News and Updates

23 January 2005: Website not abandoned, I promise. *grin* Just got lost in the shuffle of other things that Really Needed Doing. Hopefully I will get the time to get back to work on it soon.

18 September 2005: I've removed all links from this page for the time being, because I'm moving the entire directory structure of this site around and I don't want visitors ending up in dead-ends. If you want icons, try Icons.EtoilePB.com directly, or go to my icon LiveJournal. Thanks. :)

16 September 2005: Hi there! I am alive and well, and so -- contrary to the updates page, haha -- is this website. I have not abandoned it, but it's true I haven't done anything content-related in a while. I finished my master's thesis this spring and I've just finished a rather long and complicated slow-motion move to another state. Now I am settled, and being a student no more, I actually have guilt-free time to pursue things like hobbies. I hope to have the site layout and content completely redesigned and fully functional by the middle of October, and at the very worst, November 1st. Thanks for bearing with me through another set of renovations. :)

30 March 2005: This is just a little note to say that no, I haven't abandoned my website but yes, it is fantastically out of date and in need of maintenance, repairs, and re-deisgn. My master's thesis is due in April, and I finish school for good in early May; I hope to recreate and update the whole website, well and properly, after all that. In the meantime I post new graphics and Photoshop extras (brushes, gradients) at Icons By Etoile on LiveJournal. Thanks for all your patience. :)

5 January 2005: Happy New Year! I've put a bunch of new and shiny Eowyn icons up in the LOTR section. I happen to think that most of them are quite good and that my Photoshop skills have jumped up another level, but that's just me. ;)

17 December 2004: I made some Lost icons that nobody seems to like; alas. They're still here.

This whole website is going to get an enormous overhaul in the summer. In the meantime, grad school eats souls. Like Cthulu. Happy Holidays!

6 November 2004: The entire icons subdomain has been restructured and redesigned for easier viewing. In addition the pages are mostly now up to date, including all the icons I've made of the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox! Check it out. :)

22 October 2004: As you might remember, I am a Boston Red Sox fan, what with the lifetime spent in the Boston area, and therefore a very happy campter today! So, I made Boston Red Sox ALCS Winning icons. The link will lead to a different (LiveJournal) site for the time being; I don't have time to restructure my icons page and put them all up there just yet because I have papers to write and a World Series to watch. Soon, though.

27 September 2004: Something new has caught my attention, and it is Zhang Yimou's Hero which is, despite its other faults, one of the most visually stunning films I have seen in a long time. As such, I naturally felt the need to reduce it to 100x100 pixels.

In the meantime, most of my web design skills and time are going into the BU Choral Society, and I hope to improve their website a great deal in the next few weeks.

10 September 2004: Am not actually dead! Am, however, in my final year as a grad student, and therefore suffering from a distinct lack of time. I was also deeply uninspired icon-wise all summer, and on top of all that, I have suddenly found myself with a boyfriend for the first time in over three years, and since he and I live in two different cities, when we do see each other, we tend not to care a whole lot about what's going on in computer-land. Several people have dropped by recently for icons, though, and trust me, I appreciate your visits and hope to reward you before too much longer with new material.

15 June 2004: SURPRISE! I told you a site redesign was coming. I'm doing it one page at a time, so you may experience some serious wackiness viewing this site (especially the graphics and icon pages) for the next couple of days, but I promise to do it as quickly as possible. I probably shouldn't have made the index live yet, but I really wanted to show off. I hope you like it. :)

14 June 2004: You can blame Alfonso Cuarón for this, but this website now has a Harry Potter icons section. I got inspired by Lupin. I think I just have a thing for hopeless cases. Anyway, same rules as always; enjoy.

22 May 2004: A bunch more icons up, hither and yon, mostly in the LOTR section. Site resdeisgn has not been a priority of mine, due to various family, school, and work situations in the last month. It'll get done sometime this summer, though.

12 April 2004: At long last, some content that doesn't spring from Photoshop! If you're interested in film scores at all, and in Lord of the Rings at all, but especially if you're interested in both, please check out the new part of this site, LOTR musical analysis. It took me a lot of time both over Christmas and over Easter, but it's pretty much all there now. Enjoy.

7 April 2004: Sometimes something new comes along and captivates your imagination. For me this spring, that's been Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Go ogle the pretty new icons. ;)

3 April 2004: All the icons need more organizing, because of the fandoms to which I have spread out. In the meantime, there are some from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind going up presently.

In the meantime, I'm starting to think about my site redesign, because I've kind of had it with the current look and code and layout, and I can't decide whether I should make a real effort to make the site more compatible with 800x600 screen resolutions (at the moment, it only really works in 1024 or higher). If you're someone with an 800x600 resolution and you feel left out, write to me at webmaster [at] etoilepb.com. There's no point to a site without an audience, so I'd like user feedback to improve your viewing experience. Thanks!

20 March 2004: Brand new: a page expressly for icons fromHighlander: The Series. Why yes, I AM a geek. Also, I'm just now realizing how very many images on this site need to be remade or deleted. That's a year-long task. The redesign and restructure (mostly code-wise, nothing you'll probably notice) of this site is planned from May 1 - September 1, for the simple reason that there's no school, graduate or otherwise, in those months.

