I could bullshit that the smoking chimp is a comment on human nature or whatever, but the truth is: someone sent me this pic, pointing out that he holds his cig the same way that I do when I'm drinking in a photo. And that was right when I was looking for online avatars, since I didn't want to use devils any more (too "edgy teenager").
More than a decade later, here I am, still with smoking chimp avatars.
My profile pic is Hesitan, a half-elf druid, dragon marked member of house Lyrandar and accomplished airship pilot.
Hestian's recently discovered half-sister Mardu, a vengeance paladin, aberrant marked, and a survivor of a Breland suicide squad during the war. Not to mention an excellent weaver.
Ragnar, a dragonborn rune fighter, retired war hero, and accomplished chef (with his own food truck) from the eastern jungles of Q'barra.
Lathe, a warforged artificer and his loyal companion Ward. Once a worker in House Cannith's warforged factories. On an epic quest to rediscover the secrets of creating warforged to allow his people to control their own destiny.
Elena, a ranger and dragon marked member of house Vadalis and her bird companion. An expert and researcher on the Mournland and its aberrant denizens.
Wait, this is instance-specific? Darn. Though I don't want to sign up again just to have my Picture Day selfie as my avatar. Sorry Timmy Turner's dad :(
I'd like to have a bighorn sheep fursona in the future so I went looking for goat/sheep related images to use as my PFP. Eventually I came across this one which looked good in black and white/grayscale and it's kind of edgy so I decided to use it.
Mine's a Lemming in bed - it's the busy pointer from Lemmings Amiga version.
The reason is because Lemmy = Lemmings, and asleep because this was an account which wasn't intended to be used (I switched to it when my previous instance closed down).
An AI generated image community had a thread that boiled down to "just use your username as the prompt." And Captain Redmond Aggravated, Airline Transport Pirate was the result.
I took a screenshot of this youtube video because I thought it looked cool.
I have a few other versions on some platforms:
one was that image cut to the shape of the logo of the dyno bot (by that bot's /dynoavatar command)
at some point I tried to redesign the shape but it sucked
I later put a very barely visible trans flag over the dyno one (lost that image sadly)
shortly after that I redesigned the shape to some kind of thing with 2 circles (one severely cut) as a reference to my new name (lost that one too but it was better than the other redesign)
and did the barely visible trans flag thing with that one too (also lost that one but it's still my discord profile picture).
I found it many years ago. 15-20ish? I have no idea where I found it, but I've not seen it used anywhere else so I kind of just keep using it.
Don't really know what I bother since I use a client that doesn't display profile pictures anyway.
My other avatar I use gets me banned on most forums because apparently a clip from "nuts in the ass" is not suitable for public display anymore. It's political correctness gone mad tbh.
When I first got into ps2 emulation I tried Jak and Dexter and it worked great. The only issue were the eyes of character models were wonky as hell and would often look in different directions, not load, broken textures, etc. I snapped this screenshot of Jak right after the green sage yelled at him and he stood at attention with his eyes crossed. I use this photo for everything now even though it's so tiny you can't see his eyes.
I don't even see profile pics while browsing (using eternity)! Don't see any point to adding a profile picture to an account which is more or less anonymous for all intents and purposes.
Poorly drawn meme of a guy crying with a completely neutral expression. I photoshopped the tears away and put a smile on him and thought it looked really funny.
My profile picture (and part of my username) is a Celestion Vintage 30 speaker. It is a specific model of guitar amplifier cabinet speaker. While it is used all over music, it is a huge part of the modern sound of metal. IMO its tailored frequency response and its specific nonlinearities at moderately loud volumes are uniquely important in producing a slick and modern-sounding metal guitar tone.
I can't record actual guitar cabinets at the moment because I live with family, but I still use a family of homemade impulse responses that I recorded from my cabinet to play guitar [1]. 9 times out of 10 I solely use an impulse response where the cabinet was loaded with a Vintage 30 (specifically, one of the special ones ripped out of a Mesa Rectifier cabinet). Even when I'm not looking for a "generic modern metal" sound, I typically use a blend of a Vintage 30 and another speaker.
Vintage 30's are not "vintage", they're not 30 inches, they're not 30 watts, they're not from the 1930s...I'm honestly not sure where the name comes from.
[1] What I am saying here is that I simulate the sound of the speaker.