I joined the oneill_icontest comm and something about the caps they choose has sparked a wave of icons from me. I love, love, love that it has me unblocked. Some days I still make crap but others? Not so much. :) The downside is that my limited computer time is spent making icons rather than reading LJ and commenting. I feel so out of touch.

I'm glad posting the "here are some of my goofs" icons worked for you. So many times I look at the postings by icon makers whose work I find inspirational and I despair of ever getting to that level. Then I see one of them post the 11 or so "rejects" that it took to get to the one I love and I think, "maybe I'm just not persistent enough," and, "it's no accident that the icon turned out so brilliant." I kind of liked the transparency of seeing what went wrong before something went right.

Yay! Humor is so hard. I don't do it easily - but I have to say that Jack inspires a lot of silliness. :)

Yay! Love for that Sam icon! I think my text there failed me because, at least in the cap, it looks as if Sam is checking herself out and pleased with what she sees. I think in the icon it just comes across as a "yeah, she's pretty" kind of thing, rather than the more humorous idea of a woman checking out her own assets.

That texture is from...eep -- either oxoniensis or discolore, I think. I can probably pinpoint it for you at home tonight if you want to hunt it down for your own icon career. :)

And somebody else still loves Ford. *sniffle* jalabert and I were the last ones, I thought.

Ah well it was a challenge that sparked me too and the fact that someone liked it without knowing that it was I who made it.
Look here (OBS it do contain spoilers for Jericho and heroes) here.

And yes, icon making do take time and it really makes me appreciate the ones I have even more, knowing who much time it can take.

Oh and I wouldn't call the "goofs icons".
Humor is very hard, but Jack/RDA makes it easy.

Heh! The Sam icon, I thought of it more like "Oh you think I'm pretty in my dress and I'm gonna blush now" way. But then again I see that my "dirty mind" fails me AGAIN. LMAO!
Now that I look at again with my dirty mind it screams "YAY! Boobs and they are still there"

Would love the texture if and when you have the time.

*sobs* I miss young, bouncy, cute Ford. Heck even the evil one.

Hugs!

Ps. I just looked through my response and I do want to apologies for my bad English... *blushes*

Don't be silly! I understood everything you said. Any time you feel that your English isn't up to snuff, try to imagine how little we could converse if we had to rely on my Swedish. ;)

Oh that could have been fun. LOL

Tänk vad roligt vi kunde ha haft då!

Kram!

Eeep! I just discovered that BabelFish does NOT include Swedish amongst its languages. *boggle*

So...a little Googling and I think I now understand. :) Well, it *could* be fun. Until you tried to puzzle out what awful things an online translator would produce in Swedish from my English, such as:

Vara försiktig vad du önskan för! JAG makt säga , " jag klädet min moder som hat, " när vad JAG snål är " vad en söt hatt! "

~~**~~

Kram = Hug? -- I wonder if that's where the English word "cram" comes from? Or if they have the same root word?

In addition to being the language of a very cool country, Swedish is just so *pretty* to look at when it's written. I love that you have decorated vowels in addition to the plain ones I'm used to. :)

ROFLMAO I nearly feel of my chair laughing...

Tänk vad roligt vi kunde ha haft då! = "Think what fun we could have had then."

Vara försiktig vad du önskan för! = Be care full what you wish for.
JAG makt säga = I power say
jag klädet min moder som hat = I clothes my mother as hate
när vad JAG snål är = when how I stingy are
vad en söt hatt! = What a pretty hat!

The problem is probably that we "line up" the words different than English.
That's why sometimes a direct translations becomes just funny. LOL

Yes.. Kram is hug. And if I look up Cram = it means in Swedish "studying hard"

I love my little dots over the vowels to.. å ä ö... LOL

HUGS!!

Yay! Placing on your first time out is AWESOME. We will not mention how many times I tried at various challenges before placing. :| I have done such a poor job of tracking my f-list lately or esle I'd never have missed that post. Milo and Heroes -- yummy!

