Keeping it brief, I've just been given a somewhat longer holiday.

I went to see my cohort leader at college today, and long story short she thinks it would be a really bad idea for me to start my next placement Monday week (the 21st).

She thinks I need a bit more time off to get my shit back together. I agree with her wholeheartedly. I need a bit more time off because I'm hella burnt out right now, and want to spend somewhat longer than three or four days with my parents, who I am now planning to go home to the week after next as I now have enough time to kick back a bit before subjecting myself to life at home.

I will thusly hie me off to the doctor's as soon as I can get an appointment to talk to him about my Numerous Mental Issues, of which I apparently have plenty, but this I've known for a long time. And try and get an appointment for a counselor. It's all in the cause of getting me signed off college for a month, though, so that's okay. Frankly, i don't care how it comes - I need breathing space, and if being a bit mentally unstable is what has to happen then hey, I'm unstable!

But that's enough of that. I'm posting about something far more interesting than me today.

Namely, New Iconage!

... shut up, I think they're adorable.

Anyway. I've had these chibi images knocking round on my hard drive for a long time and never quite knew what to do with them. I kept trying to make complicated and sexy-looking icons with them, but that just didn't come off. Simple = Good where these things were concerned. Everything else I did with them just looked crappy. This is about as good as it gets.

On the off-chance that anyone else thinks they're adorable, I would really appreciate credit where these icons are concerned. I got the bases I used for the chibis online (I can no longer remember where - sorry) but they didn't look anything like Weiss, so I had to do that myself and it took ages. It also explains the lack of Schwarz, because I ran out of patience after finishing Aya. Sorry.

Incidentally, I just reread the transcript for the Eternal Angels Drama CDs, and my undemanding inner Weiss fangirl thinks they are several shades of ubercreepy awesome.

Especially the bit with Ken and the tiger.

It's apparently my birthday. Oh. Well, that's interesting - and you know you're getting old when your birthday becomes a day it would be nice to massively celebrate but the world won't end if it ain't.

I'm 24. Shouldn't I be more mature than this at 24?

Shouldn't I have had at least one decent offline relationship, and perhaps be thinking about getting on the property ladder and starting a pension scheme? Shouldn't I have a better idea of my own sexuality than 'probably bi shading to gay but I don't know'? Shouldn't I not be fangirling out over Ken Hidaka every hour God sends and some he don't, and have more productive pastimes than the writing of fic, the snarking at badfic, the making of icons and the drawing of fanart?

Shouldn't I, in short, be an adolescent with pastimes like this? Wow, guess what? I'm an adult geek. This is both a bad thing, because the shamelessly geeky aren't particularly popular, and a good thing because hey, who but a geek appreciates the joys of hunting down drama CD transcripts and fangirling out over OAVs at three in the morning?

Here: have some icons.

Brushes by masquerademasks, merely_anger and sugarplumkitten - at least I think they are - and a few other souls whose names I can't recall and wish I could so I could give credit, but I got them all from 100x100_brushes aroud December.

... I think I'm finally getting the hang of this icon thing.

References - because there are plenty:

• Lyrics in the first and only set come from Yuki Kajiura's Aura because I wanted to make an icon set using them since I first heard the song. The lyric 'way too close to the edge' is from See-Saw's Edge. I really hope I never decide I like .hack//sign or I'm screwed for icon quotes.



• The Ouka icon was inspired by way too many terrible Suefics in which some annoying OC flaunts her Kewl Credentials by immediately explaining how much she hates one of the canon women and how much cooler than her she is - and usually it's Ouka. I doubt Ouka likes your Sue either, fanbrat. Oh, and Yuriko? Way cooler than any of the girls you habitually aim at Ken.



• Ken and the cosmic authors? A joke on fanficcers including myself, as well as series canon: series canon was also the rationale behind 'Canon will fuck you up' - the image on that is (unsurprisingly) from one of the Dramatic Precious CD covers.



