My first profile pic on ‘Etarc’ was during the ARG & was a simple pair of eyes & a hat to match my plucked-from-the-air username. Over the weeks that followed I played a game, where I gradually altered & added details, until eventually he was a space man with a coloured background.
No one ever seemed to notice his gradual morph.
Anyway, once I got my leader badge, I used a stock pic of a tree to be distinctive and more formal.
It was boring…
Then I took a really nice red night sky screenshot on an exotic planet & found when I amped up the contrast it was a great distinctive silhouette of my long term exotic ship. I had some basic phone app which I was playing with & after several attempts (using my real life airbrushing techniques), I was able to make it look like a volcanic glow. I then shaded in my username initials & added some highlights to keep the ship in the foreground.
Turned out kind of cool & I’ve been using it ever since.
There is a game called The Realm Online. I helped alpha (Friends & Family) test it starting in 1994-5…when the internet was new. The toon is from that game and so is the white baldric but originally it is solid white.
I used to belong to an online gaming guild called Order Swordbrüden. We “borrowed” the symbols from a medieval German Order of Kinghts called Oden Schwertbrüden (otherwise known as Livonian Knights). I placed those symbols on the baldric.
I collect vintage Star Wars. I completed my loose vintage collection a while ago. When a collector completes something we need something else to feed the collecting O.C.D.!
The common practice is to start a focus on a certain item. I went for Zuckuss as he was the first figure I received as a kid.
Here’s a link to my collection so far for anyone who’s interested
I created the Polyphemus character for Waking Titan. Polyphemus was a Cyclops, and brother to the Titans. I liked him so much I made him my Steam avatar, too.
The profile picture is (loosely) based on this:
I’m very keen on the phrase “More wine for Polyphemus!”. I think I’ll adopt it as my motto.
I am really enjoying the creativity and ideas that have gone into everyone’s profile pictures. Until now, I’ve always found them to be a bit of a nuisance and have used many different pictures along the way, most thrown together hastily. My favorite was a specific photo of Europa (the moon of Jupiter, not the Phoenician princess). But overall, I’ve given them very little thought.
Thank you, Ospredox, for allowing people to share the thought process that went into those little pictures. They are far more significant than I had imagined.
I have just changed my profile picture to the badge I created for my membership in the fictional exploration group the Bedouin Cartographers. It was a group concieved by Arkady Cyrillic back on the NMS page that Cobra created while we were waiting for NMS to launch.