From Brezhnev Time to Web 3.0. My Belated Introduction Post

First of all, I want to mention that I have no photos of my childhood since they were left in my hometown being torn by war and we never had them again so probably they were destroyed by the mold or marauders. Luckily, I have found great images of the city of Sukhumi published on Flickr by Jelger Groeneveld.

CHILDHOOD

^{Sukhumi - Jelger Groeneveld / Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially}

We, a family of the four - mom, dad, and two boys - lived in a rented old house on the top of a seaside mountain. It was in the 1980s, the country called the USSR. The house was so old that it was falling apart. We lived a humble life but we had everything we needed (except water supply and central heating). This was in Georgia, known as the most prosperous republic of the Soviet Union, the most subtropical, the most hospitable, and one of the most corrupted too.

My father was (and is) an artist, a painter, and he used to earn money by creating handmade jewelry as well. He and his colleges were supposed to go to jail for entrepreneurship (the Communist Party didn't favour private commercial activity) but corruption saved our family - an official from Moscow was treated well by locals and the issue was happily solved.

^{Sukhumi - Jelger Groeneveld / Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license}

We had a beautiful garden with plenty of fruits: mandarines, figs, mulberries, grape, peaches, pears, cherries. Through the trees, we could see a pier and could hear hum of arriving cruise ships - our city was a center of Soviet tourism.

In a distance, on the next mountain's slope, there was a fenced area where a large group of monkeys lived outdoors and we always knew when there was a quarrel in the pack.

^{Sukhumi - Jelger Groeneveld / Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license}

There was a scientific research institute in that place too. In Stalin time, they wanted to create a hybrid of the gorilla and the human. Nobody knew for sure what had happened but the work was canceled.

A few minutes away from our house, there was an abandoned botanical garden. I used to wander there since I was a small boy in search of beautiful plants to re-grow them in my garden. During such hikes, I walked along these stairs too:

^{Sukhumi - Jelger Groeneveld / Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license}

I was a big fan of gardening. I planted my first tree when I was six. It was a tiny boxwood that I dug up during the family trip to the mountains.

Another hobby of mine was creating a plasticine civilization. Space ships were the main subjects of pride. One of them even had a bathroom with a toilet bowl (while we had no such device in our house). I sculpted streets, shops, art galleries, farms, mines, I created an alphabet for this race and kept the chronicle for several years.

I had a collection of post stamps and my goal was to collect at least one from each country of the world which was additionally difficult because the USSR was a closed country. Fortunately, we had a club where, on Saturdays, sailors used to sell stamps that they bought in their overseas voyages. At least, children had this talk.

BEFORE WEB

The idyll was over when the big country fell apart and the war came in the region where we lived. We, turned into refugees, appeared in a big cold city called St. Petersburg, Russia in 1992.

There were several years when we just wanted to come back home. It would be hard to tell about these years. There was too much bitterness at that time so I can't talk about that period without anger which wouldn't fit the introduction post.

I went to school and lived in dreams. I used to grow potted plants, draw, paint, sculpt from plasticine, of course. In a newspaper, I found foreign people searching penpals to exchange post stamps. My English was very poor but I did my best. I correspond with people from the Netherlands, Croatia, Ghana.

^{People from abroad in search of penpals: newspaper clippings I kept in my stamp album. Iz ruk v ruki, closed in 2014. An ad in Russian belongs to an 18-year-old Scottish girl who was learning Russian. Today, she is around 45.}

I was 16 years old at that time, I was very childish for that age while some of my classmates already drank beer and one of them even sniffed glue! 😁

^{Fallen kings and empires. As if Game of Thrones minted NFTs... Some samples from the collection of my teenagerhood}

I used to visit old book stores in search of geographical maps. The time was great for that: it was the time of poverty, people were selling things.

We were poor too but I had some pocket money thanks to my father who used to sell his painting to Germans for inflation-protected money, the Deutsche Mark. At that time, I bought a huge atlas of 1881 and a row of century-old maps, guidebooks, postcards.

^{Andree's Hand Atlas, the 1st edition, 1881}

^{The Balkans in Andree's Hand Atlas, borders before two Balkan wars and two world wars...}

I got my first photo camera then - not more than a piece of plastic, actually. Poor papa, he paid a lot for camera rolls - I always pulled his sleeve asking more.

^{A snapshot by my aunt, I love the composition 😁 This boy is me, 17-year-old, with my cousins in Crimea}

At the end of the 1990s, I entered a university and my refugeehood psychology started melting. I found friends, I used to join them for hiking in local boreal forests as well as drinking parties. I tried weed and eventually started “therapy” with magic mushrooms. Slowly but surely I was being cured from being a refugee boy.

At university, I was the guy who used to take images at events and, then, had a line of students wanting to get my images. I never tried to earn, I only asked to pay what I spent for printing.

^{My image of my friends during a boat trip at Lake Ladoga, Russia}

Father agreed that a computer was an important thing in 2001 (it was late in Russia) so, at last, we got the first machine shared by the whole family.

Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Fallout followed.

WEB 2.0 - DIGITAL NOMAD

Instead of doing the career after the university, I entered the space of professional weightlessness. I tried this and that, I worked at a factory and at an office, and I kept being a dreamer: I wrote fiction stories and lyrics, I kept taking images. I joined an online forum in 2003 and, then, started my first blog in 2005. In 2008 (or so), I signed up on Couchsurfing and started hosting guests from abroad. My bad English got a serious boost.