• All the things I've referenced in the animated Ken icon come from fics I personally have read (come on, RanKen shippers - they don't like each other. Doesn't mean they can't have sex, but for God's sake explain yourselves instead of just telling us Ken Wants On all of a sudden). Yes, I'm scared too.



• Ten points to anyone out there who worked out where the quote on that Youji icon came from. For those who didn't: Lord Flashheart in Britcom Blackadder The Second and you can't tell me it doesn't suit Youji...

The only one of these icons I would appreciate it if people didn't gank is 'White' and that's only because it's my new default and I'd kind of like to keep that unique to me - not bad for an icon I made on the spur of the moment because I was in an experimental kind of mood. Not that I can stop you, of course (just don't tell me because I'll be annoyed). Feel free to use any of the others if general-you like; credit would be appreciated but is by no means essential.

Oh yeah, and I apparently have an OTP.

Brushes by snarkybecky in 100x100_brushes, yet again.

... and we all know what 'subtext' is an anagram of.

I apologize for the use of the same image. Blame the lack of decent images of Youji and Ken together (Omi's always getting in the way) and my own inability to stop thinking up silly captions. All of course gankable if anyone wants them, because my OTP needs far more love than it's presently getting.

Right, that's me done. Going to go save a fic for sporking purposes and eat something now, and maybe crosspost these things to the amazingly torpid weiss_icons. But not right now.

I'm making this post for no reason at all but to show off my shiny new icon. Which I made just now and love to the extent I couldn't wait until tomorrow to upload it.

Look, I'm following an icon trend.

... shut up, I think it's funny. Seriously. I have no idea why I think the text on this thing is so giggle-inducing, but I do and if you can't beat 'em... At least it's not an O RLY owl, anything to do with the iPod silhouettes everyone and their dog went crazy for, or another of those gawdawfully annoying panty icons which were funny for all of about five seconds the first time I saw one (it was a Goyjo icon which at least kind of made sense). The joke's wearing kinda thin now. Surely we don't need an entire pantsu_icons comm?

Besides which, look, IT'S KEN WITH A KITTY.

Ken and a kitty automatically makes this an icon of love and win for me, and so much better than the one I was going to do with Aya and a stuffed animal. Which would have been funny, yes, but nowhere near as adorably cute or worthy of my squeeing over. Oh, and I made a random icon related to Ken and cookery which was Hell to caption because I kept wanting to throw bad fanfiction references into it and it took me a long time to think of something suitably general which still had the right 'screw you, fanon!' tone to it...

Also, I forgot to upload my latest Youji icon, which will never do because my latest Youji icon is just perfect for no-brain moments of which I have plenty. So, um, it's a lot of fuss to make about three icons but I think they're pretty and am pleased with them likewise, so I'm going on about them anyway.


Brush credits to snarkybecky in 100x100_brushes, yet again. Because I like those brushes.

I'll cut this out soon enough, I promise. It's just that I'm kind of having fun with icons about now and while the impulse lasts, I might as well indulge it. It's not like this happens to me often, so I might as well just go with the impulse while it lasts.

Anyway, I made those grayscale Youji icons shiny, too, because now I'd updated all the Ken ones, it just made the Youji ones look even less inspired than they had been doing already, which really wasn't very fair since Youji is hot and has very pretty hair and as such deserves to look good at all times. And, since I was there, I made a couple of extra ones. I have a horrible feeling I want rather more Youji icons. Especially of manga Youji, because he's just so pretty.

See, look, he's pretty, damn it.

Brush credits are, as before, snarkybecky in 100x100_brushes.

And then, of course, there is this.

Yeah. This. Which is just... well, the idea came to me completely at random last night, so I just had to see what I could do with it. Turned out what I could do with it was, um, this. Forgive me, I was overtired. Or something.

It wasn't originally going to be animated. But that would have just been boring.

Anyway, it took me like... four goes to get this thing working properly. The first one's file size was so small it meant I could get a few more frames in and get the thing looking a lot less choppy. The second, inevitably, had too many frames so the file was far too large. Decreasing the color depth only worked in that it made the file size smaller, because it meant the colors changed from frame to frame. Third time round, I got the right color depth and the right number of frames, only to discover that I should have been making the animation from the bottom up in order to get everything even.

