I love to read comics so much from a very young age. Due to family finance constraint, I don’t have many privileges to have a mountain of comic books. Even so, give me one or two comic books and I could read them over and over again. From the story to the drawing skills and presentation, everything.

That’s why throughout my whole primary school’s year, drawing artist was the top entry for the ambition list that every kid have to fill in. I didn’t become one til today, but my love towards art creation never fades away.

Steem gives me a reason to pickup my childhood passion, and the new collaboration with @cryptogee somehow fills the gap of my ‘comic artist ambition’ in the other way. I’m grateful to find ways to continue this passion.

This illustration took me unexpectedly long 4~5 hours to finish, thanks to the great amount of detail in the bot. The more I draw the more I realize how much of talent and effort it could take to be a professional artist, much respect to them.

Read the chapter here: Asimov’s Ghost - Chapter 32 - Reclamation Inferno by @cryptogee

这幅作品花了超过预期的时间，大约四五个小时，多亏了器械人的大量细节和我的龟毛心切（画起画来好像都是这样）。

这虽然是为 @cryptogee 的科幻小说而作的插画，但内容描述的正是充满攻击性和周身武器的沙罗曼达战斗机械，和 @angelina6688 的最新绘画比赛主题军事装备不谋而合，干脆就一起投稿吧！就不知道这种充满未来感和现实中并不存在的战斗设备是不是可以算数，就看评审怎么说吧。

有鉴于上篇的创作过程种不小心进入暴走模式，一鼓作气把画画完而忘了定时拍照记录，这次特别提醒自己不可再犯。也因为这次的创作过程比较冗长，中间停笔休息的机会多了，就更不会忘记照相留念了。毕竟看着一张草稿慢慢变成内容丰富的完成品，那种满足感可是足以治疗癌症的啊。

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Read an interview about how the great Warrant Buffet sees the cryptocurrency. He is not buying the idea of investing in Bitcoin obviously, again, for a couple of reasons stated below:

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi

“If you buy something like a farm, an apartment house, or an interest in a business… You can do that on a private basis… And it’s a perfectly satisfactory investment. You look at the investment itself to deliver the return to you. Now, if you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything. You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.”

While generally, I would kind of agree with him on the last sentence as that is how the supply and demand drive up the price. But comparing a house to Bitcoin is like the apple and orange comparison, they are just different.

There is a dozen of ways to make a profit out of a house investment. Rent the unit out to the tenants, create tax-free profit from the mortgage, turn it into a homestay business, and etc. Or you can simply make money the Bitcoin way, buy low sell high. No matter how you buy a broken house, fix it up, invest in some renovation, and sell it out with a brand new price, or just flipping houses on the market.

When it comes to trading, we all are practically hoping the next guy pays more for what we have paid.** The same applies to gold, stocks as well as Bitcoin.

Trading is just a tiny part of Bitcoin

“Now if you ban trading in farms, you can still buy farms and have a perfectly decent investment,” he said, but if trading in bitcoin was banned, people would have no reason to invest.

Bitcoin is not boomed on its fame for merely the explosiveness in profit gaining by trading, though I believe that would be the big part of the reasons Bitcoin became one of the most search keywords in Google.

It is more to offer than that.

Bitcoin is first thing ever created to be the real smart programmable money that happened in 2009 (I heard of it a few times before taking a serious look at it by last year, shame!). It shows the world we can actually have a currency that is not controlled by the centralised entity, which is usually the government.

It was the absolute a fresh breath in the human-dominant world where human is atop of everything. By introducing the decentralised ledger technology(blockchain) and a new way of consensus(proof of work), Bitcoin is the first money that obeys nothing but the code. Code is the only king here, it decides how the coin should behave and takes no order from any traditional authorities.

Comparing to all the fiats available on the planet, Bitcoin is the only currency one can study everything about it by the open information available on the Internet. When was the first block of Bitcoin mined? What is biggest Bitcoin transaction? Which wallet hold the most Bitcoin? Everything is ready for you to dig it out. Now, answer me the question above but replacing the Bitcoin with US Dollar.

Anyone can predict the price of Bitcoin tomorrow or 10 years later, the fact is no one actually knows and we should leave it to the open market. It might drop to zero against the dollar one day. But the Bitcoin itself is not going to anywhere, it remains on the Internet forever, with the finite supply of 21 million. In the ideal world, Bitcoin shall not be compared to fiat for its value, it doesn’t care. It is us, the traders, the speculator, and the people who care most about the price. Bitcoin is like the Internet. The Internet doesn’t care if you use it for charity payment or surfing porn.

It is not appropriate to view Bitcoin as just a trading asset. Look beyond the price, you will fall in love with it.

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Was frustrated about the Steemit just being slow in the loading few minutes ago before everything goes back to normal suddenly. After my first ever Steem meet-up in SG, I was going to make a payment for the drink fee last night to @rockysmarties using SBD (Yay the first time making full use of the mighty Steem/SBD!).

Inputting the recipient and amount to transfer as usual and proceed, then I was surprisingly greeted by the following dialogue:

The long waited Confirmation dialogue I’ve been waited for so long! Paranoid user like me always wondering why Steemit could skip such an important mechanism before carrying out a transfer. The double-checking frequency is always directly proportional to the amount I was going to send before this, characters by characters of the recipient name, digit by digit of the amount column.

Glad I don’t have to do it anymore!

