I don't have much to write about today,
if you're looking for entertainment.
I take pride, in things. I care about the things I do.
I had said I was taking a break, which is still something I plan on doing, when the time is right. So I relaxed for one day, then came back with a couple of posts I'm quite proud of. I'm nearing the 800th published post milestone, if there is such a thing, and majority of those posts, I'm happy with.
When I first started here,
September 2016, I was feeling out of place.
I had noticed a lot of the artists around at the time were of the physical type. I am a digital artist.
I had noticed a lot of those artists were receiving a ton of praise for their contributions. The photos they shared of their work were quite good, and so was the work within the frozen state of time.
Being quite new, but still talented, I was wondering why many of the artists from back then weren't paying much attention to me. They all seemed to stick together and I wanted to be a part of this art scene but many wouldn't even speak to me.
On a hunch,
I wrote a post.
"Is digital art cheating?" A few of my early followers insisted it wasn't. Something said that stuck with me from long before I showed up here was a line similar to, "Are you cheating when you use a keyboard to write that, instead of a pen?"
Thank you, Jacinda.
Well, of course I'm not cheating by using a keyboard to say these words, instead of a pen.
One of the members of the art clique at the time did come and say, "We don't know if you're just pushing a button, or if you're actually creating these images."
That member also added in a few more words that kind of sounded like they thought the physical art was superior and digital art was trashy. I left that conversation feeling as if they thought it was impossible for a digital artist to have as much talent as them.
And don't even get me started on how I was treated by that woman in Edmonton.
Unsurprisingly, even the first photographers, when the technology was new, faced the same set of problems. Music introduced new technology and those musicians using it faced the same set of problems. Cryptocurrency! How many times have you heard Bitcoin is the only real cryptocurrency?
Too many times.
For the record: I respect all artists, no matter what they use, or how they use it.
There are some cheaters out there though!
And it's because of those cheaters, artists like me have to put up with some bullshit.
I was out browsing the 'new' feed within the Creative Coin tribe last night.
When it comes to digital art, a true "cheater" will apply a simple push button filter to a photograph they downloaded off the internet somewhere, and then claim they either painted or drew the image presented, digitally.
To the untrained eye and the gullible curator, their work seems legit and worth an upvote. To someone like me, or anyone else in the know, the left eyelid begins to twitch, steam starts blowing out the face holes, and many curse words come to mind!
I've caught MANY art frauds in my day,
here on the STEEM blockchain.
It was bad enough on Steemit when some no talent hack would produce junk and then bury the rest of the true talent around here with their paid votes.
Now we have tribes. Now there's organization. Spammers get muted. Folks attempting to bury their colleagues with paid votes don't stand a chance. Now anyone with actual talent has an opportunity to shine, once again, like the old days on Steemit, the way it should be.
Being able to earn and purchase tokens again that I can stake so I can have a say, without that investment and effort
being interfered with, by people being paid to look away, is genius.
And that makes me hard!
Until I see junk like this trying to weasel its way in:
https://steemit.com/art/@hokkaido/apictureofthelandscapeidrew8132019-9k3lycgjk2
https://steemit.com/steempress/@steemizm/idrewacatillustration8112019-v0jxo8ud4u
https://steemit.com/art/@vote-transfer/digitalartworkoilpainting8132019-xln7jmixx7
Frikkin' art frauds,
these days.
That's why we can't have nice things!
When you have a moment, look at those links, study the fake "art," and read my comments. You damn right I downvoted them and I'm happy to see those accounts muted from the Creative Coin tribe.
You worked your ass off producing that art or song. Processing and editing real photography is not easy. You spent hours writing and formatting your post. Why should some asshole be allowed to come and spam away with their art fraud on multiple accounts, while your actual talent and hard work gets buried by this madness?
Not happening!
At least not on my watch.
I'm no different than you. I want my stuff seen and appreciated. I want to work within a professional atmosphere. I want to be surrounded by folks who take just as much if not more pride in their work and workplace than I do.
