on twitter begging me to let them know the next time I mint something. Or asking if they can buy something from me directly. When people manage to buy something before it sells out, they’re over the moon about it, like they just won the lottery. Get that – they gave me money and they feel like they won something huge. People are HUGELY passionate about collecting stuff.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it because it seems really, really bizarre to me. It makes absolutely no sense in my brain. But I’m trying to roll with it. It’s just all very surreal.

Investments

This is a way bigger part of the system than I thought. For my first NFT I minted 10 editions at 1 tez each. No idea what to expect. Within a couple of hours of them selling out, one was re-sold at 150 tez! There’s one of those still for sale at 3000 tez!!!

Yeah, so IF that sells (I can’t imagine it will), the seller will have made a 3000% profit. Currently 1 tez is around $4 usd. You do the math.

Of course, once something gets into the realm of capitalism, all kinds of ugly stuff starts cropping up. I discovered there are bots people will set up to buy NFTs in bulk from popular artist at low cost and immediately resell them at a huge markup. This generates a bunch of anger in the community, from individual collectors who are mainly just into collecting work from artists they like. The bots make it hard for them to get the pieces they are trying to collect.

tldr; it’s a complex and complicated space.

Supporting the Artists

Like I said, this is there for sure, but it’s not a huge part of it, from what I can see. I think the music industry is a good example. Yeah, there are lesser known indie groups who have the support of loyal fans hoping they’ll eventually make it big. But you wouldn’t say that most people buy music because they want to support the artist. They buy it because they want the music.

The Future

I have no idea where this is all headed. On one hand I feel like this can’t last. It’s like a gold rush. Pokemon cards, Beanie Baby stuff. The bubble is gonna burst some day. On the other hand, this probably will pave the way for the future of how art is bought and sold… maybe. I have no clue. I guess I’m just going to surf this wave for a while. And not quit my day job just yet.

OK, y’all wore me down. After multiple messages per week from friends and strangers urging me to put my work on hic et nunc, and many long, drawn out debates with people I respect, I finally gave in and created an NFT.

At some level I feel like a sellout. On the other hand, I was feeling way too stubborn and dogmatic about my resistance to try it. It was a serious internal struggle for the past few months.

Long story short, people seem to want to give money to digital artists via NFTs. Lots of money. But not any other way. I still have misgivings, but I’m going to assume that people know what they are doing and if they want to support me in this way, I’ll accept it.

So here’s my very first NFT:

https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/215806

Make it rain, fans. 🙂

I’m starting a newsletter. I’ve been hearing more and more buzz about newsletters these days. I always assumed these were just cheap marketing gimmicks. “Sign up for my newsletter so I can spam you with info about this thing I’m trying to sell.” But apparently it’s become the replacement for RSS for a lot of people. Who knew? Probably everyone but me.

Anyway, I’m going to start one. For the most part it’s going to be quick summaries and links to stuff that I post right here, with maybe one or two other links or items of interest. I thought about doing more complete articles in the newsletter, but I’d rather keep my content centralized here, so summaries and links it is.

For now, it’s totally free. If it takes off and people seem interested, I might experiment with doing some kind of additional paid content. Undecided at this point. One step at a time. Anyway, sign up here:

https://bit101.substack.com/p/coming-soon

First issue should go out Wednesday morning, 8/18/21.

I’m a firm believer that creative coding is a very different activity than the kind of coding that most people do for their day jobs. In feature / application / systems programming, there’s usually a fair amount of planning, scoping and architecting that comes before you start coding. Ideally, when you start coding, you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to make and how you’re going to make it.

But creative coding, for me at least, starts with “what would happen if I did this…?” and generally follows that line of logic all the way until I have something published.

So I’m always going to this value or that, deleting “true” and typing “false” or vice versa. Or, I’m using a sine function and want to see what happens if I use cosine. Or tangent. Or I want to swap greater than with less than and see what that does. Or change plus to minus or minus to plus.

After way too many times doing this type of thing, I figured there must be some plugins that would make this easier. And so there are! I use vim, and found several. I tried a few and had almost settled on vim-toggle and then checked out switch.vim, which I found to be the most powerful of the lot.

