my favorite cat picture ever

 

The cover image for The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There, a fantastic series of modern-day fairy stories by Catherynne M Valente, which I was persuaded to read by Inverarity(who writes Alexandra Quick). Her prose is just beautiful, and a few quotes were enough to win me over.

Spoiler

The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned up and further off from the rooftops of Omaha, Nebraska, to which September did not even wave good-bye. One ought not to judge her: all children are Heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb high trees and say shocking things and leap so very high grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless At All. September stood very generally in the middle on the day the Green Wind took her, Somewhat Heartless, and Somewhat Grown.

Spoiler

“It’s a family name,” A-Through-L said loftily, scratching behind one horn. “My father was a Library. So properly speaking, I am a Lyvern, or…a Libern? A Wyverary? I am still trying to find the best term.”

“Well, I think that’s very unlikely,” said September, who preferred Wyverary.

“However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth, and therefore one hundred percent likely. My sainted mother was the familiar of a highly puissant Scientiste, and he loved her. He polished her scales every week with beeswax and truffle oil. He fed her sweet water and bitter radishes grown by hand in his laboratory, and therefore much larger and more bitter than usual radishes. He petted her, and called her a good Wyvern, and made a bed for her out of river rushes and silk batting and old bones. (They didn’t come from anyone he knew, so that was all right, and a Wyvern nest has to have bones, or else it’s just not home.) It was quite a good situation for my mother, even if she hadn’t liked him a great deal and thought him very wise. As all reptiles know, the bigger the spectacles, the wiser the wearer, and the Scientiste wore the biggest pair ever built. But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals. So went my mother’s patron, in a spectacular display of Science.”

“That’s very sad,” sighed September.

“Terribly sad! But grief is wasted on the very roasted. Without her companion, my mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and poured over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it begins with A through L. My mother was widowed by a real estate agent some years ago and I never finished the encyclopedia. Anyway, mother told us all about our father when we were yearlings. We asked: why do we not have a Papa? And she said: your Papa is the Library, and he loves you and will care for you. Do not expect a burly, handsome Wyvern to show up and show you how to breathe fire, my loves. None will come. But Compleat has books aplenty on the subject of combustion, and however odd it may seem, you are loved by two parents, just like any other beast.“

September bit her lip. She did not know how to say it gently. “I had a friend back home named Anna-Marie,” she said slowly. “And her father sold lawnmowers all over Nebraska, and some in Kansas, too. When Anna-Marie was little, her daddy ran off with a lady from Topeka with the biggest lawn in the county. Anna-Marie doesn’t even remember her daddy, and sometimes when she’s sad, her mother says she didn’t have one, that she’s an angel’s daughter and no awful lawnmower salesman had a thing to do with her. Do you think, maybe…it could have been like that, with your mother?”

A-Through-L looked pityingly at her, his blazing red face scrunched up in doubt. “September, really. Which do you think is more likely? That some brute bull left my mother with egg and went off to sell lonemozers, or that she mated with a Library and had many loved and loving children? I mean, let us be realistic! Besides, everyone says I look just like my father. Can’t you see my wings? Are they not made of fluttering vellum pages? If you squint you can even read a history of balloon travel!”

As for why I chose it, I used to have art from Twig, but the story had finished and I was getting tired of it, so I wanted a replacement, and this was the first thing that struck a chord with me.

 

Mine is an adjusted version I made years ago based off of snafu comic's webcomic of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (https://snafu-comics.com/swmcomic/billy-and-mandy-2/), which is an underrated show still now.

 

Mine is a screenshot of my Guardian from Guild Wars 2, from back in 2014. I've been too lazy to change/update it.

 

Mine is an edited photo I took of myself with wet hair... before I cut it off.

My sig pic is an edited screenshot of a Ginny Weasley I made in Sims 2. I originally made a pink, non-zombified version for the April Fools Day where DLP became Dark Lady Ginny (not to be confused with the April Fools Day where it became Dark Lord Cullen, Equestria Forums, or merged with fanfiction.net). The next day, I changed it to what it looks like now as a sort of joke, and haven't bothered to change it since.

Edit: Ah, there it is...

 

It's a cropped version of some promotional art for Legion, probably my favorite TV show of the last couple of years.

@Halt have you ever thought about cropping out the white border? Because I think it looks much better like this:

 

My previous avatar was Ted Danson as Michael on The Good Place, but given that the show is now in its (final) winter break, I changed it to a moody GT Sport pic I took two years ago.

It’s a glowing brake disc, and I like the way it almost looks like an eye with the brake caliper set at an angle and the louvres up top.

 

Mines Kiriyama Rei from my favourite anime "March Comes in Like a Lion," about a kid who lost his family in a car accident, got horribly depressed and obsessive about shogi, and then got somewhat adopted by just the best family ever and found happiness again.

 

Mine is a tree from google images. It looks kinda neat.

 

It's such a good picture! I do think it suits you. Hunted down the full thing:


Aside from random avatars if they fit, my minor hobby is equipping DLP members who don't yet have avatars with avatars. Like @Mordecai was saying, after all, an avatar is like a face. I want more people to have faces! Faces for all! especially syed

 

A picture from when I was still military, my beret when it was still not scuffed and worn.

 

The weird doctor Seuss character from epic rap battles of history. Him just staring at the screen creeped me out so I thought everyone else should suffer with me.

 

It's an image I found on deviantart about a decade ago while I was looking for inspiration for cover art for my first (bad) novel.

 

^ Random observation: while the model has a bass clef on her neck, I'd wager the melody in the pentagram is likely taken from a score in the treble clef.

 

R136, Tarantula Nebula, Large Magellanic Cloud. An extremely bright and relatively close starburst. I like reading space stuff when I'm free.

 

I don’t know, ask @Jon

 

Mine is from The Godfather.

 

The Master Cylinder was a character from a television series called Felix the Cat.

 

Hmmm, I might have the original image(and some others from the same artist's home site, a decade and a half ago) on an old hard drive lying around, but while I have tried to find the original source online from time to time, years later, this is the best I can provide:

Spoiler

Either way, it's not related to my name or anything, I just liked the image well enough, and I've used it since I started. Or near enough to that.