In Which Beth Actually Fulfills a Meme
I'm actually going to try to answer the icon meme, having utterly failed last time around . . . over two years ago, augh!
All the icons I use I made myself, and most of them are miniaturized versions of LOLs. Two of the ones a_phoenixdragon chose aren't, so I'm starting with them. ;-) They're unusual in that they have no text at all. I’ve actually made quite a few captionless icons, but I don’t use most of them myself.
I got my start making icons for Lothithil, as small gifts of gratitude to her for her enthusiasm and support as I took my first stumbling steps into this branch of fandom. Many of her icons were very dark, made from caps that were too dark to see details well. I dusted off my copy of Photoshop and began to learn how to fix light levels. I usually refer to the results as "Relights".
This cap is MacGyver (duh) in the hanging-off-the-suspension-bridge scene in “The Invisible Killer”. It’s one of many of Lothi’s icons that were chosen for the wonderful expression on RDA’s face. In this case, I liked it well enough that I ended up using it myself.
This next one is another MacGyver relight, one of several I have from "Children of Light".
I just thought he looks incredibly dishy in it -- the hair looks a bit like a lion's mane, so I keyworded the icon "leonine".
Next we have two icons from LOLs: an old "classic" of Jack, and one from my most recent batch, of Mac.
This was LOLBudgetCuts, originally posted back in January 2008! It was in one of my very first batches of icons. It's actually a promo shot, probably from the special features on a DVD. The cap came from SG_one_a_days, a daily image comm that went dormant back in 2010. I'm sorry the comm has gone dark; I got some great pics there.
This next icon is from one of my own caps! It's from the MacGyver movie Trail to Doomsday. It was one of a set of LOLs, posted in July 2009. I often do LOLs in themed sets, usually three, sometimes more. The other two in this set are LOLSmoke (Why Mac can't get fire insurance) and LOLPrudential (Why Jack can't get life insurance). This one, LOL.GEICO, was the final one of the set. It's a quite nice action shot, and the full-sized LOL gives you a much better look at RDA's butt. (Which is, of course, reason enough all by itself.)
I only made an icon out of it this last fall, although I had intended to for quite a while. I kept wanting an icon involving Mac and things blowing up, because, well, it's a natural combination, right?
Mandy's final pick is (gasp!) an icon that does not show RDA! I have -- let's see -- exactly one other. They're oddities: no RDA, and the images did not originate with me. There were found elsewhere on the internet, and I snagged the picture and made the icon.
Actually, for this one, I snagged the graphic, resized it, and then added the text back in, because it didn't frame well at all.
I made this icon, and a few others, when I was getting ready to move from Seattle to south Florida. That's when I first set up the bethinexile journal. I made a few non-RDA icons for that journal, mostly related to moving or to Florida, and then found out that I couldn't really access them for posts. Since this one had a duct tape joke, I eventually adopted it for the main list when I had some icon slots open up.
- - - - -
And while I'm on a roll, here are some of the icons that were requested waaay back when I tried to do this meme! Magnavox_23 asked for the next four, which all started out as LOLs:
LOLFrequency, originally posted on November 14th, 2007 -- #6 in the gallery!! The screencap is from S1, "Deathlock”.
This was my first shot at fitting a lot of verbiage into an icon. It’s an example of a LOL for which I had a caption idea and picked a cap to match it. The caption is from a line in the episode, one of Mac’s finest bits of unironic technobabble. At this point, I wasn't yet doing outlines on text; I didn't learn that technique until much later.
The cap came from macgyver_daily, a long-since-defunct daily image comm which I occasionally contemplate reviving. The MGDaily comm ran in order: that is, the mod posted caps from each episode, one episode at a time in sequence from the pilot. She did several days’ worth of each episode, but she ran out of steam before she finished all the seasons - the comm went dry partway through S5.
LOLTreeHugger, originally posted late November 2007: LOLMac #21 in the gallery. The episode is from S2, "Ghost Ship”, another cap from macgyver_daily.