Though I have a horrible feeling if I hadn't been working on a fanservice!Ken icon I wouldn't have bothered doing the thing over four times so it was just right. Oh shut up.

This isn't my fault. I blame fanficrants.

You see, girl needs a good 'WTF' icon when she haunts a comm dedicated to plunging a spork deep into the heart of badfics everywhere and exposing the batshit crazy for all the world to see. The fact that my 'WTF' icon happens to have Ken in the shower on it is neither here nor there!

Anyway - I notice LJ now boasts a 'current location' feature. Which baffles me a bit. How many computers do these people think the average user makes the habit of posting from? For me it's a grand total of one. How interesting is it going to be to know that yup, I'm still posting from the corner of a dining room in south London?

Call me cynical, but I honestly can't see many people getting much use out of this thing...

Yay!

... This Yay was brought you you by the Department of Gratified Icon Makers who have Finally Started To get Their Heads Round This Whole 'Making Icons Look Pretty' Thing.

Well, that was fun.

Last night (well, yesterday evening, to be exact) I got bored waiting for the grad student to get off the computer, so I fired up my copy of Paint Shop Pro, and started playing around as I usually do when feeling bored and uninspired. During which playing-around session I opened one of my old grayscale Ken icons and began to poke it to see how it would react. I've long harbored an ambition to redo some of those old icons of mine, because they're so badly-designed I barely use them any more. I knew I could make them look much better if I just took the time on them.

Well, last night, or yesterday afternoon, or whatever, I got round to doing just that. And it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to make the first icon look considerably more interesting and easier on the eyes than it had been previously. So I thought I'd try another. And nother. And... yeah, you get the picture.

That continued until sometime in the small hours and for a fair chunk of this afternoon, because if a job's worth doing it's worth doing properly.

Consequently:

Brushes by snarkybecky in 100x100_brushes. Because dotted lines and things are simple and cute.

Updating old icons = fun. And I couldn't exactly ditch twenty-some Ken icons just because I hadn't put enough time into them when I first uploaded them now, could I?

Well, I happen to think they look a lot better now. Still simple, but not nearly as mindnumbingly boring as before, color being a very desirable quality. I think they're pretty, and not quite so embarrassing to own up to on comms and the like. Also, because I've now got rather more space for text, I've managed to change the captions on some of these to the things I wanted them to say beforehand yet didn't have the room for because I was being so very stupid.

I won't be posting these anywhere else because these icons I consider kind of personal. Most of my newer ones, not so much, but these ones are very much me - not least of which because all the images I got them from were scanned by me and, um, they're Ken - and I think they should probably stay that way.

Now, I'm probably going to update my grayscale Youji icons. They need to be shinier too.

*dies*

I should have been writing this weekend (or my cracked-out, student nurse's version of same). I wanted to be writing this weekend, but instead I spent most of the preceding two days trying to make icons, having been discovered by the fiends at 100x100_brushes. Who proceeded to kill me with their skill and make me want to try and make something prettiful.

Okay, so icons. Yeah. Experimental icons. Weiss and Schwarz. Yup, she made an actual icon set. It's the first time I've tried to use brushes, not having photoshop, and having to laboriously go through and turn all the image packs I grabbed into custom brush tips in Paint Shop Pro took absolutely ages. Not least of which because I didn't know how to do it and oh, the secret shame, resorted to USING THE HELP FILE.

[Brush credits: joyfulsong for the spatters and sugarplumkitten for the borders. You have mad skillz.]

If anyone out there sees these things and likes them, feel free to take them but please, please, please credit them to quietladybirman, if only because of all the sleep deprivation I went through for the sake of just goddamn well finishing the damned things.

All things considered, I don't think they came out so bad for all the trouble I had with them.

