Dear Hiveminds
For those who don't know me, I go by the name Rane. My friends on Hive have a habit of calling me Shinobi, as that was my name on discord. Due to some issues with my phone storage and computer screen, I decided to escape to the woods during most of the pandemic last summer and reduced my posting consistency. I was lucky enough to have learned some mushroom picking from several veterans, who have experience in foraging for mushrooms. I provided some food and cooking services in return for shelter and traveled the swiss Alps on a bicycle.
There is a saying :
"There are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters."
It all started with me finding a specific Camp I mentioned in my previous post.
I began with simple Mushrooms like Macrolepiota Procera:
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I also found some Sarcodon imbricatus, which is amazing to dry and make a spice from.
Original Image. Photo by
Boletus is another common mushroom I started with:
Original Image. Photo by
After a while I got much better and started finding less common mushrooms like Lyophyllum, Hericium, Grifola frondosa, polyporous sulphurous etc. as well as learning how to read the forest. I will share more on mushroom picking and the journey that took me on a path of feeling and sensing the mycelium Network. I'm kidding! I mean reading from the tree's genus and understanding the biome, where probable places to find certain mushrooms could be.
Blowing off Steem
Praying to the Whale Goddesses, Gods and Witnesses, I'd like to start by sharing a bit about why I think that dPoS is a great Consensus Mechanism for real Social Media. Also why it would fail anywhere else but right here.
Since upvotes here mean much more than just a rather subjective like, your likes on instagram or facebook are the same from anyone. Someone who understands what you do, be it art or poetry, might have been valued for his or her work and gained enough reputation to have an opinion? His or her vote should then give more value for your art if he or she was also an artist more than a philistine. Since we can set a percentage, this consensus becomes even more intricate. The Hive being an ecosystem of dapps that runs a number of tokens and coins with their own underlying economics, Hive really took the meaning of consensus mechanisms to the next level. Proof of Brain.
Based on time stamped publications on a DLT Protocol, anyone could store their intellectual property, designs, logos, a new company name or even a basic outline or other forms of original content on a blockchain. I liked the idea, because i'm not a fan of biterz. They steel your sentences and make memes, not even quoting you? You send them pictures, they post them as their own and don't even give you any photo credits? Highly disregarding plagiarism, I felt very attracted to this project in 2016 and finally joined in 2017.
Why wouldn't I?
My first Phasebook ;) account was registered in 2004 and reached a thousand friends by around 2008. It was deliberately banned for no particular reason. Maybe I had too many friend requests because Facebook had a limit at the time? Working on a PR campaign for events, I was back to Ground Zero. Bummer. I started a Youtube channel in 2006/07 and several of my videos got removed or had the audio censored in 2009. I had documented some historical events and my channel was about culture. Although none of my comedy imitating accents was viewed as offensive, I was quite disappointed about the first Breaking/Breakdance Battle in Mumbai ever documented being removed. What can I say? I never had any malevolent intentions. I really just wanted to make people laugh and entertain them. Censorship really started bothering me when I thought of Wilhelm Reich, JP Morgan and media monopoly. Just think of what happened to Julian Assange.
"Reveals a profound hatred of democracy on the part of our political leadership" - Noam Chomsky
I basically began thinking that Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook could ban anyone if they please. Specially if what is published on their servers did not suit their advertisers? Also known as the four, they penetrated into every aspect of our lives and these four corporations define everything that the masses think or do, or what direction they take. Did we really want to give them this much power?
Things alarmed me when I saw Facebook's Whatsapp emoji Namasté
It now means thank you. When I wrote thank you, it suggested this emoji!?!
What? seriously. Ok a prayer I might understand, but thank you?
Thank you for colonising India, that was already almost fully occupied since the 12th century and heavily invaded since the 7th century AD, then during British colonial times most food was exported, leaving Indian's to suffer in famine for 200 years. To top all of this, their national greeting means thank you? Who decided this? The US, Western Europe and Japan?
FYI. The most beautiful translation of it that I heard was "I bless the divine in you"
From Wingdings to Alcatel, Nokia to Webdings and ASCii, the J-Phone to Google Emoji really defined on how Emoji's were going to replace a big part of emotion in language. Whether to blame the Unicode Consortium for it or not, I think that it was still a proposal from one of these companies that lead to what people define as emotions when they receive an emoji. It becomes common.