14 February 2004: Miscellaneous icons old and new abound, and six or eight LOTR ones as well. Whee, updatses.

1 February 2004: 'Allo. A new Lord of the Rings songset up, to BNL's "Next Time." Quite catchy, really. Also, with the Superbowl (Go Pats!!!) came a Troy trailer, which is available online, and so I quickly capped and started making icons. They're up in the miscellaneous section, because there aren't enough of them to justify their own section just yet. Oh, and ditto on a couple of Indiana Jones. *grin*

30 January 2004: Site construction merrily underway. There's a brand-spanking-new Graphics Section to this site, for better organization. The Writings (I know, I know) section and the Goodies section are heavily under construction and you're just better off not trying at all until sometime in February. There's now a page for font sites in the Links section, and I have a sneakins suspicion that I'll come back to this tomorrow night and discover that I forgot to fix half my links, because it's after 1 am and I shouldn't still be writing HTML. Cheers!

27 January 2004: I'm working on some improvements to the site (mainly in organization, but hopefully also in content), but they're taking time. Please forgive links that don't go anywhere and pages that aren't found; it should all be better soon. In the meantime, if you're on LiveJournal, go add my icon journal, Icons by Etoile. ;)

2 January 2004: Happy New Year! :) A few new LOTR icons up, but several more down, because I decided that after a whole year of icon-making I could finally afford to delete the old, craptacular ones. ;) I've got a bunch more (non-LOTR) planned, but I always forget to do them when I have Photoshop open. I'll get there eventually, I swear.

17 December 2003: A bunch of new Lord of the Rings icons have gone up over the past month. Also in the past month, I've discovered people from the LiveJournal community LOTRicons stealing my work and claiming it as their own. Sure, I don't have copyright to the stuff, but what you theives are doing is just plain rude and inconsiderate, and defeats the point of a community where everyone shares his/her creative interpretations. So quit doing it, because you're pissing me off.

Also, my bandwidth use has increased DRAMATICALLY this month. I suspect people are direct linking to images on this site. Please don't do that. I run this website as a hobby, and the money to maintain it comes out of my own pocket. I don't HAVE any money on my pocked, so I can't afford to pay for the inconsiderate actions of others. So quit that, too.

16 November 2003: A few new LOTR icons, in a new style, and one up of the warrior queen we all know and love as Guenivere (because I'm *not* writing that name in Wlesh) up on the misc icons page. The big news today, though, is that the Lord of the Rings Icons section has been restructured, hopefully for easier viewing. Let me know if there are any problems.

1 November 2003: A bunch of new things today. First and foremost, as my content keeps increasing, I realize that a major restructuring is in order. I have been promising to add an icon affiliates section for about three months now. I swear, it will be done. Eventually. Also I need to arrange a place to display header-sized graphics, a better way of finding desktops, and so this will eventually resolve itself in a redesign of the menu bar and in the creation of a whole new arrangement. Fun, eh? Also, I finally need to bring the Writings section up-to-date, because currently there's nothing there.

Alas, the life of a grad student does not leave much time for major website uphauls. Look for innovations after Thanksgiving, because all of my term papers are due before December 5th.

And now, something fun: a whole bunch of new Lord of the Rings icons up over there. Some are brand-new today, some are just ones I forgot to post the last time I made them. Enjoy.

One final thing: lest you think I only like blue, my new LiveJournal layout is all shades of cream and green, and pleasantly hobbity. Check it out.

1 October 2003: A bunch of new "generic" Lord of the Rings icons up, in some styles that are new to me -- black and white, transparent, etc.

18 September 2003: There's a new songset up on the Lord of the Rings icons page: Loreena McKennitt's "Night Ride Across the Caucasus." I think it's actually better than most of my recent stuff. More consistent, too. Go. Look. Revel. Love. ;)

23 August 2003: I'm aware of the *.bmp/*.jpg problem happening with many (most) of the icons on this site. I apologize for the inconvenience, but as I'm moving this week, it's going to take me a while to get it sorted out. In the meantime, if there's an icon or six you really want, e-mail me at webmaster @ etoilepb.com, and I can send them to you. Thanks for your patience!

18 August 2003: The "No One Is Alone" LOTR songset is *finally* finished. It's only been, what, three months? I'm glad to be done.

13 August 2003: All sections of site now updated and operational EXCEPT "writings." That needs much more work than a code-copy+paste.