I recognize that most people probably use VS Code or Sublime Text or other editors. A quick search informed me that there are similar plugins for those editors as well (all links below). I haven’t tried the non-vim ones, so I can’t vouch for their quality, only their existence. There may be better ones, so do your research.

The way these work is you put your cursor on the word or symbol you want to change and hit some keyboard shortcut. For switch.vim, that’s gs. Each time you hit that shortcut the word will toggle back and forth between, say, “true” and “false”. Or “on” and “off” or “1” and “0”.

Most of the plugins come with several obvious definitions pre-defined. But make sure you find one that will also allow you to set up custom toggle sets. Some of the plugins only support binary switching between two options, but some, like switch.vim, will let you specify a list of as many items as you want. It will cycle through all of those options when you hit the shortcut key over any one of them. Here’s just a few of the custom toggle sets I set up:

["width", "height"]
["moveTo", "lineTo"]
["x", "y"]
["-", "+"]
[">", "<"]
["cos", "sin", "tan"]

And there are more niche ones I use in my day to day creative coding using cairographics bindings for Golang (blgo). Sometimes I’ll be making a piece where the background is white and the foreground is black. I use a function, ClearWhite to clear the surface to white, and set the drawing color to black using SetSourceRGB(0, 0, 0). but occasionally I want to invert these to use a black background with white shapes. So I set up some toggles like so:

["ClearWhite", "ClearBlack"]
["0, 0, 0", "1, 1, 1"]

This lets me easily make the change in just a few key strokes.

switch.vim even allows you to set up toggling rules using regx, which seems super powerful, though I haven’t dug into that so far.

So far, I’ve found these immensely useful. Maybe you will too. Here are the links:

Vim / Neovim:

• https://github.com/AndrewRadev/switch.vim
• https://github.com/lukelbd/vim-toggle

VS Code:

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=silesky.toggle-boolean

Sublime Text 3:

• https://github.com/gordio/ToggleWords

I’ve come to be somewhat known as a “math guy” in creative coding. It’s one of my impostor syndrome items because I’m really not any kind of expert in the field. I took Algebra and some Precalculus in high school banged my head on a formal Calculus course, but never made it through. Most of what I know has been self-taught and pretty seat-of-the-pants.

Almost exactly two years ago I bought my last phone, a Pixel 3XL. The phone I had before that was a Samsung Galaxy S8. It was two years old and was in good condition, but I didn’t like it that much. All the extra Samsung garbage was not to my taste. I like stock Android or as close as I can get.

After two full years, I was totally happy with the Pixel. I had no plans on upgrading or changing until I had to. And then… I had to. The first sign was the the volume buttons weren’t working. I have one of those rubber bumper cases. When I took it off, the volume worked fine. But not with the case on. The case seemed fine, and then I took a closer look at the phone beside the volume keys.

Here you can see the back cover has separated from the phone. The whole back plate was swelling out. That’s why the volume wasn’t working. The buttons on the case were no longer aligned with the buttons on the phone.

I had noticed that it was seeming to get pretty hot when I wirelessly charged it but hadn’t thought too much about it. Obviously the battery was on its last legs and getting ready for some kind of catastrophe. I kept an eye on the phone the rest of the day and started looking for a new device.

I was really pretty bummed out about this because I didn’t actually WANT a new phone. And I had to get one quick and didn’t have a chance to do a bunch of research. I was curious about the Oneplus line. Their flagships go for $600 – 900 or even higher. I didn’t want to spend that much when I wasn’t really sure what I wanted. Maybe I wanted a Pixel 6 when it came out. What to do? What to do???

I finally wandered across the Oneplus Nord n10 G5. It was under $300 but decently specced for that price. I watched a few Youtube reviews and while nobody was raving about how great it was, the consensus was that it was a pretty good phone for its price. I crossed my fingers and ordered it with next day delivery.