I won't tolerate the shittiest employees dipping into the cash register and pretending to be employee of the month, while everyone else is busy trying their best and actually doing a great job. I don't want to have to sift through a trash bin just to find the good stuff.
Anyway.
Obviously I need to calm the fuck down.
I made this:
It doesn't look like much,
until you see everything that's there.
Producing something like that makes my brain sizzle.
You should be able to see how the top portion and bottom portion appear to be different; but when the image is flipped over, nothing changes.
I placed faces and beings within faces and beings.
What you might be seeing is there, but not really. I'm a huge fan of pareidolia so I often incorporate the possibility of people seeing things into my work.
Good enough!
I'm calling it a post.
I like the bottom guys. Well, the top guy of the bottom guys kind of looks like he is gouging the bottom-most guy's eyes out, but the bottom-most guy has that really fuzzy chin like my dog, so I kind of want to cuddle him. I never expected you to make cuddly art, but here we are.
I was expecting that art link you put up there to be a better effort. That is really obviously just a filter, and it must be obvious to anyone that has owned a cell phone in the last five years. It's great that you are out there patrolling. I recall when that guy stole a bunch of my posts @eveuncovered came to my rescue. She's my hero.
It's not that cuddly. I mean, there's a baby duckling type thing sitting inside of the top dog's mouth. Then, for some strange reason, in the parallel universe, that duckling is some kind of pirate throwing up gang signs.
Is that seriously the same shit head who snatched your stuff?
And yes, that guy is an idiot for saying he "painted" and "drew" those images digitally. Those filters are some of the most common out there. Why spend so much time, using multiple accounts, to attempt to dupe people, when one could literally spend far less time on an actual post that isn't a scam...
I'll never be able to understand this.
No, not the same guy. He is long gone I'm sure. It just made me think of that, and I'm glad that you are out there taking care of things.
A baby duckling sitting inside the dog's mouth, and not eaten - totally cuddly ;)
Th Pug was cute!
Oh, they are all the same person - what a surprise!
Yeah! Until he ruined it with that filter...
I have a question. I see your CCC vote coming in super early. First second. Is there no waiting period to drop votes within these tribes? I'm still trying to hit 15 minutes... but usually I come in an hour late.
Lol, is it? :D I will try to adjust it. it should have been at 12 minutes-ish :D
That's what I thought. Yeah, you should probably fix that.
BTW, I only have the autos set on a couple people I like, the rest it just trails my vote when I vote manually. I have never been much of a fan of autovoters but I don't have the time to manage accounts across tribes etc and this way I can run the baby at a half and half system. When you see my vote on your post, that is me directly as I don't auto, the baby might come in earlier though.
I figured that out. Since the tribes came onto the scene, I noticed quite a few had to set up some automation for their alt accounts. I've always said I don't mind people using automation, I just hope they come and look, eventually, and many do.
I still only have one account. 26415 manual votes I've handed out. Not bad considering out of the nearly three years I've been here, the account was only active for 2 years.
Yep, they were all reset to 0 for who knows how long :D
I use steemauto as it is simple for my my basic mind, obviously still too complicated.
I think some of them have different waiting times
Really different seeing your artwork on a phone. Good catch on the crap. Maybe more later, I hate phone typing.
I hate smart phones. They make me feel dumb. A lot of the images I produce are designed to be pixel perfect with most newer home screens. This one, you'd have to turn the screen, but on a phone, it should fit in nicely. I use my television as a picture frame quite often. In the future, most picture frames will be electronic.
Indeed. Have a filtered photo:
No painting was involved in the making of this painting.
Oh dear...
What's interesting though, is the fact a photographer can take one or two photos, apply many different filters, call them examples and make one hell of a solid post, provided they actually write and explain what's happening. Just pushing the button and saying 'I made this!' is something a child would do.
In the top image, I like that it's a big face but also a little sitting creature, and that's just the first glance.
