Care to explain your avatar?



  • I have really been curious about some of the avatars found in the forums. As you can see, at this point I have none myself. If you would like, please post replies to this thread and explain the meaning/origin of your avatar.

    Some I am curious about especially:

    (I hope the forum picks these up - if not, sorry!)

    I see that the Firefox girl was recently explained. I wondered what it was before. Some of these are obvious as to what they are, so feel free to tell why they are. Others are hard to tell what they are because they are small.



  • Mine is from "Hsu and Chan" out of Playstation Magazine.



  • My screen name is dhromed. Sometimes Jeremy Llewiff, an anagram of my real name.

    Hence the 'dh'.

    The little cube is pure Photoshop. Fiddling with the pen tool and guides.

    The two brackets are decoration.

    Actually, the cube is decoration, too.

    And the font, also.

    Come to think of it, 'dh' isn't really descriptive, so that could be decoration too.

    Hell.

    It's an icon.

    Get off my case.



  • @dhromed said:


    The little cube is pure Photoshop. Fiddling with the pen tool and guides.

    It's very nice
    @dhromed said:

    Get off my case.

    Done!



  • @R.Flowers said:

    @dhromed said:


    The little cube is pure Photoshop. Fiddling with the pen tool and guides.

    It's very nice



    Why thank you.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I think I know about the Woo Woo icon. There was a news report video floating around the net talking about a new trend of muffler whistles. The fellow pictured was interviewed, and said something really funny, like "Naw Man, I just lawv da Muffla whistles, dey not a Botha! Dey go Woo! Woo!, and its all funn, see?"



  • Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My
    user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left
    handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it,
    because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human
    left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message
    board software happy as to size and format.



  • My avatar just came recently. It is from the whale on the moon southpark episode. It's the character sketch of kenny. I have the others too if anyone wants them.



  •     Mine is just my favorite internet activity :)



  • @Alex Papadimoulis said:

    I think I know about the Woo Woo icon. There was a news report video floating around the net talking about a new trend of muffler whistles. The fellow pictured was interviewed, and said something really funny, like "Naw Man, I just lawv da Muffla whistles, dey not a Botha! Dey go Woo! Woo!, and its all funn, see?"


    The fellow in question was named Bub Rubb (sp?) and he certainly was quite fond of the whistles.

    When the reporter asked whether or not the whistles would be a nuisance early in the morning, his response (the one part of the interview I really remember well) went like this: "Naw man, dass only in da moanin'.  You oughtta be up cookin breffist o' somebody."

    Classic



  • @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    Looks like a right hand to me.  Why would you pick a left-hand-if-you-are-looking-OUT-of-the-computer icon?  Silly.

     



  • @ItsAllGeekToMe said:

    @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    Looks like a right hand to me.  Why would you pick a left-hand-if-you-are-looking-OUT-of-the-computer icon?  Silly.

     


    Gee, when I look at the palm of my left hand, the thumb is on the left-hand side. Does yours work differently?


  • @Stan Rogers said:

    @ItsAllGeekToMe said:

    [quote
    user="sinistral"]Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as
    dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left'
    or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked
    it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human
    left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message
    board software happy as to size and format.

    Looks like a right hand to me.  Why would you pick a left-hand-if-you-are-looking-OUT-of-the-computer icon?  Silly.


    Gee, when I look at the palm of my left hand, the thumb is on the left-hand side. Does yours work differently?
    [/quote]

    As Stan Rogers correctly pointed out, you're looking at the palm side of the image, in which case the thumb does point toward the left.


  • @Stan Rogers said:

    @ItsAllGeekToMe said:

    @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    Looks like a right hand to me.  Why would you pick a left-hand-if-you-are-looking-OUT-of-the-computer icon?  Silly.

     


    Gee, when I look at the palm of my left hand, the thumb is on the left-hand side. Does yours work differently?

    Your sarcasm is biting.

    Looks like the imprint of a right hand to me as you look into the screen.  Which is of course the correct way to do it.  Unless you always talk about rights and lefts as one would look out of a monitor.  That must get confusing.

