IFC S1 R32 - Freedom

Hello there! Welcome to our digital castle.

Artwork credit - @yeszuzia on steemit and instagram

Hey again! Another week transpires! The last couple subjects were really good ones! There's still one more day left on the dreams challenge which you can find here.
https://steemit.com/contest/@ifc/ifc-s1-r31-catch-up-round-wide-awake

In other news.. We also recently started a bonus round to help promote The Marketplace, which you can find here.
https://steemit.com/contest/@apolymask/ifc-bonus-marketplace-quests

And on another note.. I wanted to mention that the end of the season is approaching quicker than I thought.

What I mean by that is.. For some reason when we switched to sweet 16.. I was thinking that the previous end date would be the start day of our championship.. But the more I thought about that.. That's not right. It should end as close as possible to when I said it would.

So... In that light and based off of looking at the diagram I have here, it looks like there will be 4 major rounds, the 16 will play each other reducing it to 8, and then they play each other till it's 4, and then 2 and then 1.

Based on us ending on July 18th.. It looks like it'll be around the 16th of June that the sweet 16 finals/championship begins. It looks like we only have around 5 or 6 more regular rounds and 5 or 6 more catch up rounds, so like 10-12 all together but 5-6 for players with a win.

Some of that might be off a little bit cause I'm bad at math and estimating, but.. I think it's pretty close! And darn! We are really getting close to the end here!

It's been an incredibly rewarding experience for me. And has changed my life as I wrote a post about before.
I'm extremely grateful I tried this idea out and that such an amazing community sprung up to support it and help create it.

I've met some really awesome people and it's brought spirit back into my life and brought some much appreciated happiness and fulfillment.

I can't say much for sure about the future of this or what next season will be like, we will continue to try to gain the communities support for most major things and let the players themselves decide the future of this, however.. A couple things I'm looking at that I want to change and that I think no one will mind are..

A shorter season, instead of 6 months, I was thinking 4 months would be a much better number. Could do less, but.. Right now 4 feels good and I'm thinking we may wanna aim for 4 months next time. Which will mean a smaller grand prize as well, but oh well! Hopefully we can find more sponsors in time. :)

Another thing I'm thinking artifacts will be a season long item instead of every 5 rounds, that is just too much work for me to try to keep up with. But.. If it's season long, I think I can manage that. The relics are fine, not much work required there.. But the artifacts every 5 rounds I didn't plan out too well! Lol.

We'll make sure the rules are as neat and clear as possible before we start the next season!
That's one thing I wanna do when this is over.. Just take a good while to look back and reflect on everything and think about how to make it work better.

I think we have something truly awesome here that has a lot of potential.. It just perhaps needs a lil work in some areas and mostly just more sponsors and volunteers, but.. In time I think this could be a really amazing thing even more than it already is. And it's already pretty amazing! :D

I was thinking we may also do some some side quests while the season is in break as well.
Not actual rounds, but opportunities to earn XP and steem at least. But if not, we still have The Marketplace now for peoples to gather and network and socialize and help each other! :)

Oh and.. Hopefully we can move everything over to the @ifc account for the second season as well.. I've been thinking about it and I think that will make us more presentable to investors and sponsors and a lil less confusing to players and in the end, the reach from my 3000+ followers probably won't matter that much when so many of the players and judges resteem and make posts to try to help remind or alert people to the rounds.

I've been watching the numbers between the catch up rounds on the ifc account and the ones I post and I don't see a big difference.. The catch up rounds are getting a lot of entries as well! I think our community and discord channel does a better job of bringing awareness to just about everything IFC related than my 3000+ followers.

I may still occasionally post a quest or a side quest on this account, but I wanna try to get it mostly over there on the main IFC account if it's not too difficult and too much work.
Anyways.. On to the quest!!

The subject of this quest is one I think that is really important.. One of the most important things actually.. "Freedom" or the quality of being "free" Free in etymology is believed by some to mean "To love". And I think that's a good description/definition. Cause if you truly love someone or something, you set it free right?

Do you truly love someone or something you enslave? Or do you love what their enslavement brings you?

Where I'm from in the United States freedom is a pretty significant subject, yet I'd say most people have no clue what it really means. Even in the "land of the free" very few seem to understand the responsibility that comes with such and way too many look to violent government force to solve almost everything.

