Six Years Fly When You're (Mostly) Having Fun and Building a Blockchain

      It seems like a lifetime ago now that I sat down and wrote my "first post" on the legacy blockchain. My initial year exploring and picking apart the intricacies of decentralized, voluntary social value and immutable community identity passed in a blur of photography and art, poetry and travel logs. It gave me an outlet for creativity that I really hadn't found a home for on traditional social media, which genuinely surprised me— what's the difference? Until you mindfully embrace a lot of the values that participating in a blockchain ecosystem like ours fosters in you, the question is almost impossible to answer. I was hooked, instantly.

      Everything— including the difficult and downright bad aspects that balance the values of good and useful that I believe in with all my heart— here on Hive has been a catalyst for me to better understand myself, my talents, and the ideals that shape me. Reopening the gift that is the time capsule of my immutable blockchain posts still makes me laugh and gut punches me in turn. The timeline that coalesces when I trace through the marks I've left here over the past six years is an eye opener for me when it comes to how I've evolved as a person simply because I've been here with all of you.

      For the last few months, I've been working on a number of things in the background— some of which are more interesting than others, some of which are a brutal volunteer slog, and some of which I'll be announcing here pretty soon. Now, I promise this isn't me winding up to spend a whole post trying to make myself sound relevant; you've already suffered through that once recently! But after a few years of the entire world being restricted and pulled taut, and more and more of my time and attention turned in to the heart of Hive's day to day community and admin needs, I have spent some time thinking about how to recapture some of the other things that Hive encourages me to be and do. I think I need to return to some of that so I figured I'd pull up a chair here, besties, and chat it out with you. The best Crim there's ever been is the one that sat down to write thankful yearly recaps, and who got a chance to analyze her own feelings because she interpreted them via pictures and shared them with the world out here on a little crypto powered blog.

      One of the recent things that I've needed to do was to create and submit a short professional bio about myself. Now, many of you guys are incredible at this sort of thing, but this is the bane of my everliving existence. Like, let's make no mistake: I'm fucking great! However, that doesn't mean that the thought of trying to present myself in a flattering salespitch sort of light is any less the rough equivalent of imagining what it must be like to have to attend a karaoke night with Justin Sun... namely, an excruciating and torturous foray into egregious arrogance. (I promise I'm going somewhere with this.)

With a career as a professional graphic artist and developer, Gina stumbled into the blockchain space almost a decade ago while searching for an intersection between disruptive technology and a better human social experience. Discovering the Hive blockchain ecosystem was like being hit by a lightning bolt- and after experimenting with web3 blogging and content creation, the energy and impact of creating a truly decentralized sovereign identity became the center of her focus for the future.

As Crimsonclad, she's spent more than half a decade learning about and contributing to the Hive blockchain community as a leader, top 20 witness/block producer, and educator helping to demystify the cryptospace and a truly social decentralized web3. A keynote speaker, live radio host, and liaison for blockchain outreach and operations, she's involved in multiple teams building projects on the grassroots fast, feeless information sharing network. She's dedicated to helping bring voluntarism, digitally connected experiences and the benefits of censorship resistance to empower and encourage people globally to thrive and redefine how we approach our social, emotional, and economic lives.

      Now, I'm pretty proud of/comfortable with this. I like this lady! (Never mind that everyone who's read it suggests rewrites: go ahead and leave yours in the replies.) Somewhere between deciding on this version and seeing myself described as "a Hive streamer who knows everyone" in a professional meeting (hahahah oh man yikes, being boastful is the Leo aspect I think I'm least guilty of, but being so heavily reduced really flared up the ol' prideful bits. Work in progress) I figure the truth is somewhere in the middle. Regardless of where it might actually lie, I just sort of want to acknowledge and push myself towards finding better balance with all the things I want to do and those which I can do. To that end, I have a couple of goals and accomplishments that I've been thinking about and wanted to lock into the chain with all the rest. SO THAT'S WHAT WE'RE GONNA DO READY SET GO

      I bet there are a lot of you who fall into a similar paralysis as me, and that's one where it can take me a really long time to get posts to where I want them to be. Somehow, between the time that I pull a set of photos and think, "oh my gosh I want to shove this into everyone's eyeballs" and actually managing to crack each bit of the accompanying story out of my knuckles and into a legible format, something else more important that has an impact on everyone else is due and I put it to the side. Then it doesn't feel right to post until I have time to dedicate to it again that isn't prioritized over volunteer work or job tasks. Repeat ad nauseam, until you have a veritable mystery graveyard of zombie posts that languish sadly around your pc hoping you will misclick on them and be reminded that most of them are missing limbs or have literal holes right through their torsos. No, just me? Well, then definitely don't open the folder marked "Posts for Someday But That Day is Not Today" on my desktop, even if you hear faint screaming and ominous whispers leaking out of it.

