This post is less an article and more of an announcement, attached to an article, attached to a charity event, attached to a piece of magazine cover art, attached to the blockchain.

The very short version of the story is this.

Chris Cheng is a famous competition shooter and instructor, former Google employee, winner of Top Shot Season 4, spokesman for Bass Pro Shops, affiliated with the NRA and NSSF, and has spoken before Congress on the topic of minority gun rights.

He’s also a gay dude from San Francisco who’s friends with the RECOIL Magazine staff, and they put him on the cover of RECOIL for pride month and did a spot on him.

There was apparently a kerfuffle on RECOIL’s Instagram page when it dropped, of people who were either (A) anti-gay, or (B) sick of corporate virtue signaling, or both. The fact that there was a kerfuffle caused a larger kerfuffle about the kerfuffle, which had RECOIL jump into the fray and defend their decisions. And thus, the above RECOIL cover became the most famous and/or infamous RECOIL cover ever.

Being a smart dude, Chris saw an opportunity. He worked with RECOIL to put together an NFT (non-fungible token) auction of the digital art of the cover, the proceeds of which will go to the following organizations:

But they needed some way to explain what the heck an NFT was to the gearhead gun prepper RECOIL crowd, which is typically the sort of crowd that either has no idea what an NFT is, or does know what they are and thinks they’re stupid. So Chris says to RECOIL “we need someone to write an explainer.” And RECOIL says, “yeah but who?” And Chris says “how about Open Source Defense?”

And in our weekly OSD Zoom meeting, my dumb ass goes on a ten minute rant basically saying “well I’m not sure I totally buy into this NFT stuff, but if I did, here’s how I would explain an NFT to a bunch of gun preppers.”

Once that earworm wiggled into my brain I couldn’t not write the article. Here’s a link to the article:

Click to read the RECOIL NFT article

And here’s a link to the auction:

Click to bid on the NFT

I found the article quite persuasive, but I’m definitely biased because I wrote it. Your mileage my vary. Here’s three more buttons to do the usual Substack stuff:

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Chris Cheng's NFT Auction Goes Live Tomorrow