jaunthie | Icon meme

This one's going around the Web, and after reading

tangerinpenguin's stories around his icons, I couldn't resist jumping in.

The meme:

1. Reply to this post with 'Icons!', and I will pick five 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 glee.

Ah, the lovely Olivia DeHavilland. One of the classic beauties of cinema, and one of my favorite actresses from that era. I'd been wanting a "don't think so" icon (so useful at times), and when I saw this arch, quirky studio still of her, I knew I had the perfect picture to make the icon with. I think this is one of the first icons I ever made for LJ, in fact.

This one was posted into one of the icon-sharing communities on LJ (I'm flaking on which one, but it was created by

jynk) and just caught my eye. Who better than the Serenity crew to encourage a little constructive breaking of rules in the best of causes? Aim to misbehave, indeed.

Okay. I knew there was a market for plushy Cthulhus, but even so, my jaw dropped when I saw this picture of Chibi Mini Plushy Cthulhus. Talk about a mishmash of geekery genres! There was only one possible descriptor for it: Sick and WRONG - and cute!

If you've been reading my journal, you might have picked up on the fact that we had an unusually snowy winter here this year. Both local papers had online photo sections filled with pictures sent in by users of various snow scenes. I don't know whether this was a professional or just a gifted reader, but there was something about the serenity of the Buddha statue with the natural snowy "collar" and "hat" that I feel is truly memorable and eye-catching.

Speaking of things going around the Internet... alan_sailer took this picture and posted it on Flickr, along with some of his other photography work. It quickly made the rounds of a lot of blog sites. No surprise there - he's got some wickedly cool photographs. Coincidentally enough, I'd just seen a presentation by the son of Doc Edgerton (the MIT professor who first figured out how to take these kinds of photographs along with a lot of other things) a few weeks prior. His son brought in a lot of the original equipment Edgerton had developed, and a local hobbyist had also brought in one of Edgerton's original flash rigs for photographing things like balloons popping and bullets going through apples and that kind of stuff. You would not believe the concussive blast that thing put out with the massive discharge of electricity, or the stink of ozone it produced. I could never work with the gear required to produce these admittedly beautiful frozen-time shots, even if I had the $$$ to acquire it. But I got a huge kick out of Mr. Sailer's multi-colored paint ball biting the bullet, as something Doc Edgerton would have loved to have photographed if only they had existed at the time. I debated making an icon of it, as I don't own the picture, and Flickr posting is questionable in the "is it public domain or isn't it?" unless someone explicitly reserves the rights. There wasn't any indication of that at the time, so I went ahead and did so while being careful to attribute the image back to Mr. Sailer. However, I just went back to his Flickr site and saw the "all rights reserved" plastered all over the images there (probably a reaction to all the publicity, and quite understandable), so I'll be deleting this icon now.

So...anyone else want to play?