Icon Meme
The Icon Meme. These images courtesy of wendelah1 .
How to play:
1. Reply to this post and I will select five of your icons
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose if you damn well feel like it
3. Other people can them comment to you and make their own posts
4. This will result in a never-ending cycle of icon glee
Iconses below the cut.
My new default icon comes from a postcard I picked up at a recent conference. Arabic has a long tradition of decorative calligraphy. (Some of this comes from the assorted prohibitions on the artistic portrayal of faces in some parts of the Muslim world at some points in time. Many other trends in Islamic art have permitted the display of faces, even the face of the Prophet. See the Persian/Mughal miniature tradition, for instance. But I'm not a historian of Islamic art, so I'll leave off here.) This is the work of a modern Palestinian-American calligrapher, Nihad Dukhan. It doesn't follow a traditional calligraphic script; it is its own work of art. The word portrayed is حرية, hurriyeh, freedom. I also picked up a card that reads الامل, al-amal, the hope. Caught on to the trend yet? I'm one postfix away from actually having my whole psudonym in calligraphy. It was all I could do not to say that out loud to people, though I had to since I was standing at the table negotiating my way onto a conference schedule that was closed in August. (I was successful. It helps when your research is intellectually sexy, you've nurtured your Ivy-League ego, and you're wearing a hot suit.) It's strange how much I've come to identify as Amal since I started writing as this persona, fewer than six months ago. My therapist has pointed out that I have a fairly clear narrative of who Amal is, and that she looks much more like my ideal self than my actual self. It's true. But I feel more and more like Amal lately, perhaps because I feel lately like I've started to become who I want to be. That's why I wanted these cards, and that's why this is my default icon. Because that's my name, even if no one knows it. (I uploaded scans of all three of Dukhan's postcards I purchased to my scrapbook, here. Gorgeous, no?) (Oh, and Nihad, if you get here via Googling yourself or something: I love your work. You might not want to read any further. Or, I mean, maybe you might. Did you ever watch The X-Files?)
By guilty_icons . For those who don't watch Battlestar Galactica, this is the hybrid. She is the navigation system/central processing system for the Cylon ships; part humanoid Cylon, and part machine-Cylon, she is hooked into the machine. She speaks in long poetic sentences that mix the technical details of the functioning of the ship with prophetic statements about various individuals and their destinies, and she ends every few sentences with the statement "end of line," as if she's speaking in code (meaning in programming language). The hybrid is among my favorite characters on BSG, because of how unknown she is. It's unclear how much she understands of what she says, how much she recognizes of those around her, how alive she is for any standard of alive. But she is crucial to the ship, and seems to have deep secrets that only she can understand. There's a pretty strong disability/quality of life metaphor there that I like. I also like the idea of ending ideas with "end of line." I have a tendency to want to close off my arguments as I complete them, to make sure that I'm clear. I often use the Arabic word halas to do this; it means something like "enough," either in a good way (my first Arabic professor used it when we got an answer right to keep us from going on and fucking it up) or in a bad way (as in "quit it!"). But "end of line" works here. We've done this part of the argument. Moving on.
by yendrie . I got this icon for my first post involving Isk. I have huge problems with the William-arc; I simply find out out of character. I have found myself describing my parenting style as "handcuffs and shotgun." This is what I imagine Scully's parenting style to be in an ideal world; Mulder's, too. This is my fucking baby and you're not touching him. (Combine this with my deep-seated and totally irrational hate/phobia for all medical personnel ever, and imagine what I was like while Isk was in the NICU.) Anyway, because of my instinctual guesses about what Scully and Mulder would be like as parents, I'm reluctant to accept William as canon, or even Provenance/Providence, because they just strike me as out of character. I like the Scully of The Unfinished Universe better, or even the Scully of the Ghosts series. But I like the idea of William, and I like the idea of Mulder and Scully trying to figure out how to be parents together. So this is my kid-stuff icon.
By bythe_fireside . This was my default icon for a long time, because this is my Scully. She is badass, she is intense, and she will take you down. So many of the Scullys I find in fandom aren't like this: she is yearning towards being soft and feminine, she is struggling to allow herself to let go and be cared for, or, in contrast to all available evidence, she is all soft and givey already. That's not her, for me. My Scully is capable, in control because she likes it that way and not because she really wants to have control taken from her, and she will defend what she believes in with terminal force. I like the way this icon is laid out, Scully just out of frame, the motion of the lines beside her. It's just beautiful, in addition to being a picture of my Scully.
By guilty_icons . In class, I recently called myself a all-black-wearing, unfiltered-cigarette-smoking, back-of-a-dark-bar-in-Paris-dwelling, depressing-philosophy-reciting bitter leftist type. (Think the Nihilists from The Big Lebowski). One of my students asked me to wear my beret to class in the future. In any case, this is my philosophy/reflection/Deep Thinking icon. I think Scully looks like Hannah Arendt here. (I tried this theory out on the one colleague who knows about my little habit, and she doubled up laughing, but couldn't stop staring at the icon.) I love Hannah Arendt, and I love Scully. Ergo, I love this icon. (Do we think Hannah Arendt actually smoked that much? Cuz, damn.)
