Cameron Builds

v excited to launch a poetry project I’ve been working on for a LONG time

I’m fascinated with the idea of websites as projects unto themselves and I will continue to add to the 150+ poems shared here until it feels better to put them somewhere else

enjoy 🫡

littlefeelings.com

I'm finding the "positive sum" language around coins really misleading.

It's literally the opposite. If the way users make money from their content is when other users buy it, it's literally zero sum, financially. Not everyone can be making money, unless external capital is being injected from a another source (which is losing money).

Friendly Reminder: 

The ONLY reason a Collectibles market exists IRL is because there are multiple real live human beings who find the *collectible itself* intrinsically valuable enough to own for a non-value-accruing purpose

Without that, it’s tulips all the way down

farcaster ppl be like

i am so excited for collectible casts <3 :) yippee

and HERE'S why it's BETTER than CONTENT COINS! 😡

we should normalize taking a few days off work to fix your sleep

we should normalize taking a few days off sleep to fix your work

The interesting thing about clarity is that you can’t really force it. 

You can, of course, put yourself in risky situations and try to simulate the clearness of thought that comes with real, dangerous, existential decision points, but even then your body adapts to those “stakes” eventually. 

You can alternatively separate yourself, isolate, go on a vision quest, etc but the moment you return to normal life is the moment your body and mind try to convince themselves that the clarity driven impulse for change was actually the aberration. 

The desire to change was “actually” the temporary whim, not your current life path you realized was out of line with your spirit. The path of least resistance will always want to redraw itself. 

Losing things permanently, or at least legitimately feeling the potential of imminent loss, is the only snow globe shake that makes you see the dust and sparkle of your life in full relief. 

Everything else, even a life altering gain, is reversible.

Memes

me to my phone when it asks me to confirm my 3rd Taco Bell order for the weekend

This is my midlife crisis you are already watching it. I basically am a total failure in every way that matters and am trying to figure out my next hard pivot to see if I can save what’s left

No Channel Channel.

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

@vgr what do you think about the Coldplay cheating couple as a weird global Schelling point for culture these past few days?

Diatomaceous Earth vs bugs is so metal

https://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/degen.html

What’s interesting?

1. Entertainment — something funny, some gossip, playing a game. A universal but relative for each person. 

2. Learning — something new about a topic you care about

3. Making money — for a lot of people, opportunity to make money by reading / watching something is interesting

“Social media” is just terminology hangover

“Content” and “Content + variable gambling reward” are king

People cast like bots
Bots cast like people
Crypto’s a church
that sold its own steeple

so anyway this weekend i thought it’d be fun to agonize over which of the twin horrors (being perceived and not being perceived) i want to prioritize for the rest of my professional career

Fabric

hi 

been heads down on something new. wanted to share some thoughts on building for creators and consumers in crypto the past ~3yrs

there's roughly 10k (+/- 5k) real monthly transacting users in consumer crypto and their desire for new metas is insatiable

for builders, this presents two possible outcomes:

1) (default) you build a thing and no one cares. no one uses it

2) you build a thing and it becomes a meta (hypersub experienced this briefly). people use it for a little while but eventually get bored. a new meta emerges and everyone moves on

from here your options are:

3) go back to the drawing board

4) chase the new meta

gaining traction is really hard and most builders don't want to give it up. so most chase, hoping their thing will eventually transcend the cycle and achieve breakout success by gaining adoption among a wider audience

but outside of infra and trading, thats never happened. (fun thought experiments: why not? will it ever? if so, what are likely to be the causal factors?)

so—

5) you can stay the course, keep grinding, and hope that the castle you've been building in someone else's kingdom eventually prospers 

or

6) exit

5 leads to burnout if you're bootstrapped and bankruptcy if you're vc-backed. hope is not a strategy (sorry)

you can exit to a categorically different market, or to a different segment of crypto. the former likely means ai, the later means infra or trading. the problem is that you're late. the market has matured, incumbents have a lot of leverage, and its hard to differentiate 

we don't bear the risks and opportunity costs of becoming founders so that other men will come to our rescue. we do it because of an irrational belief in our own abilities. my advice: build where there's durable demand. sans infinite runway or corporate sponsorship you'll die otherwise 

i realize this sounds negative and pessimistic. sorry about that, not my intention. this message is for the builders who are trying to figure out where to invest their time and energy. its what i wish someone shared with me when i started

if you're a founder and struggling with figuring out where and what to do next, hmu happy to share more 1:1

rooting for every single one of you 💛

https://farcaster.xyz/nonlinear.eth/0x96c90863

weird internet kid. word rotator. yapping on /okbanger. playing with @wannanaplabs. curating in /cameron | dev + vet + HBS. 
Cameronarmstrong.org 🫡

Cameron Armstrong

@cameron