^{Cover art by - @aaronleang}

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Welcome to the 168th Daily Edition of the Daily Qurator. Below you will find some awesome members of @qurator that worked hard to post some good quality content for all you awesome Steemians to enjoy!

The @qurator project was created to help give Steemians some extra exposure and awesome upvotes currently worth around $0.11 - $1.46!

Note: some of you have been curated twice since the start of the daily qurator and some have been curated only once. As the Daily Qurator is gaining fame with every passing day, many new steemians are asking/will ask to join us. So, expect to see posts from new users for now. When the opportunity arises, posts from older users will be curated once again

Your Quality Curator ~( @goldendawne )~ Presents:

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@jacobkaled	fineartnow

Portrait Drawing From Graphite To Charcoal Practice

It is already dark in Prague and the weather seems to be very cold outside so I though that it would be a good idea to work on a new post in steemit, especially after a long and tough week at work... this time I will show you how I managed to modify a sketch of a character I have done many weeks ago with graphite pencil by applying a layers of charcoal on top of it so the character changed dramatically, those layers basically are what I call the shading layers where i basically generate highlights and the shadow on top of the sketch

@jacobkaled shows you a step-by-step process he uses to transform an ordinary drawing into a charcoal sketch. His skills are perfect and his use of the charcoal are unbelievable.

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@onepercentbetter	busy

Finally Notifications Bell For Steemit Via Busy Platform

Good to see improvement made by the steemit community constantly. When i just started out, it's hard to get alerts on activities like who mention me or follow me or commented

Do you use busy.org for your steemit needs? Then you may have heard the advancement of the tools on the website now offers a notifications' bell; informing you of all of your activity. For busy people, this could be a very helpful addition.

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@fiercewarrior	health

A Self Evaluation On Writing The Book “The Stone The Builder” Rejected

First of all I’d like to point out straight out the gate that the excerpts from my book was not published on Steemit for profit, it was to share my story so that others could benefit. I’m quite an open book so telling my story on the Steemit Platform wasn’t going to be a problem, however I did have some apprehension about revealing details that may attract judgement and criticism. But the benefits far outweighed any negative comments or judgement I thought I may receive, and I wasn’t going to be put off by views and opinions contrary to my own as people are entitled to say what they think. Some may have seen it as a risk, but it was a risk worth taking in my view.

Writing a book doesn't happen overnight. That's something @fiercewarrior knows all too well. Read his post about the book he poured his heart and soul into and see what his plans are now. Let's head over there and give him some good Qurite support!

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@bala41288	steemstem

Ways To Help A Bird Nesting Near Your House

Humans can help birds in many ways. Some people have birds as their pets and nurture them as to how they will be nurturing their own kids. Nests are very important for a bird to be able to live and lay eggs. Nests are more like a house for some species of birds. Birds use their nests for raising their young ones by laying and nurturing eggs. Though it is not quite easy to build a comfortable nest for them, some birds do it every year when it is time to lay eggs and raise young ones

Every has seen or currently have birds nesting near their homes; but do you know why it's important to help birds in need of nests? Or what to do to help the birds? @bala41288 offers some great ideas in this post.

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@debart	art

Me Talking On TV About My Art Sculpture

The interview was held at Groot FM in South Africa a local radio/TV show where they discuss interesting things in the morning, This particular morning they asked me to tell the people about what its like to be a young contemporary artist

WHAT a great day for @debart! A TV interview! WOW! Being able to talk about his art sculpture must've been a thrill!
He even shows us how he made the sculpture and the finished piece of art. Head on over and congratulate @debart on his success and “stardom”!

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NEWS

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The new and improved Qurator bot is here!

Why the new bot?

The current bot had a 24 hour timer built in, thus you can only get upvotes 24 hours apart. Missing that window and you might not get your upvote. This resulted in posts not getting upvotes. The old EDIT and UPDATE trick always worked its magic but was a bit of a hassle.

Out with the old, in with the new!

The new bot will search for posts to upvote 24 hour after your previous upvote. If you posted 2 post in a 24 hour period it will go back and upvote your posts. (More details to follow)

The new bot will be active withing the next 24 hours. We are busy getting everything ready and transferring databases. During this time both @qurator and @qurator-tier-0 will be offline. Please understand and be patient while we handle the necessary upgrades.

The bot is completely new and even though we did test it, there might still be some errors that we have to work out during the next few days.

UPDATE: We are seeing some minor issues with the bot and will be testing it more on the @qurator-tier-0 account. Once it is stable on that account and all the bugs have been sorted out we will let it go live on the main @qurator account.

UPDATE 2: Worked out most of the kinks and will be running it for a while on @qurator-tier-0. If the test goes well then we will start using it on @qurator. =)

UPDATE 3: Looks like we worked out most of the bugs and will be doing a long run to see if the bot is stable. If it is then after this weekend we should be using the new bot on the main @qurator account.

