queerbychoice | Oppose LiveJournal Userpic Conformism!

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Oppose LiveJournal Userpic Conformism!

You know what would make social interaction really unnecessarily complicated? Imagine if most of the hundreds of people you ever interact with (regularly, semi-regularly, intermittently or ever at all) acquired totally new faces and bodies on a weekly or monthly basis, so that the only way you could recognize or identify them at all was to look closely at the little nametag everyone was required to wear around their necks. But wait, that's not all! If that were all, at least when you met a person whose face you didn't recognize, you'd know you didn't recognize them and you'd know to look closely at the nametag around their neck. But now imagine that everybody's allowed to choose what new faces to acquire, so that every single time a new movie or TV show became popular, half the people on earth suddenly changed their faces to look like the star of it, and as soon as you thought you'd sorted out who all the people who suddenly looked like clones of the latest star were, even more new people would suddenly acquire the same face.

This is the state of social interaction on LiveJournal. I've lost count of how many times I've been looking through the old entries in someone's journal in search of a recent post I remember, only to find a different entry that I thought someone completely different had written, and a comment left by me on that entry that I had completely thought I was saying to someone entirely different. And then I go look through the old entries of that person's journal and successfully find the recent post that I had totally thought the other person had written. This results in my getting terribly confused ideas about the lives some of you are living, and in your wondering why I leave comments referring to events I seem to think happened in your life, that actually happened in the life of someone entirely different who just happens to have the same icon as you.

I can't possibly be the only person on LiveJournal who tends to notice and recognize people by their icons first. Why must everyone try to look like everyone else? I say: Ban all icon-sharing communities! If you must use an icon based on a movie, a TV show, a cartoon, a popular internet animation, or any other image that people other than you are likely to be using as icons, can't you at least choose a distinctive image of it that doesn't look exactly the same as 10,000 other LiveJournal users' icons? I think the best thing about slash is that at least when slash people make icons out of the latest movie or TV show, they actually edit the images and add text and other things that make their icons individualized. Not so with the approximately 500,000 lesbians using this as their icon (and I don't understand how any self-respecting real lesbian could want to identify herself with such a blatantly Hollywoodized soft-porn version of lesbianism as that anyway). Please, resist the urge to join the Great Conspiracy to Destroy Gayle's Sanity!

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This is why my icons are pictures of me.

Well, I like my diverse icon space. Mainly because I enjoy the variety of different mooods they can express. And sometimes I think some are just plain cute or inventive. A good chunk of my icons (like the one above) are self-made, so that cuts down on the number of people using them seeing as how I keep them mostly to myself unless I want to share them with a community (in which case, I myself almost never use them.)

Of course, I'm a long time poster at Internet Infidels where avatars/icons as well as signatures aren't allowed, so I always look to the name first by internet instinct (is there such a thing?)

Of course, I also have

ankie and

eve_l_incarnata on my friends list using the exact same movie still as the one in your icon here, just minus the text, and until just now I had no idea that you were using it too, and so when I read this very comment I read it as being from

ankie, and then I glanced at the username and saw that it had more letters in it than

ankie, so then I immediately leapt to the conclusion that it was from

eve_l_incarnata.

I think all you people just enjoy hearing me call you by the wrong name. :p

Although I'm guilty of frequent icon swapping myself, I know exactly what you are saying and how confusing it is. At least you managed to write an extremely entertaining entry based on these icon woes. I'd give you my archive of old icons, but I don't have a reliable photo server thing right now.

Naw, it just means that we three have incredibly good taste in movies. ;)

From the looks of it,

ankie's is facing the other way and

eve_l_incarnata's has no text. It's all in the details. ;)

Must . . . memorize . . . carefully . . .

YES!!! that picture drives me crazy. I also really hate the cartoon faces with your hair/eye color that everyone has now, i think they're creepy. I liked the magic fashion dolls phase okay. But yeah, it gets confusing when you have a lot of people you don't know in real life.

Oh, you mean like mine? ;-) Yes, they are sort of creepy, in the way they make people look more alike than they otherwise would. But the fashion dolls all had their toes pointed inward at each other in an incredibly vacuously submissive pose, so I find these to be less bothersome than I found those to be.

I tend to identify people by their most commonly used icon or the first icon of theirs I've seen, too. Even when I know what they look like, I first picture them as that icon, be it humanoid or not.

I am guilty of frequently changing my icons and never really representing myself in them, but at least I make my own. I wouldn't want to take someone else's avatar, and I know I get confused when people on my friendslist all have matching Orlando Bloom icons.

I am honored to be thought of as a big bluish marble.

