On December 29th, 2017 I posted
my original introduceyourself post. At the time I knew nothing about crypto currency, and only slightly more about SteemIt. I had just joined the site three days before then and had been trying to find and read as much information as I could about the site. At the time the most helpful information I found was in posts by Jerry Banfield. Over time it became apparent that perhaps he wasn't the best example to learn from on the blockchain, but at the time he helped me through his posts and videos with some of the basics.
Here we are a little more than a year later and so much has changed. I generally hate when I see people who have multiple introduction posts, but at the moment it feels like something I want to do. I hope that perhaps it inspires me to get back into posting regularly again.
About a month after I wrote that first intro post I was lucky enough to be accepted as part of 
@curie. I had learned about them in one of those Banfield videos I mentioned. At first I began trying to chase my first Curie vote, even though I knew very little about the group, other than they could give me a vote that would actually be worth something. My third post, all about the of the $2 bill was written specifically to try and get a Curie vote. It didn't work, but it did get some attention from one of their curators and got me a little bit of an upvote.
At that point I was in search of ways to earn some Steem of my very own. I cam across some contests and tried to enter as many of them as possible. If you read my original intro post you know I love trivia. I found someone running a weekly trivia game on Discord, it is where I got my first Steem from. Once I had some Steem I started using the vote bots as much as possible. At the time I was unaware that this was frowned upon by many. In the end it didn't help very much. I study the patterns and utilized them pretty much the best I could and saw only marginal gains along the way.
Now back to the Curie part of the story, at the end of January I saw a post from 
@carlgnash. I had been following him since he gave my $2 bill post the group of votes that got it a decent payout. His post was about becoming a Curie Curator and how to do it. I followed his instructions and within a few days I was talking directly to him and after some "training" he recommended me as a new Curie Curator.
Right after I got accepted as a curator I wrote a post that got that first elusive Curie vote! It was
Part 2 of my Epic Movie Chase Scenes post.
Once I got in as a Curie Curator the majority of my focus became curation instead of writing my own posts. This ratio shifted again and again until I was NEVER posting my own content and just working on curation. To drive that point home a bit - it has been 169 days since my last Curie vote, and I have had 0 posts since then.
As part of Curie I was not only a curator, but also wrote their Author Showcase posts for the better part of the year, became a vital part of coordinating their Community Building efforts, and I have recently taken over the Treasurer duties for the group.
Back in May, @carlgnash, 
@llfarms, 
@markangeltrueman, and I started a new curation community 
@c-squared and 
@c-cubed. It was setup in a way that got posts curated and noticed for a wider group of authors. If you haven't heard about @c-squared go check it out. You can join our Discord here C-Sqaured Discord. In November we started running a Community Witness, for more details on that and the community as a whole check out our recent
Witness Update post. We definitely appreciate any witness votes, delegations or trail follows you might want to add to our growing community curation effort.
During the past year I made quite a few friends, and many more acquaintances. It is sad to look back and realize how many of them, and the authors I got many of those Curie votes for, are no longer actively on the platform. It is understandable though as the value of Steem has tanked so badly. When I first started Steem was at its highest value ever, and now it is right around $0.30 at the time of writing this post.
While focusing on all of this curation and other things I not only stopped writing posts, but I essentially stopped writing my third book, A Twilight Zone Trivia Book & Encyclopedia, which was due to be out almost two years ago. I do plan to dive back into that and posting, while still doing all of the curation stuff.
So let's see how this goes!
This ends my re-intro post (yes I will likely hate even my own) which turned into a bit of me just rambling on and on.
