While I appreciate that my work is apparently popular, the proper way for one to use my graphics is to upload it/them to your own image hosting site. Since I posted my first tutorial, my monthly bandwidth shot up like crazy. I had plenty of bandwidth left, so it's crap-your-pants shocking that I have run out of bandwidth. When I went and looked at my photobucket stats it became pretty clear that hotlinking was the cause of the loss of bandwidth.

A few notes about hotlinking:

+ It is called "hotlinking" because the word "hot" can mean stolen. If you use my icons without credit it's rude, but it's not theft. On the other hand I consider hotlinking theft because it takes away my resources.
+ When one hotlinks they are stealing bandwidth from me. As the last few days have shown, when too many people hotlink then nobody gets to see the graphics. Not only are hotlinkers doing something wrong to me, but they are hurting everyone else that wants to see my tutorials, gifs and icons.
+ If this happens again I am going to have to take drastic measures. I'm not sure what those measures are, but mark my words they will be drastic. Already, if I see one of my gifs on ontd , princesses_ftw , ontd_political  or any of the other communities I frequent, you can be sure that I'm going to check to see if it's hotlinked. Those hotlinking will get hit hard with the banhammer and I'll be changing the url.