Tech: My Avatar, My Self

[Altair]

Flipping through one of the threads today, my attention was grabbed by the cascade of visuals from everyone's avatars, striking both in the individual imagery and in their diversity. I'm sure we've done this before, but I don't think in a long time, so...

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Mine: The star Altair gets its name from the Arabic expression "al-ta'ir al-nasr"--the flying eagle--hence the choice of image. I like the dynamism of the eagle's pose and the realistic rendering...but I esp. like the fact that it's a silhouette chasing the sun/a star (Altair?), suggesting great height, which reflects my personal motto (below the avatar). I'd tried other eagle avatars in the past, but the bold simplicity of this one stuck.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by heraldry (no doubt seduced by Arthurian romance), and I used to doodle a coat of arms for myself, always with a blue eagle around a black shield with a silver star. I've always considered that combo--blue, with some black and silver--my signature color scheme, so I'm happy it's incorporated here.

[ehbowen]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Steam locomotive PM 1225. Which I first encountered as a high school student in East Lansing for the 1979 National Junior Classical League Convention. The major reason I chose Michigan State University for my first (unsuccessful) attempt at college...if I'd spent as much time studying as I did working as a volunteer on the restoration project, I might have graduated. Twenty-plus years later, I actually got to drive it under the "Engineer for an Hour" program conducted by the Steam Railroading Institute.

[Emma Eldritch]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

I wanted something that said "retro occultspoitation." Like a trashy paperback about witchcraft orgies, or the sleeve of a record that got confiscated by your parents during the Satanic Panic. No great deep reason, I'm afraid - I just love that stuff.

[Uneryx]

Tell us about your avatar!

It's a drawing of my cat, Merlin. When I joined I was scrambling for something that was "me" enough without being my face (still being in the broom closet, and all). My cat is my baby, and since it's something I drew, on short notice it was sufficient.

I'm probably going to change it soon but I am the busiest bee and haven't had time to create something good.

[Dynes Hysbys]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Nothing very fancy or exciting about mine - most of my craft is done outside and that's what I normally wear!

[Darkhawk]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

The current avatar is a cropped shot of this mindblowing little sculpture, which I was utterly stunned to receive as a gift.

It is... a tidy iconographic representation of a certain chunk of my mysticism, and is thus marginally less cryptic than my attempt to make an iconographic black heart hieroglyph out of a photograph of an appropriately shaped pot.  (Which was my previous icon.)

I mean, marginally less.  Not a whole lot less.

But the wolf and the tree.

[Kylara]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

While I tend towards darker and more creepy stuff, and a lot of the times my avatar reflects that, I never had my usual avatars here on the Cauldron.  I had a sparkly face picture at one time, but I ended up drawing this little mandala on one of my journal covers (which used to be just a plain, cream canvas), and I had taken a pic of it for a group I was in, and just really liked it, so set it as my avatar.

Specifically, it was on the cover of my menstrual journal, which I have been working for years on connecting more to my female side, and to the spiritual aspects of the physical body (especially menstruation, which feels both very mystical and very mundane all at once to me), so there is symbolism in my mandala relating to blood (which is very me), body-love, cycles and just spiritual connection in general.

[Jenett]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Mine is Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, on a deep blue background. Blue because I like blue very much, and those two constellations because reasons.

(The easiest to explain reason is that I have a fictional astronomer living in my head after being a player-author in a 7 year running project : explained in a thread here, which focuses on the religious and magical implications thereof.)

Somewhere in the middle of that project, I kept eyeing Ursa Major stuff on Etsy and other sources, and insisting to myself I would let myself buy it only after I could reliably identify Ursa Major in the sky. (I for some reason have had more trouble with it than other constellations. Orion is easy, so are the Pleiades if you can see them, but I was reliably getting Cassiopeia for *months* before I could get Ursa Major or Minor.)

I was living in rural Maine at that point, which had other limitations, but the star gazing was amazing (and I saw two aurorae while living there, though one was more impressive than the other) and one night I was driving home from a trip, and pulled into my parking space, which was on a dark street with no immediate street lights, and I looked up, and there it was.

I prefer Ursa Major because I am, philosophically speaking, apparently more interested in being the thing that points at the thing than being the thing pointed at (which is to say, Polaris is very handy, but I'm more interested in the process of finding it.)

Applications to my professional and religious life, sort of obvious when one puts it that way.

[Altair]

But the wolf and the tree.

...are spectacular, esp. now that I can see the whole thing. Your avatar was one of the ones I had in mind when I started this thread, so I'm glad you weighed in.