     



  • @ItsAllGeekToMe said:

    Your sarcasm is biting.

    Looks like the imprint of a right hand to me as you look into the screen.  Which is of course the correct way to do it.  Unless you always talk about rights and lefts as one would look out of a monitor.  That must get confusing.



    There is a correct way to display a left hand as an avatar? Amazing.

    Perhaps he should just replace it with "LEFT HANDED" in red?


  • @Richard Nixon said:

    @ItsAllGeekToMe said:

    Your sarcasm is biting.

    Looks like the imprint of a right hand to me as you look into the screen.  Which is of course the correct way to do it.  Unless you always talk about rights and lefts as one would look out of a monitor.  That must get confusing.



    There is a correct way to display a left hand as an avatar? Amazing.

    Perhaps he should just replace it with "LEFT HANDED" in red?


    Wow, I never thought my avatar would generate so much discussion, even flames!  It's not an imprint, although I can see how might interpret it in that fashion.  It's simply a gray drawing.  Think of the monitor as a literal window in a house, and a person is on the outside, looking at you on the inside.  They put their palm to the window, and thus you get the type of image you see.


  • I was going to say, "Is this better?" after I found a nifty MC Escher
    print that I used to have.  There's nothing to compare to any
    more, since the forum software changes all previous postings to
    whatever that user's current avatar is.  That's an interesting
    feature, an unexpected one, but I guess it makes sense.



  • Take a wild guess as to what my avatar is.



  • @sinistral said:

    I was going to say, "Is this better?" after I found a nifty MC Escher
    print that I used to have.  There's nothing to compare to any
    more, since the forum software changes all previous postings to
    whatever that user's current avatar is.  That's an interesting
    feature, an unexpected one, but I guess it makes sense.


    It would be sort of a waste if a forum saved avatar setting with each post.

    Though I suppose if Livejournal does it, why not?



  • @GoatCheez said:

    My avatar just came recently. It is from the whale on the moon southpark episode. It's the character sketch of kenny. I have the others too if anyone wants them.

     

    You mean the character sketch of Cartman?



  • @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    It is indeed a left hand. It's the central section of a drawing by M.C. Escher "hand and sphere" in which the artist drew his own hand holding a glass sphere before then drawing the entire room inside the sphere including the artist drawing his own hand holding a ...



  • @jwenting said:

    @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    It is indeed a left hand. It's the central section of a drawing by M.C. Escher "hand and sphere" in which the artist drew his own hand holding a glass sphere before then drawing the entire room inside the sphere including the artist drawing his own hand holding a ...



    Yes, the Escher image my new avatar.  The original one was a drawing from the 'Net that showed a left hand, or, at least, most of us (including myself) agreed it was a left hand.  Hence the discussion back and forth above about whether my avatar was/wasn't a left hand.  I'd try to include that image here, but I don't want to press my luck withe the forum software.


  • @sinistral said:

    Mine's really easy, and not nearly as creative as dhromed's.  My user name is sinistral, which means 'from the left' or 'left handed.'  Ever since I've discovered the word, I've liked it, because I myself am left handed.  The avatar is simply a human left hand I found using Google Images and edited to make the message board software happy as to size and format.

    Although I imagine you know this,  the image you use is a work by M.C. Escher, whose work is mostly about Math, or aspects of math, that relate to patterns of abstractions or concepts which experience transformations, and/or are self-referential in some way.

    There's a great book by Douglas Hofstadter (won the Pulitzer I believe) called Godel, Escher and Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, that relates the self-referential & transformational  nature of Escher's works to similar characteristics in Bach's musical compositions, and both of those to the fundemental idea of Kurt Godel's famous incompleteness theorem.

     



  • @Bullet said:

    Although I imagine you know this,  the image you use is a work by M.C. Escher, whose work is mostly about Math, or aspects of math, that relate to patterns of abstractions or concepts which experience transformations, and/or are self-referential in some way.



