I noticed some time ago that the avatar of ファブリス changed from a friendly face of our admin (I presume it was ファブリスの顔) to a cover from “Haunted Universe” by Steven Norquist.

Is there something into it? (I guess it’s a question to Fabrise himself )

Not sure if he got the image from that book, but just FYI that's the Helix Nebula. No idea why he used it though ^^, there maybe isn't one. I use this as my wallpaper with no particular reason other than Calvin&Hobbes and nebulas are ***** awesome

[ファブリス]

I don't know if it's a coincidence that you mention that book, maybe I mentioned Steven Norquist on this forum in one of my philosophical/spiritual ramblings? I do like Steven's essay on enlightenment, a rather.. well, "haunting" perspective that seems to correspond to what the Buddhist philosophy talks about. Mostly I find the idea of the self vs that of the interdependent universe fascinating.

That said, as devilsbabe mentioned, the picture is the Helix Nebula which the Haunted Universe book uses as their cover, and links to in the footer of their site.

As for my previous avatar it was indeed a photo of the "real" me in April 2007, crouching against a backdrop of flowers in a park somewhere in the suburb of Osaka. I liked that avatar picture, and thought it would be nicer to have a face..

But later I realized that it wasn't the "real" me anyway, since it is a photo from 2007. So I figured I may as pick the Helix Nebula as avatar. I kinda like the dot in the center... I feel like space is staring back at me

ファブリス Wrote:But later I realized that it wasn't the "real" me anyway, since it is a photo from 2007. So I figured I may as pick the Helix Nebula as avatar. I kinda like the dot in the center... I feel like space is staring back at me

Well, then using a newer photo that represents the "real" you might be a good idea, lol.
I actually liked the face avatar because you were the only one showing your face around here!
The Helix Nebula took it's share as my PC wallpaper too

[ファブリス]

undead_saif Wrote:I actually liked the face avatar because you were the only one showing your face around here!

Well you put the finger on it. I felt like I was the odd one out. It doesn't matter much, but I was hoping other people would do the same. I sometimes feel like the forum is very dry in some way. We have a really nice community on here and there is a lot of good stuff being shared, and people help each other out, but maybe people don't get much room for personality?

Perhaps this is my mistake in designing the forum. When I disabled forum sigs I wanted a simple clean layout. I didn't mean for the minimalism to reduce people's means of expression. Now that the anti spam feature is working really well, maybe I could enable those to give people a little more room for personal blog links or favorite quotes and whatnot? What do you think?

ファブリス Wrote:I feel like space is staring back at me

Funnily I'm getting similar feeling

I don't know about post signatures, I usually don't like them very much. Sometimes there'll be an interesting quote or funny message, but more often than not I find it's just an ALL CAPS BOLD FLASHING TEXT distracting you from the rest of the forum. But maybe I just don't hang out on the right forums, the community here seems really nice and invested in upping their japanese and sharing their tips, methods, etc. so I think it could be ok.

About avatars though, it would be really really nice to be able to post some decent pictures. The only reason I use a kanji is because I can't use a picture larger than 10*10 or 10KB which is just too restrictive. I tried resizing some of my pictures but you couldn't make anything out afterwards.

So yeah, pictures pictures pictures

@ファブリス
I love the signature-less forum. It really cleans the place up. All the forums I've been to people seem to make their signatures really huge and attention-grabby. I usually disable avatars and signatures because of that.

I understand the need for people to express themselves, but I get enough of that through avatars and the way they post.

edit: Text-only signatures or very small images might be okay though.

Jombo Wrote:Text-only signatures or very small images might be okay though.

Personally, I'd go for text only.