I've made my "own" which actually isn't my own, but is Scarlett Johansson. Not just some random pic of her but this one. There are several reasons why it became this one. Some of them I will hold to myself. Others will be the look she got with her hair, it could very well have been me. Fun thing is, that when I at a time tried running one of these face recognition gimmicks deciding which celeb you look like, Scarlett would not show up at all. I got Nicole Kidman as primary, and Sienna Miller as secondary. I can see the parts of their faces that would correspond to my own face. Lol. Anyways, natural look and hair free won over the other. I will from time to time run theme based avatar, like I do my Christmas one during December, and one for New Years. :-)
I'd never go by default avatar given by a side. I think it's impersonal and makes it harder to recognize who's the poster, if not just jump into the risk of thinking it being one person with mainly one topic on mind, no matter how the questions are formulated. Hmm. I know I'd change the avatar myself, unless I don't plan post stuff, or don't expect/look for feedback on my posts.
I just Googled Scarlett Johansson and found one that really did look like Nicole Kidman. I wouldn't have thought that of the pic you're using, though. It's a nice one, and distinctive.
Like you I prefer not to use the default avatar. It's too hard to find even my own posts.
Thank you. I feel good about it. I've never made a secret out of it being Scarlett. On the old platform (aM v.1.0) I did upload the full image of the one I use cropped as my avatar. I do change the tone of the image from time to time if I change my background image for my profile. I want to find a tone that suits the color in the background profile, or the other way around. Hmm. Guess that tells something about my person. There you got it. I said it. ;-)
At EP we had the possibility to choose between more default avatars. I don't remember the number, but might have been around 10 or 15. But as we had many users there it did not really work out neither unless we personalized our avatars. You've seen a smaller amount of those I flipped around between for a period of time during my stay there. :-)
Zack 