Presenting me

I have been a bit busy working on a few things connected with the next littles meet up this weekend which Papa Bear is pleased with apart from a bit of post Christmas tidying up.
The last few days have seen me thinking a bit  about a number of interrelated things and it's really those I wish to talk about today.
Take avatars for instance. We generally see them on forums, social media, chat rooms and so on sometimes as I can well remember when I first got online, you be given limited amount of preset ones by the owners and increasing more allowed you to host one of your own subject to size restrictions then some site had image hosting that integrated that with you with resizing and a choice of 'cut outs' so things didn't have to be square shaped.
What was the point of them?
I'm very much a visual kind of person in that if I'm online I look for a familiar 'face' in a thread or forum that I associate that individual with to the point as some people in a music forum know I don't like it if you change them rather like you change your underwear cos it gets very confusing.
One problem I have is different sites have different image size and shape restrictions and small square shaped one need a fairly simple image to be easily recognized while others allow for long and more subtle ones. I like to standardize an avatar across a group of related sites.
For me an avatar is a personal thing: It's an online reflection of an aspect of me I wish to communicate to people as my 10 seconds of introduction and acceptance to you tailored to where we are meeting up so on one site it's very much my nekomimi side you'll first see while others will be tailored very specifically to it (SN followers will no doubt be smiling at this point!).
Here and on related sites it is different: It is very much about "the little girl within", my very child-like but adult regressed self which just is me because in part of what happened to me apart from those disabilities I was born with, how I see me and my life as lived with nothing sexual in it.
I did touch a bit on it on Friday, but while I don't feel significantly older than I did , that side of me in real life as even in online life too has with a lot of help has moved on being a bit more mature, moving more toward what an actual child of my developmental age would do and think even as the gap between that and a fully mature adult is painfully obvious.

That is one reason why I decided to alter my avatar here: to communicate that change even if  it lacks my beloved Junior Prefects badge.
There were others, some in squared form may of worked better but there was something else, a smiling contentedness in this that is in how I feel that was missing from them while still having something of the era I'm from.
As ever I'll add the last avatar to my list of them on the about page where I talk about their histories and have synchronized a square version with my accounts at GT and IK.