My Top 5 Posts of 2017 (Challenge by @rocking-dave)

@mobbs nominated me (technically @suesa but that's me) for the "My Top 5 Posts of 2017" challenge. And what did I make this account for if not to participate in challenges or post them?

So here we go, out of the over 180 posts I published between June and December 2017, my top 5, ordered after when they were published, not how good they are in my eyes. They're all great.

1. Death in the Greenhouse

Most of my early posts weren't science articles or serialized stories, but fictional short stories with scientific background. I dubbed them "scientific fiction" instead of "science fiction", as the science behind them mostly exists. I just imagined what could go wrong - or right.
"Death in the Greenhouse" is a story about a Dr. Grace Weiland, who loves to genetically modify her plants to the extreme.
It was a fun thought experiment on what might happen if we took it a step too far.

2. Background Cats

We all love our feline friends. In fact, humanity loved them so much that they can be found everywhere throughout history! Watch Matthew write an article about these wonderful animals out of his own free will. Totally not forced. He likes doing that. I promise.

3. Songs of the Desert (Lost, Part 1)

This is the start of one of my most beloved series, that spawned the idea for other series which, in the end, created a whole universe. "Lost", "AIOA", "Mars", "Numb", "Awake" and my work-in-progress "Dystopia" are all connected. If you want to read them all, I recently put up a Google Drive with all my finished stories as handy PDFs to download for anyone. Just don't publish them on your own blog and give me the appropriate credit when you share it with your friends :)

4. Did Cheating give you Herpes?

The only science post that made my top 5 and the one with the most clickbait-y title I ever wrote. I published it as one part of several posts that tried to shed some light on how viruses and virus-associated diseases work. This particular post kept being a topic for discussion for several days in the chatroom, which leads me to think it had at least some emotional impact :P

5. A Christmas Story?

Just as my Halloween special, this one was a lot of fun to write. I initially planned to do a short spin-off of my "Keiko's Story" series but then decided against it to write something about Jesus, but not in the way people usually present him. Having grown up with stories about him wreaking havoc in a temple because people were selling things in there instead of praying didn't leave me with an image of a divine figure. For me, he has always been more of a troublemaker who tried to make people rise up against an unacceptable government. He has always been more human than he is usually portrayed.
You'll notice that in the story.

Now, the rules of this challenge state that, to win SBD I'd have to:

1. Make a #my2017top5 post with my5 best posts of 2017.
2. Upvote the original post.
3. Resteem the original post.
4. Make a comment in the original post with a link to my post.
5. Include 5 nominations.

I don't really want to win those SBD so I won't stick to all the rules, but you can if you want! And for this purpose, I nominate everyone who reads this and wants to do the challenge!

Just say I nominated you and have fun :)