About: I have been coding for too many years. You can find me on Twitter as @mark_nicol I live in Ormiston and work in Edinburgh
One of the things that fascinates me about social sites is the sheer variety and creativity of the images people use for their avatars.
I feel quite prosaic in having picked a photo that I hope feels friendly, shows people what I look like and reminds me of a happy day out walking with my family when I see it.
Does anyone want to share the story behind how they picked the picture they use?
Because i really like the song "The Bare Necessities" and i associate the picture with it.
It's the only nice picture with my face I had at hand, I don't like cameras very much :D
I make digital comics about my life using a graphics software called Paint.NET. I send it around to my friends, and the character I portray as in my comics eventually became my avatar for all of my social media accounts. It's literally just me, you know?
I don't like the idea of sharing pictures of me but when I built my first website I thought that it be prettier with a image. After browsing GitHub and other forums/websites (dev.to !) I decided to create my very own logo to put everywhere on different sites, including mine.
I was a totally into Sublime Text and minimalism, after thinking about it a couple of weeks, I created my logo (which I still use). I merged the P and the B of my name to remind the "viewer" that is it "Pierre Bouillon", took a dark theme as I thought that it was more related to back-end development (dark theme, tons of lines on screen, etc. typical shutterstock pictures ! ) and finally I added brackets all around to be as explicit about my job as possible for someone not into programming.
I am still satisfied of my little logo, even if that's certainly not the best one, it's mine ! :)
That is so clever - I didn't spot that until I looked at your profile page. Nice and elegant.
Yeah, it's not really visible in the icon and I was expecting it to look the same when I embiggened it, but the one on the profile page is actually pretty cool.
Mine is my Twitter avatar. It's me, several years ago, sitting at the beach using my then new Android phone. My wife took the picture to make fun of me not enjoying the beach (which I don't).
That's just the sort of thing my family would do to me. I love the fact you like the photo enough to use it. It does have great character as a portrait.
I think that it reminds me of a happy period of my life, so I have good vibes every time I visit dev.to.
It is a real picture, at work, we had a fun office with masks and other stuff (the perks of being a game studio), only the saber and the tattoo are added with photoshop.
Also I think most of the people here know about StarWars. Also it looks my character from SWTOR (the mmo).
Leaving the pic here in case I change my avatar
I've got a Zabrak Jedi Watchman on SWTOR 😁. I haven't played in forever, but when I stopped he was level 52 and a beast with those stacked burns. One of my favorite MMOs ever, and I was an OG with WoW back from 2002-2010 (anybody remember RopeTown or Speling Champians?). Great avatar and really fun photo!
I wasnt a fan of SWTOR, rather the universe, only played the free tier. I was too caught up with Guild wars 2. 😎
That makes sense. I was never a pay to play guy either. I'm just a huge KOTOR fanboy. It was my favorite game of all time up until about 4 months ago when it was dethroned after 15 years by Horizon: Zero Dawn. My top 3 round out at 1)H:ZD, 2)KOTOR and 3)Tied between Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and Kingdom Hearts 2. Never played GW or GW2 but I've heard good things
I use my avatar for two reasons: 1) It's R2D2 giving a flower to a trash can...really shouldn't need to say more about why that's amazing. 2) I always identified with R2D2 in that I'm very technical, quite cheeky, usually only have a couple of close friendships at a time (which I much prefer to a multitude of shallow friendships), and speak in a manner that very few seem to understand outside of my social circle. That, mixed with the fact that my wife is an officially licensed babe, I feel like our marriage is like if the trash can in my avatar reached out, took the flower, and then reconfigured into a robotic dime piece, and she and R2 lived happily ever after. Everyone who had been watching R2 beforehand would have been like "Oh that's so cute! It's gonna be so sad when he realizes that he's giving that flower to something that couldn't possibly reciprocate." Then after, those same people would be like "Wait...what the heck just happened?"
You're right anything with R2D2 is instantly good and I love the story with it. It is kind of geeky and romantic and quirky all at the same time and beautifully told. Thanks for sharing it
I grew up in the "never ever use real information online" era, and even though I've (obviously) relented to some extent, I've always hated getting my picture taken anyway. I've borrowed Morticia Addams for avatar material for ages. That's about all there is to it.
I currently relate a lot to the little red panda. She's trying her best to deal with her day to day life, her crazy co-workers and her own emotions.
She may not be going through the same problems that I am (I think my situation while it might not be unique it isn't something super common either) but I think I'm going through the same path she is (except the boyfriend path, ,I have a lovely supportive boyfriend who I wouldn't change in the world).
Also, she's cute but full of rage inside. That describes me a lot. I just need to find a healthy outlet like she does hahahaha
I can do a bit of the heavy metal voice now tho', I use it for jokes :3
I've not seen the show yet but you make me want to root for all red pandas. Go Retsukos!
My brother bought some Pop! Vinyl figures and 3d printed some glasses and painted them to look like me (and a docker logo on the shirt!) so I have my very own Pop! figure.
I liked the idea of the traveling salesman portrait, so I decided to turn my upclose picture to tsp - I think it really looks cool.
It is cool - I'd not heard of using the traveling salesman problem to make a portrait before. I had to google to see how it works.
Loved the idea and forked his repo, modified it to suit my needs then avatar....
A colleague captured that when we were getting ready for a workshop. I hate my photos generally. But I like that candid moment. So using it as a representation. ;)
The current one is a picture of my face, cheerily (!) raising a cup of covfefe to the camera, because I realised I needed one that wasn't a pink cartoon character for work purposes and didn't have anything to hand, so I took a snap on the train one day. I quite like it, so it's stayed.
I went for a couple of years having an avatar I made from Powerpuff yourself and you can probably still find me with it in some places. I only began to settle on one picture after I started using Gravatar.
Mine is pretty similar to yours. It is me at the zoo with my family and it makes me happy to see, the twist is that I digitally destroyed the avatar back when I was big on anonymity. Now I just keep it that way because it makes me look like a l337 h4ck3r.
I felt like I had to blend in with the "slightly squinting into the bright sun outdoors" crowd. I also just had a haircut.
Well, that's how I look like when I solve a problem that I had no idea how to solve at first xD.
Great question!
This topic made me also curious about the reasons behind the avatar decision of people here...
The pseudonym "Dark Smile" was established a long time ago and I needed a picture fitting to it without representing myself. So I was searching for an image that fits and on page 5 or so of the google image search (yeah, I actually went this far!) there was the avatar you see next to my name today.
Since then this picture has a special place in the backup folder :)