Back and thinking...

Damn, it has been around two months since I have posted with this account! I don't even remember the last time I did an English post with it. However, there have been some good reasons.

No, I haven't completely turned my back on STEEM 😜

Where have I been?

No, I was not pissed of by the rewards growing smaller and smaller from week to week and stopped because I thought it was not worth it. The reasons for my abstinence from posting mainly comes down to three factors:

• Work
• Sports
• Steemmonsters aka Splinterlands

Since April I am working as a full-time physician in training at a local hospital, having an average work-week of 50 hours including exhausting night-shifts. Combined with almost daily studying at home, this obviously takes up a lot of time. Additionaly, I a aiming for very high goals in terms of sports when looking at the year 2020, including the Vienna City Marathon in April and an even more extreme mountain marathon in Jule (70 kilometers with 4500 meters of evaluation). Training for those events has already started and takes up a lot of time, especially since I also discovered my love for tennis together with @weitblicker and other friends. In the last weeks, I have been doing some sporty stuff at least once a day on average.

The little free time remaining between those two factors and other social stuff has mainly been used for the third point mentioned above - Steemmonsters aka Splinterlands. I am really in love with this game, @aggroed and @yabapmatt have definitely created something great there. The game is developing quite well in my eyes - it is no coincidence that my Monsters are worth more than all my STEEM combined at the time I am writing these words. With new cards and a hopefully great mobile app coming in the next months, the roadmap looks quite promising and I am afraid that I will stay addicted for quite a while to this game. Even though I haven't posted in a while, I have been active on the blockchain almost every day. But today, it just felt right to make a "normal" post again.

What I think about the hardforks?

Talking about the last hardfork(s) is actually quite funny for me, since I haven't really experienced the fork yet due to my absence from posting/commenting. Looking at the hardfrom from the spectators perspective, it is 100% clear to me that my feed and especially top/trending contain way "better" posts now. I have also seen quite a lot of "normal" votes from big people who I haven't seen curating in a long time. Those are definitely some facts in favor of the last hardfork.

Of course I also still see poeple crying around about the hardfork. But to be honest, it mainly comes down to two groups of users:

• a) Users that are always negative. I know some users I have never seen writing a single positive word about STEEM. Funnily enough, they are still here.
• b) People who think their rewards are too small and that the world is unfair. On a platform where some receive more than others, there will always be greed and jealousy. However when you ask people who complaing about a link to an extremly undervalued post, they either can't give you one or the post just isn't that good.

I don't say that the last hardforks are perfect. The only things I can say are that the consequences of the hardfork look promising on the first view. My deeper view on STEEM will have to come back in the next weeks, as I am planning to be more active again. Which leads us to the last chapter of this post.

What you can expect from me?

Working full-time in a good position mainly has two effects on my life here on STEEM:

• a) I care about the rewards even less than before! As I am lucky enough to have a job that pays good money in real life, I am 0% dependent on the money from STEEM. I have never cashed out big sums when STEEM was worth dollars instead of cents and I definitely don't plan to cash out any STEEM soon. Beeing independent from what my post make, I will also not give to many fucks about potential revenge flags, etc. Saying so, I will start using my daily downvote power today :)

• b) I have less time for STEEM. In the near future, there won't be a @theaustrianguy who posts on almost a daily basis. I will try to do at least one english and one german post per week. And of course, I will continue to fight with my Steemmonsters! Having less time also lead to the fact, that I dropped out as an @ocd curator in the last weeks. I wasn't a good curator there in the last months, so I am probably not a big loss. I still like the idea of @ocd and also the manually curated bid-bot @ocdb. What I am not sure about is the decision to use the @ocdb downvotes to fight other bidbots by flagging users using them. I guess @acidyo, @anomadsoul and the others have thought well about this - I am still not sure I would do the same. However, still a bigh thank you for having me as an @ocd curator for quite a long time and good luck with you project in the future!

As I have spent a lot of time in the nature this summer, you can definitely expect some nice pictures from the Austrian mountains in the next posts. As a little teaser, let me just show you this beauty, which is one of my next goas, the Warscheneck (2388m).

Your thoughts?

Enough talking about myself and my plans for the future. What about you? What do you guys think about the changes and consequences of the hardforks? How do you the future of STEEM?

Greets,
Martin