OK, time for a 2nd entry... and I've spent a
bit more time with this one.
Here was my
first entry.
As for the 2nd entry, I call it
Uncharted Waters.
.. and some music (
Feel good - Gorillaz) to go along with it.
I'll attempt to avoid putting my own opinions here on what it all means
to me... since I think art can be interpreted differently from each individual. I will, however, try to explain the effort I've put into it. I've lost count on how many hours I've spent, and I wasn't really keeping track anyway.
The BackgroundI thought it would be interesting to re-create the main page of the forum as a background for the overall image I wanted to create. My hope was to make it appear as if it were viewed by satoshi on his last day of activity here, December 13th, 2010 4:45:41 PM. In order to do this, I had to crawl several threads and archives to try and ensure I was capturing the correct 'last post' in each category based on the last active time of satoshi... Note: I may have had a little fun with the staff forum, since I have no insight into that area, and I made up the total time logged in.
(
edit: full disclosure - I did get some help from theymos on the category label & rough board counts for the staff area in 2010!)
To ensure the view was as it was in 2010, as a logged in admin,
someone (
to avoid name-dropping) suggested maybe installing SMF from 2010. (
edit: theymos offered this suggestion.. after thinking about this, I felt bad omitting his name to avoid name-dropping, since he should get some credit.). Interesting idea, I thought.. so I installed a copy of SMF 1.1.11 (the version I determined to be installed back in 2010) -- which isn't as easy as you think in 2019, lol. After failing miserably trying to get it to install on a
current web server, I ended up needing 2010 versions of PHP & Apache to make it all work correctly.. although, I was able to at least keep the latest copy of MySQL, however, I had to make several modifications to the install.sql file to ensure it was adapted correctly to the newer version and would create the DB correctly.
Eventually,
I got it installed. (I was, embarrassingly, a
little giddy
). and was able to setup my admin account as 'satoshi' to get the remainder of the content I needed to try and make this all look as accurately as I could. I eventually came across an archive from the morning of December 13, 2010 which helped me even more to fill in some stats at the bottom & board counts of each category, to the best degree of accuracy I could.
The HTML code I ended up withFor fun, you can see the background page I created by going to
https://bitcointalk.org in Chrome, right-clicking anywhere on the page then selecting "Inspect". On the right pane that pops out, scroll to the top of the source and click the <html> element, right-click this and click "Edit as HTML", delete the code that is shown and paste the code below, then click out of the code to have it display the page. (I kept all links in tact and updated them to reflect the 'last post' of each category I could)
code made my post way too long... CloudFlare challenged me, then the forum denied me lol - I'll post it separately if someone wants it!
The Ship & WaterI'll leave interpretations up to the individual looking at the image. Plenty of time spent here, and I had some fun with the water effects and creatures.. I found another use for the
interesting bitcointalk logo I posted recently lol.
The word clouds on the sails are based off of
BPIP's top 200 most activity, trust, and merit lists.
The top sails represent 1st-99th and the bottom sails represent 99th-200th, for each respective category (or, mast
).
TL;DREnjoy!!
Full size is a must, IMO (...it's 4600x4600):
https://i.imgur.com/XbZH7F2.jpg
I have additional thoughts I wanted to get into this image but I'm not sure if I'll have enough time to pull them off. I'll try!
13xU5WzT8wCDBKS71G23EwE93YiNNWCLgD
