What Goblintown Learned from the Theater

In May of 2022, the Truth NFT studio secretly released the Goblintown generative PFP NFT collection on Ethereum. As the crypto bull market turned into a bear, Goblins and the meme of “going goblinmode” took Crypto Twitter by storm.

In my mind, Goblintown is most identified with a surprising and creative new use of Twitter Spaces for NFT community building. During Goblintown Spaces, a short clip of clanging, dungeon-inspired music plays on loop in the background while a cast of volunteer voice actors sourced ad-hoc from the Twitter Spaces audience put on their best Goblin character voice. These unscripted participatory improv comedy happenings felt truly new. Goblintown Spaces regularly reached thousands of concurrent listeners, and tens of thousands would tune in to each episode.

On this episode of Galaxy Brain, I’m joined by Allsee, Truth’s Director of Vibes and the original instigator of the Goblin Twitter Spaces, and four real life Goblins: i_miller00, icecreamsandwhich, Doktur Grobler, and Jon Macapodi. We discuss the origins of the unique goblin Spaces culture and its connection with performance art and voice acting.

This is a wonderfully unusual episode of Galaxy Brain. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

A note to listeners and goblins alike: after recording the show I found a recording of the May 29th, 2022 edition of goblintown Spaces that I ripped from Twitter and uploaded to Arweave. A link to that file is in show notes.

Links

- Arweave hosted May 29, 2022 Goblin episode (Download the file and append .aac to listen)