I've been pretty much saying this all along—I'm not that thrilled at all with what's been going on, and each opportunity to improve relations between 'us and them' seems to get squandered somehow. And yet, I'm still here, still plugging away, trying to do what I can for myself and by extension others and trying to stay out of the useless or senseless funk that seems to get me every so often.

I don't know what to do about new newbies. I don't know what to do about people who haven't grown that much in the six to nine months they've been here. I've spent most of my time trying to engage, upvote and post, and I've spent money that I frankly don't really have to get me to a point where I apparently can do what I need to do. Most people haven't done the latter, because they can't, choose not to, don't trust STEEM with any length of pole, don't want to get divorced, etc.

So, I could start powering down, but as lousy as a ride that hard fork was and still is, it was a major change, too. And we've yet to see the full impact of it, good or bad. My upvotes have been increasing even though the price of STEEM has more or less been sideways with a downward trend, which I actually like.

So, as much as I can say there's plenty of negative going on, there's still these glimpses, some of them bigger than that, of brilliance and sparks of hope. Does that constitute enough to keep going? Maybe, for now. Does it make me happy? No. Am I not leery of the next shoe to drop? Of course.

But it's never a zero sum game and so here I am weighing everything in my brain that would much rather use its memory and storage for writing, rather than strategy calculations. I've got nowhere else to go that's going to be any better at this stage, and given that one of the projects is from the same guy that abandoned this one, I'm not sure that's the one I'll be running to, since the same kinds of control issues seem to be popping up there now.

I think everyone is suffering from not taking this platform seriously enough, while expecting everyone else to do it. It's like abdicating one's adulthood to the infants in hopes of doing whatever the heck you want. There's blame enough to go all the way around and back quite a few times.