Twenty years ago today I was sitting in my dorm room at Penn State and I hit publish on the first ever Driven By Boredom blog post. It’s been a wild time doing this, and it’s honestly amazing I have continued it after all these years. The site was started as a place for me to put all the random projects I would make and email to my friends before social media and even things like photo and video storage sites existed. Blog wasn’t even a word yet. (Technically it was, but even early bloggers like myself weren’t using it at the time.)

Before I started Driven By Boredom I had made several websites, including strangely enough, a party photo website. I would ride the “drunk bus” that ran around the Penn State campus late nights and take people downtown. After midnight it was complete chaos and I would take photos of people partying on the bus and then get the photos developed and scanned and posted to the website a few days later. When I started blogging though, it felt different. There was a community of people who would all talk and exchange links and collaborate and it felt really exciting even though I wasn’t even leaving my dorm room. I have real life friends from those days and a bunch of us still talk occasionally on a Facebook group. 

That feeling I had back then I am getting again, feeling like I am at the beginning of something and talking with other people who are also excited about this brand new community. That’s why I am celebrating the 20th anniversary of Driven By Boredom with an NFT. If you know what that is, feel free to skip over the next three paragraphs. For everyone else, let me give you a quick breakdown (if you want a more in depth breakdown click here).

NFTs are digital items that are recognized on a blockchain, that way you can confirm who owns something and the provenance of that item by tracing all the sales back to the original creation. This will be used in the future in so many ways, that I won’t get into because it would take me forever, but we are going to talk about art. The reason you might have heard about NFTs before now is because some digital artwork is selling for millions of dollars. There is a Christie’s auction right now happening and people have been flipping these things for just massive amounts of money. (Two days ago I made over $1000 in two hours selling one.)  As crypto has skyrocketed these new millionaires are turning around and putting their money back into the blockchain to buy digital items that they love, think will increase in value, or are honestly just a flex. This has created insane prices that with some exceptions will all probably come crashing down in the short term, but I think in the long term we are just getting started. 

Why would you want to own what is essentially a gif? For the same reason you would want to own one of my photos instead of just printing out one of the photos I post on my site. It comes from the artist, supports that artist, and gives you an item to collect, even if it’s a digital one. While these crazy prices might not hold, it’s pretty clear digital items have value, people have been making money for years selling items in Second Life or speculating on domain names. None of this is really new, but having them secured with the blockchain is only a few years old.

As an artist, NFTs are really exciting because not only does it exist as a new revenue source, but it’s one you can track and profit off future sales. If you buy my NFT for $10 and later sell it for $20, I will get 10% of that future sale, and if that person sells it I will get 10% of that sale as well forever. Those royalties might make it possible for artists to make a living while other people are benefiting as well. As a customer you are supporting their work that you can show off in your digital art gallery and as that artist becomes more relevant you can make some money in the process and that sale helps the artist again. If you can wrap your mind around the idea of paying money for a digital item it’s very exciting. 

So let’s talk about my first NFT. In the future I am going to be doing photography NFTs. I have already started working on updating a series of photos for this new medium that I can’t wait for people to see, but this is the test run. I wanted to create a very cheap NFT that I might lose money on, but I really just wanted to go through the process and introduce my followers to the idea. My hope is that when I start doing more fine art NFTs, these cheap ones will actually become more valuable like how my first book sometimes sells for 10 times what people bought it for in 2013. 

So what am I selling? “Blingy” digital animations of my logo. Seriously.

The current DBB logo is actually the third logo I have had. It was designed by my friend Adam Squires in 2006 for a concert film I produced and has now been tattooed on a dozen different people and had cameos in tons of movies and TV shows as I used to stick that fucker on every lamp post in lower Manhattan. It’s very mildly iconic and I love it even though it kinda looks like a dick and balls. 

I decided to do it as three editions of blinged out gifs in the style of your awful friend’s MySpace page. Why, you might ask? Well it gives it that early internet feeling when every webpage had an “Under Construction” or a Mailbox gif on their page. The MySpace look is also important because I originally started putting the logo HUGE on my photos so that you could see it when people made my photo their MySpace photo. I loved seeing Top 8s filled with my logo. It was a fun time to exist as a party photographer. 

Okay, so let’s talk about the editions. Up first is the cheap one, the neon pink one is an edition of 20 to celebrate the 20th anniversary and I am selling it for .02 ETH. You will have to pay a gas fee to take possession of it, and that could actually cost more than .02 ETH by itself, but that price goes up and down the more people who are trying to process Ethereum transactions. The “special edition” is the turquoise and pink one that costs .2 ETH and is from an edition of only 5. I don’t expect these to sell right away because spending over $200 on one of my animated gifs is a big ask, but I do have some people who like to support my work and my thought is that if this catches on in the future maybe my very first drop will have value that makes that purchase make sense. There is also a gold edition of just one that costs 2 ETH that I made just for me to keep in my account because I love it. 

So finally how do you buy these things? I minted them on Rarible, but they are also available on my OpenSea page as well. You are going to need to download the crypto wallet app MetaMask and you will be able to transfer ETH into that wallet and then use that to log into Rarible or OpenSea. Once you know what are you are doing it’s really easy. If you are new to crypto you need to buy some ETH. Most people can buy it via MetaMask, but if you live in New York state or some other places, the easiest way to do it is to buy ETH via CoinBase and then transfer it to MetaMask. You will have to pay a fee to transfer it, but if you buy at least $100 in CoinBase and use my link we both get free Bitcoin out of it so that should cover the fee.

I realize this is all very complicated, but it won’t be in the future, and if you learn how to do it now, you will probably have the opportunity to get some very cool stuff before people even figure out that it’s cool. Plus you will have already started your soon to be huge collection of collectable digital art and helped me cover all the minting fees I had to spend to make these damn things in the first place. I honestly could have put a new zine out for the cost to make these things, but at least with my animated logos you can’t spill coffee on them.

Happy birthday Driven By Boredom.

Click here to buy the first ever Driven By Boredom NFT.

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