How to play:
1. Reply to this post and I will select five of your icons
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose if you damn well feel like it
3. Other people can them comment to you and make their own posts
4. This will result in a never-ending cycle of icon glee
Iconses below the cut.
My new default icon comes from a postcard I picked up at a recent conference. Arabic has a long tradition of decorative calligraphy. (Some of this comes from the assorted prohibitions on the artistic portrayal of faces in some parts of the Muslim world at some points in time. Many other trends in Islamic art have permitted the display of faces, even the face of the Prophet. See the Persian/Mughal miniature tradition, for instance. But I'm not a historian of Islamic art, so I'll leave off here.) This is the work of a modern Palestinian-American calligrapher, Nihad Dukhan. It doesn't follow a traditional calligraphic script; it is its own work of art. The word portrayed is حرية, hurriyeh, freedom. I also picked up a card that reads الامل, al-amal, the hope. Caught on to the trend yet? I'm one postfix away from actually having my whole psudonym in calligraphy. It was all I could do not to say that out loud to people, though I had to since I was standing at the table negotiating my way onto a conference schedule that was closed in August. (I was successful. It helps when your research is intellectually sexy, you've nurtured your Ivy-League ego, and you're wearing a hot suit.) It's strange how much I've come to identify as Amal since I started writing as this persona, fewer than six months ago. My therapist has pointed out that I have a fairly clear narrative of who Amal is, and that she looks much more like my ideal self than my actual self. It's true. But I feel more and more like Amal lately, perhaps because I feel lately like I've started to become who I want to be. That's why I wanted these cards, and that's why this is my default icon. Because that's my name, even if no one knows it. (I uploaded scans of all three of Dukhan's postcards I purchased to my scrapbook, here. Gorgeous, no?) (Oh, and Nihad, if you get here via Googling yourself or something: I love your work. You might not want to read any further. Or, I mean, maybe you might. Did you ever watch The X-Files?)
By guilty_icons . For those who don't watch Battlestar Galactica, this is the hybrid. She is the navigation system/central processing system for the Cylon ships; part humanoid Cylon, and part machine-Cylon, she is hooked into the machine. She speaks in long poetic sentences that mix the technical details of the functioning of the ship with prophetic statements about various individuals and their destinies, and she ends every few sentences with the statement "end of line," as if she's speaking in code (meaning in programming language). The hybrid is among my favorite characters on BSG, because of how unknown she is. It's unclear how much she understands of what she says, how much she recognizes of those around her, how alive she is for any standard of alive. But she is crucial to the ship, and seems to have deep secrets that only she can understand. There's a pretty strong disability/quality of life metaphor there that I like. I also like the idea of ending ideas with "end of line." I have a tendency to want to close off my arguments as I complete them, to make sure that I'm clear. I often use the Arabic word halas to do this; it means something like "enough," either in a good way (my first Arabic professor used it when we got an answer right to keep us from going on and fucking it up) or in a bad way (as in "quit it!"). But "end of line" works here. We've done this part of the argument. Moving on.
by yendrie . I got this icon for my first post involving Isk. I have huge problems with the William-arc; I simply find out out of character. I have found myself describing my parenting style as "handcuffs and shotgun." This is what I imagine Scully's parenting style to be in an ideal world; Mulder's, too. This is my fucking baby and you're not touching him. (Combine this with my deep-seated and totally irrational hate/phobia for all medical personnel ever, and imagine what I was like while Isk was in the NICU.) Anyway, because of my instinctual guesses about what Scully and Mulder would be like as parents, I'm reluctant to accept William as canon, or even Provenance/Providence, because they just strike me as out of character. I like the Scully of The Unfinished Universe better, or even the Scully of the Ghosts series. But I like the idea of William, and I like the idea of Mulder and Scully trying to figure out how to be parents together. So this is my kid-stuff icon.
By bythe_fireside . This was my default icon for a long time, because this is my Scully. She is badass, she is intense, and she will take you down. So many of the Scullys I find in fandom aren't like this: she is yearning towards being soft and feminine, she is struggling to allow herself to let go and be cared for, or, in contrast to all available evidence, she is all soft and givey already. That's not her, for me. My Scully is capable, in control because she likes it that way and not because she really wants to have control taken from her, and she will defend what she believes in with terminal force. I like the way this icon is laid out, Scully just out of frame, the motion of the lines beside her. It's just beautiful, in addition to being a picture of my Scully.
By guilty_icons . In class, I recently called myself a all-black-wearing, unfiltered-cigarette-smoking, back-of-a-dark-bar-in-Paris-dwelling, depressing-philosophy-reciting bitter leftist type. (Think the Nihilists from The Big Lebowski). One of my students asked me to wear my beret to class in the future. In any case, this is my philosophy/reflection/Deep Thinking icon. I think Scully looks like Hannah Arendt here. (I tried this theory out on the one colleague who knows about my little habit, and she doubled up laughing, but couldn't stop staring at the icon.) I love Hannah Arendt, and I love Scully. Ergo, I love this icon. (Do we think Hannah Arendt actually smoked that much? Cuz, damn.)
