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 To say that hosting “A Taste of the Metaverse” at the Media Arts Conference at Spring Valley High School was enjoyable would be a massive understatement. I am so grateful to one of the coolest people around, Josh Drews, for inviting me to demo the metaverse for learning at his super cool event. This week-long arts conference takes elementary to high school art teachers on a journey through a variety of digital art-making tools and techniques. Some of those tools included graphic design and movie-making tools, and 3D modeling in TinkerCAD - which I was happy to share.
I got to spend a few hours showing teachers how we at The Diner Studio use Spatial.io, Ready Player Me, SketchUp, and AI to develop exciting, socially immersive experiences with global artists and our students. Speaking and ConnectingOver the past year, Raina and I have had the privilege of speaking at several conferences, connecting with educators, creative professionals, and business leaders across the state. Our mission is to help individuals and organizations engage with their audiences globally by creating immersive cross-reality (XR) events that are educational, engaging, and impactful, both in real life and digital spaces. We've had the honor of presenting at various esteemed venues, including Think Up Consulting, the SC Association of Middle Level Educators (SCAMLE), the SC Arts Education Association (SCAEA), and the USC College of Engineering and Computing Spring Conference. In June, we'll be sharing our insights at The Media Arts Institute. Each of these opportunities has been incredibly meaningful to us, and we hope that our contributions have added value to the wonderful people we've had the chance to meet and speak with. Community EngagementWe've already proudly shared our success, but we are excited to reflect on and improve our second iMAGINE Upstate "A Taste of the Metaverse" experience. While this year's event was a significant achievement, we recognize that there is always room for enhancement. Our team is dedicated to meticulously analyzing the feedback and experiences from this year to develop a comprehensive plan for next year's event. We are committed to innovating and rethinking our approach to ensure that "A Taste of the Metaverse" continues to grow, captivate, and inspire our audience in new and exciting ways. Next CourseMoving forward, we are excited about several upcoming initiatives that will allow us to further our mission of connecting and engaging with diverse audiences. We plan to explore partnerships with SC Comicon, aiming to find innovative ways to collaborate and showcase their work in cross-reality (XR) projects to a broader audience. Additionally, we are targeting a presentation at the Association of Middle Level Educators (AMLE) conference, where we can share our insights and experiences with fellow educators and professionals. We also intend to host more Saturday SHOWCASE events, blending real-life and digital experiences to create memorable, educational, and interactive sessions. These efforts will help us continue to foster meaningful connections and advance the field of cross-reality events. Authored by Ken Morrill Jr on 5/19/2024
Sometimes it feels like we haven't been showing people what we've been up to. In today's world, that's very much like not doing anything at all, sadly. Well, we have been doing a LOT! Here's a really quick update:
Raina and Ken have been burning the candle from both ends ALL the way to the center of the wick! Just as their light seems to fade and exhaustion sets in, a wonderful human steps in and offers new light on a new project and they smile, high five (because they are total nerds), and jump in with a renewed sense of joy and purpose. To start, we want to thank our friends Dave, Jay, and Vans for bringing the light to us for "A Taste of the Metaverse" XR event at iMAGINE Upstate! From moment one in the metaverse, they brought joy, knowledge, and love of their audience which was obvious to our friends at the IRL event.
As we walk tiredly into this weekend for 2nd Saturday SHOWCASE for the first time in XR, we smile and hold our heads high. We get to work with Jay again and our new friends, Orlando and Micky, and share a few of the many brilliant history lessons from Anthony. Not only do we get to share these artists with our regular metaverse audience, but with our new friends in the Greenville arts community. We are proud, too, to do this work at Greenville Center for Creative Arts. If there is a better place to launch our XR dreams, we do not know where it is. Stay tuned as we recap our experience from the past two events and plans for the future!
 by RainafazzAF Hey everyone. I’ve hesitantly posted about the new ventures and undertakings in web3 that are becoming part of my life as this isn’t the best platform for it, but at the same time, I’ve always shared what’s going on in our family and personal lives in bits to keep people up to date and in the know.
