Icon Meme
I've been working on the assumption that a satisfactory collection of icons my tempt to me to post, or at least comment, more often. I'm not sure that's true, but it makes an excellent excuse for wasting time collecting them. What I have noticed is that there is a definite aesthetic I'm tending towards: mostly muted colours, illustrations rather than photos (unless the photo is so messed about with or so abstract it might as well not be a photo, or it's not so much a userpic representing me as a placard: this entry/comment is about this fandom/this character), lots of text. I could run down my icons and tell you at once which I'm going to end up changing when I find something more satisfactory, not necessarily because I don't like the icon, but because I don't feel it fits this journal. Of course, if I set up a second journal (hardly likely, given how infrequently I use this one), I've found any number of icons I like that don't fit here, and I might end up with a totally different look. Do other people do this, and if so do they do it by having a consistent theme, or just by a feeling that one icon looks like it fits and another doesn't?
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quinfirefrorefiddle:
1. Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.
This was one of my first icons, when I finally got around to setting up the livejournal account. Obviously, I needed some icons, so I glanced through whatever photos I had to hand, cropped a few likely ones to size, spent maybe 30 seconds playing around with them in photoshop and stuck them in as placeholders. Somehow, I never got around to changing them. Originally, with only six slots, this one covered archeology, history, writing, Mesoamerica, religion... Now I have other options for everything except Mesoamerica (and, I've just noticed, religion, although with so many more slots, I really feel I should be able to find something more appropriate). In any case, this is one that doesn't quite feel right, although I don't think I'd have to alter it much to get it to fit. I'd have to check my photo files to see where I took the photo: it may have been Palenque, but without checking I could very well be wrong. Also, I probably have somewhere a translation of the text I took it from, but off hand I have no idea what this particular glyph block means: any Mayan specialists round here who can tell me?
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sourfree. I have rather a lot of travel icons (if I'd let myself, I expect I could have collected a complete set of 250 of them), of which at least three are various ships. It could have been much more: I have an entire folder of them, but I exercised restraint when uploading them. I love ships, both as a symbol of, yes, travel, and for their own sake: I spent some years at sea and loved it. (Not on sailing ships, though; I mean, I like them too, but I should give fair warning that I'm one of those irritating people who gets on anything with sails and automatically looks around for someone to give me a glass of champagne, rather than offering to do anything useful.) I like this particular icon not just as a ship, but because it's a ship in a bottle, which is something I've always found a little bit magical, and because, even though I've never had any urge to own an actual ship in a bottle, I think of it as representative of all the objects I've collected over the years as keepsakes and tangible reminders. (I don't like to have enough out at one time to look cluttered, but I do like the things around me to have a history, some fragment of story that belongs to them.) I think I like the content of this icon enough to overlook that's it a photo, especially given that I like its colour scheme, but I notice I've kept it specifically for posts about ships, or travel, or souvenirs, rather than putting it in rotation on general posts as I have the other two ship icons, which are both illustrations.
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xelaz_iconz. Okay, I think this one is probably self-explanatory. I'm not sure, though, why sex is the one subject where I prefer photos to illustrations. Although, even here, I seem to mostly go for black & white.
like so many of my icons, by illuminating_dragon. Between them, illuminating_dragon and aleyma account for nearly a quarter of my icons: there's something about their styles I find very appealing. This fellow is maybe a bit brighter than I'd normally go for, especially with the dark background, but it seems appropriate to his expression of shocked surprise. (Or her expression, of course, but somehow it looks male to me.) Anyway, he was far too adorable to resist. Used, obviously, to register shock or surprise.
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alysian_fields. The other subject I have an abundance of icons for is books. (Books. Travel. There you have me in a nutshell.) I liked this as a picture of imagination, fantasy, the illusory yet real world within books ... the alchemy by which ink on paper can create anything the mind can imagine, that you can be free in even the smallest of rooms to explore the entire range of human imagining if you have a book as a portal.
