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I have things. Some are random ideas, some have to do with me as a Hiver, some with @openorchard. They could all be their own posts, but I'm lazy and I think I'll just dump a lot of unrelated stuff into one post.

So first off, I have acended to Orcahood!

I'd been thinking about a different approach, not powering everything up and leaving a large part of my stake on the exchange for trading, but once it was within reach I just couldn't help myself and pulled the trigger. Maybe from this point I'll keep some liquid on exchanges.

Random thought

This whole thing made me realize we need to further gamify this entire fish thing we have going on here. Like the only thing that made me want to power all this Hive up is this imaginary benchmark called Orca. We need more imaginary benchmarks because they are powerful. My next imaginary benchmark requires me to have roughly 10x the stake I have now. That's a waste. We should have several levels in-between Orca and Whale and more levels between Dolphin and Orca. Random thought over.

In other news @openorchard has been announced. Which is great because now I can talk about it. I've been aware of it since around last Steem Fest. Yes, I'm that cool, and now I can finally speak openly about it. This project has evolved a lot since I first became involved. When @andrarchy first laid out the vision to me...well actually when he first told me about it I had no idea what he was talking about. It takes a while to wrap your head around it, but once I understood it, it's really shaped a lot of what I think the path forward for Hive is. Basically a hybrid solution of on chain and off chain databases for offering the full myriad of features necessary for us to be able to offer a comparable experience to modern day social applications.

While each application can have their own private closed source version of this where they build exclusive features for their app, I think there is huge value in having a shared database that all the dapps pull from. Really looking forward to the future of that project.

Also I made the current logo, which might change because I (unintentionally) made the colors a bit too Steemy. Here's a bunch of what the design process for that looked like.

Jumping Topics

The Peak Peeps announced their plan to more formally collaborate with the community and what I'd already been doing is a bit more official with shiny new Discord channels for testers and brainstormers.

My first brainstormed idea that I recently posted in their Discord has to do with governance and proxies.

It's come to the front of my mind that proxies are extremely important here on Hive. Considering what we just went through I think proxies need to be more visible and more actively pursued by us more actively engaged users.

If you are the owner of a large Community or someone that people listen to on the blockchain I think you should have a proxy that you should actively seek to grow. Mine is @theusersparty by the way. I know we'd all love to live in a perfect world where everyone was politically engaged and knowledgeable with what's going on when it comes to governance, but alas, that is not the case. So if you DO know what's going on, I think something that you can do to help the community is have a proxy, actively try to grow it, especially with the users you know don't pay attention to governance or proposals.

My brainstorm was for frontends, in this case PeakD to have tools to view proxy information. How much Hive Power is following x proxy, what witnesses is x proxy voting on, which proposals, what is their stance, what are their positions on key issues etc. This might seem like a centralizing action, but I think in reality it's further real life decentralization, because there are probably a ton of users that won't participate in this aspect of the exosystem unless there is an existential threat like we just faced.

Visualization tools would serve to gamify this to make people want to grow their proxies and in general I think it would be valuable as a means of holding witnesses accountable as well as ensuring that promising projects can get the support they need. I thought a circle graph would work great.

TOPIC CHANGE!

So in one of my last posts I posted some renders where I'd brought in a human scanned model for help with practicing lighting. Well, that was sort of fun, so I went ahead and bought some high quality human scaned 3D models and holy crap it's crazy.

Of course I suppose I always knew this was possible, but I'd just never actually went and bought some photo real models before. I also learned how to build a decent skin shader so that helps with the subtle subsurface scattering that really gives it a realistic look. I need to think a bit to do something more creative with these than throw in some colored lights and line them up like a basement in West World, but this is a start.

Okay, believe it or not, I have even more things. I haven't talked about OnChainArt yet, but I'll save that for another post. Stay active Hivers, we've got a long way to go to world domination!

See you all in the next post.