Why is my profile picture fake?
First, let me disclaim that I have a complicated relationship with generative AI, but that's another post. The important thing for this post is that I used Dall-E 3 to generate my profile image.
Well really, the most important thing is the image isn't me, but is a reasonable approximation of me.
Personally, when I interact with a person, or read their words, view their art, listen to their sounds, or otherwise engage with their beautiful works, I like to have some kind of visual representation of them I can keep in my mind. It doesn't have to be real; it can be an abstraction, a cartoon, a splash of color, just some visual metaphorical anchor I can use to help organize the idea of that person in my mind.
And I want to provide that for others.
What I don't want to do is dox myself, dramatic as that sounds. I joined this service because I missed anonymous blogging.
Let me be clear, I don't want anonymity so I can say nasty things about anyone. The world has more than enough nastiness without my contribution. And it's not because I'm somebody; I'm not. It's not because I have controversial opinions, or really any strong opinions at all. I just don't want to muddy the waters, so to speak.
We all have many faces we show the world, depending on the situation. When you're giving a presentation to stakeholders, you are a wholly different person than when you're at a party. (Me? I'm a confident and well-spoken professional when presenting, and the anxious, uncomfortable, awkward wreck of the party.) Somehow, over time, the face I show online increasingly became my professional face, and only my professional face.
Recently, I'd find myself wanting to write about something outside my professional sphere, and I'd pause thinking, "what if a client comes across this? Is it weird that I'm writing about this? They know me as someone who is passionate about the web, technology, details and stuff, not some dork who likes to play with synthesizers and do horrible watercolor paintings and write entire movies for some reason.
I have a tiny Youtube channel (because who doesn't amiright???), with like 150 subscribers. I cover technical minutia of framework we use in building sites. It's pretty narrowly focused and technical. So imagine my surprise when one of my clients, who is in leadership and not technology, asked me when I was uploading my next episode. She apparently watches them all. It's just a reminder that even when I think my stuff is pretty far from a person's interest, I can't just assume they're ignoring it.
Imagine my horror when I realized that my online presence has become something of a "brand," even though I'd never intended or desired that. Online, I'm now this professional web dude. A Director™. I'm supposed to be posting business insights on LinkedIn, not gushing over how cool Toki Pona is as a concept.
I know I could reclaim my online identity. I could post all the weird and wild stuff I love and there would be basically no consequence, outside of some awkward conversations where I have to explain what a "Save the Cat" outline is, and why I'm writing hundreds of pages of dialog that I'll throw away when I start the tenth rewrite... but if I'm honest, I don't want to. I'm embracing compartmentalization, right or wrong.
So for now, I'm just going to write here, and I'm going to do that anonymously. I don't know how long or often I'll write, but at least now I've got a place. A home for the weird me. AND a cool domain. And an OK-ish profile picture that you can just assume looks a tiny bit like me.
Addendum: Boy, that was a lot of words for say, "I don't want clients to realize I'm weird." Let's be honest. This blog is incredibly self-indulgent. I'm barfing words no one needs to read into the void. While I doubt anyone would get much value reading these words, I'm getting value writing them. I could just as well write this in text files saved to a "NOT_PORN" folder on my desktop. But someone put a lot of love and attention into building this blogging platform, so I'm going to use it.