Empire Ants

• Im Hyunsik is now listed as Lim Hyunsik, because that's the romanization he appears to be using on recent stuff. The L is silent. (Which is also true of the surname Lee, such as with Lee Changsub and Lee Minhyuk.) Romanization of Korean makes my soul weep. But yeah, I want to be consistent with English-language promotions for his recent stuff. I haven't posted any sets of him yet - just a few icons with him in the background - so this doesn't really impact anything.


• Ethan Nestor-Darling is now listed solely as Ethan Nestor and his youtuber tag is now also Ethan Nestor because he rebranded his channel to simply his name, unhyphenated. So, once again, updating for consistency. RIP to the CrankGameplays era!


• I may be removing the "aesthetic" tags in the near future, but am lacking the spoons to commit to such a decision right now.


• The Planned Sets page needs an overhaul. Whether to update it so that it actually contains icons I care about making now (most of the ones currently listed, I've lost interest/need for) or to turn it into a Google Doc for easier editing, something needs to change about it. Currently uncertain what, but it's in the pipeline.

I'm currently having intense internet issues and when/if there will be a solution is nebulous. Ergo, I'm on hiatus for what I can only hope is a little while but may very well end up being indefinite.

During this hiatus, and in preparation for the new laptop I hope to get soon, I've been poking at organizing my folder of things to icon. I've removed quite a few planned sets - and will likely remove more as I continue organizing - but haven't bothered to add new sets I intend to make yet.

I'm sick of dealing with the lighting on shows and movies that don't know what lightbulbs or natural colouring are, so I'm also intending to be more selective about how many icons I make from such material in the future. It's become a chore, and I don't like that, so it's time to change my "use every viable cap possible" outlook into "icon my fave expressions, and maybe everything that's well-lit." I'll almost certainly keep over-iconning photo sources, YouTube videos, etc. because those are nowhere near as frustrating to work with as things like Riverdale. And I'll still be generous about how many I icon from suggested sets, because I know for a fact at least one person other than myself is interested in each of those sets and it's therefore not a wasted effort. (Sorry it's been eternity on some of those, btw.) And, obviously, I'm still going to icon things from every cap set I've specifically requested be made for me. (Shoutout to Anya, you're fucking epic.)

Finally, I've removed a majority of the character-based tags because it's just one more extraneous step in getting icon sets posted and I don't see much use for them anymore. Animated characters will retain their tags because there are no actor names to look up instead, but otherwise the giant cluster of character tags for live action icons is going away. It was mostly just annoying me, anyway, by causing extra scrolling to reach the people tags.

So, as you've probably noticed, I haven't been making many icons lately. I'm very slow to get to requests, and I keep opting for the lowest effort tasks when I even bother making icons. I don't want to say I've lost the joy of iconning, because honestly I've lost the joy of most hobby-like activities and it's totally just a depression/stress thing. I mean, I can't even sit down and read a book without zoning out, so... It's not an indicator of iconning no longer being 'the thing for me' and more an indicator of burning out on literally everything ever.

That said, though, I very rarely feel the urge to work on icons and my tech and internet issues lately have made it even less appealing. So I'm closing suggestions, to avoid making anyone else have to wait a massive eternity for the icons they want. I'll be making the ones requested so far, of course! Nothing will change there - including, unfortunately, the massive amount of time it takes me to actually finish suggestions - so don't worry if you made a suggestion. I'll get to it! ♥ I just ask for understanding in the fact it's going to take a while because I don't have the spoons to do lighting and colour corrections on anything lately. I'm trying to work up to it by doing a bunch of easy brighten-sharpen-crop jobs. Not sure if it's working or not, but I do have a backlog of icons for a new pb in the pipelines waiting for me to get the spoons to actually make the posts.

Maybe tomorrow? Maybe tomorrow.

Turns out, I managed to post the first half of Vanessa Morgan in Riverdale 2.04 through 2.06 twice, instead of actually posting the second half. My bad...

The second half has now been overwritten with the correct icons.

Seeing how hollow-art has apparently shuffled off the mortal coil, I'm hoping someone out there had two of my old icon sets that were exclusive to the site. I had made a set of Katy Perry and a set of Keanu Reeves that never got posted here because they were too small and slightly lower quality than the usual. They were posted under the username devilbear. If you happened to download them, please let me know. I don't seem to have copies on my hard drive or any of my externals and I hate losing things even if they were lesser quality.

I'm currently trying to find a new laptop, and one of the many concerns I have is that I'll find it difficult to make/view icons comfortably if I get too high of a screen resolution. So, I decided to ask anyone who sees this whether they think icons are too small and what their screen resolution is.

( Oh wow that's larger than anticipated. Behind a cut now! )

For those curious: my current laptop is 1600x900 and icons feel small enough it's making me worried about going for anything higher-res than a 1080p screen.

Just a little note that I've only just realized I copypasted the first icon set for Daniel Hyunoo Lachapelle into the second set's post when updating formats a while back. I've fixed it now, though, and the updated second set can be found here.

Not sure if anyone noticed, but to anyone who did: sorry about that! Please let me know if any other sets you stumble upon appear to be duplicates, because otherwise I'll probably never know until I wander to the posts myself months/years after the fact.

Yes, hi, hello. I still plan to make more icons, but life has been dragging me down and I've been spending my free time escaping into video games. Just wanted to touch base that I'm still around and there's still more to come, I'm just on a bit of an unplanned hiatus right now.

( old content of this entry )

Just kidding. I fixated and ended up transferring all the icon sets to https images. Well, almost all. That one massive set of festive Marikiplier icons is too large to be updated, so I'm keeping it as-is for now.

First of all, thank you so much to everyone who participated in the icon survey I posted last week. I put it up because I worried that my habitual multi-cropping of single images in icon sets was perhaps annoying those who use them. However, the overwhelming majority of you prefer a variety of icon cropping, so that works out perfectly for everyone involved. I'll keep doing things the way I normally do and everyone who has a preference or loves the variety in general will still get what they want (I hope!) out of each set.

Secondly, I've migrated every single icon set on this journal to the post format made by the always-epic tessisamess. It took several days - and a few hours each day - to accomplish this, but in the end I couldn't fathom the idea of moving forward with a different format on new posts if they didn't match existing ones. I almost considered consolidating old sets since Tess' code allows for far larger sets per post, then I realized that would mean editing every single one of my links to the sets across various comms and way too much added work for the crew over at wikicon. So nah, we're good as is. But hey, I won't have to chop my icon sets up into a billion posts each, now!

I hope you're all having as good a holiday season as possible this year. ♥ See you when the next icon set drops~