Beta Lyrae

I thought I posted this unreasonably large icon batch a few years ago, around when I posted Dani Moonstar post of DOOM. Recently I realized this was not the case. Have the rest of the New Mutants post of doom that has been haunting my journal since 2018.

( DOOM, AGAIN )

Some quick icons from TFP Season 1.

( 55 icons )

Fairly early on I decided to make an index of all my icons, like some people have indices of all their fanfic (I make more icons than fanfic, and none of it is tidily collected on AO3). I kept this up for a while and then fell behind and stopped updating for... six years, I think? I'm honestly not sure, because I started re-indexing in April and I can't remember exactly what year I'd left off in before then. Today I finally got through 2023 to 2026!

So the index is usable again. Not sure anyone but me ever uses it, but. It's there. (And now has hyperlinks by section, because it was getting pretty unwieldy.)

Also caught a post that I missed in my recent tag-by-year efforts (... I wanted to see how many I'd made in a given year, basically; answer: more this year than last!).

ETA: After posting this, all pleased with myself, I realized that a) the Dani Moonstar iconpost of DOOM was not on the index (fixed), and also b) I... never posted the New Mutants icon batch I spun that post off of. I thought I finally did! But I think I mixed it up with either the Dani post or this much smaller batch which I also posted well after making.

Eh. I'll try to get it done soon. But the index may never be really accurate.

#1-5 were made for the 1980s round at ic_animated.

( 40 icons )

Amidst all the terrible things going on right now, I am taking some comfort in kākāpō conservation.

Kākāpō are round flightless nocturnal green parrots from New Zealand, and they are tragically endangered (235 adults). However! Their current breeding season has gone very well so far—all the eggs have hatched now, with 92 living chicks as of the last update.

The babies are born looking rather like little balls of vibrating dryer lint, progress through fluff to vaguely bird-shaped scraggle, and eventually get green feathers poking through the white fluff.

This year there was a nest cam—past tense as those birds have flown walked out of the nest and the solar energy was getting unreliable anyway, but the highlights are still up.) The mother here is Rakiura (known for reusing her nest every mast year—most kākāpō move around more). Also, she has fanart on tumblr. (Image link just in case that doesn't work.)

Other highlights:

One female, Whetū, nested in a hollow tree, significantly off the ground. The rangers were worried about a clumsy young chick climbing down from there, so they built a ramp. The chick used it to exit safely!

Another, Rimu (named for the tree that triggers breeding years with its masts) nested up at the top of a cliff. Lovely view, but again, the rangers were very worried about her chick, which they couldn't even confirm existed for a long time—her transmitter showed she was probably feeding one, but an entrance directly onto a cliff ledge seemed very dangerous for a clumsy youngster. So the rangers ended up digging into her nest to make a new, safer exit.

Kohengi being very photogenic with eggs and chick.

Mother kākāpō gamely tries to brood chicks that are getting to be about her size.

Male kākāpō Sinbad booming booming (showing off, and looking adorably spherical).

Chicks moved between nests (usually to an island with a better food source). (It is lucky for the conservation team that mother kākāpō do not easily abandon disturbed nests, and also that they don't really have a concept of "a baby that is not mine.")

Kākāpō fertility science in cartoon form.

That time back in 2014 Lisa stepped on her egg and the team carefully patched it up and incubated it and got a living bird out of it (one of six to fledge that year!)

I've been following Biologist Andrew Digby on Bluesky, the Kakapo Files podcast and the Kākāpō Recovery instagram (imginn link in case you don't have an account).

Grab bag of icons, some made for the Side Profile challenge over on ic_animated.

Fandoms: (deep breath):
9x Immortal X-Men
7x Angel's Egg
3x Barbarous, Galaxy Princess Zorana, King of Dragon Pass, misc silent film posters
2x GRIS, owl photographs
1x American Girl: Josefina, The Dark Tower series, Lord of the Rings (Frazetta illustrations), Monstress, Pip & Flinx, The Power FantasyTigress Queen, Transformers: Worst Bot Ever

( 40 icons )

Finally finished my icon progression post for 2025 and posted it to icontalking!

Also, while I never actually posted my progression post for 2024 over there, I did finish it.

These are my entry for ic_animated's latest round. Posting them here just to have them on my journal too.

( Fandoms in alt text )

Didn't manage to post February's icons before the month was up, so here's some catch-up.

Mostly Percy, with some of Leeds and Cecelia and one Cameron.

1-5 were made for ic_animated's Crayola round—can't resist the color yellow.

( 30 icons )

This week, I spent probably too much time making probably too many icons of the same image. These are the ones I ended up thinking were good enough to post.

( The icons )

Blather

Okay. I really, really like the cover to Transformers Skybound #10—Carly and Arcee stargazing together while Carly is sitting on the roof of her van. It's a pretty image, and I really love vengeful human teenager Carly and her quasi-familial relationships with giant robots from outer space.

It turns out it is really hard to icon that image. A simple wide crop (#1) works, but you lose the details and especially the expressions. A close crop is tough because getting both characters will also get awkward parts of Carly's car (#2 was the best I got in terms of a close crop).

So I thought of circular crops! (#11-15, #24) Which did work better... but I have very few circular frame textures, and some of those had a pretty small "frame". (One also has part of the circle spilling off of the icon, which was useful for hiding inconvenient lone headlights and things like that—#11—pity I didn't like the flame border that much.)

So I used those few (some with significant color manipulation, and with different circle crops because I wasn't sure how much to prioritize getting Arcee's hand in the frame—I do like the neon effect I ended up with in #12-13), and then it occurred to me I could make my own frames by just resizing circles of different colors, and set those on other backgrounds. More flexible! (#15-20, #24-25). For a most of these I just used a plain circle crop, but in a few I used the circle as a flat colored background, or a transparent one (#20 is my favorite of these).

Then it occurred to me that I didn't actually need to keep the whole background–I could just cut the characters out! This led to #5 and #10, where Carly is "sitting" on the frame. Then I wanted the starry sky back so I did some with the background in frames, and then I started playing with text (#6-10, #22-23). I like how some of these turned out a lot! Some of them do basically use the text as unreadable texture, though.

(Around here I forgot my original objective and made icon #3, which is actually a narrower version of the wide crop, using a recolored texture as a border.)

Then it occurred to me I could crop two separate circles, one for each character, and get some flexibility that way. Thus #16-20 and #25.

... And then I realized I'd done a solo icon of Arcee and not one of Carly, so I did #21 to make things even.

Anyway, I'm planning on inflicting it on ic_animated for the Screencap Pool round, to see if anyone else has ideas about what to do with it.