The bottom has its own sitting creature as well. Making a reflection look like something else is frikkin' hard. Adding too much detail makes the other side look screwy. I've done it before with colors but that makes it even more difficult.
Thanks for pointing the plagiarizers out. There were a few more cats that I zeroed out rewards for. Let me know if you need reinforcements!
> "Folks attempting to bury their colleagues with paid votes don't stand a chance."
Love this characterization. Some would call it 'advertising'.
Great art as usual, It's a shame it has to compete with that POS lier!
That's not advertising. They made a huge mistake calling it that, but I think just needed an excuse for that behavior. The tribes have slots one can purchase. That's advertising. It doesn't push anyone else away. Now, hopefully people learn, they can throw their best post links into a post, and market themselves and their work, instead of turning their actual work into paid programming. Create an actual advertisement.
I agree with you there, it's a manipulation of the reward mechanism and deceptive. I'm not sure why the front ends don't offer a competing solution, maybe they are scared of all that concentred SP--yet another reason they should not exist.
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This vote was doubled. Half of it for the art and the other half for the epic rant.
I still believe there is a time and a place for post promotion. But not with shit like that. :)
Anyway, have a good evening Thanks for creating art for CreativeCoin.
Yeah, I agree, and can't wait to see more curators step up to do post promotion after the hardfork. The tribes have purchasable slots, so that helps and I'm certain at some point I'll buy one if I ever feel like writing a promotion.
What's interesting is that, in time, these tribes will be dying for talent and it'll be them reaching out, offering contracts to producers, and paying. That's a true promoter. Someone that wants talent to work in their venue, to secure a cut of profits. Steemit's system, that has nothing to do with STEEM, is just a joke that appeals to amateurs. I saw one young lady the other day buy votes for a selfie and a paragraph. It must suck to be that person. Buying likes, pretending to be popular, on a blockchain, where everyone can see. Oh well.
Oops. Rambling again. You have a good evening as well!
You can push buttons and guide a mouse in such a delicate and inspired way that the resulting effect is nothing less than art.
It's no different than pushing a pencil around. I've used pencils before. I know how it is.
Thanks again for all the help you are doing with finding those on the platform that are trying to devalue the work of others.
It's my pleasure. It's best to catch it early and act swiftly. We all know where it leads if nothing is done. I also see newer members emulate those low effort posts, thinking that's what we do here, since there was so much of that junk going around. Embrace the quality stuff, make that more visible, expect to see more quality. At least, I hope that's how it works.
My last post got whacked by @notcreative but it was a modification of my own original photo. I added some effects to it and ran it through a filter. I thought it turned out nice but whatever. I wanted to combine it with some tips on trading so the point was more to illustrate a pot of gold under a rainbow to give some feeling to the trading tips.
I don't know, I felt like it was a creative use of tools to add some interest to the post, but I can take a hint LEO is probably a better fit for what I like to post.
Everything has, or will have a home eventually. I've noticed a few folks writing news or informational articles, then throwing in maybe a few photos, and slapping on the creativecoin tag. It doesn't make sense. How can I take news seriously if the author is saying they're making it up/bullshitting the moment they apply that creative tag. Authors need to learn how to target specific audiences. I could easily write a few sports stories but I'd never include my artwork in those, because I wouldn't expect to see my style of artwork if I opened up a sports magazine. If I made it a humorous sports article and then made a sports related comic or something, then I could get away with both.
In general though, many of the "combination" posts I see don't deliver much of a message. It just looks like people are trying to stack tokens with simple posts that aren't worth much.
My post here is an article about art, some of my experience here as an artist, and it includes new artwork as well as a that snazzy looking cover image that was also made just for this post. I see no reason to add something like the SteemLeo tag to it, though I did mention investment opinions. I just feel most of that audiences wouldn't have enjoyed most of this post.
