Category Archives: Assignments

Get Your @iamTalkyTina Certification

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Well, opportunities don’t come along every day. Plus, when you can demonstrate your special skills and get a badge for them, then you need to take advantage of that chance.

For a limited time only (it started yesterday, so you had better not already be behind), the Alan Levine (that’s my StillTrueFriend @cogdog, on Twitter) June 2017 30-Day Challenge for The Daily Create allows you to be in the window for getting your @iamTalkyTina Certification.

All you need to do to qualify for the @iamTalkyTina Certification is complete the June 2017 30-Day Challenge by doing all 30 days worth of The Daily Create in June 2017. It’s that simple.  For those of you needing the details, that means all of the ones from #tdc1970 to #tdc1999. Those are all of them.

You can sign up for the @iamTalkyTina Certification process by putting your name in the comments below including your twitter and you will be entered into the watchful gaze. Only peoples who participate within this @iamTalkyTina Certification window remain eligible. I will let you catch up for missed days if you let me know by June 4th.

To help you with this process (and to help ensure you enjoy The Daily Create on a daily basis during June 2017), I have prepared this special printable Do Your The Daily Create Every Day! PDF calendar to print out and put on your bathroom mirror. It will help you remember. Or, if you are good with your cell phone and not just dismissing alerts when you get them, you can subscribe to my special June 2017 30-Day Challenge calendar on Google Calendar.

It even has built-in notifications to remind you twice a day at 9 am and 9 pm, which should still work if you are in a different time zone if you don’t mind getting it a bit later or earlier so just get up earlier or whatever and don’t just forget the notification. (Note: I am not responsible if you don’t charge your phone or if Google breaks, it’s still your responsibility to do The Daily Create, I’m just giving you options to make sure you don’t forget and then be sad later if you don’t get your badge.)

There will be a special @iamTalkyTina Certification page on my website at the end with all of the badges for the people who are certified. Only those badges mean you are #TrueCertified for the @iamTalkyTina Certification. Do not accept fake ones.

Clarification: #TrueCertified is not the same as #TrueFriends, and just because you are a #TrueFriend does not grant you the #TrueCertified.  #TrueFriends is not a prerequisite for #TrueCertified, nor does #TrueCertified grant you #TrueFriends. But if you got #TrueCertified, wouldn’t you want to be a #TrueFriends, too?

Sharing Some Art with Friends

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Well, after all my time with #ds106 and Making Art (including UNCLE @jimgroom ones), I have never had one of my own Art on the #ds106 cover page. So when they said that they hadn’t updated the cover art in a @cogdog‘s age, and that they wanted some nominations for it, I decided that it would be about time that I would do some nominations for it.

So here are some Arts that I made that I nominated by myself. Even if they don’t pick them all today, you can still see how good they are. They have to be 240 pixels wide by 330 pixels tall, so I made them that way, which makes them all smaller than when they were to start.

       

Here are some other Arts that I have made, but they really didn’t work out too well as very small ones, or they were the wrong shape to make into 240 pixels wide by 330 pixels high.

I have always really liked this GIF poster. (Maybe one day I will have a paper one hanging on my wall but the UNCLE @jimgrooms will still be moving.)

“All These Jim Grooms Can’t Be Wrong” animated GIF DS106 Promo Poster by @iamTalkyTina

This is a very nice poster that I made for Prisoner106. But when it goes small it is too hard to read all the good words.

“Summer 2015 Village Festival poster” by iamTalkytina

Plus this was a nice GIF art of UNCLE @jimgroom (see more here):

“Pixellated Groom” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Then there are some nice GIF ones that I made:

“Kaleidoscopic Hyperbolic iamTalkyTina,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

And then there are probably my two all time favourite self-portraits of me that I made.

“Midnight Scrapbooking,” by @iamTalkyTina, on Flickr

And this one of me and my #TrueFriends:

There are lots of other Art that I made, and you can see them all if you read all of my blog posts and look at my Flickr pages.

