Friday, March 4th 2022
AsRock Teases NFT Motherboard - The Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition
Remember that initial Phantom Gaming Evo NFT push from AsRock? It seems that the company was testing the waters amongst its user base - and the industry at large. The company is now seemingly doubling down on NFTs, but in a creative way. The company's latest "Unity Makes Strength: Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition" campaign is bringing community-based design as input towards the final production look of its upcoming Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition motherboard. The final design will then be minted into an NFT.
The company will be accepting submissions for motherboard designs around the motherboard, with users being called to paint it (the canvas is subdivided into 4,309 pixels) at their leisure. Then, AsRock will be taking five random designs among the submissions, and compare them on a per-pixel basis. The dominant color will then be averaged among the designs, and will become the final pixel. The designs can be submitted via AsRock's site from March 7th through March 26th, with participants receiving a sweepstakes code upon submission. Every entrant will be eligible to win the NFT associated with the motherboard's final design, but additional prizes will be offered on day one, 10, and 20 of the campaign. The winner is likely to hold a pretty valuable NFT by the end of it all; ASRock sold the initial allocation of 30 Phantom Gaming Evo NFTs on January 28 th for 0.1 ETH (~$250 at the time) each. With the Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition being a one-off, however, it's likely it'll fetch for much higher in secondary markets.
Sources:
AsRock, via Tom's Hardware
The company will be accepting submissions for motherboard designs around the motherboard, with users being called to paint it (the canvas is subdivided into 4,309 pixels) at their leisure. Then, AsRock will be taking five random designs among the submissions, and compare them on a per-pixel basis. The dominant color will then be averaged among the designs, and will become the final pixel. The designs can be submitted via AsRock's site from March 7th through March 26th, with participants receiving a sweepstakes code upon submission. Every entrant will be eligible to win the NFT associated with the motherboard's final design, but additional prizes will be offered on day one, 10, and 20 of the campaign. The winner is likely to hold a pretty valuable NFT by the end of it all; ASRock sold the initial allocation of 30 Phantom Gaming Evo NFTs on January 28 th for 0.1 ETH (~$250 at the time) each. With the Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition being a one-off, however, it's likely it'll fetch for much higher in secondary markets.
58 Comments on AsRock Teases NFT Motherboard - The Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition
I predict purple and pink as the winner :laugh:
How are they so utterly ignorant of the effects that NFT's blockchain, Ethereum, has had on their customers?
Using NFTs anywhere near gamers is akin to offering a knife to someone who's been repeatedly stabbed.
And for the record, I don't bust ass for diamonds :laugh: Anybody who has digested anything I've said on this site probably wouldn't take me for someone who spends thousands on a rock just to consummate a relationship. That is so not me, it's hilarious. You really lost it when you started talking about women and diamonds. Again, you talk about people being in bubbles but you actually don't see how hard I laughed when I read that, you just presume. You really think there aren't girls that don't care about diamonds? To me, a diamond girl is vanilla-flavor. We don't have much to talk about. I'd still be a virgin if all girls were like that. I also don't buy skins and crap like that. I don't support things I don't agree with when I can help it - I value that sort of thing, and generally I find that actually living by one's stated values makes for a more coherent sense of just... living. It's good to have a sense of values and try to work them into your choices and that is how I model my life. I find that when I push back against things in the world I don't agree with, or find another path, the world doesn't seem so bad and I don't find myself needing to "give up" on things in order to face it every day.
Why would you think that, anyway? You think people are just lying about what they think about NFTs? That there's no basis for people having any issues with how it is being used? Should tech people NOT care about how new technology gets used? Or do you simply reject our whole line of thinking as invalid? Either way, I gotta ask... why bother if this is the kind of stuff you have to say? Your argument for why I should get out of my bubble and support NFTs is barely there in that paragraph, outside of this vague hinting that scam NFTs are a small piece of the pie, which honestly isn't even enough for me, that small piece would still be doing quite a good bit of damage. It comes off more like this 'mad at the world' rant. It's like you just gave up on having an actual conversation right out of the gate. Dunno what you want from me.
Honestly, @Valantar already broke it down pretty well. All I can say to you, is good luck with the attitude thing, and have a better day.
