PSA: Choose an avatar

Nope. But it is a custom avatar, and I’ll keep it. It’s scanned of a drawing that my second-youngest did for a father’s day card a couple years back.

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My work was pushing everyone to add their photo to Zoom and Teams but I’ve been resisting. Maybe I’ll add my homage to Escher avatar so I stop getting bugged. :grin:

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I push it at work too. I prefer the interesting symbols to faces. At some point, a professional photographer took a bunch of profile photos for sr mgmt, and now they are back to all looking like a face from the shoulders up with a solid color background. I can tell the difference, but it takes longer than the logo from your college or a picture of a hockey puck.

It is especially annoying in atlassian tools. Many of the pages default to the same gray profile pic and they don’t show the name unless you click on them. Teams isn’t as bad. It usually has the name next to the logo, and it at least has a unique color for each person (like the forums do).

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Shaneh made me a photo avatar with one of those goofy facebook avatar creator apps. I used it on discord for like a week, then went back to Hexley. :rofl:

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Dude, that is pretty good though. That is definitely you.

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Does the site pull from Gravatar or something? I don’t recall setting this one and it’s more than a decade old at this point. I also don’t have identifiable photos anywhere else, so I’m wondering how this got there.

It’s me crouching next to the Drayson Racing B12 69/EV LMP1 car and the wireless charging system that we designed for it.

Edit: Found a better photo.

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Yeah, gravitar or discourse.

That is an insane car and project I am sure!

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Yeah, it was pretty crazy, both in terms of the project itself and everything that was going on around it. We started design of the system as a startup and ended it 6 months later as a division of Qualcomm. I got a chance to work closely on the integration with the team who put the car together. Even helped dyno it, which was definitely a unique experience.

The charging system was doing 20kW into an 800V battery at ~92-93% efficient wall-to-battery over a couple hundred mm airgap.

It’s weird to think how wild this thing was at the time compared to how modest it seems alongside some modern production EVs.

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I’ve been using the “mosquito” because a midge isn’t easily drawn, on forums since 2003.

It started on Woodwork forums when I discovered I could use an animated gif so I made this one and back then when forums were simple and I was devious, I managed to hack that bit underneath the avatar that says “esteemed member” and all that sort of nonesense to read: "pretend my avatar moves".

I’ve just checked and it’s still there! Twenty years isn’t bad!

MidgeAvatar07

On social media once I, hit my sixties, grew up and started using parts of my real name, I decided to use parts of my real head. It used to be a gif too, where one eye winked every twenty seconds or so (for several years I had a muscular paralysis which affected one eye) , just enough to annoy the you know what out of anyone.
MyEyecAvatar

The sunglasses appeared by popular request to cover that up and they’ve been there for at least ten years so I don’t think I’ll be taking them off any time soon .
Screenshot 2023-06-15 at 2.59.04 pm

But here the midge stays.

I do have an even more annoying midge footer though which I’ll happily add if anyone thinks that would be a good idea! :rofl: :rofl:

MovingMidgeFooterFast

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My avatar is the red Power Ranger.
Because he was the best Power Ranger, obviously.

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I am happy to see a lot more avatars. It doesn’t need to be your face, like Heffe says, anything works. It does really help.

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Well, it turns out I want to avoid work a little longer this morning…

Way back in the early 00’s, I was excited for a new CRPG that was being hyped up, and I was in the first-class observation car of the hype train. This was Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights. The game that would be as much a toolbox for people to build their own adventures for others as anything else. Well, I glommed on with a guy who had an idea for a “memetic AI” that would pass memes around as a way of dispersing information from NPC to NPC. Actually pretty cool, and better than “you killed someone in a back alley, but now everyone knows you’re a criminal”. We had worked out means for pathfinding, news dissemination, etc., etc. We also wanted to build a website to house scripts for people to use, and to help people use this style of AI. So I was tasked with securing a domain. For reasons now lost to the smoothing of the brain, he wanted thegamingape dot com. Not surprisingly, that domain was taken, but among the permutations offered by whatever registrar I was using, was angrygorilla or upsetchimp or something. Well, the old ADHD did it’s bit, ape, gorilla, chimp, all primates. Lemurs are primates (barely). Angry, upset, mad. Mad can also be crazy, like scientist. Mad lemur! Muahahaha! So I grabbed it for myself. Sadly, while I was trying to acquire the domain, and well before the game’s release, my cohort went silent. I believe he lost his battle with cancer, as I never saw evidence of him online again. But since then, I have used that as my online avatar/alias.

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You changed yours and it’s had me messed up ever since lol. Starting to get used to not seeing the red V1 logo

Mine is just my extremely crap logo I got from fiver. Can’t wait to find someone much better to work with on that. Once I finally get a new one I’ll update mine

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This is really sad, kind of. But I really like the system you thought of, this is a brilliant idea all roleplaying games should include. If you can kill faster than the rumors spread, you are golden. Kill the whole village? Noone can talk about it. So many better options to play evil characters. Not that I wanted to, but then it would make sense and you could still pretend to be nice in a town.

Here is one of my first forum avatars: :sweat_smile:

charcircletokoloshe

Even the armory profile still exists…

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Hahahaha, excellent. I had a tauren warrior called Yotta, because it’s a big SI prefix (10^24). Then some point later I made a gnome on a different server and called it Yocto, because it’s a little SI prefix (10^-24). I don’t think anyone I knew actually ever quite ‘got’ the joke, sadly.

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I have that issue with a couple of groups that I moderate. There are so many people that I identify solely by avatar that I’m sure I lose track of people if they change it. My avatar there is just something I chose many years ago and doesn’t really have any relevance to me anymore and I’ve been thinking about how to change it without causing that effect. The current random thought is that I should choose a new one and then ‘morph’ from one to the other slowly over time, updating it every week over the course of a couple of months, but I can’t tell whether that’s actually a sane idea or not!

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That would be really fun. But a lot of work. You could morph like the guy in the terminator movies, but some intermediate frames would be weird. Or you could morph by changing one object in the background, and then adding a PS bike helmet, and then sunglasses, then mirror the image, then add a mountain in the background, etc. That would be awesome.

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I have to mention. @robertbu’s new avatar is excellent. Especially because I already recognize him as (R). Now it just looks like he got an award (which he deserves).

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New avatar pic…

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You are one tiny man…

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