Where does it come from and are we so biased to see beyond this already?
As the former CTO of a company that helped build this platform recently said:
"I ask you to consider that our language is under attack and the very words we use to communicate are being subtly redefined or even multiply defined with contradictory meanings. There is no longer any agreement on fundamental things such as God, natural rights, or morality. We can’t even agree on how many genders there are. The very words “capitalist”, “socialist”, and “communist” mean vastly different things to different people. Everything has become subjective and in the process our ability to communicate and compromise is rapidly declining." - Daniel Larimer
Daniel Larimer- More Equal Animals
I get that some of you begin to understand what is fundamentally wrong with American politics and think you can apply this to the rest of the world. But with all due respect. The world is not America! You'd probably have to learn a couple of other languages and understand the vast traditions existing on this planet and why to even encompass how certain masses are looking towards the United States.
Dan is actually right.
Words are really important and they mean different things to different people. Imagine another Language with different words and not just what these words mean in that language, but what they meant in the history of that country, speaking that language?
If language should bring us closed together, it's also understanding these constructs and traditions and being open minded enough to understand and respect them. It becomes quite imperialistic and manipulative to impose ideologies that brainwash the masses to conform to one regime?
I lived the the US. Many of my cousins were born in the US and my family regularly visited them. I'd say that a big part of me is American.
When I was around 6 years old I learned to use the keyboard on a computer. Before I could even type properly, I'd love this little old machine.
It had and interchangeable hard drive which was a 5 1⁄4 inch floppy that stored 512k or even less than that and had a game similar to pack man. It was a C eating O's and followed my A's to be precise. No graphics, just characters. I used to see Packman games at the office of my dad around 1987, while I was using this machine. In 1988 my cousins introduced me to a video game console in Chicago.
When I was that young, I was bullied by kids in my neighbourhood and never liked playing hide and seek with them, but not really because I was a nerd. I think it was just me that chose not to want to fit in. Specially not with a bunch of hillbillies that had conservative parents that thought i'm from Africa because they had never seen an African person before. I found an older neighbour. A white father of two from South Africa. I met his Wife and the kids while hearing them speak english. A computer engineer with a Mac. He was actually one of the first people to have a color printer around where I lived and I used to love to hear him talk about technology. He changed my life. He later also introduced me to midi interfaces via LPT ports back then. I think I was extremely lucky to meet him. This was in 1991. I Remember him showing me some tools on photoshop 1.1.
By the time I had a 286, 386 and then a 486, my parents moved to the US. Los Angeles to be exact. Since I was always the computer guy in the family, I loved the fact that we had local calls for free and that you could connect to the internet in 1995 on Windows 3.11 with Netscape Navigator. I had heard about the internet in 1992 from a guy named Dennis who came to send the first email from our home in Switzerland. It was an alternative to fax and blew my mind completely. While in Los Angeles I had a couple of people like me in the neighbourhood and wasn't alone, being a bit nerdy anymore. I quickly learned how to make webpages with HTML and Java script using the notepad. I taught seniors HTML once a week at a computer technology center, where I volunteered at a very young age.
In a way I lost touch when it came to a number of things along the way. I still enjoyed action script in macromedia flash at the time it was still wasn't adobe. I put up a couple of websites that took me ages to do later and mostly spent my free time trying to be a cool kid and impress some tough guys. Once I noticed these guys weren't so tough I became a one man army again, painting some walls at night. I was never conservative about digital painting, animation, logos and vector art but really also enjoyed analog painting on walls. Apart from markers and color pencils in 1996, I only discovered the paint brush in 2012.
My life split in two when I first traveled to live in India alone in 1999. I was basically done with the US for a while as it was changing and I looked for a less saturated environment. More room to grow and more space for innovation.
Everything changed after returning. I came back to Switzerland 3 times before I returned in 2015.
