Gratitude to @kaylinart, welcome to new followers, and maturing as a community member

Well, first let me say "Wow" and "Thank you." I think that yesterday or the day before I was sitting around 450 followers. Today I'm at 527. That's a huge leap in just two days. There are tons of new people joining steemit these days looking for content providers to learn from and grow with. I guess I timed that pretty well with leaving my current job because I've had some time to write over the past two weeks. But what was the lion's share of the growth?

@kaylinart being a rockstar and sharing my post about her format

Man, I'm so grateful. She totally hooked me up. Many people could have taken teasing out the format of her posts as an affront to what they do, but @kaylinart was totally cool about it. She resteemed it. I've had a post resteemed 6-7 times before, but I think that post had the largest reach of anything I've written on here simply because her following is so YUGE. Anyway, a big heartfelt thanks to her.

Unintended consequences

A couple of things changed for me because of her sharing that post and her audience deciding to follow me.

1. I feel I have more of an obligation to not be an ass. I can be an ass and the audience that's come here on their own I think will get it because they've seen me be obnoxious before and get it's part of the schtick. However, now that I have some of @kaylinart 's folks in here I actually feel a sense of responsibility not to hit them with a shock treatment. I feel really honored that so many folks came on board, I see a different kind of financial picture because of it and I don't want to disrupt either. So, here's a little pledge from me. I'll work harder not to be an ass. I'll still cover topics that will make some folks feel weird about the world around them, but I'll make an effort for less shock and awe and more of friendly assistance to a see a different world view that may not have been previously available to them.

2. There's a lot of new people around here that weren't here before. Hi, I'm aggroed. I'm a PhD scientist. I work in higher education. I am married. I have 2 kids. I've been married since I was 23. I'm now in my late thirties. I'm a proud conspiracy theorist. I prefer the term truther because conspiracy theorist is derogatory. At the very least when I look at the score board and see 8 people have as much wealth as 3.5 billion other people I know the game is rigged. I'm going to talk about these things. And you'll see them, most frequently in my meme the news posts. So, before you allow yourself to really feel anything about these posts please just try to take a deep breath, see what you see, and give it a day to see where it fits into your world view.

I believe politics are rigged.
economics are rigged.
elections are rigged.
the federal reserve is bad.
free energy devices are real.
I believe the media lies constantly.
I believe most of American foreign policy is a form of outright violence.
I'm pretty sure aliens exist, but I'm still just holding that space as opposed to dedicated to it.
I'm a man of deep faith (reiki master), but not much of one for organized religion and doctrine.
I believe in peace, abundance, and liberty.
The freakiest phenomenon going though is the Mandela Effect, and I'll mention that from time to time.

Time to grow/level up

Part of this experience too has been picking on the founders for 2 central decisions that I really dislike. The flagging system is being abused now. It's a form of censorship and I'm not a fan. The other is the distribution of steem. I really like this platform other than those two aspects. There's lot of pretty amazing things happening as a result. That said, my plan is to still criticize these things, but try to be a little more professional than I've been in the past. Hopefully, I'll keep things more on the constructive side than not.

So, there ya' go! @kaylinart thank you! New followers: "hello and welcome." To the community at large I'll try to be better.