      So I want to try to aim for a bi-monthly post, I think. That seems like a reasonable thing that doesn't put a lot of pressure on me to fight for time with other stuff I've taken on that feels more important, internally is an acceptance that I can be selfish and share some of the stuff I'm doing, and lets me cosplay as the creative Crim for a little bit. She's a lot of fun, and just as selfishly, I really like her writing and photos and want to see more of them. Over the past two years, I've visited six more countries, expanded my life long love affair with mountains into actual honest to god ice climbing and caving on not one but two glaciers on opposite sides of the planet, gone to dozens and dozens of live shows, day-biked downhill across an international border following a steep gold rush trail, welcomed a new dog into my family, taken a ferry to a rock so small it often doesn't register on world maps to scale it 1000 feet up over the wild ocean in a squall, and I still live in one of the most beautiful provinces abundant with untouched forest to get lost in every single day.

      The world, as cynical and ravaged as it is, is still heart-achingly beautiful and the people you meet, whether next door or on the next continent, are still kind and loving and have a lot you can learn from. There are some stories in there, too.

      I mentioned some achievements in there too. I have a pretty wide set of standards on what classifies as an accomplishment, largely because I think we should be taking any excuse to celebrate ourselves and each other these days. Many of the ones I'm most fond of over the past few years have been related to Hive, whether that's doing cool stuff like getting further into 3d modeling to create mockups and assets for design refinement, helping out our projects around the chain with everything from introductions to code bases, doing some big keynote speaking engagements and a ton of live chats on behalf of the chain, or totally random but interesting tasks like learning how to create graphics to skin a vehicle. If you know of places you think someone should go and talk about Hive and all of its cool stuff, my DMs are open.

      I'm doing my best to rearrange and volunteer the parts of my life I can to add to this list of neat opportunities that build stronger bridges. One of the things I've got on my plate to work on is fleshing out my old placeholder website at crimsonclad.com to hold some of this stuff and to create a direct line to me for people on and off chain. I plan to post sometime later this month for ideas about things to put there, and also asking you guys what sort of short video content you'd like to see created for Hive.io as voicework and animation are also things I've been taking on pro bono where I can~

_{I've done a ton of different podcasts and conferences over the last little while! So many, in fact, that I can't find them all 😅 I'm working on building out a playlist so people can clip what they like out of them or use them for their own learning, etc~}

      It's pretty easy to make things sound like everything is ✨aMaZiNg✨ on social media, so I'll be the first to admit that the past few years have been incredibly challenging too. I know that everyone has experienced loss in one way or another due to global circumstances, and I'm no exception. During this bizarre shared world trauma, my family, friends and I have had some devastating losses and some really difficult circumstances. Sometimes it's easier to throw myself headlong into the ecosystem around here as a way to channel emotions I don't know how to deal with otherwise, and sometimes, it's been overwhelming and I've had to step back from tasks and things I genuinely enjoy because I'm not sure how else to slow down and take care of myself when things get bad.

      I genuinely feel like I let myself and you guys down when this happens, which is very silly because none of you have demands or expectations of me, but we're being honest here. It's okay to give ourselves a break and be kind, and I have no doubt that so many of you have periods of feeling much the same or worse. I guess I'm just throwing this in here as an acknowledgement that none of us are superhumans, but it's kind of amazing that a blockchain community can sort of make us feel that way sometimes 🖤

      One of the biggest places I've been feeling this is with my live streams; I do two radio shows that are bit more like audio/visual entertainment hangouts each week, and I've been so proud to have completed something like 350 episodes and almost 1000 hours of content between them in the time that I've been here in the Hive ecosystem. I'm so proud of them and I love them so much, but they've also been the first thing to get pushed aside as some of the bad things in my life are demanding my time. Picking and choosing what you're capable of accomplishing and maintaining good balance is part of why I'm "thinking out loud" about everything here in this post— for the first time ever, I've gone a few weeks without doing them, and it's been really demoralizing and difficult. As I get through some of the stuff throwing up the biggest roadblocks, I plan to make a post reintroducing both shows so there's a place here on chain where I can better include everyone in these shows and really revive them they way that they should be— so there's another goal for the list.

      The more work I do the more it sometimes feels like I can fall out of touch, so I thought I'd check in on a personal note and leave this spot open for questions, comments, AMA, whatever. I've been thinking a lot about spinning up a new witness box, about potentially making a proposal, about some of the big leap-of-faiths that we'll be taking together soon, and about all of the conflict and cooperation that come together here while being both a human and a component in developing web3 spaces. I guess it's safe to say that true to the rest of the cryptospace, announcements of announcements and blogging about thinking about maybe posting a blog are just par for the course. 😂

Here's to the second half of a decade trying to figure it all out and doing awesome things along the way~ 🖤