Dolphin 541,753—Monthly Report: July (2019)

Thursday is supposed to be a shorter day at work for me, wherein I come into the shop, get supplies for the coming week, and then basically go home. Not knowing what was in store for me, I fully intended to get this report posted by no later than 4 pm, my time.

Well, that didn't happen—I ended up with four ATMs to fill, two of them on the coast which is over a three hour round trip—so here I am, writing another later than I like post.

However, it is important to me that I get this post out today. This will be report No. 19, if my math is correct, and even with the full-time job meaning less time for STEEM, I'm not about to slack off on this. Hopefully, it won't be midnight when I get this finished, since I do have to work again tomorrow.

Okay, onto the summary.

Quick Summary

You might recall in the June report that I mentioned getting a last minute boost from a curation trail upvote. Well, it happened again. More on that below.

July, though, unlike June, wasn't so much dribs and drabs as it was a few larger dribs and drabs, along with a curation trail hit earlier in the month.

Wait. Didn't I just say the curation trail hit late last month? I did. And another hit earlier in the month. So, two different trails, two different times, and they made up the bulk of the SP earned for July. Which, by the way, has often been the case for me, rather than gaining traction on each individual post. I blame the value of STEEM. I don't have anyone or anything I particularly want to blame for the STEEM value, so I'll just point the finger at the value and continue.

Posts (no comments)—23

I'm still managing to get out at least five posts a week, even if that means two in one day, or one on a Saturday. It's been helping and not helping. Helping in that I stay disciplined and get something out that I believe adds some level of value to STEEM, not helping in that my main audience is generally around between the hours of 10 AM and 4 PM my time, while my posts have been going out on a regular basis between 8-10 PM my time. I live in the Pacific Time Zone, so I'll let you do the math.

So, for the autoposters, no problem, and thank you for your support. For everyone else who got used to catching my posts during the early time frame, I don't know what to do about that, other than getting on the ball and writing a post ahead of time so it can be scheduled during 10 AM and 4 PM. I seriously believe I need to try to do that. Maybe I can make it happen starting this week.

Comments—205

Pitiful, pitiful and more pitiful. The biggest sacrifice has been in the comments. I used to be able to make more than 200 comments in a week. Not anymore. Which maybe won't be such a bad thing, since one of the believed casualties of the EIP after HF21 hits later this month is the amount a comment will have to receive in order to make it through the new convergent linear curve.

I know folks don't expect a comment to receive an upvote, so maybe comments will continue for the engagement value, but I know I will end up changing my own upvoting behavior on comments if it means throwing rewards to the wind.

At any rate, I'm not sure what to do to get this back up, especially if my work schedule is going to be like this week.

I'm hoping I can get into some kind of routine where I get to more curation and comments off my blog. Maybe things will settle down at work after the summer ends.

Upvotes given—94/381

These numbers are about half what they were last month, the other main casualty of my 12-14 hour STEEM day being cut to four to six each day. I have not implemented autovoting. I think I have pretty much decided not to for now, and to wait until after the hardfork to see what difference it may make for me at my level of SP.

Along with the comments, I feel bad about this. I know it's my SP to do what I see fit with, and I believe strongly in that, but I do feel there are plenty of posts to allocate rewards to, and as one of the manual curators on STEEM, I'm no longer able to pick up the slack. I'll do what I can, though.

Upvotes received—1,668/3241

Incoming uppvote spread is not quite three times what it was in June, while total upvotes rose over double. The vast majority of those upvotes came on two posts, however, and while some of those upvotes belong to higher SP accounts, again, the bulk of them come from smaller SP following the trail with fractions of a penny to allocate. As much as I dislike where my own vote amounts are, the Plankton and the Minnows are the real casualties of low STEEM value.

The curation trail upvotes, as I've said before, cannot be counted or predicted, so the best I can do is to continue to post, try to add value, and hope that something catches the eye of a trail curator, along with the other 20,000 or so pairs of eyes I've heard are still floating about out there somewhere.

Earned SP increase—215.419

I was expecting the SP amount for July to be somewhere above hundred again, because that was more or less where it was heading before the second curation trail upvotes. The late surge put it over 200.

This happened in spite of my late night posting, so maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about that, but again, curation trail upvotes come and they go. I don't have a plan for consistently earning rewards in the two hundred range or more. It's still very much hit and miss like it's been for most of my time here.

This 215-plus earned SP amount represents roughly a 2.5 increase over last year. July and August of 2018 were both down months for me, partly due to some burnout and partly due to my wife's hernia surgery and recovery, which thankfully neither has not been repeated in any form this year. Let's keep it that way, shall we?

Earned SP for 2019 is now running 808.265 ahead of 2018 for a total of 1,307.422. If all goes as it has so far this year, I will eclipse the 3,000 total earned SP amount in August. Total earned SP from January 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019 stands at 2,903.945.

This is where I would normally give the total SP (with my investments included), but I will hold onto that number for a later category, since it increases it a little bit, but enough to acknowledge it, especially given how I came about it.

