***Excuse the typos in this post***

I had two primary goals today and they including reading and writing. Well, i am glad to inform you that i failed woefully at both tasks.

First of all, i want to attribute how poorly my day has gone (and this is me shifting the goalpost now) to the fact that i slept and woke up late. Usually, that's the perfect recipe for having an unproductive and uneventful day. But asides my messed up sleeping pattern i also came to another realization: i can't write anymore.

When i say write, i mean creative things like poetry and short stories. So it is safe to say that i have lost or i am losing my creative status/ability. Can you actually classify what you do on steem? Most of us claim to be content creators without any specification. 

Earlier today i was going through the comment section of a post. Basically, it was a post by one of the supposed steem aggressors who have been selling votes. In his post, he declared his alliance to the new moment--new steem. I am very skeptical when people do this. From my own experience, it isn't always a good sign. I know someone who made a similar pledge but went into a full-fledged flag war with other content creators on the blockchain. But the aside, he did ask a question in his post that I find interesting. It was about the new guideline for #newsteem.

I think a lot of us are confused as regards the focus of the steem blockchain. Personally, I feel it is still very much business as usual. The only major difference is the said new reward mechanism. Now in the process of reading the post, i checked the comment section for people's responses to the post. One struck me actually because it encapsulates what I have thought for the longest time has been the agenda of most top-ranking steemians. The said response was indeed from a very popular and respected steemian and he said something along the line of creating posts that promote steem. This for him was the type of content that should be rewarded. I know it is his or her personal opinion but really?! Is that what we are actually doing here? Marketing steem? Shouldn't there be a team for that at least, rather than random people on the internet with little or no knowledge about marketing?

It all makes sense to me now why these redundant steem posts keep earning a lot of rewards. For me it is counterintuitive. As much as i love this platform talking about steem is the reason we aren't moving forward because the conversation is always narrow and mundane. There is a limit to which even most steem zealots can take. I think at certain points in our journey here we become more keen about result and productivity rather than the redundant sayings of steem zealots who are unfortunately gatekeepers to this platform. And you know what? im not totally opposed to talking about steem. We need to create awareness for our blockchain but isn't it counterintuitive telling people that steem is a content-based platform but they can hardly find any good content asides your content about steem when they come here? i thought by now they will be a massive push for most of our struggling communities to scale and succeed but that doesn't seem to be the case. I stand to be corrected but there haven't been any major development/news here for quite some time now. The flag war that is currently going on in different camps has cast a shadow on steem.

It is also my belief that those who fall under the whale and orca category who are saddled with the responsibility of discovering the best contents possible aren't doing that well, rather most engage incircle jerking and patting themselves on the back every time. Isn't the essence of staking your steem to curate? If you have no interest in curating (like i am currently) why not hold your steem in liquid form and leave the reward pool for those who are capable of utilizing it or delegate your stake to people who are willing to do the job of curating content? Yes, there is the issue of security, but we've hardly had issues pertaining to that all through my stay here. It's easy to point fingers. My commitment to this blockchain is questionable as well and it is a personal challenge to myself find a way to better steem blockchain in such a way that benefits both me and the blockchain.

The second thing i can across (there aren't that much anyway) was the reduction of a number of weeks it took to power down completely. Im a bit indifferently about this, although i must admit that it would be helpful if it would hasten the process. There have been instances that i needed liquid steem in the past to invest in something. So it isn't really a mad idea.

Well, thats about all i want to ramble about today. I dont want this post to die somewhere on my phone. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain my focus for a long time. I am hoping with these little writing exercises i will get back on track.