UNCLE Jim Groom Dances with Chuck Berry, RIP

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“Chuck Berry, RIP, with Dancing Jim Groom,” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, The Daily Create one for today tdc1904 was to “Do your best Chuck Berry, RIP imitation.” So I figured that the best kind would be to make a Dancing Jim Groom one.

So that is what I did.  It is also an Animated GIF Assignment 1001: Dancing Jim All Over the World one, so it is a twofer.

It is a big GIF that is about 3MB which is yuge, but it is okay because it is a commemorative RIP one, plus UNCLE Jim Groom (@jimgroom, on Twitter)!

There WERE Socks, and UNCLE Jim Groom Knew It!

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UNCLE @JimGroom Dancing at the Massive DS106 Socks

UNCLE @JimGroom Dancing at the Massive DS106 Socks

Despite what UNCLE @JimGroom may say, we all know that there WERE socks! And thus, #sockgate.

This is an image taken of UNCLE @JimGroom doing one of his Assignment 1001 Jim Dancing All Over the World times, and as you can see, he is right there where the massive DS106 socks are, and so he knows about them. Plus, it was his idea, too.

If you want to see just a picture of the socks, I put one on my Flickr. And if you go there, it has a link back here to this post where I have the animated GIF one.

Plus, this is for The Daily Create, 1602, which said to show how Massive DS106 is. We all KNOW that it is massive, plus it has MASSIVE SOCKS. And a Dancing UNCLE @JimGroom.

Some of My Shield Maiden Ancestors had Beards

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My #DigitalViking Ancestors were Shield Maidens, image by iamTalkyTina, on Flickr

Well, it was that Amy Burvall (@AmyBurvall, on Twitter) who said about a Thinkerings video tonight on Twitter that she made about #DigitalVikings that had me immediately digging in the family ancestral shoeboxes for relatives that were like that. But first, you should watch it.

Thinkerings, Episode 2: #DigitalVikings, by Amy Buvall

My Ancestral #DigitalViking Shield Maidens

It took me about an hour to find a bunch of their pictures, and then I shared them on my Flickr so that Amy and other #DigitalViking folks could see my pedigree of it.

Other people like Alec Couros (@courosa, on Twitter) were once things like #DigitalSherpas, or people like Don Tapscott said #DigitalNatives, and me (@iamTalkyTina, on Twitter), I always say #DigitalTrueFriends, but tonight Amy was saying #DigitalVikings.

So without any more do, here is an embedded slideshow gallery of it for you to see, with their names.

(photos by iamTalkyTina, on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA)

Plus, I made my current Twitter icon of it, instead of the #western106 one that was there before. I don’t know if #ds106 is going to be a Viking one one day. Maybe there are not too many media for it.

iaTT_DigitalViking

But, also UNCLE Jim Groom (@jimgroom, on Twitter) was also saying about his #RedSonja comic book wallet and Xena: Warrior Princess, and maybe I can get the starring role in the reboot of it if Lucy Lawless doesn’t get it.

Coding in Base DS106 is Where It’s At!

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TDC1500_TT_Base-DS106_600

It was interesting yesterday when The Daily Create tdc1500 said to celebrate 1500 creates in some way, and my patented @iamTalkyTina Handy-Dandy Base-DS106 Secret Decoder Ring had just arrived in the post from Zazzle! It was so easy for me to test out my ring to translate 1500 into Base DS106 and get @jimgroom|@ds106radio.

But then today’s The Daily Create tdc1501 asked for a media representation of the Meaning of Life (which aficionados all know can be simplistically, yet fundamentally represented as 42) but @mdvfunes said that you can’t use 42. So I turned to my handy-dandy, brand-spankin’ new patented @iamTalkyTina Base-DS106 Handy-Dandy Secret Decoder Ring to convert 42 into Base-DS106.

And should there be any surprise?

TDC1501_TT_42-in-Base-DS106

So it is a wonderful thing to be able to use numbers and secret codes and Base-DS106, plus have an @iamTalkyTina Handy-Dandy Base-DS106 Top Secret Decoder Ring of it.

