Ever wished your IM buddy icon looked more like you? Go to Abistation and try out the free Portrait Illustrator Maker, which lets you customize about 20 different vectors of your face and head. That icon above is the closest I could come to illustrating myself, though I’m not thrilled with the hair (a little too weirdly spiky on top) and the mouth (I look like a smug Great Ape).

Having said that, it’s an interesting gloss on my recent column about the Uncanny Valley — the robotocist theory stating that as emulations of humans become increasingly realistic, they become increasingly unsettling. Would a hyper-realistic CGI version of me look more true to life than the one above? Or would it look kind of creepy, because it’d look like an animation of my corpse? Is it possible one could get a better sense of my personality by looking at a highly stylized cartoon version of “me,” like the one above?

Assuming I didn’t look so freaking self-satisfied, of course.

(Thanks to Chris Shieh for this one!)