My avatar

I've got a confession to make. Although I implied that I look like my Avatar when I first created him last year, it's not true. I reckon I did look like him a few years ago, but as I said in the follow-up post about the yahoo avatars, it's just not possible to create an avatar which looks like a 'grown-up'!

I was reminded of this recently by Dragonzlad. My last visit to Singapore was over two years ago, and I hadn't been able to see him on that occasion, but we found time to have supper together in London recently.

"GB, you know you don't look much like your Avatar, don't you?" says Dragonzlad with a grin on his face, when a lull in the conversation arises half-way through the evening.

"I know," I say with a sigh, "but I remember complaining that it's not possible to make an older looking avatar when I first created him last year."

"Yes but your new readers won't remember that post!"

He reminded me during the conversation that he had created his own avatar just after I had created mine, and that at the time I had commented that our avatars looked similar. To me, that just emphasises the problems with the Yahoo avatars. He's ethnically Chinese and I'm ethnically English, so given that our best efforts had resulted in similar avatars, the Yahoo avatar technology clearly has a few shortcomings!