Steemit 就在刚刚加入了一个小而贴心的功能，那就是传送 Steem 或是 SBD 的时候加入了确认的对话框。一直以来纳闷了很久，这么简单必要的汇款流程怎么这么大的一个网站都可以忽略呢。害我以前汇款时都一个字一个字的检查接收方的名字没有拼错，再一个数字一个数字的检查数目没有打错。汇款数额越大，我的检查次数就越多，搞得每次汇款都好像在拆炸弹。现在好了，终于告别这白痴的烦恼！

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For the first time, I’m creating an art drawing not for contesting purpose on Steem. Happy to announce my new collab with @cryptogee for making art illustration for his book. He publishes a science fiction story Asimov's Ghost chapter by chapter where you can have a look on his page. Excited yet feeling new in this collaboration as this is my first time.

I used to make artwork in contests with specific themes, many will focus on the end result of how amazing the drawing skills were used and how beautiful the final work looks. But few appreciating the effort in finding the subject to interpret the theme, to me that is the most important part to settle before lifting the pens.

This artwork was made with my recent favorite art tool, the Copic markers. I have many black and grey color set in hand which coincidentally match with @cryptogee book’s theme – dark and something technopunk.

这是首次在 Steem 上作画而不是为了参加比赛。很开心的宣布这是首次我和 @crytpogee 的一次在创作上的合作。他在自己的主页上定时连载了科幻小说《Asimov’s Ghost》，有兴趣的可以去支持下。

合作的模式就是他根据每个章节的内容给我点指示，然后我在画出来交差，他就会连画和那个章节一起发布。

这幅作品依然是由我近来最爱的 Copic 马克笔所创造。Copic 名下的颜色系列实在是太过庞大（300+色）而且很贵，我的手上主要拥有调色为主的黑色灰色系列，凑巧的和 @cryptogee 要求的黑暗庞克风格不谋而合。

If you have followed my previous making-of post for artwork creation, I used to take pictures of the progress at quite a constant interval. Not this time as you can see, from sketch straight to the final product.

Not because I changed the style of recording progress, but simply because I was so into it that I forgot to take a break and take pictures…

Maybe this is an indicator telling me that I should do more of it?

值得一提的是，有留意过我以往的作品的朋友应该都会发现，我习惯性的会在固定的间隔记录当前进度，而这次只有第一张的草稿，接下来就直接跳成品了。

不是因为改变风格，而是一画起来就忘了，直到画完才发现。哈哈，也许说明了我很享受这次的创作过程？

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Minnowbooster has recently released the Community Whitelist program to reduce the abuse of spam content promoting. Only the whitelisted members are eligible to buy high volume of vote from @minnowbooster would be the great solution of letting everyone accessing to the high SP of voting bots.

Whitelist was is the exclusive feature of Smartsteem

@smartsteem is one of the top vote-selling services now with more than 4000 delegators hosted by @therealwolf. I was very fascinated the team’s vision to maintain the cleanliness of the Steem platform by introducing the Smart star whitelisting system. Moderators from the Smartsteem team review applications from the public, approving or rejecting base on the quality of the author. Upon approval, whitelisted authors will be assigned from 1 star to maximum 3 star rating. The higher the rating the higher vote one can buy from the service.

Minnowbooster however, follows the initiative of Smartsteem introducing the whitelist system. The difference is the process is more decentralised. There is no application but invitation. Whitelisted members get to vote on invited users, upon getting 3 votes one admin will be able to approve the whitelist user. There are more benefits to be a whitelisted member of than bigger votes capacity, read the original post for more insight.

Which is the better service to buy votes?

Assuming you are whitelisted in both service, Minnowbooster is going to be the superior choice now.

Smartsteem was my favourite for their high and steady availability of votes capacity. However, due to last price spiking of Steem from $1.5, the demand for vote buying from Smartsteem surged as well. To maintain vote supply, the team has decided to reduce the vote-buying ROI to the range of 180% and 210%.

Minnowbooster on the other hand, was always in the shortage of vote supply and that was the reason I decided to look for alternative and found Smartsteem. Somehow their vote supply is becoming steady lately and after a several vote-buying from the Minnowbooster, I found out the ROI could be around 220% and 240%.

For the same 1 SDB, Smartsteem would give you a vote at maximum $2.2 vs $2.4 from the Minnowbooster. I’d definitely go for Minnnowbooster unless things changed.

Minnowbooster 比 Smartsteem 更适合买赞，前者的回报高达 220% ~ 240% 而后者则是180% ~ 210% 。

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Set up an overhead camera rig last week, now the recording process is much more standardized and smoother than before. The action camera was mounted by just hanging the Joby tripod from the PVC which act as the biggest pain now. The grip is not fixed and always needed to be adjusted for each setup.

To solve this problem, something more stable has to replace the flexible tripod for this setup. Bought a rotatable action camera mount for bicycle and a connector using 1/4 adapter.

The best thing is this bicycle mounter rotating in fixed angle so I can certainly be surethat the camera angle is always directly proportional to the rig and the artwork underneath. Money well spent!

把之前的设置升级，把原本的八爪鱼三角架换成了更稳定的固定式支架，主要是因为之前使用三脚架挂在 PVC 上虽然可行，但总不稳定的左右摇摆，每次设定还需要折腾一遍重新挂上去。

这种固定支架适用于单车上的运动相机安装，但是用在这里很明显的也是非常合适。以后就不用头痛的老是要设定千变万化的三角架啦。

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