I learn the basics of HTML/CSS and created my first website. Step by step, I started earning money as a freelance web developer, SEO specialist, content writer. In 2010, I had enough passive income from my own websites for starting traveling with this money.

My largest website was about traveling, za7gorami.ru (on Drupal). In this screenshot, you can see a part of its forum, hundreds of pages, and thousands of comments created by its users.

^{My favorite Georgian dish, satsivi, chicken in a spicy sauce made of walnut. My mom's recipe. The image was taken in 2010 for my cooking blog.}

My second biggest website was a cooking blog www.ehau.ru.

I used to have more than 1.000.000 visitors on these two sites yearly.

Thanks to the income from Google Adsense, affiliate programs, etc, I turned into a traveling blogger in 2010. Georgia was my number one in the list of travel destinations. As a solo backpacker, I visited countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey (including marvelous Turkish Kurdistan) and, after getting enough bold, I bought a ticket to Bangkok in 2011. Alone, right into the midst of hot and spicy Asia (mom worried much, of course).

^{Me at a hostel in Penang Island, Malaysia in 2012}

Since that time I have spent years in hostels, guesthouses, and homestays in Thailand, India, China, Vietnam, Nepal, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos.

India became my love, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City turned into my second home.

^{Krabi Province, my favourite destination in Thailand}

In 2019, I lived in an interesting apartment in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. I found that place on Couchsurfing. A Lithuanian guy allowed anybody from Couchsurfing to live at his place for as many days as they wanted. There were usually 20+ people at the same time sleeping on the floor and in chairs. I lived 16 days there and this was where I was told about Steemit. I posted several single images with tiny captions then and saw no feedback so I left the platform.

In 2016-2019, individual travel blogging was turning more competitive, too many players came, too many travel companies and large internet platforms started doing this business. Meanwhile, I was growing portfolios on photo stocks.

^{Images from my portfolio on Alamy}

Things were going slow but they were moving up. I had earnings that allowed me to keep traveling. My images have been purchased and published by Lonely Planet guides, The Telegraph, Business Insider, BBC Wildlife, National Geo Traveller, etc.

^{My photo (left top) published in BBC Wildlife Magazine (link)}

^{My image published in National Geographic UK (link)}

^{My image in Vogue, Japan (link)}

Then, the pandemic came. It reduced the demand for travel photography while the largest player of the industry, Shutterstock, decreased payments in the midst of the pandemic.

Just when you think Shutterstock couldn’t completely and utterly screw the contributors more you’ve gone and done it - dpreview.com

WEB 3.0 - INCEPTION

^{I am 42. In St. Petersburg, Russia, 2021. Image by @qwerrie, usage permission received :)}

In spring 2021, I still had a small income from my websites and photography but I knew that all had done in the past was the way to nowhere. This was the very bottom of my life. Locked in the city without my regular lifestyle - traveling, with no money, with no future.

That moment, I decided to learn crypto from scratch. (Although I was sure it was too late to start.)

I signed up on Binance and deposited 60$ for getting the first experience. As the result:

• I lost money by buying and selling random coins at random moments.
• I raised money with Dogecoin growing from 0.3 to 0.6.
• And then I lost money with fallen Doge 😄
• I didn't hold Doge and sold it at 0.4+. And this was one of the smartest financial things I did: Doge has never approached this number since then 😁

Around that time, I recollected that I had an account on some blockchain website... Steamed? Steamet?... Steemit!!

I started writing posts there and, at last, I was discovered by good people from WoX community.

Around that time, I heard a story about the fork and that most Steemians left to Hive.

I searched Hive on google and found uHIVE app thinking, for a while, that it was the place. I ended up getting several thousands HVE2 token there. 😁 I staked them then. I will have 7000 HVE2 next year. 🙂

On Hive.Blog, I signed up on July 16, 2021 with a brand-new web-3.0 nickname of mine - @x-rain. I love it! I was choosing it for ages, some friends were helping me as well...

Stick with x-rain. Honestly, this name is original... It can even stimulate ideas for sci-fi stories and photography... Just wait and see... - Toni on Facebook.

And this scrupulousness was 100% justified, I believe.

After I created the Hive acc, I powered up 51 HIVE that I bought for 0.31$. It looked expensive at that time.

^{The investment has turned to be reasonable}

But I never posted until September.

On Steemit, meanwhile, I was discovering the darker side of the place. I don't want to cover details but my frustration with how the platform was managed was growing. I had the depressing feeling that the ship was heading in the direction of the wreck.

Currently, I am powering down on Steemit. I have invested my first portion of STEEM in MANA and SAND. The fiat value of the investment has significantly risen since then.

A good investment at a time when the market as a whole is falling. It probably means I learned something in 2021 thanks to the fails in crypto trading I experienced this year.

^{My avatar at HiveFest 2021. #22 in the Meeting Contest, 10 BEER received :) I think this is not bad for a newbie :)}

Hope the best times are coming... Thank you for stopping by! 🙂

@lovesniper 😉

Best regards,
@x-rain

All images were taken by me except those under which another author is indicated.