The problem with that Sam icon is not in you, the viewer, but in me, the icon maker. The text doesn't convey what I wanted so, yeah, it seems to be Sam looking all bashful at being complimented. I am not the best at text (hah!) but I wanted it to say something like, "Yup! I Still Got It!" or something along those lines. Alas, I couldn't fit that much in, make it look good, AND have it legible. I thought "Lookin' Good" conveyed the same idea but...no. Live and learn. If I were to make it again, I'd change the text to, "Check Me Out!"

The texture comes from oxoniensis; her post is here. I used two of the textures for this icon:

http://oxoniensis-art.com/textures/oxoniensis_itexcloud33.jpg to replace the background behind Sam
http://oxoniensis-art.com/textures/oxoniensis_itex56.jpg this one set on top of the icon, set to "Multiply"

That's a favorite trick of mine, btw. I like to take a light colored texture and set it on top of everything and set it to multiply. To my eye, it makes the whole thing "gel" by uniting the color tones.

Ronon has grown on me (there! I admitted it!) but I wish we still had Ford. :)

It's very awesome and surprising to win anything at all.

About the Sam icon: -Wee... Boobs! But Check me out works too.

Ahh I've actually DL those textures and are working my way through different ways to use them. Thanks for the tip.(light on top and multiply... )
I try to use this from you:
- Crop the image. I think of this as the Base Image.
- Copy the Base Image, set to Screen 100%.
- Copy the Base Image, set it to Soft Light 100%.
Works wonder!

YAY!!! Your caving in to Ronon!!!
Yeah Ford would have been ace too!!

BTW what do you think about fans pouting over the fact that Torri is only in 4 eps in season 4?? Are you pouting? ;0)

HUGS!!

Oh! Boobs! That's down to one word and works perfectly! See? I need an editor.

The Base/Screen/Soft Light combo works for an amazing variety of pics, doesn't it? Sometimes you have a picture that has too much red & yellow in it and that just makes it worse. In those cases, you can desaturate one of the layers (screen if yellow is too strong, soft light if it's the red). I've started working sometimes with a technique from awmpdotnet for lightening some of those irretrievably dark caps (Supernatural, anyone?) and found it very useful.

I feel very sorry for Torri fans. She has had an, at best, poorly written role and I think she did a better job than they deserved with it. She has been quiet about the situation and that, too, is more class than those clowns deserve.

I'm in a weird position of being entirely casual in watching Atlantis. I don't make it a point to watch but if it grabs me in the first few minutes after SG-1 ends, I tend to wander off. So I don't have a deep emotional attachment.

However, I've been the fan whose favorite character is thrust aside and whose beloved show gets pushed and pulled into a pretzel shape by these particular writers and I know how much that both angers and hurts. I have a lot of empathy for fans of Torri and of Weir.

I *am* a Sam Carter fan but I probably am different from most of her fans in that I think this is a TERRIBLE move for everyone. SGA fans rightly don't want their cast broken up to make room for the refugee character from another show; they're rightly worried that it will become the Sam and Rodney show. Sam fans shouldn't be happy because she's being shoehorned into a new show, engendering a whole new group of fans to perceive her as replacing the real stars and thus hating her. I think it's bad for Amanda Tapping because inevitably this bad feeling will spill over into bad feelings for her personally. From everything I've read about her, Amanda Tapping is a genuinely nice woman who adores her fans and I hate to see this sort of garbage slosh onto her.

I think it stinks that they're more willing to kill off or otherwise get rid of characters that are "difficult" for them, specifically the only African American non-alien and the woman in charge, rather than stretching their writing skills and developing the characters. This is the whitest, most male-centric group of "international" explorers I've seen.

I'm sorry for all of that. And I'm not a bit surprised because I have no respect for these writers. :(

I think Boobs works every time. LOL

Btw before you read this next part...
I hope it's okay to have a different opinion than you?
You wont unfriend me? Hate me?
Because one thing I love about LJ and friends I meet is that we some times think alike and some times don't.. how boring the world would be if we all where clones of each other, right?!
The somebody I refer to later told me that she refused to disuse this further cause she didn't want to be "enemy's"....sigh

Yeah, I know what you mean about Torri's part.
She did a great job with what she had to work with.
It never seemed like she was developing like the others. Sure there was a few things in the beginning with Simon and I think they could

have done more with that.