And you're right, I've never confused your icon with anyone else's. This is very convenient. Especially because you have the same first name as

leex and if I started calling you two by each other's names you wouldn't even know I'd confused you, so we would all be deprived of the opportunity to be amused or alarmed by it.

usually if i use a movie icon it's for kicks, like happy snape here,..i make my own so unless someone swipes it,...o.o

Well,

Oh my! You know, someone actually did steal my marble once, but their journal was laid out in such a way that I couldn't even leave a comment for them asking "Why did you steal my marble?" and then eventually they stopped using it anyway.

I've heard that LiveJournal originally did (in its first year or so of existence) have a page that linked to each comment you'd ever made, but they took it down because it was too hard on their servers for some reason.

Really? Wow.

I think I'm supposed to make an obligatory joke here about how you've almost "lost your marbles..." ;)

Only one of my marbles. ;-)

I can't deal with another Amelie icon, really..

Now see here! I've had this journal for a few years now, and B-Ko has remained my trusty icon since DAY ONE. Why, when I first made the journal, I put together a set of mood icons that remains unchanged to this day. Including my angry pointy one here.

Yeah, I got an awful lot of those on my friends list too.

The angry pointy one is totally new! But I definitely won't confuse it with being anyone else's. It's both consistent and distinctive, and seems very appropriate for you too.

Yeah, I haven't seen one that's easily confused with that one so far.

I've got 16 different B-Ko icons, which is what I started with. You just don't see many of them because I've only got the three picture slots to work with.

I've thought of changing my icons many times but never did because
1. It's too much work
2. I'm not creative enough to come up with something that would be entertaining and witty and represent me
3. The reason in your post. It annoys me when people change their icons frequently, and I think I'm reading about someone different from who posted. I like the consistency of having one icon represent me, and to me, most posters are what their icons are.

if anyone started using my picture as their icon i'd worry for them.

perhaps, as with Izzy, I should use this one more

this post is really just an excuse for us to talk about our icons. :o)

I tend to make my "own" movie still, etc. icons. But then other people steal them. Sigh.

I once actually did leave a comment on one of

annarti's posts once where she was using one of her Foamy the Squirrel icons, and I left the comment totally thinking the entry was yours and that I was talking to you, and I only ever discovered the confusion because I happened to be looking through her old entries for something else a few weeks later. And that's despite the fact that all her icons have a particular border around the edge and her name on them, so if I'd looked more closely I could have seen the difference, and she also has a fairly recognizably different writing style from yours most of the time. Anyway, then I had to go back and carefully reorient myself as to which parts of your life were actually yours and which were hers. It was a really strange experience.

This is not really related to your comment, but I've been wondering for a long time whether your username should be pronounced "Imperfect Man X" or "Imperfect Manx."

*brain explodes, chunks splattering on keyboard in a manner that spells out this sentence, bentence.*

Poor Sean. I should be more careful not to explode valued friends' brains.

The latter. It doesn't really mean anything - just one of those random ID AIM threw at me because every id I wanted was taken. Decided it was unique enough to stick to it.

People use icons for purposes other than mere identification---for me, most commonly, it's to indicate mood or tone for the posting, as someone above said. It's a natural outgrowth of being able to have many, at least for people of a certain bent. As far as how much we each like/use, say, movie stills or the latest fad cartoon, that's a matter of taste. With a friends list as big as yours, you're going to have some variety of personal aesthetics out there, you know?

The main point I'm bopping in with here, though, is that icons become icons, in a larger popular sense, because of how they catch on with a larger group. Thus, in a way, all the Amelies and Pusses in Boots are perhaps, within lj, as much a result of a spreading shared cultural admiration for what they represent as they are a reflection of such a spreading phenom. in the "real" mass media/pop culture world. I think of the more faddish cartoony icons as the lite pop version of that same thing---they just pass away quicker, like a one-hit wonder.

An icon I recently shared with

eve_l_incarnata is a 2-shot animation of a fat girl in a bikini shaking her ass in the face of the viewer and looking back over her shoulder with a big grin on her face. (I'll post a follow-up with it below, to show.) I got it, with permission, from its creator on a fat lib blog. It's clearly a political icon, like a labor poster from the 30's, and I am absolutely ALL FOR its spreading, by whatever means, uh, by which it can. We need more women happily shaking their fat asses in the face of the world.

I have no icon with this comment, though, cuz it's my new default to have none. Trying it on for size. Started cuz I just couldn't pick which one I wanted, and then I noticed how it works on my actual journal's page (where a fair portion of my "readership" reads me, not being lj participants)---I have it set to show the picture used with each entry, and I realized I didn't need the default there, necessarily. Or at least it's dull/redundant when I have it there and then do several posts in a row with the default icon.

I'd just say icons function in many ways and differently in different contexts, though (granted) probably the most common way they do their job is to represent the writer on someone else's friends page.

here she is

Did you make the movie though?