In the meantime I wondered if I could possibly replace the Pixel’s battery. Quick search revealed a few Youtube videos that made the process seem not too formidable, and a number of under $20 replacement kits. Worth a shot, right?

The repair kit came the same time as the new phone. I set up the Oneplus, got my sim card in it and all my apps. It looked and felt pretty nice. No regrets. Then onto the battery repair.

The toughest part was getting the back off. You need a heat gun (which I have, luckily) and a lot of time and patience. You apply heat to the back of the phone judiciously so as to not damage it. This softens up the glue, then you pry the crap out of back of the phone. The kit had tools and a suction cup. It took a good half hour of heating and prying, heating and prying – and I had a head start since the battery had already started the job – but eventually I got the back off.

Then you have to pry the battery out. It’s also glued in. That was a bit easier, but not… easy.

Finally, the recharging coil is just like a piece of thick paper with the coil inside, glued to the battery. You have to carefully pry that off. If you’ve ever tried to peel a glued-on paper label off of something, you can imagine how that went. I got all of the coil and about half of the paper backing, but I was pretty sure I had wrecked it.

Then you put it all back together. The kit also came with glue strips to put the battery back in with. Stuck the coil back on the new battery, plugged everything in. Cleaned up all the old glue. Crossed my fingers and turned it on. It worked fine. Put it on the charger. It charged right up. Didn’t even get hot. And it held its charge really well.

The last thing I needed was some glue to put the back on again. I ordered that and finished up the next day. But since then it was working fine, holding a charge and charging just fine. Now I had some options:

1. Keep using the Oneplus and keep the Pixel as a backup.
2. Go back to the Pixel and return the Oneplus.
3. Go back to the Pixel and keep the Oneplus as a backup.

I had a good 2-3 days in on the Oneplus, which gave me a good idea of how much I liked it. In general, I did like it. I concur with all the reviews – it’s a great value for it’s price. But there is no doubt that the Pixel is way better. Some details:

• Performance. Pixel wins hands down. Opening apps takes probably 1.5-2x longer on the Oneplus. Random scrolling around is obviously way smoother on the Pixel. But this was really only noticeable on a side-by-side comparison. I could have lived with the Oneplus’s performance easily.
• The Oneplus screen pales in comparison to the Pixel… LITERALLY! (sorry) Not surprising. The Oneplus is an LCD whereas the Pixel has OLED. Again though, wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me.
• Bluetooth performance was not good. I use Galaxy Buds Plus and love them. They have been virtually 100% flawless on the Pixel. On the Oneplus, I had various issues:
  • Garbled sound. I’ve had that on cheaper BT earbuds, but never on the Galaxy Buds. I was getting it regularly every time I used them on the Oneplus.
  • Unresponsive controls. The tap to start / stop failed multiple times. Never recall it failing while on the Pixel.
  • Connection. I think it failed to auto-connect once in the couple of days I used it. I don’t recall it ever having a problem on the Pixel.
• Touch responsiveness. Very noticeable on one of the puzzle games I was playing. Tapping on on-screen items would fail close to 50%, requiring multiple taps. Never experienced it on the Pixel and when I retried the same game on the Pixel again, it was night and day.

To be fair, those are the only negative performance points I could come up with on the Oneplus. I would add that Oneplus have started creating their own UI stuff. A customized settings app, a custom launcher, a bunch of preinstalled Oneplus apps. I was under the impression that Oneplus was close to stock, so this was a bit disappointing. Not as bad as Samsung, but not a plus.

But overall, not bad. The Bluetooth and touch screen stuff were the only points that really pushed me over the edge to going back to the Pixel.

I am really happy to be back to the Pixel though and have a renewed appreciation for what a good phone it is. As I said, I didn’t want to switch phones to begin with and I’m happy that I don’t have to.

I’ve decided to keep the Oneplus though as a backup. I don’t know how long my Pixel surgery is going to hold up. So far it’s flawless, but who knows what the next few weeks or months hold. If the Pixel does crap out on me, I’ll have something to switch over to instantly. Maybe I can last long enough to see how the Pixel 6 does and maybe even long enough to see it come down a bit in price from its initial release.