    Yes, yes, we all know Escher. GEB's where most of us got our basic LisP, and Hofstaedter's works, such as GEB, Metamagical Themas and The Mind's I are staples among AI enthusiasts -- but at the time of that writing, Sinistral's avatar was a simple pencil drawing of a left hand. The Escher reflecting globe came later, and since the avatar is a single, global entity (that is, the avatar of the moment is not stored with the post's data), it has replaced the simpler drawing in the earlier posts.



  • This is my avatar:

    Of course, the forum software WTFs on animated gifs in your avatar (probably a content-type issue), and remote linking is disabled, so you just get the first frame, without transparent pixels. In case you can't tell, it's a monkey spanking himself; I'm sure you get the double-entendre. However, I often use a signature phrase "Bad code-monkey! No banana!", so it's a triple-entendre. Ish.

    Also, I can explain the third image; it's a screen-cap from one of the greatest PC games of all time, Prince of Persia 2, sequel to an equally great predecessor, Prince of Persia.

    Yes, I've just dated myself. Now get off my lawn!!!!


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    My avatar is intended to imply a (very small) section of Borg bulkhead. It is in fact a sub-cut of a piece of H. R. Giger art, and to date only a single other internet denizen (that I have found) has ever used it, and thus if one sees that elsewhere it is extremely likely to be myself, or some weirdo that is impersonating me. But the odds of that are fairly low.



  • @Tsaukpaetra my avatar is carefully chosen to capture the essence of the first letter of my name. I think it works rather well, considering the effort I put into it.


  • BINNED

    kazitor is, obviously, some kind of stylised comet 🐠

    I stole some photo of a horseshoe crab off the internet, cut out the background (a bunch of wet rocks), rotated it to have a square aspect ratio and probably flipped it so the top side would be lit.

    Why a horseshoe crab? Multiple extinction events have come and gone and yet the horseshoe crabs of 445 million years ago look about the same as the few today. They’re not flashy, extravagant, widespread or apex predators or anything like that; they just continue to exist mostly unnoticed in spite of the whole world. I think that’s rather admirable.

    Just to be clear on the timeline here:
    annotated_phanerozoic.png

    (everything died on numerous other occasions too, but these five incidents are Famous and/or Special.)



  • It's a grab from some forgotten place on the web chosen to illustrate the expression "out of the mouths of babes".


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    Mine is a joke that has long since stopped being funny.


  • BINNED

    @kazitor probably due to resolution, but I should point out that with the white pixels at the top your arrow pointing to Last Thursday is not to scale. 🚎


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    If you can figure out the relation between my username and my avatar, you can give yourself a pat on the back.



  • https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15455/poll-circular-avatars

    Specifically:

    @lightsoff said in Poll: Circular Avatars:

    I could go with rounded corners.

    Circular is literally inhuman - name one visible feature of a human that's actually circular.
    (Not ovoid or rounded edges)

    Now name one that's visible in polite company.


  • 🚽 Regular

    No.


  • BINNED

    I'm a 🇧🇪 comic character based on a comedian called Urbanus from Uranus. Yes that joke works the same way in Dutch and English.



  • I’m just a shadow of my former self.


  • Java Dev

    @Luhmann said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    I'm a 🇧🇪 comic character based on a comedian called Urbanus from Uranus. Yes that joke works the same way in Dutch and English.

    Huh, I honestly don't think I ever heard the last name before.

    Mine is a randomly generated gravatar. Some call it a rocket. Some call it a male bodypart. It used to be a sword, but I dropped that after the Ukraine invasion started last year.


  • Considered Harmful

    I'm just a big fan of Heineken. And then I added some Goatse for light amusement.



  • The froghemoth is my spirit animal.


  • BINNED

    ezgif-1-ce740022f3.gif

    The meat and sarcasm guy.
    Originally in Community Server default avatar style, converted to what it's currently with some @error_bot style merge effect.



  • A dog that looks like a mop



  • You are flipping through Encarta late one night when you discover a strange and mysterious article. It has no title, and the text is fragmented. You also notice it is printed in Fraktur, with an illuminated letter at the start. You begin to read:

    The reign of King Miser the First was a short one, and as it produced no major political change, it is usually ignored. Only one item makes it worthy of mention. Several independent sources have been discovered that describe a magical curse that was laid upon Miser the First's castle (thought to have been named MindMaze). All accounts refer to the curse as having been very powerful. It seems to have caused a tear in the time-space continuum, scattering fragments of the past and future throughout the castle and paralyzing normal activity. There is some dissent among sources as to...