I actually kind of find the backlash reassuring. Some people jump right into stereotypical hate, but the sentiment I most often see is largely directed at the people using the NFTs and how they are using them. I'm glad there has been this concentrated push to address that. It is the standard that needs to be held to really move forward with the tech in the first place. If we are to have it, it cannot be used in this way, as it stymies the good it may yet be capable of. I think it is good that there are people in different societies around the world who are invested in these notions, and treat them with massively overdue importance. It is a travesty, truly. Seeing how this stuff has been used as made me more world-weary. But not so much towards the tech itself as the people who use it, and the society that places it in their hands and gives them license to abuse it and get away with it. We have to fix that up a bit, and then tech like this can flourish more. What if it is through things like this that we learn to better adapt and integrate technology? There's no guide book. We do stuff, things happen, accounts are taken, and actions are chosen. The better we get at that, the more good tech we can have, and the more we can do with it.
I kinda see this being a theme with modern tech. It clashes with societal issues more and more. Our relationship with technology as a whole has been pretty heavily corrupted by financial interests. I think this is a difficult thing for many tech-minded people to deal with. I think it's probably very alienating for a lot of people. People and politics aren't at all like traces and SMDs. But the philosophy behind the technology and how it is placed in the world clearly does at least as much to determine its ultimate success as the overall potential and efficacy does. Some people are really good with these kinds of ethics, maybe just prone to thinking more of them. Others would rather be in a basement, just tweaking and building stuff, tucked in a bubble that allows them the freedom to study and work. It takes all kinds to make it work, even if all sides might not agree. I don't think they're supposed to. "Hegelian dialectics" comes to mind. Mind you, I can't put any substantial truth to that, but I think it is possible that a synthesis can emerge from this whole situation in due time. I'm taking it as a societal-level learning experience.
I look at this in long-long game terms. One day, I'll be dead, but the world will keep turning, and it'll matter to people there then. I'm as hungry for change as anyone, but patience and ideals go hand in hand. Lose one, and you technically lose both.
DeFi may not be perfect, but it's almost certainly better than the corruption of current government-regulated banking, and that corruption would appear to be near total if even a fraction of the papama papers exposé is true.
NFT's are just trash that use the blockchain, but the fact that they exist at all proves that the blockchain has some merit. I am currently mining as it has been, and continues to be a fantastic investment, but I hope that transition to proof of stake comes sooner rather than later - it's disruptive to the GPU industry and it's bad for the environment.
To me, it all has to trace back to sources of corruption. If we are ever to be remotely free of these institutions, they have to be dismantled, or at least sized-down. Nothing else can take their place while they still exist. There is no safe place to just hide away in that won't just get swept-up in the way the world presently works. They just eat everything that's not like them. Alternatives are either crushed or assimilated.
The more I think about it, the weirder it gets. Maybe it's pedantic, but I have a hard time shaking those little subtleties.
I don't wanna drift too much here, but you make a good point about life/relationship values among the youngest generations. In my account of things, there has been a huge schism, brought on by caclysms of dreamshattering changes in how things operate, and huge advances in information technology that bring us a bigger window to the world - as much more to feed our dreams as to break them. Millenials and zoomers often do not want the same things for their lives that generations before them did, because we are looking at a drastically different picture. We have the advantage of hindsight on certain things, and seeing how they went, going a different way and playing with different ways of living and operating. Personally, it's my favorite thing about us.
And I also think it's very much related to how things have gone with this particular issue. I think some people may just not like that this is how people handle things - they see their world dying and us killing it, disrupting the only thing we have going, whereas many of us have seen it as a miasma of dead ends since we were still kids, and been thinking about how we are going to make sense of it and what to do with it, what a life in it looks like. Those answers are for individuals to find and navigate. No amount of care in generalizing does it justice. It of course looks foreign to people around before the latest schisming of the last say, 20-30 years. It's a necessarily different way of thinking and operating for different parameters, none of which any of us asked for. It's intuitive to be critical from our end. And I think the truth of it is that nobody can actually touch it, people will think and do what they feel is best, based on what they can gather... and not everyone in the other camp reacts well to the changes that brings in culture. It's part of getting older, at 31 I already feel it - I kinda just hope it's a graceful process for me, and that I can keep perspective on what's up with people of different ages. The greatest power for change lies with the young. I think you miss out on big things in life if you never challenge any of the status quo - major learning experiences in who you are, what this world is about, what life is for you... it can't be overstated.