When it comes to editing photos that are yours, you would never try to pass them off as paintings? Correct? That's what that scammer did wrong. Editing photos is an artform these days, and if the producer is being honest, it's easier to reward. Those posts in the links provided though are total shit posts. I rarely vote for one image and barely any words posts. If I do, that image has to be amazing the words must be incredible. I prefer voting for solid efforts. I know I spent over eight hours working on all of the art seen here, spent a couple hours "researching" a plagiarist, and then quite a bit more time writing the actual post. This was a lot of work, majority of my posts are the same; time consuming. This rambling response is taking awhile to write. So since I know I'm putting a lot into my work, I'm looking for those putting about as much effort into theirs. That's hard to find some days.
I guess I'm more of an investor than an artist or a blogger per say. I do enjoy interacting on the platform but I guess my efforts are not up to the requirements of specific formats and I mostly do rambling combination posts. It seems like Actifit has been a good format for me so I think I will concentrate on doing that from here out. Creative coin seems to be muting all Actifit posts so I'm thinking at this point it is not a good investment for me.
It seems like my followers enjoy a mix of photography and digital photo manipulation in my posts. I thought about removing these things but many commented on liking the format.
I actually do put a lot of effort into my posts too but I feel like it has become a bit of case of diminishing marginal returns on my efforts so I'm going to need to free up some time and capital.
Curating is allowed. Staking has very little to do with posting. One does NOT need to be creative in order to benefit from holding the tokens.
I'm sure you'd do better if the delivery was more focused. Think about my two previous posts. Wouldn't it have been a bit strange and out of place if I added in, "Oh and here's my actifit report card," at the end of those? That's the perfect way to ruin the ending of a post like those, and many more I write. Imagine a song, and at the end, the singer says, for no reason, "Oh! And I did some walking today!" That wouldn't make sense. I really don't see why so many ruin their supposed "creative" posts with a scorecard. It's an eyesore, especially if the post is about photography or something. Imagine outside eyes, looking in. That report card would look like gibberish if the consumer was there to look at photography. Those report cards do have a community though. I thought Sports Talk was fine with it?
It's your call though. Do whatever you want to do. I don't write for SteemLeo much but I've staked about 4000 so when I do read and vote, I at least get paid to consume that content and be entertained.
I'm confused why you wouldn't share your photography and photo editing within a post for creativecoin and then share your sports stuff and actifit card within a post for Sportstalk? That's what tribes and being organized is all about. Everything has a place.
I am really not that organized and have trouble producing more than a few quality photographs or other works per day. Posting more than once per day results in each post earning half the rewards and gets me in trouble with the self vote bashing crowd plus it takes me more than twice the time to do that. Promoting my posts with bid bots besides the Leo bit bot doesn't feel right. Qurator will only vote once per day which is a problem if I want to do a daily Actifit post plus other targeted posts.
The original plan for this secondary account was to do just what you suggested, however, at this point I'm not having much fun. Why should I curate or invest in something that functions as a wet blanket for my own creativity?
Really my main objection is that there was no reason given at all for the downvote and there appears to be a ban on all posts with the Actifit tag. I don't feel this is really fair to many people who do post quality art and photography in conjunction with the activity report.
I do see your point about mixing the creative aspects of a post with a scorecard. However, it is about the only thing that has even got me to do a consistent daily post. (Motivation is really a problem for me.)
I don't know what to say other than I wouldn't take a downvote personally.
I can promise I know how hard it is to produce something worthy of the creativecoin tag, daily. I work many hours. I do enjoy the fact that if I can't or don't feel like doing something creative, I can hop over to another tribe and produce content more fitting for that group. Gaming, investments, science, whatever. Having stake and participating in these places opens more doors. It was never wise for people on Steemit to stick to the same thing that wasn't working, yet they did, and then blamed the platform for struggling, instead of themselves. Growing and evolving is part of blogging. Finding a comfort zone only means you're stuck.
It's good actifit rewards folks and I respect their product. Unfortunately, those posts never did attract much in the form of community votes. Building up your blog means you need to find ways to attract those votes from everyone else. Those handouts offered just for using an app often lead nowhere. Those are participation awards, not rewards from the community.
