Today marks the end of an era of this, specific profile picture (or avatar) from the days of 2018:

Originally shot facing against the Sydney Opera House, this profile picture has been popular at its time. In fact, search engines back then always pointed to this specific image when you're searching for "Reinhart Previano"!

Three years after and unfortunately, I have lost the original image, and this is the highest resolution version I can get from LinkedIn. And since when I started to experiment my characters by placing them as profile pictures, search results for the same keyword will, of course, now return with an amazing group of me and my robots (and don't mind about that old profile picture):

Whoa! I never expect that the robots over Google and Bing's servers do know about my robots, and they really seem to likened them by indexing our Snapchat filters in just hours after they are published! One day, I'd really want to write a love letter to them via our website's robots.txt file.

However, a flat, rounded, and illustrated version of myself might look off in some places. In The Contributors page at Webcompat.com website, I'm the only one who looks like that!

Additionally, as you can see on my first profile picture, My skin is not blue. I'm not blonde, either. But I have to since I really want to match it up against the style of Nate and Nix, the codename for my now-abandoned webcomic project which inspired the creation of this site and all of my robots today.

So, starting today, I'm excited to announce my new profile picture, celebrating the unity of my physical and digital presence in this great world:

Becoming the original character I dreamt for years.

Did you know that three of my characters are based on the modifier keys on a computer keyboard?

• controld, who's now pr0xy
• Shiftine, and
• alterine!

On the very first blog post I've published on this new site, I was supposed to represent what the Windows folks know as the "Windows Key", or the "Meta Key" if you're a Linux fan. But macOS users know the best, it's the "Command Key" in macOS. And did you know that the full name of the work-in-progress webcomic was Commander Nate and Captain Nix?

A bit of history, I've been thinking of creating these two characters since 2015, but finally be able to realize 6 years later. Nate's blue, spherical head, but more importantly, (kinda) bald!

Today, with the Snapchat filter I made myself and mentioned earlier, I'm looking like the character I dreamt for. Just look at this image, it feels fantastic and honored to be transformed like a superhero. Oh no, I have just become Nate! Nice to meet you all, in real, virtual, and in the dreams.

And sometimes I got pr0xy.

pr0xy or controld originally emerged as my alter ego back in the days of the high school. While I didn't explicitly state about his name, I sometimes ended up spawning a bunch of code and shell commands (e.g. sudo apt-get rekt) to my friends over WhatsApp. Today, that alter ego has evolved into alt1e and pr0xy, a couple of friendly helpers you can found over Twitter. And that alter ego now have start to gain some degree of independence, where they will start to be aware and act not on my behalf, but by themselves as sentient computer software!

However, I really still love the design for those characters, so there will be times when I'm dressing as pr0xy instead 'cause come on, roots are cool, too!

Oh, speaking about him, soon you'll gotta chat with pr0xy first in order to talk with me. Yes, he'll be active as my official Telegram cyborg account behaving similar to LivegramBot, but when he thinks he has found a relevant answer, he'll pass it to you first! That's a triple-win solution between you, pr0xy, and me!

Um... Why? Just why?

Changing my renowned profile picture to this, surreal one sparked some questions, but most importantly:

Are you trying to conceal your face?

Well, yes and no. In fact, my profile picture on LinkedIn will be updated with an newer self-portrait which I took for the front page of HIMTI BINUS University.

Many people believed that the human face is a private key, both in the context of cyber security and religious beliefs. That's why many Moslem women wear hijabs, and some apps do offer face censoring features for enhanced privacy.

There are some occasions where you definitely want to hide your face against, let's say, some people and computer algorithms. Nate and all my bots' head (or "shell") are intentionally spherical, because they're my antithesis against anime-style characters. Unlike many v-tubers and anime-style characters, I don't want people to be attracted to us mainly because of our body and face details, and instead, our real actions.

And apparently, it worked! Many people over the Internet today recognize me better as my blue avatar instead of my real face.

So I've decided to wear it to anywhere I'd like to go. With Nate (and sometimes pr0xy), I could be more than just an amalgam of physical human and a virtual character. Especially when I planned Nate and the original webcomic to let me attract and unite various types of communities which I've outreached for the past 5 years, including

• Software engineers
• Computer hackers and tinkerers
• Digital rights activits
• General public (as an influencer)

I'm quite upset that I rarely found great software engineers whose doubling down as an influencer and content creator. Some of them, of course, create related content for the sake of developers over TikTok and YouTube, but what I'm thinking instead is a developer who's really active on Instagram and being renowned both as a general influencer and a software engineer.

The world of software development never have been hyped like a fashion brand. Many people just work on it for their career, but a few of them wear it like "it's my style" and "it's my everyday fashion".

I want to wear it, and I want to fix it. Now you can also call me "Nate" if you feel "Reinhart" is quite boring, or too similar to someone else on your group named Raihan or Reynald or even Raindeer 🦌. Who knows that Nate's metallic blue shell could someday turn me into a Marshmello of the world of IT...

And finally, here's a better picture of me...