Keeping up to date with me? | Monthly Report | July 2022 #5

Monthly report

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_{July 2022}

This report is full of art, branding, music, and even a little bit of governance and politics! Comparing July with June is like seeing progression on steroids if you'd ask me. When I started my first Monthly report in March, I found it difficult to start writing again. In June, I slowly picked up the pieces and shared my stories with you from time to time. But July has been generous in terms of writing, sharing, socializing, and Hive rewards.

As I start writing the introduction of this report, I'm curious about how it will turn out. I'll probably play around with formatting to see if I can come up with formatting that would increase and simplify the readability of longer posts.

Enjoy,
Ruben

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Branding and creating Assets

25 days ago, I wrote the last Monthly report, as I thought I wouldn't be sharing much more approaching the end of June. Mistaken as I was, on June 29th I wrote a post about the possibility for us Hiveans to collaborate and brand Hive together. While this isn't published in July, I do want to share this with you all.

This is what Hive means to me - Free Asset (without credits)

While the post didn't get much traction, I do feel there is much to achieve with timeless assets like these. Whether we use them today, tomorrow, or in the next years to come, sharing what is meaningful to you with others always has value. Please, feel free to use the above image without any credit, I made this for you.

_{"Let's brand Hive together" Read more}

Posh GIFs

One of the initiatives on Hive that is getting more attention every day, is POSH. I've known @acidyo from the very start of my Hive journey, and I consider him a friend. While I was creating animations for Hive, I came across one of @acidyo's posts about POSH with the announcement of a new token called "PROMO". The timing couldn't be any better, this way I could create something to support the POSH initiative with some cool GIFs. When the PROMO token is going live, I'd be more than happy to create another GIF in the same style so POSH has a complete set of assets to work with.

_{"HivePosh | Thumbnail GIF": Read more
"HivePosh | Delegation Stats GIF | And a bit about branding": Read more}

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Visited a local museum in my town

The weather was perfect to check out a local museum in my town. It was nice to be able to visit something and have fun with @lackofcolor due to her being ill. If you're into art and museums, I've written an in-depth post about our trip.

While I don't want to spoil too much about the art (you should read the post for sure), there were so many different disciplines showcased. Some art didn't speak to me, but most of the art exhibited there did. Above you see a traditional oil painting which is one of my favorite artworks I saw. Besides century-old traditional art, there was also modern art. In the picture where you see @lackofcolor, we're looking at pretty modern art that actually took the viewer with you.

_{"SO FUTURE (RMT x GOGBOT) | a Metaverse exhibition worth visiting": Read more}

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Wrote a post about securing your Hive account

I've been thinking about solutions to increase security for myself, not only security-wise, but also for the reason to increase a bit of anonymity. Which obviously will be a hard task with my own name as a username. #rip. But, I'm not the only one who has his/her own name set as their username. For this post, I specifically created Animations to illustrate and improve readability. Personally, I like the GIF that displays a fingerprint being lit up. Keywords for that animation were; anonymity, bad actors, police, finding, hiding,

The post serves as a singular all-in-one post that could be referred to when a new user signs up for Hive and has issues with securing their account.

_{"Add additional layers of security to your Hive account": Read more}

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Almost posted once every single day!

Well, that escalated quickly... I didn't expect from going posting once in every while to posting almost every single day again in less than a month. I've mostly been sharing my photographs, which take me quite some time to select and write about. Going back into memory lane is pretty nice. It makes me feel aware of the time spent, and value the time that I have spent with the people I care or cared about.

One thing that I've been trying to improve, is my writing in English. I bet that most of my sentences may look funny to you. What I learned from Grammarly, is that I tend to build sentences that should be constructed the other way around.

Mostly, I've been sharing posts about my photography, whereas the bigger posts took me some serious time to select, edit, write, and format. I've been trying to write about Defi, but it seems I find it more challenging and time-consuming to write efficiently. I'll probably continue writing scraps about Defi until I can productively produce quality content about this topic as well.

Below, you'll find a selection of images with links to the posts. Just wanna try out some formatting here, and certainly will take the opportunity presented here to do so.

_{Click on the photographs to visit the designated blog post.}

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Monitoring other online activities

During the Month, I've been monitoring other online activities such as the Path of Exile review I wrote last month. Wow.. 550+ people thought it was useful, and I received quite some interesting replies. Another update to that matter is that GGG still hasn't replied or tried to come up with another solution. Kind of disgusting how they treat "loyal" players. It instantly infuriates me how greedy companies can become.

Another thing that I've been monitoring was the clip of the eye of @lackofcolor. Kind of impressive! At the time of writing about it, the clip had a little over 13K views. Today, it has a little over 20K views. This means 7,000 more views in just 25 days. An average of 280 views per day. The reason why I find it interesting is that I directed a post to Hive in the description of the clip. It is something to keep in mind when I upload more videos on YouTube to keep #posh'ing Hive.

_{"Kinda going viral?": Read more}

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Did Dan really "found" Hive, or did the community?

I didn't expect much when I was calling out @Dan for his biography on Twitter. Personally, I found it very interesting and was curious to see what his reasoning was. Surprised as I was, he did reply, and many others shared what they had to say about this topic. Even some trolls trying to put words in my mouth just asking to be blocked showed up as well.

Still, there is much to say about this topic, sadly, my English can hardly keep up with my Dutch thought-processing to even begin wording. Must have been hit to the head a few times.

https://twitter.com/RubenCress/status/1552958731045969920?s=20&t=EaBNNpQ3PLvG-r_Cy6wiPQ

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Updating my Spotify playlist

Music has been a big part of most of my life. During the time I was a breakdancer, you learn how to listen to music so you're able to dance more than just on the beat. Since I was so passionate about it, I had instrumentals on repeat. Turns out, that I can't listen to vocals. Let me clarify; I can hear the vocals, but they just translate and sound like melodies to me. Don't ask me to do karaoke.

I've been updating my Spotify playlist almost every week since I created it. So far, 850+ handpicked songs in 7 years. Damn, that list is good for 56hours of music. Most of them mean something to me and can take me back in time.

This ain't your traditional "Top40" playlist, so if you're up to listening to some experimental deeper instrumentals there is a link to my playlist down below. Also, if you enjoy Flume, Nosaj Thing, Flying Lotus, Alex Thesleff, or Mazde, let me know in the comments! I'm curious what you all listen to daily.

_{Full Playlist here}

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HIVE goals

Last month, I started recording and setting goals that I want to achieve on Hive. So far, the 10K Hive Power goal has been achieved! Much sooner than I anticipated. Also, I reached my 3rd goal of saving up HBD much sooner than I expected. I've also powered up 800 LEO (200 this month), so I'm more than happy with the stats for this month.

The third goal was to have at least 500 HBD in my savings. I'm going to see if I can boost this process with funds outside of Hive. Kind of impressive if you think about the fact that most of it are rewards given by the community. I'm so grateful for the support that I have been receiving on my posts. Would've been much harder to achieve my goals.

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Thanks for reading!

It certainly feels great to be getting back behind the wheels of writing and sharing content again on Hive. Setting up goals pushes me, and achieving them, feels great. I didn't even get to the point where I was going to tell you about my foot problem, well; in short: still hurts AF. It might be interesting to be sharing a "yearly report" of all these Monthly reports combined in one. Wouldn't that become a post that you'd be finished reading in one or two hours or something? Would be sick to summarize a whole year just in a few hours.

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