    The text breaks here, garbled by gaps and random characters. It picks up again further down:

    ... could be broken simply by stating aloud the appropriate location in time and space for that particular fragment of the curse. (Some accounts even have the inhabitants of the castle hearing descriptions of the misplaced fragments echoing through their heads.) The castle locals were unable to solve many of these riddles, because the topics were based on events in their future. The curse is said...

    Here there is another break in the text. It picks up again shortly, but you notice that it is slowly growing faint, as if a mist were growing between you and the screen.

    use the power of the curse to her advantage, reaching forward in time to summon a scholar TDWTFer...

    At this point the mist has entirely obscured the screen. You look around the room and see that it is filled with a dense haze. You stand, take a step, and trip over something by your foot. You wonder how a damp rock came to by lying on the floor of your home even as your head makes impact with it. You shut your eyes in pain, and darkness envelops you.

    As you recover, you feel a slight breeze. You open your eyes to look for the open window, and see ahead of you a large castle with a huge gate, gaping wide open. Seeing no alternative, you stuff your mouse and its dangling cord into your pocket, and make your way inside.


  • Considered Harmful

    I took the :disco:🐎 avatar and replaced the letter with an Ω.

    It could probably be used to doxx me now since I started using it everywhere.

    Lots of sites try to crop it into a circle which looks like 💩 since it's already cropped into a rounded rect.



  • I've used white floof baby critters as avatars for work since I first got into IT. Sometimes it's a dog, sometimes a bunny, sometimes a chinchilla or any other very fluffy, white thing I find doing image search for white cute fluffy.
    Since I've been using it for decades now, people that have worked with me before will instantly know who the account belongs to, and it also helps with name confusion, since my name is not very uncommon and for employers with more than a couple hundred employees, there will be several people with the same name as me. And tiny faces kind of look the same, but a white fluff is distinct.
    Now some employers/customers subscribe to the NO FUN ALLOWED way of doing things and will yell at me for having white fluff as a picture on slack. I ignore them until they remove my avatar themselves.

    And the pendant was added here because me and this place.



  • I have been using pics of black mage from this webcomic for a long time.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Carnage said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    Now some employers/customers subscribe to the NO FUN ALLOWED way of doing things and will yell at me for having white fluff as a picture on slack. I ignore them until they remove my avatar themselves.

    I once also feared the Powers. Testing the waters using the ServiceHow instance using a Rainbow Dash icon.



  • Many of my other incarnations have a photo of a hamster as my avatar. In contrast to the general psychopathy and sadism found here, hamsters are gentle creatures. (Though the fact that mother hamsters eat some of their children is a significant counterpoint.) I used Craiyon with the prompt "fractal hamster", and the result was a mystic hamster, so how could I not use it?



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    @Carnage said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    Now some employers/customers subscribe to the NO FUN ALLOWED way of doing things and will yell at me for having white fluff as a picture on slack. I ignore them until they remove my avatar themselves.

    I once also feared the Powers. Testing the waters using the ServiceHow instance using a Rainbow Dash icon.

    And now they fear you. :trolley-garage:


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @jinpa said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    @Tsaukpaetra said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    @Carnage said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    Now some employers/customers subscribe to the NO FUN ALLOWED way of doing things and will yell at me for having white fluff as a picture on slack. I ignore them until they remove my avatar themselves.

    I once also feared the Powers. Testing the waters using the ServiceHow instance using a Rainbow Dash icon.

    And now they fear you. :trolley-garage:

    Rainbow Dash - Aww yeah! – 00:03
    — My Little Pony Mania



  • @topspin said in Care to explain your avatar?:

    Community Server default

    FFTd, cropped out low frequencies by multiplying with a black box I drew in paint or something, un-FFTd back into real space.


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