I like your avatar, smiths.
I do wish people would just decide on one. Some people seem to change them with the frequency of a slideshow.
As a general rule, I don't care for the animated ones, they are too distracting. Simulist has a good one, though, the hypercube.

That would have been my choice but s/he beat me to it.
I started with a kind of scarecrow painting, then quickly realized that was a Bad Choice for an RI avatar. Besides, why be scary? I happen to love scarecrows, though, and if you think of the crows as psychopomps, them maybe scaring them away is a good thing. Anyhow I was afraid the scarecrow image would make me look like a straw-man, or even worse, be potentially triggering.

So I settled on this lamp that was just cached in an image folder on my hard drive (after coloring it), labeled 'open source intelligence.gif' or something or other. I should make it clear that I am in no way affiliated with the creator of this image, and his or her site featuring 'open source intelligence,' but I do rather like the idea of wedding 'open source' as in software/GNU/Creative Commons Licensing with 'intelligence' (HUMINT, SIGINT,
ININT), even though that is specifically what
OSINT is said to be not:
wikipedia wrote:Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. In the intelligence community (IC), the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.
I say why not? So, in that rather perverse and complicated, contradictory spirit I offer you my avatar, the lamp. I also think of it as 'lamps' being the fifth suit of the tarot, representing spirit, and how lamps shine in the darkness. Secrets don't have to be shadowy, they can be illuminated, shining mysteries, I'd say, although that may be a stretch...
If things keep up they way they've been, I may change my avatar to this:

(It looks cozy under there.)
As has been said before and by others, I liked *not* having avatars on the old forum, for various reasons. But having them now is just too much fun and adds a whole new layer to one's virtual identity. Yours (collectively) have been some of the more interesting ones I've seen, especially the ones with a personal touch.
And I'm loving c2w's now:
p.s. if anyone knows where that my lamp avatar comes from I'd love to find that site it came from, again... maybe I'll try tineye the image search engine...