So, it's the end of the month and I'm making a few changes around here. I've decided to retire this old profile photo. The most fundamental problem with it was that it was misleading, because it's not actually a picture of me. I just posted it as a kind of warped joke, but I let it go on a little too long, and I'm tired of it. Besides, it creeps me out a little.
I realize that people often use a wide variety of things for profile pictures other than a photo of themselves, such as cartoons, pictures of their cat, and whatever the hell this is. But in those cases it's always clear that you're not looking at the person's actual picture. If there are other cases out there where it's not clear, well...then I guess they have the same problem I do.
It's not really a question of vanity one way or the other. In the course of reading other people's blogs, and in a lifetime of reading in general, I've noticed the importance of putting a face to the words you're reading. I find that I usually take a quick glance at a blogger's profile photo when I first encounter their blog. I do this unconsciously, but yet that glance at the photo colors every word I read thereafter, and in the absence of a photo, my mind usually just makes up a face to accompany the words. I don't know if this is true for everyone or just for me. The visual and the abstract tend to bleed together in my brain. Nevertheless, I'm tired of the corpse of Jimmy Olsen over there representing me, and I replaced it with a real picture. There is actually quite a strange story behind that photo. It's one of the most fascinating and cryptic mysteries I've ever heard, and I strongly urge anyone who has the time to follow this link.
In other news, I've finally added a few stand-alone pages. I've wanted to add something for a while, but I wasn't sure what. I didn't see the point in making an "about" page. I'm not even sure what it's all about myself, and if anyone else has any hope of figuring out then their best guide would be the posts themselves. So I came up with some pages where the readers could have some input and...well, you can check them out for a fuller explanation.
