The Three-Legged Stool
Insights and personal musings on all things collaborative worldbuilding from Raul on a Stool
It started with a question I asked Jacob Horne during an AMA last week. > What is the endgame for what we're all building here? Is it hyperstructures? What comes after? Jacob replied: > Endgame for what we are all building in crypto: better hive mind operating system. aka how we all coordinate at a societal level. That stuck with me. A better hive mind operating system. Not in the sci-fi dystopia sense, but in the very human sense. A shared memory. A way to coordinate. A way to know things to...
There are moments in technological history when the tools change—and so does everything else. We tend to focus on breakthroughs in infrastructure or computational power. But the real cultural shifts come from something more subtle: a new interface. Interfaces are what make tools human. The keyboard, the mouse, the browser, the touchscreen—each unlocked a wave of creativity and adoption not because they were powerful, but because they made power usable. Today, as we sit on the verge of a new d...
Blockchains didn’t fail to reach the mainstream because of gas fees or wallets. They failed because we taught the world to see them as casinos. Every interface, every button, every word we chose pointed people toward one conclusion: this is a place to gamble. But blockchains were never just about money. They are a new kind of computer—a multiplayer, persistent, permissionless substrate for building things we’ve never seen before. And yet, everything we’ve built so far has been shaped by a nar...
When I was a kid, I remember walking down the block and noticing something different. The sidewalk—normally a cold, gray sheet of certainty—was soft. A fresh slab of cement had just been poured, smoothed over like a blank canvas. And suddenly, I was standing in front of it with a war raging in my chest. Should I? Would I? Could I? I knew what it was. A chance. A moment. A doorway to permanence. That cement was going to dry, and anything I etched into it would outlast the day, the week, maybe ...
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 ...
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...