Hi Crowd!
I mentioned to you earlier that I had a grand plan for December where I was going to do one thing a week, completely, and catch up/get ahead on a number of things that needed doing. I was somewhat successful in that I did some of what I wanted to do, unsuccessful in that I didn’t get to other things that I wanted to do, but I didn’t get to those things because I ended up doing things I hadn’t planned on, and I’m really happy with those, so I think even though there are some todo items remaining, overall it was a win.
The big thing I did, which ended up taking more time as (good) mission creep set in, was revamp seanbonner.com to include a native version of The Crowd newsletter, better show off my own work, and provide a place for me to show off art and artists I’ve been collecting over the years. I’m really happy with this and if you have a few minutes to waste, click around and take a lot. The collection section is no where near complete, and I don’t think it ever will be. I’ve got a lot of art, and it’s all over the place which is one of the reasons I want to pull it all together for this, but that’s a monumental task and I plan to do it little by little for the foreseeable future. You can see where it’s heading though.
A big chunk of this got done as fast and well as it did due to vibe coding it with Claude Code, which has been wonderful. Things that would have taken me weeks to do before, were done in minutes. Seriously. I can’t even explain how much time this saved me. In the old days I would have spent days reading tutorials and copying code from some repo and trying to mod it only to run into bugs which would take me days to find and solve and then run into authentication problems and go back to square one and then try again. Eventually it would have worked, but I would have a scratchy voice from yelling at my laptop and again, it would have taken weeks. Here I explained to Claude that I wanted to set Claude Code up to manage my wordpress site and to use Github for version control and asked it to give me the steps to follow. It did, and everything worked on the first shot. Then I told Claude Code what I wanted, and it just did it. Yes there were tweaks and mods along the way, but holy crap.
Because this was working so well, I decided to update BurnedPunks and while I was doing that news that MoMA acquired 8 CryptoPunks dropped, so I thought it was high time that I finished and launched MuseumPunks which I’d had on the back burner for a while. Both are done, and live now. And it’s awesome.
Some other home/digital organization things also got done, or mostly done and I’m relived about that.
I didn’t get to sit down and figure out my Flipper Zero or my new Meshtastic devices. But I’ll get to them in the coming weeks for sure. If you are playing with either of those and have tips/tricks/pointers/advice I’d welcome that.
I also get things pretty well set up with The Crowd Telegram group. If you use Telegram and like The Crowd, you might like that. There’s an announce only group, and a discussion group, so you can keep the chatter low and just get links and news from me if you want. I’m sending interesting links there when I find them (like this one pointing out all the stuff Elon Musk promises and never delivers, or this one talking about the conversation around AI using lots of water and why most everyone has it wrong). I’m still thinking about what overlap if any I want to have here, and ideally find an easy way to do that. Going into the new year I want to find easier ways to do all the things, and spend less time manually doing the same thing in different places.
Somewhat related, X is now unmonitored for me. Things get posted there automatically when I post them elsewhere. There’s also some autoposting to BlueSky and LinkedIn which I hope will be useful. Nostr is still manual, as is Instagram. Speaking of which, Om put back on his journalist hat to dig into Mosseri’s year end thoughts post, and it’s very worthwhile read. If you haven’t read the memo you can here easily, but it suggests interesting times ahead. One big thing, as Om notes, is that Mosseri seems to be admitting that in the (near) future people won’t be able to tell the difference between “real” and “AI” and Instagram is already thinking about how to manage that, including the detail that some apps/camera manufacturers are/will be using “cryptographic” chains of custody to prove where something came from. This jumped out at me because he’s talking about NFTs and blockchains as the only real way in the near future to know where something came from. Which I think is terribly funny because that’s what so many of us have been saying for 5+ years now, largely to deaf ears, about why this tech is important to artists. So the irony that people who hated on NFTs and then shifted to hating on AI are now going to end up using NFTs to unquestionably differentiate their work from AI is kind of delicious.
We’re not even 24 hours in and 2026 is already looking like it’s going to be interesting. Before I wrap this I’ll just say that on my end, I’m trying to publish more. So expect to hear more from me. Also, there’s no shortage of people talking about how fucked up a lot of things are, and for good reason, but I don’t want to fall into that hole and I don’t want to just be negative. So I’m intentionally trying to find interesting and positive things to talk about. That doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the problems, as people within earshot know all too well, but online I’m going to try and push things towards the posi. Find the good and shine a light on it. When I can anyway.
That’s all for now. NHY.
-s