Hollow’s Journal

Damn telegram intern rekt for sure

Pretty sure the telegram intern selling was a psyop.

At least I hope for his sake it was 😂

cat szn bros

Journal Entry — Early Characters

Lately I’ve been thinking about how some of the earliest versions of worlds don’t just appear as sketches or concept art, but as characters.

Simple, expressive characters that people start using long before anyone thinks of them as “important.”

Telegram stickers are an interesting example of this.

They’re not just images — they become part of how people communicate. Over time, certain characters stop being just drawings and start becoming a kind of shared language.

The more expressive they are, the more they get used. And the more they get used, the more they begin to feel like they belong to the culture itself.

I’ve been paying attention to a few creators working in this space, especially those who clearly treat their work with a high level of care.

One pattern I keep noticing is that the best sticker artists approach their work almost like animators or game designers. The characters feel alive, expressive, and consistent. You can tell when someone is a student of the craft.

The Baby Yoda-inspired sticker set on TON (along with my other favorite, Cherry) has really stood out to me for that reason.

It wasn’t just the character itself — which is already culturally recognizable — but the execution:

• expressive animation
• clean visual language
• consistency across the set
• and a clear understanding of how people actually use stickers in conversation

That combination is rare.

From a broader perspective, TON itself has been gaining traction, largely because of its deep integration with Telegram and the ease of building and distributing apps, tokens, and digital assets directly within a massive user base.

That creates an interesting environment where:

characters → become stickers
stickers → become communication
communication → becomes culture

And occasionally, culture becomes value.

I’m less interested in predicting which tokens “pump” and more interested in recognizing when something feels like it’s starting to embed itself into how people interact.

When that happens, the character often matters more than the asset.

And sometimes, the earliest artifacts tied to that character end up being the most interesting to own.

All of these stories have in common:

• People doing something before it was cool
• People building from obsession, not consensus
• People who gathered a few like-minded outcasts to build something memorable

That’s the energy I’m trying to spot when I collect early.

Collecting early isn’t about speculation. It’s about seeing the shape of something before it’s obvious, before others have put a narrative around it, and before it’s priced that way.

This journal is a way for me to document those early convictions — to capture why certain creators and projects stand out to me while they’re still being built, before the rest of the world notices.