This last bit of AI art for the year is whimsical. To make it, I used stable diffusion with the prompt 'elves dancing in a field of flowers.' Getting a decent output with this prompt took many tries. That was mildly surpising. Aren't these kinds of AIs optimized for elves?
Most of my art this year was AI stuff, but I did paint one oil portrait of @amberjyang, which I gave to her at the beginning of this month.
My year began with weeks of dystopian covid quarantine protocols at my house, such that I had to wear a mask and clean faucet handles with alcohol wipes whenever I left my bedroom. That was my January. On the heels of this, a cluster headache cycle began. I experienced daily incapacitating headache attacks through the month of May. Then the crypto markets crashed and my portfolio lost most of its value.
I responded to these unfortunate events by writing Small Gods of Time Travel and creating a few nice NFT collections. Following this, I became immersed in The Brockton Exodus, escaping as best I could into envisioning a utopia in great detail. Upon completing that work, I dove right into a sequel. I then set this aside halfway through to write The 321 Incident.
In 2022, I summarized about 572 news stories for wanttoknow.info. I wrote a bunch of articles for the crypto industry. I worked on Sifer Wars and Immutable Realms. I also posted something here on Hive almost every day.
Initially, my social life this year consisted largely of talking to people @caffetto, my neighborhood coffee shop. As summer turned to autumn, I visited my brother's compound in northern Wisconsin and got caught up with the Minneapolis crypto crowd. Around this time, to my great surprise, I met someone and fell in love. This was by far the best thing that happened in my life in 2022.
My biggest regret of the year is buying Solana at $80. Today, my Solana is worth $10. I also regret receiving payment for writing work in Terra dollars. The funds I received in this form are now completely worthless.
One unusual thing I did this year was make a dance video, mostly to impress someone special. Although this was out of my comfort zone, I had fun with it, and the experience reminded me of how much I used to dance when I was younger.
Even though the first two-thirds of 2022 totally sucked, I didn't let that stop me from producing awesome stuff. I did my work and followed my heart and ended up feeling pretty good about everything. Although I lost most of my money in the crypto market crash(es) and consequently can't afford even a small financial emergency, I feel strangely confident that things in this arena will improve in the near future.
On the surface, this confidence isn't so strange. I now have a whole line of high quality books and NFTs to sell, along with a reasonable plan to share these things with wider audiences. The strange part is that somewhere along the way this year, I stopped worrying about money. Having never not worried about money, even when I was a small child, the absence of this worry is strange. It's clearly a good thing, but I don't have any frame of reference for it.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
Mark, thank you for sharing part of year with me. And thank you for sharing your art for our event (and the world:)
Happy New Year!
For sure. Looking forward to our next chat. Happy New year!
I love the concise recap of your year! And thanks for linking your dance video, which I just watched for the millionth time in total.
I love that you created and produced such quality, meaningful work despite the big challenges you endured, and I sense a pride and dignity emerging in you. The more confident you get, it'll be interesting to see what changes in you as a result - your relationship with money being one of them.
Here's to strange confidence...
And that oil painting is by far the most beautiful gift I've ever received in my life. Forreal. Thank you so much for taking a risk and picking up the paintbrush again.
It was fun to organize the year's highlights in one place. And I'm thrilled that you're so satisfied with the painting: )
Wow that all of the greatest photos, I imagine it is a lot of fun.
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