I'm of the belief that true freedom is dangerous, but.. I think true slavery is even more dangerous.

I'd rather give freedom a chance to see what it can do, than be able to see ahead of time the results of controlling things too much. And I'm pretty lucky to live in a place that still has a lot of freedom even if it's largely illusionary in terms of the kind of power our government really has over us. Yet I recognize some places have it even worse.. Some places are much less free and that is depressing.

It would be amazing if we could help free more of the world, though I recognize we're not even truly free here where I live.. So.. I'm a bit limited. What do you think? How do we help freedom grow in the world? I'll give a bonus 1SBD to the person who I think answers that question best.

Your entry doesn't have to have anything to do with politics or writing, it could be a song or a drawing or a movie or just about anything you can think of, though I think just about anyone could write up a little blog post about what they think freedom means to them and that it might work well for you in regards to the judges voting. Doesn't have to be fancy, we all have different opinions! And we would love to hear your opinion!

And now a moment for our sponsors!

First up is @ats-david who has helped greatly! If you appreciate this contest or just his efforts in general you may want to look into voting for him as a witness at @ats-witness, he does a lot of other cool things for the community as well!

Next is @timcliff who has similarly helped out the contest significantly and who is also a witness who does a lot for the community, so likewise if you appreciate the efforts you may want to vote for him as witness also!

@krnel has also offered some support and does other good things to help out on the platform in general, I suggest you vote for krnel as a witness as well if you want to support all of this.

@steemcommunity has also helped us and expressed interest in helping more in the future and they likewise also help the community in various additional ways, I suggest voting for them as witness as well!

I'd also like to thank @theguruasia who has pledged at least 20 steem to the second and third place prizes and he said he may even donate more.

And @nxtblg who has been regularly resteeming and upvoting our challenges which has been a big help!

Plus one other person who has been helping a lot who deserves some credit is @soundlegion who has also been upvoting the contests regularly.

And while not technically sponsors, we are working with @davemccoy and those at #newbiegames and #newbieresteemday and they do a great service to the community so definitely check them out if you appreciate that, or if you're new.

Also not a sponsor, though @iexplore has taken a huge workload directly off of my shoulders and is now doing the "catch up" rounds, those should be posted on the @ifc page.. And I suggest giving him a follow and some support as well if you appreciate the work as he is doing an amazingly helpful and important job! Oh and he usually posts the catch up rounds on Sunday the day after I post mine on Saturday.

For this challenge.. If there's a tie.. We will do another round to see who wins.

The winner will be decided by whoever gets the most votes.
The only people who can vote in a qualifying sense are myself and the judges I've selected and we will vote by leaving a comment on the submission that we like the most and say something like.. "I vote for this one" and a reason why we voted would be good too, but is not mandatory.

You have until this challenges post payout ends to submit your post. Though we do accept late entries if you get it in before all the judges vote.

The challenge will finish after 7 days when the post ends and provides its payout cycle and unless there is a tie, the winner will gain the steem, the XP and have a point to go towards their long term win. (minus the 25% for curation)

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Rules

1. Thirty Second challenge starts now and is a challenge to submit something about the subject of freedom. 2. Create a blog post for the contest. 3. Title must contain, "IFC - S1 : R32 entry" 4. Leave a link to your post in the comments below. (This part is important and a lot of people forget this, please put the blog link in the right place so our judges can find it) 5. And you also have to use the #ifc tag in your blog post as well.
6. If you somehow get hurt doing any of our quests you can not justifiably hold us accountable. Take responsibility for your own choices and actions in life. This is a voluntary game where you choose to play. Only you can make that decision for yourself. 7. You are responsible for paying the appropriate government taxes, fees, and service charges resulting from any transactions with the IFC or Marketplace. We are not responsible for collecting, reporting, paying, or remitting to you any such taxes, fees, or service charges, except as may otherwise be required by law.

Acceptable content

1. Anything about freedom.
   
2. Language is primarily in English and if you would like to participate from elsewhere in the world it is up to you to translate your message into English so we can understand you.
3. We also encourage role playing for those who enjoy doing that. :)

Good luck in the contest!

Artwork credit - @yeszuzia on steemit and instagram

Original by @yeszuzia and modified by @charisma777