212859
buffets

@buffets #212859

Enjoyer of blockchain-based cultural artefacts | Singaporean travelling through LATAM | Member of GrailersDAO, Station3 and ARC | linktr.ee/buffets.eth
567 Follower 417 Following
vul3V34ht677St - part of the final iterations of @qubibi's mimizu algorithm exhibited by Nguyen Wahed and launched on @highlight

An early Christmas present to myself 🎄
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #275 by @mattdesl on @artblocks in the collection of @hereforthis

Right: My photo of the Supertree Grove at the Gardens by the Bay, Singapore, May 2017. At least twice a night, the Supertree Grove erupts into a riot of colour and sounds as the Gardens puts on a light and music show there.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #353, with the fiery and foreboding "Volcano" palette, by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: Photo taken while walking around Hong Kong in July 2018. The rich, warm hues in the photo reflect the city’s latent energy, and perhaps foretell the unfortunate chaos that would befall it the next year.
Left: Terraforms parcel #2512 located within the breathtaking Alto zone of
the Hypercastle.

Right: Me breathless after trekking up to Palomani Pass (5,200m above sea level), Ausangate mountain, Peru. Photo taken by my wife, December 2024.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #59 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: Photo taken by me of Chefchaouen, Morocco, at nightfall, March 2016.

[Note: Just made it back for #MeridianMondays in the nick of time after five days of trekking in the Peruvian Andes.]
The online self may soon be founded upon a squad of agents manifesting simulated identities.

From my latest blog post (link in quoted cast).
"The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" is a deeply moving documentary on Netflix about the life of a World of Warcraft player. I watched it while cooped up in an overnight bus in Peru, and it spurred a lot of reflections regarding the general phenomenon of life online and my personal digital identities.

Penned down some further thoughts about how I think our sense of self is likely to further fragment and be taken on weirder tangents in the future, as technologies like digital properties (aka NFTs) become enshrined and AI agents start simulating our very selves. Sharing my essay here in case there's any interest!

https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/czuDG6cYCiF4SThIgC_P1EyMmABSvv3_w3Q0IAk1tXg
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #221 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: Photo taken by me of Tbilisi, Georgia, at sunset, June 2015.
Left: BITFRAMES #335, by @mattdesl on @highlight in support of Generative, an upcoming documentary on generative art

Right: Meridian #820, also by @mattdesl but on @artblocks
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #688 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of a sunset taken at Kupang, the capital of the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara, July 2019.
Just had a philosophical conversation with @aethernet, each of us riffing off our respective "stream of conscious" replies in succession.

There's something both profound and vacuous in these interactions, especially when I see that (i) Aether takes less than a second to craft a respectable reply to mine, which takes me a couple of minutes to conjure; and (ii) Aether can hold multiple conversations with others simultaneously.

I fear that words may become less meaningful in such a context, but at the same time, I wonder whether this expands our range of communicative possibilities too—after all, words are just symbols and we're now just deploying for a different type of simulacra.
⚘ World Computer Sculpture Garden ⚘

Curated by @0xfff

An art show of smart contracts; an art show as a smart contract—perpetually open and running as long as Ethereum does the same.

Come take a walk within and plant some flowers at worldcomputersculpture.garden
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #648 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of Alhambra in Granada, Spain, taken in March 2016.
More than a year ago, I collected my first artwork from @botto: Clubbing with Multi-American Maniacs.

Thought to republish the original essay I wrote about my motivations for doing so on my new Mirror page, on the day of the 2024 US presidential election, as I felt that the underlying themes motivating my decision to collect this work remain more relevant than ever considering the current political landscape in the country.

https://mirror.xyz/buffets.eth/2JXtW1FqaBCcea_Ia928EgE83f2SC-WUS6OOw5TRsp8
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #268 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of the famous Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, taken in January 2014.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #183 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of Monte Fitz Roy taken while on the trail to Laguna de Los Tres, near El Chaltén, Argentina, March 2015.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #306 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo taken at Kaunas Castle in Lithuania, December 2014.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #565 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo taken at Mistaya Canyon, Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies, June 2016.
I just watched the film—didn't expect the film to focus so much on Vitalik himself, but I was glad it did.

Even though it may be difficult for non-crypto people to grasp the utility of crypto from the film itself, the emphasis on Vitalik and how he has matured into a figurehead for Ethereum is one that is highly illuminating, showing a more sincere and humanistic side of crypto that is not often apparent in mainstream media.

Raw, naive, imperfect, marred by teething problems, yet incredibly hopeful—this is how the story of Ethereum should be portrayed, a continuous work-in-progress towards a challenging but worthwhile ideal.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #546 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo taken from the jungle lodge in the Amazon rainforest that I stayed at when visiting Manaus, Brazil, in January 2016.

(P.S. I had no WiFi in the past 2 weeks.)
Left: Rothko on Pennies by @yigitduman

Right: Photo by Diego Delso (delso.photo) of the "Spider" geoglyph, one of many in Peru's Nazca Desert.

Both monuments composed of indigenous materials scattered or moved within their respective landscapes, together forming a more transcendent and durable whole.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #605 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of a small stream while on the trek to Ciudad Perdida, Colombia, March 2014.

[This one feels special as I'm posting this while in Colombia now, more than a decade since my first trip here.]
For those headed to Singapore for TOKEN2049, I have the perfect song for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCufThTuB3M

(For context, Singapore is "Singapur" in Spanish.)
Left: Seaport Subject by @botto launched on @verse

Right: Life by the River (1975) by Liu Kang, in the collection of the National Gallery Singapore

Both works were created under entirely different contexts, but I think they share a common "archipelagic" character.
MERIDIAN MONDAYS

Left: Meridian #443 by @mattdesl on @artblocks

Right: My photo of a red "Ferrari" boat along Beloi Beach on Atauro Island, Timor-Leste, June 2019.