meeeemery

[kaberett]

I kind of want to explain a couple of my icons, but don't want to do so unprompted, because brains ;) So... if you've been wondering about the story behind an icon [... beyond what is contained in the comment feel], I'd appreciate the invitation to witter.

Comments

[birke]

Anything special about the gingko leaf?

Also, damn, is that malachite in the Nat Hist Museum in London? I went there in 2010 and didn't see anything dick-shaped. Sad.

[kaberett]

1. They're littlebutfierce's favourite, and at one point I was putting together a care package so read quite a lot about them.

2. Turns out they're kind of amazing.

3. My undergraduate college planted one in the Fellows' garden for Colin Austin, who I met for the first and only time at the Scholars' Dinner at the beginning of my second year - where he was exactly the beautiful, terrible old Cambridge don that makes the place seem worth it -- things he encouraged me to do included stealing college linen and *actually* making off with a tiny pineapple. He was a papyrologist and an astonishing scholar of Ancient Greek and a poet, and he managed to get a stuffed toy penguin a Cambridge BA in Zoology via arrant bullshitting, and I am delighted and honoured to have met him; I am saddened I didn't get to know him better. I didn't appreciate why a gingko for him was so perfect until points 1 & 2 above, several years after the fact.

4. My last weekend in Cambridge before moving to London, my mum and I went around the Botanics. The big gingko near the autumn garden was shedding leaves, and I picked one up as a memento - the one pictured here, against the background of my favourite (ridiculous teal) trousers (further out of shot: stealth wheelchair). It's pressed in my diary on the date I acquired it.

[birke]

Oh, that's not what I was expecting! Haha. I thought maybe, since it was a special date, the gingko represented memory. Because I believe people take gingko supplements to improve their memory. (No idea if it works, I've never tried it.)

Colin Austin sounds like a character.

My college days also involved gingko, but less favourably; there are female gingkos planted outside the older part of the library and they make it smell like poo. It's one of the defining sensory experience of sitting in the Thesis Tower (which is otherwise extremely pleasant).

[kaberett]

Hah. My college library had the benefit that from the sciences floor you could lean out the windows and pick the grapes growing up the outside of the building; and the downside that it was directly on the river, i.e. full of tourists and horror-of-horrors punt tours. I can recite with perfect inflection the potted tourist-friendly history of my college and the ones either side.

[birke]

Lol dick-shaped rocks were probably not what you wanted to explain.

[kaberett]

Yes, this piece of malachite is genuinely on display in the minerals gallery in the NHM in London, in the case of interestingly-shaped malachite. I... stopped and stared when I saw it. It wasn't until my second or third visit that I managed to convince myself that whoever had deided to display it had chosen to do so for the obvious reason.

I'm still not sure whether it's the case that nobody's dared remove it from display because that would mean admitting they'd noticed the obvious, or whether they just all think it's really funny.

[birke]

How could you not display it and share the love, right?

[kaberett]

SHARE THE LOOOOOOOOOOVE

[sorrillia]

I hadn't realized you'd seen it before when you pointed it out to me and insisted I take that photo.

[kaberett]

YEP.

[jesse_the_k]

I'd be gratified to read a deconstruction of your "Swiss army gender" default icon.

[kaberett]

Oooh, I wrote about this about a year ago (no reason you should know/remember that!); let's see what of then I dis/agree with...

Hmm. No, I think I'm probably still there with all of that, give or take how self-effacing I was being; I think I'd want to add something about gender being practical, a tool to move through the world; its being a social construct doesn't mean it's not real and useful.

The rest of my new thoughts are, I think, still settling - they got sparked off a couple of nights ago - and I'd feel uncomfortable giving them a rapid treatment, and especially I'd feel uncomfortable pronouncing them as-though-an-expert as whitey to a mostly white audience. So. That'll have to wait. :-)

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the pointer, and I'll be around when your thoughts settle, soon or late.

[katzenfabrik]

I love this icon such a lot, and your thoughts about it as well.

I agree with you that the artist's description reads as mocking, but according to a comment on their deviantart, they do identify as genderqueer, so there may be a degree of self-mockery there as well. Whether accidentally or not, though, they made a really powerful image that speaks to lots of people, including you and me.

Edit: oh, and I will also be here and interested in your new thoughts whenever they settle. xx

[silveradept]

The [Not Evil] ostrich, even though I understand due to caption, and the Dalek confronting stairs, although I understand why they would curse. Please.

[kaberett]

AHAHAHAHA there is actually more backstory to this one! And I had forgotten the stated backstory, so thanks for prompting me to remind myself :-)

RIGHT SO -- have you seen all over the Internet - this was a thing about 2005-2007, I think - the icon "don't cry, emu kid", with a really ostentatious tear MSPainted onto an emu's face? Yeah. In addition to the GSF stuff, that. It is referencing that.

