IntroduceMyself - Hello I'm Dan.

Hello and welcome to my first post on Steemit.

I'm Dan. I'm male, I've fairly recently survived my fourth decade, and despite writing professionally for 15+ years, I still struggle every time it's required to feature myself as a topic.

But it's become apparent that honesty and openness are similar to hard work. The more you provide them, the more connections and opportunities can appear as a result. Despite the occasional risk or downside, that's as true today as when I first started going online in the 1990s, or when I started my own business almost 10 years ago.

And despite becoming more comfortable with my appearance over the years, I still tend to avoid sharing photos. So I'll probably never become an Instagram influencer unless it's inside a motorcycle crash helmet or being a cloud of vapour.

Professionally, I've written for websites, magazines, papers, and businesses. Originally as an employee of various companies (staff and freelance). And then moved into marketing for those same people. At some point I ended up working for myself and running a sustainable marketing and content company. And a still unsustainable but continuing effort to create great specialist websites about things I love and enjoy. And as a result of running my own company, I get to work with fascinating people. I've met extremely wealthy business owners who I've sometimes been able to help, and I've also worked with sole traders living hand to mouth to get something sustainable off the ground. Both are incredibly rewarding in different ways.

Personally I've had websites and blogs for decades, signed up to a multitude of social media platforms, and experimented with various platforms that shared text, images and videos.

I spend too much time disappearing down random clickholes involving Wikipedia pages for subjects which are both fascinating and largely useless until they come up in conversation 10 years later. I've had a fascination with the internal combustion engine since my earliest memories, and still dream about driving more cars and riding more motorcycles than I'll ever have the time or money to achieve. And I spend too much time playing videogames when I should be reading, playing guitar, or improving my fitness.

Generally, I've tried to cut down on joining new platforms. But having seen @lloyddavies and @d3p0 already active, I figured it was a good time to try something different.

After all, at a time when traditionally I was led to believe life would be settled and I'd understand how everything related to adult life worked, I've been embracing a few changes instead.

In the last 12 months, I've given up smoking (and embraced vaping instead). I've moved house to be close to my young son again, after being 120+ miles away for a few years. I've met a lovely young lady who almost immediately popped round to my house and is now a permament, loved and constantly appreciated part of my life having basically not left since. And I'm finally knuckling down to building my businesses up, alongside also getting involved again in a non-profit I founded 8 years ago to host monthly tech meetups and a massive annual STEM festival.

And if you actually read all that, here's some other assorted randomness:

• I was once woken up on a UK national radio breakfast show after falling asleep near the studio when I worked there, due to office Christmas party errors of judgement
• I've been a credited extra in a film involving one of the cast of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. And one of pop group Right Said Fred
• I have the ability to practically inhale ice cream. I can leave chocolate or sweets for weeks, but a Ben and Jerrys tub is a single serving to be consumed in about 20 minutes, isn't it?
• My username 'badgergravling' has been around for more than a decade. Scandinavian speakers of a certain age might recognise it's a slight mispelling of a once-popular internet meme...