Explain your avatar
Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2025 2:51 pm
My new one is probably pretty obvious, but if everyone is gonna keep on calling me a "predator", I might as well lean into it.
My avatar comes from my name, so it's kind of self-explanatory, although there is a little more context you guys might find interesting.
First, the colors of the bird aren't a modification of the image; by a bizarre coincidence there was already a porcelain lark that had the MAP colors. I also flip the image based on whether the site has the profile on the right or left side, so that it's facing the writing. There's also more than one photo of it, one that's in profile and one angled slightly towards the viewer.
Secondly, where the name came from. The names "WandersGlade" and "PorcelainLark", both came from looking at anagrams that combined the names "Lewis Carroll", "Edgar Allan Poe", and "John Ruskin." I picked out names based on which words I liked the sound of best in those anagram lists. I had this vague/half-baked idea that using anagrams might make my names have assonance and consonance with other MAP names. The choice of WandersGlade was also somewhat inspired by Native American names I vaguely remembered (like Crazy Horse).
My first avatar in the MAP community was a creative commons photo of a lark sitting on some grass. Then I had the image of a glade, which I wanted to look more lawn-like; with the image itself, it was difficult to pick where the focal point should be because it was a scene without a figure. I briefly had a character from a German visual novel, on the MAPrightsforum because his facial expression really amused me. Then there was the April fools profile; initially I was going to go for a kind of MLG style meme (Trump with Mountain Dew, Doritos, and sunglasses because I thought it's funny to combine that pretense at being smooth/cool/clever with Trump), however I had to settle on a version of "you've activated my trap card" when I found it because it's one of my favorite memes!
