First of all, I had NO idea how FUN Minecraft is. I think being in creative mode makes all the difference. Also using the TeamSpeak server for chatting was so great. It really felt like I was in the same room as Andy, Tim, Shannon, Ben and Allyson.
Being the most experienced of the crew, Andrew Forgrave was especially helpful and patient. He even wrote a great summary of our evening and did some awesome animated GIFs. He assigned us homework to get our own custom skins for the next time we signed in. Et Voila!
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
One of the best things about DS106 is that when you don’t feel like doing one of the thousand existing assignments, you can just create a new one.
And that’s what I’ve done, right here with Minecraft Me
I used a very roundabout method to make my skin. I found a NERD Skin at SkinDex.
NERD SKIN!
Then I imported into Photoshop and edited the tiny little PNG.
Nerdy G!
Zoom in and it looks like this:
G Magnified PNG
I couldn’t figure out how to see what I looked like so I stumbled upon this cool editor called Minershoes which let me upload and preview my edited PNG. Of course, I see it’s really simple to just edit it right there and perhaps that would have been smarter, faster, better.
I also see that Andy has a whole new amazing post about skins which is worth checking out, especially if you are a Monkey!
Thanks to Martha, I figured out that you can toggle through the Function + F5 key to change your view option and see what you look like in game. I had already dragged Allyson back in with me, bless her, she took some great shots of me.
In fact, I wanted to use the picture that Allyson was nice enough to take for me but, *sniff*, *sniff*, her pics are copyrighted so embed wasn’t allowed.
COPYRIGHT ASIDE:
Actually most new Flickr accounts are set up like this and it’s kind of tricky to find the settings to make it different. So, on the chance that copyrighted is not the desired sharing preference, here’s how you change the settings:
You > Your Account > Privacy & Permissions > Default for New Uploads > Creative Commons
I choose Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike but apparently that prevents some Wikipedia use, so I’ll let you decide what works best for you.
Creative Commons, as you may know, is a really nice way to allow sharing of your content right up front.
Before DS106 I didn’t really appreciate how helpful it could be for me to release my content under creative commons. With all the riffing and remixing we do off each other, I now realize how useful it is when you are trying to write blog posts and make art.
Of course Larry Lessig really explains it best with his TED Talk. I’m repeating myself here, but some things are worth saying every single semester.
END COPYRIGHT ASIDE
Anyway, I hope my Wäscälly Wäbbits bunkmates can organize a time to hang out in Minecraft again sometime soon. And I hope some of you find time to do the Minecraft Me assignment and get some unique looks going in game!