Ah, Mac and his trees. I’ve done several more ‘treehugger’ jokes since this one; mostly with caps from this same episode. This cap was so perfect for the idea, it literally started the sequence! The caption is the classic ‘im in ur X, Y-ing ur Z’ joke. I did that trope half a dozen times in the first two months, but I’ve only used it occasionally since then - only when I have a really good twist on it.
LOLMice, originally posted in April 2008. The screencap is from the movie Through the Eyes of a Killer, of course, and the LOL is technically a spoiler - but the movie is spoilered all over RDA fandom, so I have never felt guilty about it. The cap came from rda_daily, and was done by surreallis, the mod who ran the comm when I first wandered onto LJ.
This was a real bitch to iconify! I was still learning how to handle dark images. In addition to having a thing about being able to read text on icons, I have a thing about being able to see the image clearly, especially when it’s eye candy, y’know?
An added problem was that the source image was very poor quality. Not only was it dark; the best caps Surreallis had been able to make from this movie weren’t great images - fuzzy, blurred, rotten resolution. They worked much better in icon size than in LOL size (450 pixels high). This was very frustrating, because RDA is so smokin’ hot in the movie. It wasn’t until a good two years after this that I finally got the much better images I now have available.
Imagewise, the icon came out better than the LOL, but here again it was a challenge getting the entire caption in, at a text size that met my standards for legibility. The layout, and the light and dark areas, meant I couldn’t simply use a light lettering on dark, or vice versa - especially since I wanted to use the light lettering/ red lettering for emphasis. I hadn’t yet learned the ‘Stroke’ tool in Photoshop, so I had to paint in a dark layer at the bottom, behind the last line of text, to make it pop out.
The layout also meant I had to put lettering where it obscured part of the figure, which I really, really dislike. The full-sized LOL is a rectangle, 450 by 525 pixels, which gave me room to put the entire caption at the top - one part to the left of Ray’s head, the other part to the right and very slightly lower down. All the lovely nekkid flesh is unobscured by wordz. Icons are square - well, mine are; I always want the entire 100 by 100 pixels. Squaring the rectangles is one of the trickier steps for me. But since I wanted this one as an icon, so that’s how it had to be.
My goodness, I did run on about that one.
LOLMathLesson, posted in July 2010. The screencap is from S6, “Lesson in Evil”. The cap came from RDA_Daily, and was done by pepper_field.
This was an example of a very, very fast LOL! Pepper posted this image on July 24th, which was a Sunday - I was on vacation, so she was covering the weekend. She posted MacGyver caps she had recently done, and I snurched them both for LOLs! I snagged this one on Sunday evening when I got home, did the LOL and posted it on the 26th.
And justice_turtle asked for these:
LOLKnock, posted January 2008. The episode is from S4, “The Black Corsage”; the cap is from macgyver_daily.
Man, this is one stupid episode . . . but the eye candy can’t be beat. Many of the MG Daily caps weren’t really usable for LOLs, as too many of them were head shots of Mac looking intent. Or Mac smiling. Very lovely, but it didn’t take long to run out of caption possibilities for those! The best caps for me are action shots -- and they’re harder to get, because movement leads to blurriness. For whatever reason, this episode had way more usable action caps than most. And OMG the eye candy and armporn.
In this scene, Mac is actually lying on the floor propped up on his elbows, peering around a corner to see if the Bad Guy is in position yet for the inevitable trap. But the image looked to me as if Mac’s looking at a closed door, with a doorbell. Hence the caption. The LOL is really just an excuse to use the armporn cap, although it’s the quizzical expression that makes it work.
LOLButton, posted November 2007. The screencap is from S1, “Ugly Duckling”; the cap is from macgyver_daily. Although the LOL was made in 2007, but I didn’t do the icon until some years later. It was a request - a new visitor on LOLMac had been prowling the archives, She commented on this LOL and asked if I would make it into an icon, and I did. I love it when I get requests like that, and I try my best to fulfill them! (I'm better at that than at fulfilling icon memes, obviously!)
