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rex-luscus:

Hey guys

Remember LJ icons?

They were TINY. 100x100 pixels. That’s, like, digital scrimshaw. And people were obsessed with making good ones - and there were CONTESTS, super cutthroat ones, and trends would sweep the icon-making world every week or so and as soon as you mastered a technique it would be passé, and there were whole communities dedicated to tutorials and icon-making resources, and it was all its own WEIRD LITTLE WORLD.

Is there anything like that now? What do graphics-obsessed people make in the Tumblr era?

If there is one thing I miss about LJ it’s the shadow-conversations people used to have in comment threads solely with their icons. Icons had a vocabulary, and a grammar, and you had to learn it.

Gif sets: not quite used the same way.

Right! It was a whole different dynamic because you could choose which icon to post with. So it would be like “I’m wearing my Severus Snape with a Weird Al song quote mask to say this.”

FLASHBACK MAAAAAN.

For a year or two I had a paid LJ account and I remember being actively excited about the EXTRA ICON SLOTS. I would be able to express myself with a wider array of Thor and Batman reaction images!

a friend and i once had a conversation that went to, iirc, something like 6 pages of comments, just the two of us, only with out icons

100x100 pixels wasn’t scrimshaw on the monitors we were using. It was a totally reasonable percentage of screen space in the resolutions we had at the time.

Icons were your mood indicator, emoticon and gif rolled into one.  I actually miss having multiple icons to choose from.

I loved making icons. I still have a bunch of my icons from LJ. 

@dadhoc made a gif icon of Grand Moff Tarkin and whoever that dude is who gets choked by Vader with the ‘It’s the rebels. I don’t know sir, but they have a flag’ from Eddie Izzard. It’s still one of the most clever little bits of graphic design they’ve ever done. 

Edit: A couple of my favorites which I still have: 

(and yes, that last one is @mistresskabooms when she was like… seven, showing me her fiercest face)

What’s LJ? I remember DeviantArt

LiveJournal. Before it was bought by Russians. 

bought bY WHO