Art, in multiple formats, used to absolutely run my young and early adult life, from dance, musicals, pottery, drawing, wood working, sculpting, knitting, and writing. I’ve always incorporated art into my lessons and created posters to promote projects, books, and tease upcoming units. But it wasn’t until about a year ago this February when I started learning about what NFTs were, that this whole new world of creators and collaborators would open up to me. I haven’t really had a vision, goal, or purpose to create a new art series or collection until recently. In this past year, I have onboarded myself to so many new things and learned/am learning to use emerging technology that will be mainstream in the future, nothing new to my teaching life. It’s all about the journey, moving forward, and learning together. The friendships and business connections I’ve made in this time are something I would not change for anything. I bought an iPad last year and enjoyed seeing a handful of my artistic students draw on various programs. Procreate has been such a powerful drawing program to learn, and I’ve both been frustrated with and love the transference of skills from my favorite artistic medium of Prismacolor pencils and markers to get the same effect digitally. Still using “pencils” with my Apple Pencil has been a big learning curve that I am beginning to be satisfied with. Drawing realistic, digital versions of Ellie and Stephen’s childhood stuffed animals felt great. But taking it another step to dive into AI generative art (that’s a bit of a skill I am VERY basic in compared to what’s being created) and reworking those two things together was fun and a learning experience. Two women, JoJo and Cee Cee, who I’ve gotten to work quite closely with on many events and projects, created a web3 business called CJMetaEvents several months ago. They invited me to create a themed 1-3 piece series around the topic of “Love In Color” and what that meant to me. It took me several weeks to decide on what that would look like, and it just popped up easily as I watched Ellie take her pink stuffed dog, Cupcake, everywhere with her. To bed, on the couch, to Scotland and back, to Aunti Danni’s for the weekend. It made me think about my childhood. Lord, that ratty pink blanket I cuddled and kept warm with until I was her age made me feel so safe and happy. I wish I still had it. My MIL texted a picture of Stephen’s best childhood friend quite easily. I was so happy she still had George. So, this theme manifested into Love In Cuddles. I plan to extend this series to other’s favorite stuffed animals. Want yours or your child’s loved stuffed animal done? Give me a shout. I plan to print and hang these pieces at home. CJMetaEvents had a soft opening of the gallery this afternoon and all three of us from my team, The Diner Studio, created and submitted artwork. I loved walking through the virtual gallery to experience all the interpretations of this theme. It takes me back to my days at Michigan State when my classes had lessons in the gallery, learning how to look at, critique, and talk about the work. I’ll invite all of you to the grand opening in a few weeks. I would be quite pleased to onboard any of you interested to have a look, but feel intimidated by this platform. It’s actually pretty easy and kind of fun. And, the international world of individuals coming together feels good to be immersed in again. It doesn’t feel too dissimilar from summers at Camp Copneconic, making lifelong friends and gaining a life partner. 🥰 Join the gallery space throughout the month of February: https://www.spatial.io/s/Love-In-Color-CJ-Meta-Events-637ba7494297a900015113d0?share=4948412012590093590 Website: https://www.thediner.rocks/blog/love-in-color-exhibit-by-cjmetaevents RainafazzAF Love is a Forever Friend by RainafazzAF This art piece depicts a young girl sitting confidently on a comfortable chair, cuddling her most cherished best friend - her stuffed animal. The stuffed animal is clearly well-loved and well-worn, and it is clear that it travels everywhere with the girl, providing comfort and companionship at all times. The girl's expression is one of contentment and security, and the overall feeling of the piece is one of warmth and love.  Love is Togetherness by RainafazzAF This art piece is a cartoonish drawing of a couple, depicting them hanging out together on the couch. The couple is shown as partners in life, with a strong bond of love and trust between them. The drawing captures them in their most comfortable and relaxed element.  Love is Cuddles by RainafazzAF Love is Cuddles is the culmination of drawing and commemorating forever my family’s most treasured childhood friends over 2 generations. Pink Blanket, George, and Cupcake represent security, love, friendship, and in essence, childhood itself. NovaSageCTD
