Octogenarian thirst traps, Michelangelo biting cave paintings, and emo trap operas? Must be fall. Here’s everything important on the Internet — in other words, nothing.
Chad & El Prof
Shallow-ween.
Martha Stewart is now following in her boy Snoop’s footsteps. As of this morning, a series of limply gif-ed pumpkin carvings and Instagram thirst traps are available on the lifestyle mogul’s website as NFTs. As far as morally bankrupt pivots slash shallow cash grabs, this ranks far to the left of Facebook’s looming name change, but still. We’re charging 1eth for naughty nurse costume iPhone photos now? Somewhere in a sorority house, Bitch Better Have My Money just came on.
Stewart’s joins Playboy Magazine and JD.com in the latest batch of unexpected converts to the NFT game. I’m not saying these fossilized media properties are in any way indicative of the future of the blockchain — on the scale of yodeling Walmart kid to Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock, these attempts skew aggressively toward the latter. But we’ve been saying NFTs are the future of art, media and eComm for a while now. We’re begging for widespread adoption. Being choosy defeats the whole purpose.
PBOY’s Cave.
Our favorite NFT of the week is The Underground Sistine Chapel by Pascal Boyart, aka PBOY. PBOY is a crypto OG, which just means he’s been active in the NFT space since 2019, not since last February. This collection is a series of photographs of portions of a fresco he did inside of an old gold foundry during the 2020 lockdown. And it does feel fitting that, in 2021, spending 500eth on a painting would not net you a piece of the simulated heaven in the Apostolic Palace, but rather a lofi rip-off in a literal cave. The meta layers alone make this a stunning piece of performance art.
You can own a piece of the mural for as little as 1.98eth — more than $8k this week. Finally, it pays to be an artist. On the other hand, it also pays to be:
A sneakerhead with a deteriorating grip on reality. Gravity Footwear traded 25.91eth.
A card-carrying member of the Elon Musk Simp Club. The Rise of Algarnon traded 30.86eth.
A generic DeFi promoter with an indistinguishable edge. Into The Cryptoverse NFTs traded 35.05eth.
The metaverse is full of disappointments, but so is reality. Welcome to the future, where we can finally accept failure as a step toward greatness.
Virgo season.
When the air temp drops and the sweaters come back from the dry cleaners and the night sky starts to look like it took a few left hooks from Joe Frazier, I have this thing where I go out and find the saddest music I can and lay on the floor and play it while counting specks of dust on the ceiling fan. Fucking Virgos. I know. Laugh if you want, but how else do you become a Lil Peep stan?
As much as this ritual has helped me find the greatest unsung deep cuts in the pop punk Soundcloud scene, I never thought I’d find an album that was explicitly made for that very thing. Enter Ultraviolet, the debut LP from Kansas City’s Real As Ever, an emo trap star who has elevated depressed ceiling staring to an art form. Taking roughly equal cues from Rod Wave, My Chemical Romance, and Lin Manuel Miranda, Ultraviolet is operatic in sound, scale, and sheer emotion.
Everything here is clean and calibrated for maximum sadness — the post trap lullaby production, the pitch perfect melodies, the ratio of biblical references to struggle bars to obscure pharmaceutical name drops. The angsty earworm ‘Hollow’ coexists naturally with neo gospel (‘All Alone’ elevates unhealthy breakup coping mechanisms to literally godly proportions) and candid storytelling (there are no thumbs in sluts’ butts in this ‘Stick Talk’ — just meditations on the place of POCs in the apocalypse).
And, like the mountain silhouette in Starry Night, Ultraviolet peaks at the midpoint. ‘Skyfall / Sacrifices’ is a showstopper for the ages, an ‘I Want’ song for those who want nothing more than to throw themselves off a cliff. If you value your mental health, it might be a skip — if you’re not listening to it while standing out in the rain watching the love of your life walk away, you’re listening to it wrong. But if, like me, you find spooky season to be the perfect time to wallow in self inflicted misery? Wallowing doesn’t get better than this.
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Putting the *sigh* in pseudoscience.
I binge too much TV, watch too many movies, and read too many books, hence why we named this publication Culture HOR — we’re already living in the metaverse, where status revolves around saying the right thing about the right things and liking the same things as everybody else. What better way to get the clout and dopamine we so desperately crave than to do our HORing in front of all you voyeurs?
This week, I finished Outliers, a book you probably read as required high school reading the year Obama was first elected. Late to the party? Sure. Who cares. I’m still happy to be the guy no one invited who drinks all the beer. I don’t give a shit if you listen. My satisfaction comes from saying it publicly and getting any kind of reaction. And since the Elon Musk Simp Club just declared war on the Gladwellian Pop Psych Stans in the wake of the latter’s latest podcast series, now seems as good a time as any to insert my belated opinion into an outdated conversation unrelated to me.
All about the Buterins.
Our latest column, dedicated to the conspiracy theories I wholeheartedly believe in, is called Over Beers, because it’s one side of the conversation we might have over beers, or because I wouldn’t have these high-deas in the first place if I weren’t such a pothead these days. But I am. And, lately, I’m quite literally over beers.
This week’s theory is all about the Benjamins — or, rather, Buterins. Yesterday, Bitcoin hit an all-time high, and inflation relative to the dollar is damn near one, too. As I mentioned on Tuesday, I put my money where my mouth is months ago. I’ve got to say, it was incredibly gratifying to sell some of my crypto holdings yesterday to cover expenses, only to have the amount I pulled out covered by new gains this morning. In my humble, totally unprofessional opinion, holding USD is more dangerous than crypto right now. Someone will pay an economic toll during this reckoning. But with new technology at our disposal, we stand a chance at making sure it’s them, not us.
