Happy Spud X everyone! And a few Steem 'tings to be optimistic about....

Just a cheeky 500 Steem power up this month, to take me up to 27K SP and keep the faith with Platform!

A few Steem things I'm optimistic about...

@steemonboarding managed to get funding through Steem's Worker Proposal System, which is great news as now there's more information being produced about how to use this damned frustrating platform! Thanks to efforts from @anomadsoul and @tarazkp, check out the website here: steemonboarding.com.

@orlev's running a great new show on PAL called 'the discomfort zone' which is all about an exciting new eco-village project he and a few other people such as @eco-alex are starting in Portugal. Listen on the PAL discord channel here.

The steemleo shop seems like a promising new venture - a way for sellers of digital products and services to offer their wares with relative ease. I sell digital products myself, i might put some up.

@steemflagrewards is doing great work, I'm going to delegate a couple of hundred SP to them right now!

And a few personal steemy things....

I'm very pleased with my current 10.5% ish curation return, which I guess suggests that this part of the last HF was successful.

I became a @tipu curator - by basically asking @cardboard (great Steem name) how one becomes one. @tipu has massive VP (you can delegate if you like) and curators get to give votes worth over $1 by calling the bot - I started with one vote a day, now I can hand out 4, basically because I'm shit hot at playing the @tipu curation game.

The game is to anticipate who is going to get a healthy upvote and get in there with your tipu vote early, the higher efficiency in curation return, the higher up the leaderboard you go, and higher up = more votes that you can award, and a higher pay-out to you as a curator, albeit it a small pay-out (0.25 Steem a day atm for little moi, towards the top end of said leaderboard).

I've been added to @tribsteemup's 'abundance generator' which is great - I've been spending a bit more time reading some of the posts produced by members, it's a great place to be!

@nextcolony, thanks mainly to @dachcolony is now paying me out a return, 160 Steem so far, which is great!

I'm kind of getting back into posting a few times a week too, which is kind of nice!

So hopefully it's Onwards and Upwards into the rest of 2020!

There's quite a few things I'm not so happy about, such as the continuing decline to the user base, the fact that it's so very quiet around here, The busy front-end apparently going into meltdown, the collapse of the HUNT token price (although that may have happened a long time ago), a few idiots posting shit and getting bitter about getting flagged to zero, but besides that it's been a pretty good January for me on Steem.