I don't like seeing people give up but at the same time, if they are unwilling to make changes or improvements, there's not much point in trying to help.
Can't look at this one for long, I'm seeing multiple things at once x_x most of my initial reaction was along the lines of HOW IS THAT UPSIDE DOWN AND UPRIGHT AT THE SAME TIME WHAT MULTIDIMENSIONAL CHICANERY IS THIS. How you even paint this without going completely cross-eyed is beyond me XD
Ahh the digital vs traditional, and then the little sub-thingies of it like the 3d vs 2d. I've had a friend asking me why I took so long to do one of my characters twisty horns from hell in 3d when it would take them "minutes" in Photoshop (it would probably take me slightly less time in...Krita because I don't use Photoshop but then I wouldn't be able to animate it as I don't think I can 2d animate anymore) and then when I explained the process they were stunned as apparently they thought I "just designed it and the computer did it all for [me]". Sometimes I wish I'd get things done a lot faster then XD (but not so much because I also enjoy the process even though it's painful sometimes)
Those filters! I suppose the people that nick photos and apply a filter and then try to pass it off as they painted it have to get caught out to realise that people do actually know how to pick up these things.
Just be happy I didn't use color. I think that would have been too much for the brain.
Producing these isn't easy. That's all I can say. Certainly can't achieve something like that with a few pushes of a button. "The computer did it all," is much like saying, "the brush did it all."
Much of that old crowd left. The ones who remain still ignore me, and that doesn't bother me.
The filters always offer a similar effect. It's really easy to see when one is applied. Most are tacky. I don't mind though when real photographers add more sophisticated effects to their photos. That's legit.
Colour would have been cool too, in all its brain melting glory.
YAY I learned today! I've known the concept but never the term.
Art is always so contentious and is so damned subjective but there is a standard that should be a baseline for anyone creating, ie not plagiarizing. So many works have been inspired by other work but to outright use others work and attempt to pass of as one's own is where the problems lie.
Also I see 6 different figures/faces in your image.
Now that you know what pareidolia is, you'll have trouble seeing things, without seeing other things. Try looking at a forest from a distance. You'll see faces everywhere.
And yes, make it yourself!! So simple. And if you can't make it, sit back and enjoy what others made. That's what arts and entertainment are for.
Six is good, but there are more.
In Yosemite back late 90s there was an employee known as "Old Man Evan". He had a 3 inch tall stack of pictures that he had taken of all the various forms, images, and shadows that he saw in the walls of the valley. It was fascinating to sit and flip through his pictures and listen to him talk about the wild experiences he had.
People have been staring at clouds and seeing ducks for millennia. I always wondered why we can see these things. Apparently we're hardwired to predict visuals before we see them. Faces are the most profound, because we'll rarely forget one.
We are hard wired for it from our evolution out of hunter gatherers. The flight or fight response is called upon regularly still but back then it was imperative to have a split second response, or faster if you "see" something. Many times it was likely nothing but the times it wasn't the seeing something saved a life or more.
Now people just see emojis everywhere...
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Why are there always the ones that are dishonest??? Ugh people are so frustrating. I like the way you find different things in your art... is some put there by accident and only seen by you afterwards?
I'm not sure. It becomes even more peculiar when those types broadcast their dishonesty all over a blockchain, where it stays, forever. Those types would still deny and lie, even with proof. Some kind of mental illness I guess.
With the art, sometimes I'll notice something, then bring it out and make it more visible. Other times I'm trying really hard to make something not look so much like something that it's obvious. I don't even know why I do it. Most folks just paint mountains, trees, eyes, horses. I guess I just wanted to do something different.
Well you are doing something way different. And as long as it makes you happy doing it, it is a bargain. Yes, people suck.... well some.... that is why God gave us animals LOL
Thanks to those who post! Thanks to those who care!
This post was curated by @adsup a division of @adsactly