Anyway: the lyrics I used come from Hyde's Masquerade, and this is all his fault because if I hadn't been listening to that while coming home on the bus the other day I would never have made these icons and would have been able to write this weekend after all. So it's his fault and if it hadn't been for him I might have finished typing up the Bus Notes I've been making, which is what I really wanted to do with my time off and now probably won't get finished before I go back to work tomorrow. Damn the man.

... okay, I admit it, I made the Ken one first. And wouldn't have bothered making them at all if it hadn't been for the fact that the song in question made me think of Ken. Well, Ken first and foremost but all the others came a bit later. At about the point I realized I could use a few of the quotes for the others and decided to make 'em into a proper set as opposed to me shoving song lyrics on a series of images chosen totally at random then pointing at them and saying 'it's a set!'

Might go whore these things out on wk_icons in a bit (they took me long enough), but the jury's still out on that one. Because I like that comm and I got some good icons there, but they scare me because most of them are much better than I am.

Okay, so I kind of want to, but maybe I'll just leave it until I've done a few more and post 'em all together in a big batch. I want to make some more icons like the ones I've been doing which are very plain and have silly captions in the background, like that one I made of Ken having a bad day. And I want to make a few more badfic icons. There aren't enough Weiss badfic icons out there. And I think my OTP deserves more icon-love as well.

Yeah, I'm going to wait and then spam them with enough icons to choke a large badger.

Badfic-related side note: If you visit sue_confession, you'll see something terrible I have never before admitted to. THE STU. MY Stu. The hideous character I created aged twelve, not having the sense to realize I was doing, yet had the residual sense not to show anybody. Good thing, too; on cold reflection he's one of the biggest and most unsubtle Stus I've ever seen, heard or read about. Feel free to point and laugh - the little hellspawn, and the idiot I was at twelve, both deserve it.

Everybody's doing it, I'll do it too.

Basically, once upon a day off some time back, I once again had writer's block. Instead of staring at my monitor doing MSTs, I had a certifiably stupid notion for which I should have been shot on general principle brilliant idea. This idea was that, as everyone else seemed to make icons for their OTPs, I'd do it too, because my OTP was easily as good as all the ones I'd seen knocking about the place and din't seem to have any icon-love at all.

Never mind that I didn't know quite what OTP stood for. I did know, however, that it was Youji and Ken and that, what the hell, I wanted to make icons anyway, they looked damned cute together and it wasn't like I had anything better to do, so why on Earth not?

Okay, I edited the images. The first one is really edited. Youji and Ken are together in the original images I took them from, but in both cases one half of the pairing came out looking a little crazy, so I just went for the decent pictures and brought them together. And I edited out a load of speech bubbles and drew half Ken's shirt. In the second two the guys were already next to one another - I just brought them a little bit closer. Well, I had to, she said, clinging to holier-than-thou jusifications in a desperate attempt to camoflage her true dark slash fanatic's intentions. I only have a 100 x 100 canvas to play with, I can't be doing with empty space...

It's totally incidental that I happen to think Youji and Ken look damned cute together. And anyway Kyoko Tsuchiya agrees with me going by a lot of her artwork, she has them stand rather too close to one another a lot and OMGTHERELUVISSEWCANON!!!1!111!1!one!!

*stuffs Inner Slash Fangirl in a closet* Ignore her, she's a loony. Um... Icons!

Why do I have so many similar images, only with different text underneath? Because I like it like that. Because I thought of far too many captions and didn't have enough patience to sit there making OTP icon images all afternoon. But mainly it was because I wanted to.

If anyone out there is crazy enough to want to take any of these icons (or, in fact, any of my icons, all of which were made by my own fair hands which is why they're none of them all that great) and use them, feel free. I won't be beating a path to lj_abuse with pitchforks and firebrands as a result, complaining that someone has 'stolen' my 'art'. I mean, god damn, they're only icons. They're little 100 x 100 glyphs which took me little enough effort to make, and they're not even animated.

Besides, I'd be kinda pleased if this wasn't just my OTP, yaknow?