Icon Squee Meme - The online computery journal thingy of a turtle

08:12 pm - Icon Squee Meme

1. Reply to this post, and I will pick five of your userpics.
2. Make a post and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.

The icons typographer asked me about:

This is an icon of mathematician David Hilbert, based on a space-filling curve he invented. The picture of Hilbert is drawn in, and then erased, along the path of a Hilbert curve (although it would have taken way longer than I would have liked to draw it in pixel by pixel, so I used fading techniques to make it look like it's being drawn in much faster, and being erased faster still). I use this icon when I post about math or other cool things.

This is "yig-ped" spelled out in international maritime signal flags. I use it when talking about large bodies of water or codes. (And in case you're wondering, yig-ped doesn't mean anything. It's like "potrzebie".)

These are fictional medications that appear in the video for They Might Be Giants' song Dr. Worm. I particularly find the idea of "song remover" intriguing; I guess you take it when you've got a song stuck in your head and it's driving you crazy. I use this icon when posting about medical stuff.

This is a fractal I drew myself, which I call the L-fractal. It's based on an image of an L-shape made of four smaller different-colored L-shapes; this base image is repeatedly shrunk and used to make more L-shapes, and the resulting images are composited to create fascinating patterns of color.

Potrzebie is a Polish word, the dative or locative case of "potrzeba", meaning "need"; for example, "w potrzebie" means "in need". It was used as a nonsense word appearing in random places in the early days of MAD Magazine, and this icon is a detail of a cartoon from page 25 of "Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine" by Maria Reidelbach. It's a page from a suspense thriller with the dialog replaced by mostly nonsense, some of it from other languages, including good ol' Potrzebie. I use this icon when... well, when I'm in a silly mood, really. :}