Explaining my lack of activity... some history on how I came to Steemit and what I neglected in the process

In 2016 after going through all of the process of Valve's Greenlight process for their Steam Platform I had a game that had finally been accepted. I formed an LLC to produce the game. It was my side gig, and not a must for survival, but it is something I am passionate about and want to see completed.

At the time a little extra money would relieve a lot of the stress for myself and by extension my family. It didn't need to be much to do that. $20 a week would actually have been sufficient to alleviate any financial stresses for me. At the time my budget was so tight that an increase of that amount consistently was actually not as easy as it should be.

So I have a game finally accepted to Steam Greenlight. It is called Wormhole Ventures [1]. I could likely crank it out in six months of focused work.

Then something happened. Can you guess?

A friend was talking to me about Ethereum Mining and he'd talked enough that I decided it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. I created a bitrex account and I was familiarizing myself with that account. I sorted some columns by cryptos that were increasing the most. I wasn't familiar with the term pump and dump at the time, but I got lucky anyway.

There was this thing called Steem at I believe around 200% growth at the time and I asked myself "What is that?" I then found my way to steemit around July 7th, 2016 and it actually had only been live for a few days. It alleged that people could earn crypto by blogging and writing. I would occasionally do such things on reddit and other places and get swept away for a bit back then. "How much does it cost?" At the time it cost nothing, and that is still the case today. They said they would give $10 worth of steem power (which I didn't completely understand) to account holders. At the time I joined it gave me 10 steem power. Some family members that joined a day later only got 5 steem power, and my wife who delayed longer received 3 steem power. Mind you it was still $10 worth of steem power, just at the time the price of steem was rising for some time. It'd peak at a little over $4 per steem at that time. (we went higher than that last December 2017)

I wrote some things. I received some votes and before I knew it not only did I have well over 100 steem power I also had steem dollars that I needed to learn how to use.

The intermediary is to convert them to bitcoin and then I discovered many places that would accept bitcoin as payment. I actually made some purchases on Valve's steam platform. I then discovered the bitpay card which is one of the many debit cards that you can charge up with bitcoin and thus use them to purchase anywhere that accepts debit/credit cards. So far I haven't found any place I could not use that. I am currently using the SHIFT card which taps directly into my bitcoin account on coinbase. There are some definite positives to that, but also some negatives.

Anyway. I soon found myself getting engaging comments and interaction, and I was loving the writing and creating, and before I knew it that $20 extra per week was greatly exceeded.

I dumped myself into steemit for years neglecting many other things like the game project. It turns out in terms of the game this was not a bad thing. I have spent many thousands of dollars on tools, an assets for game development all paid with the proceeds of my writing on steemit.

In that time my capabilities for what I can do with games has extended a great deal largely due to these purchases.

I could still do the $20 or more per week now from steemit if I focused on it heavily. Yet lately my focus has returned to that game. For weeks now I've been rethinking a lot of the game in GOOD ways and I've been leveraging some of my tools. I am in the middle of rendering a lot of sprites and sprite sheets to bring alive a segment of the game that didn't get the same attention as the section you spend the most of your time.

With this said. This is why I am not writing on steemit much at the moment. It isn't the fact it is harder to earn. That is not the only reason I use steemit. I also use it as an outlet for my mind, and an opportunity to have dialog with people like you. However, I will freely admit that the diluted income and such did help me "Snap out of it" and redirect my attention towards completing some things I technically planned on completing years ago. I do think with time things have aged well and what I end up releasing will be far better.

During this time I'll likely release the occasional @newsagg. I'll try to do one of those headlines at least once a week. Those take awhile to put together. I am also sure I'll still have those moments of "I must write something." At those moments I will be here writing.

I am not abandoning the steemit community at all. I just am redirecting a lot of my time to something I neglected that I should have done a long time ago. Completing this too can open doors for the future.

Steemit has been an amazing thing, and likely will continue to be. I've learned a lot, and I'll continue to learn. I've earned fortunes, and not pulled out of them when I should and seen them dwindle to almost nothing. I've learned terms like HODL so I don't panic sell. Yet that doesn't mean HODL is unfelt.

Anyway, friends, you now know I haven't abandoned you. I simply have focused a lot of my time in other areas for the time being.