I sincerely apologize for the lengthy posts, lol. But HiveFest was just awesome. Blame Roeland.
WAKE UP!
It's around 6:00 AM in the morning. Time for bed... o... wait... no, that was my past life. Time to wake up! I asked my friend's roommate to wake me as he had to leave quite early and I knew I would have a hard time waking up that early.
It was quite nice to see the Sunrise, but as I dozed off for a couple of more minutes, I woke up to a grey sky. Hopefully, it won't be raining the entire day. The weather has been quite unfortunate for us during the conference and activities.
Four days of rain, yikes! Did everybody bring an umbrella? I surely didn't, so I desperately checked the goodie bag to see if there might have been a mini-umbrella inside. I didn't even bring a proper jacket, so good chance I'm getting sick. Speaking of chances... we had a 2% chance of rain when I left home. Turned out they forgot to add 96 to that since that would've been accurate lol.
As I've been spending most of my time with Celestal, as he is one of my oldest friends on the chain, and we've met before, I was looking forward to meeting up and going places together and having some fun. Yesterday was already cracking me up, so let's see what's in store for today. We decided to meet up around 8:45 at Amsterdam central station to take the ferry to the venue, EYE Filmmuseum. While the Sun was slowly rising, I took my chances to take some nice shots of the venue and the ferry. So much has changed in Amsterdam since my last visit, wow.
At this point, I'm just waiting for Celestal to arrive, so we could catch the next ferry. There was a rooftop party until 2-3 AM. I kinda felt some FOMO afterward, but hopefully, there will be plenty of more HiveFests.
I'm on a boat
The venue was beautiful. The EYE Filmmuseum is such a nice building, the architecture/design is amazing. This museum holds a huge collection of Dutch and international movies and movie posters. Imagine diving into these old archives and getting a flashback back into time as you find and look at these old posters. Good vibes, right? Or maybe, you'll encounter this childhood traumatized film poster, also fun... But, we are here for HiveFest7 2022! Let's go!
Welcome
Of course, @RoelandP in his gangster pajamas was the first thing that caught my eye. I asked him if this was the location for HiveFest, lol, and of course, the guys from 
As I was kind of the new cat on the block, I buzzed around silently. Not much later, we were directed to "Zaal 2", where the rest of the conference would take place.
Introduction
@RoelandP officially welcomed everyone and played out the intro of HiveFest7 - Close Encounters 2022. He welcomed us with VR, as he slowly "woke up" in reality. After VR, 
I didn't take photographs of everyone, as I focus on different things when I have a DSLR/Mirrorless in my hand, and wanted to listen to the conference as well of course.
HiveFest7 - Close Encounters - Conference: day 1
Oof... Once entering the first venue, I noticed we were entering a cinema, which is a super challenging venue for photographers as it tends to be quite dark. I knew I had to push my camera and use my ISO. Since my sensor has 40+ megapixels, this will cause -a shitton- of noise. I was a little bit worried about the quality of the results, but with some post-processing, I tried to make the best out of it! I kind of like vintage black and white images for these types of venues, which would've been the easy way to post-process rich-noise images. But I thought it would be fun to push myself and see if I can make something else out of it instead.
It's quite impressive to show up for -all HiveFests! These 5 on stage are hardcore!
Hive.io CoreDev
Howo was opening the conference, which was nice, as I was looking forward to what he had to say about the progress of HF26 and what would change on our blockchain. It was nice meeting and talking with Howo! Don't let his age fool you, because this guy is a genius (and a very kind soul). Unfortunately, I had not had the chance to speak with blocktrades, but I do want to compliment him on the way how he explains things. Very tangible and easy to understand. I feel that he holds a lot of wisdom in his hands when he supports his words with gestures.
Together with
NFTs for peace
Freechain & Marketing
Freechain, a presentation by 
Check out the video here, if you haven't seen it yet. REALLY WORTH IT!
Lordbutterfly mentioned and addressed the difficulty and the challenges regarding proper marketing with realistic costs, and how to get the 'best bang for your buck'. Even though the $1 was seen as a waste of money by someone in the crowd, I would like to address this as I disagree from a marketing point of view. The reason why I disagree is that these metrics certainly give you solid feedback on the things that 1) do work, and 2) do not work. This is incredibly insightful and valuable for us as a whole, as we got to a point where we see stagnation, and now see what to address first.
People aren't signing up because the signing up method is -still- too complex. There are probably a few quick fixes that could or should be implemented short term, so we can think about a long-term fix.
For example; let the user who wants to sign up choose to use his/her email address so the keys are sent to his email address, followed up with a tutorial that teaches them how to change the keys and addresses the importance of keeping your keys safe.
Just a short brain fart, but I bet there are plenty of other simple quick fixes that could certainly help with account creation.
Kudos to lordbutterfly for stepping up and being the one who's dealing with this.
Visionary Studios
Jeffjagoe, my man, a new dark & stormy comrade ha! You're way too humble for all the things you've achieved and done. Would love to have chatted about Solana and some business with you, so I might slide in your DMs and show you my showreel at some point! If you're interested that is.
Coinzdense
Pibara is a Dutch guy. So... you know what they say right? "There is always this one guy", and that's certainly right if you're talking about brains. I've not that much knowledge about Quantum Physics, but I enjoyed your presentation where you also come up with grand solutions. I'd love to help you out with a new website.
Beerverse
Lunchbreak
After Rollie's presentation about Beerverse, we had a short break. The food was great! There were beers, juices, coffee, tea, fruit-infused water, and various types of royal sandwiches. Great job Roeland!
I honestly thought the conference was over so I missed @Lemouth's presentation!! That's why I was a bit flabbergasted the next day when I asked him when he had his presentation. I finally know what happened now! Because I thought the conference ended, I talked with 
I'm on another boat
Petanque
Not much later, we went by boat to go to our first activity of the day "Balls of Steel", where we had food and played some Petanque. Which was cool to do in a restaurant! I wonder how Roeland comes up with stuff like this. It's just genius lol.
At this point, I finally was able to talk with more people that I haven't spoken with, or seen on the chain before. 
And that was day 1 for me!
I had so much fun and I certainly did not expect I would last so long as I'm not used to waking up this early. I used to go to bed around the time I woke up. Quite surprised I did wake up tho. I've met so many awesome people on Hive I never knew they existed or were posting on Hive. We certainly got a bunch of cool cats! Still, there were so many I haven't talked to.
Later in the evening, my feet started to hurt (I got something called Plantar Fasciitis for about 8 months now on both my feet lol), it's as if every step I take is a footprint in little pieces of glass, so I thought it would be a good call to get going and give my feet some relief and stretches.
Cheers,
Ruben
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