About.
Phew, the other week, the final drop in the 70s Pop series went live and promptly sold out a few minutes later. This final drop was once again a "Bonus Pack" for charity, raising $14k/£10k for the Women Who Code organisation. Bringing the total to just over $28k/£20k, enough to provide assistance to over one thousand WWCode members for an entire year, giving them technical development events and access to coding scholarships.
I'll talk more about the rarity and philosophy behind the design of this drop further below, but I just wanted to wrap up this project here by thanking everyone who bought one of the, in total, 640 mints of 70s Pop. It's not the end of the line for the design, but certainly the end in this chapter. One that has allowed me to get a new studio and spend more time focusing on my pen plotting art.
640 mints spread across four drops is still less than you often see in a single ArtBlocks drop, and I'm kinda hooked on these small number drops, so expect to see some more soon.
The Pop-o-matic below will allow you to download higher-resolution versions of the mints without the added animation you get in the originals.
Behold the Pop-o-matic
Downloading notes: the image you download is for personal use, you can print it out for yourself or lover, see the printing and framing instructions. You can also display it in your own digital space and on social media etc. etc.
You may not sell prints of the image, or sell the image itself as an NFT (or weird loophole you think you can find) because people will spot them and point them out.
The original 64 NFTs were for sale on ArtBlocks where they have now sold out. Some may be available for buying on the secondary market on OpenSea.
When buying 70s Pop NFTs on the secondary market look at the buying guide (not yet written) below to help you be sure you're getting a genuine Art Blocks one and not a fake knock-off.
Ghost Bonus Pack.
Below is a random selection of twelve mints, you can reload the page for more, or view the gallery.
Rarity Guide
I decided to make a change for this project and make them "all rare". In that, in-between the first drop and the timing of the final drop, ArtBlocks decided to blow up, often instantly selling out 600-1,000 edition drops. While previously I thought of my 256 edition drop as the "big" one (128 would be medium) and 64 as a small drop, in relation to the current drops 64 in tiny. Essentially making them all pretty rare in the grand scheme of things, it would be hard enough to get one at the drop, and buying them on the secondary market is not for the fainthearted.
So I decided to give them a relatively "flat" rarity.
At the same time, I wanted all of them to be special.
So I took advantage of the fact that I could strip a lot of code out; after all, the black & white tiles with nothing fancy going on were simple to do with the code from the last three drops. With this one, I decided to add a colourful animation that started one minute into the mint being shown and taking a whole mint to transition. However, you can run the fast version by double-clicking the image.
I also set it to one minute for a couple of other reasons; the first was to give the backend enough time to take a snapshot of the image before the colour change started. The second was that I hoped people wouldn't discover the effect until after the drop had sold out. In our modern world, sitting and watching a static image for a whole minute is a lifetime; I thought perhaps it would slip under the radar, which it did to a degree.
With each drop, I wanted a special surprise in there, the animate gradients of the first drop, the "surprise" pattern in a handful of the Summertime Fun Pops, the animation in Series Two, and everone of this drop being "Haunted" with the "Spirits of the 70s".
I guess I'm now into tiny drops and going the unexpected extra mile with the code. But, I mean, why keep things simple?
With that in mind, shown below are the rarities, which is handy for matching up your tile and lines size, but in my heart (and on OpenSea), they are all rare.
Tiles
The number of tiles is the first thing the code decides. In keeping with the Series Two drop this one has a slightly smaller range of tiles. This time however because I wanted it to be easier for colouring in.
