Farcastles
“On Sunday, February 11th, 2024, the first strike landed, heralding an unprecedented week of unending conflict between the realms of the North and So...
The Three-Legged Stool
Insights and personal musings on all things collaborative worldbuilding from Raul on a Stool
Introduction: The Crash Was Never the StoryIn March 2021, Beeple’s Everydays sold for $69 million at a Christie’s auction. To many, it was the starting gun for the NFT boom. Within months, profile picture (PFP) projects were everywhere, marketplaces like OpenSea exploded in volume, and a wave of artists, collectors, speculators, and brands rushed into the space. By 2023, it was over. Trading volumes collapsed. Floors fell. Twitter timelines went quiet. The world looked on and said what it alw...
In the early days of the internet, digital things were weightless. A song, an image, a document—once uploaded—could be copied and shared infinitely with no degradation, no loss, no cost beyond bandwidth. This was both the internet’s greatest feature and its most profound limitation. The sheer abundance of digital information made it an unprecedented medium for communication, but it also meant that anything digital was fundamentally ephemeral and valueless in the traditional sense. There was n...
It’s been exactly one year since I typed the very first “!attack” command into a Farcaster feed. At the time, I was just one guy with a quirky idea and a nearly nonexistent budget. I called the project “Farcastles”—a text-based, collaborative worldbuilding game that lived entirely on a decentralized social platform. Honestly, I had no plan to pioneer a new gaming genre or prove that on-chain adventures could be the future. I just wanted to inspire some excitement and show people that this fee...
Video games have always been pioneers of technological innovation. From the simple, pixelated joy of Pong to sprawling, open-world masterpieces like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, each leap forward has brought new possibilities for storytelling, creativity, and human connection. And yet, gaming has often relied on tools of the past, tethering its evolution to the same centralized systems that define most digital media. What happens when a new medium—one built on blockchain technolog...
There’s a whole lot of magic happening behind the scenes from the moment your fingertips touch the screen that brought you to this blog post. Trillions of electrons are shifting through space, bits racing through thousands of transistors, memory moving from one place to another—all to light up the pixels that form the words you're reading right now. It’s so seamless, so immediate, that we rarely stop to think about what’s actually happening beneath the surface. But this level of seamless inte...
When home consoles first entered the gaming market, their appeal was clear: “An arcade in your living room.” The pitch was simple and compelling, but the reality often fell short. Early consoles couldn’t match the sheer sensory power of arcade machines—nor could they replicate the communal buzz of playing games shoulder-to-shoulder with friends in a neon-lit arcade. Still, the promise was there, and for a time, consoles relied on mimicking what had come before. Titles like Pac-Man and Donkey ...
113, the artist from the future behind Terraforms by Matcastles, has sometimes called Ethereum a sculpture garden. The Museum of Modern A...
At first, I dismissed Farcaster as just another X (formerly Twitter) clone, doomed to fail against the established social media giants. "It's Twitter...
The concept of the "metaverse" has permeated public consciousness, especially after Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta in October 2021. In hi...