Unfortunately I never got into the whole SG1 thing because they royally fucked it up here in Sweden. I really just caught into it these past 2

years. If I remember it correct we did an all month watching through all of the season to get up to speed. LOL
With SGA I was onboard from the beginning.... and I love the interaction between all of them.
I mean sure I "love" Ronon, but without the others it would be a boring series.
And if I take a step back I can understand in sort of a way.
And I understand the disappointments to, but (yes there is a but) I don't understand how somebody can say: - Amanda is a bitch and I'm

not watching SGA any more. She should have said no to the part..."

I watch the show for all of them. The friendship between the characters, the bad guys and and... well you get the drift (I hope)
I on the other hand is looking forward to what they will come up with in this season.
And BTW why assume the worst? We have no idea how big her part will be or how her character will act being "full time" in Atlantis...
Oh and I'm pleased that they didn't replace her with say Cam.

Or maybe all this is cause my brain is too little..... I'm terrible on remember all those tinny little details that some fans notice....
Or maybe it's just that I've given up and always assume the worst.
I mean look at Jericho! It is/was an amazing serie and they just canceled it...we will maybe never find out what happened.... *sigh*
Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to start look at a show....
Ah well / end rant.

HUGS!!!

Of course you're allowed to disagree with me! Good heavens, if someone stops being friends over an honest difference in what a person enjoys in a television show, well, they're a little crazy, no?

You know what? I hope you're right. I hope that Sam's addition to the cast of SGA turns out to be just what the show needed and makes it better.

I'm more cynical than you, though, so I think the likelihood that this plan of theirs will work to make SGA better is extremely low. I'm not fond of these writers or they directions they took SGA. Many of the complaints I see from fans of SGA on my flist sound VERY familiar, I'm sorry to say. :( I'd like for the Boys at Bridge to surprise me. I just don't think it's very likely.

I still feel that Torri and Rainbow and Paul all got raw deals from these writers. However, it's a business and they know it. I'm sure they'll go on to bigger and better things. I wish them all the best; success is the best form of revenge. :)

I'll never understand how people take their dislike of a character or the way a show is being written and transfer that negativity to the actor herself. I don't know Amanda but I've read innumerable nice things about her from people who have actually met her so I tend to think she's a nice person.

I wish she hadn't still been under contract because I didn't want to see ANY SG-1 character crossover to SGA because I knew it would create lots of bad feelings. However, Amanda was/is under contract and if they say, "you'll play Sam Carter on a new show," that's what she will do. I don't hate her; I don't hate Sam.

Actually, I don't hate anybody though my opinion of the writers tends to be negative.

You are allowed your own opinion, of course, and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not one who is hoping that Sam/SGA/Stargate will fail. I hope it succeeds. Of course, I'd be even happier if it succeeded with writers I loved so that I, too, could enjoy the rush of fandom for SGA.

I'll admit that I've generally stopped watching new shows for the very reason you state. Now that I can get the shows on DVD, I tend to wait, make certain it's good and that it's going to be around for a little while BEFORE I commit to a show. :)

Thanks, Babe!

The thing is that I try to stay positive and hope all things work out with the show.
I do agree that they made a huge mistake on bringing Sam to Atlantis.
But I must say that I have enjoyed her guest appearances on SGA. Maybe that was just because she was a guest....

I ♥ Ford, I thought they did a great job with him starting out all bouncy and young, to turn dark.... then nothing. What's up with that?
And Paul! I ♥ him too. *sigh*
His sexy accent and puppy eyes...... Oh and he got a lead in Hewlett's movie!

I think your right about Amanda, I've heard people who meet her and they all prise her.
I heard about the contract and that sucks, mostly for her.

We should probably stop watching show's period. Until they decide to write in a good ending in any new show they make. *nods*

*smooches*