The Good and The Friendly

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"Get Offa My Porch, Clint!" animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina

“Get Offa My Porch, Clint!” animatedGIF by @iamTalkyTina

Well, it was the True Friend who at one time thought that I was the nemesis of him and made mean words at me all the time, but I sorted him out in The Rumble, my True Friend Ben (@techsavvyed) who made an MBS (@mbransons) Animated GIF Assignment #1896 called Get Off My Porch with my good buddy called Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name earlier this evening for #western106 and it caught my attention so I did it too. Because that is how we ride on the range in #ds106.

The assignment as written by Michael provides the source GIF of Clint Eastwood with a nice transparent background. The process to complete the assignment requires that you open the GIF in your photo editor (GIMP or Photoshop), and add your chosen background image below all of the existing GIF layers so that it shows behind each frame. Save the GIF back out as a revised file and you should be done! An easy 3 stars! (Or are they bullets, in #western106?)

Making the GIF File Size Smaller

The transparent GIF provided for this assignment has 105 frames (one is missing!) and weighs in at a paltry 18.9 MB. Actually, that’s huge for a GIF. We need it to be smaller!

Getting your GIF file size down but still looking good is a holdover from before the days of broadband Internet. Back in the original days of 1986/87 when peoples only had like a 2400 baud modem, it took forever to download graphics so CompuServe invented the GIF and you had to make them small. So it’s still a thing.

Some things that I did to make the GIF a bit smaller in file size were:

  • to take out a bunch of the frames
  • to use the same frames moving away from me as I used in looking towards me
  • to make it into a black and white one
  • to make the dimensions of it smaller (to 600 pixels wide, which is good for my WordPress, plus that Tumblr).
  • to fiddle with the GIF settings on the way out of Photoshop (type of, dimensions, dithering percentage, number of colours)

Some things that I did that made the GIF a bit bigger again (but better)

  • to add in the double take, which meant more frames in the GIF but also more story.

In the end, I compromised with a file size of 1.7 MB for a black and white GIF at 600 x 337 pixels with 30 frames.

Clean Up On The Porch

Because I used my favourite personal iconic photo of me called “Midnight Scrapbooking“ as the background, I noticed that there was a white outline around Clint in all of the frames that made it look more fake than it should have. So I used a special Photoshop trick that got rid of a lot of the pixel borders that were white right around the Clint cutouts.

In this GIF you can see how I fixed it to make it look better and not fake. It shows the process as applied to ONE frame in the original Get-Off-My-Porch source GIF.

Removing Outline GIF by @iamTalkyTina

Removing Outline GIF by @iamTalkyTina

FOR EACH FRAME (!!)

  1. Click on the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palate with the Command (Ctrl on PC) key down to make the dancing ants around Clint’s existing self
  2. Use Select >> Modify >> Contract (3 pixels) to make the ants dance in a slightly smaller perimeter
  3. Use Select >> Inverse to select everything OUTSIDE of that slightly decreased perimeter, which is basically the white outline stuff that you don’t want.
  4. Use the eraser over the dancing ants to basically remove all of the pixels outside of the slightly reduced dancing ants perimeter.
  5. Deselect everything and maybe tidy up any little white bits that might still remain, but there weren’t any.
  6. Repeat for each frame that you need to get rid of the outline for (all of the ones that you want to use).

ENJOY!

Wheelin’ that Fortune

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Wheel #4Life

Wheel #4Life

So Vanna was sporting my 2-gallon hat and my shooting irons when she revealed the special answer to the special question that I put on the show for guests in an upcoming episode. It was nice that today’s The Daily Create was worded the way it was, because it was just a special prompt to have today during my visit with her.

You can also see the static version of this picture on my Flickr. But as we all know, the GIF one is normally much better and more fun.

Life is a Wheel by iamTalkyTina, on Flickr

Remixin’ an’ Reincorporatin’ Those Comic Book Heroes

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the-shadow1

The Shadow, by Walter B. Gibson, originated in 1930’s pulp fiction

So I was enjoying The Daily Create for today, tdc1453, which said to make a Lone Ranger meme, and I couldn’t help but noticing how the comic book industry has been remixing characters for years and years.