You'd think I would - it looks like I can do the volume and still write with some depth, if not without some liberal choices in grammar and framing. But I don't fully control when I can do it. A lot of it is up to how things are going with my ADHD. When I'm on, I can be quick and thorough with my words. Everything is just right there for me and it's almost automatic. But I don't get the luxury of planning around when that happens. If I have to stop and regroup too much, I just fail hard at getting anything across, or so much as keeping track of that goal. If I were to write a book, it would take a long time, just due to the need for riding waves of periods when I'm able to write at that capacity, spending downtime trying to cultivate a routine pattern that takes me back there. There's also making time for that state to do its thing. It often comes on at the worst times and interrupts my day. The whole ability is really a double-edged sword and I am making what I can of it. Who knows what I learn about in the future?
Forums are a fun outlet for it at least. Sometimes I get ideas that I keep tucked away through that. A book isn't out of the question - there are concepts that rotate in my mind, but the whittling-down I need to do kills me. :oops: I think I just haven't found my format. I appreciate that people still let me stick around here. I at least try to make it worth reading when I respond directly.
In this thread, I'm going in a little more because I don't see the harm at this point. I've been watching people here have these conversations about product after product, with me usually just saying a little bit and leaving the rest to others while I observe. This is all just what I've been observing here coming together right as I see more of the same. It's become such a stock conversation to have here that I figure maybe it's worth adding a little divergence from the usual points. Feel out the meta a bit and see what's there.
therefore the fact that this is an nft mobo suggests one of two things:
1. the mobo sucks compared to the other options from other companies
2. the mobo doesn't suck but their habit of building cheap crap mobos makes it hard to sell good ones because their name is mud
Put it this way: if the bubble that allows you the freedom to study and work is so insular that it lets you ignore the real-world consequences of your actions, and is large enough that those consequences are massively global in scale, then that bubble needs popping. Nobody is owed the privilege of being insulated from the world in that way, and humanity does not need nor benefit from this thoughtless sprint forward, where innovation at any cost is seen as a good. We need to slow down, and start thinking more. If that means that these bubbled-up people will be less free to study and work? Honestly, that's not even a blip on the overall cost-benefit analysis of this. Slightly checking the privilege of a group of massively privileged people running the world into the ground because "we're not doing any harm, we're just innovating" is a benefit, not a loss. But ... do you think the people causing said governmental corruption would somehow not corrupt a system that entirely lacks regulatory mechanisms? The net result of things being decentralized in the way crypto is, is that whoever has the means to exert power can do so however they like, and they are free to work towards accumulating more wealth and power as no mechanisms exist to resist this.
I mean, crypto today is massively centralized. A handful of privately held exchanges control the vast majority of all transactions. Most blockchains are maintained by a handful of nodes, the owners of which are not accountable to anyone whatsoever. Heck, the history of cryptocurrencies forking due to bad actors gaming this system is conclusive evidence that such a system does not work. How so? I'd really like to hear you expand on that thought. The issue with this - and with proof of stake in general - is that this just entrenches the power of the wealthy few who can afford to be staked in a PoS cryptocurrency, which of course entirely undermines any semblance of this being a liberating technology. Not that it ever has been, but if the groundbreaking technology that is supposed to liberate people will only liberate people who can afford to stow away $100000+ somewhere and not care too much if they lose it? Yeah, sorry, that's not liberating, that is just another mechanism for the wealthy and powerful to entrench their power and wealth. Ugh, I throw up in my mouth a bit every time I see someone use that term in that way. Just ... no. I mean, it's explicit incel(-adjacent) rhetoric aimed purely at dehumanization and alienation - and for that purpose, it unfortunately works really well, as you can typically tell that the people using the words in that way are really not thinking of the group of people they're describing as humans at all. It's this fascinating pastiche of the nonsensical "we're rational and scientifically minded" attitude often expressed in the manosphere with an attempt at analyzing society, which ... well, that's rather hard to do when you refuse to engage with society as consisting of people. Of course this is likely at least in part a hackneyed response to feminist discourse around gender as societally determined and performative - they really want it all to be purely biological - but one that doesn't actually refer to actual biology, but rather mythological, pseudoscientific ideas based on refuted/retracted science (that wolf-pack "alpha" and "beta" thing, among others). And of course it actively comes into conflict with the massive and growing evidence of sex and gender complexity and even social determination of "gender" in animals. But that's going off on a bit of a tangent.
