Cave Markings 

Twitter never ceases to amaze me. I've seen lots of memes pop up and fade away in my Twitter stream, but, by far, the strangest is the #AlanStevensAvatarWeekend hashtag that sprang up this weekend. Forty people adopted a picture of me as a child in my Captain Kirk shirt as their avatar.

The background for this strange occurrence is another Twitter meme. I noticed people putting old pictures of themselves, often with outdated hair styles, as their Twitter avatar. While I have plenty of embarrassing hair styles in my past, I decided to join this meme by showing my geek cred. On Thursday evening, I changed my avatar to the afore mentioned picture.

On Friday morning, Andrew Duthie noticed my picture and claimed that he had been outclassed. Next, Y. Alan Griver adopted the picture as his own avatar because, he said, it's a level of awesome he could never reach. By Friday afternoon, Andrew and Alan had both adopted the picture as their avatar and invited everyone else on twitter to do the same.

Friday night, I looked at my Twitter stream and saw around half of the tweets had my photo as the avatar. I announced that I felt like John Malkovich inside his own head. If you've seen Being John Malkovich, then you know what I mean. I wasn't active on Twitter this weekend, I had children and home repairs to deal with, but I watched on with amusement.

Saturday night, I looked at my followers list and saw that many of my most recent followers had the Alan as Kirk avatar. I find it amazing that people who didn't even follow me on Friday, had my picture as their avatar on Saturday.

I want to give special recognition to two variations on the #AlanStevensAvatarWeekend theme. Rick Hodder changed the shirt color to red, giving it a look of almost certain doom. Scott Koon (aka lazycoder) took a different picture of me from 20 years ago instead of 30 years ago as his avatar.