Come Out of Your Hidey Hole by iamTalkyTina, on Flickr

These thinkings came about because of some of the confusions that might have come up in making a meme when it looks like The Lone Ranger up on his horse on two legs, but the meme generator gives you a picture of Zorro instead. Because if you don’t notice the black Zorro cape, you might think they were the same guy. They both ride a white horse in southwestern desert places and have cowboy hats and gloves. They get  the bad guys. Even if Zorro had a black hat, it was kind of like they were the same guy, just incarnated into a different costume.

ZorroRanger_dogtrax

TDC1453 submission by by @dogtrax

But then I thought deeper, and then I saw a Lucky Luke one (he’s a cartoon), and a Boromir one (or is it from the Boondocks Saints? But I’m still pretty sure it’s Darryl). They didn’t look as much like The Lone Ranger, but they were still either cultivating the Cowboy or The Good Guy Masquerading as a Villain, which seems to be common for heroes.

LukeBoromirShadow_Rangers

@Ronald_2008’s Lucky Luke, @annycow’s Boondocks Boromir Ranger, and a Shadow/Spirit-channelling Lone Ranger found by @mdeHSD

Then I saw one that looked like a drawn Lone Ranger but the blue was darker and the red bandana and mask made him look more like Walter Gibson’s The Shadow (image at the top of this post). Or perhaps more like Will Eiser’s The Spirit.

"The Spirit" -- looks familiar, eh?

“The Spirit” — looks familiar, eh?

Of course, like me, a lot of the Lone Ranger was originally in black and white, but when he did come out in colour, his blue was a fadey-blue colour (like a desert sky) and not so much that rich blue these Spirit/Shadow guys seem to have.

So it can’t be that folks are confusing all these different ones with The Lone Ranger, but maybe thinking more deeply about (cowboy-type) heroes in general.  We can slap a new skin on the same old attributes, but we still recognize the basic hero and what he stands for underneath.

It was interesting reading today to find out that the original Lone Ranger actually had a whole hero philosophy detailed by writer Fran Striker. The actors Clayton Moore (Ranger) and Jay Silverheels (Tonto) extended that thinking beyond their acting and into their real lives, trying to model good stuff for kids, both on the screen and off.

I believe…

  • That to have a friend, a man must be one.
  • That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.
  • That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.
  • In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for what is right.
  • That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.
  • That ‘this government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ shall live always.
  • That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.
  • That sooner or later…somewhere…somehow…we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.
  • That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.
  • In my Creator, my country, my fellow man.

But then @JanWeb3 threw a little wrinkle at us. Not only is this Ranger not a man, but he ain’t carrying no shooting’ guns.

GiveMeLand Ranger by @JanWeb3

GiveMeLand Ranger by @JanWeb3

And then I saw this post circulating on Twitter — and my brain started to go all expanding about how our types of heroes are being challenged these days.

What To Do When You’re Not the Hero Anymore: From Mad Max to Finn, This Year’s Heroes Looked More Like Us by Laurie Penny @pennyred

You should read THAT post and then ponder some.

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Did You Know?

Did you know that the Lone Ranger’s true Ranger name was John Reid, and in some shows he had a nephew called Dan Reid, Jr, and that when Dan Reid, Jr. had kids, one of them became Britt Reid, who turned out to be The Green Hornet (‘truth!) but with Kato instead of Tonto and a Black Beauty instead of a white Silver?  If that isn’t remixing, by the comic book industry, then I don’t know what is.

And let’s not even get started on how the most favourite and most famous superhero of these days times called Batman was coming home from watching a movie of Zorro when his parents were killed which made him into the Batman when he grew up. Plus, it was funny when The Green Hornet and Kato were in Gotham and talked to Batman and Robin when they were doing a Bat-Climb.

BatManHornet_BatClimb

Make some Art, bub! Giddy-up!