I did follow the fact that some people were trying to solve the Byzantine generals problem or Byzantine fault tolerance throughout the years but never understood it's significance. I began reading Ayn Rand, after pulling it out from one of my grand dad's (father's side) book shelfs in 1999. Around 2009 the resurfacing of that book and libertarianism paved the way to a new path. I was familiar with Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and was always a fan of Austrians thought when it came to economics and philosophy. They dared to oppose and challenge the german historical School. I then bought Ludgwig von Mises, Human action in 2010 and later FA Hayek the Road to Serfodm, upon returning to Switzerland the second time. In an immense Culture Shock and lost between both worlds, I met a guy at a beer store called drinks of the world, who boarded the same train and ended up vacating at the same station. He turned out to be literally my neighbour and asked me if I wanna come over and have a couple more beers with him, since it was the weekend. What he said along with a bunch of searches I did online, lead me to bitcoin and satoshi nakamoto's idea of peer to peer digital cash. What followed was a series of events and encounters with people who worked in the finance sector and in the field of cybersecurity. They also mentioned bitcoin in 2011. None of it really did much to me back then. After returning from India the 3rd time I discovered MtGox and ran my Laptop to mine BTC. I lost most of my keys too. I don't even remember where I kept my login details for MtGox.
The strangest thing about all of it was that the idea really suited some of my libertarian NON-deterministic ideologies, that were still very fluid and how I wasn't a fan of regulated markets. Freedom of choice and liberty. I was then finally ready to register a company after having worked in several fields such as Logistics, exports, manufacturing and trading with commodities I got produced in India. In 2014 I registered a company with my unique acquired knowledge in supply chains, wanting to offer more environmentally friendly solutions. The idea and business plan was written in 2009 and I had already made a website. I wanted to do much more than what other businesses called sustainable, going as far as possible in terms of:
Environmental restoration.
-What Mono Culture of Cotton plantations and GMO had destroyed in terms of soil.
Social Equity.
-Making sure end consumers knew the names of the factory workers that sew their garments. That they don't just earn fair wages but can send their children to good schools.
Financial Sustainability.
-Making sure that all practices at cotton plantations, through beneficial habitat planting, seasonal crop rotation, intercropping, crop diversity in organic farming, irrigation, biodynamics and waste water treatment are available to the currently underprivileged. Financial sustainability also meant to me that such labour get specially catered for to make sure their lives are improved.
I basically redefined CSR Corporate Social Responsibility and the so called three E's. Enviromental sustainability, Social Equity and Economic Vitality, used as an excuse for corporations to conduct business by conforming to the least or CSR by maximizing their profits and still making a premium in the process by marketing their brand or equity with ethical standards. That might be the case with most firms but isn't always an integral part of their core values. It's easier to claim it, when in fact none of them has ever been on a cotton plantation and their garments are manufactured in factories they never worked at. I am happy that this is finally changing.
Original Image. Photo by
I was a bit too early in 2009 and many told me that people don't care about child labour in china and toxic contaminants in India as long as they can get cheap garments.
I guess it's the same for meat with antibiotics? From a relative perspective? ARG's aren't healthy but you might survive them?
I returned the 4thtime after having a company still registered, but was lacking the customers to run it and I was still alone. I had all the leads and I could have just acquired them without difficulty, but it would have meant I'd have to crush my competition. Sounds to violent to me to do such a thing and also highly unethical in an infinite space to provide some soul. I didn't want to make that kind of name for myself in the market, because the nature of my business was quite neutral. Since everyone was potentially my customer or I was their service provider from one perspective, I really delved into a field that no one did. I mean why would I spend 15 years of my life building the knowledge base to do so? I still had a few customers that made sure I could keep my company, but I never paid myself a salary from it. Noticing that I was way ahead of my time when it came to socio economics and certified standards, I gave it another shot. While doing this, I wanted to work on a booking system. A vertically integrated business that eliminates middle men, essentially then creating a standard that gives people choices. Once done, it could be turned into an open market. A blockchain. I worked on it with a PhD in autonomous systems and AI, who quite much saw my vision. I started a part time job at a take away but only to buy time to do this project, which wasn't very motivating and barely paid my bills. At some point I decided to quit my job during the 2018 Bear market. After being in a relationship that had gotten pretty messy for me emotionally, I was quite torn, with a frozen shoulder on top of it all since June 2018. I noticed something wasn't right. I knew that I was probably really depressed and that my symptoms were psychosomatic. This did not fit into something that I could reason with along with my rational way of thinking. How can something psychological affect us physically?
I will elaborate on this in further posts.
