Micro-Contest!

Why, hello. Happy New Year, LBWteers, and welcome to the start of an all-new era of super nerdy excellence. Oh, what a time to be alive!

But enough of that sort of thing. You fine folks were promised a contest and a contest ye shall have. A tiny little contest!

See, I've been using the Internet for a long, long time. I remember watching a .jpg of Captain Picard resolve onscreen one line of pixels per minute, all the while wondering just what facial expression he was using - his eyebrows look neutral, but by damn he could be smiling under there and I'll find out if I have to stay up all night!

As a result of all of this healthy staying inside and typing, I have developed a slight... seething hatred for, well, these guys:

Well, various iterations of these guys over the years. These are the Firefox versions of my hated foes, loading-image (page with INEXPLICABLE SHAPES on it) and broken-image (sad little torn piece of paper) and I do not dispute their status as fine little examples of faviconery but my god I have stared at them for so many hours of my life and I now want to set them on fire. Only recently did it occur to me that I have the power to change this.

And so:

Bruce Banner loading-image now gazes serenely out at me and is all like, "Oh, hello. I see you're loading an image. How splendid, I can't wait to see how it turns out."

But as soon as something goes wrong, I know that tiny favicon Hulk will have my back. "RAR! HULK SMASH PUNY HUMANS NOT MAINTAIN WEBSITE PROPERLY! OR MAYBE SMASH MODEM, IT NOT TOO GOOD AND HULK THINK MAYBE IMAGE TIME OUT! YOU RELOAD IMAGE, HULK CAN WAIT!"

So what's the contest, you ask? Well, I reckon that some day I'll get tired of those to jokers - delightful as they are - and want to replace them. So I'm asking YOU to submit ideas for new duos to accurately represent the micro-drama that plays out in our browsers daily (or hourly). Something like, I don't know, Johnny Blaze to Ghost Rider, you get the idea. I'll arbitrarily pick an arbitrary number of winners and painstakingly pixel-craft their submissions to life, to be posted here.

RULES:

1. Contest ends in one month (2 Feb 2009)

2. Entries should be something that can reasonably depicted in a 16 x 16 pixel image, i.e., nothing like "loading-image Cybertron becomes broken-image Unicron devouring Cybertron while fighting all of the Autobots."

3. Okay, that was kind of cool. Submit whatever you want.

4. Enter as often as you like, either through the comments section or via email (found in my bio).

And that's that. Feel free to help yourself to the Banner/Hulk images - just replace the standard images in Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/res for Firefox. I have no idea what you folks with other browsers need to do, but I'm sure you'll figure it out.

2010!