Doodle or Die

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I found out about Doodle or Die earlier this week and I have been returning to it every night for kicks and giggles. If you don’t know what DoD is, it’s basically a version of telephone, but with pictures and descriptions that alternate between anonymous users. It’s great. It was created by a group of Redditers, so the community there is pretty strong. There are trolls that come by that kill chains, but there are still some amazing and funny things that go on.

The developers are busy updating the website and adding new features. They seem to be taking in lots of feedback from the community. Pretty soon we’ll even have the color PINK!

This is an example of what the drawing interface looks like. Here, the description of the subject to draw is at the top, canvas on the left, and tools on the right. It’s fairly minimal right now, but the other day you didn’t even have the option of choosing between these many brushes.

After you submit your drawing, someone else is randomly chosen to make a caption for your piece. This is actually the first piece that I put some effort into, so I do feel like sharing it a little. :B

Anyways, I wanted to share some of the funny ones I see on reddit. Below are some that I’d like to share. Note that some of these contain offensive content.

And of course, when I attempt to draw something nice again, DoD breaks. I got an error when trying to submit. When I clicked okay, my drawing disappeared. When I refreshed the page, I got a 500 error. Luckily I screen capped beforehand. I knew something would go wrong!

Gaian Drawings #1

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I went back to GaiaOnline this week to humor myself in what was going on. I have logged in several times this year to talk to a friend, but that’s about the extent of my interaction. This time, I stayed around for a little longer.

Some sort of PIE event was happening where six Gaian characters were in an eating contest. I didn’t know what I was doing, to be honest. So, the first thing I did was select a contestant I wanted to cheer for. I didn’t know what this meant and didn’t care too much, so I chose the funniest, pathetic looking character: Carl. He’s a very angry and somewhat rabid looking buck. Goofy looking, I’d say.

As per usual, there’s a community forum dedicated to the event and was crazy active. I wanted to see what this contest was about and if I could get prizes of any sort to bling out my avatar.

There are “Achievements” on Gaia now and I’m not sure when they were introduced. Anyways, there are event-related achievements along with the general ones, meaning you can only get these event ones within a certain period of time. I was trying my best to get all of the general achievements I could (such as changing my clothes, updating my status, etc), but could only get so much in such a short time and little investment. Therefore, I was trying to get these pie event achievements.

The one I found tough was trying to get 200 other users to throw pies at me (called “Pie catcher”). Of course, you can only get pies thrown at you if you are exposed in the forums. This means you have to post on threads and be lucky that you weren’t lost in the pool of chaos and thousands of other users.

My solution? I started a thread called “Pie Me! FREE avatar art for the 1st user on every 10 pgs” or something similar. I didn’t want to draw 100 avatars, so I said after 50 pages, I would stop the contest. Here’s the cool part: users on Gaia LOVE avatar art. It’s crazy. It’s funny and ridiculous. Because of that, it’s cute and I’m grateful people are appreciative. Why not hold a thread like this and hope to get pied 200 times? I’d be the person at the top of the thread and users WILL see me.

I started the thread right before dinner and wrote in my thread that I’ll be back with drawings for the winners right after. I was gone for about half an hour. When I came back, the thread was already at 60 pages. I got my “Pie Catcher” achievement, so I was happy.

This was a successful thread!

Anyways, here are the drawings. I haven’t done avatar art in about four years or something. I forgot how easy it was to draw nice looking avatars and how hard it was to draw ugly/cluttered ones. I had much more fun with some than others.

This was also a good opportunity for me to draw again. It’s easier to draw when I set myself up to do something (forced motivation, ahha) and if I know what I am doing.

Paint on the nails

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I bought my little sister some Zoya nail polish for her birthday and she said she liked it a lot. I never used this brand myself, but I heard good things about it from friends. Zoya’s website does not offer gift orders, so I had them ship it to me first so I could take the receipt out and then ship it to her.

Zoya nail polish

PIPPA, CASSI, EMME, and GOLDIE

KELLY, EMME, FIONA, and CAITLIN

Unfortunately for her, one of the colors I got was back-ordered! When it finally came, I decided to keep it for myself (hehe). The color is called PIPPA and it’s a very bright, vibrant, matte yellow. I decided to use it to see its quality on my nails.