by Raina Farrell Jan 24, 2023   Ken, Phoenix, and I took the stage this past weekend to bring The Diner Studio to a creative audience in the #PolygonShowcase produced by @MyCreativeOwls (Twitter). Phoenix, our Chief Technology Officer, spoke so eloquently as he laid out our value to the audience, our customers, and what we do as a business. Here are his eloquent words: "You are a talented creative who has put endless hours into your ingenious creations. What are you missing to thrive? And if you feel like you never have enough time, that you need more of you, you’re not alone. Ten years ago, researchers found through a study that roughly half of everyone feels the exact same way. The #metaverse is for everyone, and everyone has the power to build in it, and you should have a dream that you can see with full clarity. You are passionate about what you create. But, not every part of the process is enjoyable. Sometimes, you have difficulty resting and keep pushing yourself to be productive. You develop a block and just can’t quite reach what you need to get past it. Your work isn’t always getting the attention from others that it deserves. There just isn’t enough of you to fulfill your vision. The Diner Studio provides services through cool places for cool people doing cool things, just like you. We’re a team of creatives ourselves and we’re #metaversebuilders with an infrastructure that’s integrated with #Polygon and we’re here to help you thrive. For example, fully opening soon in the Metaverse is our space The Diner. This will be a public and freely accessible place for cool people to meet other cool people and share and learn about the cool things that they’re doing. A meta analysis studying many countries, found that approximately one in ten adults have a compulsive urge to overwork. It’s hard to step back from your work, but your productivity will increase if you practice mindfulness in balancing your life and connecting with people and focusing fully on them when they speak. Take a break, put your work away, and connect with people at The Diner and you may even find a way around that creative block you had earlier as well. Open now is CHUBBYs Food Truck Park, a second, freely accessible, public space with gallery space and free events to promote your creations. In the past year, we’ve had over five thousand visits to our park and counting. That’s over five thousand impressions that your work deserves, at no cost to you. Providing creatives with another platform to bring their passion to others, opening on January 30th will be our metaverse music venue Dark Star. Join us for a free performance by Dope Stilo Music Club as he stops at Dark Star’s opening night as part of his metaverse tour. The Diner Studio can assist you in building in and consulting in the metaverse so you need one less you to get everything done. When you leave today, open your browser and visit thediner.rocks. Go to contact in the menu and let us know how we can help you. Join us and let’s thrive together."  
These sketches represent the BIG wants in building IRL experiences for iMAGINE Upstate on April 1, 2023. Noting and sharing ideas with the team is what the three of us do superbly. This is just the way Ken handles notation. We'll keep you all updated as time goes on as to what is coming down the pike for WAY more we plan to develop.
 Post and painting by Ken/GxxnAR The day has finally come that I am showing art in public again. It's been years since I've shown my own physical work IRL. To say I needed this is an understatement. The Artists Guild Gallery of Greenville connected with Greenville County Schools art teachers and offered us space to hang our own work. I desperately NEEDED to share my work - which meant that I NEEDED to create new work to show. Sure, I could have used anything I had laying around in my portfolio, but that butted up against what I needed. Creating work puts me in a different kind of mental and emotional space - one I've missed for far too long. While also working on my BIG project - creating three environments for one of my favorite artists of all time, I wanted to get into his headspace to create MV experiences that feel like him. I guess it's cool if I name drop here: Ralph Steadman's work has inspired me since I was around 10 years old - before I could really understand where it came from and what it was saying. To create his spaces I needed to create like him - to watch the ink splash across paper, to drip, to accidentally hit surfaces other than my intended support. Physics matters when recreating IRL in the metaverse even if you do not need to adhere to those laws while jacked into a headset. So I painted - for weeks. It was actually four weeks of creating that lead to the painting above. I work fast, but I always see room for more. At the end of the four weeks, I just had to get it framed (thank you Rosemary's Art and Frame) so it could be dropped off and prepped for showing on First Friday! Creating this painting, inspired by Ralph Steadman and one of the first metaverse spaces I launched with The Diner Studio crew, means the world to me - the opportunity to show with so many amazingly talented teaching artists is equally meaningful to me. The original purchaser will receive one of 20 NFT prints of this painting. The remaining 19 will be for sale on OpenSea. If you are in or near Greenville and want to see the passion living inside the minds and hearts of area art teachers, drop by Artists Guild Gallery on Main Street in Greenville, SC this Friday through November 30, 2022. 1/12/2023 UPDATE: This artwork has migrated over to The Diner Official's account on OpenSea. You can see or collect it at The Diner Studio Fine Art Collection. You can also see it exhibited at Polygon Showcase #5 by @MyCreativeOwls from January 21-22, 2023. Get your free attendee ticket via Eventbrite.