I... can't honestly remember the specific incident that sparked it - probably I was having a rant at noldo about how ostracising people is both healthy and necessary, sometimes, and is definitely not evil - and yeah, "evil" sounds a bit like "emu", and "ostracise" sounds a bit like "ostrich", so there we have it :-)

[silveradept]

Sounds like the kind of pun I would try to make out of it.

[kaberett]

This one's another Stuff That Was All Over The Internet During My Misspent Youth one. I have never been a Whovian - I've watched maybe three episodes, and the total time I've spent watching canon is probably less than the amount of time I've spent with Love Is Cool on repeat - but nonetheless this was something I imprinted on.

And then. I started using. A wheelchair.

[silveradept]

And so it took on special significance. Makes sense.

[cxcvi]

I think I'll take the one you used in this post.

[kaberett]

It was getting on for Finals term of my last year of undergrad, and I was astonished and delighted that I'd made it through the winter (on my second attempt) and was actually, plausibly, going to graduate. My desk was in a big south-facing bay window and I got to sit at my computer with sunlight streaming in over me - the days were getting longer, I'm photosynthetic, it was brilliant.

And then one day I glanced down at the floor next to me, and it must have happened on many days before and many days after but this was the only time I caught it - and there was a patch of sunlight filtered through my monitors and my windowframe and so on that just... happened to look like a heart. So, obviously, I thought "I'm having that", and I photographed it and acquired it as an icon, and... here it is.

For me it is tentative daring-to-hope, and beneficence and forgiveness and love, all wrapped up at once, and it is the passing glory of thirty-year-old cheap-but-durable never-been-replaced horrible-college-carpet in a moment of glad grace. What transformations can be wrought with kindness and the eye of faith, and such.

[calissa]

I'd love to hear about what honeysuckle means to you.

[kaberett]

It always comes into flower right before my birthday. It's a grounding ritual, going out to find some to watch - the evening before my 16th birthday I stood barefoot in the gloaming with a mug of jasmine tea and my world coming down around me, and the first honeysuckle flower opening in front of me.

It's a reminder that the world keeps on turning and I have beauty to anchor myself with.

[calissa]

Oh, that is lovely! I am glad I asked. There is a honeysuckle vine at my childhood home (twined in with ivy), so it has some lovely memories for me too.

[kaberett]

the rosebush and the briar :-)

[calissa]

I had not thought of that! <3

[fyreharper]

I love the way you tell stories.

[fyreharper]

Potato? :)

[kaberett]

... there was a really, really long conversation over at noldo's. I don't think I can even begin to reconstruct it all - it was a conversation about potatoes and movies (I am generally in favour of potatoes, noldo generally thinks they're awful), but somehow or another it turned into me going "but they're a bit dull really" & noldo feeling the need to defend their honour, upon which the POTATIFESTO got written, of which this is... an extract. A glorious, glorious extract.

[fyreharper]

:D

[rydra_wong]

I would like to hear about the showerbeast.

[kaberett]

Showers are one of the aspects of self-care I find hardest, both in terms of physical ability and in terms of executive dysfunction. I also cling really, really hard to doing them independently and without help, even if it would be useful to have assistance, because... I am stubborn and scared, basically.

So. One must face the gazebo alone; and I must face the showerbeast alone (mostly for reasons of my own self-conception in really broken ways, heh). What I was trying to do with this one was (1) acknowledge that it's something I find difficult for a range of reasons and (2) poke fun at myself for making things harder than they have to be -- a reminder that, actually, asking for help is a thing I'm allowed to do and a thing I benefit from.

[rydra_wong]

I am ... familiar with such beasts. *rueful g*

[thefairymelusine]

The boots icon?

[kaberett]

Myself aged ~6-7 in my favourite dress, demonstrating that I don't femme very well! Standing in the scrubby patch at the bottom of my parental garden with the apple tree behind me, reading a book. I could probably dig out the whole photo and tell you which book, but it might well have been some Swallows & Amazons. I keep it around for (1) fashion, (2) my childhood, (3) gentle disgruntlement (there is a glorious photo of me around the same time - it's a class photo at school, I'm wearing that dress while everyone else is in sensible things, and I'm standing a clear two feet away from everyone else scowling like anything), and (4) discussion of shoes.

It's interesting engaging with small-self's expressions of femininity -- and that even then it was decidedly high femme nonsense, when I could get away with it.

[jedusaur]

I'm kind of curious as to why you have decided you need both a Sokka facepalm and a Zuko facepalm.

(Also am pleased to see one of the icons I made you when we were tiny babies still in use. ♥)

[kaberett]

I keep meaning to go back through the entire damn series and make an icon set of characters facepalming. I have never got around to finishing it up, but I think I uploaded these two as proof of concept.

(Yes it very much is <3 I have all the rest kicking around and know where to find them; I am just baaaad at remembering to actually like upload shit. Though the prompt is very welcome, hmmmmmm. And seriously thank you so much for that birthday present, it still makes me smile every time I use it <3)