One coat of PIPPA had very good coverage. I only painted my left hand’s pinky, so it was weird going for a couple days with only one nail painted. It was quite durable and eventually after 4 days I scrapped it off because I didn’t want to paint the rest of my nails yellow. Being satisfied, I bought more nail polish from Zoya.

While waiting for my polish order to arrive, I had been anxious. I’m in the middle of moving right now and I packed away what little supply of nail polish I already had and my nail polish remover as well. I also haven’t painted my nails for a long time. It’s been probably about two years? My nails were beginning to get long, so I trimmed them just enough to be comfortable and have something to paint on. Here’s what the end product looked like. I didn’t know what I was going for and was no good at staying in the lines!

Base is KELLY with a silver layer of JULES on half. Dots are in GOLDIE.

I don’t really like fake nails because they are annoying, cost money, and require a lot of maintenance. I think I’ll just continue to paint and practice on the nails that I grow myself.

Minty progress bar

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I get weekly reports from Mint about my spendings, but I never took a close look at the budget section.

mint budget

I'm not meeting my own expectations? Too much, too soon!

So I have a “progress bar” for Alcohol and Bars. Does that mean I’m supposed to meet this demand? I’m almost halfway there! That means I only have $15.00 to spend for the next couple of weeks. Judging my spending rate, looks like I’m in bad shape!

It also says I spent $15.00 total. Apparently, within the last 7 days I only had food at Bars. Sweet.

I guess mint takes into account the types of spending you do and makes budgets for you if you don’t have any. I found this hilarious.

Meet Alpha

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He’s my betta. Alpha is not too photogenic.

blue betta

Say hello to Alpha

My little sister and her boyfriend gave him to me last Christmas. He likes to blow bubbles every time I change his water. He used to be spoiled with blood worms, but I stopped feeding them to him because he would only eat about 85% of one and the rest of the body would float around. Corpses were bad for his water and health, making everything sickly and full of bacteria. Now he only eats nutritional pellets.

Last month, he contracted a disease called fin-rot when I was away for E3 (June 7-9). I noticed this when one of his lower fins looked unusually tattered. He must have been stressed out because the weather had been getting warmer and I hadn’t changed his water for three weeks. It was my fault he got sick and it makes me sad.

betta before fin rot

Feb 22, 2011, before fin-rot.

Sorry for the poor photo quality. This was the best one I had of his once beautiful silhouette before the fin-rot ate away his tail fins.

I went to the fish shop downtown and brought in photos of Alpha. I told a lady I thought Alpha was suffering fin-rot because I had been doing research before hand. The lady confirmed it with another co-worker and they prescribed him something called Triple Sulfa, an anti-bacterial fish medication. It comes in a powder form and came with 10 packets for about $14.00. I ended up only using one packet for his whole treatment because he’s in a one gallon tank and I split the one packet up into 10 doses. What I did was change out 25% of his water everyday with newly conditioned water and added 1/10 of a packet in with the mix. I took out his filter and let the water aerate after I added the powder for about 8 hours (until I got back from work). I turn it off when I get back because I feel the moving current irritates him sometimes because he swims funny when he runs into it. Every four days I would do an entire water cycle and continued this until I finished up the packet.

betta fin rot

This photo was taken on June 16, 2011, a week after I first saw the tearing.

I don’t know what Alpha thought when he got fin-rot or if he even realized that his fins were decaying. Why? He behaved normally. He followed my fingers when I traced the edge of his tank and he was blowing an ample amount of bubbles, which is a sign that he’s happy and healthy.

betta bubbles

Hella bubbles, hella sizes. June 18, 2011

But just because he was blowing bubbles and not feeling out of it, it doesn’t mean that he was healthy. He was definitely suffering. Maybe he’s just got a strong character and wanted to be normal? Or maybe he didn’t know because it didn’t touch his body yet? Wouldn’t he notice that he was swimming differently because he lost a lot of his tail?

short tail

Alpha's decayed tail. July 1, 2011

I started to notice more improvement earlier this month, but it looks like he’s still got it. I think I should start another round of medication, but I don’t want to over dose him. Cleaning the water should be what I should stick to. I think I’ll do a little bit of meds every couple of days and hopefully it’ll make him feel better.

Alpha after fin-rot

July 10, 2011 He looks like a completely different betta

This is a photo of him today. He looks completely different than he did two months ago. I don’t like that his tails are getting really short and that its getting really close to his body. Hopefully this rot will go away soon. I’ll continue to take photos of him to record his condition.