Late this spring, we welcomed grandbabies no. four and five

Wow, that's very cool. They must keep you extremely busy!

Once in a great while, a gold nugget or two shows up, but it's a lot of work to find it... and that leaves me mostly engaging with "the same old crowd."

As you probably know, I've created a couple of tools which helps to filter out specific tags, users, etc. and even with this, it's extremely difficult. And still extremely time consuming. If Steemit looked like this when I signed up, it's highly unlikely that I would have persevered, which is a shame because there are some good people... there's just so little being done about the bad to disincentivise people from following the same path. I really don't enjoy feeling this negative about the direction things are taking.

I've not checked, but I strongly suspect the Newcomers' Community's suddenly become more active now that it has got steemcurator support. Which of course, equates to more scam accounts being created because there's no way these newbies could possibly know this. I'm assuming of course!

I don't really understand the TipTag thing, but its creator has applied for DAO funding to expand it further so he obviously believes there's an underlying benefit to STEEM by doing it... (?)

Meanwhile, simply being alive and living in the States feels increasingly like a daily slide back towards the Dark Ages... not very positive.

Nothing surprises me about what happens in the States any more. I was amazed when Trump got elected the first time around and after all of the criminal proceedings, getting a second term says more about the state of American politics than anything else!

But glad to see signs of life from you!

Thank you! I still drop into your blog when I can 🙂