by thepresidentrix. I came across a whole series of these, and apparently I find the illustrations generic enough not to hit my whole not liking faces except in fannish icons thing (or perhaps it's that they are illustrations, rather than photos). I believe they're all quotes from a series of detective novels by Kate Ross, which I have a presentiment would prove less fun than they sound; the quotes, on the other hand, are all rather useful. I'm especially taken with this one, and can foresee using it not infrequently. I'm quite aware my own moral fittings are not entirely standard: sometimes it's views that, while sadly not in the majority, are thankfully not too uncommon, but I was, perhaps foolishly, left free as a child to read whatever I pleased and develop my own ideas therefrom, with the result that, even now, there will be times when I take what I assume to be an entirely unexceptionable and widely held position, only to find myself alone in it. I think I've managed to identify the most notable divergences between myself and my fellows (which is not to say I have always seen fit to mend them), but there are always little things I hadn't expected that crop up without warning. So, between the one thing and the other, I expect this one will see a fair amount of use, though hopefully more for expressing admiration for those of whom I otherwise disapprove than for marking WTF moments where I am again confronted by the unpopularity and isolation of my own position. More generally, this is obviously appropriate for almost any discussion of ethics.
from
quinfirefrorefiddle:1. Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.
sourfree. I have rather a lot of travel icons (if I'd let myself, I expect I could have collected a complete set of 250 of them), of which at least three are various ships. It could have been much more: I have an entire folder of them, but I exercised restraint when uploading them. I love ships, both as a symbol of, yes, travel, and for their own sake: I spent some years at sea and loved it. (Not on sailing ships, though; I mean, I like them too, but I should give fair warning that I'm one of those irritating people who gets on anything with sails and automatically looks around for someone to give me a glass of champagne, rather than offering to do anything useful.) I like this particular icon not just as a ship, but because it's a ship in a bottle, which is something I've always found a little bit magical, and because, even though I've never had any urge to own an actual ship in a bottle, I think of it as representative of all the objects I've collected over the years as keepsakes and tangible reminders. (I don't like to have enough out at one time to look cluttered, but I do like the things around me to have a history, some fragment of story that belongs to them.) I think I like the content of this icon enough to overlook that's it a photo, especially given that I like its colour scheme, but I notice I've kept it specifically for posts about ships, or travel, or souvenirs, rather than putting it in rotation on general posts as I have the other two ship icons, which are both illustrations.xelaz_iconz. Okay, I think this one is probably self-explanatory. I'm not sure, though, why sex is the one subject where I prefer photos to illustrations. Although, even here, I seem to mostly go for black & white.illuminating_dragon. Between them, illuminating_dragon and aleyma account for nearly a quarter of my icons: there's something about their styles I find very appealing. This fellow is maybe a bit brighter than I'd normally go for, especially with the dark background, but it seems appropriate to his expression of shocked surprise. (Or her expression, of course, but somehow it looks male to me.) Anyway, he was far too adorable to resist. Used, obviously, to register shock or surprise.alysian_fields. The other subject I have an abundance of icons for is books. (Books. Travel. There you have me in a nutshell.) I liked this as a picture of imagination, fantasy, the illusory yet real world within books ... the alchemy by which ink on paper can create anything the mind can imagine, that you can be free in even the smallest of rooms to explore the entire range of human imagining if you have a book as a portal.thepresidentrix. I came across a whole series of these, and apparently I find the illustrations generic enough not to hit my whole not liking faces except in fannish icons thing (or perhaps it's that they are illustrations, rather than photos). I believe they're all quotes from a series of detective novels by Kate Ross, which I have a presentiment would prove less fun than they sound; the quotes, on the other hand, are all rather useful. I'm especially taken with this one, and can foresee using it not infrequently. I'm quite aware my own moral fittings are not entirely standard: sometimes it's views that, while sadly not in the majority, are thankfully not too uncommon, but I was, perhaps foolishly, left free as a child to read whatever I pleased and develop my own ideas therefrom, with the result that, even now, there will be times when I take what I assume to be an entirely unexceptionable and widely held position, only to find myself alone in it. I think I've managed to identify the most notable divergences between myself and my fellows (which is not to say I have always seen fit to mend them), but there are always little things I hadn't expected that crop up without warning. So, between the one thing and the other, I expect this one will see a fair amount of use, though hopefully more for expressing admiration for those of whom I otherwise disapprove than for marking WTF moments where I am again confronted by the unpopularity and isolation of my own position. More generally, this is obviously appropriate for almost any discussion of ethics.