Without the request, I would never have iconified this; I didn’t think it was all that great a LOL. It was awkward to work with, and making the lettering read well in the smaller scale was tough. So I ended up adding the contrasting border - a very rare thing for me!
I don’t use the stark white letters, outlined in black, that are the standard for LOLCats. I always pick the colours for the captions from the specific screen cap itself, so that the completed image will hang together. I played around with several choices for the border, but eventually pulled the green from the palette generated by picking up the colour of the wall behind Mac.
LOLSleepingBag, posted April 2008. The screencap is from S1, "A Prisoner of Conscience". The cap came from macsyourman.com, the MacGyver site maintained by stargatesg1971, although the actual capping on this episode was done by a contributor called ‘Ninie’. Like macgyver_daily, macsyourman does caps in sequence, and she’s still not done with S6. So all the caps I have from S7 or the two MacGyver movies are my own.
This LOL was one of another themed set, all from the same scene. The joke is a ‘Russian reversal’, of course, with the added glee that the episode is supposedly set in Soviet Russia. In this scene, Mac is swaddled up and immobilised as part of going undercover in a Soviet insane asylum. He’s presumed nekkid underneath the swaddling. Mmm.
I’ve done a handful of Russian Reversals; this was the first. I didn’t use the trope again for a couple of years - and, ironically enough, that was a treehugger joke.
And, last but not least . . .
LOLOops, posted October 2010. Finally, a LOL that used one of my own caps! You can tell it’s mine, because it’s S7: "Gunz n Boyz".
Not much to say about this one. I might, just possibly, have a thing about RDA in bondage. Yup. I still haven't completely finished capping this episode -- I work on them in fits and starts -- but I jumped ahead of myself and capped this scene very early. Funny about that . . . *weg*
I also really, really love the utterly pissed-off expression in Mac's eyes in this one.
So, that's waaay TMI about a handful of little pictures of RDA, right? Well, you did ask. Or somebody else did.
All the icons I use I made myself, and most of them are miniaturized versions of LOLs. Two of the ones a_phoenixdragon chose aren't, so I'm starting with them. ;-) They're unusual in that they have no text at all. I’ve actually made quite a few captionless icons, but I don’t use most of them myself.
I got my start making icons for Lothithil, as small gifts of gratitude to her for her enthusiasm and support as I took my first stumbling steps into this branch of fandom. Many of her icons were very dark, made from caps that were too dark to see details well. I dusted off my copy of Photoshop and began to learn how to fix light levels. I usually refer to the results as "Relights".
This cap is MacGyver (duh) in the hanging-off-the-suspension-bridge scene in “The Invisible Killer”. It’s one of many of Lothi’s icons that were chosen for the wonderful expression on RDA’s face. In this case, I liked it well enough that I ended up using it myself.
This next one is another MacGyver relight, one of several I have from "Children of Light".
I just thought he looks incredibly dishy in it -- the hair looks a bit like a lion's mane, so I keyworded the icon "leonine".
Next we have two icons from LOLs: an old "classic" of Jack, and one from my most recent batch, of Mac.
This was LOLBudgetCuts, originally posted back in January 2008! It was in one of my very first batches of icons. It's actually a promo shot, probably from the special features on a DVD. The cap came from SG_one_a_days, a daily image comm that went dormant back in 2010. I'm sorry the comm has gone dark; I got some great pics there.
This next icon is from one of my own caps! It's from the MacGyver movie Trail to Doomsday. It was one of a set of LOLs, posted in July 2009. I often do LOLs in themed sets, usually three, sometimes more. The other two in this set are LOLSmoke (Why Mac can't get fire insurance) and LOLPrudential (Why Jack can't get life insurance). This one, LOL.GEICO, was the final one of the set. It's a quite nice action shot, and the full-sized LOL gives you a much better look at RDA's butt. (Which is, of course, reason enough all by itself.)
