Immutable Type Drop: The Headliners #5-15
Free-to-mint NFTs & The Doomsday Clock, Banksy mural, Lebron, Brady, Leonard Peltier...
Gm, gm, gm,
We’ve wrestled our way to this drop and have some very cool free-to-mint and micro-fee NFTs within this publication this week. We’re able to offer super low fees now that we’re on Polygon.
We have 10 new NFTs dropped this week. It’s our largest offering ever!
For the new readers: The Headliners collection are NFTs we’ve created using generative AI processes to graphically represent our daily traditional news headlines. The following are the most recent NFTs we found to be compelling to mint on Polygon.
For our journalists: We’re excited to have you as part of our community and are looking forward to upcoming collaborations. If you are a journalist and want to share your headlines as an NFT, please reach out directly on LinkedIn.
For everyone: To say we ‘wrestled’ is an understatement. The Polygon network has been finicky for a few weeks, so we had to make some updates to our own technology to increase the performance of the minting experience for the community.
Doing this work caused a delay to our schedule, but now we’re feeling great about the best options for our community experience.
Minting advice for Polygon: I’ve tested each NFT within the drop to assure each will mint for any community member, and I’ve learned a couple things that should be helpful:
When minting, be sure to choose a higher gas fee than what the network offers. I have experienced some extremely long wait times, as well as failed transactions, when choosing the default gas setting. I’m now choosing the “aggressive” setting as the minting speed to overcome network congestion. I’d recommend the same, or wait for periods of low network congestion, such as evenings.
Network congestion refers to the blockchain usage by people from around the world executing transactions.
If you do find your mint hung up for an extended period of time, there are three options.
Increase the gas fee of the previous transaction. This could help push the mint through the queue and speed it along.
“Cancel” the mint by choosing to pay a higher gas fee than the previous.
Advanced: Change the “nonce” by assigning it to a new transaction completely.
Polygon minting: If you have yet to use the Polygon network, this may be a bit of a learning curve. Alas, don’t become frustrated. It just means you’re an early adopter.
I’ve written a “how to” article for using Polygon. It should provide everything you need to begin your journey. There are even some short videos!
Sovereignty Within Low Fees
We’ve chosen Polygon very specifically to offer as much access to information as possible.
The “information” is represented in the form of digital art created with AI tools and cloud servers, but it is still information. Certainly, it’s a bit of a toy at the moment, albeit a novel toy, but it’s demonstrating our hypothesis whenever someone mints an NFT.
What is it proving?
That information may be tokenized and stored immutably by anyone with a few pennies and sufficient access to the Internet. We just happen to be demonstrating ones freedom-to-mint by creating some digital art that we find to be fun and inspiring.
Why AI art?
For less than $0.44 per hour, anyone may rent cloud computing power and create a visual representation from a description typed directly from their own hands. This means, one may observe an event, or have an idea, and provide a description to a machine and receive a visual output of that description. The person using that AI tool may make modifications and change those renderings by iterating new versions of the graphic. He/she/they may repeat the process until the output meets the expectations of the creator of the graphic.
At no point in human history have so many people so abruptly had access to a technology advancement this powerful and effective. Forty-four cents per hour and an Internet connection is about as universally accessible as we can hope during the beginning phases of an explosion of creativity. Let’s go.
Furthermore, the barrier to capture graphic representations of ideas and IRL events no longer requires access to expensive photography equipment, processing labs, editing suites, nor professional training and accreditations. With a little experience and social capital, a journalist is able to more effectively inform their community with images to accompany their words. Such new tooling does not relegate the existing creative and photojournalistic professionals to the sidelines, rather, we will now have images and graphics that had previously not existed. We are enhancing information access by adopting AI in this way.
Why are these two things important?
Because history has been written by those who could afford to produce it, store it, or to rewrite it when profitable. The lower the marginal cost to document history, the wider will be the participation of historians and journalists to contribute to the work of preserving history. One only needs words and a few pennies to give a rich account of an event and store it as an inalterable record on the blockchain.
In essence, our account of history may change when those who experience it are able to express it in their own words.
Headlines as Source Data
We’re on the road to first-party publishing and automated image generation, and our first product uses traditional news headlines as the seeds for our AI prompts.
The headline seeds are used to inform the prompt, which then becomes much more elaborate and descriptive as created by a human author.
The work of creating these early prompts establishes a library of prompts which may be reused by new creators in the future. These are some of the early steps toward automation, and it’s pretty exciting stuff.
This drop features NFTs as generated from the following headlines, complete with links to the published stories.
Here is the link to the drop page, should you prefer to view them live »
The Headliners #5-15
The Headliners #5
Verbatim headline: Thieves tried to cut Banksy mural from a wall in war-torn Ukrainian town
The Headliners #6
Verbatim headline: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
Story Link:
The Headliners #7
Verbatim headline: Meet ‘Toadzilla’ the giant toxic toad that shocked park rangers
Story Link: https://www.cnet.com/science/biology/meet-toadzilla-the-giant-toxic-toad-that-shocked-park-rangers/
The Headliners #8
Verbatim headline: Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome the year of the rabbit
Story Link: https://catholicreview.org/happy-chinese-new-year-welcome-to-the-year-of-the-rabbit-7-quick-takes/
The Headliners #9
Verbatim headline: Willamette Valley butterfly once considered extinct is back in strong numbers
The Headliners #10
Verbatim headline: NASA just discovered a rare earth-sized planet in a habitable zone
Story Link: https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-just-discovered-a-rare-earth-sized-planet-in-a-habitable-zone
The Headliners #11
Verbatim headline: Maine teen breaks Guinness World record by completing LEGO map in under 10 hours
The Headliners #12
Verbatim headline: Tom Brady retires after 23 seasons, 7 Super Bowl Titles
Story Link: https://www.wfla.com/sports/buccaneers/tom-brady-retires-after-23-seasons-7-super-bowl-titles/
The Headliners #13
Verbatim headline: Doomsday clock advances to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest to apocalypse it’s ever been
Story Link: https://news.yahoo.com/doomsday-clock-advances-90-seconds-160000383.html
The Headliners #14
Verbatim headline: Protesters demand freedom for Leonard Peltier after 47 years behind bars
The Headliners #15
Verbatim headline: Lebron James passes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as NBA’s career scoring leader
Immutable Type Virtual Museum
What’s an art collection without a museum? I, personally, find immense satisfaction displaying my collections within digital spaces. Wallets and marketplace profiles don’t provide much context for NFTs as do virtual spaces, so we’re beginning to populate our new museum space on Spatial.io.
You may find the space by following this link «note: you’ll need a Spatial.io account»
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
As always, thank you for reading and sharing. I’m excited for the upcoming drops on Immutable Type.
We’re learning loads each day and hope you enjoy the work as we build.
Cheers,
Damon Peters
Founder, Immutable Type
Twitter: @damon_peters