Images You Wish You Could Set As Your Avatar

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Full title: Images You Wish You Could Set As Your Avatar (But Don't For One Reason Or The Other)

I'll start:

 

[amadeus]

Ron Popeil. People found it jarring that I changed away from Momotaro, so I switched it back.

 

[Gori the Grey]

"Wish" is too strong a word for it, but I do have somewhat mixed feelings about my avatar.

For years, I used this little fella as my avatar:

In one of these threads, someone asked a similar question to yours: what might you change to? And I said "Well, there's only one thing, really: Shakespeare in a jester's cap." I'd actually looked, over the years, on Google images, and not found anything. But when I said that, Valka provided the one I now use. Her image Google-fu is stronger than mine.

So I adopted it. But . . . I had never pushed very hard on finding an alternate image, for the following reason. I find other posters changing their image very disconcerting (less now than used to be the case). My conception of a poster turns out to be very heavily grounded in that person's avatar. So I had thought to myself, "Well, I for my part will just hold steady and always use my Civ III avatar." I don't think I disconcerted anyone by my move; you all are more mentally flexible than me, and adjust easily to one another's avatar switches. But I've always felt some misgivings about making the change.

By now there are probably posters who don't know me any other way than jester-Shakespeare, so it would be disconcerting to them if I changed back. What a quandary I've put myself in.

 

[danjuno]

What happened to the civ-related avatars provided by the site? When I look at the edit function, it only gives me the option to upload one.

 

[Gori the Grey]

They went away when they switched hosts, Xenofro or whatever it's called. xenForo.

 

[Kyriakos]

My avatar is already pretty nice ^^

 

[GenMarshall]

I wished I could have a more cheery avatar.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Animated Avatars would be cool

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've used cat-themed avatars here for many years. In the early days, I used a variety, from little smileys (most popular one was Spud, a motorbike-riding potato, who wore sunglasses and a smirk on his face).

I've used needlepoint images (my current one is actually a counted cross-stitch pattern, and I take my hat off to whoever completed it, as working with gold thread is hard), images of a favorite musician (Will Millar, of the Irish Rovers), Carl Sagan (the one I used here temporarily is my permanent avatar on the AO3 fanfiction site, where I use a different name), and there have likely been a few others I don't recall at the moment.

At some point, though, I decided to use cats, and once I find one I like, I use it for a long time.


That's on this forum. On TrekBBS, I've had only 3 different avatars over the past 17 years, and only used one of them on the beta version of the forum (when we were going to switch from vBulletin to XenForo, the tech admin made a beta version available for us to "test drive" to see if there were any bugs that needed fixing; we found some, and this gave the tech guy a chance to fix them before the actual new version went live).

I use an owl picture created by apofiss (artist who does really adorable computer art pictures of cats, owls, and birds) on a couple of gaming forums and a news site. Another gaming site has several penguins as default choices, and I used one of those before settling on my 2019 steampunk "Writer" badge from that year's NaNoWriMo competition.


TrekBBS runs several avatar competitions in various subforums. There are competitions in the different Trek subforums, in Miscellaneous (their equivalent of our Off-Topic), and in the two Entertainment subforums (one for SF/F shows, books, and movies; the other is for non-SF/F). The winner of each of these gets to host the next competition (pick the theme).

I don't enter these competitions very often anymore, but couldn't resist the current one in Miscellaneous. Since 2024 is a leap year, the person hosting decided on "leap day" as the theme. Anyone or thing jumping, leaping, etc. was okay. We're allowed 3 entries, so here are my three:

Adelie diving:

Gentoo leaping:

Rockhopper hopping:

If I should win (there aren't many entries yet, but that could change), I doubt if I'll use any of these, at least at this point. But these contests provide avatars for people to use if they want, or inspiration to make others.


There are images I'd gladly use as an avatar, either out of my own collection or others I've found. It's just that avatars do tend to become part of one's forum identity after awhile, they become recognizable, and changing them takes a kind of emotional effort I don't do much of anymore. And if starting up at a new forum that's an offshoot of an old one, or where I know some of the people already, it's just easier to keep an old avatar for recognition.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Animated Avatars would be cool

Oh, please no! I lurk on one site that has them and they drive me bananas.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, some limited animation would liven things up. Eg I would just alter mine to wink or something like that ^^

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Oh, please no! I lurk on one site that has them and they drive me bananas.

The first gaming forum I ever joined allowed animated avatars. Then one day, on April 1, a bunch of us discovered that our avatars had all changed to "dancing Spider-man". Not everyone, just some of us. Seeing a whole page of that... turned out to be the staff playing an April Fool's joke on us. The targets were everyone below a specified post count.