  e#polygonnft #PolygonShowcase #nfts #CHUBBYsFoodTruckPark #AdjustingAndChanging
The Diner Studio: @MetaDiner @rainafazzAF @gxxnar @NovaSageCTD PolygonShowcase Creator: @MyCreativeOwls 1. No OrderUP! this Saturday, Oct. 1. The Diner Crew will be showing at Polygon Showcase Get your ticket here (It’s free to attend!): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nft-polygon-showcase-4-tickets-387653942377 2. #OrderUP! Is undergoing some changes! Polygon Showcase Oct. 1 Our journey as individual artists to becoming a cohesive NFT team, with two nostalgic Spatial.io metaverse spaces based on a 50s diner and food truck park where you hang out with your friends, has been nothing short of life changing - life changing in the way the trajectory of your professional journey takes a sharp left. Children’s illustrator and creator of #TheSquibbles YouTube show (soon to be released!) Jay Stansfield posed this question to NFT creators: Is the journey worth it? Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself that question. Even if your goal is HUGE, is the journey worth it? Can you answer this question honestly and openly? Thank you Jay for asking hard questions. Reflection is part of growth. The Diner team member @NovaSageCTD/Phoenix couldn’t have put it better, “100%. I can’t afford to not take this journey. It’s already been remarkable for my life in ways I can’t really talk about. I definitely wish I had asked myself this question about previous journeys in my life.” Premier Diner artist and metaverse builder @gxxnar/Ken pontificates, “It’s easier to say ‘yes’ for journeys I’ve chosen for myself. On the journeys I’m tossed into, I often have to ask ‘what is the value of this journey?’ They all have worth - however hard it is to find. Even with all the struggles, disappointments, and upsets of my current journey, YES!” For me, Raina, “YES! I had zero idea how much this journey would shape and change the people I met and worked with. It has been been challenging in a myriad of ways. I must have a goal to be actively working toward in my life, something challenging to learn, and this fills those buckets to the brim! Our NFT project grew into twice weekly Twitter spaces coined OrderUP! where we have discussed anything from inviting our fellow NFT community to share their creative processes and practicing “minting” on the blockchain in episode 11 in our first ever “mintathon” to “How might Web3 and the metaverse improve education?” in episode 30. As we saw the fun, potential, and projected future of meeting in the metaverse as a social platform, we really pushed ourselves to level up our knowledge and experience in Spatial. Ken’s skills as a builder have flourished, Phoenix’s tech skills know no bound, and I’ve learned the ins and outs of unending metaverse space experiences to bring back knowledge and application to our platform. Together “2nd Saturday Showcase” was born. The education and promotion only grows! Ken had already built our home, CHUBBY's Food Truck Park in Spatial and we have held numerous informal meetups. The Diner metaverse is currently our own personal meeting space and will be public in the future. But we were ready for something more formal. Our Diner roadmap has always included education, but we were all naturally positive promoters of other’s work, be it NFTs, studio art, digital remastering, music, you name it, we want to grow and onboard our community, both in the metaverse or in real life. So, every 2nd Saturday, both on Twitter OrderUP! and in CHUBBY’s Food Truck Park on Spatial, we host up to 5-6 creators, open to everyone, to show and sell their work to an audience. Hard to picture? Well, have you participated in a Zoom meeting? Then you’ve experienced what we do, but with a twist. The environment is 3D and you don’t have to use your camera. You use an avatar. You can create one and make it look like you at Ready Player Me’s website (https://readyplayer.me/) or just jump in with a generic avatar all ready to go. You just need an email address. That’s it. Come take a seat by the stage and immerse yourself in a creators showcase. https://spatial.io/s/CHUBBYs-Food-Truck-Park-X5-61f8be45bca31f0001497b39?share=7652942740381371841 Our journey has brought us to 50 successful episodes of OrderUP! and we are presenting our team’s NFT work in our first Polygon Showcase this coming Saturday, Oct 1! We are thrilled to be part of another creator's goal to promote artists too. @MyCreativeOwls, a talented creator and NFT/metaverse trailblazer, has worked tremendously hard to build and bring the NFT community together. We are so proud to present our hard work there. Our goals of educating, uplifting, and helping expand our futures together is in sync! We’d be thrilled to see you there! Get your ticket here (It’s free to attend!): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nft-polygon-showcase-4-tickets-387653942377 Order UP! Changes Why we're changing: As we’ve grown as a team, it was inevitable we would find the need to pivot and adapt, just as the world of web3 and NFTs are changing. Finding how much we loved shifting from our brainstorming set around promoting artists in a regularly set and formatted gallery crawl style to a showcase style show and sell in our own beloved CHUBBY’s Food Truck Park, 2nd Saturday Showcase emerged. Hosting a metaverse event is hard work, even with a team. You are “on” in front of a live group of people, but you need to know your tech and content seamlessly. As we stumbled forward