icon: woodstock
I had this idea a while ago. I'm not sure if it's a good one. We'll see.
For a variety of reasons I've been slashing every unnecessary expenditure from the budget over the last few months, and killing off the paid LJ account was an easy decision. But it turns out one can only maintain fifteen user icons with a free account. I had seventeen. I had to part with two.
Once upon a time, userpics meant something. With ALL THE GADGET KIDS and the TELEPHONES these days, it's difficult to remember how important a user icon was back in the day, how they had to be conservatively chosen and conscientiously deployed, how they were finite in number, and as there were no image searches or photo albums or galleries, these icons were often the only glimpse one would allow of one's true image.
Back then, if someone on LJ was intriguing for any reason, I would have no clue as to their real name or identity beyond what they chose to reveal in their profile - but I could always glimpse at the userpics. Is pleasuredome young or old? male or female? nerdy? edgy? angry? sexy? literary? tormented? goofy? Russian? Is he or she wearing pants? Often the userpics were the only clue, and said more about the writer than the writing revealed.
Mine were (are) benign. As they were created, though, I took them very seriously, as I rarely included photographs or links to other places where I might be discovered. Nickel Chief was always a secret, and I was afraid of being found out by respectable people who assumed only sweaty, lonely fruitcakes used “the net” at the turn of the century. All these now-common terms - blogs, avatars, online communities, profiles, midgets - were considered dirty words by skeptics who didn’t get the potential at the time.
(Now those who scoffed in the ‘90s are my facefriends, and the crap some of them post is appalling. It makes LJ’s erudite heyday seem, in retrospect, like something from a lost era, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, or the castrati.)
Maybe I took the naysayers too seriously, or was needlessly paranoid, but when I set up the Chief’s account and tried to give him some sort of identity, I was only the second person I knew in real life who used the internet for some sort of creative, community-minded purpose, and proceeded timidly. (The first, of course, is the indelible schpahky who has taught me so much, and who brought me here in 1822.)
Back to the present day. The first icon to go from the paid account was dear old Woodstock.
He may have been a late addition. Yes, it was a bit of a play on my real last name. (“It’s Bird,” he admitted, after guarding the secret on this site for over a decade.) I wanted just one icon that represented me in a playful mood. Something fun and friendly to offset the daily ANGST OFTEN LKJFSD.
If my wacky comment to a screwball post was all meant in good fun and not to be taken seriously, it didn’t feel so good to include all the moody, black-and-white, deathly images I had in my stable of icons, and Woodstock alleviated that. I really like Woodstock’s role in the Charles Schultz multiverse, and dig his avian patois. I don’t like the color yellow very much, so Woodstock was there for me when I wanted to brighten my monochrome world with a little splash of sunshine.
I can’t believe I just wrote that. But it’s true. I expend a lot of energy attempting to appear cheerful to people.
Maybe in the next post, if there is one, I will discuss the other one I deleted. Maybe I’ll even write about each one of my icons, where they came from, why I chose them, provide the original source photograph if I have it, and pull back the curtain a little bit, not just for its own sake, but as a way of reconnecting with who I was and what I wanted, and what LJ meant to me at the time, and try to make some sense of a past that feels completely forgotten and forever and forever and forever ago, before I sort of started to disappear.
For a variety of reasons I've been slashing every unnecessary expenditure from the budget over the last few months, and killing off the paid LJ account was an easy decision. But it turns out one can only maintain fifteen user icons with a free account. I had seventeen. I had to part with two.
Once upon a time, userpics meant something. With ALL THE GADGET KIDS and the TELEPHONES these days, it's difficult to remember how important a user icon was back in the day, how they had to be conservatively chosen and conscientiously deployed, how they were finite in number, and as there were no image searches or photo albums or galleries, these icons were often the only glimpse one would allow of one's true image.
Back then, if someone on LJ was intriguing for any reason, I would have no clue as to their real name or identity beyond what they chose to reveal in their profile - but I could always glimpse at the userpics. Is pleasuredome young or old? male or female? nerdy? edgy? angry? sexy? literary? tormented? goofy? Russian? Is he or she wearing pants? Often the userpics were the only clue, and said more about the writer than the writing revealed.
Mine were (are) benign. As they were created, though, I took them very seriously, as I rarely included photographs or links to other places where I might be discovered. Nickel Chief was always a secret, and I was afraid of being found out by respectable people who assumed only sweaty, lonely fruitcakes used “the net” at the turn of the century. All these now-common terms - blogs, avatars, online communities, profiles, midgets - were considered dirty words by skeptics who didn’t get the potential at the time.
(Now those who scoffed in the ‘90s are my facefriends, and the crap some of them post is appalling. It makes LJ’s erudite heyday seem, in retrospect, like something from a lost era, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, or the castrati.)
Maybe I took the naysayers too seriously, or was needlessly paranoid, but when I set up the Chief’s account and tried to give him some sort of identity, I was only the second person I knew in real life who used the internet for some sort of creative, community-minded purpose, and proceeded timidly. (The first, of course, is the indelible schpahky who has taught me so much, and who brought me here in 1822.)
Back to the present day. The first icon to go from the paid account was dear old Woodstock.
He may have been a late addition. Yes, it was a bit of a play on my real last name. (“It’s Bird,” he admitted, after guarding the secret on this site for over a decade.) I wanted just one icon that represented me in a playful mood. Something fun and friendly to offset the daily ANGST OFTEN LKJFSD.
If my wacky comment to a screwball post was all meant in good fun and not to be taken seriously, it didn’t feel so good to include all the moody, black-and-white, deathly images I had in my stable of icons, and Woodstock alleviated that. I really like Woodstock’s role in the Charles Schultz multiverse, and dig his avian patois. I don’t like the color yellow very much, so Woodstock was there for me when I wanted to brighten my monochrome world with a little splash of sunshine.
I can’t believe I just wrote that. But it’s true. I expend a lot of energy attempting to appear cheerful to people.
Maybe in the next post, if there is one, I will discuss the other one I deleted. Maybe I’ll even write about each one of my icons, where they came from, why I chose them, provide the original source photograph if I have it, and pull back the curtain a little bit, not just for its own sake, but as a way of reconnecting with who I was and what I wanted, and what LJ meant to me at the time, and try to make some sense of a past that feels completely forgotten and forever and forever and forever ago, before I sort of started to disappear.