I only made an icon out of it this last fall, although I had intended to for quite a while. I kept wanting an icon involving Mac and things blowing up, because, well, it's a natural combination, right?
Mandy's final pick is (gasp!) an icon that does not show RDA! I have -- let's see -- exactly one other. They're oddities: no RDA, and the images did not originate with me. There were found elsewhere on the internet, and I snagged the picture and made the icon.
Actually, for this one, I snagged the graphic, resized it, and then added the text back in, because it didn't frame well at all.
I made this icon, and a few others, when I was getting ready to move from Seattle to south Florida. That's when I first set up the bethinexile journal. I made a few non-RDA icons for that journal, mostly related to moving or to Florida, and then found out that I couldn't really access them for posts. Since this one had a duct tape joke, I eventually adopted it for the main list when I had some icon slots open up.
- - - - -
And while I'm on a roll, here are some of the icons that were requested waaay back when I tried to do this meme! Magnavox_23 asked for the next four, which all started out as LOLs:
LOLFrequency, originally posted on November 14th, 2007 -- #6 in the gallery!! The screencap is from S1, "Deathlock”.
This was my first shot at fitting a lot of verbiage into an icon. It’s an example of a LOL for which I had a caption idea and picked a cap to match it. The caption is from a line in the episode, one of Mac’s finest bits of unironic technobabble. At this point, I wasn't yet doing outlines on text; I didn't learn that technique until much later.
The cap came from macgyver_daily, a long-since-defunct daily image comm which I occasionally contemplate reviving. The MGDaily comm ran in order: that is, the mod posted caps from each episode, one episode at a time in sequence from the pilot. She did several days’ worth of each episode, but she ran out of steam before she finished all the seasons - the comm went dry partway through S5.
LOLTreeHugger, originally posted late November 2007: LOLMac #21 in the gallery. The episode is from S2, "Ghost Ship”, another cap from macgyver_daily.
Ah, Mac and his trees. I’ve done several more ‘treehugger’ jokes since this one; mostly with caps from this same episode. This cap was so perfect for the idea, it literally started the sequence! The caption is the classic ‘im in ur X, Y-ing ur Z’ joke. I did that trope half a dozen times in the first two months, but I’ve only used it occasionally since then - only when I have a really good twist on it.
LOLMice, originally posted in April 2008. The screencap is from the movie Through the Eyes of a Killer, of course, and the LOL is technically a spoiler - but the movie is spoilered all over RDA fandom, so I have never felt guilty about it. The cap came from rda_daily, and was done by surreallis, the mod who ran the comm when I first wandered onto LJ.
This was a real bitch to iconify! I was still learning how to handle dark images. In addition to having a thing about being able to read text on icons, I have a thing about being able to see the image clearly, especially when it’s eye candy, y’know?
An added problem was that the source image was very poor quality. Not only was it dark; the best caps Surreallis had been able to make from this movie weren’t great images - fuzzy, blurred, rotten resolution. They worked much better in icon size than in LOL size (450 pixels high). This was very frustrating, because RDA is so smokin’ hot in the movie. It wasn’t until a good two years after this that I finally got the much better images I now have available.
Imagewise, the icon came out better than the LOL, but here again it was a challenge getting the entire caption in, at a text size that met my standards for legibility. The layout, and the light and dark areas, meant I couldn’t simply use a light lettering on dark, or vice versa - especially since I wanted to use the light lettering/ red lettering for emphasis. I hadn’t yet learned the ‘Stroke’ tool in Photoshop, so I had to paint in a dark layer at the bottom, behind the last line of text, to make it pop out.
The layout also meant I had to put lettering where it obscured part of the figure, which I really, really dislike. The full-sized LOL is a rectangle, 450 by 525 pixels, which gave me room to put the entire caption at the top - one part to the left of Ray’s head, the other part to the right and very slightly lower down. All the lovely nekkid flesh is unobscured by wordz. Icons are square - well, mine are; I always want the entire 100 by 100 pixels. Squaring the rectangles is one of the trickier steps for me. But since I wanted this one as an icon, so that’s how it had to be.