through our first two showcases, CJ Meta Events hosting guru @HiCeeCee popped in to lend a practiced hand. She showed Ken how to add seating to the stadium benches and stayed in the audience. Just having her there was a sigh of relief. When she attended as a presenter in the second showcase, the community was blown away by her personal art. She is continually present, supporting, teaching, and escorting the NFT community through new metaverses on her Monday Twitter space #MetaverseMonday and hosting events with partner event designer (jojohombreave.nft) @hombreave17, elevating everyone's experiences. Phoenix, Ken, and I have found our roles within 2nd Saturday Showcase and get better with each event. We found doing these events on back to back weekends was not sustainable, and having love of alliteration, once a month 2nd Saturday Showcase took it’s place in our OrderUP! lineup. That left us with some other things to think about. One event from OrderUP! episode 11, when we host our first “mint-a-thon”, we knew we had something there! It was so scary and so much fun. Exhilarating actually. I had never “minted” a thing in my life. Not only was I challenged by Ken to draw on the spot and post it to Twitter every 15 minutes for an hour, I had to mint it as an NFT on OpenSea! Talk about leaning in the classroom! at Ken’s home studio. Yikes! It was so fun and I learned a great deal that day. However, OrderUP! revolved around round table topic discussions with our community. It’s really at our core foundation. So, we put all these menu items together in a new and ordered way. We did not want to be a one stop Diner, we are The Diner Studio and web3 and the metaverse is evolving. We are certainly a part in shaping what it looks like. Here is our new monthly Order UP! Diner Menu! New Time (beginning Sat, Oct 8):
1st Saturday: Let's get creative
Thanks for hanging out with us through these changes! The Diner Crew appreciates and loves you all! ~Raina, Ken, and Phoenix By Raina Episode 13. Of course it was 13, only 13 could be this cursed. To everyone’s surprise, it was also blessed beyond imagination. Well, well, well. Saturday, April 9th will be one The Diner Crew is never likely to forget. With multiple unsuccessful attempts to record our Episode 13 Twitter Space, we carried on with the excitement to announce our big news and will try to recapture the magic here. Thank you to the frens we’ve made in this space for being there with us, giving advice and feedback, and helping us as we all learn to navigate this new piece of the world we are all trying to shape.  The Website: thediner.rocks As Phoenix took the reins and ushered us into the reintroduction of our website, thediner.rocks, the nerves to speak began to settle. I love the feeling of those good butterflies in your stomach when you are about to do something that makes you a bit uncomfortable, public speaking, but you know you will be so proud of yourself when you’ve accomplished the task. Phoenix teased the soon to be launched interactive road map with updated content, that also plays the role of our shared future roadmap as a business and team. That’s something to celebrate. The Blog: I love words and the nuances of a good turn of phrase. I’ve been wanting to make a move into writing and blogging, but I didn’t know where to start. So, starting here with @MetaDiner and our collaboration as a team is such a wonderful place to begin this experience. I’ve met with a few friends recently who make a living as writers, and Allison Hill, a freelance writer for BBC Wales and journalist, gave me some great advice about blogging - “Personal narrative is the easiest to write,” she said. “It’s a bit harder to have to do interviews and cite sources.” But, I have been an English teacher for the past 16 years, and teaching writing is my jam. It’s quite different being on the writing end though, knowing other people will be reading my words. That’s a bit nerve wracking. But, I took Allison’s advice to write a personal narrative for our first blog post. I was pretty stoked with the way the piece came together. I love writing and crafting with words. It is a piece of art in itself to me. What I want the bog to be:
I have to give a shout out to the podcasting team NFT for Newbies! (Check out their trailer here). They have been one of my go to sources for professional development, as they too, navigate the world of NFTs from scratch. I love the ease of being able to listen to them in the car on my way home from work.  How I hope the blog helps people: Since we have been hosting Twitter Spaces, learning from other’s stories, and how they were introduced to NFTs and Web 3, it’s so comforting to know others are also pretty new to this whole experience and are just as interested as Ken, Phoenix, and I are to learn from each other and help promote each other’s projects. The first blog post is about the importance of our communities surrounding us in our various selves: play, work, friend, parenting, spouse, whatever roles you play, it is important to cultivate and nurture those relationships. I want to use the blog space as a platform for people to connect with us. Upon sharing the experience and intentions behind our blog, asking those who chose to participate and support us, before, and leading into Episode 13, it was important to get their feedback, thoughts, and suggestions on what I had just shared. We heard you and are taking notes! Thank you for helping us grow as a team. We are all writing the playbook.