Highest single payout—0.088 SBD/39.082 STEEM/39.475 SP

This is the late upvote from the curation trail mentioned already. It came from OCD, which is followed by blocktrades, among some others. While smaller in numbers, they have proven mighty in upvote amount. I thank them for finding my posts and for their generosity.

The post was titled My Seven Month Old Grandson's Trip To The Hospital. Since we're back into the high SBD debt and liquid STEEM ratios, STEEM was paid out. Since last month's OCD payout was part SBD, it's hard to tell for certain, but I do believe July's payout was a little bit higher.

While that was the number one spot, I do feel the need to mention the second highest, since it came from the curie trail earlier in the month, and they have been very consistent with me month to month. Their upvotes came on a multiple daily prompt freewrite post I wrote called Two Knights Walk Into A Bar. Hopefully you can tell from the title that it was meant to be humorous, and I did have a lot of fun writing it. Payout on this post was 4.204 SBD/0.617 STEEM/15.443 SP.

I just realized something while looking through the higher paid posts for July that curie came around not once but twice! Sorry guys. My apologies.

The second curie vote was the third largest payout with 1.704 SBD/8.929 STEEM/15.953 SP. The name of the post was Batman: HUSH, The Animated Movie—So Much Promise Unrealized. Basically a movie review where I shared mostly my disappointment with quite a few artistic choices DC and Warner Bros. made with the adaptation from a year long comic book story arc. One that is fairly recent and at the time, pretty important for Batman's character development.

Okay. I think it's safe to move on here.

Self-Upvotes—2

Comment bug got me again. Twice! It's kind of funny though to hear GINAbot ping and then read that I just upvoted myself thinking that it was someone else doing it. I guess I'm still just as excited about notifications now as I was when I first started.

Sigh.

Contests—0.

Didn't do well enough in the Curation and Engagement Leagues to earn any STEEM, and I didn't participate in any other contests. Time to regroup I think.

Flags given/received—0/2

Pretty random as always with the downvoting, although as I recall, these actually hurt reward-wise. That's not happened before, given them the rather dubious distinction of being the first. Now that we've got that out of the way...

Reputation Ranking—65

Still at 65, but the fractional meter moved nearly to half a point, so that was good.

Investment—0

Still no investing, even though STEEM dropped below $0.25 by the end of July. I'm not keen on it bottoming out further, but I believe it will have to for me to invest more, as much as I want to. That, and maybe another paycheck or two.

Token Trading

This is a new category that I don't know I will have every month, but at the end of July, I traded in some tokens for STEEM on STEEM-Engine. Went fairly smoothly, by the way, once I figured it out.

Every time I go there, I find some new coin that the creators airdropped in. These happened to be 500 dporn tokens that ended up being worth 30.881 STEEM. I know, I know. Hold! Hold! Well, I'll probably be selling off some others as I get a chance to go through them.

I promised the total SP through July 31. With the token trade for STEEM, all SP sits at 7,451.352.

SNAX

This is also a new category that I've upgraded from the Miscellaneous section. I'm doing this because it is ongoing and because it gives me a sense of accomplishment, even though SNAX is worth fractions of an EOS, and gets worse each time I look.

I like it because of the way the attention rate is set up and because the SNAX is still in that stage where earnings are much higher than they are on STEEM. Undoubtedly that will come to an end at some point, so I'm going to keep with it for as long as it lasts.

Total SNAX as of July 31 was 132,330.1915. That's not quite 64,000 more added to last month's total. So, I'm closing in on a triple SNAX orca. I know. Woohoo. At least I get some kind of satisfaction out of it. I just need to find a way to be more consistent with posts that people want to resteem, engage with and upvote. I might let you know what that magical formula is if I ever figure it out.

Miscellaneous

I don't have much to say here since I moved some stuff out of this category. August is so far looking up, though there's a lot of posting, commenting and curating to try to do over the next 23 days or so. I'm not counting chickens before they hatch, because that only leads to unmet expectations. So, I'll try to carry on as I have and go from there.

I think I should mention briefly something about the upcoming hardfork, since it is slated to take effect, barring non-consensus by a supermajority of the top witnesses, on Tuesday, August 27. Because it will come late in the month, it's true direct impact, whatever it might be, won't be fully felt until September and beyond. However, indirectly, there could be ripples leading up to it, so it feels like a time of increasing uncertainty from here on in. The best I can do is continue on, and hope that others of you will do the same. The closer we get, the more I just want it to be done with, its positives and negatives to be known, so we can find our way forward.

After 9 PM again...

I'm tired, so it's time to go to bed. Long day tomorrow. Most likely I will have overtime for the week. Still need to get a freewrite post up. Hopefully that happens tomorrow since it didn't happen today.

In re-reading what I wrote last month about life holding serve since work has me limited on STEEM. Just for the record, my grandson going to the hospital for a telescoping intestine is very much an instance of life intervening. I could do without that.

Please.

Onward and upward.

P.S. I want to mention that if you're interested in reading another monthly report, take a look at what @bashadow has going. The latest report can be found here.