buffets

@buffets

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While writing isn't my livelihood, it has served as an important foundation for my thinking. As the literary critic Walter Benjamin has written, “Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it." Writing is a means to structure my thinking, and it thus indirectly influences both my professional and personal pursuits to a significant extent. As I'm taking a year-long sabbatical at the moment while travelling Latin America with my wife, I'm not doing any serious writing at the moment. But I occasionally pen some longform essays about crypto culture on my blog: https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #663 by @mattdesl on @artblocks Right: My photo taken in the mines of Cerro Rico, Potosí, Bolivia, January 2025.

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Even as our futures remain uncertain, undefined, one thing has become even sharper: the work to build our relationship has only just begun. There's a lot more toil to undertake, paths to navigate, and meaning to make—together. The nebulousness in Newlyweds thus mirrors closely what I feel about our journey ahead. Similar to how we're now wrestling with the implications of AI on our lives, my wife and I will need to deal with the weight of traditions and the illusion of ideals, all while trying to leave a meaningful imprint within the latent possibilities of our relationship. We're no longer newlyweds, but we're exactly where we need to be.

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All the works in Kevin's In Utero series embody the "incomplete" outputs of a text-to-image AI model, its process of image generation halted before it can fully take shape. The result is an embryo frozen in time, the nourishment of its underlying text prompt—in this case, "newlyweds"—fading away just as we start to see something. In a sense, the exhortations in my wedding vows—"I do"—mirror those of the prompt in this work. There's intent, there's a call for action. And the underlying machinery cranks on: on one hand, us navigating the playbook of marriage, and on the other hand, the diffusion model undertaking the steps it's been programmed to do. But much like Kevin's intervention to halt the diffusion process, our decision to combine a desired sabbatical and our honeymoon into a year-long escapade has proven to be a clarifying act.

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Newlyweds - In Utero by @esherick on EXPANDED.ART I collected this piece in June last year, not long after my wife and I left Singapore to embark on our honeymoon in the Americas—a journey that is still currently ongoing. It's been a year and a day since our wedding on 21 January 2024, and tomorrow will mark exactly 8 months of us travelling together. As I reflect on how far we've come and how far we still have to go, I can't help but turn back to Kevin's artwork, which unwittingly serves as an apt artefact for this moment of our lives.

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When I was a student in DC (a decade ago), I really liked hiking along the Potomac Heritage Trail—I could start on it by heading to Rosslyn from Gerogetown, and then walking upstream from there. https://www.nps.gov/pohe/index.htm

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¡Buenos días! Visiting Argentina next month, and was just curious whether crypto is something a fair number of people use in their daily lives, e.g. for transactions and to send/receive money from abroad? Was also wondering whether USD stablecoins can be used to get pesos at the blue dollar rate?

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Is this Ausangate?

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And to sleep at the same time every night!

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Happy monday to you too, and thanks again for the tip!

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #197 by @mattdesl on @artblocks and in the collection of @jwpe Right: My photo of giant ferns taken in Amboró National Park, Bolivia, January 2025.

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Familiar with his work but not that quote. It's perfect! And it pretty much sums up my article in a line instead of >5k words 😂

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NFTs have always been fun and interesting. I think if we have the right vocabulary about its superpowers, they always retain their allure: https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/1SwOqkcWy9-zJ8OYBp8gNmmtVctm786xfZ4z6hYtobs

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Wrote a really long essay recently outlining some thoughts on why and how we should look at NFTs as status assets. This was inspired by 6529's New Year tweet thread on NFTs and the discourse on NFT rarity that ensued. My central thesis is that rarity is just one of many dimensions that NFTs will accrue value in the future. Instead, it is more useful to think in terms of how status competition between different market participants will lead to different types of NFTs being desired. https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/fpPPk3A81vRinrXN6XB0GGcmu8L7A4p4_4VhHDEZRqY

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👀: https://cycles.material.work/126

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Lens 126, Ring 1, Position 22 - Cycles by Material Protocol Arts Bloodrush to the head as I witness the beating heart of a novel hypersculpture—digitised flows of cryptic symbols pumped straight into its veins by the quivering, throbbing rhythm of the World Computer. 🩸

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Thanks typo! 🫡

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Some thoughts on NFTs: - Framing them as status assets - Analysing how status-seeking strategies by different groups of crypto participants drive demand for NFTs in different ways https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/fpPPk3A81vRinrXN6XB0GGcmu8L7A4p4_4VhHDEZRqY

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MERIDIAN MONDAYS Left: Meridian #285 by @mattdesl on @artblocks Right: My photo taken underwater at Cenote Nicte-Ha, Quintana Roo, Mexico, August 2024.

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CT is talking about swarms of AI agents, but here we have friends at home orchestrating swarms of cyborg insects https://mothership.sg/2025/01/spore-japan-scientists-cyborg-insect/

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