Nevertheless I had really lost who I was at that point. On top of that my grandfather from my mom's side suddenly died because of something that went wrong in the hospital. He'd wake me up for yoga in the morning and I remembered every time I continued sleeping and never went. I remembered that he asked me to take my car and drive up to an ashram with him. He'd love that. We never went...I kept seeing his kind face when I closed my eyes. I was very sad. My grandfather told me a lot of things that were really good for anyone and was into Natural Health, Herbal Sciences and Ayurveda. I guess he figured out some things he would have done earlier on in life then later if he had the chance. For some reason everything literally changed when I joined the Group Meditation with 
Slightly Fictional
Historical events that lead to the Hive being formed out of a community of publishers, artists, techies, liberty and freedom enthusiasts and bloggers who believed in a brighter future for data ownership, censorship resistance and free speech wasn't an easy one.
Firstly a really interesting guy invents a rather unconventional consensus mechanism. Invested in his personal interest and pursuing even greater challenges, he left the project as soon as he could. Following another dream, he dedicated himself to a new project using the same consensus. We all know how that really worked out? Who wants to call it politics at this point?
I like the part where a company grows a witness pool and one of their main employees leaves the company. Why? Because simply others in the company aren't as vested and dedicated into the project as much as he was. No one in the company was truly and passionately concerned about where the project was going. The idea was that the community was going to build it along with them. When or where have you ever heard of a social media network like this? One that no one really owned? By the people for the people. Everyone really owned shares in it that they could vest. One where anyone could give a proposal and the community would support anyone building on top of the blockchain. He then began a witness pool that made up almost 70% of nodes running the network. He build an entire side chain along with a team before the company was supposed to release a feature that allows any user to release their own tokens. The company didn't keep their promises. Instead, the community along with that guy build most of what made up the entire blockchain. A team from eastern Europe and a Korean guy each built separate smart phone apps to engage with posts along with several other projects. More projects were proposed that wanted to build on top of the blockchain by then. Still a part of the comity, the witness pool and this one guy even said that they didn't need the company or their CEO anymore entirely. Politics aside, the blockchain became very dear to the witnesses and it's community of publishers.
The CEO of the company decided to do a deal with a another Blockchain giant and sold one of the largest stakes in the network. Delegated governance took on a very sticky situation for the most decentralised social media platform out there. After the community then stood up against a possible take over, this marked a climax in it's history. The Stake, not intended for voting or trading that made up around 33%, 20% of the entire supply was sold to a business owner who just buys companies that help govern blockchains, building an empire of blockchains. A very controversial figure. Known as Ninja mined stake, the funds were actually intended to be funnelled into the further development of the blockchain. In a couple of strategic moves, the witnesses orchestrated an event never before seen or heard in blockchain history. Something that was super hard to pull off. They forked into the HIVE. That's because you can't own a community!?!
I don't know about you, but if Hive was a country, then i'm a patriot! We are? We have our own currency!
What am I doing here?
I never wanted to publish any of my art on centralised social media anymore, unless it was previously time stamped here. Since I was writing a story for the two characters Yang and Rane, I wanted to be in a place where original content is appreciated.
I still made a couple of accounts using
I finally created a twitter account recently, also to support 
I also had to make sure I'd use instagram to reach the main stream and recently started an account there too. I think most people who see my stickers on the streets looked for me there?
https://www.instagram.com/yangyanje/
I could use some support as growing organically isn't so easy there anymore.
Above you can see that I am changing my profile picture.
Last year I worked on a digital version of my avatar character Yang for a new profile image. I painted the original image on a Canvas in 2012. This shows a part of the process of me tracing and vectorising the Canvas that leads to my avatar image. I actually used the pen tool for each shape and did not click on any tracing button for this.
After tracing my art work to vectorise it, I thought i'd make this post to update my profile picture and background image. In case anyone would like to order a bag of this, I will release an NFT with 50 pieces of it here on Hive at the NFT showroom soon and also announce it.
I also changed my horizontal lines from this:
to this:
I still haven't gotten to updating my closing animation. I recently stopped using adobe softwares like illustrator and photoshop and work with free open source softwares like Ink scape and gimp. I'd love to learn blendr and make animations there.
I encourage anyone to join the #naturalmedicine - Spitituality Challenge
'The masses copy the few who pioneer and sell it as their own. The even fewer who discover and create the paths for pioneers to think and act see beyond the patterns of time.' -
'Once the ripples from the actions of a few reach the masses, they permeate a sense of ease for anyone to adapt to. By then, the ones who thought of the undone and did the untried will think of new ways to conquer time' -
Join the holistic health economy on hive! 
Meditate with the Hivemind