It feels almost like last Christmas holiday again. If you look at the numbers, it's obvious that the reward pool is brimming with STEEM and flowing over. If this was happening to a bathtub in a block of flats, all the damage caused could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. It feels absurd to watch the author rewards go up like in an aggressive bull market while the price of STEEM is barely staying above $0.8. This is, of course, an artifact of the blockchain and posting activity coming to a halt last week. Some people are saying that the paradox of rewards going up also has something to do with armies of spambots posting hundreds of times a day running out of Resource Credit Mana and thus being incapable of draining the pool by self-upvoting. I haven't seen any data quantifying this but I'm sure that is a factor contributing to the ongoing bonanza real human Steemians are experiencing. I remember the last few days of 2017 and the first few days of January 2018 like yesterday. When I looked at the numbers on steem.supply, I felt a bit embarrassed at the level of rewards for the kind of ordinary blogging I was doing. That situation was temporary and a consequence of a few Whales and Orcas taking in an interest in my blog and the very high level of STEEM and particularly SBD price around that time.

Now I'm trying my best to offer quality. I'm trying to only use material of my own in actual blog posts (as opposed to my DLike shares, obviously). Thanks to having almost 2000 photos on my Flickr account, I have something to choose from. My goal is to keep taking more and of higher quality. Graduating from using a phone camera only is part of that. Learning to use a DSLR will be involve another learning curve. I owe a lot to @gamer00 who helped me along in the beginning. I couldn't have hoped for a better onboarding process. I've been trying to pay it forward by supporting new users. This is why I've made it to the list of TOP 200 effective Steemit сurators that encourage discussion for the last week (2018.09.24-2018.09.30) again. This time I was 124th. @gamer00 has stopped being active on Steem but that's ok. I seem to be doing fine. Consistent activity seems to pay off. Steem on, Steemians!