tachibana.blog

Today, I was reminded of Anique’s Serial Experiments Lain 2020 eXhibition event, launched way back in October of 2020. It was an extremely cool event, and I’m sad I didn’t take more pictures or do more to archive the content they had available – the museum portion of it felt as if it would stay up forever, but in 2023, it finally shut down.

During the event, they also released a number of interesting pieces of merchandise. From what they had available, I was quick to purchase all of the acrylic stands they offered – I’m a huge fan of Yoshitoshi Abe’s “Weather Break” artwork, so to see them featured on official acrylic stands? Perfect!

But, this merchandise came with an interesting quirk: this happened to be the period of time in which Anique was experimenting with selling NFTs and “digital collectibles”. Because of that, you could buy… a digital acrylic stand?

That’s right – for 500 yen, you would receive a digital collectible and certificate of ownership, which you could check on the Anique website at any time. For a total of 2,200 yen, you could receive a physical acrylic stand as well – but the digital portion was still required.

I opted for the physical collectibles, and as such, I hadn’t thought about the digital certificate in the past few years. But thinking of the event today made me realize: I should go check on it!

It ended up being near-perfect timing. As of today, I’ve officially owned my acrylic stands for a total of 1700 days, 2 hours, 43 minutes, and 45 seconds. I’m quickly nearing their five-year anniversary!

It’s a bit odd to think that Anique hasn’t released any digital Lain collectibles since the 2020 event – maybe they weren’t a hit? Or maybe they found physical collectibles to just be easier? Not sure.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for this post – I thought it was fun to look back on one of Anique’s early Lain events, and it was nice to see that their digital art website is still up and available!

If you’d like to read more about the Lain 2020 eXhibition event, I began documenting it over on the Lain Wiki. The page is somewhat barren for now, but I’m hoping to add more over time – and maybe I’ll publish a longer blog post about the event as well?

Thanks for reading!