At this point, I sat back as Phoenix and Ken took over. I enjoy that each of us has overlapping and different pieces to bring to the table. The CHUBBY’s Project As a youngster, Ken expressed how much he loved reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which introduced him to the idea of a metaverse. Through his influences of this novel, The Jetsons, Garbage Pail Kids, enjoying delicious burger and food creations while hanging out with friends at old fashion diners, and creating art, it doesn’t surprise me one bit how this all meshes and derives the essence of CHUBBY’s burgers, The Diner, The Food Truck, and the idea of collaborating and celebrating frens in the metaverse. The Diner, a Spatial space, is not only the place to feed your face in cyberspace, but the place to quench your thirst for knowledge in the metaverse. We will host web3 learning and teaching events in The Diner 2.0 after the adoption of 50 CHUBBY’s Burgers. We plan to mint in late April if all goes according to plan. Each person holding 1 or more CHUBBY’s Burger Grade “A” =
On Saturday, April 23 (or so we had hoped!), we hosted what was to be our pre launch party with Episode 16 - more to come about this momentous day in our next blog post! As we rounded out on the 45 minute mark, all three of us sort of had a satisfied sigh. We had done it. We went live telling our NFT community about the blog and our project and our drop date. April 23rd. UPDATE (April 24) The CHUBBY’s Burgers launch was scheduled for April 23rd according to our own roadmap, but we experienced some technical hurdles that were revealed with our testing processes. We want to make sure minting is safe, secure, and simple for our frens of The Diner. We will communicate a final launch date and time when we feel it is appropriate (soon). Thank you for hanging in there with us. Then… THEN…OMG…THEN… Ken: “Oh my Gosh! Oh Man! Um! Oh Man! Ralph Steadman is in our space! Ralph Steadman is in our space. Ok. Welcome! Oh my gosh.”  Ralph Steadman is and has always been a force and influence in Ken’s life. Steadman’s 1998 book Gonzo The Art sits on the back of his couch in his art studio.  Ken had sent two DM invites to our spaces recently in hopes of making a connection in this new NFT world, but never really expected such a thing to happen. Soon, we had the privilege to learn the person behind the visit was none other than Sadie Williams, Steadman’s daughter and project manager. She was quite new to NFTs and Twitter Spaces she said. Residing in Kent, England and 5 hours ahead of our EST zone, she had sat down to relax on her Saturday night, perused her Twitter DMs, and popped into our space, unknowingly changing our world!