I don't think it's pedantic at all - rather, criticizing this as pedantic is one of the main ways this type of harmful rhetoric gets disseminated, as it's an easy bad-faith attack that shuts down debate. The words we use have a massive effect on how we think about the world we live in, which in turn shapes how we relate to and operate within that world. Heck, do that for long enough and it even shapes the neural pathways of your brain. This type of "pedantry" is of massive importance, as is the only way to combat the entrance of dehumanizing and harmful words into everyday discourse. And there are plenty of historical examples that demonstrate that once a population starts talking about another group as not or less than human, violence and attempts at subjugation or eradication follow close behind.
I love your point about the ethically-minded and the tinkerers. I agree, that is what is ultimately needed and where I think things often fall short. You have the people focused on the tech, and they have to trust and work with people who have the money that makes the tech happen when it comes to the ethical side. Why having that money somehow designates you as the ethical arbiter is beyond me. The default state of that exchange is corruption. Within tech-minded spheres are those ethical thinkers, who's hands are tied and voices silenced by entities that can just pull your budget the moment what you're doing doesn't suit their cash flow plans. I think there exists a willingness from both parties in the tech world to come together, but there is yet another with wholly conflicting interests that screws it all up...
I didn't mean to imply that tinkerers should be free to try stuff in a way where they are absolved of recourse for damage. That would be the grossly negligent facebook mindset of "Move fast and break things." I'm talking more about a very long drift to the wayside, where someone could pick it up and play with it in ways that are really and truly inconsequential and without real impact, just sandboxing ideas. I'm not thinking of a 'doer' necessarily, but an explorer. To me, a tinkerer or a hacker is someone who explores possibilities with devices and systems. In the absolute barest sense, they don't care about monetary or political goals and put themselves and everything they do as far away from that as possible... the type of person who may not even WANT to share their findings with anyone but the right person and might just let it die with them otherwise. SOMEBODY definitely has to link-up with them, but it has to be the right people making up the other side of that.
It really boils down to this, for me. I recognize that every so often a person looks at something that once went wrong and finds the idea that should've been the one all along, with the advantage of different circumstances and knowledge to inform a different process and sought usage. There's no way for me to describe that in a concrete way. The ideas are there in the nexus now. What form they take, and really, how much of the original ideas remain over time, is hard to say. It really feels like a lot could happen right at this point in history. When it comes to crypto, some things do have to change fundamentally. And the original idea was probably never going to be feasible. But the next idea from the next idea from that may become something more grounded and realistic, provided some other things also change between then and now. I just don't think it's possible while people can still see and grab so much money from it all. I do not want to come off like I think some booming revival is coming anytime soon, or that things will cataclysmically deviate from how they are now. I definitely do not see THAT. I see crypto as the wrong dream, for the right things. I'll admit, I've never delved much into that side of the internet. I don't really have the constitution for those levels of negativity and childish attitudes. What I've seen in youtube comments is enough for me to call it bad juju and stay away. I will become very mean, and I think those people are really down and out, if not with a lot of gross tendencies. It's too simultaneously sad and angering for me and I don't navigate it well.
I appreciate the clarification, though. That does put what I was feeling into full view. I'm with you on all of these observations. I try to choose my words so as to avoid spreading certain implications. Because I have seen how jokes just stop becoming jokes, how adopting language in certain ways changes portrayed emotional responsiveness to things. I use it to check my own attitude from time to time. Changing the terms you compile thoughts in changes the thoughts themselves over time. Gotta be part of why propaganda focuses so much on terminology. I can't believe how well it works sometimes, when I see it in myself.
I will say, on here, I often word things so as to avoid sowing too much division of politics and philosophy. It's easy to cross the line keeping it a little too real and from then on just losing the whole plot. I don't think it's a matter of saying what you mean being wrong. It's just that the outcome isn't necessarily as productive as I would want. I prefer to stay on a level where different people can still read/participate/be comfortable. The culture here isn't one that carries the heavy, heavy stuff well. FWIW, I still don't feel I have the approach down at all, and what I mean to convey just goes unseen, or worse, flipped over.
I also am not coming at everything with full confidence right now. These past 5 or so years have brought me a lot to reflect on, and my worldview has changed radically over that time. I am still sorting a lot out, myself. Just doin it live. I don't want to say anything I can't take responsibility for. I may over-correct sometimes. I have these weird little tics with conscientiousness to the point of impracticality, just being around a lot of uptight people as a kid.