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Yes, other people's avatars and usernames do somewhat influence my impression of them, but if they post much, their posts can override any first impression I may have gotten.
For my part, my avatars tend to depend on what interests me at the time I make the avatar. Then I tend not to change them because I'm too lazy :-)
But when I'm picking an avatar I do think about how it comes across. I don't use pictures of people who aren't me because that just doesn't feel right to me, for example. But I'll cheerfully use a picture of something that's obviously not me if I feel like it at the time. I try to pick pictures that look friendly and harmless, hoping that if I say something that *could* be taken badly, people will look at my avatar and figure I didn't mean it that way.
My mobileread avatar is technically a beanie baby elephant, but I think of it as a mimmoth. A mimmoth is a kind of vermin that occasionally shows up in the web comic _Girl Genius_--a miniature mammoth. They're a bit like mice, cats hunt them, people try to exterminate them and so on. Someone saw me wearing a Girl Genius badge holder at a science fiction convention and gave me a magenta beanie baby elephant, explaining that it was a mimmoth. And since I couldn't leave it at the hotel, as it would get into the walls and breed, and I couldn't break its verminous little neck and drop it in the wastebasket, since it would be a biohazard, I had to take it home.
But doing the responsible thing had its price; it turns out that mimmoths reproduce by credit card fraud. They get your credit card number and go on the internet and order more of themselves. That's how I ended up with the grey mimmoth. (Really, Ea, I'm not being silly--I'm explaining about my avatar. I can't help it that mimmoths are silly.) I have a orange-and-black one too. It showed up in my birthday presents last year. I'm not sure how it got there. I have questioned it closely but it just trumpets and tramples its little feet. The other two mimmoths staunchly maintain their innocence, but that's what mimmoths *would* do.
So anyway, when it came time to pick a picture for my avatar I didn't feel comfortable using one of *me* with strangers but I'm perfectly willing to expose a mimmoth. This one is named Ramp, which is Dutch for "disaster." Or so I'm told. You have to kind of growl the R to get the proper sound.
My username dates back to a very old Usenet (I think it was) group called alt.callahans which was very loosely based on Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (a book by Spider Robinson). I always liked the name Cat Dancing (until I read the book lo these many years later and discovered that she was killed--not even for transgressing against the double standard of sexual behavior but for having wrongly been thought to have transgressed against the double standard--double grrrr!) but didn't want to use that name myself so I thought, well, when I'm reading newsgroups I'm not dancing anyway, am I, I'm sitting still.
And I kind of liked the name so I've stuck with it. It has enough of a history to "feel" like its mine.
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