UPDATE 4: Rough weekend for Steemit nodes. Steemit was down a bit and nodes were bombing out. Took a toll on the old bot. The new bot was also affected but not as drastically as the old one. Think that's a good thing. Still working out some kinks and polishing here and there.

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Steemit Challenges on Discord

We all know that there are some awesome Steemians that created great challenges with cool prizes here on steemit. @stresskiller took it upon himself to make a really neat Steemit challenges calendar that he synced and integrated into Qurator's Discord Channel. If you are a member of Qurator feel free to check out the Discord Channel and visit the steemit-challenges tab. There you will find an updated list of all the daily/weekly challenges. massive shout-out and thanks to @stresskiller!

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Introducing: Toss up Thursday!

We have Tasty Tuesday for Foodies and Photo Friday for Photographers. What about the rest of our awesome content creators? We thought of an idea to get some upvotes and possible post promotion. Check out the Toss up Thursday post!

With all the flag wars and drama on Steemit, we decided to go the opposite route. Make love, not war! We don't take part in flag wars, instead wehave upvote wars! Whe highly suggest checking out our latest competition and think of your ideal strategy to win that awesome Tier 5 prize. =)

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New Tasty Tuesday is out! Go cast your upvotes!

We will be doing a weekly Tasty Tuesday that will focus on food related blogs. Photography and Food is something that gets overlooked by Steemit quite a lot so we want to help out a bit by getting more people involved in both categories.

To view our latest Tasty Tuesday please visit this link to cast your vote for your favorite dish!

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Did you vote for your favorite Photo Friday yet? The newest edition just launched!

Qurator will be hosting a Photo Friday each week where 5 members will be selected to win a Tier 5 membership!

Head over to Photo Friday to cast your vote and show some support! Who knows, maybe next week it's your turn to receive some votes and stand a chance to win! =)

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The bot is Qurator exclusive and will upvote all Qurites with an upvote of 2.65 times the worth of what you send it, up to $1.20+!

Delegators will see payouts of 90% of all SBD earned by the bot.

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Qurator's Discord Channel that all Steemians can join - https://discord.gg/pJtWp57

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New Tiers Update

The latest Tiers update is out and updated. You can see the post here.

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Steemauto Curation Trail

RIP Streemian and hello Steemauto! The new curation trail is active and running! If you would like to support your fellow Qurites or just earn some extra curation feel free to join our curation trail that is active on Steemauto.

We suggest not following the trail with 100%, steemauto has 2 ways of following a trail, static or scaled. We suggest using SCALED instead of static since static votes can add up quickly and drain VP very fast. We suggest using scaled and then maybe around 25%.

Steemauto can show us who is currently on the trail and at what percentage. Looking forward to see more Qurites joining the trail in the near future! We also reward the team players and there might be a nice surprize for a lucky trailer. =P

Steemauto guide and registration info

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Want bigger upvotes? Check out Tiers and how to gain access to them

TIER	Requirements
	Basic 4 STEEM registration fee. Basic upvote for life from @qurator.
	Delegate 100SP to @qurator or Upvote @qurator's posts 4+ times a week
	Delegate 200SP to Qurator or Upvote @qurator's posts 7+ times a week
	Delegate 300SP to @qurator
	Delegate 400SP to @qurator
	Delegate 500SP+ to @qurator

Delegation links:

100	200	300	400	500

After you click the link you will have to check the value, click next and then enter your steemit NAME and Private Active Key to delegate. Please remember to leave at least 50SP in your account!

Members	1103	+6
Steem Power	2783
Delegated	124 159	(+200)
Voting Power	78.95%
Upvote Weight T0 (@qurator-tier-0)	6%	$0.11
Upvote Weight T1	1.1%	$0.29
Upvote Weight T2	1.9%	$0.44
Upvote Weight T3	3.6%	$0.88
Upvote Weight T4	4.6%	$1.17
Upvote Weight T5	5.9%	$1.46

Temporary boost to our Steem power. Should be back to around 100K in a few days.

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Upvoting or Resteeming this post will help us grow and in turn enable us to give better upvotes to our members and quality content creators.

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Your Quality Content Curator - Banners

Feel free to use our any of our banners created by awesome Steemians.

Simply copy and paste the link into the bottom of your post, this will be awesome support towards the project and we are sure many of you are proud to be a Qurite. =)

^{Thank you @mrlightning | @rebelheart | @royalfinest for your designs.}

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^{The Qurator project is brought to you by:}

^{@scrooger | @boontjie | @goldendawne | @ewkaw | @ackhoo | @em3 | @brumest | @stresskiller}

^{Special thanks to @kryzsec for the SBD contributions.}

For more information about the Qurator Project and how to join click HERE