After much prevaricating, I am finally unleashing my own set of reply / curation images on the Steem blockchain. In the 52 days that I have been on Steem so far, I have been inspired by much of what I've seen. There are some very talented people on here!
Very early on in my travels I came across some of my fellow Kiwi's who were doing amazing things, such as @cryptonik with the banner advert to promote the AUS & NZ Discord server. I even received one of these myself, which I now display proudly on all of my New Zealand-related posts. Another inspirational member of our Discord group is @ryivhnn, who uses a series of goat images to represent "upgoats", resteems and follows. Ryivhnn takes requests, and you can check out some previous ones here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Aside from the Steemians from downunder, I have been inspired also by @carrieallen, who has a whole collection of cartoon-ified images of herself which she places on posts and replies, and even in Discord channels. This whole concept of personal branding is something that I'm really into.
To this end, I am unleashing my own reply / curation images here. These are a little something that I have created in The GIMP image editor. I have used my, by now familiar red, white, and black triskellions, inspired by Māori tukutuku panels. I have also included a lovely panoramic picture of Auckland, my home city. This element was created by Xsvenne2000 and it has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. The remixes which I have created here also include angry-robot-1300616 by OpenClipart-Vectors, which has been released under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. I also used warning-sign-304370 by Clker, which has been released under a CC0 license as well. The remaining elements, notably the upvote, resteem, and follow icons, were created by @omra-sky, for the @freewritehouse. I have remixed them with permission (see here for details). The resulting remixes, from all of these elements, is a set of unique reply / curation images which I'll be using from now on, to indicate that I have upvoted, resteemed, and/or followed a particular post or reply.
Upvoted only
Upvoted and resteemed
Upvoted, resteemed and followed
What is important to note here is that these reply / curation images are not begging symbols. They aren't asking for upvotes, resteems, or follows. These images only indicate that I have chosen to upvote, resteem, and/or follow something, of my own free will, without any expectation of reciprocity. This is what post curation is all about, to my mind.
To make use of these images easily, I can quickly copy the relevant HTML codes from Hackmd.io. This saves me from needing to upload them afresh to the Steem blockchain each time.
• The image used for the post thumbnail is a remix by 𝓣𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮. It includes the cubes-677092 image created by CreativeMagic, which has been released under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license.
• The image used for the horizontal rule separators throughout this post is a remix by 𝓣𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮, using the same cubes-677092 image as above.
• The image used for the Māori Dictionary links is an Emotiki® emoji created by Te Puia, and is used with permission. For details, see their Terms & Conditions of use.
• The other images in this post are documented thoroughly within the body text of the post itself.