My goodness, I did run on about that one.
LOLMathLesson, posted in July 2010. The screencap is from S6, “Lesson in Evil”. The cap came from RDA_Daily, and was done by pepper_field.
This was an example of a very, very fast LOL! Pepper posted this image on July 24th, which was a Sunday - I was on vacation, so she was covering the weekend. She posted MacGyver caps she had recently done, and I snurched them both for LOLs! I snagged this one on Sunday evening when I got home, did the LOL and posted it on the 26th.
And justice_turtle asked for these:
LOLKnock, posted January 2008. The episode is from S4, “The Black Corsage”; the cap is from macgyver_daily.
Man, this is one stupid episode . . . but the eye candy can’t be beat. Many of the MG Daily caps weren’t really usable for LOLs, as too many of them were head shots of Mac looking intent. Or Mac smiling. Very lovely, but it didn’t take long to run out of caption possibilities for those! The best caps for me are action shots -- and they’re harder to get, because movement leads to blurriness. For whatever reason, this episode had way more usable action caps than most. And OMG the eye candy and armporn.
In this scene, Mac is actually lying on the floor propped up on his elbows, peering around a corner to see if the Bad Guy is in position yet for the inevitable trap. But the image looked to me as if Mac’s looking at a closed door, with a doorbell. Hence the caption. The LOL is really just an excuse to use the armporn cap, although it’s the quizzical expression that makes it work.
LOLButton, posted November 2007. The screencap is from S1, “Ugly Duckling”; the cap is from macgyver_daily. Although the LOL was made in 2007, but I didn’t do the icon until some years later. It was a request - a new visitor on LOLMac had been prowling the archives, She commented on this LOL and asked if I would make it into an icon, and I did. I love it when I get requests like that, and I try my best to fulfill them! (I'm better at that than at fulfilling icon memes, obviously!)
Without the request, I would never have iconified this; I didn’t think it was all that great a LOL. It was awkward to work with, and making the lettering read well in the smaller scale was tough. So I ended up adding the contrasting border - a very rare thing for me!
I don’t use the stark white letters, outlined in black, that are the standard for LOLCats. I always pick the colours for the captions from the specific screen cap itself, so that the completed image will hang together. I played around with several choices for the border, but eventually pulled the green from the palette generated by picking up the colour of the wall behind Mac.
LOLSleepingBag, posted April 2008. The screencap is from S1, "A Prisoner of Conscience". The cap came from macsyourman.com, the MacGyver site maintained by stargatesg1971, although the actual capping on this episode was done by a contributor called ‘Ninie’. Like macgyver_daily, macsyourman does caps in sequence, and she’s still not done with S6. So all the caps I have from S7 or the two MacGyver movies are my own.
This LOL was one of another themed set, all from the same scene. The joke is a ‘Russian reversal’, of course, with the added glee that the episode is supposedly set in Soviet Russia. In this scene, Mac is swaddled up and immobilised as part of going undercover in a Soviet insane asylum. He’s presumed nekkid underneath the swaddling. Mmm.
I’ve done a handful of Russian Reversals; this was the first. I didn’t use the trope again for a couple of years - and, ironically enough, that was a treehugger joke.
And, last but not least . . .
LOLOops, posted October 2010. Finally, a LOL that used one of my own caps! You can tell it’s mine, because it’s S7: "Gunz n Boyz".
Not much to say about this one. I might, just possibly, have a thing about RDA in bondage. Yup. I still haven't completely finished capping this episode -- I work on them in fits and starts -- but I jumped ahead of myself and capped this scene very early. Funny about that . . . *weg*
I also really, really love the utterly pissed-off expression in Mac's eyes in this one.
So, that's waaay TMI about a handful of little pictures of RDA, right? Well, you did ask. Or somebody else did.