if anyone's tried looking for old icon posts on dreamwidth and livejournal, they likely have ran into icons hosted by photobucket. and because photobucket is annoying as all hell, they make it near impossible to save those icons, by slapping watermarks on them, fucking with the urls, and somehow disabling something as simple as ctrl+s to save a fucking image. i've had my workarounds for downloading an icon manually, but downloading an entire batch at once has basically been impossible because of these limitations. but i think i finally figured it out, so i'd like to share how i did it and maybe help other people running into the same problems lol