More icon discussion

[kate_nepveu]

Continuing the meme of asking about icons, or asking me to ask you about yours.

ninjoo asked about these:

Keyword: "FMA (Flamel snake)"; source: http://www.readmanga.com/view.php?currtitle=1&chap=001&img=3.

FMA = Fullmetal Alchemist (recommendation post). This particular image is from the manga, but I fell in love with the anime and wrote thousands of words about it. Though I called it a "Flamel snake," I think now the more usual term is "crucified serpent," though the addition of crown and wings may be peculiar to the anime. It's significant in the series and I think it looks cool.

I generally use it when I'm talking about alchemy in the show.

---

Keyword: "Serenity"; source: http://video.vividas.com/CDN1/3929_Serenity/web/index.html.

From a web preview of the movie Serenity (tagged posts). I loved the composition of text (a modification of a line from the trailer) and image, and tried to crop the image to showcase that.

---

Keyword: "relaxing with a good book (or four)"; source: ankh_khpt via book_icons.

(Embarrassingly, I think there may actually be five books in the stack, though it's hard to tell.)

Reading is my first love; I am a compulsive reader and a narrative addict. So I went looking through book_icons a while back, and came away with three, this one and:

(By fooish_icons and thinkum from Joaquin Mateo's Door to the Sea, respectively.)

The beach one is for the pleasures of reading; the stacked books is a general book icon; and the last is "happiness is a full bookcase." Because, you know, just as one book isn't enough, one book icon isn't either.

---

Keyword: "Saiyuki Gaiden (Kenren and Tenpou)"; source: October 2005 Zero Sum, uploaded by psychodragon82 (full image).

As Fullmetal Alchemist was my first anime and I fell in love with it, so Saiyuki was my first manga and I fell in love it it (booklog entry; LJ posts). Saiyuki Gaiden is a prequel, not yet released in the U.S., about how five hundred years ago, the main characters got kicked out of heaven.

This icon exists solely because the original picture is so damn pretty.

---

Keyword: "Sandman (Li'l Death)"; source: Jill Thompson drawing.

Same general explanation as for the Li'l Delirium icon in the original post. I think I uploaded this to use for one specific comment; I don't use it often or for anything in particular.

* * *

desdenova asked about these:

Keyword: "LotR (NetHack style)"; source: me.

I made this during my short-lived Lord of the Rings re-read project. I never even got to Moria in the re-read, but I had the idea and just couldn't resist.

Anyway, NetHack is a single-player dungeon exploration roleplaying game, in which the dungeon and characters are usually represented through ASCII. The white @s are human(oid)s; the green @ is a Wood-Elf; the green h's are hobbits; the red h is a dwarf; the T is a troll; and the o's are orcs (purple: orc-captain; gray: Uruk-hai; red: plain old orcs). The | is a grave, that is, Balin's Tomb. I don't pretend that the Fellowship is arrayed in a textually-supportable manner, but all the characters are accurate, and I am a great big dork. =>

---

Keywords: "Firefly (River)," "kill with my brain"; source: Firefly 110, "Trash".

Doesn't every Firefly fan have an icon of River saying "I can kill you with my brain"?

Which keyword I use signals what purpose I'm using it for, to talk about River herself or to express the desire to kill someone with my brain (which, probably fortunately, I cannot do).

---

Keywords: "fantasy," "raven-in-flight"; source: cover of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (booklog) and thought the raven-in-flight from the cover was very evocative of the book's approach to the numinous. It's as good as anything to represent fantasy as a genre. (I'd use "raven-in-flight" when I was talking about the book specifically, or I suppose a literal raven.)

---

Keywords: "cat-vacuuming," "fandom"; by Suzanne Palmer.

Cat-vacuuming is what you do when you should be working, usually things that are productive and yet not what's due. It was coined on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.composition, whose members commissioned a cat-vacuuming pin to wear at conventions [*] as a recognition sign. Suzanne Palmer sketched the design and gave me permission to use it as an icon.

[*] Thus also my use of it for "fandom" in the science-fiction-convention-going sense, which is probably more obscure than useful, but hey.

---

Keywords: "Gorey," "struck with an axe"; source: Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies

Because there are days when that's how I feel.

Comments

[glvalentine.livejournal.com]

The cat-vacuuming icon is precious to me, and the Fellowship icon made me laugh out loud - I'd never seen it before, which automatically makes this the best meme ever.

[kate_nepveu]

Yay!