Until today, I thought it was a tomato. I should zoom in more.
It’s apparently a lot more confusing than I thought. At least most people seem to think it’s something that I grow.
Are there actual trout that look like yours? It does look like a fish to me, but not particularly like what I think of as a trout.
@thorny_locust’s strawberry looks nothing like a tomato to me; the distinct point at the bottom is pure strawberry. OTOH …
How our avatars look on a phone are very different from how they look on a 24" monitor. It continues to amaze me how many people experience the Dope mostly or exclusively on a smartphone. Not that they’re doing it wrong, just differently from the traditional expectation of website use back in Ye Olden Tymes. Which was how / when I established my own SDMB habits.
And that in turn has a large bearing on how one should design their avatar. As @wolfpup said so well a few posts above.
Ha! I’ve never looked at the larger version of your avatar, and I always assumed it was a guy (most likely you) who was bald or shaved his head and was wearing his sunglasses on the back of his neck.
I never noticed the pattern on your lab coat until you mentioned it just now.
Back on the old boards, when they enabled avatars, I used the Rebel Alliance logo (from Star Wars); when we switched to Discourse, I changed it to a picture of Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
A couple of years ago now, there was a thread here where people talked about cat-themed avatars, and I changed mine, temporarily, to a picture of a cat wearing Obi-Wan’s hooded cloak. It was cute enough, and amused me enough, that the temporary change became an “until further notice” change.
It bears no relation to an actual trout. But I’m not a fisherman, so they all look the same to me.
Bah. It sounds like I should change my avatar. Most likely, I will go with either a zoomed in version of the image I am already using or find a suitably flashy rendition of the Sons Of Ether symbol.
Thorny Locust I always thought it was a strawberry. It is reddish and shaped like a strawberry. However, I strongly prefer to use my laptop for web surfing. So, as has been mentioned, the image is larger for me.
I’ve always liked ParallelLines avatar. I immediately recognized it as Aku, one of the main characters from the Samurai Jack cartoon series.
To be fair – there are thousands of different varieties of tomatoes. I don’t offhand know of one that’s shaped and colored like that strawberry, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there is one.
– a brief web search turned up two candidates; though the picture of the second one looks more like a grape to me.
And, IIRC, there were a number of other cat-conversions, and people began complaining that they were getting confused as to which poster they were communicating with due to cat-contamination. Which proves that many of us pay more attention to the avatars than we may admit!
Because Aku is one of those strangely affable villains that are just as easy to love as to hate. 
Mine is just me and my cousin from back in the day. Banditos we were, along with his brother.
I have changed my avatar to a close up of my face wearing EtherGoggles I designed and built from various scaps.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
This thread has inspired me. Since signing up, I’ve had it in my mind that I’d upload some kind of avatar, but I was just never motivated quite enough to put any effort into it. Then, yesterday, I remembered (not even sure what prompted me to think of it) the parody of Hopper’s Nighthawks with the antagonistic anteater, and the light flipped on. Yeah, that’s it! The absurdity of it appeals to me, and, well, it kinda fits the name dirtball.
I’ve never seen this show. I just assumed it was an extremely angry version of Donald Duck.
I like this one! It’s nice to see your face. 
Thanks!
What are EtherGoggles?
I thought your previous avatar was a back view of the The Warlock from “The Magic Goes Away”.
I think it looks pretty good (when I click through to the micro-summary), and absolutely makes the steam-punk “Herr Doktor” more clear. Then again, I’m one of those reading on a full sized monitor, and have no idea how it will look on a mobile device.
That’s… not exactly wrong if you look at it the right way. Take Daffy in his most heel-like moments, where he crosses over into true villainy, add phenomenal cosmic power, but keep the sort of smug, self-assured humor, and you’d have a pretty good facsimile of Aku.
Here’s a youtube link to the episode intro. And yes, Aku is voiced by the much-missed Mako in it’s original run.
I honestly recommend the series a lot. The art is deliberately stylized, which makes it a bit more “timeless” than most, and it has a number of very memorable characters. The series has a combination of fun, light stories and action, makes fun of a LOT of tropes, and has some wonderfully beautiful and moving episodes as well. The very belated final season is… polarizing, but Seasons 1-4 are absolutely worth a watch.
Oh sorry. A company named White Wolf publshed a role playing game called Mage- The Ascension. The premise is that the world look pretty much the same. But vampire, werewolves and all kinds of other things lurk in the shadows. Reality is defined by belief. Mages have the power to warp reality. The bad mages are like Big Brother. The good mages have 9 separate groups. One of the groups is made up of mad scientists. Rather than thinking of what they do as magic, they think of it as Science. These are the Sons Of Ether. The group used to be one of the bad guys. They defected when the luminiferous ether that used to be in space was made no longer real. OTTOMH- Gyro Gearloose of Ducktales, Professor Keenbean of Richie Rich, Professor Frink of the Simpsons, Hubert Farnsworth of Futurama, and all the evil Nazi scientists that Hellboy fights are great examples of the Sons Of Ether. The symbol (which apparently cannot be seen) on the back of my labcoat is the symnol of the Sons Of Ether.
EtherGoggles are fairly comon among them. They do various things like allowing you to see invisible things or other planes of existence etc. They also provide much needed eye protection in the lab.
I’m still annoyed that @rat_avatar’s avatar is not a rat.