A Life of Sin: An Ongoing Re-introduction

It recently dawned on me that no one here really knows who I am. I'd argue that's because I don't even know, so how could anyone else? This is an attempt to remedy that for all of us who might be interested.

First, I guess I should start with the basics. My name is Greg. I'm 47 years old and I live in the Southern U.S. I've never been married or spawned children. I don't even really like the adorable little morons. I do love animals and have an enormous admiration for their ability to just live in the moment indefinitely. It's, in part, inspired my pursuit of a personal philosophy of "Here and Now", as in this is where I want to live. On a good day I fancy myself a bit of a philosopher. I don't think anyone else does, but regardless, I'll probably get back around to that in a later post.

I've been on Hive since it was "That Which Shall NOT Be Named", going all the way back to November, 2016. Back then I didn't know what I had stumbled into, but it wasn't Facebook so I was instantly drawn in. For a couple of years I tried to find something here that interested me, but like everyone else I found the place to be every bit as lacking in exciting and interesting things to do as it was promising to offer everything exciting and interesting that other social media was lacking, mainly account ownership. Now, I didn't realize at the time that owning my account was as important as it became as time went on, but now that "Cancel Culture" is a thing, and it can be invoked for seemingly no reason at all, even an idiot like me can see the necessity of having a public forum in which one can always go to speak one's mind. More on that later.

After a couple of years, and on the wrong side of the Big Crash that heralded in the Long Winter I found Splinterlands. It was raw and rough but it looked like a safe place to move some of the little money I had left before the bottom dropped out completely, so I dropped a few hundred dollars into it. I was instantly hooked and haven't looked back..., except to compare card prices from then to now and appreciate how much the value of my collection has grown :). I would say that nothing else at the time could have kept me coming back so shout out to the Splinterlands dev team for being among the first here to really begin to show how special this place is.

Somewhere along the way, Hive began to feel less like an online arcade and more like a community of friends. I can't really pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but over the last few months, in particular, I began to notice I'm getting more out of my time here for two main reasons.

The first, of course, is financially. I'll go into that more later for newer folks, but for now I'll just mention that if you don't know about hive-engine.com you're missing out on what many would argue is the best thing about Hive. The tokenization of content is HUGE and it's only going to get bigger, so I recommend finding a few tribes you like and start stacking/staking those tokens! Some of my favorites are The Man Cave Project, Proof of Brain, CineTv, and, Leo Finance.

The second reason is the community as a whole. It may be a bit taboo to present it this way, but taboo is kinda my thing, so... if there's such a thing as a "good cult" Hive would be it. If you take away all the religion, authoritarianism, and general depravity cults generally get up to so that you're left with a tight community of people with a shared goal and an unrelenting enthusiasm to see through then Hive is the people's cult. We're all borderline insane with excitement for this place and justifiably so. No other social media network I know of pays me simply to engage. That alone is outstanding, but it's not even the tip of the iceberg..., but riding high and hard for Hive isn't the reason for this post so moving on...

I'm a work in progress. I'm trying hard to remain such. I'm not even 50% as successful at it as I'd like to be, but as long as I feel like I'm still growing I'm fighting a winning battle. I've learned some very valuable lessons here. In fact, I believe my entire perspective has been significantly shifted over the last couple of years. I spent well over a decade in a state of depression that I didn't think I'd ever escape from. My dad passed in 2011, my mom and step-dad began suffering from poor health and moved in with me shortly thereafter, and I eventually had to quit my job to stay home full time to care for them. I should mention here that I wasn't particularly good at it, and it was a long journey for all of us, but I did what I could with what I had. None the less, my step dad passed in 2013, and mom held on until January, 2019, although she had gone to live with my brother in 2016. That's a whole chapter I'll save for another time. The point is, even though I wasted a lot of time during those years, I never completely gave up. I totally gave up on some things, but, especially after being introduced to Bitcoin, I always had a feeling I was down, but not out...like I was beat down and broken but still had enough left for that one solid strike when I got my opening. I recently found my opening and now I'm back in the fight.

I'm going to stop here for now. I've been wanting to do a re-introduction for a while, but since we have Collections now, I'm going to try them out by running an ongoing introduction. Depending on time and interest, if any, I'll periodically post something new about where I've been and where (I think) I'm going, as well as how I'm getting there.