Hey, Hiveians! Well, the day has come. Dark Pinup Act Two went live this afternoon. We delayed the launch by about two hours just to tie up some scripts and ensure a smooth release. Other than that slight delay, it was a near flawless deployment. @facingsofficial has really polished these releases. This was our tenth one to date. Also, credit cards has made this accessible to a whole new audience that wasn’t holding WAX. I’m still on a bit of a high, especially after the last two straight months of production.

I thought I would take this opportunity to do a post-mortem on the Dark Pinup Act Two release. Last night, I did a bit of a preview of what today would look like. Even after I made my Hive post last night, I saw the sun come up as I was writing the final asset descriptions for the back of cards. I slept for a few hours, got up, took my son to school and then spun my wheels for a few hours until sitting down with Francis and Felblob on the FACINGS livestream to open packs and talk about the set.

The set itself looks near flawless. I’ve been browsing the collection on the AtomicHub market and feeling a deep sense of pride in the final product. Obviously, this is extremely personal, as the artist and creator of the photography, a co-founder of @facingsofficial and a collaborator with the other artists that brought Act Two in to existence. Our VFX team art the allstars of this set. Schwarzbacca, an OG in the NFT collector space and veteran VFX artist in the film industry, and Eduardo Garay both contributed to the rarest cards in the set. Eduardo flexed his motion graphics chops with Golden Hours and Artist Signatures and Bacca returned for prismatallics and candlelights!

I’m not hung up on sales or even money with this release. Sure, a sell out would be nice. It took Act One about a month to sell out. Something that I eluded to in previous blogs here on Hive is that I’ll be leaving @facingsofficial. Tomorrow, actually. It’s been a journey but it’s time to move on and I’m forming a new co-op-esk company with my longtime pal, @swarddraws. As my last official release with @facingsofficial, this had all the hallmarks of a personal milestone. It was the prefect bookend to this most recent chapter.

Tonight I’m going to be coming down from this creative high and recovering from the tenuous stress that’s built up over weeks to make sure today’s launch happened. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking @guthrie to school, the coming home and going back to sleep until…whenever I want. I missed quite a few kickboxing classes leading up till today, so I’ll be hitting the back tomorrow evening. From there, forming the foundation for Mirrorpool and looking ahead to projects for an upcoming new year. Thanks for reading! Have a great night!