Avatar

So when I read this assignment I had no idea what an 'avatar' even was. I saw the movie, but apparently this wasn't the same thing... After some searching on the internet I figured out its kind of like a cartoon picture of yourself? It says on the description of the assignment that we're supposed to use photoshop or dreamweaver but I definitely don't have either of those on my computer... hopefully that's not going to be an issue in this class! I tried a few sites where you can make up a little cartoon person but most of them were really weird looking and I could never really figure out how to save the picture once I made it. One site actually wanted me to play some kind of virtual game like the sims or something with this little cartoon of myself... umm no thanks! Finally I found a site where I could put in a picture of myself and 'cartoonize' it. Doesn't really look like a cartoon but its as good as I'm gonna get! 


The second part of this assignment is to critique another avatar I found online... Well considering I didn't even know these things existed until about an hour ago I'm not 100% sure where to find another one. I had enough trouble making one myself! But I guess in my first part I kind of did this already. This whole idea of creating an online version of yourself could definitely relate back to what we were talking about in class on Wednesday- Lacan's theory of the 'mirror stage' and the 'Ideal-I'. For people who 'Blog' a lot this character is like an alter ego (Freud is kind of like a theorist...) because it is an image they identify with, but its not actually them. One reason I didn't want to use some of the avatars I attempted to make was because I didn't think they were an accurate depiction of myself. The internet is supposed to let me get closer to my Ideal-I, not further away!! I didn't like some of the sites I tried because they had such limited options for creating my avatar. With only three different kinds of eyes and four hairstyles how am I supposed to make something that looks like me?? It all ended up looking like a character from a tv show no one watches... 


So I know this was supposed to be two pages but I don't have much more to say about avatars! I may add more after the discussion in class tomorrow :)