| Tiles | Percent chance | Expected | Actual | Difference | OpenSea Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 2.89% | 1.85 | 1 | -0.85 | OpenSea |
| 5 | 8.5% | 5.44 | 7 | +1.56 | OpenSea |
| 6 | 14.34% | 9.18 | 8 | -1.18 | OpenSea |
| 7 | 16.18% | 10.36 | 13 | +2.64 | OpenSea |
| 8 | 17.01% | 10.89 | 10 | -0.89 | OpenSea |
| 9 | 16.6% | 10.62 | 10 | -0.62 | OpenSea |
| 10 | 11.77% | 7.53 | 9 | +1.47 | OpenSea |
| 11 | 6.08% | 3.89 | 4 | +0.11 | OpenSea |
| 12 | 2.84% | 1.82 | 1 | -0.82 | OpenSea |
| 13 | 2.03% | 1.3 | 1 | -0.3 | OpenSea |
Lines & Line Boost
Once the tiles are decided, the next step is to pick the number of lines. The more tiles there are, the fewer lines you can fit in, conversely the fewer tiles, the more lines can be crammed into each of them.
This typically means if you have a certain number of tiles, the range of lines you can have is limited to around three. So to give us a chance to break out of that, you sometimes get a line boost.
In keeping with the first Bonus Pack the Boost was limited to the -2 to +2 range rather than -3 to +3, as I didn't want the Bonus Packs to stomp on the rarity of those values from the main two Series.
| Boosted | Percent chance | Expected | Actual | Difference | OpenSea Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8.17% | 5.23 | 3 | -2.23 | OpenSea |
| 0 | 67.23% | 43.03 | 43 | -0.03 | OpenSea |
| -1 | 8.22% | 5.26 | 4 | -1.26 | OpenSea |
| 2 | 7.37% | 4.72 | 9 | +4.28 | OpenSea |
| -2 | 7.45% | 4.77 | 5 | +0.23 | OpenSea |
And now the lines
| Lines | Percent chance | Expected | Actual | Difference | OpenSea Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 4.1% | 2.62 | 2 | -0.62 | OpenSea |
| 5 | 6.47% | 4.14 | 8 | +3.86 | OpenSea |
| 6 | 8.4% | 5.38 | 5 | -0.38 | OpenSea |
| 7 | 10.44% | 6.68 | 4 | -2.68 | OpenSea |
| 8 | 12.14% | 7.77 | 5 | -2.77 | OpenSea |
| 9 | 13.23% | 8.47 | 8 | -0.47 | OpenSea |
| 10 | 12.59% | 8.06 | 9 | +0.94 | OpenSea |
| 11 | 11.07% | 7.08 | 9 | +1.92 | OpenSea |
| 12 | 8.55% | 5.47 | 10 | +4.53 | OpenSea |
| 13 | 5.6% | 3.58 | 3 | -0.58 | OpenSea |
| 14 | 3.24% | 2.07 | 1 | -1.07 | OpenSea |
Format
The Format is once again some code that gives a little, well, form to the layout of the tiles. In this case, Top-down, Middle and so on refers to how the "random" tile engine chooses what kind of tile to place.
Paranormal Activity
Meanwhile, paranormal activity is a "re-branding" of the number of "noodles", the small tight loops and curls there are. Instead of listing the exact number of them in the mint, they get assigned to bands because it's much more in keeping with the Ghost theme. It also stops people from going "I have the 1 of 1 of 32 noodles", where everyone probably has a unique number of noodles in such a small run.
Although they're banded in such a way to make the more extreme outliers sit in the "rarer" bands than the others.
Underlying Dread
Much like Paranormal Activity, Underlying Dread is a banding of tiles. In this case, the number of times four tiles are joined up into a larger tile.
Because it's tricky to get a lot of larger tiles, the Very High is a lot rarer than the Low ones. It's also funny that sometimes a 10x10 grid will have a lot of tiles converted to the larger ones, giving it the look of a 5x5 grid.
Haunted
If a mint is "Haunted", it means it has the spirits of the 70s in it creating secret groovy patterns. So, of course, all of them are haunted.
For one hot second, I considered making the colourful animation a "rare" feature with only a handful having them, but as mentioned above, there was only 64 in total that seemed unfair.
| Format | Percent chance | Expected | Actual | Difference | OpenSea Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| True | 100% | 64 | 64 | +0 | OpenSea |