12 August 2003: Welcome to the Caribbean, Love!

Er. I mean, welcome to the new site layout. :) Not al the subdomains are up and kicking yet, so they look pretty darned silly, but I didn't like having the whole site down, and the icons pages work, and they're all anyone comes for anyway, so so far so good. :) Now keep reloading the page until you get an image you like in the upper left. And, er, if you know anything at all about HTML, CSS, or XHTML, do yourself a favor and DON'T look at the coding of the site, it'll probably give you a stroke, and it'll be a fair while before I fix it. Thanks! :)

9 August 2003: So far this girly-blue site is in beta only, but I bet you weren't expecting it to look like this.

7 July 2003: I made pretty buttons! Now you can link to me. You know you want to...

4 July 2003: Redid entire Lord of the Rings icons page for easier viewing and loading, finally. Consider it stage one of site overhaul, with similar changes to follow on this main page as well as all others. And all the colors and whatnot are still changing, too. And I forgot that I never did finish the Writings section. Figure August 1 and September 1 for being done with various steps of the redo. :)

22 June 2003: Almost forgot--put up the rest of the Lil' Endless set under Sandman Icons. Still doing site redesign, but still don't know what it should look like. Also, am lazy. :-P

12 June 2003: Big icons update. Well, medium. Two new Sandman, one Trogdor, Elrond added to the bordered icons on the LOTR page, and Vizzini to the Princess Bride page. And by this time next week I'll have a broadband connection on my OWN computer again, YAY.

3 June 2003: Wow. Well. There's a new Matrix desktop in the goodies section, plus some new Matrix icons (in an all-new Matrix icons section!) and some new Sandman icons. And reading HTML on this screen is kind of like looking at the Matrix... only not green. Yeesh.

Also: have figured out that best way to keep my private icons private is not to put them on the website (duh) so if you could have sworn something was here before, it probably was... and it will be again when I'm done using it. :)

23 May 2003: Have finished all undergraduate work forever and ever; now have time to focus on website. Am beginning process of learning CSS properly; not as hard as I thought. Need to design new color scheme and graphics--those are the things that take forever. Can't decide exactly how I want it to look, but joy of CSS is that I can change my mind fairly frequently with much less hassle.

Also, more Lord of the Rings icons up again, and a section for icons based on The Matrix is coming up soon. And also possibly a desktop, because I just realized I want to make one.

16 May 2003: Am thinking hard about new site layout. I like the tables and stuff, but the color scheme just isn't working for me anymore--and the L-shaped menu/headline area is too big. So those are some of the key things I'll be fixing in the redesign. It will take a while, though, because I'm going to learn all the CSS to do it properly, and save myself massive aounts of time in the long run. So don't look for the change anytime soon.

In the meantime, there are still more Lord of the Rings Icons up. I'm working on a way to split that page, too, because there have got to be more than a hundred icons on it, and load-time is slow.

2 May 2003: Have had site layout for almost a month now. Already want to change it a bit. Am not touching it before June 1 however, as that would be what we know as DUMB.

Also, have just noticed--at 10:30 in the morning on May 2nd--that until this moment, every entry on this page was dated 2002. Have just changed them all to reflect the correct year. That was dumb too.

29 April 2003: Website and subdomains are back to normal functionality. Halleluia. Have many photoshop things in mind, and also some fics, but time for neither right now. Although there is a new desktop up in the goodies section.

23 April 2003: Am having some bizarre problem where geocities apparently thinks my sudomains don't exist. This is, in fact, false. For example, usually the icons are available at icons.etoilepb.com. But today, that generates a 404 file not found error. *However*, you can still see the page at www.etoilepb.com/icons. I don't understand it. If it's still like this tomorrow I'll find out how to contact support.

In the meantime, I completely loathe my job.

20 April 2003: No, I'm not totally finished with the Writings section... but I've given out the icons link so much I figured, what the hell. :) THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE VERSION 4.0 IS LIVE AND PUBLIC AS OF RIGHT NOW, 1:00 in the afternoon on Sunday, 20 April. Thanks for visiting. :)

18 April 2003: Managed to finish all of the Short Fiction in the writings section. That leaves Nova, Rants, and Parodies. Someday I'm going to finish this thing, I swear.

18 April 2003: Everything's done except the writing section... I'm on it, but it's hard. It's the one thing holding back the new launch. In the meantime, I put up a bunch of new Princess Bride icons last night, and I'm working on some requests now. Yaaaay.

14 April 2003: Thanks to Charlie telling me the one semicolon I was missing, this site now works in Mozilla. Woot! The icons and links subdomains are completely content-filled and active, although the "my friends" page could really use some help. Don't know why I'm making updates, as site has not yet gone live and nobody but me (well, and Dop... and Charlie... and Sam... and Julie... okay, a lot of people) is reading. This leaves the "about me" page and the "goodies" and "writings" subdomain--as well as some guestbook tweaking. And maybe I'll make my livejournal match. Or maybe, you know... I won't. :P

12 April 2003: This whole site is a disaster in Netscape, and apparently doesn't work very well in Mozilla either. And I've just looked at the old version in Netscape 6, and discovered that it blows too. Well, fantastic. Can't I just make everyone use IE 6?

11 April 2003: Oh, for the love of toast. I seem finally to have made the buttons functional. Looking for a go-live date in two weeks, I think. Have shared link to icons subdomain because updating old "ljicons.html" was simply too much pain in the arse.

4 April 2003: I think I may just start hand-typing in site updates here. Dealing with the blog is getting to be too much trouble, since it won't FTP right, and then I want it to be a table cell because iFrame doesn't quite cut it... so maybe the old-fashioned way is best. And this is a link to google so that I can test my CSS.