Another big catch-up post

I apologize for the excessive diarylike nature of that last post. Here's a more conventional big-pile-of-links-with-commentary. Sorry I've forgotten where I got some of them, these have been accreting for months now.

( games, words, music, design, animation, science, time, bugs, machines, crabs )

My userpics

It recently occurred to me that many of you may not know where my userpics come from. So here are some origin stories.


This is my default userpic. Back in college we used a program called faces that would display an icon for each person who was currently logged into the system. People generally used a bitmap of their face, but I designed this logo of my name instead. I'm surprised that not everybody notices that it's the same upside-down—inspired by Scott Kim's ambigrams (also known as inversions). I also use it as my X-Face header in email, although not many mail clients will display those anymore. (Maybe I'll submit a feature request for GMail...)


This userpic is CEO Ernie, which comes from a web presentation about Instant Runoff Voting. It's about an election for CEO of the Henson Production Company with candidates Ernie, Miss Piggy, Elmo, Oscar, and Beaker. The presentation seems to be broken in the current Firefox, but I posted a direct link to the image in my journal around the time of the California recall election. The image doesn't really scale well down to LiveJournal icon size, so you can't make out some of the details, like that he's holding a mirror showing Bert's face.


This userpic is from the explodingdog web comic by Sam Brown. People send in captions and he draws pictures for them. This one is i computered it. Another of my favorites is I write computer programs all day.

I mentioned in my first post that I had "a lot of issues" with the LiveJournal interface. Actually, I still do, which is why I still refuse to get a paid account. But some time recently they doubled the number of userpics for unpaid accounts from 3 to 6 which I didn't realize until rosminah mentioned it. So I will probably make a few more soon.