Nature is healing.

Hopefully, like me, you’re embracing this fairly dismal marketⁱ as an opportunity to distract yourself a bit.ⁱⁱ

So now that we’re here, have you ever wondered why some XCOPY works hit so… different? Why some are so freaky, others so creepy, and still others so banal? Why some, despite their embedded rebukes of our all-too-glossy exteriors, manage to sooth what ails, like a palm reader who obviously knows nothing but somehow also knows too much? With this in mind, let’s take this conferring-with-the-flowersⁱⁱⁱ moment to inspect X’s lawn and count the blades of grass thereupon. To do so, we’ll break down the GIF-Master’s^iv editions into number of frames to see if there’s any conclusions we can draw:^v

Of course, at this time of the cycle,^vi who doesn’t want to see charts that go up-and-to-the-right? Remember those? Ahh simpler times…

Looking more closely at the chart above – aside from the fact that “8” is a very common number of frames-per-GIF, from which we might infer that X is catering to his Asian base – we see that, per Anita Porchet,^vii this whole “analysis” is a fucking joke! Because just as more firings in a kiln doesn’t make a cloisonné enamel dial any better (it may in fact mean the opposite – that more errors were made in production), so too is it true that more frames don’t necessarily make for more compelling GIFs. Although it must be said that I’m already on the record as loving Taxmen above all other XCOPYs, so maybe there’s a subconscious correlation after all. But really, we can’t read too much into these things, no matter how tempting it is to regurgitate such simplistic narratives to ourselves.

The “Zhuper Cycle” and “Triple-Halvening” taught us that much at least.

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1. It’s also been raining non-stop this spring… making up for the mega heat waves of the last couple summers. At least we won’t have southern BC forest fires to choke on this July. Indeed, nature is healing! ↩
2. I know my man Raoul Pal is! Normies rubber-neck at car accidents. Don’t be a normie. ↩
3. If we only had brains, we’d have been 80% in stables at $4k ETH last December…
   Alas… aren’t our JPEGs loverly? ↩
4. What’s a GIF, you ask? GIF, which stands for Graphical Interchange Format, is an digital format that animates and continuously loops a series of images without the need for user interaction. These automated video-like clips are actually closer to quick flip-books than anything streaming on Netflix, but their simplicity is what makes them so highly compressible and therefore more easily transmissible across various messaging platforms, which is why they form such an important foundation for online meme-based culture. ↩
5. This chart focuses on XCOPY editions because that’s what I happen to personally collect and therefore have the most expertise in, which of course just leaves the door open for future pseudo-academics to explore his 100+ SuperRare 1/1s in a similarly Artnome-ian manner! ↩
6. So close…

   

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7. Anita Porchet is, for the willfully ignorant, the greatest living miniature enamelist on the planet. She primarily works for Patek Philippe but she also takes commissions for some of the other large brands. Her recent interview with Collectability is well worth a listen for the exquisite insight into her magical and nearly-forgotten world. Indeed, there’s so much more to culture and the arts than narrow profitability and bean counting, as Anita’s loving craft so thoroughly attests! ↩