A couple of others were just as pleasantly surprised: Coinlaundry (Jason), an awesome supporter of our ORDER UP! Twitter Spaces, was in awe too. He chimed in and said, “And in walks Ralph Steadman’s daughter!” Our team coder and programmer, Phoenix exclaimed, “When I quote tweeted the ORDER UP! announcement and said “It’s gonna be big!, I had no idea it would be THAT big!” The next 1 ½ hours, sadly unrecorded, flew by as Sadie graciously navigated this impromptu Q and A. She delighted fans who saw her dad’s name in our space who popped in and likewise educated newbies into the awesomeness that is Gonzo art, Ralph Steadman, and her forethought to bring her dad’s world into the future of Web 3 and NFT art. It was exciting to say the least and educational to boot. Additionally, it was humbling to “meet” Sadie and learn that she is new to the NFT world, just like the rest of us, but knows this is where the future lies. She said as his daughter, she feels “proud to represent him and to expose people to his artwork.” We couldn’t agree more. Sadie left us with this wise tidbit, “We need to make the NFT space not what it is, but what it should be!” Yes Sadie! That’s how we feel too. Thank you for an amazing evening! And, we’re out! By Raina
I was walking to my car through the school parking lot when I heard my name being called. Ken had his arms loaded down with art supplies and student projects. He asked, “Do you know what NFTs are?” Over an hour later, with the sun much lower in the sky and family calling me home, it was hard to tear away from a conversation that had restoked long burning embers into something I could not yet describe at the time. Little did I know, a small connection I had sought out in my own way, would bloom into a new community of people I didn’t know existed. My curiosity was piqued, as it always is with Ken. Our conversations have been brief at school, but varied and full of shared excitement at the possibility of connection and community building over the years of working in the same building. He oozes with the kind of energy and big scope thinking that's hard to miss. I naturally gravitate toward this type of energy in my life and cultivate as much collaboration and support of projects as possible. It excites me that the possibilities and ideas of collaboration could birth something big and impactful on the community, be it my students, school, or the greater area where I live. The web of possibilities are endless. I know this feeling. I know this experience. I’ve lived it and cultivated it many times over in my life, and it was time for it to happen anew. Electric. I am feeling hopeful for the unknown in my future for the first time in a VERY long time. Who knew supervising students in the hallway a few years ago outside the art room would be a catalyst. Ken’s classroom felt like stepping back in time to the art building at Michigan State University. I found myself half joking one day, but quite serious too, saying “If you ever found a way to pay me, I would quit teaching and be an assistant in your classroom.” What I was really saying was, “I believe in your big picture and I am both qualified and inexperienced to help you make that happen. I thrive on learning new things and applying what I know to make that shift happen. If something brings butterflies to my stomach, even in a fearfully exciting way, because I don’t know all there is to know surrounding said thing, that has always been a tell tale sign for me to go in that direction. For a long time, I didn’t exist without the arts playing some role in my life, be it playing a background actor or dancer, creating art of varied mediums, or designing advertising campaigns with a team for my university courses. But life takes turns and opportunities arise that change the shape of who we are. Growth and learning take place, and more opportunities bloom. During college, I sought out a summer job at YMCA Camp Copneconic in Fenton, Michigan, not too far from where I grew up. I had spent countless hours babysitting to save money for trips out of Timbers Girl Scout Camp in Traverse City, MI, and gained lifelong practical and community building skills that have never failed me in life. These experiences landed me a job that would change the course of my life for the next 20 years. I parlayed my art into entertaining kids, my team building and wilderness skills into leadership positions of varied degrees, and community building skills into some of the best friendships that would not only take me around the world, but bring me joy in marriage and motherhood. Meeting Stephen at camp was the best thing that ever happened in my life. I found a partner to travel with, move across the country with, and build a life with. He became my community that bloomed from shared experiences at camp. When we moved on a whim after a visit to Greenville, SC, I found a new and exciting community to shape and learn in; being an English teacher. I’ve loved this community, one high school, one middle school. Now, here I am, 16 years later, ready for a change. “Raina, do you know what NFTs are?” I had never heard of such a thing, but Ken had! He’d been creating them. And he needed a team to bring his vision to life. So here I am, three months later, immersed on the weekends with a brilliant programmer and artist himself, Phoenix, and a visionary creator who thinks far beyond creating art. My new community. Friends. Business partners. Artists. Community builders. Learners. There is so much to learn! I LOVE IT! I love the feeling of being linked to other people in a profoundly connected way. For me, the essence of community lies deeply within my makeup as a human. It is as varied as my interests and as laser focused as my goals. I’ve found it ironic lately that the ebb and flow of the communities that make up my life have become ever more important as I journey through a big change. I have always been a goal setter, one who sees the big picture, and breaks down the parts to make a plan of action. There is security in this for me. Yet on the flip side, I thrive in learning new things, especially those things that I may not be so good at, yet, and perhaps scare me a bit. Those are the things I will become a master of. To community building and growth. Cheers. |
AuthorThe Diner Studio are Metaverse builders with a focus on utilizing Metaverse technology to help creatives around the world thrive. Archives
July 2024
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