New pic, who dis?
Another week, another chance to struggle with a blog topic. I just got off of a whirlwind of a couple of weeks. An 11-state road trip to get our daughter off to college. A first-time empty nester vacation. Trying as hard as possible to not open my laptop.
My first week back to normalcy was less than normal. It started with a national holiday, included a ~6-hour tattoo session, and by Friday evening, I got caught up on all the loose ends that opened up along the way.
The original plan was to drop a post about how I'm signing tagged releases for my agent and context library, to add some public visibility for archive purposes. Since I side quested pretty hard, that didn't quite happen, even though I did end up knocking a bunch of cool new stuff out.
Instead, you get this post.
Deep lore
For a while now, I've operated with a consistent profile photo. I use it as my favicon on my blog, and any and everywhere in between. Some notable iterations include but are not limited to:
- The Plants vs. Zombies one
- A few iterations of the one from that one anime generator that one time
- That era with the childhood photos
- Me with a fake moustache from the back of a pizza box
I use them, then lose them.
The photo
My previous profile photo was taken during the COVID-19 pandemic. I don't quite remember what photo I was using before that. The photo was taken two addresses ago, a handful of pairs of glasses ago, and featured me standing in front of an iMac I no longer own and a wall of bass guitars. My ears were stretched up to 00g at the time as well.
I still mostly look like I did back then, and my daughter complimented me recently on how I aged pretty well considering how old the photo was. Since it was during COVID, it was back when I was still cutting my own hair and stuff.
With our daughter leaving the nest, it felt like it was time for a bit of a personal refresh. No AI-touched-up bullshit slop. Just a picture of me, holding our two idiot pugs, with a healthy amount of MySpace-era editing (background and fuzz filter) thanks to Picsart.
It's so fucking dumb, and I love it.
The (WIP) audit
Because I like to present myself consistently, when I make a change like this, I have to do it in a bunch of places. And because I gave up on Gravatar due to my overuse of masked emails, it's not a very simple process.
Starting with the user accounts on my machines, I sweep my most commonly used services. Code forges, social profiles, this site, other sites. Not limited to just my personal stuff either, I make sure I use the same profile photo everywhere, including work Slacks and such.
It's a labor of love, and I love it so. But this will probably be a work in progress for the rest of the year.
Why bother
Call it OCD if you'd like, but swap "compulsive" for "consistent". Consistent name, consistent face. I use my real name, and I don't like to hide behind random graphics (anymore). It's just how I like to represent myself.
To take it a step further, I've been complimented in the past that it's "easy to find your profile" because of this disorder of mine. It's a trust signal, and I offset the burden of making the change by doing so sparingly.
:wq
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