Imagine looking at a forum page, 40 posts/page, with most of them having this for an avatar (white background removed, reduced to 100x100):

TrekBBS allowed animated avatars before the migration to XenForo. Mine was animated (farmer smiley sitting on a tractor, caught in a tractor beam from a passing starship).

Non-animated avatars have made people entering the contests go overboard with animation. Of course if anyone wants to use those as their actual avatar, they can't use an animated version. But all that repetitious, jerky movement is something that bothers me. So I never vote for an animated avatar, and when it's my turn to host one of these things, I specify non-animated avatars. People have complained about that, but the fact is that if I'm going to have to look at and deal with a dozen-plus avatars for a contest, I don't want to get a headache out of it.


The whole question of avatars comes into perspective for me when I remember the forums I belonged to where we weren't allowed to have avatars. One of them didn't even allow smileys or sigs. FFS, they didn't even have the quote buttons enabled, and the only people who could use quotes were the ones who knew BBCode. Moderation there was insanely draconian. You could discuss a character going through some issue, but not the issue itself (example: Sonny Corinthos in General Hospital has bipolar disorder, but mentioning anything about bipolar disorder itself would earn an infraction).

And then there was the first Fighting Fantasy forum I joined (and later quit), where we were not allowed to use the PM system and sigs could be only 6 words long. The owner there decided that his target membership was about 10 years old, when the truth is that most FF gamers are at least in their late teens and the vast majority are adults - many of them older adults, given that the game is now over 40 years old and we were among the first players back in 1982.

 

[EvaDK]

Can't use it, because I suspect the puns and memes from other members would never stop.

 

[Kyriakos]

I refuse to accept this is Eva Green.

 

[EvaDK]

She is slightly weird

 

[Gorbles]

If you don't accept Eva Green at her weirdest, do you truly accept Eva Green at all?

Anyhow, this was mine for a time. Not made by me, I can't even remember where I got it from. But I liked it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I don't have a clue who Eva Green is (and that is NOT a request for information).

Here are a few others of mine:

Carl Sagan, sitting in front of a radio telescope in a Cosmos episode (most of you have seen me use this here):

Bonanza cast (I didn't make this one, but wouldn't be opposed to using it, since I like the show and have made other Bonanza avatars):

Cats walks in the rays of a sun in splendor; I might use this one at some point:

These next two were for a TrekBBS avatar contest about musicians who weren't huge celebrities:

David Munrow, playing a shawm:

Fabian Salazar, playing a quenacho

 

[Quintillus]

I don't have a clue who Eva Green is

French movie star, perhaps best known for her roles in Casino Royale (2006) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Also the subject of EvaDK's avatar, which looks to me like a screengrab from Casino Royale? Last name pronounced "grain" if I remember correctly.

Okay, so that is some information... but providing information feels useful.

Carl Sagan, sitting in front of a radio telescope in a Cosmos episode

Do you happen to know which radio telescope that is? It reminds me of the one in Green Bank, West Virginia, but all radio telescopes look a bit similar to me. But he likely would have been interested in that telescope.


---------

I don't have any particular images I wish I could set as my avatar, although I appreciate the lack of animated avatars here. Maybe I should set a profile image though, most people don't realize we have those as well, and the zeppelin USS Macon flying over Manhattan would make for a splendid image...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

French movie star, perhaps best known for her roles in Casino Royale (2006) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Also the subject of EvaDK's avatar, which looks to me like a screengrab from Casino Royale? Last name pronounced "grain" if I remember correctly.

Okay, so that is some information... but providing information feels useful.


Do you happen to know which radio telescope that is? It reminds me of the one in Green Bank, West Virginia, but all radio telescopes look a bit similar to me. But he likely would have been interested in that telescope.

The only famous one I know of other than Arecibo (RIP ) is the Very Large Array, comprised of over two dozen radio telescopes. It's located in New Mexico.

Very Large Array

 

[Quintillus]

The only famous one I know of other than Arecibo (RIP ) is the Very Large Array, comprised of over two dozen radio telescopes. It's located in New Mexico.

Very Large Array

Hmm... the Green Bank one postdates Sagan by a few years, so it can't have been the current Green Bank one (which is also probably too tall for that picture, although photographers can play tricks with angles). It could have been one of the Very Large Array telescopes. Or a previous Green Bank one (the older ones were smaller). Or another one.

Update: DuckDuckGo'ed it, and you are right! It is a Very Large Array telescope!