It was born as a joke: I need to put a picture? What about a .gif with transparency, does it work? (It does) Well, what about a fully transparent .gif?

And here it is..

Mhhh ... two guys with the same stupid idea. I have seen a few other people with black avatars around, I wonder if they all tried to use a transparent avatar (and then were to lazy to change it).

Well, it is not I was too lazy to change it back. I kinda liked the joke with the "no windows" description. There is no MS Windows, but also no window... you know.

Laziness, I had to let GoG change my grey avatar to blue.

And there's this belief that people will learn less of me with a generic avatar.

It's Jedah Dohma from the Vampire series (great fighting games, some of the best). The sprite is from SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash.

He's insane with a refined air, can manipulate blood, and steals souls. What's not to like?

I can be a grumpy person and I own cats figured it was fitting to have grumpy cat. Also, I'm not a morning person.

It's a photo of a small bit of art I have hanging in my office, simply titled "GORILLA".

I love Iain M. Bank' books about The Culture. The first one I read was Excession, which had a character, a ship Mind, called Grey Area (also known, for various reasons, as Meat Fu*cker behind its metaphorical back). I used to use GreyArea or MeatFckr as my LAN death match name back in the days when eight characters was the limit and I was a classy type of person ;-) , and then started using grey_area online. When I went looking for an avatar I liked the idea of a wireframe face, and found this one - stolen and resized from some website now so long ago I cannot remember where it was from.

Here, my name is different (I have alternated between grey_area and anomaly on different sites for ages) but I like the avatar, so...

Okay, here's the story behind the avatar:

On top of a small hill in the middle of a forest there stood a mighty tree. Thick was its trunk and the leaves of its canopy swayed gently in the breeze.

Once a lumberjack passed through the forest, and saw the tree, and he thought: "if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

The lumberjack was so taken with the question, that he immediately set to make the tree fall when no one can hear it. He cut it just so that it would take some more minutes to fall, and quickly went away.

When he was some distance away, the lumberjack thought he heard a faint sound, so he turned and saw that the tree on the hill had fallen. Disappointed, he went back and tried the same with another tree, this time making sure that it would take more time to fall.

He went away again, occasionally glancing back to see if the tree has fallen, but this second tree wasn't high up enough on the hill, and so after a while was lost to his sight. The lumberjack started wondering if the tree had fallen already or not, and just had to check it, so started going back. After a minute or two he was sure that he had heard the unmistakeable sound of a tree falling, and going back confirmed that the tree was down.

"That would not do," thought the lumberjack. He went home and picked up an explosive charge with a wireless remote control. He went to the forest, found a tree, cut it enough, placed the charge, then walked out of the forest and pressed the detonation button.

He wasn't sure if the remote was out of range, so he went back to check, and found that the tree had fallen. It had fallen out of his hearing range, so the lumberjack was very happy. At least until he realised that there were also animals in the forest, and they were there to hear the tree fall. No, there must be no one there.

He spent the next several days digging a fire trench around a small copse of trees and cutting down the trees around it to provide a good buffer. Days turned to weeks as he attempted to make sure his chosen trees are protected. Then he set fire to the rest of the forest so that the animals would run away.

The forest fire continued for some days, and was all over the news. It took a lot of firefighting to quench it, and by the end of it there were indeed no animals in the area, nor much in the way of a forest.

The lumberjack waited a couple of weeks longer so that people would forget about the fire and move to other news, and went back. The small copse stood there, his protected trees still alive. He was very happy. He started cutting down a tree, but then he realised something: there was no longer a forest for the tree to fall in.

At which point he was captured by the police and taken to continue his philosophical musing in a cell.

And that is the story behind the avatar.

Mine is a photo of a Stargate prop from a larp in the UK I went to over about 8 years. I realised the sun was setting so I planned the shot. Its been my main avatar on the web since around 2012.

I drew it. Hail the symmetry tools!

It's something that I'm writing about during my free time.. and no, it's not related to Sauron.

During Insomnia there were quite a few of us with the generic non-avatar icon. So I somewhat hurriedly tried to think of something, and the blue Snood it was!

I did quite enjoy Snood, and hey, it's the only Snood here AFAIK.

Well, Wizball is my favourite C64 game, so the Wizball it is.

Mine usually represents the game I'm heavily focused on, the current avatar was when I got back to playing UT2k4 but I haven't played it in months now.

If I kept up with every game I change there would be a new one weekly.

I drew a lot of these 3 haired stick men with oval heads back 10-15 years ago. Most of them involved doing something stupid with fire or explosives but a few like this one were less juvenile. I always self identified with the character, and the penguin conveniently shows support for Linux.