Being nominated for that 7 day B&W challenge seemed to set a precedent, and I have two more nominated posts to work on. This one came first and I feel this is a pretty cool idea so I'm going with it.

You can see full details here including a potential SBD reward if you put your post in the comments section, use the #my2017top5 tag, like and resteem the post!

Typically, your posts have anywhere between a few minutes and 12 hours before it'll never get read again. If in trending, this could be a few days. After that you can forget it. But we've all written stuff we're proud of or at least wish more people at least heard about, so this is a good opportunity for me and others to bring some posts back from the dead, albeit briefly.

Since I started Steemit in 2017, I had to go all the way to the beginning of my career here, but I already knew which ones I was gonna select. So here are my top 5 posts of 2017:

1. China: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Before I really knew what I was doing, I had a ton of stuff in my head I wanted to put on paper somewhere and Steemit was that place. I started a 5-part series about why China sucks, basically, and countered it with a few episodes on why china is good, too.

I went pretty overboard, with each of the 5 parts hitting something like 2,500 words. But they weren't me bitching and whining - no, my life in China is actually quite nice. These were essays about the majority of China we don't really learn about or see, how the government says one thing, but the evidence says the complete contrary.

For example, the Government and by extension, the people who listen to the government, say that 700 million people have been 'lifted out of poverty' over the last few years, to the mass applause of the global community. What the evidence provides however, is that China simply lowered the threshold of what it means to be in poverty according to global standards, and lifted 700 million people from earning under $1.90 a day to earning over $1.90 a day, which for many people was basically $1.91.

GREAT JOB CHINA! You get the idea. I genuinely think the series is incredibly eye opening, though a big read.

Check out part 1 here

2. Pedophiles

I started on Steemit with the intention of having controversial opinions on everything, but it wasn't really where my passion laid, and i was trying too hard to find an image. This post was the result of that, and I like it mostly because of the angry person below trying to send me to hell in the comments for my opinion - that pedophiles aren't necessarily criminals and should be seen as people who need help, not people who need to be hanged.

Interestingly checking back on their channel 8 months later, all their posts are getting flagged for being a massively bigoted racist, to no surprise.

Check it out!

3. Abandoned Shoes of Nepal

One of the moments in my life that'll stick with me forever is the month I spent in Nepal, and during that time I noticed a lot of sad, lonely shoes. So why not give them some appreciation on a more global scale? As dull as it sounds, I really feel the shoes (complemented by my lovely narration of each photo) provide a real feeling to life and culture there, high up in the Annapurna mountain range, as if they hold secret stories to the people who left them there, never to be seen or known about.

Check them out here

4. Underappreciated Camels

This was one of, or maybe the first in my Surviving the Extremes series, and honestly, I learnt a sh*t ton from doing the research into how incredible these animals actually are. From way back in school we already learn that they're amazingly adapted to their desert environment but what you learn in school is not even the tip of the sand dune, so to speak. Literally every little nuance of their physique is acutely tuned to their surroundings in ways you can't even take a wild guess at. It's a big post, but definitely worth the read.

Check it out here

5. Space & Exoplanet series

It's really too hard to pick just 5, so I have to cheat a little and go with the whole space series that I did, often working with infrequent Steemian @georgeboya. Here I've provided the review post I did covering pretty much everything up to that point.

Subjects include:

• Water Worlds and their potential for life
• Eyeball Earths, that simply put are tidally locked to their sun like the moon is to Earth, creating one super-hot side and one super-cold side, and a thin ring of potentially temperate, life-sustaining land in the middle.
• Extreme Exoplanets, where I look at the nastiest, most hellish places ever discovered like, say, a planet that rains shards of glass in 8,700km/h winds around the entire globe...
• The Genesis Planet, the oldest known planet to date at 13 billion years of age
• Unexpected Star Systems, where there are known or at least possible systems of up to 7 stars in a single solar system, double planets,
• Defining planets, where I point out how it's not actually that easy to answer 'What is a planet', and how doughnut-shaped planets are, technically, possible
• How to Find Exoplanets, where I look at the numerous brilliant techniques we use to see such dim-lit things so far away
• What Planets Look Like, a continuation of the previous point, but looking at colours and gases and again, potential for life
• Double planets, where two planets rotate around each other kind of like the Earth and Moon, but how they could be so close that they even exchange atmosphere and water between them (double planets have been observed, albeit not in such detail
• Planets bigger than stars where we do indeed break down the definition of planet even more, to find planets that are... bigger than stars.

Check them ALL out here

Cripes, I've been busy. And to think all those posts have been long, long forgotten!

With that in mind, I'd like to nominate others to bring back some rotting posts for us all to enjoy.

@saywha, @suesa, @trumpman (because he keeps nominating me with junk), @acidyo and @zest, you guys are up next ^__^