#4-5 Humans and Apes
The Transition Point
Background Information
This point in time was a major transitioning point for what evolved Satoshi Degens to become Occulum. Satoshi Degens was my side project at the time, and my main project was a community on Solana called DegenDAO. At this point in time, learning more about Ordinals and seeing crypto come back to life, I knew that Solana NFTs were inferior to Ordinals. I didn't want to run something I truly didn't believe in, so I decided to airdrop our treasury (100k+) to the holders and close the project. Now Occulum became my main project, but I wanted to make it more special.
In the past, I just airdropped different mini-collections to holders. There was no big picture, and everything was messy, being part of different collections. I decided I wanted to do one more drop but make it a big boom. Have this last drop be many collections that I then merged into one idea, becoming Occulum.
Before I closed DegenDAO, I was in the process of upgrading it to brand-new art, but now that it was closed, I didn't want it to go to waste. So I then decided that these humans and apes I was working on were to be the first mini-collections of this big drop I was preparing.
The Creation of Humans and Apes
The whole idea was originally created in early 2024 when I wanted to upgrade my collection but was not sold on an idea yet. Jazz then came to me with three different mock-ups: humans, apes, and gorillas. I was only to pick one, but my favorite was humans, and everyone I went to liked the apes the most. Apes ended up winning the vote, and then everything kind of went on pause. I went through the whole phase of closing down, and at that point in time, the whole idea would have been lost.
I decided to bring the idea back to life to add to Occulum. I chose to do humans and apes since gorillas didn't get much traction. These two collections were very fun to create. These were the most detailed pixel PFPs Jazz created for Occulum. For the number of traits we created, both could have been multi-thousand supply collections, but they were only 222 each. The traits were hand-put together, and for apes, Jazz even added some extra edits to some pieces to make them more different. A major focus was the color palette and how nicely traits blended with each other.
Inscription Details
222 Humans and 222 Apes - Each image is 252 by 252 pixels. The total file size for all humans was 821 KB and 497 KB for apes. Humans were inscribed during August 2024, with an inscription range from 73,783,750 to 73,785,563. Apes were also inscribed during August 2024, with an inscription range from 73,964,776 to 73,968,331.
What was Special?
The most special part of these two collections was marking the massive shift of me fully focusing and doubling down into the ordinal space, especially with the art leaving no past idea undone. The art itself, I think, also speaks for itself with its detail and clean color blends. You can clearly see the massive improvements from the first works Jazz did with the Degens.
Closing Remarks
Even though humans and apes are not on crazy sats or have provenance like our other collections, they're still very special to me. I don't see many human collections being experimented with in ordinals, especially with pixel art. For the apes, I see it as an evolution from our original staple collection, Degens. It overall adds a wider range of people being attracted to Occulum, where some prefer more detailed pixel art over simpler creations. Occulum's main goal with all these mini-collections is to offer various different types of art styles to bring the most amount of people to enjoy and collect art, also offering the ability for people to collect high-quality art at an affordable price instead of spending thousands.