[Altair]

I ended up drawing this little mandala on one of my journal covers

You drew that yourself? I'm impressed. I like its mystical/mundane connections.

Mine is Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, on a deep blue background. Blue because I like blue very much, and those two constellations because reasons.

I recognized the constellations and was hoping you'd explain (lovely image, BTW), so I'll hurry over to your link right now.

[Jenett]

You drew that yourself? I'm impressed. I like its mystical/mundane connections.

I recognized the constellations and was hoping you'd explain (lovely image, BTW), so I'll hurry over to your link right now.

I should probably note that the project website is down for technical reasons, but there's a mirror of a lot of it up that includes the month-by-month PDFs.

[Eastling]

Flipping through one of the threads today, my attention was grabbed by the cascade of visuals from everyone's avatars, striking both in the individual imagery and in their diversity. I'm sure we've done this before, but I don't think in a long time, so...

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

I've had a few different avatars here. Most of them have been based on commissioned art I've gotten of my images of my Powers. My previous ones were Ariadne and Dionysos, and the current one is more or less Mercury.

[Sefiru]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

My mouse avatar owes its origins to an incident at work where a dead mouse was found at my desk, which was a source of some excitement a the time. I started by joking about it at work, putting toy mice on my desk and such, and that included using this picture as my avatar on my internal work email. I liked it so much that I changed my Cauldron avatar to the same picture, and I keep using it wherever I create a new account. It's become my online "face" as much as "Sefiru" has become my online name.

At the same time, I've gotten more curious about mouse lore, and how my way of living is kind of mouse-like, so it's become a sort of spirit animal for me.

...Also, I might be a bit of a furry. Possibly.

[SunflowerP]

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Interesting coincidence that you should ask; I was just the other day really looking at my avatar (usually I don't think much about it at all, except insofar as I recognize it at a glance and can readily identify my own posts when I'm scanning an old thread, but every now and again I notice it and think about it), and appreciating how much it suited my purposes.

So, long long ago, back when TC was using Beehive software (which didn't use avatars), someone posted a link to a fun little Lego-based avatar-maker. (It could even have been me; I might have run across the Lego tarot elsewhere on that site first... or maybe it was the other way round, and I found the tarot by poking around after someone else had linked the Mini-Mizer.)

In those days, avatar-makers leaned heavily towards providing body-shapes of an unrealistically sylph-like slenderness - and I am emphatically not a sylph. (These days, avatar-makers are a much more obscure feature of the 'Net, so I have no clue about their selection of body shapes.) I was quite pleased to find the Lego one, because the proportions of a Lego mini-fig are much closer to my own. I immediately constructed the closest representation of myself that the constraints of that system would allow - which is still the one I use. I've since made others that emphasize different facets of my personality/interests (most of which I use on my DW journal, but there's also a 'silly hat' version that I put up every year when we honor Cauldronites who have gone west), but this is my 'general purpose' one.

I have long brown-with-reddish-highlights hair (though with more grey strands than I had when I first made it) that I customarily wear pulled back (though gathered at the nape of my neck, not in a high bouncy ponytail). In summer, I habitually wear short-sleeved ankle-length dresses of the sort that I can basically just drop over my head with no fuss - I don't own a black one, that's to go with the hat; and none of them have quite that sort of neckline (which is to represent non-vanilla-ness). The hat is exactly what it appears to be, your classic witch hat, and shouldn't need further explanation. And I am an incorrigible bookworm and lurrrve my coffee.

Photorealistic it's not, but it's a reasonably accurate symbolic representation of me, and I like to think it bears a fair resemblance physically. I remain happy with it, even after ~a dozen years.

Sunflower

[Sobekemiti]

Flipping through one of the threads today, my attention was grabbed by the cascade of visuals from everyone's avatars, striking both in the individual imagery and in their diversity. I'm sure we've done this before, but I don't think in a long time, so...

Tell us about your avatar! Why did you pick it, and does it hold any special significance?

Mine is just an avatar I threw together that shows Sobek on the left and Heru/Horus on the right. My Sobek has a complex and complicated syncretic relationship with Heru, so I can't just ignore Him. Sobek is Heru. Sobek is the primary god of my practice. He comes first above all others. So that's why They're on my avatar. Everything I do is under Their watch and care.

Also, whether I refer to Sobek(-Heru) as He or They really depends on whether They are being One or Two at the time. I have the same issue with Aset/Isis, being She and They, as well.