GM

Fine art, gag toys and VIP passes.

Just another Friday at Mint or Skip.

Programming note: We’re off on Monday, back on Tuesday.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

What is even happening here

Context

Magic Eden and Shampoooty co-announced an upcoming Bitcoin drop called Kid Toys, Adult Issues. 

It’s a collection of 900 3D toy artworks with the first 600 purchases coming with a free physical toy. 

Price and release date still TBD. 

Our take

Shampoooty (Andy Sahlstrom) refers to himself as an Interactive Technology Engineer, Inventor, and Kinetic Artist, and his portfolio certainly matches that range. 

Visiting his website feels like entering a forbidden emporium of strange and magical objects. 

You’re first greeted with more vanilla everyday things, like kinetic origami, or stepper motion timelapse controllers.

But things quickly get weirder as you hit injection simulators, airless organ articulators and touchless tongue drums. 

And of course, given his dark humor, there’s also a prominent gimp sculpture that I shan't be presenting in our golden-penned newsletter, but curious readers are welcome to use their imagination:

Above all this, however, Shampoooty is perhaps best known for his satirical and absurdist toy designs. 

In 2023, he went ultra-viral with My First Ankle Bracelet, which ended up getting over 100 million views across all platforms. 

This has led to a devoted audience on Instagram, where he shares more of these irreverent objects and gets as many as 50k likes per image. 

And to be honest, some of these are insanely creative (and dark). Here are a few personal favorites:

This year he plans to double down on this toy line, including what he says will be “the most viral Ordinal yet”. 

My guess is that he’s inscribing most of the images found on his Instagram along with several brand new designs. And, thanks to the power of Bitcoin, these will be forever stored for future generations to enjoy. 

There’s an ongoing quest system to get on the WL for the drop, which as you would expect has mercenary alpha groups circling like hawks, but this seems like your best bet of getting one. 

Bottom line 

One for those who love corrupting the youth. 

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Dew Origin Pass

Dew, an aggregator for Polygon NFTs that launched in early 2023, will soon launch its own NFT collection, The Origin Pass.

It’ll grant preferential access to the Dew Studio, an incubator and launchpad for curated partner collections, the first one being SA World (more on that one below).

While little information can be found online about the founders of Dew, the platform raised $10 million from big market players like Polygon and Circle, lending it credibility.

A free access pass to potentially interesting collections on Polygon sounds good to me.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

EVENT by Bernar Venet

Sotheby’s second in-house generative art drop is coming in the form of EVENT by French conceptual artist Bernar Venet.

This follows Themes and Variations, the auction house’s first collection in this program and one of the biggest art drops of 2023.

Venet is a multimedia artist with work spanning decades, mostly known for metal sculptures and installations. So it’s no surprise that he would use those as inspiration for his first long-form gen art collection here.

Some mint details are still missing, including price, but we know how strong Sotheby’s pull can be, and I’m finding their program’s curation interesting thus far, so I’ve tentatively…

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

SA World VIP Pass

SA World is an upcoming web3 gaming platform which will soon launch a VIP Pass, its first NFT and also the first partner collab for the Dew Origin Pass.

Built by the team behind Summoners Arena (a free-to-play mobile game on Binance’s chain that raised $3 million in early 2022), the platform seems to focus on developer infrastructure and NFT gamification, some of it quite complex, all powered by a $SAE token in the future.

Sounds intriguing for a free offering but a lot of details are still missing, including pass-holder benefits.