Avatar? WTF is Avatar!

I was supremely amused looking at my yahoo avatar today. For some reason my pseudo digital self is wearing a turkey suit. Not sure why I made that choice. It is disappointing that the tail obsures the alien standing next to me.

Also yahoo apparently has been tracking my fantasy sports leagues all these years, compiling everything. I had a team called Lords of the Bling in an NBA fantasy league in 2003 that somehow finished second. Thats an imaginary silver trophy lining my virtual trophy case. HIGH FIVE!

But anyway, back to avatars. For me to understand avatars I look to 2 sources:

Snow Crash: A book by Neal Stephenson, where Hiro Protagonist's avatar runs wild as a samurai sword weilding badass in the three dimensional computer created world known as the "Metaverse". This is the best science fiction book I've read, probably.

The Matrix: As Morpheus puts it -- digital representation of our physical self. This version springs directly from the users subconcience. Better put -- slaves mind. But I can't get into the Matrix, cause its pretty complicated.

So yeah, I know avatars are digital representations of computer users in a virtual world. Be them sprung from the users imagination(Snow Crash) or the subconcious(The Matrix).

While I hate to say the Matrix is not realistic -cough- Snow Crash's avatars are far closer to my turkey suit wearing jerkass.