The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Avatars

*** Avatars ***
Please note the following:

  1. The minimum avatar size is 20 x 20
  2. The maximum avatar size is 172 x 20

Remember to keep them within rules and regulations.

Administration

Every time I tried to shrink my pic to an acceptable level for an avatar, it still wouldn’t be small enough. And when I shrunk it down to as small as could go, it was extremely tiny and pixellated,and not even that was small enough–15KB-still too big. I should know better how to fix this…ugh… Any ideas? Thanks for any possible help.

Sounds like the resolution is too high to start with. Hm… I’m not very good at working with avatars either, though.

Hi Guys!

Where does the word Avatar come from, and what does it mean?

Too lazy to google it, I suppose! :question:

Tam.

Oooh, Alex’s came out nice, I see…

Tam: the word “avatar” is modified version of another noun in Sanskrit (a Hindu-Indian language), “avatara” which means “descent” (and which is probably modified from a verb which means ‘to descend’.)

The religious concept is that the gods stay in the heavens but send images of themselves to our world. In Western post-Christian thought, it tends to mean something more like ‘incarnation’ or ‘manifestation’, with the actual descent of deity not merely the illusion thereof. But when the internet came along, the original meaning worked pretty well as a term for a visual appearance of someone who was really somewhere else. Thus the little photos on message boards are now often called “avatars”.

James Cameron will be releasing his new sci-fi action love-story movie “Avatar” this autumn, which features machines and eventually biological creatures being run by humans through remote control on an orbiting ship (since they can’t survive in the atmosphere of the planet below). So we’ll doubtless be hearing the word a lot more in coming months. :wink: