Ends of the Earth Doll Machine—End of Serialization

Entering the recovery period after the diagnosis, the brain fog is severe, the short-term memory fails, and the dreams come back a thousand times. A few days ago, I dreamed of a windy evening, a claw machine and a truck stuck in the sand. Think about writing the end of the claw machine as a recovery from the brain fog of COVID-19.

To briefly review, the doll machine NFT is a project started by Chen Derui in September last year. It has a total of 100 days, one piece of work a day, and it is a video of the claw machine disappearing on the street. Each video is about ten seconds. The full name of the project is "Lock-in Vending Machine" . Vendor Lock-in means commercial monopoly. Vending Machine is a common metaphor for smart contracts.

Earlier, I wrote three articles about the claw machine project, which happened to experience the rise and fall of the Hic Et Nunc platform on the Tezos blockchain, the open casting of the OBJKT secondary market, and the rise of the TEIA platform. In addition, there are also some points of view on volume and price and creative management. If you are interested, you can refer to it.

1. Here and Now (Hic Et Nunc) - Refried Beans
2. Liminal Space Deja Vu - Refried Beans
3. Bricks & Clicks - Claw Machine NFT Hundred Days Serial (3) - Bean Paste

This one talks about what the whole operation is doing in the physical world, especially the last ten days.

These 100 days are not as simple as minting and selling NFTs and selling them.

In the middle, De Rui rented a claw machine in Ximending. This claw machine was just next to the Shiyuan Salted Crispy Chicken, which became popular due to NFT a while ago, and now it is not far from the enclave bookstore. (Looking forward to the NFT of the membership card of the enclave bookstore, I stole some scrutiny on the testnet). There are a bunch of gashapons in the doll machine, and you can exchange NFTs when you clip the gashapons. These capsules are from the toy store in the Wannian Commercial Building, a time-honored shopping mall in Ximending. Some special capsules even have notes in them, which can be exchanged for some cryptocurrencies. In the end, the holder of the gashapon exchange NFT can share the profits of the doll machine.

One month passed so fast, the Lock-in Vending Machine 050 Project is about to end on Christmas Eve three days later.
So far, a total of 226 NFT works have been airdropped to 83 collectors. The physical claw machine has received over 1,619 coins (a total of 11 kilograms).

– via DeRuei’s tweet

In addition, De Rui also took the surplus and actually bought a claw machine and put it in the basement of the bookstore in Taichung. At that time, the basement was still being renovated, and De Rui borrowed the scene video to have a collaboration (Collab) with the foreign 3D artist EverlastingBuilding. This overseas artist also made a 3D virtual room exclusive to Taiwan by fate. ( pictured )

In the past 100 days, De Rui's doll machine has experienced several waves of highs and lows. It has experienced a period of intense sales in the secondary market, and it has also faced a tragic moment when the primary market is sold out in one day.

Around the sixtieth day, De Rui discussed with me whether the last ten days should be planned for a big event. At that time, I casually mentioned, "Why don't you go out with the doll machine?" I didn't expect this idea to come true.

At the beginning of January this year, the day before the by-election of Taichung Second District Legislative Council, De Rui used the money exchanged from NFT to rent a hand-operated pickup truck with a generator on it and a white claw machine with zebra patterns. , and me, all the way to the coast of Taichung and Changhua. It was a wonderful itinerary for a whole afternoon and evening.

The general process is as follows: drive to a fixed point, stand up the doll machine, remove it from the truck, place it on the side of the road, turn on the generator, set up the tripod to record video, finish work and get on the truck, repeat a dozen times.

The final result is the 090-100 eleven.

But the eleven were very different from what was originally expected because the van broke down.

Before actually renting the truck, De Rui and Peiying had already visited the Zhangbin Industrial Zone along the Gaomei Wetland, and they also captured spectacular pictures, such as the Taichung Thermal Power Plant on the album cover of Pink Floyd, the endless Dunes and more. These were never filmed in the end.

In the late afternoon, De Rui wanted to drive the truck into a sandy construction site, but the wheels sank into the sand as soon as it got in. No matter whether he used wooden boards or various tools, it would not work. We just got stuck in the sand pile of Haipu New Ground, listening to the shrill whistling of the fan blades under the wind turbine, waiting for road rescue. Finally, a large trailer pulled the lorry back to the road with dozens of meters of rope.

Before breaking down, we also recorded some good pictures, such as the claw machine standing there abruptly and glowing on the road beside the anti-wave lift, under the windmill, and on the road into the sea. Because the wind was too strong, in order to prevent the claw machine from falling down, I hid behind each of these works.

Especially on the road into the sea, the eldest brother of the Coast Guard is still curious about what we are doing. Why would a normal person take a doll machine to take pictures? De Rui replied: "Students are doing works."

Because of the breakdown, we happened to meet the last train of the electric train passing by next to the railway tracks in Uri, and recorded the meeting between the train and the doll machine; we also happened to meet Lin Jingyi's legislator candidate's campaign site, they were in a large parking lot, because It was late so it was just time for the show. As a matter of course, we drove in and parked, and then videotaped. After all, election culture and claw machines are very much here, right?

My favorite piece is the claw machine in front of the truck meat-cutting factory, with a pile of truck corpses in the background, like a giant whale sinking to the bottom of the sea. We had a brainstorm and wrapped the claw machine in blue canvas, and the demise inside was still visible, like a blind box, or a catch that hasn't yet disintegrated.

The last 100 is a video of the claw machine being placed on the truck and moving away (for me, it was the one standing behind the claw machine), and the whole project ended.

The whole series of NFTs of the doll machine, welcome to click on the link to watch.

In the last ten days, there was an episode where our fishing robot was successful.

Due to the special actions in the last ten days, the sales situation has also become very good, which has attracted the attention of some robot accounts. We found that as soon as it was put on the shelves, it would be swept away by anonymous accounts, causing some old collectors to be dissatisfied.

So we thought of little tricks to fight robots. We announced on twitter that the price will be more than ten times the original price, especially reserved for robots, and other versions are open to real people for bargaining. Sure enough, there were two arbitrage robots that did not write the upper limit of the price, and ate more than ten times the works.

Later, the owner of the robot also wrote a letter to scold him, which was really out of style. However, De Rui is very good, and he even refunded the money to the robot.

Four months have passed since the end of the claw machine project, and many things have happened in between. Looking back, the medium of NFT gave us a new opportunity to complete a series of works that we had never thought of before.

Regardless of bulls and bears, regardless of the epidemic, whether it is in the encrypted world or not, this is the throbbing of creators. Thanks for the diagnosis, I was wandering about the scene and thinking about it all.

This article is the last in the claw machine series, dedicated only to De Rui and Pei Ying.