In 2024 I decided I needed a picture that was more appropriate for my age (I was born at 330ppm of CO₂, i.e., in the seventies of the last millennium):
And dithered:
The black and white variant got used for the longest time on Mastodon:
Used on social media a lot, generated by Prisma app, the first style transfer app I had come across. The app was released in 2016, the timestamp on the file I have is from January 1, 2018. I think it's safe to say that this is based on an image from 2017:
Here I was trying to raise awareness for people wearing masks. I think we can say that this campaign eventually failed with most people deciding that wearing masks to protect the immuno-compromised was way too much effort.
Used for a very long time (and still the favicon of this site, a picture from the day I got married (2007):
Used on my RPG Stackexchange profile, still based on that very old balcony picture:
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Replaced the two logos for my site:
https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex.png → https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-drinking-coffee-48-bw.jpg https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-face-faint.jpg → https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-drinking-coffee-48.jpg
https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex.png
https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-drinking-coffee-48-bw.jpg
https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-face-faint.jpg
https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/alex-drinking-coffee-48.jpg
Bye bye original picture I took several years ago. I would have guessed when I was around 25 years old, ie. 1998. I guess that was before I owned a digital camera. 🙂
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Used on Facebook, recently:
& Claudia on the webcam (small).jpg Alex & Claudia on the webcam
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Recently I realized that I need to upload pictures with higher resolutions in order look ok on newer forums, Twitter, and the like. So I extracted the face from the SVG file used for the RPG logo.
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When trying to design a logo for my RPG category to be used on the RPG Bloggers network, I took the old 48×48 X-Face I’ve used for so long and overlaid it on to a map I had been using in my Alder King game.
Then I realized I needed the same logo at a higher resolution, and with higher visibility came the need to no longer base it on the Lenap map, so I traced the face in Inkscape, and rearranged the map so only elements I had introduced myself were visible. Since this map was now available as a vector graphic, I was able to generate higher resolution images to be used in print products. ¹ ²
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Other small ones I’ve used on forums (→ Gravatar).
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I decided to switch to a new source image, since the balcony image above is several years old by now. Again, I edited away surplus pixels and optimized the eight color palette:
Note that I effaced the background using the sky color. Using the Gimp for 48x48 images! Just edit it until size drops below 740 bytes, then use the following code to get the string to use for your Face header.
(gnus-convert-png-to-face "~/pics/alex-face-bridge-small-edited.png")
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Another image. Crop to 48x48, posterize to the max, edit away all surplus background pixels
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New face, from a holiday picture: Cropped a square, resized it, played with the color levels, removed the background, and reduced it to eight colors:
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Here are the faces I have been using in my mail and news headers. The first two are based on the image of me standing on my old balcony.
The oldest image from that time is my old X-Face.
Later I produced my first Face based on the same image:
Then I edited away surplus pixels and optimized the eight color palette:
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This is the image I used when AIM got portrait support. It’s still the basis for many of my pictures eventhough I must have been taken around 1998.
