The Eye
The eye that has been my user icon for LiveJournal was custom created for me back in approximately 2000. At the time I was doing a radio show called The Body Electric, and in a fit of enthusiastic optimism, I decided I'd put up some posters for my radio show on campus. I was also running a personal website off a server in my dorm room themed around the show, and thought that getting some better graphics for it would be nice.
I have never felt like I had much skill in the visual arts, so I hit up my friend H, who was an art student. In exchange for a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies (or possibly two, it was a long time ago), she created some posters and web site graphics for me to use. H also threw in a random weird eyeball icon that I believe might have been a failed experiment.
The posters were cool, and were hanging up around campus for a few months. Because The Body Electric was a soundtracks show and frequently giving away tickets to the Cinematheque (I actually coordinated the giveaway for the radio station for a while), I was able to talk the Cinematheque into hanging up a larger poster advertising the show for the rest of the year. The website stayed up through graduation. Since then, none of that art was used, although my parents hung up the larger poster in their house for a while, and I'm sure I have the other stuff on the final backup of my college computer.
The eye logo went unused until I joined LiveJournal late in 2003. When I needed a user icon, I remembered the eye logo and dug it out. It's been up ever since. Since then I've used it on any number of other systems as my logo, mostly at work. Some coworkers joke that I must be Sauron as I "see" everything.
When I joined Facebook in January 2009, H was one of the many people I reconnected with. For many years we didn't really chat as she wasn't on that system much (you know, having married and had kids and a job and all that stuff). Then the 2016 resolution "Commit Not Particularly Random Acts of Communicative Kindness" led to me getting her address, at which point I realized that she lived near the Super Bowl party I've attended every year since 2012. The card triggered some more regular communications, we had coffee in Cleveland in 2017 when her family was visiting in-laws (we chatted mostly about work as we're in similar lines), she came to the 2018 Super Bowl party with her kids, and assuming that everything goes according to the plan (I'm writing this on Friday morning), this morning we had brunch together.
Facebook gets deservedly dogged on for a host of poor choices and inadequacies, but if used for the actual purpose of communicating with your friends, it can be pretty great, although in this case that wouldn't be enough if I hadn't reached out with the birthday cards. On a side note, H doesn't remember making the Eye icon particularly (she vaguely recalls the overall commission), probably nobody listened to my radio show because of those posters, and she doesn't directly do art for a living. Matters not: friendship can be formed by a few good stories from back in the day, but that's not enough to sustain them. Probably just making an effort is the most important thing, although that isn't enough by itself.
And yes, I did occur to me that if I got everyone's address for birthday cards I might identify a few people I could add to my travel plans, but that was way down the list of reasons I did it originally.
I have never felt like I had much skill in the visual arts, so I hit up my friend H, who was an art student. In exchange for a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies (or possibly two, it was a long time ago), she created some posters and web site graphics for me to use. H also threw in a random weird eyeball icon that I believe might have been a failed experiment.
The posters were cool, and were hanging up around campus for a few months. Because The Body Electric was a soundtracks show and frequently giving away tickets to the Cinematheque (I actually coordinated the giveaway for the radio station for a while), I was able to talk the Cinematheque into hanging up a larger poster advertising the show for the rest of the year. The website stayed up through graduation. Since then, none of that art was used, although my parents hung up the larger poster in their house for a while, and I'm sure I have the other stuff on the final backup of my college computer.
The eye logo went unused until I joined LiveJournal late in 2003. When I needed a user icon, I remembered the eye logo and dug it out. It's been up ever since. Since then I've used it on any number of other systems as my logo, mostly at work. Some coworkers joke that I must be Sauron as I "see" everything.
When I joined Facebook in January 2009, H was one of the many people I reconnected with. For many years we didn't really chat as she wasn't on that system much (you know, having married and had kids and a job and all that stuff). Then the 2016 resolution "Commit Not Particularly Random Acts of Communicative Kindness" led to me getting her address, at which point I realized that she lived near the Super Bowl party I've attended every year since 2012. The card triggered some more regular communications, we had coffee in Cleveland in 2017 when her family was visiting in-laws (we chatted mostly about work as we're in similar lines), she came to the 2018 Super Bowl party with her kids, and assuming that everything goes according to the plan (I'm writing this on Friday morning), this morning we had brunch together.
Facebook gets deservedly dogged on for a host of poor choices and inadequacies, but if used for the actual purpose of communicating with your friends, it can be pretty great, although in this case that wouldn't be enough if I hadn't reached out with the birthday cards. On a side note, H doesn't remember making the Eye icon particularly (she vaguely recalls the overall commission), probably nobody listened to my radio show because of those posters, and she doesn't directly do art for a living. Matters not: friendship can be formed by a few good stories from back in the day, but that's not enough to sustain them. Probably just making an effort is the most important thing, although that isn't enough by itself.
And yes, I did occur to me that if I got everyone's address for birthday cards I might identify a few people I could add to my travel plans, but that was way down the list of reasons I did it originally.