Perhaps you could use an illustration to clarify which it is!

Most of my pictures are of me, or by me (or both). Except for a couple.

sorry... ;)
i try to keep my icons original at least somewhat...
i guess i never thought of it, because i tend to- especially lately- keep my lj contacts to a minimum...

yay svu icon! ;)

But I already know people use icons to express different moods. The problem is that it doesn't really communicate very meaningfully if I mistake you for someone else who's feeling that mood. What we need is more creativity, and just because your fat icon is lovely and I would be very much in favor of more people having lovely fat icons, that doesn't mean it wouldn't still be far superior for people to create new ones from their own inspiration. It's only 100x100 pixels and a free "GIF Animator" program, and there are people in

iconrequests who will fulfill requests. Or hell, I fulfill requests. Is there really no possible way you could ever want to individualize your icon to make it more distinctive? Does it have to be a black bikini and a hot pink background? How about a beach scenery bacground? How about personalized hair?

" I think of the more faddish cartoony icons as the lite pop version of that same thing---they just pass away quicker, like a one-hit wonder."

Yes, of course they do, and then all the same people on my friends list show up with some new identical icon to one another. They always do, it doesn't end. And I think you'd start getting distressed too if you had, like me, so many identically-iconned people on your list that you had literally had entire conversations with people and not found out until months later that the person you had been talking to was a different person than the person you had thought you were talking to. It's crazy-making, I tell you! I'm too young to feel this senile yet. I want my sanity back.

Gayle, give it up---people aren't going to change for you on this one. You're going to have to force yourself to read the user names, fer cryin' out loud. If it's really as disconcerting as you think, it's not such a huge step to force yourself to take.

You may consider it ideal that everyone personalize any shared icons---and I'm sure you have an idea of how much they would need to be personalized to be distinctive enough for your purpose---and, sure, I'm all for a creative world. But my focus for the time I spend at my computer has different priorities, and I can only to get so many. And some things---some ideal world thoroughly pure expression kinds of things---are just not on my radar. That's probably true for many folks around here.

You have the power to recapture your sanity: don't comment, ever, until you take a good look at that user name. (Or, hell---can one set one's journal to show NO icons?)

Of course most people aren't going to change for me on this one - that's not the point. The point is that a few might and most of the rest can at least extend a little sympathy.

No, hence the quotes, above.

Ahaha, it's true. When I think of you, I first picture the big bluish marble. And then I think, "No, wait, I know what Gayle looks like... Gayle has gray eyes and lots of curly hair..." and then I picture the actual you. But I always do think of you as the marbly-thing, and all my other (especially long-time) LiveJournal friends as the icons they had when I first "met" them.

Actually, I still picture you primarily as your scribbly Shel Silverstein drawing.

I definitely do the same thing, which is why my icon turnover is rather low (with the exception of sudden icon-adding sprees, in which case I still keep the old ones as well). I also rather dislike faddish icons- I always make my own, and the only ones that come from movies are the "Stitch and the Tramp" icon and my "Yitzak" icon. Anyway I'm pretty sure few people have made "Stitch/Tramp" icons (though it would be cool if they did!), and for some reason I haven't seen similar Yitzak icons either. So it's hard to mistake my icons for other people's, and I'm proud of that.

And I get mad if anyone steals one of my high-frequency icons, because I do sort of feel like that would be stealing my identity. If anyone ever stole my siren, pixie, hippo, or blue raccoon, I'd throw a fit. Some of the other icons are more for moods, and if someone wants to steal one of those I usually say yes. But otherwise I get sad.

*applauds*

don't look at me... I'm with you on this one.

Someone took my default peace icon once, and I didn't even know what to say. I made it. I designed it. It's one of the few things I've ever been really really satisfied with that I created, and I felt like it was so accurate to represent me. I could see swiping some fad pop icon, but not something original and creative. Gods.

Once, a couple months ago, a whole slew of people on my friend list had the same exact icon as an "awareness" thing, and it made me crazy. At first I mistook everyone for the first person I saw with the icon, and then I just gave up and ended up with a big merged person in my head that included all of them. Gah, it was horrible.

Agreed.
Each of these three has a story to it. Each of these three is permanent---unless livejournal decides to allow more than three icons for unpaid users, these will remain my only icons. Each of these three is, in some way, meaningful to me.

Also, they match my journal's color scheme. Y'ever get the feeling you're putting in way, way more effort than everyone else, and no one's noticing?

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Oppose LiveJournal Userpic Conformism!

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That picture bothers me too

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Destroy Gayle's Sanity!

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Re: Destroy Gayle's Sanity!

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can't get with you on this one, Gayle

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