Hi everyone, since it's been a while, wanted to give a few updates about what has been going on in my world.
I've been in Taiwan for quite a while now, in one of the few places still keeping a solid lid on Covid. And you wouldn't know about it either since nobody seems to be covering how well Taiwan is doing in this regard. Yes, everything is very normal, nothing is locked down, and people just wear masks. With strict quarantine rules and enforcement, comprehensive contract tracing and general compliance with masking rules, and with rising vaccination rates, there are several layers of defense against the spread of covid. I think I'll stay here for a bit longer. Oddly, I've been here so long and am only now starting to meet new people (any hive folks here?), which has been interesting. Also taking care of our new baby girl which is exhausting and wonderful.
The hive life for me has mostly been focused on maintenance of Hive Engine. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride but there are quite a few infrastructure improvements:
- Many fixes improving hive engine node consensus, tools to detect divergence quickly, various contract bug fixes (imagine putting out such a fire with a crying baby in one hand haha)
- Having to spin up a new comments contract indexer when the entire machine just disappeared without warning (FUN....... at least now we have two of these running)
- New fixes and features in the comments contract such as disabling downvotes, muting, an "app beneficiary tax" (changes in review), tag exclusion (changes in review)
- Changes to hive engine account history that will plug in gaps on token and nft transfer reporting (changes in review)
I think there's a lot more but that's all I'll list for now. Things have been pretty stable lately which is good, thank goodness and knock on wood.
I did end up getting a single hive punk 
which I put on the market for a ridiculous price.
Oh, and I've been dabbling in Splinterlands now, jumping in on a few chaos legion packs, and it's all quite fun, helpful also that I held onto cards from long ago. Lets me consistently get to Gold III by end of a season. There's been so many improvements to the game also, and have been finding it pretty fun to play as well.
So .... How are you all? Happy holidays as well! I missing any new hive-y things?