Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES! userpics.
I occasionally rotate my default icon, going between the ones I think are both "general, not expressing a specific reaction/emotion" and "especially pretty." Whatever I have as current default is usually the one I like most right now.
Setting this entry to the computing one. Decades ago, when I was
really little, my family had a computer that would play this pattern of shifting squares -- it must have been a screensaver of some kind, I can't imagine what else it would be -- but I've never been able to find it in
collections of retro/classic screensavers. And "abstract color-changing squares" isn't something you can narrow down on google. If not for somebody else making this icon with the exact right colors/combinations/pacing, I wouldn't be sure if it was something I really saw, or just something I imagined.
There's a special kind of nostalgia to it. Like a screenshot from a cartoon that blew your mind when you were eight, and then you never managed to watch it again, so there's a magic to the memory that never got tainted or tarnished by "oh no, it didn't hold up."
...so, uh, does anyone reading this know what this pattern was called? What OS was it shipped with? Who came up with it? Or at least, what niche Reddit community do I need to ask to solve this mystery?